by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
Marjorie Fraser Snow
Nini just doted on Tony. Of course, I don’t know the whole story, I don’t know why Tony did what he did, because I wasn’t close to Barbara those later years. I think of her often. What a tragedy.
Barbara was my cousin. My father, Irving Fraser, was Nini’s brother. He died when I was three months old. Barbara and I had a great many wonderful experiences in our growing-up years. She was almost, in many ways, a sister to me. She was a lovely child, she was really one of the most beautiful girls you could ever see. Her coloring was absolutely gorgeous, and of course that beautiful red hair. She was a very popular child and always had a lot of personality.
We lived in Westwood and they were in West Roxbury, in a lovely section, way up on a hill. They had a lovely large house, with a very large porch with columns or pillars going up.
Barbara had her own room, and lots of beautiful toys and dolls. I know she attended public schools at different times but it seems to me there was a time when she did go to a private school for something, I can’t remember what.
I remember she liked to wear mostly casual country-type clothes, as we all did then—tweeds and cashmere sweaters and skirts, and loafers or saddle shoes. It was sort of a uniform in those days.
We both loved horses and riding and dogs and dog shows. We spent a couple of summers together on the Cape, around Dennis. Later Barbara with her own family—Brooks and Tony—rented farther along the Cape, in North Truro. One of the houses they rented was up on Corn Hill overlooking Cape Cod Bay. It was a very nice house. Contemporary. All glass in the front.
Barbara loved to swim. She took chances in the ocean—she wasn’t afraid of anything. In fact, the two of us nearly drowned at one point off of Plymouth, playing in the surf when the Coast Guard had told everyone to stay off the beaches because of a storm at sea. And that didn’t bother us at all. We went out into the surf because of course the waves were so tremendous that it was wonderful, better than the usual-size waves. But the undertow was fantastic.
We started to go backwards two strokes for every one forward, and Barbara started to panic a bit, she started to scream, and I reached out and said, “Let’s take each other’s hands and pull together.” And we did and we gradually inched to where we could find a toe on the sand, then we collapsed. And of course the Coast Guard had been called, because Nini couldn’t see us in the ocean from the upper porch because the waves were so big, and of course our bathing caps had been ripped off. We received quite a talking to from the Coast Guard officer for disobeying the rules.
Ethel Woodward de Croisset
One day, in the early sixties I think, Barbara was staying with me in my house in Spain—years before all the terrible things happened—and the sea was quite violent. She was doing some ski nautique, some waterskiing, off the beach there. I would have been afraid—I’m rather a fearful person. She was in a bikini, and there was nothing to protect her at all, with all these boats everywhere—she could have had her leg cut off by one of the propellers. But Barbara had absolutely no sense of fear. She was a violent person, you know. She perhaps as a young woman used her violence to get what she wanted. It was her character.
Marjorie Fraser Snow
Barbara was hoping to go to Bennington. Her plans were sort of made in that direction. But then of course her father died and her plans kind of changed.
Barbara and Nini moved to New York. I remember having dinner with them at the old Touraine in Boston the night before they left.
A bit later, a famous illustrator by the name of McClelland Barclay saw her someplace and I think said something to the effect that she was one of the ten most beautiful girls in New York City that he had ever seen. And on that basis, I believe, she was offered a screen test or whatever they call it—not your usual-type screen test, better than that—and she and Nini went out to Hollywood together.
Brooks Baekeland
McClelland Barclay did a lot of Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post covers, but it was his illustrations of stylish, strikingly beautiful women for the legendary General Motors advertising campaign “Body by Fisher” that made him really famous and that, by the way, propelled the phrase into the language. As I recall, he was also a judge in one of those Miss America pageants. What he did of Barbara was just a daub—you would never have recognized her. It hung for years in the entrance of “21.”
In Hollywood, she was given some small normal contract—the kind the studios get everyone to sign to hold them—while a screen test she made with Dana Andrews was being evaluated.
