Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

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

  So I went up to his house in Port Lligat—that’s the twin village to Cadaqués. You went by the cemetery of Cadaqués to get there, in those days over a dirt road. Dalí had an interesting house, it was so old. As I walked in he gave me some pink champagne and he said, “Come with me, I will show you my studio,” and he showed me this enormous, strange room, sort of octagonal almost it was. He said, “Here is where I masturbate.” He thought I was going to be shocked, you know, but I just paid no attention.

  And Dalí set the tone for the whole village.

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated

  Cadaqués

  Dear Jim and Gloria,

  This place is surreal and very fake except for the natives who loathe everyone and cast a spell on us all. The morals are so crappy & awful & hypocritical that you can’t take them seriously—the cripple being helped in and out of the boat by the mistress of her gigolo husband who loathes them both and tries to attack, each night, the baby-sitter who is Tony’s girl and tells him everything. Balthusian symbols abound and trompeurs and pleasure-seeking. Marvelous!

  I swim in the sea, comtemplate suicide, think that somehow I must do something to justify something and I don’t even know what it is!

  Anyway it’s the classic Mediterranean summer. Not for the likes of me. I need the cool northern fogs & tides to keep me sane.

  X

  B

  Elsa Mottar

  The whole thing was just so impossible, you know—one just didn’t know what to do with Barbara. You never knew what was going to happen next, so whenever she appeared on the scene, everybody’s nose would be out of joint. She and Brooks were always flying away from each other and then coming back together again, and it was a totally mixed-up relationship that you could never make heads or tails of. I mean, you didn’t know if they were really interested in each other or if they just stayed together because of Tony.

  George Staempfli

  I remember one scene at Barbara Curteis’s. She had a terrace outside her bedroom, and that’s where she gave all her parties—it had a wonderful view of the harbor. And Brooks was there one night, and Barbara Baekeland suddenly appeared downstairs and marched into the house, and he had to flee over the rooftops—literally! Another night Barbara Baekeland was found wandering around the streets of Cadaqués stark naked.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Barbara Curteis and I were having a coffee together on her terrace. We heard the row downstairs as Barbara forced her way in and past Nuri, the Curteis maid, and came charging upstairs. To avoid the mayhem I foresaw if Barbara found me there, I vaulted over a parapet down onto the terrace of the adjoining house. I must have landed very softly, for to my astonishment I found—in a layout identical to that of the house I had just left—a French couple in bed sound asleep. I was sure that they would wake up as soon as La Baekeland started to sound off on the terrace next door, and I could only hope that they would understand my predicament and not give me away. The row between the two Barbaras was loud—the Baekeland part of it, for Barbara Curteis kept a ladylike cool—but the couple never awoke.

  Barbara Baekeland was never seen running naked through the streets of Cadaqués, but she was seen in many towns running in her nightgown—in pursuit of a fleeing husband. What few people besides Tony and myself knew was that Barbara in a rage would only be satisfied with physical combat. If you feared—or refused—to hurt her, you were forced to run away from her. Because I loved her, I sometimes found these midnight chases amusing—but not always. For years she embarrassed and exhausted me.

  Daphne Hellman

  I was visiting Lily Auchincloss, who had taken a house in Cadaqués, and I saw Brooks in an open car, with his head in his hands, as if in despair. He was just sitting in the parked car, right outside the place they were renting. He said to me, “Go up and speak to Barbara. I can’t.” And when I knocked at the door she thought at first I was Brooks and wouldn’t let me in, but when she realized it was me, she let me in and said, “Get me a drink. Brooks won’t get me a drink.” She was in a very peculiar state. But then later that summer I went on a couple of picnics with the two of them and things had gotten more peaceable.

