by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
You know, Barbara had brought him to see my husband professionally. At the time Justin didn’t tell me. He would never speak of friends or their children if he were treating them. Several times I met people in his waiting room and I was surprised. I saw Barbara there once and I was totally surprised.
I don’t really remember how we first met the Baekelands, whether it was on the street with the children or whether a friend introduced us. I just remember being enormously impressed with Brooks and Barbara. He was cold and dark and she was warm and light—it was like they were Yin and Yang. I thought they were the most fascinating couple I’d ever seen. I remember Barbara with a big fox fur hat. She said, “It’s just my skiing hat.” To me she was glamorous, and that hat was the cat’s meow!
And she rode horses. She’d get up at six in the morning to go off and ride somebody’s Irish hunter in the park. Brooks said to me once, “I can tell when she gets up in the morning—the bed goes up like that and she’s gone.” So that’s what I remember—that she would get up at six to ride a fiery horse in the park and Brooks would let her go.
There was a painting of Barbara in their house—she had her hair down and very red lips and a very décolleté dress—and I remember studying that and wondering if that was the real Barbara or not.
Brooks Baekeland
I commissioned that painting, a pastel, from Pal Fried, a Hungarian who’d studied under Monet in Paris and who signed all his pictures Fried Pal—last name first, à l’européen. He was one of those painters who can do brilliant sketches, which they then proceed to ruin. He had already done an earlier portrait of Barbara for me, which I had watched him ruin—I gave that one to Barbara’s mother. This one I halted at the right moment—I made him stop. He was offended but agreed. Later he went out to Hollywood and painted people like the Gabor girls and Marilyn Monroe, but this was probably the best portrait he ever did. It’s the one that I reclaimed from Barbara’s Cadogan Square apartment after her murder. Sylvie much resented my having it, and it was always hidden away. She finally destroyed it—by accident, she said, and I believe her, but Freud might not have.
Elizabeth Blow
The first time I ever saw her was at one of the Art Students League balls, which in those days were great events—sort of like the Beaux-Arts balls in Paris. Everybody went to a great deal of trouble over their costumes. This one was a literary ball, the theme was literature, and I wore an old beautiful red velvet skirt that was made in tiers of French ribbon and a black bodice—I was Le Rouge et le Noir! A lot of the men didn’t know what to do for their costume so they just put a towel around their heads and made their faces up with some kind of dark brown paint and went as Hindus. Fred Mueller, who I was engaged to, was very blond and Germanic-looking, and he went as a Hindu—he looked absolutely marvelous. And I think Brooks was dressed that way, too—he was tremendously attractive, just one of the handsomest men I’ve ever met in my life.
Anyway, when I went to the ladies’ room, there was this beautiful girl there. She was not dressed in costume, she just had on a perfectly ordinary dinner dress. We got to talking and she told me she’d just had a son. And she talked about her son—she was very happy, she was thrilled to death.
We saw the Baekelands a lot after that night, mostly in their house. It was a rather conventional house, considering the personalities in the house.
Heather Cohane
My husband Jack told me this story about the Baekelands. It was long before I knew either of them. It must have been about the time Tony was born. They were all having dinner in some restaurant—Jack and his wife before me, and I think Aschwin Lippe and maybe his wife, Simone, and Brooks and Barbara—and they were playing this game: “For a million dollars would you eat a pound of human flesh? Would you go to bed with the first person you met after going through a revolving door, for a million dollars?”—and so forth.
Brooks must have answered yes to that question, because Barbara was saying to him as they left the restaurant, “Oh well, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll just go off with the first man that comes along in a car!” And she dashed into the middle of the street and flagged down a car with four young men in it. She jumped in and it took off. And of course, Jack and his wife and Aschwin and Simone and Brooks were left there with their mouths open, watching her disappear.
A couple of hours later she came home, having evidently got rather cold feet. Barbara was very beautiful in those days, so I mean, that was quite a crazy thing to do in New York City, a dangerous thing to do in New York City. Very crazy and very dangerous.
