by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
Peter Gimbel
It was Brooks who got me involved—he really enticed me into the thing. My identical twin brother, David, had died of stomach cancer at the age of twenty-nine, at which point I started to examine my own life pretty hard and decided that Wall Street, where I had been working, was not the world I wanted to spend the rest of my life in. So now I was looking for something very offbeat to do. In July of 1956 when I was twenty-eight, I’d made a dive to the Andrea Doria and in a small way, the way it can happen in a bigger way now, become instantly noticeable—anyway, I was asked by Fairfield Osborn to join the board of trustees of the New York Zoological Society, and a little while later the president of the American Museum of Natural History asked me to join their board.
So when Brooks, whom I had met a couple of years earlier, came up with the idea for the Vilcabamba expedition, I was very excited. I was interested in the expedition much more from the standpoint of pure exploration and adventure than from the scholarly/intellectual/archaeological kind of thing that Brooks was interested in—he wanted to find where the last stand of the last Inca had been made and discover the last tomb and so forth and so on. I would have gone in there even if you had guaranteed me that there was no lost city—just because of the romance of dropping into a virtually cutoff island, because that’s what it was—a huge fifteen-thousand-foot-high island rising out of low jungle on all sides. Here was the unknown, you know.
Brooks was in Zermatt with Barbara, so we were planning it all by long distance, you might say—by voluminous correspondence. Barbara had broken her leg skiing, really smashed it—a terrible break. So Brooks had—I have to call it an excuse, because it was what he really wanted to do: remain in Zermatt skiing while I organized the whole thing myself. I mean, he was in Switzerland and the guy doing the dirty work was right here—okay?
I have to give him credit, though—he was a brilliant, brilliant land analyst. He could look at a cliff that was covered with jungle and say, “There’s a ledge running there that I think we can traverse.” And he’d be right on the money every fuckin’ time! I question whether we would have gotten out without him.
Scientifically my evaluation is the thing was a complete failure as an expedition—or at least a nonsuccess—but that in terms of a strange adventurous exploratory feat it was a success. And I would say that on the Geographic staff it was perceived both those ways. Clearly, the drama of our entry and the long trek out outweighed whatever the magazine’s disappointment scientifically was, because they ran it as a big cover story.
From National Geographic, Vol. 126, No. 2, August 1964
BY PARACHUTE INTO PERU’S LOST WORLD
by Brooks Baekeland
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR AND PETER R. GIMBEL
Cramped in the airplane with our bulky gear, Peter Gimbel and I looked out of the open door and then, questioningly, at each other.
A year of careful preparation had brought us to this moment of decision far above a remote spur of the Andes of southeastern Peru….
Brooks Baekeland
That was not my “colorful account” in the Geographic. My piece—“too subjective”—was totally emasculated and rewritten by a Geographic hack for that thirteen-year-old girl who lives in Sioux City, for whom every issue of that amazing magazine is always written. I did not give a damn. I had a wonderful summer, mostly paid for by National Geographic Society funds, and my own vanity was not involved.
Ethel Woodward de Croisset
Brooks asked me to have a look at his article for the Geographic before it was published. Now it had some very good things, wonderfully described things, in it, but it was badly punctuated, full of misspellings, so I did some editing, you know—just little, simple things to the English, which I did on a separate sheet of paper. Then I gave it to Barbara, whom I happened to be seeing, and said, “Give this to Brooks. I did a little editing.” I’d actually taken great pains with it. And Barbara was outraged. She said, “I wouldn’t think of showing this to him, and don’t you ever mention it! Just tell him it’s wonderful. He mustn’t be discouraged.” And she tore it up. I felt very bad, I hadn’t realized…. But it shows you how she protected him, always telling him he was a genius. All of this sort of thing was to keep him.
