by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
Ivan and I had this funny railroad flat on Seventieth and Lexington, right over the bus stop, and every day, from the time I was twenty until I was twenty-three, Tony came to me on the way home from Buckley, because Barbara might or might not be home. I mean, I lived just that far away from them—I was right there. At three o’clock in the afternoon he’d come in the back—he had a little strap with his books and a little hat. He had a key to my house. Ivan was at work and I’d be trying to write my novel and trying to clean up my house and trying to think my thoughts. And we’d go home to his house together.
It was everything I ever thought would be the perfect house. You came in and the dining room was there—I must have had a million meals in that dining room—then you went up the stairs and Barbara took you in to a sort of fawn-colored library, quite a small room—and she had those green rings dripping off her fingers and her feet hanging off the ottoman like nobody’s business. And back there was her bedroom, with lace all over the bed. She was often in bed, with all sorts of men sitting around—Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg…I never saw Brooks there. She had a salon. And I mean, all I thought was, That’s the way to live!
Tony’s room was on the top floor. It had a skylight and a little tiny sort of wire balcony. I sure remember his room in that penthouse on Seventy-fifth Street that they moved to later on! I mean, in her room up there, she had the leopard-skin bed, the seven thousand Chanel suits in her closet—right?—and then there was Tony’s room—the maid’s room! I don’t remember when it was, but I began to see that Tony was just breaking to pieces, that they were killing him. They were a perfect couple, for that—to destroy the boy.
Brooks Baekeland
When you came in at 136 East 71st Street, you were in a marbled foyer. You then went up some stairs to a living room with windows the width of the whole front of the house. At the back, on this same floor, looking over a garden, was the dining room. Tony’s room was on the third floor, not the top. In the penthouse at 130 East 75th Street, there was no maid’s room. Tony’s room had been made out of a small library. He—nor anybody else—was ever supposed to live there. He was supposed to be in boarding school when we used that place. But because he kept getting kicked out of his schools, we were forced to take him there. It was too small an apartment for three people, and was in fact ideal for one. Barbara had one Chanel suit at that time.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
Oh, I can remember her movements when she would say—she would always say—“I’ve found this marvelous…”—right? That was a word she used all the time—“marvelous, marvelous.”
Last spring it was a beautiful day and I went down to the Strand Book Store—they have books on the street down in front, many many books—and I bought The Letters of Madame de Sévigné that I’ve always wanted. And I didn’t notice it for a long time but later I saw that the book was signed “Barbara D. Baekeland, 1942—New York.” It must have come from her books in the penthouse that were sold after she died. I mean, how bizarre!
And then I thought, God, in 1942 she was already collecting The Letters of Madame de Sévigné! Now I don’t even know if she ever read them. I have them now and I haven’t read them. She obviously already had something in mind. I mean, Madame de Sévigné had a salon.
Brooks Baekeland
I had bought a selection of the letters of Madame de Sévigné for Barbara in English—she could not read French at the time. She had never heard of Madame de Sévigné, the most celebrated correspondent of the seventeenth century. Madame de Sévigné did not have a salon, but she did have an only daughter living in the south of France whom she wrote to from Paris practically every day for twenty-five years, dispensing court and literary gossip and proffering the most tender expressions of maternal love. She also wrote to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld—the one who said that we all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
She—they—they were really false, the Baekelands. False. False to everything. When I first saw them as glamorous, I guess I wanted to be false, but when I began to understand how Tony felt, I saw them as—terrible, both of them. Both of them terrible. I mean, I feel they never attended to what was serious—neither one of them ever. They just took on this idea of what was life. What did they have in mind? Imagine, I mean, going to live on the Île Saint-Louis! Who did they think they were? The Murphys?
I mean, when I knew Tony I was only a few years older than him and I didn’t have any children of my own. But once I had children and I knew the responsibility that it takes to bring them up, I realized what total bullshitters the Baekelands were, with their goddam salons—well, it just isn’t fair. I mean, I resented my parents—everybody resents their parents in one way or another, I suppose, right?—but, boy, I survived, and when you get down to it, you have to hand that to your parents in a weird way—right? They didn’t kill you. And the Baekelands killed him.
And he was a wonderful little boy. I was a very romantic young girl and I had read D. H. Lawrence’s Rocking Horse Winner and, you know, that’s what he was—he was like a little literary boy, he was like all the boys in English novels. And that’s what she had him be. He’d be brought in on a string and shown. She just didn’t leave him alone. Not for one second.
I went to Broadmoor to see Tony with Missie Harnden, who I knew from when Ivan and I had a house in Cadaqués for five years, and all he kept saying was, “I’m free, I’m free now, I’m free.” He said it to both of us—“I’m free now.”
Letter from Antony Baekeland to James Reeve, February 12, 1976
Broadmoor
Dear James,
I just got your letter which came with a lovely Audubon magazine from my grandmother, Mrs. Hallowell. Full of photographs of birds and flowers and forests in the U.S.A. This morning we had group therapy and it went very well. I feel so wonderfully well these days—my grandmother Nini will be very pleased with me.
