Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

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

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, August 1, 1960

  Ansedonia

  Dear Gloria & Jim—

  Our beds haven’t had a chance to cool and this certainly hasn’t been what I’d call a tranquil summer but it’s been fun. Yesterday a large contingent dove for gem coral. We almost lost one languid

  Englishman—very exciting! Tony brought up one perfect amphora and we have masses of fragments. Why don’t you write to Klosters right away for reservations for skiing. It would be fun to be there together.

  Have started painting but it does not go well.

  We miss you—

  B

  Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

  The following summer, 1961, Brooks and Barbara rented my house, and we did the most fantastic things together. Long before the Kennedys started their great river travel, we were going down rivers, these marvelous Etruscan rivers in Italy. And millions of people came and stayed with us—old, young—Lucy and Alan Moorehead. And Tony was wonderful. My servants all adored him. He used to train crickets to sing in different keys. I remember, when he was going back to school in America, he gave me two crickets which sang in totally different keys and I absolutely nearly went mad, I couldn’t get to sleep at night. He always had all these animals—partridges, turkeys, and everything you could find outside. He would take them up to his room and study them, and he would draw the most beautiful drawings of them.

  Now this second summer there were terrible scenes between Barbara and Brooks all the time. She was being difficult and impossible, and Tony, whose room was right over their bedroom, heard all these rows going on. You see, Brooks was the passion of Barbara’s lifetime and that summer he was having a walk-out with some debutante that he’d met. And that was, I think, the beginning of the unhappiness—that primeval flutter.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  When Brooks and Barbara asked us to share a house with them in Ansedonia, it seemed like such a good idea because I’d been very tired after the birth of my first child, and I was expecting a second, and Cleve and I had rented out our own house in Connecticut for the summer, to a couple who gave us wonderful money. And with that money we were able to share the fee with the Baekelands. I mean, it was a way of resting and not having too many responsibilities—and we thought we were going to have a lot of fun.

  It was a very large house, we each had a big section to ourselves. And there was a large staff. It was Rosie Rodd’s house, the haunted house. Totally haunted. Really. Cleve trusts ghosts and likes them, I’m terrified of them, but we both felt it. I refused to walk in the door alone. He had to come with me.

  Cleve Gray

  It was a very strange house. It had a very long, very dark corridor, and I would say that around six in the evening you started feeling these swooshing presences—it’s the only way I can explain it. And at night, after dinner or whenever it might be, when we went up to our room, we both couldn’t get into the room soon enough and shut the door, because there were these…these…these things. I think the Baekelands both accepted the fact that it was haunted.

  I used to wake up at dawn and hear this absolutely beautiful Arabic song, it seemed to come from the garden, and one day I said to Barbara, “The gardener has the most marvelous voice.” She said, “Do we have a gardener? There’s no gardener here.” I said, “Well, the man who comes every morning very early to the garden and sings this Arabic song.” Well, she got all upset. She said that Rosie Rodd’s lover, an Arab, had disappeared about six months before, in Africa—he had been an agent with the British government and had apparently been murdered—and she said that it was he who was haunting the garden. Well, that isn’t my kind of ghost. Except that I did keep hearing that song.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  The house was right under the walls of one of the great Etruscan towns, called Cosa. When we were residents at the American Academy in Rome in 1979, almost twenty years later—which is the place that has done all the digging—we were often in the company of one of the world’s great archaeologists and classical scholars, Lawrence Richardson—a very very British-type American, very elegant. And the kind of man, the kind of Victorian rationalist, who you would think would absolutely dispel the idea of the existence of ghosts.

  Larry came to dinner one night at the Academy and we started talking about ghosts and he said, “My dear, I’ve lived with them from the time we started digging—Cosa is filled with ghosts. Of course you heard ghosts in Rosie Rodd’s house! That whole wall is a necropolis. What did you expect—there’d be no ghosts?” He kept us up to two a.m., and I thought of this whole haunting of this…of this doomed couple by ghosts who were now being certified by this great archaeologist. That’s a very interesting metaphysical symbol.

  That summer the Baekelands went out every single day on this yacht that they chartered from a local fisherman. And they just sat and drank masses of wine and jabbered and gossiped with this duchessa and that principessa and yet another contessa this-and-that. We did it twice and we never did it again—two boat trips and we retreated completely into our shell.

  Luckily we had for, oh God, a few lira a day, a local girl who took care of the baby—which is another thing we could never have afforded in the States—and twice a week we drove to a marvelous town called Saturnia where there are these sulfur waters that heal everything and that make you sleep beautifully and so on.

  Brooks Baekeland

  It was miles and miles up in the mountains. Once, during a rainstorm, we had chairs and a table and umbrella brought out and had lunch served to us, with the warm sulfurous waters gushing out of the ground and spreading into a small river up to our navels. At that time there was only a simple café-restaurant—all in open farmland—and we never saw anyone else when we were there. We often drove up at night under a full moon.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  That summer we also made an extensive tour of the Etruscan places—Cleve was buying black Etruscan ware, and Brooks used to help him find it. We got museum pieces for practically nothing and we brought them back wrapped in our baby’s diapers. And Cleve would do watercolors, and I was painting, too, at that time—this is years before I was a writer.

