by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
“Tony was well read,” Dr. Maguire adds, “but he had something a lot of schizophrenics have—a kind of pseudointellectuality about things. I’ve been involved with schizophrenics for a long time, because they’re not boring—they’re very interesting, in fact. There’s a certain truth to everything they say. I find this fascinating, because it all seems so true, yet they can’t function normally. And when they commit criminal acts, they always, in some way, manage to tell the world what they’re going to do before they do it.”
Tony Van Roon
I knew that Tony Baekeland was fairly solvent but I didn’t know he was, you know, exceedingly rich or anything. But what I would say is always the sociopathic element in Broadmoor would take great advantage of people who were like that and would be their friend until there was nothing left. I do remember that when he went to the canteen he certainly always made adequate allowance for what he’d need in the week. But the thing was, as soon as he got back to the ward, people would say, Well, you don’t need all that, why don’t you give me some, and he was really a very nice guy, you know. So the problem was he would give things away, particularly if he saw somebody who was less fortunate.
Patricia Greene
He was always very sensitive as a child. He was a will-o’-the-wisp child, in a way—now you see him, now you don’t. At his parents’ dinner parties he would fly in and out, like quicksilver.
He would come to our house, but our children would not so often go there. He would come to us because we were more of a family, I think, and he rather liked that. I think Brooks and Barbara were rather social. I think they were quite social. He went to his grandmother’s when they went out at night—I would see him walking down the street with his parakeet in a cage and his pajamas over his arm.
One Halloween I took him around the block. We made our costumes in those days, we didn’t buy them, and I made one for him. Then I went around with the children. They were quite small. I remember Tony was overwhelmed with the excitement of it. And he ran off through the night, down the block, and I was quite alarmed because he just disappeared. We chased after him and finally caught up with him and he was just running, running, running, in a wild manner. And then we all went around the block together. The block was very nice in those days. At the Paul Mellon house, the butler answered the door and offered us apples on a silver tray. Those days are gone forever.
I remember Tony had some mice or something in his room, and of course he had the little bird, and I suppose he had fish. And when he would come to our house he would look at our animals—we may have had a white rat that impressed him, too. That was more of his link with my boys than anything else.
There was a vacant lot across the street from us—they had torn down the building—and I think there were rats which intrigued Tony and our boys, and I said, “You’d better stay away because you might get bitten.” Our boys pretty much stayed away, but I think Tony used to go through the boards again and again and poke around and I think that upset Barbara, because I remember her speaking to me about that as a concern—how she could keep him away from the building. I guess Tony just had this enormous interest in any sort of animals.
From A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Horseless Age Press, New York, 1907
My two children are great lovers of animals, and if I let them have their own way, their not too small collection of dogs, rabbits, cats, guinea pigs, birds, etc., would soon increase to the size of a little menagerie…. When I finally heard that my boy, George, had been bargaining for a live and healthy ferret I decided that it now was time to compromise on some gentler representative of the animal kingdom, so I finally consented to the purchase of two tiny Bengalese finches. Housed in a little cage, they were from now on to become our traveling companions.
Patricia Greene
One of the first times I met Barbara, she said, “Oh, Tony’s raising moths in my closet.” And I thought that was enchanting, so I looked and, sure enough, in a shoe box he had some moth cocoons, and she twinkled and was merry over that. I must say I adored her for that—I was always saying, “Get the moths out of my closet!” And she had mink coats and very expensive clothes in hers.
Brooks Baekeland
I am practically certain they were praying mantises—the cocoons given us by Alan Priest, who was Curator of Oriental Art at the Metropolitan Museum at that time and our friend Aschwin Lippe’s immediate superior. Anthony Quinn, who came to see about renting our house and who opened the closet in Tony’s room where they had just hatched out in their thousands, may remember his astonishment. He did not take the house. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy did.
Patricia Greene
We invited Tony to our place in the country mainly because one of our sons had gone over to see some of his moths and was intrigued. You see, Tony was really just the boy-next-door type thing. The second time he came to the country, he developed warts from the frogs. There’s apparently a little virus that they carry. I think Barbara was pretty horrified at that. He didn’t come again.
You know, he did some drawings at our house in town. I must say they were quite different. Most boys were drawing rockets or airplanes and things like that, and he would be drawing more imaginative stuff—fanciful animals.
Barbara used to do paintings of insects. Very large. Mostly representative. They were very good. I remember she worked very hard one summer on Cape Cod, and she came back with an exhibit in the fall. I remember meeting her before the show and she said, “I’m a wild woman, I’ve been painting like mad all summer, I just couldn’t stop, and I’m on my way to the hairdresser!” And her hair was standing out. She was a wild woman.
It was a charming show. You walked up some stairs in this very small gallery and Barbara was greeting people. I have a mental picture of her standing with her lovely hair and her lovely complexion and pretty dress. She had little white kid gloves on. I was impressed with that—white kid gloves! She was soft. I can see the little white kid gloves around her little plump hands—she wasn’t plump but she gave the impression of being so. I commented on the gloves and she said, “I don’t like to touch all these people, I guess.” So that was a sidelight I remember of her character. Of course, people did wear gloves in those days.