Marjorie Fraser Snow
Barbara did not care for Hollywood at all, and she and Nini came back to New York. They had their car shipped back by rail—they just wanted to get out of there!
I think they stayed for a short time at Delmonico’s when they got back, and then they lived for a time on Central Park South and then they had an apartment someplace on Park Avenue. I visited them there and we would drive up the Hudson to the Sleepy Hollow Country Club—I think that’s on the Rockefeller estate. It was a lovely place to ride, with a lovely indoor riding area.
Barbara Hale
When she met Brooks, she’d been having this big romance with John Jacob Astor. The fat one. I met him later and I said, “Oh, you knew Barbara Baekeland!” and he was furious. I don’t know why. I guess he just thought it was none of my goddam business, you know.
Phyllis Harriman Mason
Mrs. Daly almost got Barbara married off to John Jacob Astor. Barbara was supposed to get the famous emerald ring. I felt that Mrs. Daly was responsible for all Barbara’s flights of fancy. She had brought Barbara up to be a duchess.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
Nini was trying to get Barbara into society—and into what she called “the mon.” My mother-in-law, Cornelia Hallowell, used to comment on now Nini would always refer to money as “the mon.” I mean, to Cornelia money is money, it’s not “the mon.” There is no pet name for it. The Baekelands put all their sort of dislike of Barbara’s background onto Nini. Well, she was very obvious. Barbara had a lot more polish.
Elizabeth Blow
I think there was a part of Nini that probably did want to exploit Barbara. Here she had this really extraordinarily beautiful and talented daughter. They were sort of like little adventuresses coming to the big city, because they came from—where did they come from?—no, not Boston proper at all—they came from West Roxbury, which is, you know, really the wrong side of…I mean, nobody comes from West Roxbury, Waltham, places like that. Nobody ever even talked about them. I mean, they didn’t exist. Even Newton was a little bit going too far out of the magic circle already, and Newton Centre was considered very déclassé—it certainly was in my day. So Nini and Barbara, these sort of lace-curtain-Irish type of people, weren’t in the picture at all.
I mean, I was born in Boston and entered into this kind of society from the time I was five years old when you started going to dancing school in the Somerset Hotel, the Somerset ballroom with the gilt chairs. In those days it was Mr. Foster’s Dancing Classes—the little girls were all dressed up—and you proceeded through that. Then you went to the subscription dances, and the last subscription dance was the most elegant and the most exclusive—it was called the Friday Evenings and there you had your first glass of champagne. And then you came out.
Katharine Gardner Coleman
Barbara never played up the Boston side of it at all. My father was Bostonian, as you may know—G. Peabody Gardner. Now, Brooks’s mother married an extremely nice man from Boston—her second husband was a terribly terribly nice man and a great great friend of my father’s. Daddy thought the world of Penn Hallowell.
Luba Harrington
Barbara came from very ordinary people. Now the Baekelands maybe weren’t so great, but it’s a better family. Barbara took over a good friend of mine, Domenico Gnoli—an artist, a marvelous artist—just because he was from a good family. From one of the best families in Italy, as a
matter of fact. The Count Domenico Gnoli. So she latched on. And when he died—he was only thirty-four—liver cancer—she was running around at the church receiving people, because she felt they were important. I mean, she was acting like a close friend of the family, and she never even knew his mother, never knew his sister. That’s how she was—she was a latcher-on-er.
Do you happen to know the derivation of “snob”—s-n-o-b? I used to teach linguistics and crap like that at Yale. In Italy, in, I don’t know, maybe the thirteenth, maybe the twelfth century, a lot of nouveau-riche Italians tried to get their kids into the schools where the noble families sent their children by offering the schools a ton of money, so finally what the schools did was start a new category which the nobility called sensa nobilita—without nobility—because not only weren’t these nouveau-riche noble, they didn’t even have the instincts of nobility.
Barbara Curteis
Barbara adopted this irrepressible redheaded Irish persona to cover up whatever deficiencies she thought she had. She didn’t know things that everyone else knew or that she assumed everyone else knew and that in fact they probably did know, and she couldn’t entirely catch up with the head start that the people she wanted to know had on her. And this persona that she’d adopted eventually took over.
