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.