May 31, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story
by Frances Kiernan
Brooke Astor, the widow of a prominent New York multimillionaire, would become not only the grande dame of New York society, but a hands-on philanthropist who worked hard to change the world — well into her 90s, writes Frances Kiernan in her biography of the socialite.
In 1953, Brooke Marshall, a two-time divorcee of moderate wealth, married Vincent Astor, a businessman who had inherited millions of dollars from his family. He died six years later, leaving her to lead his $67-million foundation.
Though she loved circulating in fashionable society, Mrs. Astor took grant making seriously, writes Ms. Kiernan, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine.
“We go and we see,” Mrs. Astor would say. “We never give to anything we don’t see.”
Ms. Kiernan describes Mrs. Astor’s role at the Vincent Astor Foundation and in the city where she concentrated her giving: how some men on the fund’s board resisted giving a woman so much power; how she planned to revitalize Central Park and the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant; how she visited the people her philanthropy benefited; how she gave millions to support the New York Public Library and the Bronx Zoo.
“I remembered that Thornton Wilder said that money was like manure and that it should be spread around,” Ms. Kiernan quotes Mrs. Astor. “So what we have done is to spread around this manure, and I have been raking it.”
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110; (212) 354-5500; fax (212) 869-0856; http://www.wwnorton.com; 256 pages; $24.95; ISBN 978-0-393-05720-1.
