Mrs. Astor Regrets (14 page)

Tony Marshall lacked role models for a father, and his upbringing led him to value proper behavior over displays of emotion. He has such a formal demeanor that he told his boys that hugging and kissing were not manly, a lesson that did not take. But he made an effort to stay involved with the twins, writing and calling and conveying interest. As Philip puts it, "I've got to give my father credit for trying hard, since he wasn't with us all the time."

While Americans reeled from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968, the society pages marched on. On June 16, just ten days after Kennedy's death, the
New York Times
ran an article headlined, "The Goal of Brooke Astor: Easing Misery of Others." The writer, Judy Klemesrud, described Mrs. Astor as "svelte, sixtyish, a swinging blonde grandmother with bright blue eyes that sparkle." Her two dachshunds, Benny and Judy Montague, leapt repeatedly onto Mrs. Astor's lap during the interview, as she complained about being treated as a dilettante. "I think I have to overcome quite a lot," she said. "Being Mrs. Astor, a lot of social workers are against you. They think you're a silly Lady Bountiful, who doesn't know a thing. When that happens I try to be as attractive as possible and win them over."

To stress her relevance, she brought up her interest in politics and race relations. She was that rare upper-crust Manhattanite who had actually been north of Ninety-sixth Street and to the South Bronx. She admitted to the
Times
that as finance cochairman with John Hay Whitney of Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign, she had advised the candidate: "Having a Whitney and an Astor on a finance committee for a Rockefeller seemed a bit much, but he didn't mind." She noted that she had recently accompanied Nelson and Happy Rockefeller and Laurance and Mary Rockefeller to Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta and described marching in the cortege. Klemesrud's piece ended by naming Mrs. Astor's favorite designers (Valentino and Mila Schon) and describing her relaxing weekends at her country home, where she "plays croquet [and] romps with her twin 14-year-old grandsons."

Mrs. Astor, who had given the reporter a Rockefeller button, worked hard for her Hudson Valley neighbor. If Rockefeller had won the GOP nomination and the presidency, a post in the new administration might have opened up for Tony. Tony had joined the board of his mother's foundation, but he had higher aspirations. Once Richard Nixon became the Republican standard-bearer, Brooke, according to her friends, made generous contributions to his campaign on her son's behalf. A year after Nixon took office, the president named Tony Marshall as ambassador to Madagascar, a volatile former French colony off the coast of Africa. "I'm sure that her contributions were a factor," says Henry Kissinger. Tony's half-sister, Sukie Kuser, who spent her entire career at the State Department, is blunter, saying, "Brooke bought the ambassadorship for him."

Just how much Mrs. Astor contributed to the Nixon campaign cannot be determined: full and accurate record-keeping began only after the Federal Election Commission was established in the wake of the Watergate scandal. According to transcripts of the White House tapes, Richard Nixon instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 17, 1971, "Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must give at least $250,000." As Louis Auchincloss recalls, "Brooke used to say that he was a great ambassador to Madagascar. I said, 'Have you ever heard of a bad ambassador to Madagascar?' She said, 'That's enough out of you.'"

Tony Marshall has a more elevated view of his diplomatic career. "I was a friend of Dick Nixon, I helped him in '64 and '68," he told me. "After he won the election, he asked me where I wanted to go to be an ambassador. I did not want to go to Europe. I wanted to go to Africa." After Common Cause, a public-interest group, successfully sued for information about Nixon donors who became ambassadors, it was revealed that Tony Marshall contributed $20,000 to Nixon's campaign in 1968.

"Suzy Says," the syndicated gossip column by Aileen Mehle, made mention of Tony's new job, with the assumption that readers had no idea who he was but might be interested because of his mother. The item referred to "Anthony [Tony] Marshall, Mrs. Vincent Astor's son." He could not escape that comma after his name.

