Mrs. Astor Regrets (19 page)

As compensation for the difficult winter months in Northeast Harbor, the summers offered a constant cornucopia of invitations for the minister and his wife. "We had them to dinner a few times," says Frankie Fitzgerald. "They're both very smart. Charlene includes people in conversation—she makes a big effort towards everyone." The minister and his wife were also frequent summer dinner guests at the home of August Heckscher, a former New York City parks commissioner. At Heckscher's home, the couple met the erudite and entertaining New York lawyer Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., whose father was intimately involved in the life of the Kennedy family. Frank Morrissey benefited from that Camelot connection and moved in well-to-do circles. "Francis is very charming and worldly. Augie saw him as a third son," recalls Paul Gilbert. "He was so smooth, you wouldn't believe it. He reminds me of the movie
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
"

Important moments in life often arrive without a change in background music to signify a plot twist. For Tony Marshall, his annual visit to his mother in Maine had always been a pleasant interlude, especially once he stopped taking Tee, who did not get along with Brooke. Cove End was beautiful, the deferential staff looked after him, and his mother invited interesting people to visit, as she did in July 1989, when she gave a large luncheon for Katharine Graham, the
Washington Post
publisher. She also invited the minister and his wife, seating Gilbert at her table with Mrs. Graham and Charlene next to Tony at another table.

Oh, the mischief that can arise out of a simple arrangement of place cards. Charlene and Tony quickly discovered they had interests in common: he loved opera, she played the piano; they were both amateur photographers; he had a wry sense of humor, she was a responsive listener. Suddenly they were laughing and flirting on a summer day, having a party of their own. It could have stopped there, but it did not. Tony, always a gentleman, is circumspect about the events that led to the breakup of two marriages. When I asked him about his second meeting with Charlene, he simply says, "It was a renewal. We fell in love, and got married."

There are few secrets in Northeast Harbor, a town so small that it does not even boast a traffic light. Sandra Graves, whose family runs McGrath's, the only newsstand on Main Street, was working as a cook for Mrs. Astor that summer. "I got to work a little before seven
A.M.,
" she says. "The kitchen window looks out to the driveway, and you can see anyone who walks up. Charlene showed up early and rang the front doorbell. It might have only happened once or twice, but it was drilled in my head because it was so odd." Tony was waiting downstairs and slipped out to join Charlene for a walk. Graves and her companion in the kitchen, the housekeeper, Helen Dodge, found Charlene's appearance disturbing.

The walks quickly became local knowledge. There was the predictable tongue-wagging because Charlene left her sleeping family for an early-morning stroll with Mrs. Astor's married son. Dot Renaud, Sandy's mother and the newsstand proprietor, says, "If you're a minister's wife, you're supposed to conduct yourself, especially in a small town. She had children, and while they weren't babies, they were young." (Robert was twelve, Inness was sixteen, and Arden was nineteen.) In the next few weeks, other members of Mrs. Astor's staff noted jarring things. Tony, not known to venture far, was gone for twelve hours at a stretch. His new passion for bird watching, he told people, was keeping him busy.

Philip Marshall, visiting in August, was too wrapped up in his own romantic life to notice much else. Two weeks earlier he had attended a cousin's wedding in Canada and met a painter and filmmaker, Nan Starr, a Philadelphia native who was then living in Boston. "I was telling everyone that I had met this wonderful woman," recalls Philip, then teaching at Southeastern Massachusetts University. Armed with a basket of warm popovers baked by his grandmother's staff and a bouquet of basil from his grandmother's garden, Philip drove down to see Nan. Seven weeks later they were engaged. Nan, whose father ran a gourmet food company, came from an affluent family herself but had some trepidation about marrying into a family with such enormous wealth and public attention. As she puts it, "I was very much in love with Philip, who didn't have any money himself, but I was concerned about raising a healthy family in the shadow of his grandmother's fame and fortune. I've seen excessive wealth cause serious problems for some families." Only later, when Tony Marshall called Philip to say that he had left Tee, did Philip realize that he and his father had been falling in love at the same time.

