Secret journals kept by Brooke Russell Astor’s staff reveal tragic scenes, including one in which the society doyenne was literally dragged into a meeting against her will to sign over $60 million to heronlyson after she slammed her cane against the floor shouting, “Do you hear me?”
When they weren’t caring for her in person, Astor’smaids, nurses and butlers were listening to her private meetings via a baby monitor. They filled 30 journals over four years with what they described as abuse, neglect and manipulation of the Alzheimer’s sufferer.
The endless badgering by her son and lawyers led to a deep, paranoid fear of men in business suits. Astor, who died last year at age 105, was constantly in fear for her life. And her only defense was to pretend to be asleep when her son came to visit, they say.
In her new book, “Mrs. Astor Regrets,” MERYL GORDON reveals what the staff knew about the alleged neglect and pillaging of Astor’s property and bank accounts by her son and his lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., who are both set to go on trial in January.
BROOKE ASTOR was recov ering from a broken hip at Holly Hill, her Westchester estate, when her longtime lawyer, Terry Christensen, arrived for a meeting. Unknown to Christensen, the walls had ears: His private conversation with Brooke Astor that day on Aug. 13, 2003, was being overheard elsewhere in her home.
Because Astor, 101, kept demanding that the duty nurses leave her bedroom, a baby monitor had been installed to track her movements. As a result, every sound in her bedroom was broadcast to the room next door, where her nurses waited.
A nurse’s aide regaled the household staff with what she heard, claiming that Christensen mentioned a “rift between Brooke’s only child, Anthony Marshall, and Astor that could be resolved only by giving money to Tony’s wife, Charlene.”
The word “millions” got everyone’s attention.
Astor’s head butler, Chris Ely, had been told by Tony several years earlier that Astor had Alzheimer’s disease. Now she was signing legal documents and giving away money?
In a written account of the day, Ely acidly noted that “Christensen seemed to want me to agree with him that Astor was very well and in good mind. This comment coming from a man who could not look at me straight.”
It’s standard practice for nurses to jot down medical notes, but Astor’s caregivers kept unusually detailed accounts describing her activities, moods, nightmares and reactions to visitors.
Ely kept hearing complaints from the nurses about events in Astor’s Park Avenue apartment. He urged them to write down anything unusual. If anyone ever asked, there would be a contemporaneous chronicle by eyewitnesses.
What the nurses captured in more than 30 voluminous notebooks over a four-year period was a portrait of a despairing woman who felt that she had lived too long.
“She is dead set against eating, saying she wants to die,” nurse’s aide Pearline Noble wrote on Sept. 25, 2003. “She said she is old and wanted the window shades down.”
Astor’s emotions were even more turbulent three days later, as a night nurse wrote: “A very restless night. Had nightmares. Was not able to tell her dreams, only that someone was trying to kill her.”
The nurses took special notice of Tony’s visits, writing that Astor appeared “unhappy” after being in his presence.
By Dec. 17, as her deterioration accelerated, she could not complete full sentences or make her wishes understood. The day nurse wrote, “Paranoia, undecipherable words, disoriented after lunch.”
Despite the incoherence and disorientation, on the next day Astor met again with Christensen, this time to change her will.
Until then, Astor’s will had always left the bulk of her estate to charity, with a detailed list of beneficiaries. But under the new codicil she agreed to put 49 percent of the remaining assets left in a trust by Vincent Astor into a new entity, the Anthony Marshall Fund, allowing him control of some $30 million in assets.
On Jan. 12, 2004, Astor scratched her name on a second codicil, bequeathing $60 million directly to Tony Marshall, thereby disenfranchising the charities on whose behalf she had worked tirelessly for four decades.
What was Astor’s mood on that fateful Monday? According to the new lawyers dispatched by Tony, who had fired Christensen, she appeared to be cheerful and sophisticated, dropping bons mots into conversation, discoursing on world events, and reading complex documents without her glasses. What the nurses described in their notes was a frightened old woman being dragged down a hallway against her objections to a closed-door meeting.
In the account of Francis X. Morrissey Jr., a lawyer who had recently begun working on Astor’s estate, she appeared pleased to see him when he arrived at the apartment at 4 p.m. “She extended her arm, and we both walked into the library side by side,” he wrote. “She looked at me and said, We are here for something important.”
The nurses were not allowed into this meeting, but they saw Astor before and after. Noble had started keeping a separate log, using easy-to-decipher pseudonyms for the characters: Brooke was Princess Polyanna, Tony was Golden Boy or Golden Retriever, Morrissey was Tutor, Charlene was Miss Piggy or Poor Little Rich Girl.
Here’s how Noble described that afternoon: “Golden boy & tutor took Princess Polyanna on each arm pulling her into the library . . . Mrs. Astor didn’t know if she was coming or going. She told Mr. Marshall she don’t want to be pushed in any business and she reiterated ‘Do you hear me’ with a bang on the floor with her walking stick. She was having a hard time walking.”
Noble wrote that Astor did not even recognize Morrissey and asked her son, “Who is that?”
