Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich

  From 1954 on, Barbara and I began to live more and more in France—also in Austria, Italy, and Spain—and this underlined with a terrible clarity my father’s betrayal of his origins. Barbara had already learned—and climbed—all the rungs of power and réclame in New York—tout pour la parade, as a French cook of ours once said to me—and we were beginning to lead that life that people later compared to Gerald and Sara Murphy’s.

  6

  RUINED ROYALTY

  IF TONY BAEKELAND had participated in afternoon occupational therapy, he would be returned to his ward at four-thirty—which would leave him with three hours to fill before supper. Although various sports such as football, soccer, tennis, and baseball were available to patients in the late afternoon, Tony preferred watching television or listening to his tapes. “I was always encouraging him to play sports,” says Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, “but he was reluctant. I told him that going out for one of the teams might contribute to an eventual diagnosis of his being cured, and he said he’d think about it.”

  Sometimes patients mobilized themselves to the point where an entrepreneurial skill emerged. “Surprisingly, in an environment like Broadmoor, very imaginative things can go on,” a staff member comments. A group of patients, including Tony Baekeland, once got together and ingeniously brewed beer in the bathroom area—out of raw material smuggled into the hospital by visitors. “While it was fermenting,” one of the nurses recalls, “the patients—to maintain the temperature in the room—kept taking hot baths! Despite all the time and energy spent on this very elaborate enterprise, the patients lost out in the end—they were caught by a supervisor just as the beer was ready.”

  Ironically, Tony Baekeland’s great-grandfather, a determined violator of Prohibition, also brewed his own beer. Found among Leo Hendrik Baekeland’s private papers was one titled “A Simple and Rapid Method for Making Beer.”

  The result was a drink of about three-and-a-half to four percent alcohol, which fermented in anywhere from forty hours to five or six days, according to temperature. “Stronger beer,” Dr. Baekeland advised, “takes more time.” In Broadmoor there was all the time in the world.

  Elizabeth Blow

  I think it started going wrong when they sold their house in New York and moved to Europe and then started moving around in a sort of rootless way. They never bought anything, they never had a home in Europe, they just rented houses in various resorts. Mainly, though, they were based in Paris—that’s where they knew Gloria and Jim Jones and so forth.

  Gloria Jones

  Jim and I were having a drink at the Ritz bar, we’d just come back from the bank or something, and she just came over and said, “Hello, I know who you are.” Like that, you know.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Because I was the shy one, of course it should have been Barbara who first talked to them, but it was I who saw Jim and Gloria sitting in the “alley” that faces on the garden to one’s left as one walks through the Ritz lobby toward the rue Cambon and the bar. Jim was wearing a pair of Hollywood “shades,” and as they both looked up at Barbara and me, I said to him, “That’s a lousy disguise.” He said in his gravelly voice, “Do I know you?” I said, “No, but I know who you are. You wrote a masterpiece.” He grinned and invited us to have a drink.

  Gloria Jones

  We saw quite a lot of them, I guess, in those times, and they seemed all right—they had wonderful parties. They had this little house on rue Barbet de Jouy, 40-bis I think it was, and once a week, probably, we’d go to dinner there.

  I remember she had a bed down in the living room, sort of a Louis Seize lounge where she slept—which I thought was funny, because Brooks had a bedroom upstairs, which I never saw. She sort of made a thing about that—that she slept in the living room. And they had two Spanish servants. They lived, you know, very well. She decorated beautifully, and she was a good housekeeper, too.

  Tony was young, I think he was going to school in Paris—a day school. Sort of vaguely I remember him coming home with bird cages and birds. He was a nice little boy. Barbara gave him all the attention in the world as a child.

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria Jones, Undated

  Gloria—chérie—

  Sorry about Wed. night. His name is Sonnenberg and he is the king of “Hoopla” (his name for his work), the best, and a very wise and wonderful man.

  Tony languishes with his drawings and wants to deliver them as soon as you’re back. He’s wild because I forgot them!

