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Since being convicted in 2009 of defrauding his mother, the late Brooke Astor, out of more than $60 million, Anthony Marshall has been out on appeal, hiding out with wife Charlene — or, as Mrs. Astor called her, “that bitch” — in their Upper East Side apartment. It is a cage, but no longer a gilded one.
There are no more dinner parties, no charity balls, no hired help. Tony and Charlene Marshall are social pariahs, and Tony no longer speaks to his twin sons, who testified that their father and stepmother were abusing Astor, forcing her to live in deplorable conditions and withholding medical treatment.
So now it’s just the two of them rambling around their second-floor apartment, days spent on the phone with doctors and lawyers, bills piling up and friends letting them down. Charlene no longer even has a house account at Butterfield Market, the Lexington Avenue grocery she frequented for years. One pal says she drives “a little Japanese car” — the days of chauffeured Town Cars long gone — and does most of the cooking.
Sometimes her friends from church will visit, or one of her three children from her first marriage, but Tony has very few friends, and often they are alone.
“This whole business has just devastated him,” says Sam Peabody, a close friend of Tony’s since boarding school. “They don’t go out much. They’ve been through the mill, as you can understand.”
Their newly quiet life, however, is about to be upended. On Sept. 24 and 25, Sotheby’s will auction off more than 900 pieces of art, jewelry and furniture from the estate of Brooke Astor — and all of that furniture had originally been willed to Tony by his mother. After his conviction, he reached a settlement with the state attorney general stipulating that the furniture be returned and leaving him with just $14 million — a fraction of what his mother had originally left him, and much of it likely spent on lawyers. (Charlene was left one necklace and two fur coats that were too small for her.)
Within the next couple months, Marshall’s appeal is expected to be heard in Manhattan Supreme Court. (Charlene was never charged, though the prosecution depicted her as a black hole of greed, dubbed “Miss Piggy” by Astor’s staff.) Tony is now 88 and in very poor health; Charlene is 67. Peabody says both are convinced Tony will never be sent to prison.
“If he does go to jail, it’s a death sentence,” Peabody says. “Nobody feels this will ever happen.”
Their lives, friends say, are hell anyway.
Not since Claus von Bulow went on trial in 1982 for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, had New York City seen such pulpy dispatches from the vacuum-sealed world of high society.
Here was the grand dame of philanthropy, over 100 years old, her name and fingerprints all over New York — from the St. Regis Hotel, which she redecorated in the ’50s, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the New York Public Library to Prospect Park — reduced by her son and his wife to a life of solitude and squalor.
Her beloved dogs would relieve themselves all over her Park Avenue apartment, and no one was there to clean up the mess. She would nap on a sofa soaked with urine. She continued to dress for dinner, hat and handbag included, then dine off a tray in front of the television.
It was an unthinkable ending for a vibrant, engaged woman whose net worth was estimated at more than $103 million.
“Money is like manure,” Brooke was fond of saying. “It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”
She was not as generous when it came to her only child, Tony, the product of her first and very miserable marriage to New Jersey scion J. Dryden Kuser, an abusive alcoholic who broke her jaw when she was six months pregnant. The marriage lasted 11 years, and in 1932, she wed again.
Her second husband, financier Charles H. Marshall, was as wild about her as she was about him. Tony, however, he didn’t care for, so Brooke shipped her son off to boarding school when he was 11 years old. When Tony was 18, he took his stepfather’s last name, but even that gesture didn’t endear him to the old man. Tony was forever the outsider. When he was 17, he enlisted in the Marines; he fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima and was awarded a Purple Heart. He went on to serve as a US ambassador to Kenya and, later, as an intelligence officer in the CIA. His mother remained loudly unimpressed.
“I wish Tony had made something of himself,” Brooke would tell friends.
Charles Marshall, the love of her life, died unexpectedly in 1952, without leaving a will. He had been suffering financially, and 11 months later, Brooke, at 51, married her last husband, the multimillionaire Vincent Astor. When he died in 1959, he left Brooke $60 million.
In 1979, Brooke turned to Tony, who had worked in finance, to manage her money, which had shrunk by half. He made all that money back and more, and their relationship, while never warm, was fine — until Tony met Charlene one summer in Maine. According to Brooke, it was destined because Charlene would walk in front of their house every day, hoping Tony would notice her.