You know, Barbara had a love affair with a Spaniard and it was all so Brooks would realize that she was more attractive than he seemed to think her. She told me that she’d met him in New York, right when things were going very ruggedly. She had suddenly discovered—she hadn’t known—that Brooks was dragging around looking for other women. A little later she found out that he had an affair on with an English girl.
She didn’t like her Spanish friend at all—very soon she’d had enough of him. But she played the game that she was going to leave Brooks and run off with him. And she told me that Brooks begged her not to go, that he was very moved and all of this. I think the Spaniard was terrified that she was going to go off with him—he faded out of the picture when he heard that threat.
She may have slept with him once. You know, she was fundamentally an Irish Catholic, brought up very severely in Catholicism, but I think that then she got into this very sort of Café Society group of people, but of rather an intellectual sort, and she probably had some false Freudian ideas as well. But she was basically extremely correct.
Brooks Baekeland
Barbara told me that her Spanish lover, who was, ironically, a physicist, did not have enough money to support her properly. I offered her $12,000 a year, the equivalent of about $72,000 today, if she would leave me and marry him. It was to be my wedding present to them both. Barbara knew that I meant it, that I would not break my word. But he could not park a car properly and she did not like his feet, she told me. I gave up.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
New York
My very much missed Joneses—
There is so much to tell you—I feel I’m back in the trap but I’m sort of beginning to enjoy it. When we first arrived Tony & I were in a state of such despair. I missed you—Paris—some kind of human order—but now that old pals begin to hove to, I begin to cheer up a bit, but my God what an inhuman city it is!
Brooks is still crashing about the jungle. Making only 2 kilometers a day—hacking his way through with a machete and probably having a very tough time. In the meantime I see my Spanish boyfriend from time to time but I am less and less interested. He has a kind of warmth and tenderness that is very touching and I think knows me better in 2 or 3 weeks than Brooks does after 20 years, but
finally the odor becomes oppressive. I think I’d rather sleep with a stranger—and after 20 years my husband still is!
Anyway I’ve decided to come back to Paris in Feb.—no matter what—and I am going to try to do something this fall. Rather like a plant struggling up through a yard of cement but maybe there will be a small flower.
Just came back from a fancy lunch at Pavillon with Ben Sonnenberg, Italians, etc. Life is gay—I’m a new arrival! In fact I find social success can be predicated on the notion that one must always have more an air of arrival than of departure. I intend to cultivate this for my gray hairs.
Kisses & hugs. How is Kaylie? Her little face on the balcony as she watched us drive off I see as clearly as if she were in my arms. Kiss her for me.
X
B
From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished
Tuesday. We went to a teeming late evening party given by Ben Sonnenberg, a wonderful, erudite, close friend who owns the Stuyvesant Fish house in Gramercy Park, probably one of the best-designed houses in New York, overflowing with incredible paintings and etchings, not to mention several hundred guests including Aschwin and Simone Lippe, Charles and Helen Rolo, Gilbert and Polly Kahn, and Barbara Baekeland, solitary and wild-eyed.
Peter Gimbel
Once at Jack Cohane’s house Barbara put her arm around my neck and tried to wrestle me to the floor to force me to have it her wa
y—she’d gotten angry at me because I didn’t agree with her about something.
Here she was, hanging on to me. I didn’t try to shake her or push her or anything. I was so mad I just wanted to let her humiliate herself. Finally she started to giggle, because she saw how really absurd it was.
Let me tell you something more about why I felt taken advantage of by Brooks. Having shown up for the expedition as close to the time of departure as was possible—I mean, just in time to help me with the last of the preparations and to go through his parachute training—what did Brooks do shortly after the expedition was over but leave again for Europe. Leaving me to mop up. And oh God, the mopping up! You can’t imagine—information the Geographic wanted, returning equipment to the people who supplied us, filling out reports, just a lot of busy work. But believe me, that’s very much the way he is. You know, he’s never asked me why I feel the way I do about our partnership. Looking back, I suppose he did me a kind of favor, because from that period of my life on, I’ve never been somebody who’s been particularly easy to take advantage of.
