by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
What tied me to Barbara for all those years? Pity. I still feel sorry for her. I still feel guilty. I still feel protective.
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, September 18, 1975
Visitor’s Name: Dr. and Mrs. Justin Greene, U.S.A.
Relationship to Patient: Friend and ex-doctor
Summary: They are both concerned and showed sound appraisal of the overall situation. They knew Tony as a small boy, and Dr. Greene saw him professionally on some occasions where he had most likely formed the opinion that Tony was dangerous to his mother. This present visit was essentially informal. He described Tony as overcontrolled, there being several incidents where he overreacted to situations in a nonviolent way. Dr. Greene recounted two occasions as a child where Tony became overexcited and ran away and there was some difficulty in finding him. Dr. Greene thought his violent outbursts were specifically directed toward his mother and did not think he was likely to be a danger to others.
I discussed our intended transfer of Tony from Gloucester back to Cornwall House and asked the Greenes when they saw him later in the afternoon to explain that this was a therapeutic move rather than in any way punitive. They agreed to do this.
Colm Byrne
When I knew Tony, he was in Gloucester House. I couldn’t say I knew him that well—Gloucester House when I was there had ninety-six patients.
The patients at Cornwall House, where he had come from, were, let’s say, much more disturbed. Cornwall House was commonly referred to as “the monkey house.” That was because largely the patients in there were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, whereas the patients in Gloucester House tended to be fairly controlled for a long period of time, more stable—there wasn’t a great deal of what we call psychotic behavior in Gloucester House in comparison with Cornwall House. Cornwall House was much bigger as well. Gloucester House was referred to really as a semi-parole block because it was much more easygoing.
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, November 27, 1975
Visitor’s Name: Mrs. Nina Daly
Relationship to Patient: Grandmother
Summary: Maternal grandmother still seems less disturbed by her daughter’s death than by the fact that her dear little Tony is in trouble. She seems just as mad as the rest of the family.
Brooks Baekeland
Nina Daly is a Fraser—no nuttiness there that I ever discovered. I had a very close, often Rabelaisian relationship with her. She was the best part of my marriage. She had an enormous sense of humor, no education, silly values, and indomitable loyalty.
Helen Delaney
Nina Daly is a harmless enough creature. Her values came from Cholly Knickerbocker and the Catholic Church—mostly from Cholly Knickerbocker. But on her husband’s side of the family there was real mayhem. It’s what you might call a frail line.
Brooks Baekeland
The fact is, the turning, bending, hinging energy in the stories of human lives is given off by very intense and often very queer people who are no longer alive to play mischief, though the mischief still breeds. There are two kinds of mischief in this regard. There is the mischief in the blood—when it is there, as it was certainly in Barbara’s father Frank Daly’s family. Frank Daly’s own father, Barbara’s grandfather, was a violent and aberrant man, and so had been his father, Barbara’s great-grandfather, by all report. And Barbara’s paternal grandmother was a “case” who mooned at the piano all day and never did any housework or house management—a kind of Zasu Pitts creation.
And then there is the other kind of mischief—the mischief that produces more mischief by cause and effect, action and reaction.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
Barbara’s father committed suicide—I don’t know why, I don’t even know how, unfortunately. And her brother committed suicide. I remember Fred Baekeland saying, “Isn’t it extraordinary that the whole family has committed suicide.”
Helen Delaney
The suicide of Frank Daly, Sr., was observed by Frank Jr. through the window of the locked garage. Frank Sr., who had lost what money he had in the Crash, was gassing himself with carbon monoxide while pretending to be working on his car—it was a Pierce Arrow, as I recall, and he was underneath it and the engine was running. Frank Jr., walking back and forth before the garage window, watched his father die. The insurance company was suspicious but could never prove fraud. Frank Jr., Barbara, and Nina Daly each got about sixty thousand dollars from the insurance company. This was in 1932, mind you. That would be at least six hundred thousand each in today’s currency.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
The son Frank later died in a car accident, supposedly on purpose—I don’t know. How does one decide that somebody has gone into a tree on purpose?
