Brooke Astor
Brooke Astor, who died last Monday aged 105, was a survivor from a more gracious age and one of the 20th Century's great philanthropists. Shortly before his death in 1959, her husband, Vincent Astor, predicted that she was "going to have a hell of a lot of fun" with the charitable foundation he had established.
To ensure that end he left her some $122m and, over the next 40 years, Brooke Astor gave much of it away in pursuit of the foundation's aim -- "the amelioration of human misery".
By the early Nineties the charity had given more than $150m to what she called New York's five "crown jewels" -- the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Bronx Zoo, Rockefeller University and the Public Library.
Brooke Astor personally approved the allocation of each grant and visited every potential recipient herself.
In 1976 New York struck a special medal in her honour. It was presented to her before a cheering crowd of 10,000 as the city's mayor proclaimed that no other person had done more for the city of New York than Brooke Astor.
She was born Roberta Brooke Russell, an only child, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on March 31, 1902. Much of her childhood was spent abroad as her father was a Marine officer who served in a succession of posts overseas. Astor grew up in Honolulu, Panama, Shanghai and Peking.
The peripatetic nature of her existence deprived her of lasting friendships, and she began to write stories and to keep a diary as a form of companionship.
It was therefore a surprise when, as a 15-year-old at the Princeton prom, Brooke met -- and then agreed to marry -- J Dryden Kuser, heir to a street-lighting fortune. The marriage was not a success, its 10-year course marked by gambling, drinking and adultery.
She emerged from the divorce in 1930 determined never to marry again.
Nevertheless, in 1932, recanting her vow, she became the wife of Charles 'Buddie' Marshall, a wealthy stockbroker, 12 years her senior.
Marshall encouraged his wife's concern for the underprivileged, and during the Second World War she served in the Red Cross.
After the war, from 1946 to 1952, Brooke Marshall was the first features editor of House and Garden.
Charles Marshall died in 1952 and although she had known Vincent Astor socially for many years, the proposal of marriage from him that followed her husband's death was utterly unexpected. She was nonetheless won over and, aged 50, became his third wife in 1953.
Vincent Astor was the great-great-grandson of the financier John Jacob Astor who, on his death in 1848, was America's richest man.
Following her third husband's death in 1959, Astor wrote two volumes of autobiography: Patchwork Child (1962) and Footprints (1980). Two novels followed: The Bluebird is at Home (1965) and The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree (1986).
She remained fit, bright and alert, preferring the company of her flowers and her dogs to that of New York's premier social families, whom she found extremely dull.
Brooke Astor had a son from her first marriage, Anthony, who took the surname of her second husband, Buddie Marshall.
Her final years were clouded by a battle between Anthony Marshall and his son, Philip, who accused his father of neglecting Brooke Astor and enriching himself at her expense.
Anthony Marshall denied the allegations, and the matter was settled out of court in October last year, with JP Morgan Chase & Co and Annette de la Renta being appointed Brooke Astor's guardians.
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