You must be happy to be with your mother—when do you move into your new house? I have decided to be a writer like my Papa.
Poor dear Una Verbi has had to be put into a home—her mind has gone and Val feels terribly, of course, that he has abandoned her. He came yesterday in tears and stayed an hour. They both have become such good friends—I will be sad not to see her again, but who knows?
James, please give my regards to your mother. And do try to write if you find time in your busy days.
Love,
Tony
James Reeve
The really disturbing thing was this mother bit. You see, in his letters to me he always said to give his regards to my mother. My mother! I’d probably mentioned my mother to him in passing but no more than that.
I had this recurring nightmare that he’d be let out. He had told me once, certainly, how lovely it would be to come and stay with me in the country, down in Somerset, and this haunted me, because what was I going to do if for some reason he was being let out and he said, “I want James Reeve to come and pick me up”?
I suppose I would have done it. But I remember being warned that he could be frightfully dangerous. I mean, anything could have set him off, poor chap.
When you went to see him, you went in through a great big massive gate. Then there was a little door, and sitting behind a desk was a man who took your parcels if you’d taken presents, and there was a ledger where you wrote your name and you said whether you were a friend or a relation. And then you walked through this tiny cubbyhole and there was another door, and you were let in, and then there was a huge great courtyard. You walked down one side of it, like a sort of cloister, and there was another locked gate, with a guard standing there who opened that, and then you would go down a corridor where the kitchens were, and this corridor went on endlessly. And finally there was this great big mausoleum of a room with a stage, a piano, windows, and dotted around were these sorts of little tea tables where we would sit and have our tea. Two or three guards sat on a bench, watching. If your back was turn
ed to them, you could have slipped anything to your friend or relation, and taken anything back. Which was extraordinary!
I wondered to myself where Tony had got the clothes he was wearing, because they just weren’t the sort of clothes he would wear. Not that they were rag-and-bone-men’s clothes, they were just what my grandmother used to call “lower-orders” clothes. They didn’t fit well on Tony. I mean, he was rather distinguished-looking in his sort of slovenly way. The materials were all wrong—I mean, nylon jackets and things didn’t look right on him. The impression was that the clothes were just castoffs, from a murderous plumber or something, who happened to have died the night before.
One always had the feeling he could very easily have supposed that one’s interest in him or visits to him were just out of a sort of macabre fascination. And this is why one had to tread a very careful line jollying him along. I soon discovered that if Tony had a visitor, he didn’t want to sit there and talk about Broadmoor. I respected that. He wanted to have news of the outside, which was a shame, because I was dying to ask all sorts of questions, like what were the bathrooms like, what were the dormitories like. And were the beds comfortable. They obviously weren’t. But you couldn’t ask him. He hated that. And actually, morbid curiosity may have had a place the first few times I visited, but then it evaporated, I can tell you that.
Whenever I wrote to him, it was difficult because one didn’t want to dwell on his side of things, so naturally one would just talk on about one’s life. In one of his letters to me—here it is—one line says, “I wish you had done what I had suggested, i.e., come at two o’clock.” Actually I remember that day. I deliberately hadn’t come at two—to cut short the thing. “So we could talk at length,” he wrote. Which meant, of course, two hours. “Also so I might have shown you the really beautiful pictures of my mother which I felt would have interested you. I don’t think I told you, but she was a great Artist.” With a capital “A”! “And I’m trying to find some of her remarkable paintings which were lost with the other things at 81 Cadogan Square.” It’s all so complicated, isn’t it? I mean, you pick up a letter to look at one sentence, and three others are underneath it.
Well, my friendship with Tony was a bit different. Visiting someone in an institution like that is not like having a friend, it’s like looking at an animal in a cage. I mean, it has to be!
Every time, I had to screw my courage up to the sticking point to visit him, because, I mean, I also had my personal hangups about the place. It reminded me of Rugby, where I was sent, which is about the nastiest form of public school in England. It wasn’t what the authorities did to us, it was what the other boys did that was so appalling. They used to roast you over fires when you arrived and were sort of a new creature, and they used to heat up the backs of those old-fashioned metal hairbrushes and brand your bottom with them. Three boys committed suicide while I was there. It was a Victorian institution very much like Broadmoor. So it nearly made me sick going to visit Tony, because even all the smells were the same—sweat and urine and cabbage water and damp walls and blocked drains and uncouth lavatories.
And then I would find this pitiful, wan, pasty-faced creature with the bitten nails and the light-red oily hair. It was not attractive. Nothing attractive about it. Not that life should be attractive all the time, I know, but it would have been nice to find one ray of light there.
The thing that used to shatter me was his having to be got from being asleep. He shouldn’t have been allowed to go to bed in the afternoon—except, you see, a lot of the time he was drugged. It was very obvious sometimes that he was drugged up to the hilt. This is the pitiful thing—they’d rather the patients were quiet, so they’d rather they just went to bed in the afternoon. They haven’t got the skilled staff to look after those difficult creatures. If each one of those prisoners had had an interested psychiatrist, it would have been a very different matter.
