Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich

  Paul Jenkins

  Barbara Baekeland had a glorious side to her nature, too, but one night at the Joneses’ I saw something from another point of view and my anger just surfaced from that, from suddenly sensing the son’s curious kind of despair. What was his name again? He was kind of like a wild James Dean.

  Barbara and I had crossed swords before on a couple of occasions. She came to an opening of mine once and made some frivolous remark, and you know how tense you get on those occasions. I thought, you know, basically, that she was an undermining person. But she was a frequent guest at Gloria and Jim’s, which is where I held forth, and when she came in I always felt guarded to some extent after the flip kind of way she’d treated me and so I gave her a wide berth. But on this particular occasion I just let her have it, there was nothing in me that could refrain from letting her have it. I can’t quote myself, I can’t even paraphrase myself—it was just a concentrated salvo of what an insensitive and dangerous mother I thought she was.

  I can only confide one other thing. Having been brought up in a particular way myself, I probably saw a mirrored reflection of my own mother in Barbara. And although I didn’t see much of Tony, the brief moments I did, it was very vivid to me that he was trapped in something that there was no…I would look at him and I’d think there but for the grace of God went I—although I don’t think I would have gone to the length Tony did. Of course, my mother was also out of reach.

  I remember when my mother came to my first opening and we went to the Cedar Tavern afterward, Marisol came up and bent over and said, “And how iz zee dominating mozzer?” Then I got into a fight with somebody at the bar who had made a remark to my mother as we walked past, and he just happened to be Charlie Egan, the art dealer—he was the first to show Bill de Kooning and Franz Kline. Anyway, I slammed him into a cigarette machine. But usually at the Cedar Tavern something happened, somebody got a beer in their face or something like that—so it was a good climate in which to rid yourself of the frustrations and ignominious vicissitudes of being an artist.

  Anyway, that night at Jim and Gloria’s I could see that Barbara was doing something bad to someone who had no drive, purpose, or focus. Her son was what I would call a psychological object for her. It was very strongly clear to me that this young man was being psychically exploited to the fullest extent. He was a human sacrifice, to Oedipal emotions. It’s what I would call incestuous betrayal. She might have never touched him and yet you could tell he was being smothered alive.

  Sue Railey

  I felt that he never had a chance—perhaps his father really didn’t bother enough about him and his mother bothered too much. I think that if Brooks had been a different type of father, maybe…But that’s a big maybe.

  I met them when they first came to Paris, I can’t remember what year that was. I lived there for thirty-three years. My husband went over there to our embassy and he fell in love with France and when it was time to be sent somewhere else he said he’d never leave Paris and he never did till he died. We saw a lot of Brooks and Barbara. They had a very quick, easy contact with people. And a marvelous house, a little pavilion. It was like a doll’s house, in fact. They entertained a bright group. I would think that they would have felt that they could easily have been Sara and Gerald Murphy.

  Brooks Baekeland

  The Murphys—no, Barbara and I were not that way, although I understand why people who are romantic and like tradition would see us that way. Gerald and Sara Murphy had no energy. They entertained people who did. They sucked up others’ energies and taught them—the brutes—style, fifty years ago called “manners.” All their guests acknowledged the lessons. I may say that Madame Ethel de Croisset falls into the same class—a benefactress to brutes and to princes.

  These are exquisite people. Barbara and I were never exquisite—cultivated, Proustian. We were a bit mad, especially my beloved Barbara. Mad. I was mostly smiling, not behind the arras but in a window seat, watching. But Barbara gave penny for penny.

  The comparison between us and the Murphys comes from our being spoiled and loving the arts and being in France after a war. We never were that stable—purring, gracious, collected, surrounded by our domestics. We could have been. Barbara never understood that in order to pay for something you wanted tomorrow you might have to give up something today. Order. She never had understood order. We were not the Murphys. We were more like ruined royalty. We were two gulping bankrupts. I tease—or rather, I repeat what I used to tell her. Barbara could have given lessons in extravagance to Jackie Kennedy. She had spent all her insurance money from her father’s death, then all her mother’s, and now she was spending two-thirds of my money.

