Brooke Russell Astor

Brooke Russell Astor (born March 30, 1902, Portsmouth, N.H., U.S.—died Aug. 13, 2007, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.) was an American socialite, philanthropist, and writer, who employed her position, wealth, and energies in the interest of cultural enrichment and the poor.

The daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps officer and a socialite, young Brooke’s early years were spent on Marine posts in Hawaii, Panama, and China. Educated for the most part by governesses, she became fascinated by the art and various cultures that she observed during these years.

After her family settled in Washington, D.C., she attended Miss Madeira’s School for a time, and there she founded a literary society. She did not graduate, however. She married her first husband, J. Dryden Kuser, at age 16. Her marriage introduced her to a number of politicians and journalists, and during this time she began writing for Vogue and Pictorial Review, volunteering for charitable organizations, and serving on charity boards. She gave birth to her only child, a son, when she was 24 years old. After her divorce in 1930, she made her home in New York City.

During her second marriage, which lasted from 1932 until her husband Charles Marshall’s death in 1952, she traveled extensively and began writing for Town and Country and editing for House and Garden magazine. She married Vincent Astor, heir to the fortune of fur magnate and financier John Jacob Astor, in 1953. When he died in 1959, Brooke Astor became the president of the Vincent Astor Foundation. From that time on, she set about providing nearly 100 grants each year to charitable organizations, civic programs, and cultural institutions in New York City, including organizations serving the homeless, programs to build parks in housing projects, and such institutions as the New York Public Library, the Bronx Zoo, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In some 35 years before the foundation’s closure in 1997, she presided over the distribution of approximately $195 million.

Astor’s two works of fiction incorporate her skill for writing memoir. Her novels The Bluebird Is at Home (1965) and The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree (1986) examine life in upper-class society and reflect her personal experience. Her two autobiographical works, Patchwork Child (1962) and Footprints (1980), treat, respectively, her youth and her life as a socialite and philanthropist.