From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished
Friday. Dinner tonight at the Baekelands—Ben Sonnenberg, the publicity agent, and his wife; a supposedly brilliant psychiatrist, Sandor Rado; Geoffrey and Daphne Hellman—he writes for The New Yorker, she is a strange faunlike harpist. Afterwards Betty and Fred Mueller dropped by, and we spent most of the time trying to get free advice from the psychiatrist.
Elizabeth Blow
When Fred and I had our first child, we were living down in Greenwich Village in a very tiny apartment. Then we moved to Fiftieth Street and Second Avenue, to a railroad flat over a liquor store. Then we were going to have a second child so we had to move. And Fred found this incredible house on Seventy-second Street, which we rented for only one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month from this couple who were going to England for two or three years—he had a Rhodes Scholarship.
It was mammoth—five floors—and Fred, poor Fred, would come home from work and haul himself up to the top floor, the old maids’ quarters, which he was redoing so we could rent it out. Whoever rented it was going to have to use our staircase.
We ran an ad and a very nice lady and her daughter-in-law, a widow, turned up and they were absolutely delightful. It came out as we were talking to them that the older woman was Barbara Baekeland’s mother. She was lovely-looking, and over the years she has never changed very much. I mean, she had nothing of the sort of smashing looks of her daughter but she was very pretty, very kind of birdlike, always very nicely dressed. She always had a sort of prim-and-proper look about her.
I think we charged them one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. They made the place absolutely charming. The sitting room in the front they fixed up with great taste, and the little kitchen that Fred had put in. They didn’t entertain very much, but Barbara came over a lot to see her mother, and that was how I really got to know her so well. And of course Tony would come over all the time to spend the afternoon with his grandmother. He adored her. And she adored him. And whenever Brooks and Barbara would go away for the weekend, he would come and stay over.
Nini was a fascinating person at that time because she was quite neurotic, you know. She never could sleep very well, she had to have all the blinds pulled down—there couldn’t even be one single ray of light coming in—and still she could not sleep a wink. I remember her thousands of times leaning over the banister. I would say, “Hi, Nini, how are you?” and she would say, “Oh hi, darling. Didn’t sleep a wink last night—I’m a wreck.” She was always saying “I’m a wreck.”
As far as one could see, they were a very happy little family. Brooks and Barbara appeared to be the ideal couple, with this charming little boy whom they both loved—no, I don’t think too much, you can’t love someone too much. Of course later it did become too much.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
One summer I visited Brooks and Barbara on the Cape, Ballston Beach in Truro. It was once my stepfather’s beach—Ozzie Ball, Sheldon Osborn Ball. He owned from Truro to North Truro, two miles of oceanfront. Zeckendorf offered him three million dollars for it, but he gave it all to the national parks.
Tony and I played together all day. He was so bright, he was way ahead of his class. I mean, I could spend the whole afternoon with him and have fun, and I’m not a child lover to that extent. I mean, I treat children like grown-ups—if they don’t give me the same thing as a grown-up, I don’t want
to be with them. And Tony could give me the same as a grown-up—you know, opinions, feelings, wonderful observations. I would say his best time was up till the age of about four.
One afternoon, he and I watched a praying mantis on the boardwalk, and then he sat and drew the mantis and then he drew some birds—really wonderful. And later that night when Barbara was putting him to bed, I heard her say—over the partition that divided the rooms—“Tony darling, who do you love more, Liz or Mummy?” And he said, “Mummy, of course.” And I thought, if at four she’s giving him that kind of signal…
Dodie Captiva
I knew them from the Cape. I can’t say I knew them intimately. I mean, I knew them about as well as people do when one lives there year-round and the other comes for the summer.
I used to go once a year to visit New York and I was walking up Fifth Avenue, north of Rockefeller Plaza, daydreaming, when I suddenly caught sight of something familiar out of the corner of my eye—a woman and a small boy. He was five, maybe six—little enough to almost have to be held by the hand. They were strolling and looking into store windows, and when I came abreast of them I looked at the reflection in the window and saw that it was Barbara and Tony. They were so enraptured with each other—whatever they were doing, whatever the conversation was—that my red flag went up!