Peter Lake
Brooks got to be a god on our expedition! No, seriously, for a few minutes he was one. About two-thirds of the way into the trip Peter Gimbel, Jack Joerns, and I were drinking from the river when we were surprised by some Indians who had snuck up behind us with bows and arrows and were clearly going to kill us—they thought we were evil spirits or something. And then Brooks came up from behind and surprised them. Now, these Indians didn’t have any facial hair, they had long straight black hair on their heads, and they were short, and there, suddenly, was Brooks—you know, tall, bald, with a gray beard. We got this letter about a year later from some missionaries that said the Indians had thought Brooks was some kind of god and that that’s why they had spared us.
Brooks Baekeland
The arrow that kills you is shot by an enemy you never see.
I only killed one human—an old man sitting with his back to a tree by a bridge in Germany. There had still been no Hiroshima, but there had been, I think, the awful Hamburg and Dresden and Cologne. About Himmler’s gas chambers, we dewy youths still knew nothing. I had already decided that if I were sent on fighter bombers, to bomb “targets of opportunity”—that is, French and German towns—I would try to destroy cabbages and potatoes rather than young mothers and children.
He was reading a newspaper. He was wearing a bowler hat. We were “attacking” the bridge. My stream of .50 caliber bullets from four wing guns hit him before I even saw him and by mistake, and his bowler hat rolled slowly across the bridge. This was just before the end of the war.
I mourn for that old man still.
From the New York Times, “Financier Tells of Trek in Andes,” John Sibley, December 2, 1963
Two New York investment bankers, G. Brooks Baekeland and Peter R. Gimbel, have returned to tame office routine after a grueling 90-day expedition through previously unexplored wilds of the Peruvian Andes….
Why do men do it?
“I don’t know,” Mr. Baekeland mused. “I’m one of those people who’s always driving up a little dirt road.”
Peter Gable
Tony and I were still in school at the time but we decided that nothing would do but that we go along on the expedition. Why not? We were two healthy, active seventeen-year-olds. So we bearded his father with this idea—you know, “What do you think of the notion that we tag along and fall out of the sky with you and Mr. Gimbel?” We’d spent so much time fantasizing about how much fun it would be, what an adventure—I mean, Tony’s father was a swashbuckler from the word go. Anyway, the thing I remember most about his response was his distinct lack of enthusiasm—not about our participating, because, of course, how could a responsible parent be enthusiastic about that? But he wasn’t even willing to play along with us. He didn’t say, “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea because…” or “Gee, that’s a great idea but…” He just said no. End of case.
I saw Tony only a handful of times after 1963. We really did just do different things. I mean, I went off to college. In the early seventies sometime, I bumped into his grandmother, Mrs. Daly, on the street and she gave me Tony’s address in England.
Heather Cohane
I went to see him quite a lot in Broadmoor. The first years he was there I couldn’t go, because I was living in Ireland and very involved in my knitwear business and I hardly had time to even visit my children at school in England. But as soon as Jack and I sold our house in Ireland and went to live in London, I started to go to see Tony very regularly. Because I loved him and because I remembered him as a very gentle boy in Ansedonia. Jack would never go with me, because he suffered from claustrophobia—he was afraid of getting locked in.
What riveted me about Broadmoor was, you could not tell who was the inmate and who was the visitor because the inmates were dressed in ordinary clothes. There’d be, you see, two men sitting at a table and I’d say to myself, Now which one is the madman? And when the bell clanged, meaning visiting hours were over, I would jump to my feet to see who the inmates were, because they would be going off through one door and the visitors would be going out the other. And I practically never got it right! And this is the thing that fascinated me, and I decided that we were all mad.
