The House of Sorrow

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The House of Sorrow

The memoir of Brooke Astor’s son provides more than just a window into the twilight of America’s WASP elite.

In the Shadow of a Monument, by Anthony D. Marshall, Covenant Books, 539 pages.

Social climbing in the United States does not come without certain costs. We know this from, among other things, The House of Mirth, The Great Gatsby, the King Vidor film Stella Dallas, and the primetime soap opera Dynasty, but we also know it from the more than century-long reign of Brooke Astor (1902–2007).

The noted socialite and maven of philanthropic giving was the only child born to Major General John Henry Russell Jr., who, from 1934 to 1936, was the commandant of the Marine Corps, and his wife, Mabel. Hers was a perfectly honorable background, but Brooke did not claim full membership in the WASP aristocracy until her third try at marriage: In 1953, Brooke was wed to William Vincent Astor, son of John Jacob Astor IV, who was, among other things, one of those who died aboard the Titanic. “Of course she married Vincent for the money,” said novelist Louis Auchincloss. “I wouldn’t respect her if she hadn’t. Only a twisted person would have married him for love.” 

But the transaction came with complications. At the time of her marriage to Vincent, Brooke was the single mother of a grown son, Anthony Dryden Marshall. Born in 1924, Anthony was the sole lasting legacy of his mother’s failed first marriage to John Dryden Kuser. (He chose to assume the surname of her second husband, Charles Henry Marshall III, who died in 1952.) In exchanging vows with Vincent, Brooke had embarked on a new marriage that would deliver her to a position of prominence and power, but her son was a holdover from an earlier life. Anthony had become an “Astor” simply by virtue of proximity to his marriage-prone mother. (And people think that the class system in England is complex.)

Nonetheless, Marshall made the best of his lot: Heeding the counsel of Grandfather Russell, Marshall enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Second World War. He was honored with a Purple Heart. After Vincent died in 1959, Brooke finally found definition for her life by attending to her late husband’s foundation, but Anthony had already charted his own course: A graduate of Brown University with a hankering for world travel, Anthony had been in the employ of the U.S. government, including at the CIA. He proceeded to trade on his friendship with Richard Nixon, who named him to a succession of diplomatic posts: U.S. ambassador to Madagascar (1969–71), to Trinidad and Tobago (1972–73), to Kenya (1973–77). Under Gerald Ford, Anthony was named ambassador to Seychelles (1976–77). He dashed off magazine pieces, wrote fiction, and, much later, took a stab at producing shows on Broadway. His was the sort of superficially meritorious but vaguely dissatisfying upper-class life of a Whit Stillman character.

Anthony slummed in one particularly unforgivable way: After a pair of failed marriages, he sought the companionship of one Charlene Gilbert, then the wife of an Episcopal priest—conceivably a tony position, but, for whatever reason, Charlene was not welcomed into her lover’s social set. Nonetheless, Anthony was not to be dissuaded. Despite his mother’s preference that he become the fourth husband of Pamela Churchill Harriman, Anthony married Charlene in 1992. Then, in 2006, Anthony found himself on the receiving end of accusations that he had, in various ways, mistreated Brooke. He was said to have intervened in her financial affairs to provide for his own enrichment, and deprived her of the luxe life befitting her station; the term “elder abuse” was bandied about. 

All of this culminated in Marshall facing a criminal trial in New York on charges including grand larceny (for upping the salary he took for managing his mother’s money). He denied everything, but a jury pronounced him guilty in October 2009. In June 2013, Marshall began serving a potentially years-long sentence that was truncated, by virtue of his obvious and worsening infirmities, to about two months. Released in August 2013, he lived out his days in freedom until his death in November 2014.