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
I was in Truro with my parents, I was sixteen years old and I had just learned to drive and I didn’t have anything to do, and one night my father and mother said, “Now Sara, pull yourself together and do something. Now what can you do?” And what came up was that I could make a little children’s camp. Well, it turned out to be a big business—I ended up with, like, fifteen children. I charged ten dollars a week. I made a lot of money—for me. My mother had this station wagon and I used that to pick up the kids. I took them to Gull Pond on the Truro-Wellfleet border—we took Oreos and apple juice and we’d go swimming. You know how people always say, “Those were the days, I remember those days,” but I do remember. I mean, now Gull Pond looks like, you know, Ocean City, Maryland, but when I went there with my little group, there wasn’t a house on it.
Originally I had Edmund Wilson’s little daughter, Helen Miranda, who’s now a quite established painter, and Daphne Hellman’s three children, Daisy Hellman, Digger St. John, and Sandy Bull, who became quite a big rock star. And one day Daphne when I was drumming up business said, “Some people called Baekeland have rented a house on Castle Hill Road, and they have a little boy.” So I drove right over there and this woman in a brown bikini was washing the car. She was gorgeous. I mean, she was just everything, I mean the most…I mean, I don’t think Marilyn Monroe had come alive yet—right? I think this was before Marilyn Monroe. I was sixteen and Tony was seven, so it was 1953—was Marilyn Monroe in business in ’53? I don’t know about whether she was there in history or not, but for me I had just never seen anybody as glamorous as Barbara Baekeland. And I followed that star for many years.
She agreed right away that I could take Tony in my little bathing-suit group. He had sort of a batik bathing suit and he was redheaded and oh gosh…He was always my favorite. And one day a little later on that summer Barbara or Brooks took me aside and spoke to me about Tony’s stutter, and I said, “He doesn’t stutter.” So they said, “He doesn’t stutter with you?” I said, “Not at all.” So at that point they hired me on as a baby-sitter for whenever they went out in the evening or went away for the weekend.
Daphne Hellman
Once at their place on the Cape when I was there for dinner, Barbara and Brooks got Tony to read the Marquis de Sade out loud. He didn’t read particularly well. He was doing it because he’d been commanded to. It struck me as very peculiar. Maybe it was to help him get over his stutter. Maybe it just seemed peppier than having him read from David Copperfield.
Barbara was the social one and Brooks was the curmudgeon. I remember one day I came upon them walking in the rain at night having some terrible fight. I guess Brooks flirted a good deal. Of course, Barbara was always hitching a ride with the milkman or somebody and being absolutely charming with them. She really was able to absorb people’s flavor and get pleasure out of them.
Barbara Hale
Bob Hale and I went up to Truro to visit them. I’ll never forget sitting on the beach and seeing Ben Sonnenberg trotting along in his Georgian manner—looking perfectly awful, you know, in a bathing suit. He saw that there was this perfectly beautiful redheaded girl sitting with me and he came up to us and said, “Wouldn’t you like to share my little picnic?” Well, he had this very elaborate picnic basket such as you’ve never seen in all your life, filled with pâté and lobster sandwiches and stuff like that—this was his pickup deal, and from then on Barbara saw a great deal of Ben Sonnenberg in New York. I remember Brooks came down to the beach with Tony and joined us.
Daphne Hellman
Tony and my daughter Daisy as little kids on the Cape were inseparable. I remember them crowing like roosters on the roof of that rough-and-ready house that Brooks and Barbara were renting right on the beach. Crowing was just something Tony and Daisy did at that time. It was very annoying to everybody. Barbara and Brooks got sort of fed up.
Daisy Hellman Paradis
We used to get into mischief together, at Ballston Beach, and go and raid the local farmer’s garden. Once, we took our clothes off in our garage, and when cars came we jumped up and down and yelled, you know—and my father came by and he was rather amused.