  Wuss sends you a purr and a snuggle and says he wants to meet Pussy What’s-her-name very soon. Call us when you’re back.

  Also am mad because Brooks returned Jimmie’s manuscript before I got a chance to look at it.

  A good trip—

  B

  Gloria Jones

  She was a loyal good friend, she was fun, she was appealing. And she really knew how to dress. I mean, she always had one real Chanel suit and then two or three made by this wonderful fat lady we used to go to.

  Addie Herder

  Barbara used to take me to the openings at Chanel, and we were given proper seats and deference because of her. She also knew a good dressmaker—a charming woman, maybe Rumanian, very talented—who ran up little numbers for us. I think they were fifteen dollars or something, for beautifully tailored summer frocks in linen. The dresses she made us were as elegant as you could get anywhere in Paris. She later became the designer for Hermès. I mean, how would I ever have got to have anything like that if it weren’t for Barbara? Barbara knew where to get everything.

  I liked her, because she was funny, and wicked, and because she extended her friendship to me in a way. It wasn’t really friendship, but still, for her, it was something. What I mean is we were not socially equal in the sense that, although we had many of the same friends, I never entertained and I didn’t go to all the fashionable watering holes unless I was taken. When I came to Paris I was practically a waif. Barbara didn’t know me but I was under the aegis of Gloria and Jim Jones, so I just came along with the package for her. She was also a genuine admirer of my art, my collages, and said so, to other people.

  Gloria Jones

  Barbara was doing the chasse when I first met her—you know, hunting. She loved that. She had the costume and everything—for jumping over fences and killing a deer, a boar, I don’t know what the hell kind of animal it was. She had a streak of that craziness in her.

  Brooks Baekeland

  In the chasse à courre you do not jump over fences or anything else. Only in one place in France—in Pau—was there a proper hunt which “took fences” à l’anglais. At Chantilly, where Barbara rode, the boar was not hunted—only the stag.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  She was the boldest rider ever—she’d get on any horse and it would be rearing and bucking and Barbara was always just laughing. She had tremendous courage. You had to pay a thousand dollars a year to join the thing at Chantilly and have maybe three hunts, and you had to dress in red velvet with hats and feathers. And she was always in on the kill. Everything Barbara did she did well.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Barbara was not an official membre de l’équipage but an invitée and so had no right to wear the hunt costume, which was green and black, and didn’t. Le Baron de Thierry, the adjoint Master of the Hunt who was an elderly, gallant man who had the best chef in Paris, had quite a penchant for Barbara. He called her, she told me, “ma chère petite chose.” In France, of course, a proper gentleman shows gallantry to all women, and the women expect it.

  Paule Lafeuille

  Barbara Baekeland was a student of mine in Paris. She was strikingly keen on improving her already fluent French. She used to come to me punctually twice a week, and she studied her lessons better than any of my other students. The sessions we had together were for me time spent with a dear friend. We spoke—in French—of every interest we had in common: literature, theater, music, art, and life in general. Barbara was extremely fond of Paris a
nd got along amazingly well with the French, whose way of life she appreciated and partly adopted.

  She was a woman of delicate artistic taste. When she moved from the rue Barbet de Jouy, she chose unhesitatingly the most beautiful part of Paris to settle down in: the section of the Île Saint-Louis called “the prow of the boat,” an old and picturesque area teeming with memories of the past. She adorned her cozy seventeenth-century apartment there with genuine antique furniture, beautiful paintings, Persian rugs, and a selection of lovely pastel-colored materials.

  Barbara had many glamorous French friends but she also led a very elegant life among the American circle in France. On my part, I knew quite a few of her intimate American friends: Virginia Chambers, Ethel de Croisset, Dorothea Biddle, Kitty Coleman.

  Barbara’s most characteristic qualities were broad-mindedness, charm, grace, and kindness. My heart aches thinking of her, and that does not help.

  I never tutored Tony. I remember her saying how much she adored him and admired his talent as a poet.

