The Last Mrs. Astor by Frances Kiernan

Author:Frances Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

A GREAT SMALL FOUNDATION,

1968–1976

In my mother’s eyes a woman should know only what made her attractive to an intelligent man, and even then she considered that a woman should hide how much she really knew.

In June 1968, less than two weeks after Robert Kennedy’s assassination and only two months after Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed—with the entire country polarized by the war in Vietnam and traumatized by the deaths of two men who seemed to hold out the promise of racial justice without violence—Brooke Astor sat for her first full-scale New York Times interview. For this interview she chose a small red sitting room in her large Park Avenue duplex. Sharing a sofa with two very active dachshunds and surrounded by some forty dog paintings, a “svelte, sixtyish” Brooke Astor managed, against considerable odds, not to come across as some out-of-touch Social Register do-gooder.

She managed this astonishing feat by bringing to the interview a heady blend of charm, genuine enthusiasm, and self-deprecating humor, as well as sufficient ammunition to mount one carefully placed preemptive strike. “I think I have to overcome quite a lot,” she told the interviewer. “Being Mrs. Astor, a lot of social workers are against you. They think you’re a silly Lady Bountiful who doesn’t know a thing. When that happens I try to be as attractive as possible and win them over. I’m not there to show off.”

Nor had she chosen to meet in the red sitting room just to show off. She had at least two causes she wished to promote and an entire city she wished to persuade of their importance. One cause she wished to promote was the important work being done by the Vincent Astor Foundation. By her ninth year as the Foundation’s president, she had definitely learned a thing or two. Rather than hide the luxury of her surroundings, she was prepared to make a virtue of them. Instead of pretending she had no interest in current fashion, she addressed the issue head-on. She knew what her visitor wanted from her and she was more than happy to comply.

The occasion for this interview was the culmination of one of the Foundation’s most recent undertakings: the opening a few days earlier of a brand-new clubhouse on the Lower East Side for something called the Boys Brotherhood Republic. Within the confines of this spanking new clubhouse, “2,000 Negro and Puerto Rican youths” were going to have an opportunity to run a de facto city—a city where they would not only elect a mayor and city council but end up actually having their own police force and law court. The city’s own mayor, John Lindsay, had attended the opening.

This ambitious undertaking, which would seem to fall under the general heading of youth services, wasn’t really up Brooke Astor’s alley—although the handsome new building would hold some appeal and elective politics happened to be a particular interest at the moment—but she made such a persuasive case for the Boys Brotherhood that the dazzled interviewer lost sight of the fact that it was Foundation money, not Mrs.

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