Helen Delaney
One day Frank Jr. whipped around a curve in Cohasset, Mass., I think, and just drove at high speed into an elm tree. The official story was that the steering mechanism had malfunctioned. I know he had been drinking for some time.
He was a front-and-center-look-at-me kind of guy—just like his sister. He loved to raise Cain in public. I forget what he actually did for a living but I do remember that he was trying to crack the detective-magazine market. I don’t think he had much luck. His wife was the quiet-little-woman type, so there was friction there as well. They had two nice little boys.
Brooks Baekeland
Barbara and I inherited that fatherless family. She performed all the brave and wonderful human prophylaxes. I begged for money from my family. I resented bitterly having to ask my fascistic father for anything, but I did not mind being in debt to my marvelous grandmother—I could even glory in that, because our spirits, hers and mine, were always in tune. The problem, the Socratic problem, of value—how can it be established? proved?—controlled her life as much as it did mine. Both Barbara and Tony were wrecked on those stony shores. They became raiders—or rather, she was to begin with. They were arrogant. They were destroyed. These are not merely abstract questions. Those who have seen Nemesis in their stories were right indeed. It works in all our lives. It worked with a terrible obviousness in theirs. A swift, destroying sword.
If one seeks to pin down the source of Tony’s violent instability, one mustn’t entirely blame the Dalys. I think there was mischief in the blood on both sides—the Baekelands as well. I have in my notebooks a quotation that I copied down from Robert Gittings’s life of Keats—I was in India at the time: “Suffering had laid cruelly bare his abnormally passionate nature, unbalanced since his boyhood, always in extremes.”
Was I thinking of Tony when I copied this? Certainly not. I was thinking of me!
Someone, I now forget who, told me years later that when Foster Kennedy heard that I had married Barbara Daly, he said: “God forfend that they have a child!”
4
MOTHER’S MILK
AS GRADUALLY TONY BAEKELAND became a member of society at Broadmoor, he could choose from among the several occupational therapies available to patients: toy-making, pottery, carpentry, metalwork, printing, radio-making, basket-making…He preferred drawing and painting. “He gave me one or two things—paintings of flowers and things like that,” Dr. Maguire recalls. “We have to be very careful about paint because in some cases it’s very toxic and patients can harm themselves.”
Tony Baekeland soon improved to the point where he was reading university-level books—among them, a volume on abstract mathematics. He wrote to his father that he was happy, had “a home and new friends.”
Old friends—and friends of friends—began to visit him. There was as well a community group called the Broadmoor League of Friends, two of whose members—a retired army doctor and his wife—took a particular interest in Tony.
“Colonel Verbi was at one time in the English army,” Dr. Maguire explains. “He was a wonderful friend to Tony. He and his wife had the time to visit. Tony was so fond of them he gave them a number of gifts—I remember particularly a figure
of an elephant. When Mrs. Verbi died some years ago and I went around to their house to call, Colonel Verbi gave me—to give back to Tony—the things that Tony had given to his wife. And, when Colonel Verbi died, he left Tony a silver ashtray in his will.”
Toward the end of his third summer in Broadmoor, Tony received word from his father and Sylvie in France of the birth of a half brother.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, August 29, 1975
Broadmoor
Dear Sam,
My time has been of great profit to me: I have learned a great deal about people, myself, and life in general. I now realize that for many years I had been living a totally false life and it finally ended the way it did because the burden I carried just became too great to bear. Anyway, for Mummy’s sake I have decided to make a new person of myself and I have found great peace and happiness. I realize now how much I always took my mother for granted (and the other good things in life) and how selfish and blind I was in many ways.
My father and I are good friends now. I have a little half brother whom I have not met.