Brooks Baekeland
When Barbara left Hollywood and came back East, she did so expecting to be sued by the studio but not giving a damn. She was—joy to Mama!—now considering giving in to John Jacob Astor’s strenuous and stertorous courting. Have you ever seen a picture of him? He looked very like Louis XVI and was dubbed by Time the “Pear-Shaped Prince of the Idle Rich.” His father went down with the other gentlemen on the Titanic, singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
But after the screen test, the studio decided not to try to keep her. Miss Daly was not, they could see, of rich thespian ore. In fact, she would have made the worst actress in the world.
Peidi Gimbel Lumet
It was a terrific aging actress role that Barbara Baekeland eventually played. She couldn’t get over the fact that she’d been John Jacob Astor’s girlfriend for a minute. It was a theme, it was consistently there. It was her notion of herself and that’s what her behavior was based on.
Brooks Baekeland
I am not sure why Barbara changed her mind about John Jacob Astor. I may have been the innocent reason. In any case, he was still married at the time to Tucky French. He married various tarts, but Tucky was not one of them. Hers was a family as “distinguished” as his own. But it was at this time, according to Barbara, still—or again—a dewy young photographer’s model, living with her mother far above their means at the old Delmonico’s, that John Jacob Astor made her an offer of three million dollars—money in those days—if she would wait for him until he could get a divorce from Tucky French.
Now, I do not remember the exact order of events—whether Barbara turned down the bribe before or after she met me. I was a pilot trainee in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the time, and had been invited by my sister Dickie, who lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with her first husband, to come for the weekend—I had a leave—and meet a pretty girl who was a “poet.”
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
Dickie and Barbara had probably met in Hollywood. Dickie, you see, was in the movies, too. She was in Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. They wanted her to stay on but she hated it, she hated it as much as Barbara did. Dickie was quite impressed with Barbara. I mean, they’d be bound to like each other, because they were both very verbal and bright and very beautiful. And later, as a matchmaker, she had Brooks and Barbara for the weekend, and there’s no question—that weekend was momentous.
Brooks Baekeland
I found a remarkably beautiful and staggeringly self-assured young woman whose pretentions to poetry puzzled me when I plumbed them. She thought it would be wonderful to be a poet, but she had no training in words, and I hurt her feelings by calling what she showed me “marmalade.”
To skip a banal story of sex and still embryonic violence that might interest the readers of a woman’s magazine, during a heated zigzag from Ridgefield to the Adirondacks to the lacy-fluffy abode of mother and daughter at Delmonico’s to, finally, Pinehurst, North Carolina, Miss Daly strongly intimated to me that she was pregnant. I took her across the border, to Bennetsville, South Carolina, and for two dollars—the court fee—and ten dollars—for a wedding band—I made her into Mrs. Brooks Baekeland and myself for the next thirty years into “Barbara’s husband.”
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
I heard John Jacob Astor followed them all the way down to South Carolina, trying to prevent Barbara from marrying Brooks. But she was madly in love with Brooks, and she thought he had a lot of money—a lot more than he had, I imagine.
Brooks Baekeland
I soon realized that, whether Barbara was pregnant or not—and she was not—I had not married a soul mate but a powerful and ambitious antagonist. She was a far more brilliant and a far stronger personality than I ever was or could be.
Shortly before I met her, though I did not know it until long after, Barbara had been a patient of the famous psychoneurologist Foster Kennedy. Because of my disagreements with my father—essentially the strain that is set up in a young man of overly passionate nature between his desire for freedom at any cost and his desire not to bring dishonor on his name—I had been “introduced” to Foster Kennedy earlier myself. Besides my grandfather, he was the first intelligent man I had ever met—I mean known on an intimate basis, could talk to, could make myself understood to, could seek and take advice from. It was an almost rhapsodic experience. He asked me out to dinner to meet people like Jerome Kern, Robert Oppenheimer, Wystan Auden, and a galaxy of British diplomatic and military stars—his cousin was Chief of Staff of the British Army, Field Marshall Sir John Greer Dill.
