It’s hard to find good help, especially when you’re dead. Choosing an estate’s executor, the person who carries out the terms of a will, is a fraught decision, and whether you tap a friend, family member, lawyer, or bank, the outcome is never certain—and you won’t be around to oversee the operation, anyway. Dispersals get more complicated when the estate is large, but the burden of being an executor is never just about money; often its difficulties stem from emotional, and sometimes ambiguous, relationships.
Take the case of Brooke Astor. Before she died, in 2007, the New York society doyenne was caught between competing forces. Her executor and only son, Anthony Marshall (who himself died in 2014), worked with lawyer Francis X. Morrissey Jr. to plan Astor’s $100 million estate,…