Marjorie Fraser Snow
She studied under, I believe, Gonzalez, I think on the Cape and also in New York at the Art Students League, and also under Hans Hofmann. I think she had a one-man show somewhere in New York. I think she got very fine reviews, as a matter of fact. I know she had one on the Cape. And Nini was so proud of her!
Patricia Greene
Barbara was very proud of her mother for taking a job at the Museum of Natural History. Mrs. Daly apparently didn’t have to work at that point, although at one time I know she had rather a hard time making ends meet. It must have seemed like a dream to have Barbara marry all that plastic money! But later on, Mrs. Daly said she was bored just sitting around and she wanted to do something. Of course Tony was delighted when she went to work at the museum—after all, the Museum of Natural History! That was right down his alley.
I just took it for granted that he’d be a naturalist. I thought he’d go on and pull himself together—you know, that he’d get to be a rather eccentric naturalist of some sort. Or a painter.
Jonathan Frank
When I visited Tony in New York, we used to cut out to the museum where his grandmother worked. Basically there was sort of a loose connection because we would report to her but we were pretty much on our own—and we were really young at that point.
We used to play outdoors a lot and I’d say we preferred it that way. At night we would escape to the bedroom and we had a game where we would climb up on a cupboard way up high and then jump down on the bed, pretending that we were pterodactyls—you know, flying dinosaurs.
Nina Daly
I went looking for a job and I got one in the gift shop at the museum and we got a vacation in the summer for two weeks and we got holidays. I
really enjoyed it. I would have liked to have done something else after I finished there. I would have liked to have worked in some store or something, if it had been a nice store. Anything to keep busy, to get out of the house in the morning.
Tony would stop in and see me an awful lot. I loved that. He used to come and spend about three nights a week with me, too. It was to keep me company because I was alone, you see. And I had lived with them for a while, because I hadn’t gotten used to living alone. You have to get used to it if you’re not used to it. My sister used to come and stay a lot with me. She never had any children, so she used the family’s children. She loved children. I love children, too. I miss them now.
Tony went right nearby to the Buckley School. He liked it there. He was doing great. He was a good student, he always read and read and read and read. When he was in Broadmoor, he’d write me for some books he wanted and I’d send him some Shakespeare and others.
Teacher’s “Comments” on Antony Baekeland, French Class, Buckley School, New York City
When he wants to, Tony can produce really beautiful prose and poetry in French as well as in English. The job of getting him to want to do this is tremendous at times, but the result, when it is good, makes whatever has gone before seem worthwhile.
Despite everything that has happened this term I still feel that Tony is one of the finest boys I have ever known. If he can realize his full potential he will be the finest.
Peter Gable
I met Tony in the second or third grade at Buckley, which was a very competitive school academically. He was not a peculiar child to another child—to this child—but he was certainly different because of some of his enthusiasms and abilities. I mean, he was uniquely brilliant—brilliant in ways that another child wouldn’t appreciate, I think.
His artistic abilities were spectacular—he loved to draw birds, you know. He was a baby Audubon. I remember once we were out playing in the park—we were old enough to be unchaperoned, eight or nine or something—and I captured this pigeon. I don’t think it was an entirely healthy bird, it was a basic Central Park shit-on-the-statues pigeon, and Tony took it from me and tucked it under his coat, and we rushed it back to his house on Seventy-first Street, and it was there for some time, flying free—first in his room and then having the run of the floor. The pigeon rather liked us, as I recall. In any event, it ultimately either conferred lice upon us or there was some fear that it would or whatever, and it was dispatched, I don’t remember how. But I certainly remember Tony’s sketches of that pigeon, in either pencil or pen and ink.
Every day after school we’d go home together to his house and stuff. You know, he was my best friend, and his house was more entertaining than my house. I mean, he had an area in his room where he raised orchids. I think that was a passion of his father’s. I remember a rather enormous fishtank-like proposition with a controlled environment, in which these exotic flowers grew.
I remember his mother as being striking and a flamboyant and vivacious person. She was certainly more animated than the mothers of other friends. I mean, when you’re a child, what do you know of the adult life? You know your parents, their friends, your teachers in school with whom you probably have some sort of distant relationship, your baby-sitter, the elevator man—in those days everybody had an elevator man; when I was a child the only adult you addressed by his first name was the elevator man.
I certainly perceived Barbara Baekeland as being extraordinarily something, you know. I also remember what I perceived at the time to be a rather stormy relationship with her husband. Oh, they would fight, they would fight. I can remember hearing them. Tony and I both sort of listened, though we probably couldn’t make out the exact words that were being spoken. My mother and father were having a rather rocky time, too, so raised voices amongst adults in a household was not foreign to me, I didn’t think what I heard over at the Baekelands was that strange, you know. But the volume!
