Brooke Astor's possessions go under the hammer Brooke Astor was no ordinary socialite. Certainly she was rich, had a well-known name, and was chic and immaculately coiffed, but there the resemblance with other New York socialites ends. With her daytime uniform of pearls, white gloves and hats (latterly often with veils), an evening weakness for lavish jewels and sumptuous designer frocks, her devotion to a succession of noisy, small dogs (in her case dachshunds), and an apparently consuming passion for philanthropy, Astor was widely regarded by her compatriots as New York's answer to the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother - only thinner, two years younger, with three husbands to her name rather than one, and a widowhood of 48, rather than 50, years. She herself first made the connection with royalty, saying, 'Unlike Queen Victoria we are amused - we are always amused. But where the British Royal family has galvanised a nation's voluntary and charity workers through a canny exploitation of the mystique of monarchy, Astor relied on the more tangible potency of money. Money is like manure," she liked to say, quoting the novelist Thornton Wilder. 'It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around. The money in question came from Astor's third husband. She married the famously difficult Vincent Astor, whose demons included anger management and alcohol, in 1953. Brooke was 51 years old and, according to the writer Louis Auchincloss, in her prime ('The most attractive woman I have ever known. She was never beautiful, but she was radiant and charming"). Only 11 months had passed since the death of her previous husband, Charles Marshall, whom she described as the love of her life. If her marriage to Marshall was a love match, her decision to accept Astor's proposal - he reportedly bombarded her with five letters a day - may have been more pragmatic (his nephew Ivan Obolensky labelled Brooke unambiguously an 'adventuress"). Whatever its basis, the marriage proved outwardly successful. Vincent Astor died of a heart attack in 1959 and left his wife a fortune estimated at about $60 million, with an equal sum earmarked for 'the alleviation of human suffering" via the Vincent Astor Foundation, the charity that Brooke Astor oversaw until she wound up its activities in 1997, when she was 95. Prophetically, Vincent Astor had told his wife, 'Pookie, you are going to have a hell of a lot of fun running it. As he intended, the 'human suffering" targeted lay within New York City, the source of much of the Astor fortune, which had its roots in the fur trade and New York real estate. A hell of a lot of fun" appears to have been precisely what Brooke Astor had. She made the Vincent Astor Foundation her life's work. From the outset she determined to be more than a figurehead. Her involvement was always personal. When neighbourhood regeneration programmes applied for grants, it was not a faceless bureaucrat with a clipboard who conducted the site visits but Astor herself - in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and wearing her finest: typically three strands of pearls, a hat and high heels, even in her 90s. 'If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I'm not dressed up or I'm not wearing my jewellery, then the people feel I'm talking down to them," she said. 'People expect to see Mrs Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don't intend to disappoint. The cause with which she was most closely associated, and which she made her exclusive focus in later years, was the New York Public Library. That grandiose Beaux-Arts building is famous for the monumental pair of pink Tennessee marble lions that flank its front steps. Among the jewellery Astor bought herself is a brooch made by Van Cleef & Arpels in the form of a New York Public Library-style recumbent lion. Decorated with coloured diamonds, coral and rubies, it is articulated in the manner of the Duchess of Windsor's Cartier big cats. It is included in the sale, with an estimate of $20,000-30,000. Brooke Astor's life contains elements of an all-American fairy tale: a happy, conventional upper-class childhood followed by a series of marriages to ever-richer husbands, culminating in an apparently contented and distinguished widowhood in which, through charitable endeavour, she repaid her good fortune. There were nightmare elements, too: her first husband was an alcoholic who beat her and frittered away his days playing golf for exorbitant stakes ($2,000 a hole in the 1920s). Her second husband lost his money, forcing her to trade on her connections and take a job with Condé Nast, at House & Garden. Astor himself cannot have been an easy companion. Then, at the end of her life, came mental degeneration and accusations that her only son had betrayed her. But in public she never stopped smiling. In 1996 the New York Landmarks Conservancy named her a living landmark: 'A list of the city monuments is incomplete without her name alongside," it reported. Like any New York landmark, she presented an unruffled mien. Presumably the Astor who was 'always amused" recognised her own good fortune, which included being able to indulge her enthusiasms. The interior designer Albert Hadley, who worked on her country house, Holly Hill, as well as her New York duplex (he installed brass-trimmed, cinnabar-coloured lacquer bookshelves in the library, which would become an icon in the history of American interior design), claimed of Astor's involvement in the decoration of her homes, 'No one can equal her gaiety of spirit, her joyous laughter and her keen wit. Her visual wit included a distinctly 'doggy" element to several rooms, with massed displays of historic canine portraiture and garnitures of antique Chinese carvings of dogs of Fo alongside more whimsical inclusions: ceramic dachshunds and dog bowls modelled with dachshund figures. Sotheby's sale includes a group of 75 dog paintings, their subjects predominantly King Charles cavalier spaniels and, of course, dachshunds. Among highlights is a painting by the 19th-century Leicester-born sporting artist William Nedham of a liver-and-white springer spaniel and a smaller toy spaniel probably intended to represent a King Charles (estimate $3,000-5,000). Nancy Astor, an earlier Astor bride, was disdainful of her father-in-law William Waldorf Astor's alterations to Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, which included 18th-century French boiseries and furniture made for Mme de Pompadour's hunting lodge at Asnières. Brooke Astor's collection also includes a number of pieces of 18th-century French furniture, alongside large-scale English giltwood looking-glasses and girandoles of the same period. But while the effect in that earlier Astor house was of sumptuous excess, in Astor's homes extravagance is leavened by quirky Chinese pieces, predominantly black lacquer and porcelain, inspired by her childhood in what was then Peking, where her father, Major General John Russell, was the commander of the guard at the American legation. At Sotheby's, Elaine Whitmire, the vice chairman and head of single-owner sales, says Astor's collection is 'exactly what one would expect from an extremely well-travelled woman of her time. Her interests are clearly varied, and her residences reflect a very lady-like refinement - beautiful interiors that are stylish but always warm and inviting. It is, it seems, a collection born of love - not necessarily of the variety found in marriage, but a love simply for objects themselves. In her 90s Brooke Astor published doggerel verse in the New Yorker: 'Love is an apple, round and firm/Without a blemish or a worm./ Bite into it and you will find/You've lost your heart and lost your mind. Items from Astor's estate seem likely to exceed estimates and prove that losing one's heart to a beautiful object seldom equates with losing one's mind. Sale of property from the estate of Brooke Astor, September 24-25, Sotheby's New York