Anthony D. Marshall, the only child of the late Brooke Astor, lived nine decades; served in the Marines, American intelligence, and as an ambassador; and worked as a Broadway producer. Then, in his dotage, he was accused of theft and elder abuse of his mother by one of his twin sons. He was arrested, tried, and imprisoned, inspiring classic tabloid headlines (the Daily News: “Disaster for Mrs. Astor”; the New York Post: “Bad Heir Day”).
But he also left behind a secret when he died, in 2014, a thoroughly broken man after his compassionate release from the Fishkill Correctional Facility. Neither Marshall nor his even more publicly reviled third wife, Charlene, had testified at his trial, leaving their side of the tawdry tale untold. But he did not, it turns out, go quietly.
In July 2023, a Christian vanity press called Covenant Books published Marshall’s autobiography, In the Shadow of a Monument. Unedited, ill organized, and brought up to date with a self-pitying afterword by Charlene, the book is nonetheless a must-read for anyone with a taste for blackened sacred cow.
Marshall’s memoir has gone unnoticed since it was published last summer. It has not been reviewed or written about, and it has no ranking on Barnes and Noble or Amazon, where it has just one online customer review, though that reader did give it five stars and called it “the other side of that story.”
That it is. It is also an act of revenge by its author, who was convicted on 14 of 16 charges against him, topped by grand larceny in the first degree, for taking advantage of his mother’s mental decline and swindling millions from her. That conviction and his sentence of one to three years in prison was upheld on appeal. So, for many if not most of those who followed his trial, Marshall’s version of events will prove hollow and unconvincing, not to mention insulting to his mother’s memory.
But despite the pedestal she was placed on in life (and on the back cover of the book, in a photo by Richard Avedon), there are many knowing New Yorkers who believe Astor (née Russell) was all too human, though few said so publicly. One who did was David Patrick Columbia, founder of New York Social Diary. “This man—and everybody knew this about him—served his mother very very well,” Columbia wrote of Marshall. “He was an only child. And she was not a particularly attentive mother. She sent him to boarding school at 8. Never saw him basically while she was married to Vincent Astor because Vincent didn’t want him around. Never took his phone calls. Never told him why she didn’t see him… Terrible people robbing a saintly character? That’s a made-up idea. That’s not fair.”
Even now, 15 years after New York v. Anthony D. Marshall and Francis Morrissey, the last great society trial, such sentiments are voiced, if at all, through euphemisms such as flirt (i.e., promiscuous), socially ambitious (i.e., a calculating gold digger), and devoted to her beloved dachshunds (i.e., her family ran a distant second). Though Marshall draws similar conclusions, he aims his darts instead at those who, in his telling, claimed to be his mother’s best friends and were just as bad or worse.
Marshall was “an only child and sometimes a lonely one.” The woman he calls “Mother” “also experienced some emotional abandonment as a child,” he writes, a deprivation that “left her frightened, untrusting and profoundly insecure.”
Marshall writes that his family was “far from being wealthy.” The average observer might disagree after reading about the Portofino castle his mother and stepfather, Buddie Marshall, rented in his childhood; their maid, housekeeper, and boatman; his governess; and the baby-blue Rolls-Royce that ferried him to the Buckley School.
Marshall’s biological father, Dryden Kuser, a wealthy drunk, who married Astor when she was 16 and promptly “squandered his inheritance,” divorced Astor when Marshall was four. When Marshall turned 21, Kuser sued him to claw back a trust he’d created when the couple divorced, initiating a litigious family tradition. “It was outrageous: a father suing his son!”
Marshall loved Astor’s second husband, Charles Henry “Buddie” Marshall, a stockbroker from a colonial WASP family whose first wife’s sister was married to Vincent Astor, Marshall’s future stepfather. They lived in a penthouse duplex on Gracie Square, where “Mother and Buddie slept separately.”
Marshall was sent to Groton, where the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, judged him thoroughly unprepared and nudged him down the prep-school ladder to Brooks School. Poor grades kept him on perpetual probation until his grandfather suggested military school, where Marshall finally gained “some modicum of self-respect.”
Enlisting in the marines, he made second lieutenant, carried his general grandfather’s pearl-handled Smith & Wesson revolver to Guam and Iwo Jima, where he was wounded, and was awarded a Purple Heart and a first lieutenant’s bars. After getting a degree at Brown, he joined the State Department as an intelligence officer.
“Mother and Buddie,” Marshall reports, “totally disapproved” of the unhappy first marriage that produced Philip Marshall and his twin brother, Alec, in 1953. When Marshall hied off to Africa soon afterward, “Mother thought it was a terrible idea, a waste of my time,” he wrote, adding that she “wasn’t interested in where I was going or why.”