  It was Brooks who was trying to write a novel, or whatever. Trying or pretending, nobody knew. But I mean, he was definitely bitten by that terrible American neurosis which I think should go into medical dictionaries, which is somewhere between obsession and paranoia—novel-writing, the idea that you’ve got to write a novel in order to prove yourself. And Brooks seemed to me to be absolutely tainted with that disease. Well, you see, he was a romantic, and he wanted to write a romantic book—I think he wanted to be Hemingway.

  And Barbara pretended that she wanted to paint but that her life was too busy to allow her to. Of course, she was creating her own mayhem. She had a studio in the garage into which she went once the whole summer we were there. Everything was this dispersion toward other people, you know—this trying to make an impression, this thing of having people around all the time, which had to do with her being so terrified of facing herself and facing her own center, her own gravity. It was a totally dispersed energy, Barbara’s.

  I never found her as entertaining as Cleve did, because I think he was sort of sexually charmed by her. She wasn’t my kind of woman. I like women who are intellectually more centered than I am. I mean someone like Ethel de Croisset. I like very rigorous personalities. I cannot stand dispersed personalities, and all my close women friends have been women who are more powerful than I am. I need women who are stronger than I am. I’m pretty strong, but I want them even stronger.

  And Barbara at that time was all parties, parties, parties—well, the way the Murphys were. You know, I mean, in a way they were Murphys with no talent. Which is a terrible thing to say—Murphys with no talent. I mean, Gerald Murphy was a pretty good painter, you know.

  Cleve Gray

  Barbara wasn’t a bad painter at all. She was a very very talented
person. She thought she could do everything. Well, of course, she did everything, but none of it was quite good enough.

  Brooks I always thought was extremely intelligent. I remember Peter Gimbel, several years later, saying to me, “Do you think Brooks is going to turn out all right?” And I said, “God, Peter, if Brooks isn’t going to turn out all right, I can’t imagine how anybody will.” You see, I was still very impressed with him. He seemed to me perfectly balanced, I didn’t see any of his imbalance. His ideas were all very sound.

  I remember he said to me that summer, “I have a terrible fate in store for me.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, I have to remember my family—my grandfather, my father, every member of my family became senile fairly early. There’s no question that that’s what’s going to happen to me, and this is what I dread.” But I think this was a romantic idea—you know, that he thought about himself that way.

  I remember he made fun of Barbara’s chasing titles, but then he got wrapped up in it himself, I guess. I mean, any title—any possibility for a title—she would just go zooming at it. One thing that always amused Francine and me—in the entry hall there was a table and on the table was a bowl and in the bowl Barbara always had scores of visiting cards which would all be left so you could see them—“Duchesse de Croy,” “Prince de Lippe,” “Principessa de Colonna.”

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  And then the bills she was paying or the letters to her poor mother in New York, her poor little Irish mother—the nonglamorous things—were always way at the bottom of the bowl. But always on top were the titles.

  I disliked them much earlier than Cleve did. I wanted to wash my hands clean of them.

  Remember the ending of Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust? That’s the ending I see for Brooks. Exactly that kind of ending.

  Once we were having dinner at the Gimbels’ in New York, and Peter kind of grumbled something about how fake the happiness was between the Baekelands. I said, “Oh, but they always talk so much about their happiness!” and he said, “That’s just what I mean.”

  During the time we spent with them in Ansedonia she would hint that they’d had no sexual contact at all all summer. She had some kind of menstrual problem, she was bleeding all the time and refusing to see a doctor, and the bleeding problem was deterring her from having sex.

  I don’t know if Brooks was fooling around or not. I mean, he would probably pretend he was going off to study some wild plant—he would do it with the utmost elegance. And that was Brooks all over—he was very much to the manner born. He had the most European sense of manners about those things.

  But now, the most incredible thing of that summer comes down to Tony. Very often we would have dinner alone with him because I was feeling kind of weak from this pregnancy that was so close to the other one, and the social life bored me, as it always has in my life. So in the evening Cleve and I would mostly stay at home, so we were a lot with Tony, because every time his parents went out he was left alone, and if we had gone out also, then he would have been totally alone. And we had the most delightful conversations with him—he was a total charmer. He was off to Exeter that year.

  And not a hint of anything wrong in him except for that stammer, which would go in and out. I mean, like many stammerers, he would sometimes talk for half an hour without stuttering. I had a stuttering problem as a child myself, I was the same kind of stutterer—and I had a definite lack of attention from my mother, and a lot of psychiatrists have new theories of how stammering is an attention-getting device, subconsciously of course. And the only, only hint that there was something deeply wrong in him was this.

  I should begin by saying the house was crammed with food. I mean, Barbara was the kind of woman who had no sense of moderation, and it drove my kind of abstemious frugal French nature crazy—I having lived, you know, under the Occupation, knowing what hunger was like and so on, seeing these hams and chickens and roasts being thrown out or given to the peasants, and three turkeys being bought instead of one. I mean, the house was so full of food you didn’t know what to do with it.

