Marylena Graves.html

Category 3: Long-form, well-known regional figure

Marylena Gilley Graves

Marylena Gilley Graves died last spring. With hardly a penny to her name or any relatives to mourn her passing, it was a rather bleak and colorless end for a woman who brought such sparkle and fizz to the Maine communities such as Bar Harbor, where she and her mother Sally settled and opened their iconic Crystal Palace restaurants.

But Marylena was not without fans in the end. A group of those friends and former Crystal Palace patrons will be gathering at the Maine Grind in Ellsworth this Friday, Nov. 19, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. to celebrate her interesting life with music, dance, food, drink and song, with the intention of raising money to give Marylena a proper burial at Ledgelawn Cemetery in Bar Harbor.

The public is invited to attend and share Crystal Palace stories or learn something about one of Maine’s most colorful establishments and the two women who ran it.

Back in the early 1970s there really wasn’t a whole lot of fun stuff to do or places to go around town.

And then along came Marylena and Sally, a delightfully quirky duo who opened an equally delightful and quirky restaurant they called the Crystal Palace. While the address of the eatery changed from Salisbury Cove to downtown, and later to off island, the food and ambience was always the same. The women offered a menu that could be exotic – such as pineapple curried chicken; unexpected, as in a salad of iceberg lettuce topped with Parmesan cheese and pineapple. Or it could be perfectly dreadful, as in chocolate-covered chicken with pineapple – a fruit that was also featured in many of their towering desserts.

They transformed the buildings they rented into seraglio-like settings with bright purple, yellow or brilliant blue walls, beaded curtains in all the doorways and wispy, colorful scarves draped over the lamps that sat on a variety of rummage sale tables and sideboards.

Along with some kitschy art on the walls were the occasional signs bearing such admonitions as “POSITIVELY NO BREAST FEEDING.”

At their last Bar Harbor address on Cottage Street, one almost expected belly dancers to appear accompanied by Middle Eastern musicians. No belly dancers were on the nightly playbill, but at some point between 7 and 7:30 p.m., all cooking and service stopped and Marylena would come rattling through the curtains in a gauzy tutu or some other interesting outfit and give a little impromptu tap dance while singing old-time pop tunes, with her mother or perhaps their friend Margaret Dyer accompanying on piano.

One never really knew what they’d get on their plates or by way of entertainment on any given night at the Crystal Palace. But it was always fascinating and often wonderful.

The Gilleys really did have some stage savvy and talent. Marylena had been professionally trained in voice and dance from the time she was a tot, and Sally had the soul of a true Mama Rose. Both she and her daughter dreamed that, one day, pretty blond Marylena would become a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. Legend has it that Marylena actually auditioned for a place on that famous highkicking chorus line and that she did well enough to make it through several cuts before being rejected. Around that time, she also did a little professional performing in Boston. And, she married Mount Desert Island native Jim Graves who was in the Navy. The marriage lasted only about six years.

In 1972, Marylena, with her mother’s full collaboration, decided to come home to her native Bar Harbor and provide her own dancing and performance opportunities. As a sideline she also taught dance to many of the neighborhood kids, who apparently adored her.

In the 25 or so ensuing years of cooking, singing and dancing at the various Crystal palaces – in Bar Harbor, Franklin and Milo – Marylena did earn a degree of local fame.

“She was so full of excitement,” recalled former dance pupil Cheryl Agnese.

“She was wonderful and oh those wild tutus,” said Annie Menzietti Palmer.

“She was a free spirit,” said her childhood friend, Martha B. Higgins of Trenton. “A Fruit-Loop in a world of Cheerios, as the saying goes, a real, true original.”

That originality eventually earned her Andy Warhol’s predicted allotment of 15 minutes of real fame when the late Charles Kuralt interviewed Marylena at the Crystal Palace for his televised CBS “On the Road” series.

For years Marylena took to the road herself, in a vintage Cadillac with a basket of hanging flowers swinging in the back.

Around 1995 Marylena closed the curtain on her career as a restaurateur and performer to care for her ailing mother, who died in 2000.

Although her Crystal Palace days were over, Marylena continued with her music by joining a ukulele group at the University of Maine at Machias, where she won any new friends and admirers.

“Ever since she died in March, the ukulele folks and I have been planning to organize something for Marylena,” said Maine Grind proprietor and former Crystal Palace groupie Leslie Harlow. “But everything is so crazy in the summer we couldn’t get it together until now.”

What they have come up with is a combination fund-raiser, memorial service and party of the sort that Marylena herself probably would have enjoyed. The evening will feature sweet and light savory fare, a cash bar for beer and wine, old-time music and ukulele playing.

Proceeds from the event will go toward paying for a plot at Ledgelawn Cemetery, where Marylena’s parents are buried, and to have a monument made.

“I hope enough people who had some interesting and fun times at Marylena’s restaurants will turn up,” said Ms. Harlow. “It would be so wrong to let this incandescent woman just fade away and disappear.”

Anyone who cannot attend this event but who wishes to contribute may contact Richard Bedard at P.O. Box 220, Columbia Falls ME 04623 or call 483-2349.