Next, he joined the C.I.A., working on the development of the top-secret U-2 spy plane for four years. After a brief detour into business consulting, Marshall bought his first foreign ambassadorship, with contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns.
In 1952, Buddie died penniless; Astor married her third and final husband, the real-estate heir Vincent Astor, seven months later. “I was an extra piece of furniture in his life,” Marshall writes of his second stepfather, whom he paints as brusque, jealous, and competitive. As for Mother, “She swore it wasn’t Vincent’s money that attracted her,” Marshall writes, “but the security of a way of life.” That—and all the money—became hers alone after Astor died, six years later.
Marshall re-entered his mother’s privileged world. And was privy, if the reader chooses to believe him, to her secrets, such as how Vincent’s friend Cardinal Francis Spellman sought to join the ranks of the new widow’s suitors (who included Douglas Dillon and David Rockefeller’s brother Laurance). According to Marshall, the prelate invited Astor to his bedroom, then sprang from behind a curtain with his pants unzipped. Marshall claims his mother told him the “great big ugly thing” caused six days of “traumatic blindness.”
After fighting off a lawsuit from Vincent’s relatives, Astor took control of her late husband’s multi-million-dollar fortune, split between a foundation and her inheritance. She asked Marshall to manage her personal investment portfolio, which had lost half its value due to mismanagement, while she ran the Vincent Astor Foundation. He mentions several times that, before his comeuppance, he’d upped her trust’s value from $19 million to $82 million.
In 1962, Marshall married his former secretary, Thelma Hoegnell, who had initially resisted his proposal, fearing Astor’s influence; after what Marshall describes as a chilly 28-year marriage, they divorced. He’d been introduced to his third wife, Charlene Gilbert, by his mother four years before, but he kept a decorous distance, he insists, until they both were seeking divorce. They eventually moved into an apartment owned by his mother, who disapproved of his marrying again but nonetheless tried to set him up with Pamela Harriman. In the event, Astor did attend her son’s third wedding, arriving 20 minutes late. Monuments have their privileges.
They also have their coveters, as Marshall relates in the second section of his book, which begins on page 351 (of 542) but is the bleeding spleen of the memoir. “On July 24, 2006, Charlene and I woke up happy,” he writes. Overnight, Marshall charges, a cabal led by his son Philip, Annette de la Renta, and David Rockefeller, and aided and abetted by Henry Kissinger and Chris Ely, a butler Marshall had fired in 2005 when Astor stopped entertaining, had set out to destroy him.
Marshall claims that Ely, along with nurses, aides, and household staff, had whisked Astor out of her apartment at four A.M. and into a hospital, where her doctor, who, like Marshall, was out of town at the time, did not have privileges—and where “a guard armed with a revolver” watched over her. Simultaneously, he alleges, they fired several staffers and filed Philip’s petition to stop Marshall from making decisions on his mother’s behalf, accusing him of all manner of grotesque mistreatment, most notably, forcing her to sleep in torn nightgowns on a ratty TV-room sofa reeking of dachshund urine.
Marshall writes that his family was “far from being wealthy.” The average observer might disagree after reading about the Portofino castle his mother and stepfather rented in his childhood and the baby-blue Rolls-Royce that ferried him to the Buckley School.
Not only was that “an encyclopedia of lies,” he claims, it was submitted to light tabloid fires. Marshall asserts without evidence that all her nightgowns and museum-worthy couture fashion had been removed and hidden and that belongings from his mother’s weekend estate, Holly Hill, including antiques, luggage, linens, and china, were surreptitiously photographed. Holly Hill had been shut down when Astor’s medical condition required proximity to her doctors, according to Marshall, and abruptly reopened and re-staffed post-petition with the reinstated Ely in charge.
Marshall, again without evidence, says he was sure the unfaithful servants planned to purloin Astor’s valuables “with the complicity of the big three,” de la Renta, Rockefeller, and Kissinger. Backing them up were “fifty-six lawyers, sixty-five legal assistants, six accountants, five bankers, six doctors, a law school professor and two large public relations firms,” assembled to deliver a message: “She isn’t your mother anymore,” as Marshall characterizes it.
Marshall skates past harder-to-explain aspects of the “disaster,” such as a missing Childe Hassam painting and the curious, criminal role played by his co-defendant, lawyer Francis X. Morrissey, in the drafting and execution of controversial codicils to Astor’s will. And he lingers on tabloid takedowns, hate mail, obscene phone calls, his animosity toward the judge and opposing lawyers, and a raft of suspicions based on hearsay, including a forced diuretic overdose to justify Astor’s hospitalization.
(Air Mail editor Graydon Carter testified for the prosecution at Anthony Marshall’s trial and first published the news, in a 2008 Vanity Fair story, that Marshall was writing a memoir.)
