The son of philanthropist Brooke Astor, who is accused of neglecting to care for his ailing 104-year-old mother, yesterday said Secretary of State Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and even his own son had demonstrated “bad manners” by challenging his guardianship.

By time most people reach 82, the age of Mrs. Astor’s only son, Anthony Marshall, they have succeeded — or long since given up — trying to teach their children the importance of manners. But in his most recent statement, Mr. Marshall fixates on two favorite topics of high society — manners and decency — and suggests that Mrs. Astor herself would not have approved of the behavior of her grandson, Philip Marshall.

In a legal complaint made public last week, Philip Marshall reportedly accused his father of denying Mrs. Astor the level of care and supervision she requires at her advanced age and of pocketing $2.3 million a year to act as her caregiver. The complaint requests the court to appoint a new guardian and comes with affidavits from Mr. Rockefeller, who planned Mrs. Astor’s 100th birthday party, and Mr. Kissinger.

“My mother has always emphasized the importance of good manners,” Anthony Marshall said via e-mail through a spokeswoman. “Those who have associated their names with the action taken against me and my wife Charlene have not only exercised bad manners, but total disrespect and a lack of decency.”

Mr. Marshall extended his criticism to the woman reportedly named in the legal complaint as a suitable replacement guardian, Annette de la Renta, who is the wife of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and a close friend of Mrs. Astor.

Referring to Mrs. de la Renta, a spokeswoman for Mr. Marshall, Brooke Morganstein, said: “No protégé of Brooke Astor would conduct herself in this manner. Mrs. Astor would be appalled by this attack on her son and mortified by this unrestrained invasion of her privacy. Mrs. de la Renta is taking Mrs.Astor’s name in vain and is acting contrary to everything Mrs. Astor has always stood for.”

All this talk of polite behavior struck one observer as quaint and a little off the mark.

“I think it’s sort of comical that it’s come to an issue of manners,” the author of “When the Astors Owned New York,” Justin Kaplan, said. “I didn’t think that we hear about manners anymore. … We’re entering the second act of this melodrama.”

Mrs. Astor was brought to her Westchester estate to recuperate after being released from Lennox Hill Hospital Saturday, according to press reports. Once the grand dame of New York society, Mrs. Astor was hospitalized at 4 a.m. last Monday, two days before the Daily News first reported on the court papers that her grandson filed. The cause of her hospitalization is unclear.

Mrs. Astor gave away nearly $200 million to charity between the time of the death of her third husband, Vincent Astor, in 1959, and when she closed the Astor Foundation, in 1997.

Anthony Marshall’s words yesterday shed little light on his relationship with his mother, or the decisions that he has made as her guardian in recent years, as her age forced her from the public eye. They do provide insight into the fractured relationship between the former ambassador to Kenya and C.I.A. agent and his son, Philip Marshall, who is a professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.

Anthony Marshall said that neither Messrs. Rockefeller and Kissinger “nor my son Philip, ever contacted me to express their concerns before the action was released, which I first learned about by chance.”

He continued: “As friends — or simply as decent people — they should have contacted me and I would have been very receptive to their ideas and acted on them.”

In the original complaint, Philip Marshall accuses his father of cutting the number of staff members caring for Mrs. Astor, of failing to fill her prescriptions, and of neglecting her to the extent that she was sleeping on a couch that reeked of dog urine, according to the Daily News. A court hearing is scheduled for August 8.

Yesterday, Anthony Marshall referred to the allegations as “ludicrous distortions of the truth and outright lies.” He previously said that his mother has a staff of eight attendants.

Contacted by telephone yesterday, Philip Marshall, who lives in South Dartmouth, Mass., declined to comment on his father’s statement.

A spokesman for both Mr. Rockefeller and Mrs. de la Renta, Fraser Seitel, said that his clients had involved themselves in the guardianship “for only one reason, and that was to ensure that Mrs. Astor … be accorded the treatment that she deserves.”

Regarding Anthony Marshall’s criticism of their manners, Mr. Seitel said, “They, too, regret the publicity that this has gotten.”

A telephone call to the New York office of Mr. Kissinger’s consulting firm was not returned late yesterday.