Savage Grace - Natalie Robins
Page 31
Dr. Jean Dax
She was in a deep coma for twenty-four hours, and I think gradually pulled out of it—within the next twenty-four hours, roughly. There was no evidence of brain damage.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, February 27, 1968
Jaipur & Udaip
Rambagh Palace
India
Dear Jim & Gloria—
I called up the Htel-Dieu before leaving Rome on Sunday. The head nurse gave me a good report on Barbara’s condition, assuring me that there was practically no danger now at all. From this dose anyway.
I am writing to say three things. (A) My thanks to you and Gloria, who are somewhat saner and a great deal more sophisticated than Barbara’s other friends in Paris—all mostly female and therefore and to that extent somewhat hysterically delighted, I am sure, in the TV-drama aspect of this thing. Barbara has just about drained all there is to drain out of romantic (and not-so-romantic) violence where I am concerned, as I told you. And that is the second thing: her belief in force to get her way is fundamental in all things great and small, as everybody from waiters to prime ministers have experienced, and I have had to deal with that constantly for 25 years. Although the “provocation” this time may be judged great, there have been other times when even greater violence threatened over (as a start) where we planned to have dinner. I am to an astonishing and astonished degree unmoved, loving her no less than ever for all that. I would not probably feel that way had it not been for certain proofs of other things that indicate quite clearly to me that I am not the “only man there can ever be in my life”—i.e., that her hang-up on me is nowhere near so deathless as she will maintain to her girlfriends.
Third, Barbara never tells her TV audience the whole truth about her situation (or anything) and she has no doubt also failed to tell you that on top of the other funds she gets regularly from me she also gets $850 per month for the rental of the New York flat—i.e., another $5,100 between my decision about this thing and my return from this trip. She can (and does) piss away the funds I give her, but she is never as short as she pretends. She has a lot of dough to spend just on food, liquor, and play—nothing else to pay for, as I take care of all the basics myself. Because she is almost pathologically incapable of ordinary cost accounting (and hence any sort of planning also) she has no idea how much she blows on clothes and other things far and above any reasonable budgetary allowance. Her lack of realism in all things, a sort of fundamental inability to separate wish from fact, “what ought to be” from “what is,” “what can be” from “what might be” (important in any partnership) has (partly) accounted for a good deal of the sense of mutual paralysis in our lives, of which she herself sometimes complained. It has caused in me a deep reluctance to plan anything seriously with her—even a feeling that whatever I did with her would somehow simply be bungled or warped around again to suit the same old parade—but I don’t want to dwell on that. I am no saint myself.
I am not “abandoning” Barbara. I am just not making myself available anymore for her particular scene (any scenes), as I have perhaps 10 more years of non-senile life ahead of me, and I want now to think of myself a little, too. I am being selfish. That does not mean that “life is over” for her by any logic that I can see. Other men have lives to lead and many also have mistresses. If all the wives gobbled pills every time Dagwood took off on his own, America would soon be depopulated.
Finally, as I said to you on the phone, I am rather sick of the atomic fly swatter. I suppose when you first start using atomic weapons—even if only to slay a fly—and since there are no stronger resorts to force, then you can hardly think or fight in lesser terms. That is the trouble with melodrama—the climaxes are all used up in Act I.
I know Barbara is in danger (if not now, then later) because of that. But what the hell can I do about it, short of being her butler/gigolo or taking myself out of the scene in a sort of preemptive strike? But why should I?
The Morgan Bank will keep me in touch if there are any new developments, but as B’s friends I hope you will make it plain to her that nuclear disarmament is now in order and that this sort of thing drives any man sooner or later to profound indifference. She claims, when that has sentimental social value, to be a Catholic born and bred. What she needs is some self-examination not with a shrink but with a good old-fashioned Irish priest, who will ask her “What about it?” in those old-fashioned ethical terms that she understood (perhaps) before she went out to Hollywood in 1940, with John Jacob Astor hot on her lovely tail. It’s been show and little substance ever since. I helped in that, of course.
Yours ever and to Gloria—
Brooks
Gloria Jones
When she came to, Virginia Chambers and Ethel de Croisset and I were with her, and Dr. Dax, Jean Dax, who was the doctor for all of us. About a week later Virginia and Ethel and I took her to the American Hospital, which is way the hell across town, and she stayed there for six weeks. She was really in terrible shape. “I want my husband”—that’s the first thing she said in the American Hospital. She kept saying that to anybody who would listen to her—“I want my husband.” The bastard. Where was he? She was writing him letters—letters, letters, letters all the time. She used to always get him back with letters.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to James Jones, March 12, 1968
Dear Jim—
It is exactly two weeks since I spoke to you on the phone from Rome.
In India I received some of the most pathetic letters I have ever seen from Barbara. They were written from the Htel-Dieu and from the American Hospital where she went afterward. These letters were forwarded to me via Morgan’s. I have heard nothing since, because my itinerary had a rather large gap in it and I have not yet been able to close it—moving too fast. But I worry a whole lot about B, and I would be glad to have an encouraging word from you and Gloria—something objective that I can feel is accurate and written by someone who knows her and loves her. I admit to having been terribly affected by what she wrote. Of course I was meant to, but that makes no difference to me. I love her very much.
