Childhood and Inheritance
Vincent endured a difficult childhood. His vain mother was embarrassed by his resemblance to his father and would humiliate him in public. In addition his parents' marriage was less than perfect. Vincent's only sister, Ava Alice Muriel Astor, was reportedly Ava Astor's child by a New York society man named Sidney Hatch—though others argued her biological father was Ava's future second husband, Lord Ribblesdale—while Vincent's father, a friend wrote in a letter to her husband, had numerous affairs and morals shockingly loose for a warden of the Episcopal church. They divorced in 1909 and on September 9, 1911 Jack Astor married Madeleine Talmadge Force, an 18-year-old beauty six months younger than his son. In 1919, Ava married a recently widowed English nobleman, Thomas Lister, Baron of Ribblesdale. While a student at Harvard University in 1912, Vincent inherited an estimated $69 million when his father went down with the Titanic. After his father's death, he quit college to manage his family's vast properties. He also wore his father's recovered gold pocket watch and wore it the rest of his life. Astor at the time was called "the richest boy in the world."
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