The Richest Boy

After escorting his pregnant second wife to a lifeboat, coolly waving to her as the boat was lowered to the calm sea, jaunty, mustachioed Colonel John Jacob Astor IV went down with the unsinkable ship Titanic while the orchestra played "Hold me up, mighty waters, / Keep my eye on things above." That left a nervous, narrow-chested youth of 6 ft. 4 in., perhaps the greenest freshman at Harvard, to inherit a fortune of approximately $87.2 million, organized around vast and spreading holdings, including some of Manhattan's finest hotels--the Astoria. St. Regis, Knickerbocker. Cambridge and Astor House. It was 1912, apogee of the Progressive Era and the nation's damnation of what Theodore Roosevelt had called "malefactors of great wealth."

Indeed, the gales of social criticism were already blowing before young Vincent Astor fully comprehended that he, at 20, was heir to one of the U.S.'s least popular traditions--fortune founded by great-great-grandfather out of fur trading with the Indians and Manhattan real estate; fortune battened down by grandfather and father upon acres of New York tenements bitterly known as "Astor Flats"; fortune tarnished when half the family moved to England because the U.S. was not "a fit country for gentlemen to live in."

"It is monstrous," read a letter young Astor got from Muckraker Upton Sinclair soon after leaving Harvard to administer his money. "The poor people see in the papers the picture of your magnificent and luxurious home and they realize that it is out of the rents that they pay." But Astor, wiser even then than he appeared to be, replied calmly: "I am not unmindful of the wrongs to be righted . . ."

Left-Leaning Neighbor. Quietly he set about righting some of the wrongs. "Each dollar is a soldier that does your bidding," he once said, and he watched them win or get mowed down. He turned parts of his Hudson Valley estate at Rhinebeck, N.Y. into a model farm, parts into a holiday home for invalid children. He kicked off and often led a house-to-house canvass of tenements built on his land, urged New York police to crack down on lawbreaking landlords. In later years, during Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's social-reform surge, he demolished slum tenements by the dozen, sold others to New York City on easy terms.

For an eventful decade. Astor turned his social awareness toward politics. The focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Hudson Valley neighbor he had come to like while Astor was a naval officer in World War 1 and Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. With open pocketbook, with amateur's enthusiasm, Vincent Astor backed his neighbor for New York Governor, for U.S. President, took F.D.R. cruising on his $2,500,000 yacht Nourmahal after the election (TIME Cover. April 9, 1934). End result: disappointment. When F.D.R. went farther and farther to the left, Astor could not go along, and soon the magazine Today, which Astor had founded along with F.D.R. Braintruster Raymond Moley to boost F.D.R., was calling the Hudson Valley neighbor "an irresponsible radical." Today merged in 1937 with Newsweek, in which Astor held the controlling 60%-plus interest.

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."

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