  Thilo von Watzdorf

  Remember that book Piano Mécanique by François Rey? They made a film of it. It was really a lousy book but it did show Cadaqués in the mid and late sixties, a mixture of Saint-Tropez and the Rome of La Dolce Vita. It was just the worst place at that time for a kid of that age who was very impressionable.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  When I first met Tony, that summer of ’67, he was very much in love with a young man in Cadaqués—Jake Cooper, a great beauty. Jake was the type who would stop in the middle of town and oil his body, and he always had a court of young men around him—Tony Kinna, Ernst von Wedel, people like that.

  Tony was, let’s say, a basically well-brought-up little boy, and he was mixing with a whole crowd that was rather shabby. In Cadaqués everyone mixes—it’s the great joy of people who usually have regular lives and in summer suddenly they are with people who are not their sort and it’s very exciting. Voilà. So Tony was seeing people who were not his sort and they were taking a lot of money from him, of course. And he came totally under Jake Cooper’s spell.

  Elizabeth Blow

  I’d heard that there was a man who was exerting a tremendous influence over him in Cadaqués and I think probably this was the beginning of Tony’s collapse mentally.

  Pico Harnden

  Jake Cooper was known around Cadaqués as Black Jake. He was a very handsome Australian who first appeared on the scene as the lover of a woman called Erika Svenssen. She was sort of the sex goddess of Cadaqués and he was the black prince, if you like. He was a tall dark guy who wore a silver earring in his left ear and went around in washed-out jeans and Afghan belts, without a shirt on, and every woman in Cadaqués was amazed by his beauty and his bravado, and the next thing that happened was that Jake Cooper and Tony Baekeland took up together—much to Erika’s chagrin.

  Erika Svenssen

  I was nine years in Cadaqués and that was my favorite summer, you know? It was so important, that summer. I was at the age then that I thought I was still twenty-one. I hadn’t gone into the other generation yet. I still think I haven’t.

  Jake was like a devil. He had a Svengali thing. He had a power over people. He was always causing incredible jealousies and things—people turned against each other. He moved into this farm, this abandoned farm, and he had a sort of entourage, you know, of strange people. They were heavy into trying out mushrooms and drugs in general, and he was also delving into things—whether he got them out of books or what, I don’t know, but I know he kept meeting people, secret people. I think he practiced black magic. He wore little bones and things on his vest. Certain little bones. I would ask him about them and he just wouldn’t tell me, you know. He would say “my magic amulets” or something. I’d never seen any sort of formation of that kind of bones before—the way they were put together. He wore them dangling on his vest, you know. He wore them all the time and all kinds of people that he had around him died. There was a young boy who died. I think there were three who died who were around him. I think he put some kind of spell on them.

  Jake was a friend of Dalí. They were making a film together—one of those Dalí-type films showing angels and monsters together, the power that the devil would have over the angel and yet the angel would win out.

  Jake had an absolutely wonderful side to him, too, which was innocent and fun and sweet. Magical in a good sense.

  I remember when Jake and I first met Tony Baekeland. I have a visual picture of the first time we saw him—of his freckles and his red hair, and the sun on him—his body and the whole thing. I can see him in front of me right now.

  Barbara Curteis

  One day Tony said to me, “You’ve got to put a picnic together.” By this time he was not doing anything at all, and the devil finds work, as t
hey say. So we went down to the beach and picnicked. And a terrible man in black leather, looking like Tony’s Nemesis, came down the beach and fed Tony drugs, and Tony became his thing, his creature. He went right on taking drugs—he went off to Morocco with this man and they brought back belladonna and he ate the whole thing himself and disappeared under one’s eyes to a blob of quivering jelly.

  Pico Harnden

  Tony and Jake showed up on their way back from Morocco, with God knows how many kilos of hash. My parents were away, and Jake and Tony made brownies in the kitchen. They turned on the entire house. Everyone—my little sisters, my brother Mishka, the maids, the dog—consumed these brownies to such a degree that by the time my parents came back everybody was still completely passed out. Jake and Tony had taken off. They were living together in this house that Duchamp had had at one point, right by the water—one floor.