Paul Gilbert may have been the last to know. He and Charlene had problems—"We were broke; we had nothing," he says—but the marriage seemed to be "on cruise control." When the summer ended and Tony returned to New York, Charlene told her husband that she had to take several out-of-town business trips on behalf of the Maine Community Foundation. One September Sunday, when Charlene purportedly was in Boston, the Episcopal priest invited parishioners to a communal coffee after services. A woman came over to chat with him and idly passed along a bit of gossip: "My cousin in Washington just saw your wife getting off a plane. She went up and hugged this older man. Was she going to see her father?" The priest managed not to drop his coffee. The marriage ended quickly. When Charlene came home, Gilbert confronted her, and she moved to a friend's house a few blocks away. Three weeks later she packed her clothes and headed to Manhattan.

Brooke Astor was aghast over the affair. Fond of Paul Gilbert, she was devastated that her hospitality had led to this fracture of two families. "Charlene's husband would call every single day, and they would talk while Mrs. Astor was having breakfast in bed," recalls Sandra Graves. "She swore to God that Charlene would never be allowed in the house. Mrs. Astor made all these comments about how she was going to disown Tony, not let him have anything, didn't want Charlene in his life—she was very, very angry. But I knew she would get over it. Charlene knows how to talk and get things around to her own way."

Charlene came back to Northeast Harbor several weeks later to visit her children. The streets of the small town were empty, and she and the rector took a walk. Charlene said that things seemed to be moving too quickly. As Gilbert recalls, he replied, "Quick? You moved out, you left your kids, you've taken up with an older man—what do you mean, quick?" The couple filed for divorce in the fall of 1989.

When the official decree came through, Gilbert felt obligated to talk about the breakup in a sermon. "He had to. Everyone sort of knew," says Nancy Pyne. "This winter was a particularly hard one for me," he told his congregation. "My marriage of twenty-one years came to an end in January. I thought that I knew what brokenness was, but this was a new and even deeper experience. Each day as I woke up to face this new situation, all I could say to myselfwas this: 'I am alive this day, and it will be a good day.' Some days were not good at all. Now the days are good again, and all I can say is that somewhere along the way my brokenness was mended. I have more of a limp than I did before, but I am walking once again."

Given Gilbert's role as the wounded party, left with two children still at home, the blame for the split fell on Charlene. But her friends argue that she had reasons for wanting to get out of the marriage. Sam Peabody explains, "She has said the marriage was very difficult, and Tony came along and she adores him."

Tony's wife, Tee, took the news as hard as Charlene's husband did. "One of the sad things about Tee is that she just couldn't get over the divorce," says Pamela Walker, who had befriended Tee in Madagascar. "You have to pull yourself together and go on, but she had a hard time doing that." The soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Marshall made anguished phone calls to Tony's sons. "I'd talk to her—I'd want to be polite and nice," said Alec. "I just felt that I didn't want to take sides, and blood is thicker than water." Philip, sympathetic to Tee's misery, found it difficult to welcome Charlene into the family. "It was hard because I knew Tee had been collateral damage of this new romance," he says. Yet he was also glad to see his father's spirits soar, adding, "Charlene is outgoing, fun—she really did bring a lot of great stuff into my father's life." Mortified by the scandal, Brooke could not stop complaining to her friends. Ashton Hawkins says, "She didn't go to her parish for a year because she felt so embarrassed."

Against this backdrop, the two women who dominated Tony Marshall's life embarked on a relationship fraught with mutual mistrust. Even though Brooke had a permissive attitude toward divorce, she could not believe that Charlene had walked out on her husband and children. Charlene presumably was not interested in hearing moral strictures about parenting from Brooke Astor. Just as Vincent Astor had once regaled Brooke with tales of his mother's cruelty, Tony was apparently honest with Charlene about his tangled relationship with his mother. Impressed by Tony's accomplishments, she loyally believed that his family should show him more respect. But she made a strategic error in voicing those complaints to Philip, who found her obsession with ancient family history to be self-serving. "Charlene was talking about 'Look what your grandmother has done to your father, sending him away to boarding school as a child,'" he says. "We always wondered why she was harping on that so much."