The next forwarding address that Morgan’s has for me is an airport departure (date, air and flight no.) on March 31—so you can write to me care of them and I will get your news then.
I am very grateful to you both for the trouble you have taken.
Love—
Brooks
Gloria Jones
Barbara was also writing letters to President de Gaulle and Mrs. de Gaulle—Mrs. de Gaulle especially, because Barbara said she knew she would understand. All of us, you know, spent time with her—Ethel and Virginia and I. She had a very nice private room. The American Hospital’s very fancy, you know.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
The American
Hospital Neuilly
Darling Gloria—and Jim—
How can I ever thank you enough? When I’m really glad to be alive I’ll find some way. To get me out of the Htel-Dieu—that monstrous place—saved my sanity. I want to find or write Brooks and tell him how sorry I am I’ve caused so much anxiety & pain to people I love. I haven’t the right to hold him if he wants to go but I wanted to see him once more as he left me with such anger. So much of our problems have been my fault. I realize it now. Perhaps if he does come back I can prove it and I would never reproach him.
How glad I am that with your worries and concern for me you came to see how I was. It’s enough to see the blue sky and the tree outside my window to begin to feel like being a part of it all. As much as I love Brooks I did not love him enough to let him go with a chance to be happy and that is what I reproach myself for.
Dax won’t let me even wear my own nightgowns—or have calls. Thank God I can still write or I would go crazy! Maybe this isolation is good for some people, but it leaves me with my thoughts, which are not happy ones, and is a kind of punishment.
Thank you for everything you
’ve done for me over the years. There’s been so much kindness from you both and I have been so hateful. But I mean to study “How to Win Friends and Keep Them”—indeed cherish them—joke—but I am going to try to correct my very grave failings of character.
Come and see me when you can. I need an antiperspirant, hair rollers, and a soin de peau—Carolina has all this.
It’s much better here than the Htel-Dieu! Quelle irony! But nurses aren’t very gentle people. I suppose if we were jabbing people with needles all day long & wiping their behinds & watching them die we wouldn’t be, either.
Neither doctor spends more than 5 min. with me & one a psychiatrist. How I’m going to pay for it all, God alone knows.
Come soon—
XX B
Paule Lafeuille
I visited her daily at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Her friends used to take turns by her bed, and every day one of them, in order to entice her to eat, would present her with some delicacy that their cook had prepared. As for me, living next to Petrossian’s store, I could bring her a slice of smoked salmon or a few grains of fresh caviar. Our efforts were rarely successful. She would push her plate aside and say, “It is delicious…. How sweet you all are.”
She loved to confide in me at length about her distress, and I can tell you that her words were Gentle Love itself’s. She seemed not in the least resentful of Brooks’s desertion and only kept repeating, “All I want is to see him once in a while. I shall not be able to live if I cannot occasionally set my eyes on him….” Heartbreaking. By the way, I had also taught French to Brooks. I never did again from then on. I made a decision never to see him again. I made it the very moment I heard of his flight to the Far East and the subsequent dramatic events. In February 1973 he wrote to me from a village in Brittany asking if I would consider meeting his new wife who—I quote him—was not being too well treated by Barbara’s old friends. This letter has remained unanswered.
Ethel Woodward de Croisset
She came out of her coma in exactly the same mood that she’d gone into the suicide, you see—which was one of total frustration because she couldn’t get ahold of Brooks. And I think it’s a miracle that she in some way didn’t try to take her life again, but probably one doesn’t do that sort of thing. What I mean is that the attempt hadn’t been a cleansing sort of thing. She came out absolutely wild it seemed to me—and to Gloria. All this I think appears in one of those books of her husband’s.
From The Merry Month of May, James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971.
I put in a call to Harry in Rome…. “Louisa’s in the hospital,” I said.
“Oh? She is? What for?” Harry said.
I was beginning to feel irritated. “A suicide attempt,” I said….
There was a pause on the line. “I suppose if she dies, I’ll have to come back, won’t I?”
“If you want to get her buried, you will,” I said furiously. “I know I sure as hell ain’t going to do it.”
“Oh, somebody would,” he said. “Edith de Chambrolet. Have you called Edith?”
“No, not yet,” I said. “I was trying to keep it quiet.”
“Well, call her. Call Edith. She’s a do-gooder. She loves to do good works.”…
He had told me to call Edith de Chambrolet. I did. I had met Edith at their place for the first time, and afterwards had had dinners with her frequently at her place. Large dinners, always very formal, eight to twelve people. Edith was a remarkable person. She was one of the richest women in America, and had married some impoverished French Count and had four sons by him…. She spoke with just about the broadest drawling “A” I have ever heard, and had stary eyes….
Together we walked over across the bridge and down past Notre-Dame to the Htel-Dieu….
As we walked in through the bed rows of beat-up, near-dead people, she said, “Isn’t it marvelous, now? Extraordinarily efficient.”