  Did you know that she was a sometime shoplifter, too? So was Tony. A small thing, right? No. Truth, honesty, are things that are indivisible. A whole generation forgot that. But what was worse to me—almost—was the sheer bad taste. I could understand a starving mother stealing for her children, but these two playbodies stealing luxuries for the mere excitement of it? No.

  Thilo von Watzdorf

  They were traveling all over the spas of Europe, the places where one should be “seen,” when I first met them. They had this white Mercedes 190SL, with a cat in the back and Tony in the back, and they were traveling through Europe for months on end.

  They rented this place in Ansedonia, where my mother and stepfather had bought an old farmhouse near where the Dutch royal family later bought their property—my stepfather, Prince Aschwin de Lippe, is Prince Bernhard’s brother. The Baekelands, like my mother, had got their house through an eccentric Englishwoman named Rosie Rodd, now Rosie Baldwin—there was a whole tribe of English there, friends of Rosie’s and friends of her three beautiful daughters. I must have been sixteen that summer, a couple of years older than Tony. He gave the impression of being the typical case of a son of well-to-do American parents who just played all year round. He seemed to me to be very shy, very much of a loner, and I sort of romanticized about that because I felt that there was something so crazy in the structure of his life. I could never even figure out where he went to school, or if he ever did.

  Michael Alexander

  They lugged him around from place to place, they were always sort of getting a house here and a house there. I met them in Ansedonia with my friend Rosie Rodd. Tony was just a sort of nature boy then. I can tell you that nobody thought he was a violent person.

  I used to go and see him in Broadmoor, poor dear. It’s not an unpleasant place, I assure you. It’s not exactly a hellhole. Oh, maybe some of them do go a bit berserk from time to time, but you don’t get the impression of one big roaring madhouse. They all look like perfectly harmless people. However, that’s not the point, is it? Tony, between you and me, was perfectly happy there, all things considered.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Rosemary Rodd Baldwin, Undated

  Broadmoor

  Dear Rosie,

  Great and wonderful things have happened in my life—the Sun is coming back to me and I am so happy and well. I feel as if Mummy had really never left me at all.

  I have stopped being desperate to leave Broadmoor: I find I am learning so much every day here and I know that when I am ready I will go. And I have made many good friends here.

  Insects look all right again, grass, flowers, and trees. I still tend to go rather astray in my reading but it’s getting better. Rosie, please write to me soon and tell me all your news. I miss you a lot.

  Love,

  Tony

  Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

  I had the first house ever built in Ansedonia—me and my three children and my second husband, Mr. Rodd. He was Peter Rodd’s brother—do you know who I mean? Marvelous-looking. Peter was married to Nancy Mitford, and he was the model for the character Basil Seal in Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. My mother-in-law, my darling old mother-in-law, threatened to take Waugh to court—there was such a hoohah. Waugh was terribly rude about me in that book of letters of his. My children wer
e absolutely hopping mad—“Mummy, can’t you do something about this?” But I really couldn’t care less. First of all, it’s lies. He says in a postcard to Nancy Mitford: “I did not find Mrs. Taffy a lady.” Well, I am Mrs. Taffy, because my husband was Gustavus King of Sweden’s godson and namesake, so he was always known as Taffy—Taffy Rodd. But you see, I never met Evelyn Waugh in the whole of my life! I was dying to, but my husband would never have him in the house. Not so very long ago a man who was writing some sort of book asked me, “What did you feel like when you read that Evelyn Waugh said he didn’t find you a lady?” And I said, “Why should he have found me a lady? I didn’t ask him to. And what would I have done with one if he had?” In another letter Waugh runs down the film La Dolce Vita, which I acted in with my children to make some money, because we had no money. I played the medium.

