The Nurse Who Saw It All

Louis Lanzano / AP Photo Could Pearline Noble, who dubbed the Marshalls “Miss Piggy” and “the golden retriever,” help get Brooke Astor’s son Anthony off the hook by painting his wife as a villain?

How’s this for a defense strategy if things look any worse for the ailing Anthony Marshall (though it’s hard to imagine how they could)? Blame it all on his wife Charlene.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—in its wisdom and reportedly after long deliberation—decided not to indict her. So the defense could claim her husband was nothing but her pull toy, without any fear her golden years will be spent at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

The curious fact is that Charlene Marshall does bear a striking resemblance to Miss Piggy—with her florid skin, stout body, short neck, feminine charm when she feels like turning it on, and alleged reputation for gluttony, at least as far as her mother-in-law’s fortune is concerned.

In fact, Fred Hafetz, Tony Marshall’s lawyer, tested a strategy something like this, perhaps inadvertently, during the last few days. Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr. forbade the prosecution from introducing into evidence notebooks—kept by Pearline Noble, one of Brooke Astor’s nurses—which include mocking references to the Marshalls.

But in one of those quirks of the law, it was OK for the defense to cite the slurs, and so they did.

Striding over to Mrs. Marshall in the courtroom gallery, Hafetz placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, scowled at Noble on the witness stand, and demanded to know whether she’d referred to his client’s devoted wife in her notes as “Miss Piggy.”

Then the attorney—who’s kept his theatrical skills under tight wraps until now—crossed back to the defense table, dropped a similarly sympathetic hand onto Mr. Marshall’s shoulder and asked if the nurse hadn’t also called him “golden retriever.”

His point was that Noble, a 48-year-old Jamaican woman who started working for Brooke Astor in 2003 and was at her bedside when she died in 2007, bore a grudge against the good Marshalls so her incendiary testimony was tainted and therefore worthless.

“Are you a nurse?” the lawyer scoffed. “Did you go to a nursing school? Did they teach you to refer to your clients in the most derogatory words—to call Mrs. Marshall 'Miss Piggy' and her son by a dog’s name?”

But Mr. Hafetz was playing with fire by raising what increasingly looks more like a dominant/submissive relationship between the Marshalls. The curious fact is that Charlene Marshall does bear a striking resemblance to Miss Piggy—with her florid skin, stout body, short neck, feminine charm when she feels like turning it on, and alleged reputation for gluttony, at least as far as her mother-in-law’s fortune is concerned. Her courtly, white-haired husband, on the other hand, seems devoted to her and eager to please—just like the princely breed of dog Noble compared him to.