Roberta Brooke Astor (née Russell; March 30, 1902 – August 13, 2007) was an American philanthropist, socialite, and writer. She served as the chairwoman of the Vincent Astor Foundation, established by her third husband, Vincent Astor, who was a member of the Astor family. Brooke Astor was the author of two novels and two volumes of personal memoirs.
Early life
Roberta Brooke Russell was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the only child of John Henry Russell Jr., the 16th Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Mabel Cecile Hornby Howard. Her paternal grandfather John Henry Russell Sr. was a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. She was named for her maternal grandmother (Roberta) and was known as Bobby to close friends and family.
Due to her father's career she spent much of her childhood abroad living in China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other places. She briefly attended The Madeira School in 1919, but graduated from the Holton-Arms School. As a child she kept diaries, letters and drawings from her travels, which were published in an illustrated edition of her memoir "Patchwork Child: Early Memories" in 1993.
Marriages
John Dryden Kuser
She married her first husband, John Dryden Kuser (1897–1964), shortly after her 17th birthday, on April 26, 1919, in Washington, D.C. "I certainly wouldn't advise getting married that young to anyone," she said later in life. "At the age of sixteen, you're not jelled yet. The first thing you look at, you fall in love with."
John was the son of the financier and conservationist Anthony Rudolph Kuser and Susie Fairfield Drydan. Susie's father was U.S. Senator John Fairfield Dryden. John Kuser later became a New Jersey Republican councilman, assemblyman, and state senator. They also lived in Bernardsville, New Jersey.
Brooke described her tumultuous first marriage as the "worst years of [her] life", which was punctuated by her husband's alleged physical abuse, alcoholism and adultery. According to Frances Kiernan's 2007 biography of Astor, when Brooke was six months pregnant with the couple's only child, her husband broke her jaw during a marital fight. "I learned about terrible manners from the family of my first husband," she told The New York Times. "They didn't know how to treat people". A year after the marriage, according to a published account of the divorce proceedings, John "began to embarrass her in social activities" and "told her that he no longer loved her and that their marriage was a failure".
Brooke and John had one son, Anthony Dryden "Tony" Kuser, May 30, 1924. She filed for divorce February 15, 1930, in Reno, Nevada. It was finalized later that year.
Charles Henry Marshall
Her second husband, whom she married in 1932, was Charles Henry "Buddy" Marshall (1891–1952), the only son of Charles Henry Marshall. Buddy was the senior partner of the investment firm Butler, Herrick & Marshall, a brother-in-law of the mercantile heir Marshall Field III, and a descendant of James Lenox, the founder of the Lenox Library.
Astor later wrote that the marriage was "a great love match."
She had two stepchildren by the marriage, Peter Marshall and Helen Huntington Marshall. Helen's first marriage was to composer Ernest Schelling and her second to cellist János Scholz.
In 1942, Brooke's then-18-year-old son Tony changed his name to Anthony Dryden Marshall out of admiration for his stepfather. Buddy's financial fortunes turned in the mid-1940s when Brooke went to work as a features editor at House & Garden magazine for eight years. She also briefly worked for Ruby Ross Wood, a prominent New York interior decorator who, with her associate Billy Baldwin, decorated the Marshalls' apartment at 1 Gracie Square in New York City.
William Vincent Astor
In October 1953, 11 months after Charles Marshall's death, she married her third and final husband, William Vincent Astor, the chairman of the board of Newsweek magazine and the last rich American member of the famous Astor family. Vincent was the son of RMS Titanic victim John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV and socialite Ava Lowle Willing. He had been married and divorced twice before, had no children and was known to have a difficult personality.
"He had a dreadful childhood and as a result had moments of deep melancholy," Brooke recalled. "But I think I made him happy. That's what I set out to do. I'd literally dance with the dogs, sing and play the piano, and I would make him laugh, something no one had ever done before. Because of his money, Vincent was very suspicious of people. That's what I tried to cure him of."