  You see, my husband’s father, Lord Rennell, had been for years the English ambassador in Rome, and we were the only unofficial people living in private properties for the first few years after the war. We had Palazzo Rodd, on the Via Giulia, and for holidays we went to Ansedonia, to Casa Rodd, and when we got hard up we rented it out.

  Look, I launched Ansedonia and Porto Ercole. Yes, really. I started the whole thing. I lent money to fishermen to build tiny flats and then I opened a restaurant which was the biggest fun on this earth—which, alas, doesn’t exist anymore. And I found the property for the Dutch royal family, and then that’s how it went—all the rich and famous came. And it was ruined for me—I can’t bear going back there. So then I left for Turkey, and that’s another part of my life.

  I met the Baekelands when they wrote me asking to rent a house in Ansedonia. Practically all the houses had been taken, but I got them the house of Princess Boncompagni. They thought, of course, it was going to be one of those frightfully smart Cadaqués or South of France houses; in fact, it was a small bungalow built by the local builder. Anyway, during all this I had the most extraordinary correspondence with Brooks, whom I had not yet met. One day, for instance, he wrote me that he didn’t want two servants, so I said, “You won’t have two servants. I’ve got you a cook, that’s all, and her husband will just sleep in her room, naturally.” He wrote back saying, “I don’t want the husband sleeping in the house because he’s bound to eat some of our food if he does.” I wrote back and said, “Listen, there’s one bed, he’ll spend the whole night making love to her, and I assure you it’ll be only the matter of a cup of coffee in the morning.” And I had a letter back saying, “I don’t give a damn if he makes love standing up, I don’t want him in my house!”

  So the Baekelands arrived, and almost immediately they said, “Mrs. Rodd, we must tell you we’re very disappointed in the house, it’s not at all what we wanted.” Well, I thought then that they were the sort of Americans who would never be happy in Ansedonia. So I said to the child, who was wonderful-looking, like a faun—the most adorable little boy that’s ever been—“Tony,” I said, “why don’t you go on up to my house and meet my children?” and he rushed off while his parents and I sat down to sort things out. And when he came back, he said to Barbara, “Mum, they’ve got the best library I’ve ever seen—please let’s stay here.” And on that appeal the Baekelands remained in Ansedonia, and after about a month I was able to move them from Villa Boncompagni to Villa Nistri.

  Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, July 18, 1959

  Villa Boncompagni

  (Villa Nistri after July 28)

  Ansedonia

  Dear Jim: Gloria:

  We are getting squared away finally (“you squares!”). We have found a comfortable villa on the water, rented from Pieri Francesco Nistri, a famous pal of II Duce and a great War Criminal; but I love him. It turns out that we are sitting in a nest of Etruscan remains: in fact, two hundred yards above us through the gorse is the ancient city of COSA, an Etruscan, then a Roman stronghold, where the American Academy in Rome has had a bunch of archaeologists digging for nearly a decade.

  We swam off a small island here the other day, just made it back in a sudden storm that came up, but the island was worth visiting to

  Tony. Millions of seagulls and some sort of native partridge are nesting on it. What would interest you most, I think, is the underwater archaeology around here. There are rocks, small islets, islands and reefs all ready and waiting to wreck ships. There must be plenty of dead galleys and galleons lying on the bottom around here.

  Do you think you would be tempted to pay us a visit at some time convenient to all of us in August or September? I’ll be in touch with you. Are you having fun? How’s the baby?

  Love,

  Brooks

  Katharine Gardner Coleman

  I went down to Ansedonia to visit them that August—in rapid succession they had these two older women to stay, Sue Railey and me. I was one of the two old crows that went down—I mean, Sue and I were nine or ten years older than Barbara. Anyway, I stayed for a week, a good fat week, you know—ten days—and that was exactly the summer when Prince Bernhard came down with his equerry to look over the Borghese property that was for sale.

