Vincent Astor - Marriages

Marriages

• Astor married Helen Dinsmore Huntington, on April 30, 1914. At the ceremony, he was stricken with the mumps, a disease that made him sterile; as for the bride, her friend Glenway Wescott, the novelist, admiringly described her in his unpublished diaries as "a grand, old-fashioned lesbian." At the outbreak of World War I, Vincent took advice from his friend and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and joined the Navy. He served overseas with his wife, who did charity work with the YMCA in France. Vincent was promoted from an ensign to a lieutenant during the War. The couple divorced in 1940. A year later, Helen Astor became the second wife of Lytle Hull (1882-1958), a real-estate broker who was a friend and business associate of her former husband.
• Shortly after his divorce, Astor married Mary Benedict Cushing, known as Minnie. She was a daughter of the prominent Baltimore surgeon, Dr. Harvey Cushing and sister of Babe Cushing Paley and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney. They divorced in September 1953, and the following month, Minnie Astor married James Whitney Fosburgh, a painter who worked as an art lecturer at the Frick Museum.
• On 8 October 1953, several weeks after divorcing his second wife, Astor married the once-divorced, once-widowed Brooke Russell Marshall, whom he called Pookie. According to an oft-told story in society circles, Astor agreed to divorce his second wife only after she had found him a replacement spouse. Her first suggestion was Janet Newbold Ryan Stewart Bush, the newly divorced wife of James S. Bush, who turned Astor down with startling candor, saying, "I don't even like you." Astor proceeded to tell her that he was not well and, though only in his early 60s, he couldn't be expected to live for very long, whereupon she would inherit his millions. At that, Janet Bush reportedly replied, "What if you do live?"

Minnie Astor then proposed the recently widowed Brooke Marshall. Together, Brooke and Vincent Astor developed the Vincent Astor Foundation, a foundation that was designed to give back to New York City. Brooke Astor would live to be 105 years old.