NEW YORK (AP) – Brooke Astor left her 83-year-old son a who’s who guest list for her funeral – and a will that pits him against other mourners who have accused him of going for her money while she lived in squalor.
Brooke Astor died Monday at 105 at her Holly Hill country home in Briarcliff Manor, had been planning her funeral since 1979. The service, scheduled for today at 2:30 p.m., is expected to draw an A-list of American celebrities to St. Thomas Church on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street.
Names on Astor’s list include Martha Stewart, Harry Belafonte, Renee Fleming, Whoopi Goldberg, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Nancy Reagan and former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara.
Astor died of pneumonia. She is to be buried in Westchester, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near her estate by the Hudson River.
In her will, she wrote the epitaph to be inscribed on her tombstone: “I had a wonderful life.” But as she approached death, the drama involving her family was far from wonderful.
No mention of the funeral home handling the arrangements.