Mrs. Astor Regrets (18 page)

For Brooke, Maine had held out the promise of nature's beauty and rejuvenation for five decades. If she felt low, Cove End lifted her spirits, and she treated the townspeople like extended family. Ever eager to help, she embraced civic betterment, creating scholarships so schoolteachers could take trips to Europe and underwriting library renovations. This was her town. But something wrenching had happened here, and she still brooded over the experience. Her long-rooted feelings of security had been swept away, leaving her embarrassed in front of the entire community. She blamed that humiliation squarely on the shoulders of Tony, and even more on his third wife, Charlene.

Mrs. Astor's church in Northeast Harbor, St. Mary's-by-the-Sea, was founded in 1882 by a visiting Episcopal minister and has always catered to the village's summer aristocracy. The picturesque unheated stone chapel with soaring wooden arches was built in 1902, the year Brooke Astor was born, and a smaller winterized chapel was later added a few blocks away from Cove End. In 1982 a new minister was hired: Paul Gilbert, a Wesleyan graduate and naval officer who had come late to his calling. The convivial Gilbert, whose previous congregation had been in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Short Hills, was an avid sailor. He and his wife of fourteen years, Charlene, concluded that Northeast Harbor was an ideal place for their three young children, Arden, Inness, and Robert. True, the salary was low—$18,000 a year—and the church-provided residence was cramped, with a tiny living room and mismatched furniture. But the job offered the prestige of preaching to and influencing one of the most elite congregations in America.

It was de rigueur that the minister and his wife join the summer social circuit, attending the cocktail parties and mingling at the village's private swimming club with the town's wealthy scions, academics, and literary lights. Northeast Harbor's nickname has long been Philadelphia-on-the-Rocks for its Main Line summer migrants, but New York, Boston, and Washington have also contributed their share of distinguished names listed in the Redbook, the indispensable seasonal phone book, which cites the owners' estate names, Lil Hope and Saltmeadow Farm and Pebble Beach and Windy Willows. Frankie Fitzgerald, a lifelong summer resident and a descendent of the famous Episcopal rector Endicott Peabody, says that in order to succeed as pastor of St. Mary's, "You have to provide pastoral care for the local people and really pay attention to them. Then you have these whiz-bang summers and you have to be a powerful preacher to keep those people in their pews. That's when you raise all your money."

Brooke Astor, who attended church every Sunday, was quickly captivated by the articulate minister, a fellow literature-lover who worked references to John Updike, Joseph Conrad, and even Winnie the Pooh into his sermons. For his part, Gilbert was pleased to discover that Mrs. Astor, despite her wealth and prominence, was unpretentious and approachable. "I liked the fact she was a straight shooter," he says. "She spoke her mind and functioned very well in a world of men. She was a good listener."

On a summer Sunday in 1983, Paul and Charlene Gilbert took the five-minute walk from the rectory to Cove End for afternoon tea, on a weekend when Tony Marshall was visiting without his wife, Tee. For Tony, who was not devout, the idea of chatting with the new minister and his wife may not have been high on his to-do list. But as his mother and the minister conversed, he found himself intrigued by Charlene, who was more than twenty years younger than he. She was alluring, with a raucous laugh and a risqué sense of humor. Several decades later, asked if it was love at first sight, he smiles and replies, "We admitted later that we saw something in each other's eyes." At the time, Charlene confided to a childhood friend that she was smitten. "Charlene told me that the moment she laid eyes on him, she knew," the friend recalls. "Charlene said, 'I walked in and I thought immediately, "One day I'm going to marry him."'" But despite the spark, the kindling did not immediately burst into flame. It smoldered quietly, for six years.

Charlene Detwyler Tyler grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, in one of those downwardly mobile southern families that had more pedigree than money; in the local shorthand, they were the kind of people who were "too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash." Charlene's ancestors are said to include the portrait painter George Inness and President John Tyler. The family home at 14 Rutledge Avenue, built in the 1890s by her paternal great-grandfather, was in a good location, a few blocks from the Battery and its Civil War cannons, with Fort Sumter across Charleston Harbor. But whatever resources had once distinguished the Tylers were gone by World War II. During Charlene's childhood, Azile Brown Tyler, her widowed grandmother, still lived in the handsome Victorian home with the wraparound porch but rented out the top floor to make ends meet.