Charlene wound up leaving her husband, an Episcopal vicar, for Tony, and Tony left his second wife for Charlene. Brooke was mortified, convinced Charlene was an amoral gold-digger and social climber. Tony and Charlene were married in 1992. Brooke Astor found her son’s third wife repulsive on every level.
“She has no class and no neck,” Brooke had said. Her chauffeur, Marciano Amaral, testified that Brooke resented how openly Charlene coveted her jewels. “I don’t want that woman to wear my jewelry because she doesn’t have the neck to wear my jewelry,” she said. “Why did my son have to marry that woman? He can just sleep with her.”
By 1999, Brooke Astor was in serious decline, the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s evident. She became obsessed with the idea that she would wind up poor, asking her son over and over what she could afford — even though she had her Park Avenue apartment, an estate in Westchester, and a summer home in Maine.
Her staff became alarmed when, in 2002, Tony suggested his mother sell her favorite painting, Frederick Childe Hassam’s “Flags, Fifth Avenue,” for $10 million. She had long dreamed of donating it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but now she agreed to the sale, and Tony took a commission of $2 million.
Tony fired Brooke’s longstanding attorneys and hired a friend, Francis Morrissey, a lawyer who had been in trouble before for fleecing wealthy, aging clients. Staff alleged that the two were forcing an increasingly demented Brooke to sign codicils — three in total — to her will.
Finally, in July 2006, Annette de la Renta — Brooke’s closest friend and the wife of fashion designer Oscar — petitioned for legal guardianship. She was backed by Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Tony’s son Philip. Within 24 hours, the request was granted. In August 2007, one month after his mother’s death, at age 105, from pneumonia, Tony was on trial for, among other things, fraud and grand larceny.
The trial and the coverage did them in; Tony began experiencing serious health problems, and three years ago had open-heart surgery. Today, friends say, he can barely walk around. Charlene is the one who takes care of him; they don’t have a live-in nurse. The woman who had so doggedly angled for a life of leisure spends her days playing nursemaid, consulting with their lawyers and racking up ever more billable hours they can’t afford.
“Charlene, I think, is a heroine,” Peabody says. “Her life is totally devoted to him.” Charlene, who is a lay minister at St. James on Madison Avenue, has had to pull back on her involvement with the church to care for her husband. “She’s fully concentrated on him,” Peabody says.
Others aren’t buying it. “I think they talk about religion and church, and they ignore the Ten Commandments,” says Chris Ely, who was Astor’s butler for a decade. “They looted and terrorized this woman, and now [Tony] has reverted to the coward he is. He should just suck it up and go to jail.”
Charlene is rarely seen around her Upper East Side neighborhood, and her friend, the artist Richard Osterweil, says they’re afraid of the scrutiny brought about by the auction and Tony’s upcoming appeal. She thinks she was treated worse by the press than he was; Charlene was mortified by the “Miss Piggy” moniker and at one point compared herself to Job.
“She was online, all day, reading everything,” Osterweil says. Another pal says she was irate at depictions of her as obese.
Charlene was resolute that she and her husband had done nothing wrong — in fact, she considered them the real victims, a stance she holds to this day. “She gets angry,” Peabody says. “There are all these lawyers they have to talk to, all these things they try to avoid reading in the paper. She felt personally attacked by lies.”
After the long trial, there’s a good chance Charlene and Tony will be left with only a tiny fraction of the fortune.
The money from the Sotheby’s auction will, according to Brooke’s wishes, go to the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library, the Animal Medical Center of New York, the Pierpont Morgan Library and city schools, among other institutions.
In November 2011, Brooke’s Park Avenue apartment sold for $21 million. It took so long, says Peabody, because one member of the board, afraid Tony and Charlene would profit, refused all potential buyers. (They saw none of that money.)
Upon sentencing Tony Marshall in December 2009, Justice Kirke Bartley said he could think of no finer punishment than to leave the Marshalls without any of Brooke Astor’s wealth, condemned to live out the rest of their days with only each other.
Sam Peabody admits this is, in fact, their life. “It’s constantly, constantly nibbling at them, one way or another,” he says. “And they’re never free of it. Never.”