Tony Marshall was not a wealthy man by his mother's standards, but he was a millionaire with an apartment in the Carlyle Hotel (which Tee received in the divorce settlement), a hefty annual income, and the prospect of a staggering inheritance. As someone who had been living in a minister's modest quarters, Charlene was bedeviled by the same kind of gossip that had followed Brooke's marriage to Vincent Astor—that she was only marrying for money. Nan Lincoln, the arts editor of the
Bar Harbor Times,
recalls the speculation: "Was she a gold digger, or was this a romantic love story—the poor stifled parson's wife who finds the man of her dreams?"

The final judgment on docket number BAR89-DV-053,
Charlene T. Gilbert v. Paul E. Gilbert,
was entered into court records on January 26, 1990—a divorce document with a poignant breakdown of the couple's assets. Charlene was ordered to pay her husband $113 per week in child support for Inness and another $73 a week for Robert. The Gilberts had a meager $720 in a money market account, $550 in a savings account, and $28 in a checking account, but jointly they owed $2,800 on credit cards. They did have one valuable asset; 4.4 acres of land in Bar Harbor, valued at $200,000, with a small mortgage of $22,000. Paul Gilbert kept three Persian rugs, a guitar, a bookcase, the stereo system, a cedar chest, his father's picture, a baby picture, and a thermos lamp. Charlene claimed as her property $20,000 worth of possessions: a 12-inch television, a brass tray, a portrait of her ancestor Judge Tyler, a Chinese plant stand, a piano, a wicker sewing basket, some silver and cut glass, a boudoir rocker, a brass fireplace set, a Zenith radio, a Duncan Fyfe couch labeled "broken," and a beer stein lamp.

Charlene spent more than two years in Manhattan waiting for Tony's divorce to be finalized. Living in a studio apartment (which Tony now describes as "a ratty hole"), she supported herself as the executive director of the Garden Club of America. "She had a miserable beginning in New York," says a Charleston confidante. "She was flat broke." (During this period, though, Tony did have something in common with one of his sons. Alec Marshall's first marriage had just broken up, and over lunch at the Racquet Club, he and his father would commiserate about divorce lawyers.)

Tony and Charlene were married in 1992 at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, in a service conducted by Father John Andrew. Reconciling herself to the inevitable, Brooke graciously played mother of the groom. The couple's five children from their previous marriages did not attend. "I was not invited. I would have gone," says Alec. "My father said, 'We've decided that either all of you go or none of you go.'" Charlene's version of her wedding day was passed to me via a note from her Manhattan friend Suzanne Harbour Kahanovitz. "When Tony and Charlene married, they wanted a small private ceremony," Kahanovitz wrote. "Mrs. Astor insisted on being the witness and then taking them out for a celebratory lunch at her favorite place, La Grenouille, so she could be the first to tell all her friends. Mrs. Astor also called the judge to make sure that Anthony's divorce from his prior wife went through in a timely manner." Sensitive to Tony's postdivorce financial situation, Brooke bought the couple a duplex apartment in a prewar building at Seventy-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue.

To friends, Brooke stressed that "Charlene makes Tony happy." As a mother, she appreciated how Charlene cared for Tony, whose health was not always robust. A few years after the couple married, Tony suffered a heart attack, and the doctors found scar tissue that indicated he had had a previous episode. Charlene told Philip and Alec that she had found the stricken Tony in the closet, searching for the right tie to wear to the hospital.

Tony would later insist that his mother and his wife enjoyed each other's company. But Brooke's friends said that she never warmed up to her new daughter-in-law. "Brooke was never hostile to Charlene in any way, never said anything unkind," says Freddy Melhado. "Charlene tried very, very hard, but they didn't speak the same language." Henry Kissinger is blunt in describing Brooke's attitude: "My impression was that Charlene set her teeth on edge."

Charlene did not begin to understand the rigorous rules of Brooke's social set in New York, and her faux pas endlessly irritated her ninety-year-old mother-in-law. For example, Charlene decided to take advantage of Tony's membership at the Knickerbocker Club to give him a birthday party there. The old-fashioned club, which discourages meetings and forbids guests from taking notes in the dining room, was Brooke's favorite lunch spot, and she relished its gracious atmosphere. But on the evening of Tony's party, she heard the strange sound of jangling bangles: Charlene had hired a belly dancer, whose bare stomach was undulating away. Brooke muttered to Marilyn Berger, who was seated next to her, "Can you believe this?"