I remember going in the autumn once and all he wanted to know was what the countryside looked like. Pitiful, really. And so few people visited him. That was the thing that I found unforgivable. So many of the fashionable friends never went near him. They couldn’t be bothered! I suppose all that circle was just vapid butterflies. How else do you explain it? They were all a lot of Fitzgerald dustbags!
From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished
Saturday. The night before last we gave an “artists” party for Jack and Drue Heinz—Brooks and Barbara Baekeland, Noguchi, Marcel and Teenie Duchamp, Barbara and Bob Hale. Barbara Hale and I presented over two hours of enthusiastically received pantomimes during which I imbibed over half a bottle of brandy which, on top of a stupendous bottle of Musigny ’49, gave me my first hangover in months. At one a.m. everyone—including Marcel—was dancing gaily to Jelly Roll Morton—at 3:30 finally fell into bed.
Drue Heinz
I knew the family early on in their life in New York, when the little boy was about seven years old and his father was writing a scientific thesis. They were a charming, intellectually inclined family, who seemed at that time very together and set for a happy life.
Alastair Reid
Barbara invited me to a cocktail party soon after meeting me at Ambrose Gordon’s. Their house had an enormous paneled living room and I realized then that they must be impressively wealthy. Clearly she collected people, because she talked about having a salon and so on, and she had picked the people who were there that night. She was certainly capable of having a salon, she was just exactly the kind of person who should have had one. She sparked, she was the center. People paid attention and she paid attention to them, too—enormously. And Brooks was very laconic and, you know, cool and hanging back, while she did the whole thing for him, and I could see that he had acquired her because of her vivacity.
James Kingsland
I never knew quite what Brooks was doing, he was always doing something—either writing a novel or dabbling in mathematics. It was occasionally referred to lightly at dinner parties, but I assumed that it was nothing very serious other than keeping him occupied during the day. Later on he went into exploring and stuff like that. He was a guy with a lot of ideas and energy who was looking for things to do.
Brooks Baekeland
I had combated my father from childhood to live by the principles that my grandfather had taught me—I had taken them literally, thanks to his and my grandmother’s love, to a point where I could say, when asked what my “occupation” was, that I had no more “occupation” than had had Socrates when he sat in the shadow of a wall in the Agora. I meant no arrogance. I thought of myself as a simple cobbler—of the mind. Stitching thoughts. What could be humbler than that? But people took offence.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
It seems to me that Brooks has had the great problem of finding his own field, which he hasn’t. And Barbara was certainly an excuse for his not having done anything particularly with his life and with his talent. He liked to say that he couldn’t do this or that because she had to be going here and there.
Céline Roll Karraker
Barbara changed tremendously from the time I first met her. Brooks, sort of like my grandfather, didn’t like that life—and yet he was not strong like my grandfather to keep his own life.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
I can remember being at their house once when Barbara was carrying on in her very social way. And when I left, Brooks followed me out, he said, “I’m so sick of all this.” You see, he was already fed up with it, but then he gave in—it was comfortable, it was easy. He became just like Barbara in some ways, because he said to me one time, I remember, “I was shooting with the Duchess of Sutherland,” and I said, “Who’s that?” and he said, “You’ve never heard of the Duchess of Sutherland? Why, she’s the richest woman in Scotland!”
Brooks Baekeland
The only English duchess I ever met was the ex-Wally Simpson. Correction—I had a conversation in Paris many years later with Nicole, the Duchess of Bedford. We both l
ived on the Île Saint-Louis and we had both employed the same cook. But that doesn’t really count—Nicole Bedford was born French.
Francine du Plessix Gray
The Baekelands entertained like no one else in New York; they had a kind of largess for it. It had a kind of European touch—there wasn’t this ghastly long cocktail period, you know. It was orderly, and it was beautifully catered—marvelous food and marvelous wine. And it was very lively, it was more like a Parisian salon in a sense—there was a combination of money and intellect. In America, especially at that time, in the fifties, people didn’t know the difference between Isadora Duncan and Inigo Jones, you know. I mean, the WASP ruling milieus were just rather illiterate, you could not have an intellectual conversation.
The Baekelands gave Cleve and me a fabulous engagement party—just maybe twenty, twenty-four people—and afterward, I remember, we played a kind of game where there was a curtain lowered to a certain level and the women sat in the back of the room and the men took their trousers off—we got to see their BVDs and so on—and they did this kind of chorus-girl dance behind the curtain and the women had to guess whose legs belonged to whom—you know, which are my husband’s legs! Then they switched—the men went on the other side and the women did it.
Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
There were always a lot of games. If the evening wasn’t going well, Barbara always had a great feeling for what to do to sort of pick it up. She was a wonderful hostess. I never went there without having a good time—ever.
The turning point in Barbara’s social life came, as far as I’m concerned, when she met Marjorie and Fairfield Osborn Jr. He was the president of the New York Zoological Society and son of the director of the American Museum of Natural History—they were very well-connected culturally, socially, everything, absolutely, and from then on they were her closest friends. They adored her and they introduced her to all of society, including Prince Aschwin Lippe, Prince Bernhard’s brother, and Barbara was just adored by all these people. The Osborns got her going on the fast track.