Brooke Astor’s much-reviled daughter-in-law Charlene Marshall fears her ailing husband Anthony is not strong enough to make it to sentencing, let alone prison. “Tony’s in terrible shape, he’s in terrible shape,” she told Max Abelson at the Observer. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if he’s going to make it to Monday.” That’s when the State Supreme Court will issue a sentencing for the fourteen counts against Marshall (only one of which has a mandatory prison sentence, and that’s still being contested by his lawyers). “I’ve been very introspective. What did I do wrong? What part have I played in this? What’s in me that has caused this reaction from others?” Charlene mused, regarding the widespread revulsion aimed her way in the media. She also said she worried that she gave her husband bad advice, but would not tell Abelson what it was. “My feeling was, for a long time, that I made a mistake, and I hurt the very person and people that I love,” she said.
But the point Charlene wanted to stress the most was that, though she didn’t care what people who don’t know her think, she is not greedy. She barely needs anything in life, in fact!
“If we ever had a fire in this apartment, the first thing I’d do is grab Pichou” — their dachshund — “and Tony. The second thing I would grab is as many of my books and photographs as I could. Other than that, you can take the rest and it can go flying out the window. I don’t care. So 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. Because those kinds of things I don’t care about; I never have cared about them … Give me trees, pine trees, and walks, and water, and the woods, and beautiful big rocks,” she says. “These are the things that speak to me, the sea, the smell of the sea, the smell of the pine. Give me the little red squirrels running around, or a chipmunk jumping on me. That’s the best. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”
Wow, Char. Even we wouldn’t go that far. Not only would we prefer getting a $80,000 snowflake necklace with 367 round diamonds to getting jumped on by a chipmunk, we might prefer getting nothing to it.
