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The Baby Monitor Diaries
"She was talking about a marriage that took place in 1919, when she was 17, and there she was, 80 years later, still talking about it,” Gordon says. Annette de la Renta, Astor’s closest friend, was astonished to witness the incident and was unsure how to react. “Mrs. Astor was becoming unglued about it,” Gordon says.
No matter how strained the mother-son relationship might have been, nothing, surely, could excuse the abuses described in her household staff’s diaries, which one of the nurses wrote using easy-to-decipher code names. “Brooke was Princess Polyanna,” Gordon reports, “Tony was Golden Boy or Golden Retriever, Morrisey was Tutor, Charlene was Miss Piggy or Poor Little Rich Girl.”
The scope of the alleged abuses is horrifying to anyone who had the privilege of knowing Astor, a woman of tremendous warmth, wit, and incandescent charm whose conversation was a delicious mixture of gossip and high-minded literary talk, punctuated with a rapt enthusiasm for the cultural institutions she championed.
Ever the coquette, she exuded winsome charm in 2004, at the age of 102, when she attended a lunch party given by Alexis Gregory, the publisher of Vendome Press, for her old friend George Embiricos, a Greek shipping magnate. Elegantly turned out as usual, she wore a hat, gloves, and a tailored Oscar de la Renta suit. Clearly bewildered by the proceedings, she had a beatific smile, delighted that everyone was making a fuss over her. But it was obvious to even old friends that she had no clue who they were. It is sobering to reflect that two months earlier she had signed over $60 million of her fortune to Tony.
I will never forget the first time I met Mrs. Astor, when my first New York boss, George Trescher, a fundraising genius and one of her closest friends, took me for tea at her duplex apartment at 778 Park Avenue to arrange the seating for a gala at Rockefeller University honoring a bevy of Nobel laureates. I was dazzled from the moment she descended the stairs, in a stylish leather miniskirt, aged 83, apologizing for being a few minutes late because she had been working out with her personal trainer. She and George bickered over who should sit where.
“You can’t sit him next to her!” he told Astor. “Don’t you know he’s sleeping with her husband?” She giggled and deferred to George. With an impish grin she confided that President Reagan and Nancy Reagan were coming to her apartment for dinner that evening and she was planning to prevail upon Mrs. Reagan to pull strings to allow her “wonderful new English butler,” a former footman at Buckingham Palace, to obtain a green card. Two years later, after Mrs. Astor hired me to write and perform a wry musical tribute to Rosamond Bernier, the Metropolitan Museum lecturer, for a party in Rosamond’s honor, I called her to ask if she would consider writing a letter in support of my green card application. I was flabbergasted when her chauffeur rang my doorbell an hour later with a handwritten note from Mrs. Astor, full of beneficent hyperbole.
That incident gave me a profound respect for her sense of civic responsibility, and her extraordinary kindness. Countless others who experienced her philanthropic largesse and delectable charm will probably weep, as I did, to read in Mrs. Astor Regrets of how terrified and vulnerable she felt at the end of her life.
For more on Mrs. Astor, read Michael Gross on New York high society and the battle for the Astor fortune.
Christopher Mason, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is the the author of The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal. He is also a prolific writer and performer of musical tributes and satirical songs.
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Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
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The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
My goodness, I got chills from reading this and plan to run to a bookstore later to pick up this book. How sad that someone so generous had to suffer such awful offspring. I can't think of a harsh enough punishment for them.
The story doesn't say whether the conversations picked up by the baby monitor were tape recorded, or whether Gordon relied on the accounts, written after the fact, of the servants who planted the monitor. If there were actual tape recordings, it would give this story more credibility.
I think the allegations are malicious nonsense and this clique of charity vultures have paid the nurse to write this foul drivel, I've known Marshall for years and he's a kind gentle man. The greed factor is more likely stirred by the charity lawyers: it's a huge racket here in New York and they're all feeding off it
A terrible story but a timeless one rooted in a mother's inability to love her own child. A modern greek tragedy. They are all victims, except for the greedy wife, the chorus urging on the son to get his due. Mrs. Astor was a boon to NYC in her generous civic gifts, but not to her only son who spent a lifetime seeking a love she was incapable of giving.
Annette good. Staff good. Tony bad. More of the same old conventional wisdom. As someone smart said on this same subject, Tell me something I don't know. And "I once met Mrs. Astor" isn't it!
Thank you.
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