NORTHEAST HARBOR, Maine — Miss Piggy was openly contemptuous of her husband — even in front of the hired help.
Charlene Marshall would stand behind her 20-years-older husband, Anthony, and make faces when he talked to the gardeners at the Maine estate of his mother, socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor, one of the gardeners told the Post.
“What bothered me about Charlene is when Mr. Marshall would be talking to me or my father, she’d stand behind him making little faces, making fun of him. We all thought it was so rude,” said Scott Hamor, 43, who worked on the Cove End estate for 22 years.
“She made faces like, ‘You dummy. Didn’t you know that?’ It really disgusted us.”
Anthony Marshall, 85, was convicted Thursday of taking advantage of the fact that his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and helping himself to fistfuls of cash from her $180 million fortune.
Scott’s father, Steve, 66, a gardener who worked on the property for 41 years, said Mrs. Astor promised him she would take care of him in her will if he worked for her until her death.
But that never happened, he said.
He and the other Cove End employees were let go in 2004 after Marshall and Charlene — dubbed “Miss Piggy” by one of Astor’s nurses — managed to gain control of the oceanfront estate on Mount Desert Island.
“Everything was done underhandedly. They had a right to release us, but they should have come out and done it in a decent way. After 41 years, I got a phone call from Mr. Marshall saying I was terminated — and we never spoke again,” Steve Homan said.
“Mr. Marshall kept saying, ‘We can’t afford it. We can’t afford it.’ I offered to take a pay cut just to stay on, but he wanted anyone who was loyal to his mother gone,” he added. “He’s a man who’s controlled by women.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the Marshalls would do this to us.”
Alicia Johnson, 57, who worked on the estate as a maid for 12 years, was equally angry.
“They stole from all of us,” she said. “When they let us go, they stole what we had coming from Mrs. Astor. They took a piece of all of us.”
Carole Reitenbach, 66, the parlor maid at the estate, said Mrs. Astor had great disdain for her daughter-in-law.
“She referred to her as ‘my son’s wife’ and called her a money grubber, though not in those words,” she said. “She said Charlene was just after the money. Charlene was reserved and polite, but there was a tension in the house. You could feel it. It was palpable.”