The aide later confirmed her written remarks in an interview with me and then physically demonstrated, with her arms around me, how she usually helped Astor walk, half carrying her.
“They started to pull her,” Noble insisted. “They are not holding her to balance her – it ended up being a drag.”
That evening, nurse Minnette Christie wrote in the regular log that Astor was frightened, saying that “men are in the house who know everything about her and she doesn’t know them. Also that the men want her to do things. Very hard on herself, referring to self as a ‘damn fool.’ Reassured that no men are in the house and of her safety. Remained apprehensive and did not want to be left alone.”
On March 3, Tony and Morrissey arrived at the Park Avenue apartment bearing a new document for her to sign. In order to save on estate taxes, the codicil instructed her executors to sell her real estate and include the proceeds in the estate. Astor’s displeasure at being asked to sign more legal papers was duly noted in the nurse’s notes.
“Her son arrived with an unexpected guest. They all sat down to sign some papers. She got a book from the lawyer Morrissey. They left, she shook her head, saying ‘What can I do?’ “
Nurse’s aide Noble was so upset that she wrote a few days later that she and the chauffeur had promised Astor that “me and the driver will protect her. She’s not signing anything else.”
AS the reigning authority figure in Astor’s employ, Chris Ely was the person whom everyone else looked to for advice. He had been trying to signal to her friends that things were awry. But as a butler, he still had to practice indirection, dropping hints rather than saying anything outright.
Invited to lunch at her good friend David Rockefeller’s country house near Holly Hill, Astor got dressed up and went downstairs. Then she told Ely to cancel; she did not want to see anyone. The butler insisted she get in the car and express her regrets in person.
When Rockefeller came out to greet her, she promptly announced that she was not staying.
“It’s OK,” Ely said in a loud voice designed to be overheard. “There’s nobody here waiting for you to sign papers.”
The butler’s ruse worked.
Rockefeller later went to dinner at the home of Henry and Nancy Kissinger and mentioned the strange episode. As Nancy Kissinger says, “She wouldn’t get out of the car. David went up and said, ‘Brooke, it’s me, David.’ She said, ‘It’s the men in blue suits, they make me sign things.’ “
The story was burnished and embellished with each retelling on the Upper East Side. It was a sad but riveting piece of gossip. But no one knew what it meant, or ultimately how to respond.
In January 2006, Tony’s son, Philip, visited his grandmother. As he was leaving the apartment he began chatting with Noble and Christie. Rarely have such pleasantries provoked such an outpouring.
“Minnette said my grandmother was only going to the doctor once a month, and she wasn’t going outside at all,” Philip explains.
The nurses unleashed their concerns: that Tony had turned down their requests for medical equipment, that the household was a shambles, and that Astor’s prized dachshunds, Boysie and Girlsie, were not being walked regularly, with predictable results. Christie said Astor was being fed the same meal of leftovers four days a week.
Philip telephoned other members of the Astor staff. He hit pay dirt with a call to Alice Perdue, who told him about odd disbursements from Astor’s accounts to Tony and Charlene – including almost $900,000 to support their theatrical ventures, and significant expenses for Brooke Astor’s Maine estate, even after it had been transferred into Charlene’s name.
“I thought, ‘Oh, good, I can tell someone,’ ” Perdue says.
“I knew that things were much worse than I ever could have imagined,” Philip says. His father and Charlene had eliminated virtually everything that gave Astor pleasure. The juxtaposition of their new wealth and his grandmother’s straitened circumstances fueled his rage.
He contacted Astor’s friends David Rockefeller and Annette de la Renta, and in July 2006 they filed a petition to remove Brooke Astor from Tony’s care.
THE Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art meets twice a year. Annette de la Renta, a board member since 1981, is vice-chairman of the museum and heads the acquisitions committee.
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2006, when the first board meeting since the Astor scandal hit the newspapers was scheduled, the museum staff believed that Tony Marshall would not be attending, since he had not RSVP’d. The assumption was that Tony would be too embarrassed to show his face. So there was a collective gasp when, just as the meeting was beginning, he strode in.
“We thought he did it for shock value,” says one museum staffer.
“I debated, ‘Should I go or not?’ ” Tony told me several months later. “I thought, ‘Look, I know I’m right. I know the truth, we know the truth. I’m not going to shy away from there. I want to see how people react to my being there.’ “
The answer was immediately apparent: He was persona non grata. The museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello, recalls, “I averted my eyes, my gaze never met his. Everyone did.”
For Tony, walking to his seat was the equivalent of a long day’s journey into social death. It was a shunning worthy of Edith Wharton, although Tony lacked the rebelliousness of Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.”
In November the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged Tony in an 18-count indictment with stealing two of his mother’s paintings; paying himself a nearly $1 million unauthorized salary bonus; selling her beloved Childe Hassam painting and giving himself a $2 million commission; and coercing his mother into changing her will. Morrissey was charged with conspiracy and forging Brooke Astor’s name. The two face trial in January.
Copyright © 2008 by Meryl Gordon. Excerpted from the book “Mrs. Astor Regrets” to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.