In Brooke Astor's Blue Room

Toward the end of the six-month trial, which kept tabloids screaming with headlines like “Diss Astor,” and “Bad Heir Day,” the jury asked to review photos of the blue room. The blue room was not the grandest in Brooke Astor’s ten-room duplex apartment on Park Avenue —that prize belonged to the oxblood-lacquered library, designed by Albert Hadley and featuring red velvet Louis XV chairs and over 3,000 first editions in Moroccan leather—but the blue room was where Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor had spent her last years. A small sitting room adjacent to her bedroom, it contained a fleur de lis rug, a blue and pink chintz couch, blue sateen armchairs and matching drapes. The blue room was where Mrs. Astor received the occasional visitor, and ate dinner alone (dressed in fancy frocks and diamonds) on a folding tray in front of the television. Mrs. Astor, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in her latter years and could not recognize close friends, signed several codicils to her will in the blue room, surrendering control of the bulk of her 185 million dollar Astor fortune--once slated for New York City charities-to her only child, Anthony Marshall, and his third wife, Charlene.

If the walls of all the blue rooms that Mrs. Astor inhabited over her life could speak, they would tell stories so violent they would knock the million-dollar, gilt-framed paintings off the walls. Begin with the conception of Anthony Dryden Marshall, christened Anthony Dryden Kuser, which occurred in the middle of the roaring twenties in a bedroom done up in gray-blue velvet with matching armchairs, drapes, and velvet headboards. Dryden Kuser, Anthony’s father, heir to his financier father’s millions as well as his mother’s fortune from the Prudential Life Insurance Company, was drunk, as he had been most nights of his marriage. He was also in a foul humor after losing at cards. His twenty-one-year-old wife was asleep, and he woke her, demanding sex. When she murmured that he was drunk and she was half asleep, he persisted, forcing himself upon her, taking what he regarded as rightfully his.

In the era of the Teapot Dome Scandal, where rich men got richer in the Blue Room of the White House, no one talked about marital rape or domestic abuse. When Brooke Kuser discovered she was pregnant, she was shocked, as well as angry: “Having not participated very willingly in this future event, I was perturbed,” she wrote with well-bred euphemism in her 1980 autobiography, Footprints. Six months later, Dryden Kuser got drunk again, fought with his wife, probably about money (in one afternoon on the golf course, he lost $36,000) or his affairs with other women. Dryden Kuser was accustomed to getting his own way. That night he got so enraged, he knocked his wife down and broke her jaw. Brooke’s father urged her to get out of the marriage, but she stayed for the sake of her son.

Anthony Dryden Kuser grew up in rooms decorated in every color of the rainbow—rooms in red, green, violet and blue, filled with marble fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling drapes, Louis XVI chairs and 19th century Chinese wall paintings, grew up with Shetland ponies and Pekinese dogs and French nannies, had everything a child could possibly want except his mother’s love. Even after Dryden Kuser divorced his wife to marry another woman, giving Brooke custody of her son as well as a handsome alimony, she handed her little boy off to nannies at every opportunity. When she remarried stockbroker Buddy Marshall, she and her new husband took off on a months-long European honeymoon, leaving Tony behind to be cared for by nannies. When Buddy Marshall thought that Tony Marshall’s longtime French governess, whom the boy adored, was spoiling him, Brooke fired her. At the age of ten, when Buddy observed that Tony needed toughening up, Brooke sent her only child to boarding school, where he was friendless, and beset with nightmares. As Tony put it in a self-published, thinly fictionalized novel, Dash, “As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake.”

When I imagine the childhood of Tony Kuser, I think of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. In this classic 1770 painting, a slim teenaged boy with a face so sensitive, pale and refined it might belong to a girl, stares out from the huge, elongated mostly blue canvas with a melancholy vacancy. His elegant, cavalier clothes—ermine-plumed hat, blue satin britches, matching waistcoat, lacy ruffled shirt, silk stockings, leather shoes tied with blue ribbons—tell us that he is not accustomed to any play or work in which he might soil himself. His arm crooked confidently at the waist suggests that he will become master of the landscape he dominates--pastoral, estate-like countryside with a gentle brook in the distance. Yet, beneath the patrician pose, there is a tentativeness and vulnerability, as if he doesn’t have a clue why he has come into the world, much less how he will make his way in it. (Ironically, research into Gainsborough’s masterpiece revealed that its subject, Jonathan Buttall, son of a rich ironmonger, proved woefully inadequate to the task of making a living, filing for bankruptcy in 1796. The Blue Boy changed hands several times, leaving Great Britain in 1922, purchased for a record $728,000 by California railroad magnate Henry Huntington, inspiring Cole Porter, who socialized with Brooke and Buddy Marshall, to write a song about its fate called, “Blue Boy’s Blues.”)

