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BUTLER: SON DUPED ASTOR INTO SELLING PAINTINGS

He was Brooke Astor’s loyal English butler, and today, he mopped the floor with her allegedly swindling son Anthony Marshall.

Butler Chris Ely scored point after point for the prosecution this morning — giving Marshall his worst day yet in more than six weeks of testimony on charges he strong-armed his Alzheimer’s-addled mother out of more than $60 million in gifts and bequests.

In the top charge against him, Marshall allegedly tricked his 99-year-old mother into thinking she was broke so she would sell her favorite painting and he could pocket a $2 million commission — and Ely was there after Marshall clinched the deal, he told jurors.

“Now can I buy dresses?” Astor pitiably asked her son when he phoned her to report the sale, for $10 million, of her beloved masterpiece, Childe Hassam’s Up the Avenue From Thirty-Fourth Street.

“He said yes,” Ely, who was holding the phone to his “madame’s” ear, remembered of the son’s reply.

Fast forward a year and a half, to August 13, 2003. Ely was there again, he told jurors, watching as an estates lawyer that prosecutors say was Marshall’s henchman left Astor’s bedroom — having just secured the convalescing old woman’s signature on a letter granting her son a $5 million “gift.”

Ely was barred from testifying that the lawyer, Henry “Terry” Christensen, wouldn’t look the butler in the eye on the way out the door. “He seemed to want me to agree with him,” that Astor “seemed well–” even though she was exhausted and in her bedclothes.

After the lawyer’s departure, Ely told jurors, Astor — diagnosed a full three years prior with serious Alzheimer’s — had no idea what she’d just done.

“Mrs. Astor asked me what had happened — why her lawyer had come,” Ely testified. The butler said he told her he didn’t know, but that since she’d sent the maid for a pen, perhaps she’d signed something.

“She wanted to know what it was,” Ely told jurors. “I said I didn’t know.”

The butler rang the lawyer, and handed his lady the phone — and listened.

“Mrs. Astor asked what had happened that day. Mr. Christensen said that it was nice to see her. Then Mrs Astor lost her train of thought and said it was nice to see him.”

Throughout four subsequent phone calls to the lawyer and Marshall himself, promises to send a copy of the document she’d signed that day were made, then broken — ultimately the document was never forwarded.

Within months, Astor was so out-of-it, mentally, that she was routinely calling Marshall “My husband,” the butler said. “My husband wants to put me in an old lady’s home,” she once confided to him.

Meanwhile, Marshall had allegedly co-opted Astor’s downstairs office space, social secretary and telephone number for use by his and his wife Charlene’s theater production company. “Delphi Productions!” Ely was surprised to hear Astor’s social secretary chirp after he dialed Astor’s Park Avenue duplex one day in late 2003.

And her fears were mounting. Don’t worry, he told her one day in Feb., 2004, when had a sudden panic attack as they arrived at David Rockefeller’s Westchester estate for a visit — and Rockefeller approached their car wearing a “country jacket and tie.”

“I told Mrs. Astor that she’s not to worry, that she’s with friends and that there’s nobody here with papers for you to sign,” Ely told jurors.

Ely, who had been based at Astor’s weekend Westchester estate, Holly Hill, for eight years, was fired by Marshall in January, 2005 — and immediately rehired after Marshall’s son, Philip, successfully fought to have his father removed as Astor’s guardian. Ely was at Astor’s side when she died, at Holly Hill, in 2007.

Also yesterday, jurors heard from Miranda Kaiser, 37, the Yale-educated granddaughter of David Rockefeller. Kaiser told jurors she was there at her uncle Laurence’s Westchester estate, Hudson Pines, on Jan. 4, 2004, when Astor and her grandfather came to visit him.

“Look Brooke!” the granddaughter recalled her Uncle Laurence telling Astor. “I’m wearing the tie you gave me for Christmas.” Astor turned to David Rockefeller. “David,” she asked, “do I know that man?”

Astor, in other words, had completely blanked on the identity of a close friend — reportedly a former lover — who she’d known since her marriage in 1953 to Vincent Astor, and who, in fact, she had just traveled to visit.

A far cry from Astor in better times. Even into her ’90s, the beloved philanthropist — responsible for a total $200 million in charitable gifts to New York causes — had a sharp wit.

Marshall would say too sharp.

Kaiser told jurors today that once, sometimes in the 1990s, she asked Astor why she’d only ever had one child — Tony.

Astor answered, “He was so unfortunate, I decided not to have any more.”