  From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973

  Tony Baekeland was happiest at a school in Paris from eleven to fourteen.

  Karen Radkai

  École Active Bilingue is the name of the school in Paris that I think he went to at one point. It’s on the rue Bourdonnais, near Champs de Mars. It’s where children from abroad often go.

  Tony’s parents as such drifted in and out of Paris. I had dinner with them there once, and I couldn’t wait to get out of their house—you couldn’t have even a conversation with them they were so busy name-dropping.

  Katharine Gardner Coleman

  They gave very nice dinners. I was living in Paris—I was Kitty Herrick then, the Widow Herrick. And they were renting a house from this wonderful architect friend of mine, Burrall Hoffman, and his adorable wife, Dolly. Burrall built what’s often described as the finest house ever built in America, you know—Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay in Florida, for James Deering, the industrialist.

  At the Baekelands’ I met a great many people I never would have seen, ever in my life, anywhere else—some quite fascinating Americans. I mean, that’s about the only time I met Ben Sonnenberg—wasn’t he the man that had the place on Gramercy Park? And she had the Art Buchwalds there once—I would have given my eyeteeth to have had the Buchwalds for dinner. Barbara had a way of absolutely attracting—well, I mean, everybody, men, women, and children.

  As you can gather quite well, it was Barbara who was my friend. She was just like that huggable, warm, adorable little dog she had. It was a Peke, and I mean, the hair and the cuteness—everything.

  My feelings were perfectly congenial and all that, in the beginning, with Brooks. He was a good enough host, a good enough guest, and at one stage I thought he was quite a good father. At one stage.

  He looked just like that Siamese cat they had. Those slit eyes! Well, I’m allergic to cats—maybe that’s a part of it, I don’t know.

  Paul Jenkins

  The first time I saw Brooks, he was with Jim Jones at this fancy fencing place on I think the avenue Hoche. There he was, fencing away. He looked pretty good, too.

  Brooks Baekeland

  I fenced with the French team at the Cercle Hoche, the oldest dueling club in France, in both épée and fleuret. I had already studied saber with the Santelli brothers in New York and was being considered for Olympic training while a freshman at Harvard.

  I took Jim Jones to the Cercle Hoche. I took him also to Klosters to ski, but never mind. He had told me that he had been a Golden Gloves champion. I found he couldn’t box his way out of a wet paper bag—in fact, he refused to put the gloves on with me! He had no speed or coordination or eye and so soon gave up fencing. He was hopeless on skis, too—hopeless in all the Hemingway things he so aspired to. So he wrote about them. I did not despise him for any of this—I was touched. I understood one of the springs of a novelist for the very first time: imaginative compensation.

  The fact is, he wrote one impassioned, true, and very fine book, From Here to Eternity. He ruined his life as a writer—I told him so—by trying to live with the nobs, not only the Hollywood and other big-money sets, but the French aristos. He was horribly flawed by his snobbery and a whole display of social-defense complexes—falsities that marred his work: all the worst American values. Celebrity and the open signatures of wealth—all the things my grandfather laughed at—were uppermost in his life. His generous life, I hasten to add, for Jim was a walking heart.

  He was a small-town boy from the Midwest. He would have made a perfect target for Sinclair Lewis. His “taste”—a concept so important to Barbara, who was just as big a snob but who had the woman’s keener tracking insights—was awful, embarrassing. Barbara and I were as far in taste from Jim and Gloria as Gerald and Sara Murphy were from Scott Fitzgerald. But this, too, is a kind of snobbery.

  Incidentally, both Joneses had been completely taken in by Barbara’s act of being a Back Bay Brahmin—an act which I sometimes regarded tenderly and sometimes with contempt but which I still financed, to my ruin. The Joneses meanwhile thought of me as a parvenu—I was the shy and quiet one.

  Jim was actually as shy as a girl. He was a very intelligent, kindly, feeling, sensitive man. A girl. A girl that snarled. The idiot world was “took in” by the snarl. I loved Jim. I did not love Gloria—she hadn’t his touching reasons. She was just a tough Mafiosa broad. Her greatest quality was that she loved Jim—don’t knock it.

