US News

LIFE NOT ALWAYS ‘FAIR’

She knew the name, just couldn’t place the world-famous face.

During two posh but cozy luncheons in the early 2000s, New York’s grande dame, Brooke Astor, posed a most remarkable question to her dining companion, magazine editor Graydon Carter.

PEYSER: TONY TOTALLY WHIPPED BY MUMSY & CHARLENE: SON

“Where is Graydon Carter?” was Astor’s question to the exuberantly coifed, highly recognizable editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair — whom she’d known for nearly a decade.

“Have you seen Graydon Carter?” the doddering doyenne asked him.

“I put my hand on her shoulder and I told her, ‘I’m Graydon Carter,’ ” Carter remembered yesterday, after taking the stand as prosecution witness No. 30 in the monthlong Astor swindle trial.

“Oh yes! Of course you are!” Astor answered, recovering awkwardly.

That was early this decade, at Astor’s favorite Manhattan lunch spot, the Knickerbocker Club, Carter told a Manhattan Supreme Court jury. Later, when the two lunched again, in Palm Beach in February 2003, there came the same question — a clear sign, prosecutors will argue, that the Alzheimer’s-afflicted Astor was by then ripe for swindling by her own son, defendant Anthony Marshall.

“Have you seen Graydon Carter?”

“No, no,” Carter remembered answering. “I’m right here.’

“She got very embarrassed,” Carter told jurors.

Carter was just the latest in a long line of prosecution witnesses — Barbara Walters and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are slated for today — recounting how the beloved philanthropist was clearly addled as she hit her 100th year.

Prosecutors say that by then, Marshall — married to a domineering and greedy wife, Charlene, a woman 20 years his junior — began strong-arming his bewildered mother into signing complicated will amendments bequeathing him and Charlene some $60 million Astor had long intended go to the city’s museums and libraries.

Defense lawyers insist that Astor had good and bad days, and that it was on her good days that she competently changed both her heart — softening her disdain for Tony and Charlene — and her will.

Her forgetting of Carter is especially notable. Vanity Fair’s chief for nearly 18 years, a celeb-magnet restaurateur in New York, A-list party planner and long a mainstay on both coasts’ social and literary circuits — Carter met Astor in the course of her publishing three pieces in his magazine.

The first was in 1995, titled, “The Art of Flirting.” Written in the first person, it recounted how her grandmother once counseled against eating everything on one’s plate, and contained this apocryphal line: “To want to enjoy one’s dinner is correct, but greed is not. Hunger can be satisfied and greed never can.”

“She was probably the most beautifully turned-out woman I’ve ever seen,” Carter told jurors of Astor, in a surely unintentional diss against his fashion-plate editrix colleague at Condé Nast, Anna Wintour.

For the next five years, as he published two more of Astor’s pieces they dined together at the Knickerbocker and the Four Seasons, and he attended an occasion or two at her Park Avenue duplex. She felt close enough to Carter to confide in him about the terror of her wedding night with her first husband, who she described as a drunken and abusive brute.

Jurors heard still more testimony on Astor’s descent into dementia yesterday — some of it harrowing. The former parlor maid from Astor’s waterfront Maine estate told of an occasion in 2001, when she heard Astor yelling, clearly upset, and, running to look, saw the old woman screaming and naked on the landing.

On another occasion, Astor turned to the maid — Carol Reitenbach Stanley, 66 — after walking her dogs and asked, “What is my name? I don’t know what it is. Who am I?” Astor was 99 at the time, and it was more than two years before any of the will amendments charged against Marshall and his co-defendant, estate lawyer Francis Morrissey.

The day began with star witness Philip Marshall — the son whose 2006 attempt to wrest guardianship of his grandmother away from his dad eventually led to the current prosecution — angrily locking horns with a defense lawyer.

Defense lawyer Kenneth Warner repeatedly shouted “Sir! Please! Sir! Please!” and waggled a red pen at Philip, who stood his ground — sometimes angrily attempting lengthy answers to yes or no questions.

laura.italiano@nypost.com