Charlene's mother, Marguerite, known as Meg, had been the Azalea Queen in a small town nearby and had been swept off her feet by the charming Charles Tyler, Charlene's father. But early in the couple's marriage, Charles was severely injured at the local navy shipyard when a piece of heavy equipment fell on him. According to family legend, he was pronounced dead at the hospital, but then, to the shock of the attendants, the white sheet placed over him began to move. Tyler was left permanently disabled. "He could walk, but it really affected his arm," said Oscar Johnson Small, Jr., a retired Charleston accountant distantly related to Charlene's family. Suffering from a lifetime of excruciating pain, Charles Tyler turned to alcohol to anesthetize himself, and his wife kept him company. The five Tyler children, four girls and a boy—Charlene, the second child, was born in 1945—were terrified by their parents' boozy battles. As a friend of Charlene's recalls, "The father and mother were alcoholics and they fought like cats and dogs, and it affected the children. The girls got out as quickly as they could. The father came from a good background, a moneyed background, but he just couldn't make it."

Tyler nominally sold health and accident insurance. "He was a born salesman—he was like a comet and took off. But then he self-destructed because of alcohol, mainly to address his pain issues," said Paul Gilbert. Meg Tyler helped support the family by working as a lab technician at the Medical University of South Carolina and as a caterer. "Charlene had a childhood that was out of one of those southern novels—highly dysfunctional," says a woman who has known her for forty years. "Her mother was a beauty queen and a hard-drinking woman, but she was a great cook."

Sometimes Charles Tyler would set off to take the children to church on Sundays but would detour to the wood-paneled bar tucked into the back of the members-only Hibernian Hall, an imposing 1840 historic landmark with white Ionic columns, where he would drink while the children played. Family members call him an abusive drunk but refrain from detailing the particulars. A Charleston resident with an intimate knowledge of the Tyler home life explains, "What happened in that house was real, and it was horrible, and everyone in the family is still living with the repercussions. Those girls cannot have enough security or enough money to protect themselves."

From an early age Charlene took on the role of family peacemaker, using her charm to distract the adults. In search of a reliable parental figure, she turned to her grandmother. "Charlene would come by, and she was a great comfort to her grandmother—she did chores, the little things that you women need done," says Small. Charles and Meg Tyler uprooted their brood to Greenville, South Caroline, but the relocation did not change the sad realities of the marriage. Bravely fleeing toward safety, Charlene, then just twelve, got herself back to Charleston and showed up at her grandmother's door. "The grandmother saved Charlene," says one of Charlene's childhood friends. "Charlene was at a tender age—she needed to get out. Mrs. Tyler thought, 'At least I can save this child.' Charlene was always a loving girl."

Azile Brown Tyler set out to give her granddaughter the kind of education that would pave her way into Charleston society. The route in was Ashley Hall, one of the most prestigious girl's preparatory schools in the South, whose graduates include Barbara Bush, the novelist Josephine Humphreys, and the children's author Madeleine L'Engle. Founded in 1909, Ashley Hall exudes southern gentility. The administrative office is in a four-story 1816 Regency house with Oriental rugs, marble fireplaces, and antique chandeliers. Located in downtown Charleston, the school boasts elegant gardens and an aviary, the Shell House, which is decorated with conch shells and has been converted into a student gathering spot. Yet despite its finishing-school appearance, Ashley Hall was designed to offer a rigorous education; in Charlene's day, its students were required take Latin.

After she enrolled in 1960, when she was fifteen, Charlene blossomed. She sang in the glee club and performed on the varsity drill team. Anne Miller Moises, also in the class of '63, recalls that "Charlene was very funny and seemed happy and chipper. She had such rosy cheeks." Moises goes on to speculate, "Maybe she is the type who makes the best of everything, but she never let on that she had had a hard time." Charlene would ride her bike to school with her neighbor Gail Townsend Bailey. "I remember sitting with Charlene on her front porch, shooting the breeze," Bailey says. "She was very gregarious, great to be around."