Tony Marshall, who turned up in an elegant blue suit and tie on most days of his trial, did not go bankrupt; but he never won the blue ribbon of his mother’s love, especially in later life. At 18, he legally changed his surname to Marshall, but when Buddy Marshall died and Brooke married Vincent Astor, Brooke Astor curtailed relations with her grown son, explaining in Footprints: “ Vincent was jealous of Tony.” Tony was going through his first divorce, and Brooke felt guilty about rejecting her son at a time when he clearly needed her, but as she explained in Footprints, “I needed to concentrate on Vincent.” Brooke tried to make it up to her son by donating $100,000 to the reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, which helped secure Tony an ambassadorship to Madagascar, but she privately complained to friends that Tony was a n’er-do-well. She resented that she had to hire him herself, some years later, to manage the Astor millions. When Tony divorced his second wife to marry penniless Charlene Gilbert, Mrs. Astor was appalled. Not only was Charlene the ex-wife of an Episcopal priest, she also had “no class and no neck.”

Tony Marshall’s son, Phillip, blamed Charlene for the ill treatment Brooke Astor received in her final years, which led Phillip to sue his father to win guardianship of his grandmother. “The Battle of the Blue Bloods,” with its tales of a dog-urine soaked couch in the blue room and the disappearance of a multi-million dollar Childe Hassam painting from the living room, was on the front pages of every newspaper in New York, including the decorous New York Times. When the case was over, Phillip Marshall wrested guardianship of his grandmother from his father, as well as inadvertently paved the way for the elder abuse unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to charge the elder Marshall with sixteen counts of fraud.

So why do we care? Partly, it’s because we conflate beauty and truth, as well as beauty and goodness. We imagine that because the rich can create perfectly choreographed rooms with antiques and art work from every corner of the globe, because they can turn themselves into objects d’art with glittering Ceylon sapphires and the latest designer fashions, because they can dine off Blue Willow China and sleep in canopied beds, we imagine that they are better than we are, that they are gods. Money is power, and power is a kind of aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger, friend of Brooke Astor, once observed.

But money cannot buy love, and when the well-appointed life in the blue room goes wrong, the rich take each other to court, and the rest of us can’t get enough of their misery and dysfunction, because in the end, rich or poor, blue blood or not, we are the same, desperately seeking the serene blue depths of our mother’s love, desperately seeking, to paraphrase the words of recovering alcoholic writer Raymond Carver, “to call ourselves beloved.” (“And did you get what/ you wanted from this life, even so? / I did/And what did you want? /To call myself beloved, to feel myself/beloved on the earth.”)

In the People vs. Anthony Marshall, the jury of eight women and four men, "little people" as Leona Helmsley would have called them, who worked as caterers, consultants, and teachers, found Anthony Marshall guilty of grand larceny, fraud and embezzlement. At 85, in frail health, he will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. After the conviction, the jury repaired to the Blue Ribbon Bar in Greenwich Village, miles away from Brooke Astor’s blue sitting room on Park Avenue.

Into the Wild Blue Ocean

“There are two things you will never regret,” writer Mary Gordon once observed, “a swim in the ocean, and the birth of a baby.” I recite this like the rosary every time I consider plunging into salt or fresh water, every time I list the usual reasons why I shouldn’t—the water is too cold, the air colder, I’m too tired, too depressed, I don’t want to get wet, I look like a Henry Moore sculpture in a bathing suit. Sometimes I talk myself into a swim; sometimes I don’t. One simple fact remains constant: the older I get, the less inclined I am to embrace the labor of plunging into cold water, especially ocean water, with its breakers and riptides, its potential to fling me about like so much sea kelp.

On the second-to-last day of September, on Crescent Beach in Block Island with the wind blowing so hard that you had to shout to make yourself heard, I repeated this homily to my three friends, hoping to convince them to join me in what would likely be the last swim of the summer. My friends are writers as well as mothers (actually, all are grandmothers, but don’t tell anyone because it makes them seem ancient as the Mohegan clay cliffs). We met years ago in a writing group in Westchester, and have mostly stayed in touch, through moves, divorces, and remarriages.

We were spending five days on Block Island, courtesy of Mary-Ann’s agent, who had generously offered to let us use her vacation home with its many bedrooms, porches and gardens in Rodman’s Hollow. We had divided the day into sessions of writing, biking, hiking, and gossiping. A swim in Block Island Sound seemed just the thing to make already unforgettable day even more so, before we headed home to drink wine and watch the sunset.

But no argument would sway Sarah, our southern belle from Virginia, who ironically was the only one wearing her bathing suit beneath her biking clothes. Sarah said swimming was a good idea in theory but that she had dipped her toes in the water and it was just too (expletive) cold, that her scrawny limbs were turning blue at the mere thought of plunging into Block Island Sound. If we were at Cape Hatteras in August, or Bermuda in March, but we weren’t, we were in the Bermuda of the North, thirteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island a week into fall and nothing would make her get wet, no matter how blissed-out she might feel afterward.

So Sarah huddled against her backpack, promising to record the polar swim on her Nikon, while we three nutty New Englanders made our way to the Crescent Beach bathhouse, which was unfortunately closed for the season. Draping a towel over a railing on the outer deck, which provided only the flimsiest cover against the gazes of passersby, including an old geezer with a metal detector some twenty feet away, as well one fortyish fellow in a golfing hat, who later approached us and confessed to watching us swim, pointing out that the water couldn’t have been that cold because we didn’t even use a towel to dry off. (The truth was, which we didn’t share as there was no need to discourage his plans to go swimming, we had packed only one towel!)

