"Vincent Astor was dreadful," she later informed me, speaking about Brooke's third husband, whose name and fortune Brooke had inherited after five and a half often miserable years of marriage.
"Dreadful" was her harshest criticism, usually reserved for someone who was very pushy or rich and money-obsessed. My mom rarely said bad things about people, but when she did, she had a lexicon all her own. Later, when I asked her why not, she said, "She just never grabbed me"-which was classic Gloria. I could tell right away my mom didn't like Mrs. The conversation was brief, which was probably for the best. We'd had a lot of practice being well-behaved young men, making good impressions when out with our mother. What handsome young men you have here"-that sort of thing.Ĭarter and I stood and took turns shaking her gloved hand. Before taking her seat that day in 1981, she paused by our table and said something like "Hello, Gloria. Her table was waiting for her, right next to ours. If you can get a table," Dominick Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair, before cautioning, "But don't count on getting a table." "Mortimer's is the best show in New York. Less than eighty years later, Mortimer's was the scene of many such "events." It was the "see-and-be-seen" watering hole for the boldest of boldface names on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Her coming was an "event" that lit up the gossip pages all over the city. Astor, Caroline Astor, who defined and dominated New York society during the Gilded Age, didn't eat in a restaurant until almost the end of her life, in 1908, when she finally bent to the liberalizing changes of the twentieth century and set foot in Sherry's, when it was on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street. Mortimer's, on the corner of Seventy-Fifth and Lexington, was to New York society what Delmonico's or Sherry's had been a century before, that is, once society ladies allowed themselves to be seen eating in restaurants. We were having chicken paillards and burgers at Mortimer's that day, but the food was beside the point.
I was probably the only thirteen-year-old in New York who did imitations of society figures like Jerry Zipkin and Nan Kempner to make his mom laugh. We'd all make mental notes of things people said or did and then giggle about it together afterward.
And she didn't take that world too seriously-that was part of the fun of going out with her. It was like having a front-row seat to a never-ending performance filled with fascinating and often odd characters you actually got to interact with. My dad had died three years before, and my mom often took us to places she would otherwise have gone with him: Broadway plays, Elaine's for a late-night dinner, the Café Carlyle to hear Bobby Short sing Cole Porter. It was 1981, and I was eating lunch at Mortimer's on Manhattan's Upper East Side with my mom and Carter, my brother, when Mrs. I'm pretty sure the fur she was wearing that day was sable. I didn't know "Astor" was the name of a family whose fortune began with beaver fur that the pearls Brooke Astor was wearing around her neck and the gold glinting on her earlobes, the lustrous coat over her shoulders, even the food she was about to put into her mouth, would have been paid for-if you traced it back far enough-by the bloody business of removing fur pelts from dead beavers, otters, and other small animals. I knew the name "Astor" only because of the Astor Place subway stop in the East Village and the barbershop nearby called Astor Hair, where the cool kids from my school liked to go. My first thought when I met Brooke Astor was, Who is this very small lady in a very big fur coat? I was thirteen, and it wasn't the first time I'd asked myself such a question upon being introduced to someone by my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt.
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