  Will Davis

  I thought Brooks was pretentious. Barbara, too. They were trying to model themselves after Caresse and Harry Crosby but they just didn’t have the equipment. You know, the English have a phrase for people like Brooks and Barbara—“light, dangerous people.”

  I liked Barbara all right—I loved her laugh—but I didn’t approve of her. I mean, I’m very conventional about women. I essentially like them to behave, and Barbara didn’t know how to behave. She was a madcap.

  I started to flirt with Barbara the first time I ever met her. Brooks and I were sitting in the front of this cab and Barbara was sitting in the back between Jim and Gloria Jones—this was in Paris, in the spring of ’61—and I had my arm around the back of the front seat and I started to let it go up and down Barbara’s legs while having a conversation with Brooks. Jim and Gloria both thought this all extremely funny, and Barbara herself was nearly hysterical with laughter. What I was saying was reasonably funny, but of course Brooks didn’t understand why they were all breaking up like that.

  Oh, she was very pretty, very pretty, and good legs and stuff like that, but the more I saw of her, the less I was drawn to her that way. What she had was, she had more energy than anyone I’ve ever known. You couldn’t tire her out—no matter how late you stayed up at night you could not exhaust her.

  Duncan Longcope

  I had been living in Paris for perhaps a year before I met her. But I had once seen a very good-looking woman with a Pekingese in the café opposite the Brasserie having a tartine in the morning. I thought she was English. We didn’t speak or anything. And then later a friend took me to meet the Baekelands, and, I mean, there she was—Barbara.

  She had a real élan vital. She could carry an evening despite whatever mood Brooks was in. You never knew—usually he played along, he was a decent enough social type, he didn’t sulk and stuff—whatever his particular position may have been at that moment in regard to the rest of the female world.

  They liked to walk quite a lot, I remember. I often saw them walking on the quais, and they were quite charming on those occasions. I walked with Brooks now and then myself, and it was possibly on one of those walks that he told me he had his mail sent to another address in Paris, I supposed so that he could have his privacy.

  Eileen Finletter

  Brooks was always very secretive, and more than a little somber, while she was gay and happy, but they looked good together—they looked rich and self-assured. I used to see t
hem at the Joneses, who had kind of an open-house thing every Sunday night—mostly Americans, a lot of Hollywood people, a lot of writers. One night the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court appeared—Earl Warren. Sometimes Jim would read a chapter from his latest book, and Barbara, I remember, would sit there looking up at him as though he were God or something. She’d say, “Oh, how beautiful!” I mean, she’d gush, and it would drive me crazy.

  Addie Herder

  I remember Barbara at the Joneses reading a wonderful story to us that she’d written, about a trip where she and Brooks and Tony went walking somewhere in places that were not urban—some kind of exploratory hike—and how on this excursion there was a struggle between the parents for possession of the boy.

  Brooks Baekeland

  I found a great many stories in Barbara’s London apartment after her death—with her writing teacher’s comments on them. The only thing I saw that had not been written by me was her so-called novel, which was frankly pretty lamentable—and so designated by her instructor in his tactful way. Barbara, while she had the most essential thing for a writer—passion—could never have been a successful one. You have to brush your teeth, put away your clothes, make your bed, pay your rent…you must have some respect for order. Good writing is damned difficult. Spoiled girls don’t do it.

  Eileen Finletter

  One Sunday at the Joneses, Tony was standing next to Barbara behind the bar, which was high, like a church pulpit, and she had her arm negligently draped around his shoulder and she said to me, “Oh, what a lovely day it’s been! Tony and I spent the entire morning lying in bed reading the papers.” And since my own son was about the same age as Tony, I was shocked, because I thought, My God, if I did that to him—I mean, in front of a roomful of people. She wanted me to have the impression that it really was in bed. And Tony didn’t move, he just stood there smiling. And I thought, That’s odd.