William Fulbright, then the leading Democratic critic of the Vietnam War, held a confirmation hearing on Tony's nomination before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on December 12, 1969. The senator lobbed softballs, inquiring how long it would take to travel to Madagascar ("You can make it if you hurry in about four days," Tony replied) and asking what language the natives spoke (French, Tony replied, noting his own "brushing knowledge" of Swahili). Tony's résumé, provided to the committee, seemed almost a parody of a clubbable man, listing eighteen memberships in organizations and private societies, including the Brook Club and Explorers Club in New York, the Metropolitan Club in Washington, the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland, and Buck's Club and the Royal Geographic Society in London. Asked about his occupation, Tony told the committee that "my principal interest was in food manufacturing in Nigeria using locally available raw materials." When pressed, he acknowledged that he ran a company that used cocoa, yams, plantains, and potatoes to make doughnuts and chips in Nigeria. He listed his apartment as his office address.

"Madagascar was not one of our critical posts," said David Newsom, who was then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. "He had some Africa experience, and therefore he wasn't totally the new boy on the block." Pamela Walker, whose husband, Peter, a career foreign service officer, spent six months as Tony's deputy in Madagascar, recalls, "We wondered what Tony Marshall would be like, given his background, but he turned out to be a very good friend and a good ambassador." But she came away with the impression that there was tension between Tony and his wife, Tee. "They both were only children and both had difficult mothers," Walker says. "Tee's mother was constantly sick and needed to be cared for. I don't think Tee cared much for Mrs. Astor."

While Brooke rarely spent time alone with her grandchildren, she made an effort during those years, taking the teenage twins to Europe on a ski trip. They flew to Paris, where she took them to a cocktail party with Jackie Onassis and Sargent Shriver, and then went on to St. Moritz. "I had brought my ratty clothes, and my suitcase was lost on the flight," recalls Philip. "She took me to Pierre Cardin—I wasn't used to shopping. She got us each our own personal ski instructor, and would meet us back at the chalet for lunch."

After eighteen months, Tony's tour in Madagascar ended abruptly under mysterious circumstances. On June 1, 1971, local officials asked that he be sent home, and Tony left the country five days later. "He was persona non grata with the Malagasy government," recalls Sukie Kuser. "They said he was a spy—he had been with the CIA." A 1971
Wall Street Journal
article titled "Little Black Lies: Spy Groups Increase Use of False Material to Put Enemy on the Spot," led with the tale of Tony Marshall's ouster. The Malagasy government claimed to have received a secret document that implicated Tony "in a supposed coup planned against President Tsiranana," according to the
Journal.
The U.S. government dismissed the document as a hoax. The
Washington Post
noted that Tony Marshall "aggressively attempted to attract American business and ranching investment to Madagascar."

Getting booted out of Madagascar, even if the charges were fraudulent, did not boost Tony's stock at the State Department. His next diplomatic appointment was a distinct step down: ambassador to the tiny Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Languishing in the tropics on an ambassador's yearly salary of $31,000, Tony donated $48,505 to the Committee to Re-Elect the President
(CREEP)
between January 1971 and March 1972. In January 1974, Nixon named him ambassador to Kenya, a post that he held until Jimmy Carter took office in 1977. "I suspect the influence of Mrs. Astor in the White House was not an insignificant factor," Newsom said drily.

Kenya was unquestionably Tony Marshall's most challenging diplomatic assignment. A former British colony, the country won independence in 1963 after the violent Mau Mau uprising and was led by President Jomo Kenyatta, whose regime was marred by charges of corruption and brutality. With American companies eager to invest and a large Peace Corps contingent in the country, Tony had his hands full representing U.S. interests.

"Tony was competent," says Henry Kissinger. On a visit to Kenya, Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state, met with Kenyatta to discuss U.S. military aid, accompanied by Tony, and posed for the cameras on a safari, telling reporters that he had borrowed Tony's bush jacket. Declassified cables and news stories show Tony negotiating over American aid, protesting the expulsion of American businessmen, helping a high-ranking African leader get medical treatment in the United States, and flying back to Washington to brief the White House national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

During his time as an ambassador, Tony scarcely saw his sons, and he was furious when Philip ridiculed Nixon in a cartoon for the St. George's School magazine in the wake of the Kent State shootings. But after the twins went off to college—Philip attended his father's alma mater, Brown University, while Alec went to the University of Vermont—they visited him in Kenya. Brooke wrote to Tony during this period expressing her concerns about Philip and Alec and urging her son to be more involved as a parent. She was particularly troubled by Philip's rebelliousness and the lack of an authority figure in his life.