Tony told me he went berserk once at Broadmoor because something annoyed him and that he was put in one of the solitary cells for a couple of days. He also said that he got beaten up once, I can’t remember why. But a nice thing is he did develop a very good friend in there, I presume a lover. I don’t think the friend had any parents or anything. It was rather a sad story—you know, nobody to worry about trying to get him out. In fact, he’s still there. You see, in Broadmoor you have no hope if there isn’t somebody campaigning the whole time to get you out. I remember Tony saying that if he ever got out of Broadmoor he would miss his friend very much.
Once I took my daughter Ondine to see him on her way back to school—she was at a boarding school called the Manor House in Wiltshire. She wanted to go with me, though she was only eight at the time. Jack and I had told her what had happened—I mean, she grew up knowing that Tony had killed his mother.
Ondine Cohane
There was a lot of clanging. I’ll never forget all those gates clanging behind us. I liked him. He was nice. But I didn’t talk to him much because I was upset about having to go back to school, so I just listened. He talked about his inmates—the people in his cell—and what they were allowed to do. He told us the rules. My mother told him I loved animals, so he told me about his chicken when he was small and how he used to take it around with him. I felt very sorry for him. I didn’t like to think of him behind all those gates and everything. He wrote my mother later that I was rather a sad little girl, but I was mostly sad to be going back to school.
Heather Cohane
One day I decided that I should take my son, Alexander, who in fact was Barbara’s godson, to see Tony. He was at a very impressionable age, you see—seventeen—and at Eton, and, you know, there were drugs and all sorts of other things around. So I thought it was a very good idea to show him what could happen to you if you did take drugs.
Willie Draper
When I was at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, Tony would send me hashish from Paris, wrapped in tinfoil in an envelope. It was a whole different scene then. Nobody at prep school knew anything even about marijuana in 1963. Believe me. Nothing. Nobody. But then pot and all the hallucinogens began to be used in very creative ways, you know. Tony and I would pretend to be sea turtles on the beach in East Hampton where his parents used to rent a house sometimes when they came back from Europe for a couple of months. At this point it was only pot, and we didn’t do it all the time—we weren’t potheads or anything. I mean, you can’t even begin to relate it to the way people smoke pot now. We didn’t do it as a social thing at all.
Alexander Cohane
We drove down from London one Sunday, Mummy and me, just the two of us, and we went t
hrough the main gate and then, you know, he came through into this sort of visitor’s lounge. He was taller than me, he was about six foot. Quite good-looking. I mean, a handsome man he probably would have been if he’d been out in the street walking along. We sat down and we just started talking, and we gave him a packet of cigarettes and a whole load of apples and oranges, sort of a selection of goodies—you know, what we sort of call in England “tuck.”
We must have been with him about three hours. He talked the whole time. He told us every detail about killing his mother. I wish I’d had a tape recorder with me, because, you know, I’ve never known anyone who killed anyone. He said she had pissed him off—you know, done something to annoy him—and that he just picked up the knife in the kitchen and said, “You’ve destroyed my life. I’m a wasted human being.”
He said to us, “It’s ruined my life in several ways to be in here.” And he said that it was just absolutely hopeless and depressing to look out at the countryside and not be part of it. Then I remember him very clearly saying, “I feel my mother’s presence around me all the time, I love her so much. She’s in every tree.”
8
POSSESSIONS
AFTER TONY BAEKELAND had been at Broadmoor for three years, he began to wonder if he would ever be allowed to leave. “He was showing great improvement,” says Miwa Svinka-Zielinski. “He sounded quite reasonable on the whole, and he even began to consider what he might do if he got out. He told me he thought perhaps he would teach.”
But even though Tony might be feeling better, the legal obstacles surrounding his release were still tremendous. An average stay at Broadmoor is six or seven years, but some patients—and Tony was one of them—are there under restrictions that make it all but impossible to leave. In Tony’s case, not only would Dr. Maguire have to be convinced he was completely well, but the Home Secretary would have to concur that a discharge was in the best interests of society as well as of the patient. It was not unusual for cases as complex as Tony’s to be bound up in red tape for years.