Yours with love,
Tony
Brooks Baekeland
God, not I, is an ironist. Barbara became pregnant only twice in her life—not counting an “occult” insemination in Mallorca by Sam Green, between two chairs across a room, with the aid, I suspect, of mucho hash—and for both she had to have an operation to untip her tipped uterus. The first one—I was flying then in Germany in early 1945 or late 1944—was miscarried. The second, in the autumn of 1946, was Tony.
H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia
She told me that she was one of those rare cases of women who can only conceive a child during their period. I mean, it’s not biologically possible, is it? And she wound up conceiving her own killer.
Marjorie Fraser Snow
I believe when her brother was killed she was carrying Tony and they were afraid she might lose the baby she was in such a state.
Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971
He was born in August 1946. The labor was very long; there was no anesthesia; and high forceps were used.
Brooks Baekeland
When Tony was born, I was living at 1220 Park Avenue, in a three-room apartment with Barbara and her mama and, in insidious progression as the next years passed, her widowed sister-in-law, Edna, and her two sons. Little did I realize that I would be supporting the Dalys for years and Nina Daly for the rest of her life. We also had an incontinent, decerebrate toy poodle which had come with Barbara and her mother from Delmonico’s. It peed everywhere and was called Negus. Finally we moved to 136 East Seventy-first Street, the large house that my grandmother had bought for me.
I was a graduate student in mathematics and physics at Columbia. I was the original student who did not go to lectures but discovered the texts from which those supposed gods, our professors, were themselves simply copying out sections on the blackboard, which my helpless fellow students scribbled down as fast as they could. I bought all the books and I worked out every single problem in every single book.
Peter Gimbel
I’m awed by intellectual prowess, especially in the physical sciences, and on that score Brooks always awed me. He had the highest academic record of any predoctoral student who ever went through Pupin—that’s the physics building at Columbia—up until whatever time that was, late forties or whatever.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
Brooks was within one week of getting his Ph.D. and he just left. He left, he said, because he was sitting in class and he had taken all day to do the answer to one problem and this guy came in and did it in fifteen minutes—unless he could be the best he didn’t want to do it at all.
Elizabeth Blow
I know there was opposition in the family to Brooks’s quitting Columbia, and I think I heard that they even reduced his income because of it. But meanwhile he had decided to become a writer.
From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished
Monday. Thanksgiving we entertained on a reasonably extensive scale—thirty or so people late in the afternoon for cocktails. Yvonne Thomas and her budding daughter Gwenny; Oscar Williams, the poet and anthologist, who gave me a recording of his dead wife Gene Durward reading a selection of her own poems—splendid poems, badly read; Jack Astor; Barbara and Brooks Baekeland—Brooks is currently at odds with his father who isn’t speaking to him because he deserted physics for writing.
Brooks Baekeland
I enrolled in a short-story-writing class at Columbia to titrate—loosely: offset, neutralize—my studies in mathematical physics. I used to get off the Fifth Avenue bus at Seventieth Street each day when returning from my classes and sit for an hour or more in front of the fountain in the Frick Museum to wash all the chemistry and physics off me.
Alastair Reid
I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence when Brooks’s short story—I think it’s the only story he’s ever had published—appeared in the college literary magazine, Inscape. The faculty adviser to the magazine was Brooks’s old classmate at boarding school, Ambrose Gordon. In fact, it was at Ambrose Gordon’s house near Bronxville that I met Brooks and Barbara for the first time. She was raw-faced, large-boned, but I found her very attractive in conversation, in her enthusiasms and her suddennesses. She was much looser than Brooks. He was terribly aloof, very conscious of his own elegance—he dressed with almost finicky attention. What would be that thin elegant look that we have now—it was his. He exaggerated his own thinness. He was balding and he looked as though he polished his head. I mean, he had an incredible arrogance, a kind of personal arrogance.
