I just finished reading a really good book, Mrs. Astor Regrets, by Meryl Gordon, about the Brooke Astor family drama. It was like eating intelligent potato chips -- I couldn't stop. Besides being well-researched and written with flair, it had all the elements to draw me in -- wealth, history, family intrigue, law, Manhattan and Westchester where I grew up -- and I highly recommend it.
For me, an unexpected consequence of reading the book was a fresh take on age. Mrs. Astor really came into her own as a personality and benefactress when she was in her late fifties, after the death of her third husband, Vincent Astor. The Astors had been married for only five and a half years, claustrophobic ones for Mrs. Astor since her husband was anti-social and jealous. At his death, however, he left her not only a personal fortune of $60 million in a trust for her benefit, but also control over the $60.5 million Astor Foundation. With these assets, Brooke became for the following four and a half decades an important New York philanthropist and socialite, with multiple residences (Manhattan, Westchester County, and Maine), many servants, and close powerful friends such as Laurance and David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters and Annette de la Renta. 
So for Mrs. Astor perhaps the sweetest years of her life were her sixties, seventies and eighties. Her late fifties were good, too, and perhaps also the beginning of her nineties.
(She lived to be 105, but her last decade was marked by physical and mental decline, along with questionable treatment by her son and his wife, who fired Mrs. Astor's dearest retainers and closed her households outside New York City, ostensibly for her benefit but apparently for their own avaricious purposes. They also arranged for several revisions of her will that benefitted themselves, at a time when Mrs. Astor was non compos mentis. Their actions ultimately led to an elder abuse lawsuit filed by Mrs. Astor's grandson with the support of some of her powerful friends.)
Of course, Mrs. Astor benefitted not only from a strong gene pool but also from the attention, pampering and medical care that wealth enables. Nor was she an angel: She was narcissistic and vain, as well as frequently cruel to her only son. Yet, even though her life was not a typical one, it still provides encouragement that one can be vital and involved in decades that younger people often view dismissively. She danced; she partied; she gossiped, she sat on boards and visited non-profit organizations. She liked a constant flow of new people in her life, and her best friends ranged in age from the Rockefeller brothers who were only a few years her junior, to Annette de la Renta who was nearly four decades younger.
Another thing that amazed me about this tale was that even the putative villain-- Mrs. Astor's son Anthony Marshall -- was in his seventies and eighties when his alleged evildoing took place. Not only that, but during these years he and his mother had a formal mother-son relationship that continued to define her as the venerated older person and him as the deprecated but devoted junior. This guy, eighty-three when his mother died, was still trying to prove that she loved him.
As my kids would say, it was a 'whack' family, but, disregarding the bizarre family dynamics, the implications for a long life filled with involvement are good.