I was tongue-tied, and felt totally incapable, with her there.
“Now, Louisa,” she said at the bed, lifting up one side of the plastic oxygen tent. “We must stop all this nonsense. We must pull ourselves together and I know that you will.” She let the tent flap drop. “We’ll talk to her again a little later. Let it sink in, first. I’m sure she heard us. In her unconscious.”…
Harry remained adamant about not coming back unless Louisa actually died. And even then he was not absolutely sure….
They moved Louisa, in an ambulance, to the American Hospital in Neuilly. The whole thing was handled by the American-trained French doctor we knew who worked there, and whom all of us, including Edith, used as our doctor…. His name was Dax…. I did not feel up to riding out with her myself, but Edith de Chambrolet went with her….
I talked to the American Hospital doctor…. “She was just about as dead as you can get,” he said equably, “without actually dying.”
From Time Magazine, Review of The Merry Month of May, Timothy Foote, February 22, 1971
Among the [book’s] victims is Harry’s wife Louisa. Jones turns her into a near vegetable as the result of an attempted suicide…. Letting the lady live on in some domesticity or other would have been a truer and crueler fate.
Brooks Baekeland
A novelist is a cannibal and may eat his friends for his professional purposes—Jim Jones always did. I could not read The Merry Month of May—trash. I am the only person alive, along with Sylvie, who knows all the truth—and therefore the truth. And the truth, when deeply seen, is always greater than any fiction. In its depths—but only there—reality not only seems to imitate art but surpasses it.
From Saturday Review, Review of The Merry Month of May, John W. Aldridge, February 13, 1971
Even with all due allowance for his evident faith in human credulity, Jones cannot really expect us to believe any of this. His people, given the intellectual sophistication he attributes to them, would scarcely behave in this way.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
We left together exactly on the 24th of February, and that’s the day she tried to kill herself. Each time Brooks had tried to leave her before, she had done this. The first time was up at camp, in the Adirondacks—she took pills and he had to rush her across the lake in a rowboat to a doctor.
Samuel Taylor
I remember one night during the sixties my wife Suzanne and I were at the Baekelands’ for dinner—Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn were also there—and Barbara said, “Guess where I was at five this morning!” and we said, “Where?” and she said, “At Bellevue Hospital,” and she showed us the bandages on her wrists. And being very gay about it, you know—very charming about it.
Nancy Perkins Wallace
My brother saved Barbara’s life once. Mike was staying with Barbara and Tony in Cadaqués and she took an overdose of something, and they had to drive her in the car, screaming and yelling at her to stay awake—driving wildly through the night to some Costa Brava hospital.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Paris was the fourth time, and Brooks just…he couldn’t…he had to get away from her. That didn’t mean he didn’t love her. He did, and when she begged him to come back, I was terribly afraid that he would. Everybody thought, Brooks is off on a fling again, he’s forty-seven, he’ll come back. But I know now that he would never have come back to her, never—because she was too powerful, she was someone who would take the air you breathe—borrow it and leave you gasping. You just couldn’t exist with her around. Barbara tried everything to keep him—if a man is about to leave you and you take one hundred pills of Nembutal, that’s a pretty good way to make sure he’s not going to leave you.
Elizabeth Blow
You know, Sylvie had also tried to kill herself. Well, I mean, the story is so absurd, but possibly it happened. I believe it happened. According to Barbara, Sylvie had tried to take a lot of pills and been put in the hospital, and Brooks and Barbara had sat up all one night after this thing occurred and they had decided that they would go on with their life a
nd their marriage, that they would live together forever and that they really loved one another. And then there was a call from the hospital, a desperate call from Sylvie saying she wanted to see Brooks, and Brooks said, “Look, Barbara, I think I really should go over to the hospital. I’ll come right back.” And he went over to the hospital and Barbara never saw him again. He left the hospital with Sylvie and fled to Rome.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
The American Hospital
Neuilly
My darling Gloria & Jim—
What would I do without you? He won’t come back as he is a man that goes deeply into relationships and he will just become more & more fond of this girl—who first tried to get Tony & when that failed picked on Brooks. He is so guileless he won’t see through her and though I don’t mean to denigrate the feeling she has for him, she is, I think, intéressée. The last two times I saved my marriage by going to him with no pride and saying I was sorry. This time I have less pride and really think what I’ve been through has changed me. He had to leave without seeing me for if he saw me he loves me too much to have left me there tied up like a hog for slaughter. I feel that if I could only talk to him everything will be all right.
I haven’t seen my Spanish beau since last Spring & then just for lunch to tell him I was through. He never meant as much to me as the hair on Brooks’ head! Whoops—as a hair on Brooks’ head.
The trouble is now everyone knows and if I am ashamed he must be more ashamed. This is what will keep him from coming back to me.
When she was ill I urged him to go and see her in the clinic so that if anything happened that was serious he would not blame himself. She has kept him from seeing me & had the gall to write me a hypocritical letter in which she says she only wants him for a few months. I can’t find the letter now—the doctor probably took it.