Charlene Marshall, American socialite in scandalous trial

Charlene Marshall was neither charged with nor convicted of any offence, but in the eyes of New York’s social elite and tabloid press she was the scheming, grasping wife responsible for her husband’s disgrace in one of the more notorious celebrity scandals of recent times.
In the early 1990s she left her husband of two decades, an Episcopalian church minister in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and married Anthony Marshall, a former Second World War marine, CIA operative and US ambassador. He also happened to be the only child of Brooke Astor, the revered New York socialite and philanthropist who had inherited a fortune from her third husband, Vincent Astor.
Mrs Astor clearly detested her son’s third wife, whom she called “Miss Piggy” and “that bitch”, and appeared determined that her latest daughter-in-law should inherit as little as possible of her vast wealth. One version of her frequently amended will reportedly bequeathed the new Mrs Marshall a solitary necklace, a pair of earrings and a couple of fur coats that were too small for her ample frame.
Her son, who was guardian of her estate, had other ideas — not least because by the early 2000s he had suffered several heart attacks and most of his mother’s $180 million fortune would go to charity, not his wife, if he predeceased her.
By the turn of the century Mrs Astor was suffering from dementia and Mr Marshall was manipulating her in order to divert millions of dollars to himself and his wife. They lived in considerable style with a Manhattan apartment filled with artworks, a summer estate in Northeast Harbor, a yacht and an annual stipend of up to $2 million a year for “managing” his mother’s finances. They financed two Broadway plays, Long Day’s Journey into Night (2003) and I Am My Own Wife (2004), both of which won Tony awards. They featured in gossip columns and glossy magazines.
Then in 2006, Mr Marshall’s estranged son by an earlier marriage, Philip, a university professor, filed a civil suit in which he accused his father of mistreating his grandmother and mismanaging her funds.
Specifically he accused his father of siphoning off her money for his personal use, duping her into giving him the Maine estate, and slashing her domestic expenses so she was living in relative squalor in her Park Avenue apartment. He claimed Mrs Astor was “forced to sleep in the TV room in torn nightgowns on a filthy couch that smells, probably from dog urine”.
The case resulted in a court-approved settlement under which Mr Marshall agreed to relinquish control over his mother’s affairs and to return $1.3 million, various artworks and other items of value. The judge said there was insufficient evidence to uphold the abuse charge. Mrs Astor died the following year, aged 105.
But the case caught the eye of Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan’s district attorney. Three months after Mrs Astor’s death he charged her son with 16 counts of mismanaging her financial affairs, including larceny, conspiracy and possessing stolen property. “Marshall … took advantage of Mrs Astor’s diminished mental capacity in a scheme to defraud her and others out of millions of dollars,” Morgenthau alleged.
The criminal trial began in March 2009 and lasted six months. New York was captivated as a parade of luminaries, maids, butlers and nurses took to the witness stand to testify for the defence or prosecution. Friends of the late Mrs Astor, including Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and the television personality Barbara Walters, all testified against Mr Marshall, as did his two sons, Philip and Alec.
But from the outset Mrs Marshall was portrayed as the devious gold-digger and social climber who was really responsible for her husband’s misdeeds.
“It was she — a woman of humble origins and grand designs — who motivated him to steal from his philanthropist mother,” the New York Daily News proclaimed.
“Anthony did it for love,” the New York Post reported. “He did it to keep Charlene in sensible shoes and shapeless suits. He did it to please this coarse and devoted woman on whose heaving breast he always found a comfortable home.”
In a very real sense it was Mrs Marshall who was on trial, but she never testified. She instead sat behind her husband in the public gallery each day of the six-month trial, occasionally wiping tears from her eyes. She was there on October 8, 2009, when her husband was found guilty on 14 of the 16 charges of defrauding his mother. He was sentenced to between one and three years in prison and the Marshalls were cast out of polite New York society.
Charlene Detwiler Tyler was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1945. Her father was an insurance actuary and businessman and she enjoyed a comfortable upbringing.
In 1968 she married Paul Gilbert, an Episcopalian minister, with whom she had three children: Arden, Robert and Inness. After a short spell in New Jersey the couple settled in Northeast Harbor where Mrs Astor had her summer estate and attended Gilbert’s church, St Mary’s-by-the-Sea.
Charlene Gilbert met Anthony Marshall at the church. Both subsequently left their spouses and married in 1992. Their liaison caused something of a scandal in that small New England community. Some reports claimed she set out to seduce him, but both insisted that their previous marriages had already been in trouble.
For 14 years the Marshalls lived in considerable style in New York. Then Philip Marshall filed his civil lawsuit against his father, Morgenthau’s criminal charges followed and the couple’s gilded lives imploded.
Mr Marshall appealed against his convictions but lost. Having exhausted all other legal avenues, he finally reported to a New York prison in June 2013. By then he was 89 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure. He served just eight weeks of his sentence before he was granted medical parole and died a year later.
In 2012 a court had settled the outstanding issues surrounding Mrs Astor’s estate, cutting her son’s inheritance from $31 million to $14.5 million. It ordered that the balance be given to various philanthropic causes identified by Mrs Astor before her son persuaded her to change her will.
In his own will Mr Marshall left his remaining millions, and the Maine estate, to his wife and her three children, pointedly leaving nothing to his own two sons who had testified against him.
Mrs Marshall retreated from public view but continued to maintain her innocence. “What did I do wrong? What part have I played in this? What’s in me that has caused this reaction from others?” she asked in a rare interview soon after her husband’s conviction.
“When I read these articles — I was greedy, I wanted the money, I wanted Brooke’s things, her furs, whatever it is — I just have to sit there and laugh, because it’s so far from the truth. Those kind of things I don’t care about. I have never cared about them.”
Charlene Marshall (née Tyler), key figure in an American celebrity trial, was born on July 28, 1945, and died on August 6, 2024, aged 79