[Calpernia]

Charles Merrill

Merrill: sources - ABC, The New York Times, The New York Post, and his website.

Merrill was once married to Princess Evangeline Zalstem-Zalessky. Born in 1897 in New Jersey, Evangeline Johnson was the daughter of Robert Wood Johnson, co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. Evangeline was thrice married, first to the conductor Leopold Stokowski, then to a Russian nobleman known as Prince Zalstem-Zalessky and lastly to Merrill.

Zalessky was more than three decades older than Merrill. She died in 1990 at the age of 93.

In the years that followed, Merrill met his partner Kevin Boyle on a beach in California.

“After my wife passed away I went to West Hollywood,” he recalls. “I got a bit part as a pirate in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Hook.’ It was during that trip that I met Kevin. He’s very gentle, artistic and intuitive. Eventually he came back here to live with me on the mountain.”

[Calpernia]

MULTI-millionaire blueblood Charles Merrill has devised a novel way to protest President Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage: He's stopped paying his taxes. The eccentric Merrill, 71 - whose cousin, Charles Merrill, founded Merrill Lynch, and whose late wife, Evangeline, was the only daughter of Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson - is refusing to file tax returns for 2004 or 2005 and wants other wealthy gays to join him.

"My partner and I believe marriage is when two people love each other regardless of their sexual organs," Merrill tells PAGE SIX from his home in the hills of North Carolina. "We're paying first-class taxes to be treated like second-class citizens and we're sick of it."