Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

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

  Katharine Gardner Coleman

  I was having lunch with Brooks and Barbara one day when Tony came in from school with his little traveling case. I mean, it wasn’t vacation time. He had walked away from, you know, another school. And I said to Barbara and Brooks, “Here’s some free advice for you.” I had boys then that were older than Tony, you see. I said, “You just cannot let him come home. Don’t even let him think that he can come home. He’s got to get through, and then at the end of the school year, if the school hasn’t been successful, find him another one.”

  He was just sent to his room and told they’d talk about it later.

  Brooks Baekeland

  I was very disappointed to discover that the flame of curiosity and intellectual determination—capacity for, belief in, work—that might, for instance, have made a scientist out of Tony was lacking. Whether that was genetic or due to the values he was being brought up in I cannot say. In any case, I had already educated him to the point where he was ahead—in some directions—of his science teachers in the various prep schools he went to.

  Two things had become clear—to me, not to his mother—by that time: one, that he was bright enough—and even talented enough—to embark on any career one could think of, and two, that he was bone-lazy. There is a myth that very bright people can accomplish a complete academic program without ever opening a book, to coin a phrase. That is false. In fact, the very, very bright open more books than anyone else. Usually. Therefore my son soon puzzled me, for I had spent every summer, wherever we happened to be at the time, tutoring him mornings to bring him back to the surface, as it were, for his entry in school the next fall. He would always start at the top of his class and end up at the bottom, with strong suggestions from the schools that he be taken out.

  As he was entering puberty he also began to be a disciplinary problem in his schools—“subversive,” “a bad influence,” etc. But I went on tutoring him right up to the time that he and his mother announced that he wanted to go to Oxford. He had never been able to finish high school and had even been asked to leave a school with the academic standards of Avon Old Farms.

  From the Catalog, Avon Old Farms School, Avon, Connecticut

  Aspirando et perseverando—aspiring and persevering: the School motto is more than a figure of speech to members of the Avon community. The motto is a reminder of the way of life that governs the hearts and minds of the people who make up the School. Boys discover at Avon that aspirations can become realities and that perseverance is vital to the attainment of both individual and community goals.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated

  Avon Old Farms

  Avon, Connecticut

  Dear Gloria and Jim,

  Now that I’m more or less installed in school I can write. Getting back here was a bit unpleasant, but everything feels very normal after a few days. I’m going to see Rosie Styron pretty soon about those poems. This school is a real waste, so what I might do is leave at Christmas and come to London, go to a Cramming school to see if I get these A-level exams and see if I can get into Oxford next year.

  Anyway I’ll probably “aspire and persevere” at least until then.

  Love,

  Tony

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Christopher Barker, Undated

  Avon Old Farms

  Avon, Connecticut

  Dear Christopher,

  This school is the most ridiculous farce. I really don’t see why I’m coming here at all. Even the teachers are minus-I.Q. people. But I suppose I must stick it out. I’ve been in the infirmary with bronchitis, and got so bored I finally just left. This horrible nurse kept bringing me trays of teas and jellies instead of my dinner.

  Read a poem called “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” by Ernest Dowson.

  Yours,

  Tony

  Avon Old Farms School Memorandum to Antony Baekeland, October 5, 1963

  On two occasions you have escaped from the Infirmary via the window. If you should feel called upon to do this again, you should keep right on going because we are not going to condone such behavior in the future.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Christopher Barker, Undated

  Avon Old Farms Avon,

  Connecticut

  Dear Christopher,

  I’m sitting in my room after a shower listening to some Bach harpsichord music, one of my main pleasures here. I managed to get out of swimming practice with a half-feigned sore throat. School life on the whole is very boring, in spite of the certain thrill of being in the sixth form. As we did last year, several of us sneak out late at night to do evil. On weekends, or when we can, we buy masses of food and liquor. After the last bed-check, at 12:00, we all somehow manage to get out of our dorms (I just jump out my window), past the night watchman, and meet at the chapel. From there the six of us proceed into the depths of the forest (the country is very heavily wooded) to the little cabin we built last year, cook our steaks and drink our Irish coffee and sing. Very nice too—heh heh. We manage to squeeze some excitement into a regimented existence.

  I actually have a bat who lives in my room—in the rear of my closet, to be exact. He suddenly moved in last Wednesday. Every morning and evening I leave the closet door open for an hour so he can get in and out. And I never close my window, so he can get in and out of that easily enough. I found out to my horror that over the summer something had happened to my blue suit. Rats or moths or something ate enormous holes in it. I’ve been wearing a dinner jacket to dinner and no one has said a word yet. Very odd.

  I suppose you’re surrounded at Princeton by a lot of ostentatiously rich crewcut dummies. They, my dear Christopher, are the U.S.A. They are legion. Like the stars. Probably very nice.

  Pretty depressing though, I suppose.