But changing our suits, we were hardly aware of him or any other idling beachcomber, shouting into the gale that we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing such a thing twenty years ago, but that now we didn’t give a hoot. Or, as Mary-Ann put it, quoting from a slogan on a tee-shirt that she picked up in Old Saybrook, a slogan that became a kind of shorthand for our island idyll,“Frankly, Scallop, I don’t give a clam!”

It probably won’t surprise you that my bathing suit was blue—with tiny white polka dots that a saleslady assured me some ten years ago were meant to provide a visually slimming effect, enhanced by the old-lady skort that reached to mid-thigh. It was the sort of suit that my mother would have approved of, would have worn herself had she been inclined to swim in the ocean in September.

But here’s what made me sad: when she was my age, my mother was not inclined to swim in the ocean—not in September or any other month of the year, even though she lived within a few miles of several beaches on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Florida. In the summer months, when she headed north to her summer cottage in Canada on Georgian Bay, where she had spent nearly every summer of her life since she was a child of five, where, in fact, she had first learned to swim, she didn’t go into the water either. She always had her reasons: she had just had her hair done, she was getting over a cold, the water wasn’t warm enough (even though Lake Huron was considered the warmest of the Great Lakes, a fact which she always proudly cited to friends), she didn’t want anyone to see her in a bathing suit as she had recently put on a “few tons.”

“Did your mothers stop swimming when they got to be a certain age?” I had asked my friends earlier, as we made our way from the Greenway Trail down to Mansion Beach, scouting a spot in which we might take our swim.

“Yeah, even when we were kids going to the Connecticut shore every summer, my mother rarely went in the water, she always said she didn’t want to mess up her hair,” Mary-Ann said, explaining that her mother reported that your skin gets more sensitive as you get older, and that she had never been able to bear the cold even when she was younger.

“My mother swam a lot when she was young growing up in England,” Sarah remembered, “but now that I think of it, she hardly ever went in as she got older.” Sarah’s mother had been a smoker, and had died of emphysema at the age of 78.

“My mother doesn’t swim as much as she used to, but she still does a kilometer in the pool almost every day,” Christine offered brightly. Christine’s mother was the only one of our mothers who was still alive, and maybe, I theorized, there was a connection; maybe when you stop swimming, stop submitting yourself to the baptism of cold water, something shuts down and you start preparing to die.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “we can’t forget that it’s only been in the last hundred years that women have been encouraged to swim, or engage in any other sport, for that matter. There was no women’s swimming competition at the Olympics until 1912.”

“And when they did go in the water,” Mary-Ann said, “think of the bathing costumes they had to wear—bloomers, caps, trousers. Who would want to get wet wearing all that stuff?

When we reached Crescent Beach, we agreed that we were the lucky beneficiaries of feminism. If it hadn’t been for pioneers like Annette Kellerman, the woman who designed the first one-piece suit that she wore in attempting to swim the English Channel in 1905 (and was, in fact, arrested for wearing on a Boston beach two years later), and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the entire English Channel in 1926, completing the feat in 14 hours and breaking all previous records, we might not be here today, plunging, in our one-piece Spandex suits, into Block Island Sound.

Then, with Sarah capturing our posteriors for posterity, we charged into the surf, whooping and hollering, repeating that it wasn’t all that cold, except when the wind scattered bits of cresting wave on our goose pimpled arms. We counted to ten, asked each other who was going to be first. In seconds, Mary-Ann, the oldest and gutsiest among us—and what you should know about Mary-Ann is that she has earned enough money from the ten books she was written to buy a condo on the Connecticut shore--dove into the surf. Christine was next. I was last, breaking out into a lusty, mangled French version of La Marseillaise—“Allons, enfants de la patria, le jour de gloire est arrive”--that would have given my high school French teacher a mini-stroke. (“Rebecca,” she used to say in a voice that let me know I was going straight to the guillotine, “You don’t roll your r’s.) But I digress: in a quieter moment between breakers, I explained that singing the French national anthem was what my first husband, Len, had done when he went swimming, and that belting out the rousing verses never failed to warm me.

“Three cheers for Len,” they cried. All these dear ladies, including Sarah on the beach, had known Len. All, if I asked them which I did more than once during our reunion on Block Island, could tell me one funny story about him that I had forgotten. Then Christine and Mary-Ann screamed out their own mangled versions of La Marseillaise, and it made my heart sing like a barking harbor seal. How many friends could I go back with twenty-five years and have it be as brief as the lull between one breaking wave and another?

Sarah, who shared the dozen pictures she had taken of us that evening after an Indian dinner of Mary-Ann’s lentil dahl, remarked that what was so amazing about watching us was that we went into the water as droopy-butt middle-aged ladies, but that once we got wet, we became girls again, our oldest, deepest selves suddenly laid bare, like sandbars at low tide.

“The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” observed Annette Kellerman, who continued swimming just a few weeks before she died in California at the age of 88, “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”