Brooke Astor, whose combination of glamour, wealth, savvy, conscience, and patrician grace created in her a kind of perfect storm of philanthropy, died yesterday at her weekend home, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. She was 105.

Astor’s last years had been unkind, as she endured unwanted publicity over her son’s treatment of her, reportedly selling her art and Maine vacation home, and housing her in squalor. How far it all was from the glory that once was Brooke Astor, the gold standard of both society and philanthropy.

She had a gold-plated name, having married into one of America’s oldest great fortunes; her husband’s grandmother had invented the Social Register.

But if her name could open doors, and her fortune would make even a banker whistle, Brooke Astor’s philanthropic legacy was her own creation. Any billionaire with a conscience can tell you it is hard to give away a fortune; harder than making one, some say.

Placed in charge of distributing a fortune amassed primarily in New York, she made the city its main beneficiary, funding projects as grassroots as new grass and parks, and as highbrow as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, where her foundation’s last dollars went, to purchase “good books.” In all, some $200 million was spent to better New York, yet it was not the amount but the care and panache that made her a leader.

“It became glamorous and important to support what Brooke was supporting,” the president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, said.

Roberta Brooke Russell was born on Easter Sunday, 1902, in Portsmouth, N.H. She was raised at first “rather royally,” she wrote in her memoir “Patchwork Child,” in her grandparents’ Washington, D.C., mansion while her father, a Navy officer, served a lengthy tour of the Orient.

Things with her mother were more complex. A bright and enthusiastic personality, Mabel Howard Russell was a socialite and an intellectual. Being with her, Brooke writes, was to be “in the midst of the blinding radiance that was mother.” Yet Astor would write that the relationship was competitive, and she speculated that her mother pushed her to marry young just to get her out of the house.

Brooke was 16 when she met J. Dryden Kuser, wealthy and a collegian, manager of the Daily Princetonian, and president of the New Jersey Audubon Society. They married in a rush of enthusiasm and maternal cajoling, at 17.

Things quickly degenerated for the newlyweds. Kuser turned out to be a “flagrantly unfaithful” drunk and broke her jaw when she was six months pregnant. Her father urged her to leave, but Brooke stayed for the sake of her son, Anthony. She finally sued for divorce in 1930.

In 1932, Brooke married the stockbroker and socialite Charles Marshall, and the new couple sailed to Cherbourg aboard the steamer Europa. Summers were spent at a castle in Portofino, Italy, where Brooke met Max Beerbohm, a distressingly plump and shirtless Ezra Pound, and Evelyn Waugh, in a rare good mood while on honeymoon.

During World War II, Brooke volunteered at a Staten Island hospital. Typically, she worked hard — often until 3 a.m. — and the uniform was part of the appeal. She described herself in a nurse’s veil as “a grey lady.” After the war, she became a features editor at House & Garden magazine.

The two decades she spent with Marshall were, she later said, the happiest of her life. He died in her arms on Thanksgiving Day, 1952.
Had she not married for a third time, Brooke Marshall might have become a society tea matron — she had met the eligible Marshall while riding to hounds — and a fine if undistinguished magazine editor with a comfortable lifestyle. But much as she loved taking tea, she loathed society teas.

Barely six months had passed after Marshall’s death when Vincent Astor began paying her court. Astor, who had inherited a fortune when his father went down on the Titanic, was already married, but neither he nor Brooke let that stand in the way. They were married in 1953.

The marriage was difficult from the start. Mrs. Astor described her new husband as “extremely jealous.” He would not permit her to talk on the telephone when he was home. “I think I made him happy,” she told the New York Times in 1980. “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.”

Melancholy, reputedly alcoholic, and one of New York’s more prolific philanthropists, Vincent Astor did the city his best turn when he settled control of his $67 million foundation on his wife at his death, in 1959. As he lay dying, Astor told his wife what he was leaving in her care. “You are going to have a hell of a lot of fun running it, Pookie,” he said.

Brooke Astor refocused the Vincent Astor Foundation, established in 1948 for the “amelioration of human misery” on New York causes.
Astor announced to her dead husband’s astonished retainers that it would be she who made the decisions. She sold Newsweek magazine, which Vincent had helped found. She settled a bitter challenge to the will from his half-brother. Then she was off to the races.
“I never give to anything I don’t see,” she once told Newsday.

Among the first grants was $1 million to United Neighborhood Houses, in support of a program to keep teenagers at settlement houses from joining gangs. Coming in 1961, the same year the film “West Side Story” won the best picture Oscar, it was a prescient grant and one that helped set the tone for a foundation that would not confine its giving to the favored charities of the Four Hundred.

But the institutions Astor liked to call the city’s “crown jewels” were hardly neglected. John Jacob Astor, the butcher who came to New York in 1783 and died in 1848 after becoming America’s first millionaire, was one of the founders of the New York Public Library, and his descendants continued to support it. Astor sat on the board of the library after her husband’s death and became its leading light.

In 1963, the foundation gave a half-million dollars to convert the Arnold Constable department store on Fifth Avenue and 40th Street into the Mid-Manhattan Library. It was the beginning of a relationship that included $5 million in 1977 to improve collections, and $10 million in 1985 for research libraries.

In 1983, Astor announced she was giving up all her other board memberships to concentrate on the library, a move it credits with focusing attention on its needs to the extent that, in the words of Mr. LeClerc, “it recalibrated the aspirational level for libraries all over America.” She remained honorary chairman of the board of trustees until her death.

Other crown jewels on the Astor tiara include Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, the Morgan Library, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Bronx Zoo, where the foundation funded “The World of Darkness” exhibit, featuring bats and naked mole rats.

The zoo honored her by naming its first baby elephant “Astor” in 1981. It is unclear whether the gesture included a reference to her lifelong affiliation with the Republican Party. The year before, at a dinner party she threw for Ronald Reagan, the president-elect crawled under her table to retrieve a diamond earring she had dropped.

Over the decades, the foundation’s giving seemed to move from direct involvement in misery-amelioration to a more long-sighted view that included aesthetic and intellectual pleasure among the goals worthy of funding. Historic preservation became a priority in the 1970s, including the rescue of Federal-style houses in Manhattan near Fraunces Tavern.

Astor’s apartment was among the most tasteful and luxurious in New York, occupying two floors, plus an additional apartment for guests. The décor was by fashionable decorators like Mark Hampton and Parish-Hadley, who created for her a famous sang-de-boeuf library that epitomized her dedication to œuvres littéraires.

Likewise, Astor was a byword for stylish dress. Traveling to inspect the projects she’d funded around New York, whether at the Metropolitan Museum or at a settlement house in Harlem, she was inevitably “the little lady with the big hat,” unmistakable and perfect. “People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady,” she once said. “And I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

Astor not only spent nearly $200 million to improve New York; she spent all the money her foundation had, an unusual gesture in the world of philanthropy, where funders typically try to preserve their capital and make their institutions theoretically eternal, like the prayers said for kings at medieval priories.

And she was getting older. In 1996 she told the Times, “I would like to have one year before I dance into my grave, of doing something good for myself.” Remarkably, for a 94-year-old, she got another decade and more.

Brooke Astor
Born Roberta Brooke Russell on March 30, 1902, in Portsmouth, N.H.; died August 13 at her estate in Westchester County; survived by her son, Anthony Dryden Marshall, and two grandchildren, Philip and Alexander Marshall.