  We went out on all these glorious picnics in this Italian fishing boat that Brooks had rented, and there’d be every kind of possible combination of people packed in. There was one time that I got very upset with Barbara, very very upset because she was showing off and diving from the top of this boat where, if you didn’t do it quite right and your foot slipped or something, you could just crack your head open on the edge, and there were boys, young people, around who wanted to copy what she was doing. There was an Italian diver in the group—one of those professional people who go underwater and carry a knife with them, you know, and he and I got together and said we didn’t like what Barbara was doing at all, it was very dangerous what she was doing, she was reckless, and finally we both prevailed upon her not to do it, but, I mean, it took him plus something of me to put a stop to it. And Brooks didn’t even seem to take any of it in.

  One time I got perfectly furious with Brooks—and told him so—because he said, “I’ve got something pretty darn interesting to show you. Do you want to see Tony’s diary? He’s written some things about a little girl he met.” I said, “I not only don’t want to see it but I don’t know how you can feel you have a right to take something that is your child’s private private thing….” But on the whole he seemed utterly devoted to Tony that summer. He was teaching him how to snorkel—it was when snorkeling was just coming along. And Tony was just a cunning little boy who was a little bit extrasensitive and very interested in animals and nature. What he really did not like was his mother’s society—or social life, if that’s what you call it. We’d all be sitting around and he’d say, “I don’t know why you want to go out tonight, Mummy. Look at Mrs. Herrick”—that’s who I was then, Mrs. Parmely Herrick—“she doesn’t want to go and meet the Marchesa of So and So and So and So and So and So.”

  Daphne Hellman

  Brooks and Tony both were sort of in despair over the social life but Barbara kept escalating, she wanted to see more and more titles—princes and duchesses down through barons and even sirs.

  Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York City, March 12, 1971

  He recalls being most happy when he spent entire days by himself. He states, “I was taken by my parents to all their friends’ houses, so I really grew up more in my parents’ generation than in my own.”

  Nike Mylonas Hale

  When Bob Hale took me to meet the Baekelands in Ansedonia, we weren’t married yet, and I was quite young, and, you know, Brooks was very flirtatious. He carried me across the threshold, and that infuriated Barbara. The next thing was, she was saying to me, “Why don’t you go down and play with Tony?” Now Tony was about twelve, you know, and I was twenty-five! Well, Barbara didn’t like me at all. She was great friends with Bob’s first wife, Barbara Hale.

  Tony was on the rocks playing with crabs, sort of pulling them apart, which
Bob thought was very creepy, but I didn’t think so, I think that’s what little boys do. Of course, in hindsight it is an awfully creepy little episode.

  They didn’t really pay much attention to Tony. I mean, it was typical that he was down on the rocks alone. I think one of the things that must have been very difficult for him was that Barbara and Brooks were so dramatic—always. Both of them had so much drama that you couldn’t sort of survive around them.

  From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished

  Wednesday. Ansedonia is somewhat barren, the villas are too close together, the mosquitos at times are devils, but it was a thoroughly pagan, never-to-be-forgotten Tuscan summer.

  There is a breathtaking ruined temple on a hill; the view is stupendous, up and down the coast in both directions, but Heather is still convinced she saw a somberly clad sinister ghost sitting on a low wall of the temple at eleven o’clock one morning and it was hard to drag her back again at any hour.

  By coincidence Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, son Tony, Millie their deaf Pekingese, a rooster and a Siamese cat turned up two days after we arrived, settled into a villa a few hundred yards away from the one Heather has rented for us, which belongs to Prince Antonello

  Ruffo di Calabrio, whose sister has just married Prince Albert, the

  Belgian King’s brother. The Baekelands have added greatly to our stay. Later Simone Lippe with Thilo, one of her two sons, and Alexis

  Lichine and his wife also dropped by.

  From A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Horseless Age Press, New York, 1907

  Everything around us was so harmoniously peaceful and the Italian landscape so serene with the freshness of nature! Yet, wherever the eye wandered, ruins evoked visions of a fugitive splendor, which had been in all its glory during ages long gone by, when human ambitions and human might tried to rule this enchanting corner of the world.