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Cash Shortage. Everywhere Vincent Astor went the headlines bore down relentlessly—on his taste in racing cars and yachts; his membership in clubs (29); his knowledge about tropical crustaceans; his volunteering, at age 50, for Navy duty in World War II (from which he emerged a four-stripe captain); his disdain at all times for the Cafe Society that scooped up countless relatives, including his half-brother John Jacob Astor VI (born four months after the Titanic sinking). Hardest of all the headlines shone on his marriage to three beautiful, brilliant women. They were: 1) Helen Dinsmore Huntington (married 1914, divorced 1940), since then, as Mrs. Lytle Hull, a leading patron of Manhattan music; 2) Mary Benedict Gushing (married 1940, divorced 1953), eldest of three, celebrated heiress-daughters of Boston Surgeon Harvey Gushing; 3) Mrs. Mary Brooke Russell Marshall (married 1953), daughter of the late Major General John H. Russell, who commanded the U.S. Marine Corps from 1934 to 1936.
But increasingly, as Vincent Astor moved away even from the fringes of history, the life that the headlines missed was still the same story—free from cliche success or cliche failure—keyed to hard work and hard try. In 1952, as an old yachtsman, he knew warm success with his day-to-day involvement, as biggest stockholder of U.S. Lines Co., in the completion of the splendid superliner
United States. In 1957 he knew cold failure when his project for a 46-story office building on Manhattan's Park Avenue—to be called Astor Plaza, it might have capped his long march from the Astor Flats—bogged down and passed to a Manhattan bank largely because he could not set up adequate financing. When Astor died last week in Manhattan, aged 67, of a heart attack, he died childless. Behind him he left his fortune—augmented during his stewardship to between $100 million and $200 million. Out of its vastness he left $2 million to his wife and $827,500 in 24 other bequests, including $25,000 to his first wife as evidence of "my deep affection and respect." The rest he left to his Astor Foundation to be used to "alleviate human misery." And behind him, in the teeth of the dead muckrakers, he left a quiet life to make the quiet American point that, as Vincent Astor put it, "it is unreasonable to suppose that because a man is rich he is also useless."