Ferris who?
Brooke Astor was so addled with Alzheimer’s by 2001 that she couldn’t remember one of her favorite actors, Matthew Broderick — even though he’d been a guest at her Westchester estate and she’d watched him on Broadway six times, including that very night.
“Who are you?” Astor demanded when Broderick, then starring in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” on Broadway, joined their table after a performance of the hit show, one of the dinner guests told jurors.
“Uh, Brooke, I’m Matthew!” Broderick answered. “You love me!”
Noted theatrical and film producer John Hart, who put on “The Producers” and other Broadway hits, told this sad tale from the witness stand yesterday as the Astor swindle trial entered its third week of testimony.
Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, is on trial in Manhattan Supreme Court, fighting charges that he strong-armed his failing philanthropist mother out of more than $50 million, both by pressuring her to sell her favorite painting — for which he pocketed a $2 million “commission” — and by leaning on her to sign new bequests enriching him and his wife, Charlene.
Defense lawyers counter that Astor’s symptoms of dementia came and went, and that she was fully competent when she made these gifts to her son in 2002 through 2004. But yesterday, prosecutors called Hart to the stand to describe strong evidence of Astor’s dementia well before then.
“In 2001, I took her to see ‘The Producers,’ ” Hart told jurors, testifying warmly about his longtime friend. “She was very frail then.”
Astor was closing in on age 100 at the time, and Hart and others in her close circle would try to “protect her” in public, he told jurors. “People would always push around her, sometimes in a rather joyous way . . . Everybody wanted to say hello.”
Astor still always looked her finest on outings, Hart noted. Always, there’d be gloves, twinkling brooches and her trademark Easter Parade-like chapeau.
“[Astor] always had an ongoing crush,” Hart remembered. One of those crushes, he told jurors, was “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” star Broderick, who shared with Astor what Hart called “a child-like sense of humor.”
Astor had been to see “The Producers” and, before that, Broderick’s “How to Succeed in Business,” five times previously, Hart testified.
“She had had him to Holly Hill,” her 75-acre estate in Westchester, Hart told jurors. Broderick, 61 years her junior, was not just a crush, but a friend.
But after the doddering doyenne sat through “The Producers,” Hart took her to a nearby restaurant, where they waited for Broderick and co-star Nathan Lane to change and join them for dinner.
When Broderick entered, Astor didn’t know who he was.
Confronted, Broderick introduced himself, comically noting her longstanding crush — “You love me!” — and asking, “How did you like the show?”
“I loved the morning, but the afternoon went on way too long,” Astor answered, sounding utterly un-moored.
“Well, it’s shorter when Nathan isn’t in it,” Broderick protested, for the benefit of Lane, who had also joined the table. Everyone burst into laughter, including Astor, who enjoyed a good laugh even when she didn’t understand the joke, Hart said.
“Matthew told the joke to ease the discomfort” and to put Astor at ease, he explained. “What she got and what she didn’t get didn’t really matter; she knew she was in a safe place.”
By 2003, Broderick spent his visits with Astor singing funny songs to her, or joining her in playing with her glass figurines. “I’m ga-ga,” she’d admit — when she could converse at all.
Astor, incidentally, had had other crushes besides Broderick, Hart noted. In 1998, she’d been invited to the White House to accept from President Clinton a Medal of Freedom for her philanthropy. She was 96 at the time.
“I think she thought he flirted with her,” Hart told jurors, smiling.
After court, he elaborated.
“She insisted Bill Clinton had grabbed her on the lower back. The very low back,” Hart said, smiling again at the memory. “She thought he was a lady’s man, but she didn’t mind.” And as for Astor’s comment about “The Producers” — “She was right about the play itself. The second act was endless!”
Astor never wanted Marshall to inherit her fortune, Hart said, recounting how she once read to him from the biography of Andrew Carnegie: “Very little comes of inherited wealth.”
The trial continues today with possible witnesses including Metropolitan Museum curator James Watt and former Astor secretary Birgit Darby.