  I sometimes start to grope for my identity when I’m lonely. One really hasn’t lost it at all, it just steps into the shadows…

  Yours,

  Tony

  Peter Gable

  After Buckley, when I was ten or eleven I was shipped off to Choate, where I was a very bad boy. I was sent down from school. I don’t remember what my crime was—it was probably being a smart-ass. Then I was sent to some hideous school in Greenwich which has long since gone out of existence, and I stayed there for a while—Tony meanwhile was at Exeter or Brooks—and then I fetched up at a somewhat backwater boarding school outside of Hartford. Avon Old Farms School. The beach upon which I was washed up.

  And it was quite amazing—the first day of school, who should I see but Tony! And we fell on each other’s necks—how have you been and so forth and so on. Now when we were little boys at Buckley, Tony and I had the sort of telepathy that children can have with each other—I mean where whole paragraphs can be left out because you know each other so well, you have a continuity of experience where even the slightest little trigger puts you both on the same track. Anyway, there had been this hiatus of three or four years, and now, the long and the short of it is, the magic was gone. I was a little different, he was different.

  Tony was most decidedly no longer “just another kid.” All his brilliance and genius, dimly perceived by me as a child, was becoming more difficult for him, I think. I remember him in English composition class at Avon—his vocabulary was quite an astonishment even to his teachers. At Avon if you were bright you stood out, and Tony had a brilliance above and beyond anyone else in the school. Still, I don’t think he excelled in his studies.

  Brooks Baekeland

  When I went there, Avon Old Farms was an interesting school. But it was not an educational institution in the usual sense. What had appealed to my father when he sent me there was that the students milked cows, cut trees, worked in the fish hatchery, plowed, raked leaves, bound books, and worked in a carpentry shop. The fact that some of the boys came with a string of polo ponies or an airplane was not what interested him. Not all of the boys went on to college—I suspect most did not, and of those th
at did, damned few went to Princeton, Harvard, and Yale.

  I had an altogether easy ride at Avon—I spent a quarter of my time fencing, an eighth on team sports, and much of the rest on ornithology. And I was admitted to Harvard, where I might have chosen to study Chinese bronzes or cultural anthropology or Russian history or French literature or comparative religion or philology or the art of glassblowing in the Renaissance or architecture from Egypt to the Bauhaus, but since I was a Baekeland, none of these “frivolities” were open to me. What I did, and my family never knew, was audit them all—in those days, for I think eleven dollars you could audit any course you wanted, which meant sit in on the lectures, read the books, make a fuss in class, and even take the exams, but you could not get the credits. At the same time I was taking a heavy course load leading toward a biochemistry major. Why biochemistry? God knows, but I knew it would please my family—or rather, not shock them. I was expected to become a scientist, to do something satisfactory for the family—as for myself, I was as unmotivated as a loose-skinned pup, nine-tenths curiosity.

  I was rooming—or rather, dividing a capacious suite in Massachusetts Hall—with the editor of the Crimson. He was a wag. He was a dog. I was a cat. But that dog and this cat shared a sense of the absurd and I still remember him with affection. We were grand, budding terrorists. I showed him how to convert all our cotton underclothes into guncotton; how to fill our housemaster’s bathroom—bowl, tub, sink—with Jell-O when he was out courting and the icy winter air could come in through the opened bathroom windows and set it for his sleepy return; how to string out underwear on a cotton clothesline converted into guncotton and with the tip of a lighted cigarette make it disappear with a flash behind the back of one of the campus cops when he came up red-faced to arrest us for hanging our laundry in the Yard. It was my grandfather, by the way, who had taught me to make guncotton out of my underwear—also how to make an extremely unstable explosive out of ammonia, potassium iodide, and iodine—and so helped me on my way out of my freshman year at Harvard.

  I remember having a tin full of aluminum powder dropped down the chimney from the roof of Massachusetts Hall while I waited in our ground-floor apartment with a match to light it, sending a flame one hundred feet high into the night sky over Cambridge. The list of tomfoolery is long and I could go on. Most of my inventive powers were occupied in such nonsense that first term.

  And then, I got the ax. Suddenly I was a totally defeated young man. I never expected to see any of my family or friends again. I was dazed—literally frightened out of my wits. No future that I could see was open to me. I was finished. Honor, Family—such things were important to me then. Who thinks of Shame today?

  Pride—some say satanic pride—has been one of the keys to my whole life, and in 1938 it had a great deal to do with my not seeking the advice from my family that I might easily have found, had I only been able to seek it. But the essence of pride is that it never asks for anything, can never admit weakness. It may demand, it cannot beg. In fact, great pride never even thinks of asking! I am positive that it never even occurred to me that anyone might be able to help me.

  My father’s reaction was—predictably, and he was right—that I had “absconded with funds.” I had taken with me eight hundred and fifty dollars in cash, all I had in account with the bursar, which my father had given me to study biochemistry and not for gallivanting out to the West Coast, which is where I decided to go.

  I took a Greyhound bus from Cambridge to San Francisco. I stopped off in New York to say goodbye to my mother, who lived in Turtle Bay, and my sister, then eighteen. I did not reveal to my mother that I was leaving “forever” but I did to my sister, who then did an impulsive and generous thing—she gave me a small necklace of cultured pearls.