  Later that summer I was at Meliton’s and Jake came in and put six or seven cactus leaves down on the table next to my drink. I asked him what he was carrying cactus leaves around for, and he said that he fucked them, and I said, “Now wait a minute!” He said, “I’ll show you.” And he went and got a knife from the bar and sliced the base of one of the leaves open, then he took my hand and stuck it up to my wrist in the cactus and pulled it out, then he put it back in again.

  One day our bell rang and Tony was at the door. He ran upstairs in a complete state, he went running straight to my father who was sitting in a chair, you know, and hid behind the chair. My father said, “Listen, Tony, come out from behind there and just sit down and be civilized.” He said, “You’ve got to help me—Jake Cooper is after me! If he comes, just say I’m not here—please!” And sure enough, at that very moment, Jake Cooper is downstairs in the street screaming at the top of his voice, “Tooooooony”—this really very seductive sort of rutting call—and Tony is shaking. And of course, my father called down, “Tony’s not here at the moment,” and Jake took off.

  Jake Cooper

  Ah, it’s an end-of-the-road-like village, Cadaqués. It’s a town that has rocks, stones, of a special quality all around, and people going there, usually after a very short while, after their second day there sometimes, go through very tense strange feelings. Quite a lot of people get very upset. It’s a trapped feeling. I remember Dalí used to say it was something under the ground that could make men sterile and that made them very nervous. There was some great strange energy there in Cadaqués. I think it’s one of the most special little towns I’ve ever seen.

  I was called Black Jake, I suppose, because I dressed in black. A girl who I used to be involved with—actually, she gave me the first acid trip I ever took—said I should throw all my clothes away and I should just wear black and silver, and—I don’t know—that’s what happened. Friends took all my clothes to a flea market—they got rid of all my tweeds and things like that, and for many many years I did just wear black and silver.

  I was with Erika Svenssen and we were sitting on the terrace of a little café and just behind us was somebody who said a few words to Erika and this person was sitting next to Antony Baekeland, and that’s the first time I saw Antony. I saw him quite a lot after that, and then we went together to Morocco, and then we got this little house for ourselves in Cadaqués.

  Antony was involved in extreme yoga then. In winter he used to sit naked in front of the open window, doing breathing exercises—first through one nostril, then the other—following the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  He painted quite a lot and he was always painting the eye of an eagle. That eye he used to reproduce and reproduce. He painted it once on the wall of our house. I think it’s been painted over.

  One day he got spaced out of his own head and went to walk in the mountains and it was quite stormy weather. And when he came back, he was in a very high state from his walk in the storm. He said he was going to have a shower at a friend’s because there wasn’t any hot water in our house, and it was quite cold. So I said okay, and while he was out having that shower his mother turned up from Switzerland. She said, “I’m Antony Baekeland’s mother and I’ve come to take him away.” And I was really taken aback, I didn’t know what was happening. She said it again, “I’ve come to take him away,” then she said, “Where are his things?” She just took a few of his things, not really even the things that he used very much. She just took odds and ends. “I’m going to take Tony now,” she kept saying. “We’re leaving today. I’ve just arrived and I’m going. Tony and I are going today.” And then she disappeared up the road to where he was having his shower. And she took him back with her to Switzerland and then off to that island—Mallorca. And I never saw Antony again till Broadmoor.

  Barbara Curteis

  I had telephoned Barbara in Gstaad when I saw the state Tony was in and she came back to Cadaqués to fetch him. Brooks was in Ibiza and wouldn’t come. And the next day, the day after she was meant to have taken Tony back with her to Gstaad, I was on my way to Barcelona and stopped in some café—and saw Barbara’s rented car going in the opposite direction from Switzerland. They had indeed set out the previous day but it turned out that Tony didn’t have his passport with him, and Barbara had said to the authorities at the frontier, “My son doesn’t need a passport.” I mean, even Barbara admitted she’d been pretty offensive—she’d kicked and spat and so forth. Anyway, the two of them were taken off in a paddy wagon, and they spent the night in jail in Gerona, the provincial capital of that end of Catalonia—he in the male and she in the female jail. “Oh, a charming jail!” Barbara said. “Perfectly delightful!” And then she made a remark I’ll never forget, it has a sort of echoing horror for me. She told me proudly that she’d said to Tony as they were being led away in handcuffs, “Here you are, darling, at last—manacled to Mummy!”