Meanwhile my father was tremendously impressed and puzzled by the fact that the man who charged the highest psychiatric consulting fees in the world was charging him nothing for seeing me—and telling him nothing, either. It was Foster who said to me one day, “Brooks, there is something very big and important going on. You should be a part of it. Go up to Montreal. Get in the Air Force. I know the Air Marshal. I’ll ring him.” And that is how it happened. I left almost overnight.
I asked Barbara not to come to Canada while I was still in training, but she came anyway. I did not go to meet her. My then very close and dear friend the poet Howard Nemerov, one of nature’s gentlemen, met her instead and comforted her. I ignored her. I mistreated her. I did everything I could imagine that would put a girl off, but I had forgotten her persistence.
It gives me pleasure to think for a few minutes now about Barbara as she was in those first years, during my training and subsequent instructorship in Canada. She kept insisting on following me about on my postings, first as a trainee in #13 Elementary Flying Training School, St. Eugene, Ontario, then at Uplands Advanced Flying Training School at Ottawa, then at #1 Instructor’s Flying Training School at Trenton, Ontario, and then in a long series—Aylmer, Gananoque, Kingston, St. Hubert’s in Montreal—where I taught the death-defying youth of the British Commonwealth, plus a good bit of Texas, how to dogfight and kill with machine guns, rockets, bombs, and lousy jokes—we could have ended the war four years earlier with those, properly employed.
Barbara stayed in local rooming houses, even at one time above an undertaking parlor—the smell reminded me of Bakelite. I had a forty-eight-hour pass every two weeks. I was nuts about flying, about everything I was learning and doing, but I was not nuts about my wife.
One of the things that most put me off about the beautiful ex–Barbara Daly was her convertible Chrysler and her mink coat and her empress’s airs, which did not go at all with my disguise as a minor Prince Incognito, Air-craftsman 2nd Class, and “one of the mob” fighting Hitler. I was all for Democracy. She was soon ordering around my commanding officers. She already knew “how the world works.”
I did not want to know. I hated the very fact that that was how it worked. I loathed her for her political acumen. You can imagine my embarrassment when I came home once, after two weeks, to my humble hovel, wherever it may have been at the time, to discover Barbara giving a cocktail party—the first person I saw on opening the door was the man before whom I cringed and whom I saluted every other day of my life, my C.O., suddenly converted into a genial and subservient “friend” calling me “Brooks” instead of “Baekeland, AC2”—a man whose social inferiorities would have embarrassed a Gila monster. I wished that my new wife might just vanish back into the meretricious world she had come from.
Anyway, there were always those two weeks before we were able to couple on bumpy mattresses and cow the local population with her airs of Catherine de’ Medici. And it was horribly boring for her—I mean all those blotchy, overworked, overbabied, gingham-dressed other officers’ wives at tea in the intervening fourteen days.
Since I soon saw that the poetry was not going to work, I began to try to teach her how to draw and do watercolors. As a teacher I took my job seriously and, standing behind her—as I did through the rest of her whole artistic career—I gave her the ideas, the suggestions about form, theme, color, etc. She did have talent and ambition, but she had no imagination. What she had—and what may be more valuable to an artist—was passion. But she had never had a Conté crayon or a brush of any kind in her hand before. You can see in Nina Daly’s apartment in New York that what Barbara did with that ignorance and passion was not so bad at all. The romantic spirit.
And in the long summer evenings in that north country, after a crummy but lovely dinner in some awful village greasy spoon, we would go walking for miles out into the Canadian countryside—wilderness, or semiwilderness in those days, with me trying to walk on the rails of some abandoned railroad line and reciting “Gerontian”—I was mad about T.S. Eliot then, think him an old fart now—and, above us, in the satined evening sky, the Nighthawks sliding straight down with that amazing BOOOOOM to impress their girlfriends. I trust they were! I was.
