A Will, a Fortune and a Blue-Blood Trial

NEW YORK – Tony Award-winning producer Tony Marshall (I Am My Own Wife, 2004) was not at Radio City Music Hall Sunday night for Broadway's annual celebration of the theatrical season. But the 85-year-old Marshall was back in Manhattan criminal court Monday morning to resume his starring role in a drawing-room drama (now in its seventh headlined week) that might be called, I Am My Own Defendant.

The only child of New York philanthropist and white-gloved social icon Brooke Astor, Marshall is accused in an 18-count indictment of looting part of his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother's $185-million estate before she died in 2007 at the age of 105. Dressed in a dark pinstriped suit, blue shirt and red tie held down by a Marine Corps clip – and blessed with a vigorous handshake despite his cane – Marshall radiates the patrician hauteur of a man who stubbornly believes he can rise above this humiliation no matter what the jury's ultimate verdict.

The trial, which is about at its halfway point, has already featured as witnesses enough bold-faced names (Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Annette de la Renta) to host a glittering society benefit. There was also the emotionally wrenching Oedipal day when Brooke Astor's twin grandsons (Philip and Alec Marshall) testified as prosecution witnesses against their father.

Cameras are not allowed in the courtroom – and, as a result, the Astor trial so far has been a New York-only obsession rather than daily fodder for cable television audiences. There is a retro quality to the trial that Brooke Astor – a ferocious gossip in her prime who vaulted into the social pantheon with her 1953 marriage to Vincent Astor -- might well have appreciated. At a time when newsprint is fast going the way of parchment scrolls, the Astor trial has been lovingly chronicled by the three New York dailies ("Astor was not all there, sez ex-butler" was a headline from Tuesday's Daily News). And in a moment Monday that should have been preserved in amber and sent to the Smithsonian, there were three courtroom artists sketching the white-thatched defendant and the witnesses.

(Spousal full disclosure: My wife Meryl Gordon wrote a 2008 book about the events leading up to this upper-crust courtroom saga: Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach. She is covering the trial for Vanity Fair.)

The opening prosecution witness Monday morning was 82-year-old former housekeeper Mily de Gernier, who first went to work for then-recently widowed Mrs. Astor in 1965 as a chambermaid. De Gernier described the steady deterioration of the woman she called "Madam." Speaking softly in a Swiss-German accent, de Gernier recalled, "She stopped calling me Mily...She called me the 'Big Lady' because she couldn't remember."

Brooke Astor's mental condition is central to the trial because Tony Marshall (aided by his urbane attorney Francis Morrissey, the other defendant in the case) is accused of inducing his mother to rewrite her will in his favor in 2004 after she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and was unmistakably displaying the symptoms of the disease. De Gernier testified that around the time that Mrs. Astor was rewriting her will (and enriching her son and his third wife, tabloid-target Charlene Marshall, by as much as $60 million), she was also fearfully complaining to her maid, "There is a man in the closet."

The 12 jurors and four alternates have been treated to a crash course in Brooke Astor's over-the-top lifestyle (a private plane to fly her luggage to Palm Beach for the winter season was a typical indulgence.) The prosecution showed photographs Monday of Mrs. Astor's ornate drawing room and "blue room" at her in-town residence, a duplex at 778 Park Avenue, as de Grenier recounted how Tony Marshall had removed a Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo drawing and a John Frederick Lewis painting from the walls (each worth about $500,000), saying that his mother had given them to him.

At the height of the 1970s fiscal crisis, Brooke Astor became a fabled New York figure through her philanthropy on behalf of everything from the New York Public Library to settlement houses in the Bronx. But the trial has brought out the other less ennobling aspects of Brooke Astor's personality – including her obsession with using her iron will to reward and punish through bequests. On the way to the courtroom Monday morning, I shared an elevator with an aide who was a pushing a three-shelved rolling file cabinet crammed with binders containing more than 30 different versions of Brooke Astor's last will and testament, dating to 1953. In fact, when Mrs. Astor retreated to Holly Hill (her country estate in Westchester County) for the weekend, de Gernier testified that her employer always traveled with a locked attaché case that contained the latest will.

No man may be a hero to his valet, but Brooke Astor was unquestionably a heroine to her butler, Chris Ely. The British-born Ely, who finished testifying Tuesday afternoon, was the staff member who displayed the most consistent and intense loyalty to his employer in her final years. "She was great fun, she was very generous, she was a very nice person," Ely said on the witness stand. "She loved trees, she loved animals, she loved the outdoors as much as city life." Mrs. Astor responded to his fidelity with an undated, hand-written note on the finest stationery (shown to the jury) that stated, "I could not live without you."

The 46-year-old Ely, dressed in a gray suit, white shirt and gray tie, had his own moment of fun when prosecutor Elizabeth Loewy began the standard quiz on his background. "What did you do after school?" the prosecutor asked. "I went to work in London," Ely replied with a hint of a smile. "And what did you do in London?" Loewy inquired. Ely's deadpan reply: "I worked for the queen." A former footman at Buckingham Palace ("I rode in a lot of carriages"), Ely became Mrs. Astor's butler at Holly Hill in 1997.

The combination of Ely's Remains of the Day decorum and his devotion to Mrs. Astor added a wrenching quality to his sad-eyed tales of a bewildered woman who increasingly lost understanding of what was going on around her. In 1999, when she was still a physically spry 97, Ely testified that she repeatedly told him, "I'm going ga-ga." By 2002 – the year of Brooke Astor's 100^th birthday, which was celebrated with a shimmering dinner hosted by David Rockefeller – Ely testified, "She was confused a lot of the time." As the butler recalled with embarrassment, "She once asked me if we were married."

For those who insist on a larger motif to major criminal trials (turning, for example, O.J. Simpson's acquittal into a parable about sports heroes, race and big-money defense tactics), the Astor case can illustrate anything from the dangers of elder abuse to the ugly underside of lives of privilege.

But mostly it is a ripping good yarn worthy of white-shoe novelist Louis Auchincloss (an early witness in the trial) and Edith Wharton. As long ago as 1960, well-born social critic Cleveland Amory wrote a book entitled, Who Killed Society? Now, nearly half a century later, we are witnessing the final throes of blue-blood New York in a shabby downtown courtroom far from the drawing rooms of Park Avenue.