Brooke Astor Biography

Roberta Brooke Russell was born on March 30, 1902, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was the daughter General John H. Russell, who became commandant of the United States Marine Corps in the mid-1930s. She married for the first time when she was only a teenager. She and her husband, J. Dryden Kuser, had a son named Anthony. The couple divorced in 1930.

Brooke fared better in her second marriage. In 1932, she married Charles H. Marshall, a stock broker. Brooke has described her marriage to Marshall as "a love match," and they were deeply devoted to each other. During the course of this union, her son Anthony took the name of his stepfather and became Anthony Dryden Marshall. Unlike other wives of successful businessmen of the time, Brooke worked outside of the home, working as an editor at House and Garden magazine. Marshall died in 1952.

Brooke had known Vincent Astor for years before they became involved in 1953. Vincent had not even divorced his second wife, Mary Cushing Astor, or "Minnie" as she was called, when he started to pursue Brooke. After his divorce and during a whirlwind courtship, the couple married in October of that year. The couple only had a few years together before Vincent died of a heart attack on February 2, 1959. After his death, she became the head of the Vincent Astor Foundation, which gave away roughly $195 million before it was closed in 1997.

During its time, the foundation awarded grants to numerous organizations, such as the Bronx Zoo, and to support social programs and other special projects in the New York City area. The foundation was not her only charitable enterprise. Brooke also served on the boards of many cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. For her philanthropy, Astor received many awards and honors, including the Presidential Citzens Medal in 1988 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.

Besides her charitable work, Brooke had a career as an author, writing her memoirs and fiction. She explored her childhood living around the world in Patchwork Child (1962), and in Footprints: An Autobiography (1980), she offered readers a glimpse into her life as a socialite and philanthropist. She also wrote two historical novels, The Bluebird Is at Home (1965) and The Last Blossom on the Plum: A Period Piece (1986).

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