Tony’s father I remember as being austere and uninvolved—very much of a shadow figure. He once took Tony and his mother and me for a picnic one Saturday into some countryside. I remember so clearly being in the back of the car—he kept a Mercedes convertible at the time, I think—a sports car—the top was down, it was a beautiful fair-weather day, and Tony and I were bundled in the back. We buzzed up to where there was a beautiful glade with a pond and I guess we had our lunch and then Tony and I wandered off to play. But the interesting thing is that this and one other time are the only occasions I can remember—and Tony and I were close close friends for several years—when I was in the company of both his parents.
When summers would come, Tony would disappear to some foreign clime until fall, then we’d both be back in our short trousers and blazers, hiking off to school.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Brooks and Barbara were two very powerful people who had their own fight together, and the little boy was sort of a puppet in between. He was trained by these parents to be brilliant. You know, you can teach a child to say the Latin word for “monkey” as easily as to say “monkey,” and he was trained that way. I’m completely against it.
Even when the son was in Broadmoor, Brooks was ordering him, “You have to show remorse!” The son would say, “Absolutely not! You have to.” There were letters, there were letters constantly. One would say, “You killed Mummy!” Which is a point of view. And the other one would say, “You didn’t hit your mother with a banana, you hit her with a knife!” So. The thing that Brooks could never understand is that his son never showed him that he felt the slightest remorse. That, Brooks couldn’t understand.
Brooks Baekeland
No matter how crazed he was, there was always a cool, lucid center that knew, and he certainly knew that I held him responsible for what he had done. I would not play the “diminished responsibility” game that all the others played and that he wanted me to play, too. I insisted on being his conscience.
Mishka Harnden
I’m sure Tony was born fairly unstable. On the other hand, all of what he went through when he was a kid certainly scrambled him for good. He was like that dog they had, you know—he was a slightly larger Pekingese. “Tony, do this! Tony, do that!” “Yes, Mother.” I mean, Tony Perkins in Psycho—you know? I mean, it gets to be that close.
Yvonne Thomas
The way she would praise him and show you everything he’d written or drawn! Both of them did. They wanted the boy to be a genius. That’s what struck me. And made me feel uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable with the boy because I felt he felt he had to be something.
You know, when you impose yourself on your children like that, it’s because you want them to be more than you’ve been. I think they were very ambitious and that nothing had happened with their ambition. She was always talking about what they were going to do. They wanted to do a coup of some sort, either in literature or in…I thought they were silly. She represented something sort of social—purely social—to me. I thought the way she entertained and her conversation and that crispy sort of voice were affectations—everything was something that didn’t interest me that much. Especially at that time. Now I don’t care, you know. But then I was very strict—everybody was—about exactly the style that you chose to be. I became an Abstract Expressionist painter and it changed my life—it changed a lot of my views, a lot of my values. I didn’t see too much of the Baekelands after that.
But oh, the son was shining as a little boy! But then when he turned into adolescence, one didn’t hear so much.
Willie Draper
Tony was the most brilliant and the most refined—and the most creative and the most sensitive—so he built the most walls the most quickly and his ability to communicate his feelings was lost the quickest. Tony right from the beginning was a marked man. I knew him at Buckley, I knew him the whole damn time. I mean, just the whole way through, you know, we were tight. But then I phased him out of my life because he was too negative for me, and my sister Checka filled the spot,
she was going through more similar things.
Tony and I got stabbed trick-or-treating and stuff together—I can’t remember whether we actually got stabbed or whether we almost got stabbed. These roughnecks followed us back from the park and they cornered us, and we were ringing the bell at Tony’s house and nobody was coming down. Another time we had our bikes stolen in the park and some policeman took us around in the patrol car and everybody pointed at us like we were criminals.
He had—both of us had—very intense mothers, you know. I loved Barbara. I mean, she loved me, first of all, and part of the time Tony would be really jealous of me because—you know how it is—he’d get along really good with my mother and I’d get along really good with his mother.
Barbara was very loving—it’s just that she was so intense emotionally, and her moods would change, based on her relationship with her husband and her whole Celtic character. She was just, you know, a wild woman. Sometimes it was just…it was frightening.
But Tony was a great guy, a great guy—he burned with such a pure flame.
The biggest mystery in my life is why we choose what we choose, because we do choose—in the end we have total responsibility for what happens to us. And, you know, what ignorance is it, what is the mechanics of what makes someone like Tony who has all of this potential…? I think it’s emotional starvation, myself—I mean, it really has a lot to do with just very basic things.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
I saw Tony every day, every single day when he was at Buckley. I’d gotten married when I was twenty, to Ivan Chermayeff, and we lived just a block away from the Baekelands. Barbara was very happy for me—I mean, she liked Ivan because he had, God knows, the scent of success on him. She gave me for my wedding present some very pale emerald earrings, which were very like the rings she used to wear—she told me they had been Brooks’s grandmother’s or something and that she had had them reset—two emeralds with two pearls. I mean, I was her darling baby-sitter, right? And, I suppose, to give her credit, which I don’t like to do, ’cause I’d like to kill her, I suppose she really thought I was a lovely girl. You know, because I adored her—anything that she said went with me.