For the first time since she acquired the property in the 1960s, Brooke Astor’s former waterfront estate on Mount Desert Island is being offered for sale.
The 3-acre property, which overlooks Gilpatrick Cove and the yacht club in Northeast Harbor, has a listing price of $6.5 million.
Astor summered in Northeast Harbor for decades along with other rich and powerful seasonal residents from out of state whose heirs still include members of the Rockefeller, Milliken and Ford families. Before she died in 2007 at the age of 105, Astor gave away more than $200 million of the Astor family fortune to institutions in New York and Maine.
The 6,800-square-foot summer cottage, known as Cove End, has 10 bedrooms and eight bathrooms, according to luxury real estate firm LandVest, the listing agency for the property. Built in the 1930s, the inside of the colonial-style house retains a look popular in the 1950s, when Brooke Astor married her third husband, Vincent Astor. Bright colors, floral patterns and wall-to-wall white carpeting dominate the interior design, according to photos posted with the online listing.
The property also features a swimming pool and a stone terrace that overlooks the cove.
Philip Marshall, Astor’s grandson, said the listing photos of the interior strongly resemble the way he remembers the inside of the house when he visited Astor there, though some of the details may now be different. He said his grandmother was an avid swimmer and almost certainly had the pool installed on the property after she purchased it.
“It sparks fond memories of time my family and I spent with my grandmother,” Marshall said. “She would want the new owner to have the same sense of stewardship for the property and the community that she did.”
Astor never remarried after Vincent Astor, heir to the Astor’s family riches, died in 1959. She had suitors, according to media reports, but chose to pursue a life of social independence and philanthropy without the encumbrances of another marriage.
She once told a friend she lacked patience and disliked the notion of “having anyone tugging at my sleeve at 10 o’clock and telling me it’s time to go home,” the Los Angeles Times reported when she died.
Since Brooke Astor passed away, Cove has been owned first by her son, Anthony Marshall, and then effectively by Marshall’s widow, Charlene Marshall. Charlene Marshall died last summer at Cove End at the age of 79, according to her obituary. Anthony Marshall died in 2014 at the age of 90.
Ownership of the property came under scrutiny toward the end of Astor’s life, when Anthony and Charlene Marshall were accused of mistreating her and seizing control of her assets as her mental state declined. Anthony Marshall ended up being charged and convicted in 2009 in New York of elder abuse and, though Charlene Marshall was never prosecuted, she was largely blamed for her husband’s efforts to seize control of his mother’s estate.
Philip Marshall, who said he and his brother have no financial or other interest in Cove End, said the transfer of the property to his father and then to Charlene Marshall in 2003 was “one of the early red flags” that his father was inappropriately seizing control of Astor’s assets.
Philip Marshall and his twin brother, Alexander, were Anthony Marshall’s sons from a prior marriage. Their father married Charlene Marshall, the ex-wife of a local Episcopal priest, in 1992. After they found out in the early 2000s that Charlene owned Cove End, they sought legal counsel and ended up taking their father to court over how he was handling his mother’s affairs.
At one point, before she died, Brooke Astor told Philip she might leave him a cottage on the property, though the idea was more his grandmother’s than it was his, Philip said. But his father found out and dismissed the idea, telling Philip he wouldn’t want to have to maintain it, he added.
“It was evident my father was denying my grandmother’s wishes,” Philip said.
A 2006 court order required Charlene Marshall to transfer ownership of Cove End back to Anthony three years after he, acting as his mother’s legal guardian, had transferred ownership of the property first to himself and then to his wife. The court order also forced the Marshalls to return paintings, family silver, jewelry and a 10-carat diamond ring to Astor’s estate, control of which was transferred by the court to Annette De La Renta, a longtime friend of Astor’s, and to the bank JPMorgan Chase.
The current legal owner of Cove End is an irrevocable trust that Anthony Marshall established before he died to benefit his wife, according to the town’s real estate assessing records. Charlene Marshall has three adult children from a previous marriage, but it was not clear Tuesday whether they also are beneficiaries of the trust and might get the proceeds from the sale of the house.
The town’s current assessed value for the property, which is used to determine its tax bill, is $2.1 million.