By the year 2000, in the throes of early-stage Alzheimer’s, philanthropist Brooke Astor thought her son was out to get her.
“You only want to come to see how soon I’m going to die,” Astor, then 98, told Anthony Marshall as he escorted the unwilling patient to a December 2000 appointment with an East 60th Street gerontologist.
“Why are you coming?” she snapped at him.
The brow-raising putdown was revealed yesterday, during Day 5 of testimony in Marshall’s swindle trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
PEYSER: PALS THINK SHE’D SPARE THE CLOD
Marshall, 84, is fighting charges of grand larceny and conspiracy that could put him away for 25 years.
Prosecutors accuse him of the most foul acts of filial filching, saying he strong-armed his failing mother out of paintings and bequests valued at more than $50 million.
Two of Astor’s closest friends, socialite Annette de la Renta and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s wife, Nancy, are scheduled to testify for the prosecution today.
Astor’s remark may have all the more credence with jurors for having been recorded, contemporaneously and in writing, by none other than Marshall himself.
Jurors heard yesterday that Marshall included it in a single-spaced, seven-page letter addressed to the gerontologist in question, noted Alzheimer’s expert Dr. Howard Fillit. The doctor spent nearly all day on the stand detailing his one appointment with Astor.
Then the jurors saw it for themselves — as a yellow-highlighted excerpt on a giant computer screen above their heads in the courtroom.
The lengthy letter lets prosecutors use Marshall’s own words against him, and is one of their strongest pieces of evidence. In it, Marshall also details how his mother had been wandering lost on her own property, losing things and blaming the maid, forgetting the names of old friends and — perhaps most incriminating, given the charges — having trouble with simple arithmetic.
“Mother asked me, ‘What is my income?’ ” Marshall wrote in the letter, which had the stated purpose of helping the doctor understand the full depth of his mother’s dementia. “I told her, giving the annual figure,” he continued.
“Is that for the month, or the year?” she then asked.
At the time, Astor was reportedly earning at least $2 million a year in interest alone.
Within two years of admitting his mother’s math woes, prosecutors charge, Marshall talked his mother into believing she couldn’t buy another dress until she sold her favorite painting — Childe Hassam’s masterpiece “Up the Avenue from Thirty-Fourth Street, May 1917” — for $10 million.
Marshall is charged with grand larceny for the $2 million he pocketed off the sales price as a “commission.”
He said in the letter that his mother was totally blanking on who her friends were. When he took her to see actor Frank Langella — another of Astor’s friends — perform as Scrooge on Broadway, “she never made the connection that Frank was Scrooge, nor that he had been at her dinner for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan two evenings previously,” Marshall wrote.
“In the car on the way home, we gave [actress] Patricia Neal a ride,” Marshall continued. “Mother could not grasp who she was.”
Marshall also used the letter to detail how Astor was wandering onto roadways at her Westchester estate — classic Alzheimer’s behavior, the doctor noted.
“Recently at her house in the country she went out without telling anyone,” Marshall wrote.
The old gal simply trotted out the front gate with her beloved dachshunds, Boysie and Girlsie — both off the leash, he wrote, adding:
“She was neither aware of the danger (cars, to her and her dogs) nor aware of what she had done.”
Marshall was adamant that his mother not be told she has Alzheimer’s — saying it would only worsen her depression.
“She knows and speaks to Nancy Reagan and has associations with other people with [Alzheimer’s],” he wrote.