IMAGINE the frustration of a carload of people stumped by a particularly baffling Botticelli guessing game subject. Famous? Yes. Born in the 20th century? Yes. Female? Yes. Actress? No. Singer? No. Athlete? No. Artist? No. Activist? No. Hostage? No. Politician? No. TV host? No. Chef? No. Writer? Sort of. Still alive? Not sure. Unless someone were to luck into the question "Is she an exceptionally generous, gracious and well-dressed widow?" the game could easily zip through 20 No's to its close without nearing the desired name: Brooke Astor. The lady in question, who celebrated her 105th birthday on March 30 at Holly Hill, her Westchester estate, is worth knowing better, as Frances Kiernan's guardedly admiring biography, "The Last Mrs. Astor," proves. Until last summer, most people thought of Brooke Astor as the dapper, aged socialite whose face so often popped up in society photos in The New York Times. They also knew her as the widow of Vincent Astor (her third and final husband), and, through the Vincent Astor Foundation, a great benefactress of many New York cultural and charitable institutions. Older New Yorkers recalled pictures of her visits to various projects throughout the city, to which she unfailingly wore pearls, hat and white gloves, calling to mind, Kiernan writes, "a photograph of the Queen Mother during the Blitz." As recently as 1996, she journeyed to the South Bronx to celebrate the renovation of a local church. As she and a friend walked by the church, someone threw from an apartment window a roast pig, which landed directly in front of them. Mrs. Astor neatly dodged the pork and kept walking. When a local character ran up to her and kissed her, saying, "Sweetheart, you don't look a day over 50," Mrs. Astor "beamed and said, 'Why, thank you,'" her friend recalled. But last July, the dowager doyenne, then 104, returned to the papers, this time to the news sections. Her grandson Philip Marshall had filed court papers making the shocking charge that Anthony Marshall - his father, and Mrs. Astor's only child-was "intentionally and repeatedly ignoring" his ailing grandmother's "health, safety, personal and household needs, while enriching himself with millions of dollars." Anthony Marshall, Philip charged, had fired much of Mrs. Astor's longtime staff, closed her beloved Holly Hill, and used her money to underwrite two (admittedly excellent) Broadway plays. Three friends of Mrs. Astor-Annette de la Renta, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger - backed the grandson's charges with affidavits. (With friends like that, who needs sons?) In October, a settlement named de la Renta as Mrs. Astor's guardian, and, without accusing Anthony Marshall of wrongdoing, required him to return $1.35 million to the estate. Mrs. Astor, by her own published admission, had not been the world's greatest mother -even if, as Kiernan writes (apparently not meaning to poke fun), "she felt a special responsibility for her son's well-being." Still, this was not a final act anyone would have envisioned for one of the city's most decorous citizens, a woman so instinctively polite that she asked Winston Churchill for permission before she named her dog after him. Family photograph of Roberta Brooke Russell, later Mrs. Vincent Astor. In "The Last Mrs. Astor," Kiernan acquaints readers with Mrs. Astor's long, rich back story, soft-pedaling her subject's flaws but taking care not to exaggerate her stature. While praising Mrs. Astor for being "attractive, gay, fun to be with, and a great flirt," Kiernan assesses her philanthropic contributions more cautiously. "How much good Brooke Astor ultimately did, there is no telling," she ventures, hedging: "A drop in the bucket is a drop nonetheless." The Vincent Astor Foundation's drop came to some $200 million during the 40 years Mrs. Astor spent as its director, personally vetting the organizations she supported, guiding donations and spurring others in her set to mimic her generosity. If $200 million is not a big drop - well, New York is a very big bucket. Still, this book is intended to praise Mrs. Astor, not to bury her. Readers seeking dirt on the much-covered scandal will not find much to roll in; the unsavory coda receives only nine pages. Instead, Kiernan resurrects the monument as she appeared when the author first met her, over lunch at the Carlyle in 1999: neither polished to a blinding luster nor especially tarnished, but imposing and original just the same. Kiernan, a former editor at The New Yorker and the author of a biography of Mary McCarthy, draws her portrait from books, articles, interviews and, notably, two memoirs that Brooke Astor wrote herself. Those books - "Patchwork Child" (1962) and "Footprints" (1980) - can be hard to find. Mrs. Astor's pet charity, the New York Public Library, had lost its only copy of "Footprints" when I went looking for it earlier this spring. Happily, Kiernan's biography can fill the breach, inform the curious and perhaps inspire conscientious New Yorkers to take up Brooke Astor's gloves, and sense of civic duty, for themselves. Born in 1902 to a well-connected but not dazzlingly wealthy family, Roberta Brooke Russell married a prosperous Princeton graduate named John Dryden Kuser (he later became a New Jersey state senator) when she was 17. According to "Patchwork Child," he was an alcoholic philanderer who broke her jaw when she was six months pregnant. She divorced Kuser in 1930 and in 1932 acquired a far superior second husband, the doting stockbroker Charles Marshall, known as Buddie. Later, Anthony Kuser legally changed his name to Marshall. Buddie Marshall died late in 1952. Six months later, his widow met the multimillionaire Vincent Astor, a descendant of the fur trader turned Manhattan real-estate magnate John Jacob Astor, and a man considered so unpleasant by his peers (and even by his own mother) that he reportedly required a solitary seating for lunch at his club because nobody would share a meal with him. Rumor had