Celebrities stand by disgraced son

It will be an ignominious end to an astonishing era. When the frail figure of Anthony Marshall, 85, walks into a Manhattan courtroom next week he will face going to jail for stealing from his own mother.

Yet Marshall is no common criminal. He is the fabulously wealthy son of Brooke Astor, doyenne of one of the most famous families in New York history, whose miserable last few years of life ended up causing a court case that has scandalised the Big Apple.

The trial, in which the most serious charge was one of grand larceny, ended with the conviction of Marshall, who was found guilty of enriching himself at the expense of Astor.

The court found that her enfeebled condition allowed her son to ransack her estate and change her will, forging her signature.

In the lead-up to sentencing, Marshall has found unexpected celebrity support from actress and talkshow host Whoopi Goldberg, who lives in the same building as him and has written a letter to the judge in support of him.

"Please don't put him in jail ... it would only amount to an unnecessary cruelty," she wrote, pointing out Marshall's ill-health, age and service as a former US Marine and diplomat.

"I cannot believe he will even be able to survive there," she said. "He has suffered enough through this humiliation and ugliness."

The television broadcaster Al Roker has also pleaded for clemency. But whatever the denouement to an extraordinary and melancholy case, the trial has brought down the curtain on a fabulously wealthy slice of "old New York" that few in the modern metropolis believed still existed outside an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

That world clings on in the rarefied atmosphere of uptown New York, clustered in penthouses around Central Park. It is a place of old money and a few well-known family names like Roosevelt, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller.

But no name was ever as storied as Astor. The family traces its roots to John Jacob Astor, who in the 19th century became the first multi-millionaire in America and rose to the peak of New York society.

There is even an Astor Court and an Astor Place in Manhattan.

"They were the ultimate New York story. They immigrated, became very rich in the fur trade and then real estate. Now the family has dissipated," said Professor Dan Czitrom, an expert on New York history at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts.

And no one in New York's high life was as highly regarded as Brooke Astor, whose 105-year life - she died in 2007 - seemed to effortlessly shun the internet era and to hark back to the 1920s jazz age.

"Brooke Astor was probably the last person alive of her era and that society," said John Eligon, a reporter who covered the case for the New York Times.

But the legacy of the Astor name is now clouded by the unseemly skulduggery surrounding her will. Prosecutors produced a list of 72 witnesses to testify against Marshall and to show how he and his wife Charlene persuaded the ailing old woman to change her estate.

They included such names as Henry Kissinger and Annette de la Renta, wife of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. "It was incredible to see these people, with their wealth and famous names, go through the same metal detectors to get into the court as the rapists and murderers," said Eligon.

The story that emerged showed that Manhattan blue-bloods could form families just as dysfunctional as any of those less privileged.

The prosecution claimed that Astor was persuaded to change her will after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The changes benefited Marshall to the tune of at least an extra US$30 million ($42 million).

His wife, whom some witnesses sought to portray as a gold-digger, would also inherit her husband's wealth on his death, something that an earlier will would have prevented.

The case cast a deeply unflattering light on the Astor family. It began when two of Astor's friends and Marshall's son tried to wrest guardianship of Astor away from Marshall.

They said Astor's Park Avenue apartment - where Ronald Reagan and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan had once been entertained - had become run-down. Its dining room was used as a dog run and Astor sat on a couch that stank of dog urine.

They succeeded in ousting Marshall and then uncovered the changes to her estate. Defence lawyers contended that Astor had been lucid when she changed her will, but others painted a tragic picture of a woman in serious decline. Witnesses recounted Astor appearing naked at her holiday home in Maine screaming: "What's my name? I don't know who I am."

Another said Astor did not comprehend the 9/11 terrorist attacks or recall the name of President George W. Bush.

It was also alleged that Marshall had convinced his mother she was almost broke, when in fact her estate was worth US$185 million.

One of Astor's nurses had nicknamed Charlene Marshall "Miss Piggy" and testified that Astor had referred to her daughter-in-law as a bitch.

It was the sort of airing of dirty laundry in public that Manhattan's elite families spent many long decades avoiding.

But no one should have been too surprised.

The world that Astor symbolised died long before she did, washed away by a tide of new Wall Street money that made finance - not inherited wealth - the new status symbol.

It was then dealt another blow by the invasion of reality television into once guarded private society.

"Brooke Astor was the last person of her status to do it without pretension. She did not strive to be who she was. She just was who she was," said Eligon.

It is perhaps a sign of the changed times that the campaign to persuade a judge not to jail Marshall is headed by celebrity names.

But many experts expect the whole sorry saga to end with one of New York's most famed society members being jailed.

- OBSERVER