Nine years after his death, Marshall spoke up for himself in the curious form of the present volume, which was published in 2023 to a conspicuous lack of hullabaloo. This memoir was not published by any of the “Big Five” publishers but by the Christian self-publishing entity Covenant Books. One would hope that the choice was informed at least in part by the sincere Christian faith of Charlene Marshall, which is revealed in a nearly 50-page concluding chapter about her husband’s incarceration. As it turns out, Charlene comes across more favorably than anyone else in the book.

In the 470 or so pages during which he is at the helm, Marshall commits an error common to memoirists who have led long, distinguished, sometimes thrilling but not unusually notable lives: He assumes that the average reader will be intrigued by every episode that he can call to mind—and, rest assured, he can call them all to mind. The book is drearily long, but to his credit, Marshall is capable of tossing off the occasional sentence that, in its total lack of self-awareness as to its own over-the-top-ness, elicits a chuckle: “An outstanding trip with Mother was on a chartered yacht, the Marandis, to sail down the Dalmatian Coast.” Or: “I had time to revisit the Acropolis. I had been up it once before, on May 4, 1956, a moment in my life which I will never forget.” Or: “There has been a family attachment to the New York Zoological Society for more than one hundred years beginning with my paternal grandfather, then Vincent, Mother, and me—as trustees.” We get it, Anthony—you were among the 1 percent!

Even so, nowhere does Marshall strike one as a malicious, mendacious, or miserly man. To the extent that we can judge him by his words, he appears to have worshipped his grandfather, cared intently for his mother, and adored his third wife. We are given only his side of the story as to his mother’s physical and material condition, and his responsibility or culpability thereof, but taken on its own terms, his account is plausible enough. He concedes that his mother did appear sickly sans makeup—“which is not extraordinary when one has reached the remarkable age of 104,” he notes. Sensible, too, is his assertion that, at that age, his mother no longer needed a butler but many, many nurses. And who could argue with this, written in reference to her relative state of alleged destitution: “She had all the clothes she could possibly need. Even so, her social secretary, Erica Meyer, had the upscale shop Worldly Things on Madison Avenue repeatedly send her new clothes for her selection.” As for Astor’s financial matters, of which Marshall had assumed maintenance decades earlier, he reports great success: “Mother’s personal investments grew from $19,000,000 to $82,000,000 by June 2006.” 

Many large sums, famous names, and accusations are thrown about, and Marshall sometimes writes with the tone of one who feels himself the victim of a vast conspiracy. “We had no plan. We had no lawyer. This was clearly what ‘they’ wanted,” he writes with confidence after the first accusations were lobbed. In going through this ordeal, bit by excruciating bit, Marshall might have heeded some advice from his mother, who was disinterested in the particulars of financial reports: “She didn’t like the nitty-gritty, but was very interested in the big picture.”

So here’s the big picture: Anthony Dryden Marshall should have been spared a term in prison, however brief. He never faced criminal charges of “elder abuse,” and whether or not he was strictly above board in handling his mother’s business affairs—the subject of the criminal trial in which he was found guilty—the imprisonment of a Parkinson’s-stricken 89-year-old World War II veteran, Purple Heart recipient, diplomat, Lincoln Center trustee, Wildlife Conservation Society trustee, et cetera, was cruel and unusual. His attorney noted in an unsuccessful appeal that Marshall was “so elderly and in such perilous health that a prison sentence would kill him”—and it nearly did.

Having been mocked by the WASP establishment for so long, Charlene apparently felt she had nothing to lose in laying bare the treatment to which her husband had been subjected behind bars, and the pitiful state in which it had left him. In her concluding chapter, she is a far less affected writer than her husband; she also appears to have been far more open and empathetic. She can be slightly repetitive—she twice writes, on successive pages, that Marshall was the oldest person to ever go to prison in New York for a nonviolent offense—but chalk it up to her fervor. She feels her husband was gravely wronged, and she is gravely offended. “This essay,” she writes, “is for anyone who has been heartbroken by having a loved one in jail.” 