I never had great feeling for Barbara at all, to tell you the truth—as a child, I didn’t like her. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, of course, but it didn’t seem to me she had a whole lot of affection for Tony. Or for me, you know—or for kids in general. She was somebody who was always sort of saying “Oh darling,” you know, this and that, but there was something sort of not so real there. Artificial maybe.
Tony wrote to me a couple of years after he killed her. I didn’t answer because I really didn’t know what to say, you know. Jesus Christ! What do you say to somebody who’s killed his mother?
Helen Miranda Wilson
I remember very little about him—that he had red hair and freckles, that I played with him when I was very young, with him and Johnny Frank, the writer Waldo Frank’s son. I’d better identify him as Waldo and Jean Frank’s son, because Waldo was married a number of times. Johnny’s now a paramedic and ambulance driver in San Francisco. Anyway, we all used to play together in the summer, and Tony Baekeland was a real brat and a bully. Yeah, a bully—and I was a pretty hefty little kid. You want me to tell you what I really remember about him? It’s pretty funny actually. I remember us playing up in the woods and somebody went to the bathroom—I think it was him—you know little kids—and I think he scooped some up in his hand and chased me with it. That’s it, that’s my recollection of him.
Jonathan Frank
Tony and I were real close when we were little kids, up till we were eight or nine. And we were both terrible! In fact there was another boy, Johnny Van Kirk, and the three of us were inseparable—we were called the Terrible Trio. The grown-ups used to call us that. But it was a fond name, even though I’m sure we were terrible.
Johnny Van Kirk
My mother used to make up stories about us—“Black Johnny,” “Yellow Johnny,” and “Terrible Tony.” It was a threesome.
The only reason for the “Terrible Tony” was because he was always off on some very imaginative rant or other. He had a fantastic imagination, he just knew no bounds. Tony was not ordinary. No, I would say he was extraordinary.
He was certainly the wildest of the bunch. I spent a lot of time at the Ballston Beach parking lot with him, blocking off large sections and flooding them with water from his house, making vast, swamp wonderworlds between the parked cars. He was always inventing mad games for us to play. Johnny Frank and I would go out and buy toy trucks and guns and stuff, but Tony would invent them right out of his head. Mostly fantasy games, role-play
ing games. And he had a capacity for involving you in them—you would forget your inhibitions and become a part of it all very easily.
He even convinced us that if we would rub this strange funny clay from the dunes on ourselves, we could fly. We’d literally spend hours running down the cliff and jumping off as far as we could, convinced that we had flown a little farther each time—with a little more clay! And it was Tony’s ability that really allowed us to do this. There was a kind of persuasion that he had. He was very forceful at that age. And it was a good time.
5
FUN AND GAMES
ONCE A WEEK TONY BAEKELAND, along with five of his fellow patients at Cornwall House, was escorted to the canteen, where he was free to purchase, among other things, candy, cigarettes, soap, coffee, and tea. A patient was not allowed to handle cash himself; rather, all purchases were charged to his hospital account, into which his money had been placed. Each month he received a computer printout of the status of his finances.
“Tony could be very kind to others,” Dr. Maguire says. “In fact, I had to protect him from being overgenerous. I initiated a request for a protector through the Court of Protection, which is a branch of the Supreme Court in England, and Tony’s money was eventually placed under the protection of a court-appointed guardian, who inquired into his needs and then apportioned the money to him. Usually it is given in a yearly sum, but I convinced Tony’s guardian to give it to him in six-month installments. He was also receiving an allowance from his father, and there was quite a lot of money from other sources as well, including income from investments in New York.”
By the beginning of 1976, Tony Baekeland had adjusted to hospital routine, both social and therapeutic. “He had a chronic illness, of course,” says Dr. Maguire, “but he fluctuated—he had ups and downs. His true basic personality would show through every now and then. His kind of illness was not strictly an illness that depends on the environment. It was genetic.