I think Ambrose Gordon had invited me to dinner that night so I could say to Brooks Baekeland, “I read your story.” It’s been about thirty years since I read it, but I do remember that he was clearly into a certain kind of wordplay that was pretty fashionable. He talked about Queneau, whom I hadn’t read then but have since. Raymond Queneau, the French puzzle-maker—word games. Brooks invoked people like that and Karl Kraus, and I remember being annoyed because he was clearly bent on naming writers that other people hadn’t read. He gave the impression that he was a mysterious and secret writer—an impression which I may say he kept up as long as I knew him, into the sixties, because when I met him about ten years after this, he was still, you know, secretly and mysteriously writing something which—there was no question about it—was a masterpiece. He chose to arrive at the top in his own mind. I mean, his story in the Sarah Lawrence quarterly was clever, but that’s all. But then, I never thought of Brooks as a writer—ever.
Helen Delaney
As a work of fictional art, Brooks’s short story may leave something to be desired, but as naked fantasy it is simply astonishing—both as a psychological self-portrait and, amidst all the giddy hilarity, as a sinister foreshadowing of Brooks’s future behavior toward women.
“Milk,” Brooks Baekeland, Inscape, Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Spring 1955
Bitterbaron Bentley was bewitched with Bach and Baby-blue eyes; and Balls and Bangs and Bungs and Balloons and Baboons; and Buttocks and Beadles and Beerbohm; and Baubles and Bassets; and Bigness and Biting and Birthdays and Bishoprics; and Blushes and Blurbs and Blow-holes; and Bliss; and Boudoirs and Buns and Borscht and Bow-wows; and Beautiful Bouncers; and Bubbles and Boxers and Boys; and especially with Brut and Bon-ton—just to mention a few things that bewitched him.
How could Knipples (J. Frederick Knipples: “Freddy”) resist his excellent advice on diet?
He couldn’t, of course.
The thing was that Freddy had been losing weight, due to the wrong flora (improper bowel management), and, meeting Bentley at the house of a fashionable hostess—where her small dog vomited yogurt in his lap—Freddy lost no time in seeking the debonair Bitterbaron’s advice. Under the circumstances the advice was uncommonly pithy: raw mushrooms and mother’s milk—a quart a day, minimum.
Bitter
baron gave the name of a good wet nurse and advised stepping up the dose until the final figure of a gallon, or four quarts, was reached in three months, which would require two and possibly three nurses, that is, six tits at the outside.
“They run about 2.7% on butterfats and very high in protein,” said Bitterbaron, jotting down the information for Freddy. “So you’ll probably feel a nice sort of glow after a while, but I think a little roundness will be becoming to you, Freddy.”
He pinched Freddy’s breast.
“You’re much too thin. The mushrooms will give you what I call
Adventure Tone. It’s not quite like Muscle Tone. It’s better, rather more adventurous.
“You’ll be a regular wild boar, you naughty boy!”
They both laughed delightedly.
Well that’s how it started—the diet, I mean.
Freddy was small and blond and he bit his nails down to the quick. He had thinning hair (he was painting the scalp with iodine to “stimulate” new growth, and the iodine looked like a birthmark), and his eyes were like two pleasant, disqualified marbles. Freddy needed love—all the time. Those blue, vague, marble eyes of his showed it. They were like the eyes of a woman after childbirth. Of course he wore the fashionable black “loafers” with tassels (the smart, expensive ones), dark-gray flannel suits (Brooks Brothers) and gray socks with blue piping, and he never sat without crossing his legs gracefully and smiling: and he had the world’s most happy, charming smile. Freddy had no problems—if you except his flora—and he had oodles of money to play with. Only he hardly realized it himself. He just took it for granted, and he was terribly generous with it with all of his friends. His father, Argon Hoegfeldt Knipples, and his grandfather, Karl Peter Knipples, built up the Knipples family shipping business which had left him and his mother very well off when Argon died. And now there was only himself left, the last of the Knipples, going on thirty-six, adjusting nicely.