Where to begin? Marshall recounts her husband being dispatched to Rikers Island, where his first night was a preview of the inattentiveness and inhumanity that followed: “There was a plastic mattress on the floor but again, not something he could get to. Tony Marshall was forced to sit up all night long in his wheelchair. Through the one small window in the door, he could see the guard and though he called and called for help, no one responded.” One has the sense of his helplessness and that of his wife: “My whole body was shaking from the experience of finding my beloved husband in such a terrible, terrible condition and me powerless to do anything about it!” He was shuffled to the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, then to the Fishkill Correctional Facility. 

What might sound like grousing about his conditions is anything but. For example, his diet—lunches of “a few very dry egg noodles, a piece of bread, a few very small pieces of sort of brown meat in a watery sauce and red Kool Aid”—contributed to digestive problems that ultimately led to his hospitalization for ailments including kidney failure and sepsis: “His constant constipation had pressed so hard on his prostate gland that it in turn pressed on his bladder so hard that it prevented him from being able to urinate and the urine had backed up into his kidneys creating this life-threatening illness.” The judge who sentenced Marshall asked, referring to Brooke Astor, “What would she say if she were here?”—but surely no one would believe that she would endorse her son being reduced to such a state, no matter his misdeeds.

Charlene turns out to be a trooper. She writes, without sarcasm or self-pity, of getting a $15 haircut at a Walmart near Anthony’s facility “that turned out to be one of the best haircuts I’ve ever had!” She reads from the Book of Common Prayer while visiting her husband, leading the guards—typical state workers, unhappy and uncharitable—to tell the prison superintendent that she had been “sleeping,” which is, evidently, impermissible. “I explained about the prayer book and that I was praying,” she writes. “He asked if I could pray without bowing my head and closing my eyes.” Charlene understood the point of prison for its inhabitants and those who care about them: “They strip away every shred of your dignity and any sense of your personhood—as well as that of any visitors, trying to discourage anyone from visiting, by humiliating you over and over again, hoping to break you down completely.”

Above all, Charlene understands the way in which incarceration works to deny its victims not just of freedom but the basic stuff of life. “Being in prison, deprived of all that was good, all that he loved—nature, classical music, the warmth and comfort of a loving touch—was torture in the extreme,” she writes. After winning medical parole, she writes, “Tony lived for a year, three months and, eight days after being released from prison.” Charlene herself died in August 2024 at age 79.

Does any of this sound familiar? Among the various strategies deployed to deny Donald Trump a second stint in the White House, the most ominous was not the attempt to slander him in the press, keep him off the ballot, or depose one Democratic nominee and install another, but the efforts to put him behind bars—to, seriously and literally, subject the 45th president and then-presidential candidate to confinement in prison. The charges brought against Trump were dubious in the extreme, but even if we were to grant the validity of some of them, did any of them merit imprisonment rather than a fine, community service, or a stern censure from a judge? The drive to jail Trump resembled the actual jailing of Marshall in the following way: It seemed less a matter of justice but an expression of malice. 

Having won the election, Trump looks poised to evade this fate, but the Marshall affair reminds us that imprisonment, when used as a default punishment regardless of the particulars of a case, can cause suffering that exceeds the suffering caused by the alleged crime. Consider the sentence given to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. I have no sympathy with Silicon Valley in general nor with Holmes in particular, but when a judge sentenced Holmes to 11 years in prison for charges including wire fraud, he was also consigning Holmes’s two young children to a comparable term of motherless-ness. Her incarceration doubles as a state-imposed destruction of the family unit. During his first administration, Trump perceived, more clear-headedly than most Republican politicians, the costs of excessive imprisonment. He is to be applauded for signing the First Step Act and for issuing pardons or commutations to people from all walks of life with whom he empathized, from Alice Marie Johnson to Rod Blagojevich. 

The saga of Astor and Son may strike some as trifling—another metaphor for the decline of WASPdom—but this memoir, with its potent contributions by his widow, proves that it was anything but.

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