D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A
David Patrick Columbia
NEW YORK SOCIAL DIARY WELL, SPRING HAS finally sprung, but don’t get your hopes up about the weather. The forecasters gave us plenty of snow warnings this winter but very little of it made its way to ole Manhattan. Nevertheless, the witch hazel has bloomed in the park near my apartment and the forsythia has followed suit. By the time you read this, the tulips and the daffodils will be in the mood and April showers will bring may flowers. The beatings of March doldrums. The New York Post reported in the last week of the month that Anthony Marshall, the son and only child of the late Brooke Astor, has lost the
appeal of his 2009 conviction for trying to steal $60 million from his mother. Evidently, Marshall, who appeared in court in a wheelchair last December, “begged the court to spare him jail time given his age, health, military service, public service, and lack of prior criminal history.” Justice Darcel Clark of the New York Appellate Court responded, “We are not convinced that as an aged felon Marshall should be categorically immune from incarceration.” Marshall will be 89 at the end of May. “The lack of a criminal history is an ordinary circumstance that does not vitiate
Brooke Astor, in her heyday 22 QUEST
a prison term for obtaining millions of dollars through financial abuse of an elderly victim,” the judge declared (and the Post reported). And so ends The Final Act of The Tale of Roberta Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor, daughter of an on-duty marine commandant born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 111 years ago. She died six years ago this August in her mansion at Briarcliff Manor in New York, a wisp of her former self at 105 and woebegone. And it is a saga, but it has yet to be told. I did not buy the story the way it was presented in the media. The public-relations
strategy beginning with the innuendo accusing the son of elder abuse was entirely untrue and an outright smear. As much as its proponents reveled in it, they besmirched the memory of the mother. There were several forces operating and all, obviously, in their own interests—the son and his wife notwithstanding. It may be that Mr. Marshall fiddled with the facts of his mother’s will. This is not an unusual circumstance but, yes, it is illegal. Wills are wars and are often fought to the death after the original death. Furthermore, the mother had made more than 30 different wills in her life and each of
Anthony Marshall, son of the late Brooke Astor, was found guilty in 2009 of siphoning money from his mother’s estate.