it that his wife at the time, Minnie Cushing (a sister of Babe Paley and Betsy Roosevelt Whitney), wanted out of the marriage but had agreed to find Vincent a suitable replacement first. When the two of them came upon the newly widowed Brooke Marshall, they heard wedding bells. Vincent proposed the following weekend. Brooke turned him down flat, but yielded two months later. Why would a battle-scarred Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall have risked such a union, especially when, as Kiernan notes, the speed of her remarriage badly upset her Marshall relatives? According to Kiernan, Mrs. Astor's good friend Louis Auchincloss said, "Of course she married Vincent for the money," adding: "I wouldn't respect her if she hadn't. Only a twisted person would have married him for love." Kiernan is more circumspect. Citing her subject's own take on the connection, from "Footprints" (which she gently compares with wishful "bedtime stories" composed by Mrs. Astor "for her own comfort"), she explains, "in agreeing to marry Vincent she was taking upon herself the task of making him happy, while doing her best to undo the damage caused by his mother's early mockery and neglect." When her husband died in 1959, six years into their marriage, Mrs. Astor inherited $134 million for her pains, half of it set aside for the Vincent Astor Foundation, which was dedicated to "the alleviation of human misery." Did she love her husband as much as she loved the New York Public Library and the Met? Nobody can know what complicated passions may lurk in the souls of others. Mrs. Astor, channeling Ogden Nash, indicated as much in a poem she published in The New Yorker in 1996, the week of her 94th birthday: Love is an apple, round and firm, without a blemish or a worm. Bite into it and you will find you've found your heart and lost your mind. Whether or not Brooke Astor found her heart in Vincent Astor, she did not lose her wits. After his death, she took the helm of the charity he had established, and led it farther, and more daringly, than you'd think such a comme il faut person could - forward and in high heels. It's as good a reason for fame as any; and better than many. Brooke Astor was so instinctively polite she once asked Churchill's permission before naming her dog after him. Liesl Schillinger is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Until last summer's reports that Brooke Astor's son was keeping her on a shoestring budget in her Manhattan apartment, the widow of millionaire Vincent Astor was known as a society maven who doled out money to worthy causes. But in this enjoyable and flattering biography, former New Yorker editor Kiernan, who knows Mrs. Astor personally, describes how the thrice-married woman was raised to be charming and agreeable, and learned her lessons well. Kiernan finds some detractors, who saw Astor's charm as manipulative and her agreeable nature as sugarcoating on a single-minded determination to advance her status. But even the negative comments have a positive spin. Responding to the theory that Astor married the ill-tempered and reclusive Vincent for money, Louis Auchincloss said, "I wouldn't respect her if she hadn't. Only a twisted person would have married him for love." Then again, it was an odd pairing, and not just because the matchmaker was Vincent's then-second wife, who allegedly wanted out and believed the way to obtain a generous settlement was to find "a suitable replacement." Tidbits like these add zip to Kiernan's affectionate portrait of the poet and writer who really made her mark when she took over her husband's philanthropic foundation. A portrait of the grande dame in decline, manipulated by her son is a poignant end to a grand saga. 16 pages of photos. (May 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Former New Yorker editor Kiernan (Seeing Mary Plain, 2000) pussyfoots around the life of New York philanthropist, society lady and writer Brooke Astor. Reading this cautious bio of her tantalizing talents at garnering men, money and causes, it becomes apparent that the beloved grand dame was wily as well as charming in her heyday. (She's still alive, but frail and secluded at age 105.) The only child of a respectably middle-class career officer, Brooke Russell spent her childhood overseas, roving from Hawaii to China to Washington, D.C., where she attended Miss Madeira's School. Her mother's ambition for her reached no higher than marrying a rich man, and by age 16 she was finished with school and faced with a suitor: wealthy Princeton senior Dryden Kuser, who turned out to be alcoholic and abusive. The couple endured ten unhappy years and produced one child, Tony, before Dryden asked for a divorce so he could marry another woman. Brooke soon wed longtime admirer Charles "Buddie" Marshall, a well-connected stockbroker who first had to extricate himself from his own marriage. They lived grandly and happily for 20 years, during which Brooke began work as an editor and writer at House and Garden. After his death in 1952, however, his widow discovered that Buddie's punitive divorce settlement meant she inherited only a modest income. Not to worry: Within six months, aging moneybags Vincent Astor had proposed, encouraged by his current wife Minnie, who figured she'd get a better divorce settlement from the odious creature if he'd found someone new. His death in 1959 made Brooke marvelously wealthy and the head of the Vincent Astor Foundation. She became a famous philanthropist in her own right, generously supporting the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, among many other venerable institutions. Proficient, but too heavily based on Astor's own memoir, Footprints (1980), to be terribly revelatory--or interesting. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

With all the headlines about her son's unguardianlike behavior, it's good to have a biography reacquainting us with Mrs. Brooke Astor. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.