After the Democrats took over in Washington, Tony Marshall and his wife returned to New York, in the spring of 1977. He did some consulting work for Amoco and United Technologies, but ended up dependent on his mother once he took on managing her money in 1980 as a full-time job. "I was very glad to do it," Tony told me. "I discovered things were being mismanaged badly. The trouble was that a bank had all of my mother's money, which wasn't very much at the time, and banks, in my opinion, don't manage money well."

At the Vincent Astor Foundation, Tony took over an office right next door to his mother's. He placed some of her money with Freddy Melhado's firm and also invested in bonds, options, and stocks. Over the next twenty-five years, his rate of return lagged significantly behind the Standard and Poor's index. Monitoring these investments was not a nine-to-five job, so he had ample time for long lunches and to dabble as a writer. Linda Gillies recalls that Brooke was happy to have her son on the premises: "You could often hear them laughing together." As the secretary of the Vincent Astor Foundation, Tony kept an eye on the budget, but he never joined his mother on her trips to the slums or weighed in on grant proposals.

By then Tony was accustomed to seeing his sons sporadically. After college, Alec moved to New York to study medical photography, and at the last minute his housing arrangements fell through. "My father had plenty of room, but he didn't take me in," Alec says. "It would have disrupted his life." First as children and then as adults, the twins learned that if they wanted to see their father, they needed to make an appointment. As Alec puts it, "He told us when to arrive and when to leave."

During the years that Tony had been overseas, Brooke had been running the most famous salon on the Upper East Side. She had tepid feelings toward her son's second wife, Tee, which became more of an issue once the couple was back in New York. "The wives couldn't get along with her," says Sukie Kuser. "It got so that when he was married to Tee, they had separate holidays, he with his mother, she with her mother."

The publication of Brooke's autobiography
Footprints
in 1980 led her to grant another interview to the
New York Times.
She coyly told the newspaper that in the twenty-one years since Vincent Astor's death, she had received "lots of proposals" but preferred single life. "I'd have to marry a man of suitable age and somebody who was a somebody, and that's not easy," she said. "Frankly, I think I'm unmarriageable now. I'm too used to having my way." She mentioned her affection for her grandsons. "They were hippies to begin with," she said. "But now they've emerged and they both have paying jobs." Alec was then working as a medical photographer for Mt. Sinai Hospital, while Philip had just received his master's degree in historic preservation at the University of Vermont.

Even though the seventy-eight-year-old Mrs. Astor was reflecting back on her life, she was then in the midst of creating her crowning achievement at the Metropolitan Museum—Astor Court, a courtyard crafted in Soochow, China, and installed on the second floor at the museum. She had lived in China from 1911 to 1914 and devoted much of her memoir
Patchwork Child
to those years. She would often reminisce about a peaceful summer spent with Buddhist monks. Under Mrs. Astor, her foundation spent nearly $10 million to install the courtyard, which featured a skylight, a koi pond, and Ming Dynasty furniture, at the museum.

The
New York Times Book Review
described
Footprints
as "delightful" and "bubbling," but avid readers in Brooke's social circle thought her portrayal of Tony was cruel. She described him as a "spoiled" boy and an emotionally wounded war veteran who would "cry out in his sleep," and she admitted that she had not been a good mother. "A lot of us knew there had been difficult times between Brooke and Tony and he legitimately could have felt a little bit hurt by her autobiography," said Howard Phipps. In the closing pages of the book, she did write that "one of my great delights is my son Tony." But that did not atone for the pages that came before.

However, there were perks associated with being Mrs. Astor's son. She used her clout at the Metropolitan Museum, the Wildlife Conservancy, and the New York public television station, Channel 13, to help Tony win seats on those boards. "She asked all of the boards to take him on as a trustee," says Ashton Hawkins. "They did it, swallowing hard."