Her high school years were a swirl of circle pins, pleated skirts, and dancing the shag. In the 1963 Ashley Hall yearbook, the
Spiral,
Charlene Detwyler Tyler is described as having "cheeks like apple blossoms in the spring." Her nickname is Rabbit, her favorite phrase is "Hey, babes!" She is slender and lovely in the picture, her dark hair in a flattering bob that comes just below her ears, and she has a shy smile on her unlined face.

For Ashley Hall girls, the standard path was to come out at the St. Cecilia Society ball, go to college or spend a year working at a socially acceptable job (in an art gallery or historic preservation), and then marry and move into a house in the narrow area south of Broad Street. Charlene could not afford college and went to work at the South Carolina National Bank as a teller, the job she had when she met her first husband, Paul Gilbert.

The year was 1967, the occasion was a boat race in Charleston Harbor, and a mutual friend invited both Charlene and Paul to crew on a sailboat. Faced with a low draft number during the Vietnam War years, Gilbert had entered navy officer training school and had just been stationed in Charleston. New to the city and a Yankee, he was pleased to encounter this popular local girl. "She was very outgoing, very charming, great sense of humor—a slim young woman with a lot of life to her," he recalls, wistfulness evident in his voice.

Charlene was still living at home with her devoted grandmother, sharing the downstairs quarters while boarders occupied the top floor. One night in November 1967, while at the movies with Gilbert, she suddenly had a feeling that something was wrong and insisted that they leave. The clocks in her grandmother's home had stopped, and her seventy-eight-year-old grandmother was dead. In her will, Azile Tyler left her home to Charlene, who was bereft at the loss of the woman who had raised her. A short time later, Paul Gilbert proposed. "I felt like I was doing the noble thing," he says, "but I was also in love with her." They were married at St. Philip's Church on August 28, 1968, with a reception afterward at the Hibernian Hall on one of the hottest days of the year. "There was no air conditioning," recalls Mary Lou Scott, Paul Gilbert's sister. "I have never seen so many drunk people."

A month later Gilbert was promoted to captain and became the commanding officer of a minesweeper, the USS
Meadowlark,
berthed in New Jersey. The couple spent a year in Perth Amboy. When his navy service ended, in late 1969, the Gilberts moved back to Charleston, where their first child, Arden, was born. Paul Gilbert worked at a series of unsatisfying jobs, including administrator at a local medical college and yacht broker. Charlene gave birth to another daughter, Inness, in 1972, and to a son, Robert, in 1976. Pursuing his interest in religion, Paul Gilbert enrolled in the Virginia Theological Seminary and took his family with him to Alexandria. "Faith was important to Charlene, and she supported me all the way through," he says. "I'm very grateful to her for that."

During the six years between Charlene's introduction to Tony Marshall and the encounter that would rupture both their marriages, she and Paul Gilbert became popular figures in Northeast Harbor. Like many resort communities, the town lives by the calendar, with a summer population of several thousand dwindling to fewer than five hundred people after Labor Day. To supplement the rector's income, Charlene became an event planner, first at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and then at the Maine Community Foundation. "Charlene and Paul were warmly received, very involved in the community and in activities supporting their children," says Bob Pyle. When the town's fire alarm went off, he says, "Charlene was one of the first people who would show up, with coffee and doughnuts."

One full-time local resident, Gunnar Hansen, a writer and actor who specializes in horror movies (he played Leatherface in the cult classic
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre),
spent two summers living with the Gilberts while he rented out his own house to vacationers to pay the mortgage. "Charlene was more talkative and social, but Paul to me was the caregiver at home," he recalls. "She was out the door in the morning. He had made the sandwiches and got up and made breakfast and got the kids off to school."

But Charlene took on the role of caregiver when her mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Although her three sisters lived in Charleston, their mother chose to leave that city, where she had spent most of her life, to be with her once-rebellious daughter in Maine. Pattie O'Brien, Charlene's younger sister, recalls, "My mother died in Charlene's arms. I've always been grateful to Charlene, because I couldn't have done it. That's so hard, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." Paul Gilbert supported Charlene's desire to take in her mother at the end. "We converted our living room to her bedroom, and she died there," he recalls. "She reconciled with Charlene, which was quite beautiful."