  We had brought baby food from France with us for our six-month-old son, because French baby food is notoriously marvelous, so much better than American, and Italian baby food is well known to be not nutritious. Anyway, we had two months of French baby food in Ansedonia with us, packed in vacuum crates—cans of puréed veal and puréed beets and puréed spinach and so on. And about the fifteenth of July we noticed that there were these strange gaps in the rows.

  And a few days later the peasant girl who was looking after our son said to us, and I think she began to cry—we had enough Italian to get the gist of what she was saying—“It is Mr. Tony. I have seen him do it. He comes in at night when the baby is asleep and steals the baby food.”

  Tony was stealing Thaddeus’s food! To eat—in this house brimful of food. You see, he wanted to be a baby. He’d never been a baby. He wanted to be mothered. Or maybe he wanted to identify with our baby, because he’d never had any proper parenting from his own parents, and maybe at that point we were giving him more parenting than they were.

  Tony was a complete victim of the whole thing. But a victim of the most curious kind—under this deceitful veneer of affection and praise, this unbelievable and constant praise that went on—“This child is so gifted…. Isn’t he beautiful!…And his painting and his poetry, and his schoolwork!” I mean, every afternoon this child was praised, praised, praised, but deep down he was completely left out of everything.

  Ethel de Croisset came to stay with us for a few days toward the very end of our time in Ansedonia, and she saw through all this immediately—and she knows what parenting is. She’s been a remarkable parent herself, and her parents were marvelous—I mean, Elsie Woodward was an extraordinary mother, and the father was extraordinary, and Ethel was absolutely appalled by the way the Baekelands were bringing up Tony.

  Letter from Brooks Baekeland to James Jones, February 17, 1966

  New York

  Dear Jim:

  I have taken the liberty of writing Ethel, with you as substitute, into my will as the guardian of Tony’s person and U.S. Trust Company as the guardian of his property in case both Barbara and I should grow wings (or perhaps a forked tail, in my case) before Tony is 21.

  Duties are just about nil except for tender hand holding and the offering of dry Kleenex, but the law demands a “guardian of the person” for all minors. Tony loves you both and just about no one else that I can think of in the fuddy-duddy generation, so that is why.

  Affectionately—Love to Gloria,

  Brooks

  P.S. St. Anton for about ten days, then back in Paris.

  7

  ASPIRING AND PERSEVERING

  OFTEN THE BROADMOOR STAFF would “look the other way,” in the words of one nurse, when it came to sex. “As long as it didn’t get out of hand. Even by day there were areas of the wards that weren’t very closely supervised. You only had five nurses on duty for every forty or fifty patients, so you couldn’t possibly patrol all the areas all the time.”

  “I have the distinct impression that Tony did have relationships at Broadmoor,” says Michael Alexander. “He was quite happy, so they must have let him have some sort of sex.”

  James Reeve adds, “Tony only talked to me about things he thought I would approve of, though I often wondered what the story really was. I did try once to draw him out on the subject of sex at Broadmoor, but he was very reticent.”

  “There is a great deal of homosexuality in the hospital,” reports David Cohen in his 1981 book Broadmoor. “On the whole, what sexual activity exists seems both rather cheerless and loveless.” One patient describes Broadmoor in the book as a “homosexual brothel.” Another explains, “If you haven’t got any women available, there does come a point when you just burst.” Yet another offered that he felt rather tender toward another patient simply because “I am quite tender.”

  “The authorities sometime
s break up couples after having ‘tolerated’ the situation for some time,” Cohen elaborates. “Fear that they may be split up arbitrarily makes relationships even more brittle.”

  Broadmoor authorities are at pains to point out that homosexuality is not at all uncommon in sexually segregated institutions, be they mental hospitals, prisons, or schools.

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

  From ages 11 to 14, he spent the school year in Paris and then summers in Italy. At age 14 he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, but was forced to leave because of his grades.

  James M. Hubball

  I was Tony’s headmaster at Buckley School, a long time ago. I have a vague recollection that when Tony went to Exeter, there was an episode in which he was found hiding in the laundry chute—for what reason I never knew. The last I heard of him was that he was living in London.

  Sara Duffy Chermayeff

  When he got thrown out of Exeter, the evening he came home, Barbara called me and we had a long talk. I don’t know what exactly he was kicked out for. She always said, you know, “They don’t understand him—he’s an artist.”

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

  At age 15, he ran away from another private school.

  From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, February 7, 1910

  George is today fifteen years old. At his age I was I believe in the same mental condition as he is with the difference that he has had the benefit of better intellectual environment. I had to do everything by myself and find my own way. The only help I had was the encouragement of my beloved mother.

  Suzanne Taylor

  Tony was at Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts, with my son David, who told my husband and me, knowing we knew the Baekelands, that Tony had run away from school to go to the Caribbean and write poetry. And David said, “Guess what he was taking with him!” It went all around the school, you see. I mean, he was going off to write poetry, right? And he was taking a hatchet and a flashlight and I think a rope hammock! He never did get there—he was caught at the airport.