But the book’s real headlines are Marshall’s speculations on motive—“greed, vengeance, status seeking, and personal ambition”—which are a fun-house-mirror reflection of the same charges that were leveled against him and his wife, and which led to his conviction.
Marshall alleges that de la Renta “waited until my mother was unable to defend herself before making the lunge for power and control.” She “wanted to slide into Mother’s shoes” and “replace Mother as the Grande Dame of New York.” Rockefeller’s JPMorgan Chase Bank, “holding legal documents in one hand and a bottomless bag of cash in the other,” he continues, was “in for the kill.”
Marshall believed that instead of letting Astor die in peace, as she’d requested in a living will, de la Renta, as her new legal guardian, sought to assume her identity in the public mind.
The ultimate goal, Marshall charges, was to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, where de la Renta sat on the boards, “thanks to my mother.” They would get not only what Astor had bequeathed to them, “but all her money. And I was standing in the way.”
Rockefeller “became Mother’s savior.” Kissinger “couldn’t have cared less” and “was just doing a favor for a friend.” But why did the wealthy banker Rockefeller and the powerful ex-diplomat get involved? “Annette needed accomplices; she could not do it all alone,” Marshall writes.
When reached for comment, the four living lead characters in the tragedy maintain their positions. Charlene Marshall took her husband’s book to a vanity press because, “I knew nobody in their right mind in New York would publish it,” she says, adding “You can say anything about me. I don’t care, I know who I am and who I was.”
When I ask Charlene why she waited so long to publish, she seems mildly offended by the question. “It’s nobody’s business except mine,” she says, before adding that there were “lots of reasons” why publication was delayed: “I endured eight years of total crap, and then Tony dying, and a year to get his will probated, and then I left New York to go to Maine for a year.”
Marshall’s speculations on motive—“greed, vengeance, status seeking, and personal ambition”—are a fun-house-mirror reflection of the same charges that were leveled against him.
I ask Charlene to clarify and she says a friend from their theatrical days, who had written his own memoir, finally convinced her. “He was also quite strong about including my writing about Tony’s incarceration” and “how horrific that was.” And the world’s smallest violin softly played.
Chris Ely was surprised to learn the book exists at all. “I don’t really care what he says. He knows what I thought of him,” Ely says of Marshall. “He was a scumbag. He ended up in jail and I didn’t.”
A lawyer for de la Renta calls Marshall’s allegations “preposterous.” At the trial, several notes that Astor had written to de la Renta were entered into evidence. “I just want to say I love you very much and am so proud of you because I feel that you are like a daughter to me,” one of them read. If that’s true, Annette clearly came out on top of Marshall in their rivalry for Mother’s affection.
Philip Marshall thinks that “under vastly different circumstances,” his father would be proud of how “I helped my grandmother, a vulnerable person … who was relentlessly poly-victimized.” As for buying his father’s book, he adds, “I prefer to invest in elder justice.”
Which leaves us with the tragedy of a father and his sons. Marshall implies that his sons, left behind when their parents divorced, begrudged his departure. And he states bluntly that “Mother thought they were ill-mannered, unappreciative, and demonstrably only had an interest in her for her money.” He even reproduces a letter in her hand in which Astor writes that Alec “rather frightens me, and I have visions of his directing a gang to kidnap me.”
The author Meryl Gordon interviewed Philip, Annette de la Renta, and Henry Kissinger for her book Mrs. Astor Regrets, the definitive account of the affair. She is mentioned once in Marshall’s memoir, as a confidante of Philip’s, which Gordon confirms. “I’m truly baffled that he’d write that Philip was after his money,” she tells me, as both he and his brother “said they didn’t want anything from Tony’s estate.”
Rather, Gordon adds, they “were concerned about Brooke and her well-being. When she went back to Holly Hill, she began eating again, a classic expression of the will to live. She was happy again, surrounded by people.”
“When she got older, Brooke did invite people over and give them things,” Gordon says, “so it’s understandable that people wanted to know what was still there.” Indeed, de la Renta was one of the recipients of Astor’s end-of-life largesse, but Gordon defends her against Marshall’s accusations, which “are certainly not in keeping with anything I know.” She adds that Kissinger “felt a strong connection and wanted to do right by” Astor, and that Marshall was charged with taking some of his mother’s valuables.
Philip may have triumphed over his father in court. But by taking his fight with his father public, and allying with Astor’s amis mondains, he made the end of her life the wrong kind of public spectacle, inadvertently ensuring that the monumental reputation she’d built with Vincent Astor’s fortune would forever have an asterisk on its pedestal.
Michael Gross is the author of several books, including Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. His latest book, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class, was published in November