  In San Francisco I lived first on Howard Street. I had discovered Jack London, and I soon began exploring Pacific and Montgomery streets—the famous Monkey Block where Saroyan lived. I had never heard of him and drank with him at the Black Cat without knowing who he was. We remembered it all together in Paris many years later when we went to Longchamps and Auteuil to lose our money on the ponies and spent nights drunkenly with Jim and Gloria Jones. At that time the Black Cat was the hangout of striptease girls and whores. It was a tough neighborhood. I could hardly take in the education I was getting, it was coming in so fast, but my ears were as long as a donkey’s and my eyes were out on stalks.

  I met a lot of extraordinary characters out there—truly Saroyan’s world and Steinbeck’s. Those two didn’t come from nowhere, you know—like all writers, they were just writing what was, and that is the way it was in those days.

  I could add a lot of stories to theirs. The Duke. “The Duke of Market Street,” he was called. A famous fixture in San Francisco. He was the King of the Bums. His only possessions were a magnificent Capehart record changer, the first word in hi-fi almost before hi-fi began, and every opera and symphony that had ever been recorded—this in a fleabag that he shared with a Norwegian sailor who was always out to sea.

  He did not want me to become a bum like him. He found me a job as a trainee doing analytical chemistry for a paint company. And then several things happened quickly. One day I received a letter from an acquaintance of my father’s, Colonel Frederick Pope, a director of the American Cyanamid Corporation who was also the president of the Chemical Construction Corporation, offering me a job in south-central India assisting two chemical engineers in building a basic chemical complex for the Maharajah of Mysore.

  “Duke,” I asked—for I could talk to this duke, as I could never have to my father the Grand Duke—“what should I do? Should I keep on trying to find a night job that lets me go to school by day, or should I go to Jack London’s Alaska, or should I accept this great panjandrum’s miserable offer of a hundred dollars a month to build a chemical factory somewhere in India?” I was not sure but I suspected that part of the deal was that my father should pay my salary.

  He never hesitated. He said, “Make peace with your father and go out to India.”

  I was able to do the second.

  Dr. W. Lindsay Jacobs

  Brooks Baekeland was hostile toward his son and in a welter of confused moralizing seemed to wish him ill, consciously or unconsciously.

  He wrote me a letter about Tony, enclosing a cutting from some French magazine. I remember it was a full-page color cartoon made up of three separate sections. The first showed a man sitting quietly in an armchair reading a newspaper. The second showed a little boy pointing a space-ray gun directly at the man, with all sorts of yellow stars shooting out—it looked like the finale of a Fourth of July firecracker display. The last section of the cartoon was just a pile of ashes on the chair. And Brooks Baekeland had written on the side of the cartoon: “Sometimes this frightful realism comes too close to the heart of the thing.”

  Brooks Baekeland

  In the end—long before the end—I saw Tony as a kind of personification of Evil, and I knew him better than anyone in the world and he knew that I did—as Caliban knew that Prospero knew him. But to whom could—would—I have said that? No one. I told him—oh, I told him. And he understood. He knew that I loved him, too. And he loved me—too much, according to some of his homosexual friends.

  Suzanne Taylor

  Angel, who cooked for the Baekelands two or three days a week, also came to us two or three days, whenever we were alone—she wasn’t good enough to cook for company—and she used to tell us an awful lot about the Baekelands, naturally. She told me, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to Tony, because when his parents are away he picks up older boys on the street and brings them home.” He was about fourteen then.

  Dr. Thomas Maguire

  Tony’s first homosexual relationship was at the age of eight.

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

  In adolescence Antony found homosexual interests and had some physical experience at boarding school. He reg
ards himself as attracted to both sexes.

  Peter Gable

  One Christmas break at Avon I came trundling down to New York and I stayed with Tony. His parents were living in Paris most of the time by then but they had this penthouse pied-à-terre on Seventy-fifth Street and Lexington, with lots of terraces. It was just kids down for a long weekend. Tony had a party, a little gathering. I remember there were a lot of very cute girls there. Girls appreciated Tony’s looks and his wit or his manner or something—they rather liked him. And he seemed to reciprocate their enthusiasm. I mean, he had, it appeared, as much enthusiasm for girls as anybody else, certainly as much as I had. He seemed to be as hotly in pursuit of the almost unachievable piece of ass as any of us. He became attracted to a friend of a cousin of his who I was going out with. God she was a sexy little girl—long brunette hair, curvaceous, quite something to warm the cockles of your heart on a cold winter’s night in a boy’s boarding school in Avon, Connecticut. And this girl and Tony formed some sort of vast friendship for six months or so. Her parents lived somewhere in Connecticut—Westport, Southport, Eastport, Northport—and there was a weekend that we all spent unchaperoned in their house, which I remember as being beamy, with a large fireplace and lots of stone. We built a fire and drank a bottle of Cointreau or something, and then we toddled off to bed. Now these were the years when girls’ knees stayed wired to each other. So neither Tony nor I expected, nor did the girls anticipate, that anything of a particularly prurient nature would transpire. We did end up in the girls’ room, where there were two double beds—Tony and his girl in one and me and my girl in the other, all of us clothed to some degree. And what did we do? We went to sleep!