  9

  CALLING IT QUITS

  IN 1977, an unofficial committee of concerned friends of Tony Baekeland began looking into the possibility of having him freed. The group consisted of Heather and Jack Cohane, Michael Alexander, Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, and the Hon. Hugo Money-Coutts, whose family controlled London’s exclusive Coutts Bank, and whose wife, Jinty, was a daughter of the Baekelands’ old friend Rosemary Rodd Baldwin.

  Tony’s aunt, Elizabeth Archer Baekeland, who was living in London at the time, refused to be drawn into the group. She says, “The people who were helping Tony all believed that his violence was spent when he killed his mother. But Tony’s uncle, Fred Baekeland, my former husband, always believed the exact opposite. He said to me, ‘Nonsense. Tony’s capable of killing other people. He’s highly dangerous and always will be, so don’t ever try to get him out of Broadmoor.’”

  Of the unofficial committee, Miwa Svinka-Zielinski alone recognized the need for caution in the selection of a hospital for Tony if and when he was discharged from Broadmoor and repatriated. “I believed,” she states, “that Tony had a classic love/hate relationship with his mother and that his sickness was absolutely only connected to her. I was convinced, after seeing him all those years in Broadmoor, that his illness would not surface again.”

  Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, May 14, 1976

  Visitor’s Name: Mrs. Nina Daly

  Relationship to Patient: Grandmother

  Summary: Thinks he looks and behaves so much better than last year. There’s no one who has any interest in sponsoring him outside hospital, either in U.K. or U.S.A., in his welfare, or who would be prepared to spend a penny on him, except herself, and she is not well off. She was informed that there is no certain date by which Tony will be discharged.

  Brooks Baekeland

  I had reason to hope that Tony’s mind might clear one day in the peace and quiet of Broadmoor Hospital where he had friends and where, he repeatedly told me, he was happy.

  Many people with his symptoms had, after the age of forty—for reasons as mysterious as schizophrenia itself—gradually become calm and peaceful citizens. I was hoping for that. Occasionally he still wrote me
violent, paranoidal letters, which I forwarded to his doctors. They worried me—not for myself but for him, since some English and American friends with strings to high places were trying to get him set free. It was a sentimental, well-meaning movement—which worked and was tragic in its consequences. I was against all their energetic and romantic efforts to open the cage door for this gifted hawk who I feared would soon swoop down on some helpless prey.

  Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, May 24, 1977

  Visitor’s Name: Mrs. Nina Daly

  Relationship to Patient: Grandmother

  Summary: Saw Mrs. Daly in waiting room and she is more frail and in a wheelchair.

  Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, June 3, 1977

  Visitor’s Name: Michael Alexander

  Relationship to Patient: No blood relationship

  Summary: Has known Tony Baekeland since 12 years. Was very close to family prior to and after the time of the manslaughter. Mr. Alexander was helpful, clear, and incisive. Is eager to help in whatever way he can, especially if repatriation is sought.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, November 3, 1977

  Broadmoor

  Dear Miwa,

  I hope very much to be discharged before too long. I have some dreams to tell you. The first one was that I was with a great friend of mine who was building a house and I remember watching him put pink stucco on a wall. The next was that again I can fly. I let loose a bird at Michael Alexander’s house—later we became brothers. Next I dream that a man accuses me and René Teillard of confessing one another: I associate this with life prior to the French Revolution. My last dream was that my father lives with Sylvie in a mountain chalet—he scolds me but later forgives me.