Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

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

  I try nowadays to be less careless and more careful in the things

  I do.

  All the best.

  Love,

  Tony

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, October 14, 1967

  Dear Michael,

  Two important items: Carolina says you are coming on the 25th. I have a cook laid on and wondered if you might not like to have her do a dinner for you? She’s an angel and very good—can do a marvelous curry with almonds, figs, bananas, etc. I order a sorbet from that marvelous place, have smoked salmon first, and it’s a delicious repast—with Carolina we can do 14.

  Wednesday night I gave a small dinner for Marcel and Teenie Duchamp, and Sunday 15 for dinner when Tony arrives with a friend! Am so pleased!!

  Duncan Longcope

  I remember Barbara telling me that Tony had a girl and that she liked her a lot. She referred to her as Robin Redbreast. Just in fun—I mean, you know, that sort of verve of Barbara’s. She said, “Oh, isn’t it nice that Tony has a girlfriend!”

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  It’s easier to say to your mother and to your father that you have a girlfriend than a boyfriend. When they said to him “Where were you tonight?,” it was easier to say “I was with Sylvie” than “I was with Jake.” I can honestly say that Tony used me as a screen—a smokescreen for all the shady parts of his life. I mean his boyfriends, who he couldn’t very well present to his parents.

  After that summer in Cadaqués we came back to Paris—I mean Tony came back and I came back—and I received a phone call from him saying please come and have dinner at his parents’. And I thought, Two grouchy parents…. I’d never met the parents.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Tony had asked Sylvie to be his “girlfriend.” That was an invention from the beginning to try and cover up his affair with Jake Cooper, with whom he had been found in our bed at 45 quai de Bourbon by a friend of ours only just before we came back from a trip to Scotland. The friend thought at first that Tony was in bed with a girl. The concierge—Madame Laurant, who knew better—was scandalized and asked me if Madame Baekeland and I were “au courant des choses qui se passent ici quand vous n’êtes pas là.”

  Anyway, when Tony wanted to bring Sylvie home to meet his, he said, “amazing” parents, she was curious and agreed. Later when the story that “Brooks stole Tony’s girlfriend” made such nice waves in the lives of the bored—and of course it had been Barbara who had started that in order to “prove” that her son was not a homosexual and that his father was a cad—Tony got sympathy and even a kind of passport to decency by not denying it. It meant nothing to him that both Sylvie and I knew better.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  I was quite young, perhaps younger than my years, and I saw Brooks and I thought he was the most dashing man I’d ever seen, and I saw Barbara and I thought she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen. Usually with a couple there’s one very handsome and then a toad right next to it. But they were both so handsome. They were dazzling. And I certainly never thought that Brooks would look at me because to me he was a grown-up, he was forty-seven and he was married and that was it.

  They started inviting me to all their dinners. I was the “nice young thing” that you put at table and so forth.

  There was a game between Brooks and Barbara that was very near to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—a great game in public, you know, where he would drive her to tears on a little matter. I mean, they wouldn’t go too far but she would have very pretty tears and he would say, “Look how good she looks with tears! Doesn’t she look handsome with tears?” That sort of thing. Which made me feel that I was sort of part of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and what were they going to do with me, these two. I felt like a puppet between their hands.

  Duncan Longcope

  Robin Redbreast or whatever her name was was staying in the same hotel that I was living in, the Htel Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Louis en Lille. I assumed that Tony had, you know, visiting privileges, but one day I saw him knocking on her door and in a sort of pleading tone asking to be let in, and this went on for a long period, but the door did not open, as I remember, and he went away. I did one day see Brooks there, which sort of surprised me.

  Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, Undated

  Mon cher—

  I suppose you are zipping about the planet as usual? I am bacheloring here for a few days while B. skis in Switzerland with a pack of lusty females.

  Affectionately, Brooks

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  Barbara couldn’t stand to be in any one place for long. It was October, then it was November, November was boring, so she decided she would have to go skiing, and it was when she left to go skiing that finally Brooks called me. I couldn’t believe it, because then it meant something. We went out to dinner together, on the Île Saint-Louis, and we had, I have to admit, a wonderful time. We spoke…he spoke and I was fascinated, I can tell you—and that evening I absolutely fell in love.

  I stopped being the family friend very soon after that. I couldn’t stand it, because on one side I was in love with Brooks and on the other side Barbara had taken a liking to me and she was trying to arrange things between Tony and me—romantic things. She thought that I should consider him as a nice future husband. She kept telling me that one day Tony would be a very rich young man.

  She didn’t know about me and Brooks. She didn’t want to know, of course. Not only that, but I think that she thought that I certainly was not anything to beware of.

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, November 27, 1967

  45, quai de Bourbon

  Dearest Michael—

  We are in the middle of making a whole series of decisions—should we buy a large property in Mallorca and build on it, or should we build a small house next to the Bordeaux-Groults at Cadaqués—an endroit that seems to have a fatal fascination for us! We are spending Xmas there in Emily Staempfli’s house—very snug, very expensive, with my mother who is flying to Barcelona to join us. Tony is already there and his little robin, Sylvie, comes, too, along with Michael Alexander. Should be very gay.

  Always affec.—Barbara

  Michael Alexander

  I was staying with them the Christmas Tony brought Sylvie down as a guest. She was his girlfriend originally. And in fact, Brooks took her over. I think it was a quite quick take-over. I think it was going on all the time I was staying there.

  Letter from Michael Edwards to Barbara Baekeland, February 2, 1968

  Dear Barbara,

  You will be glad to hear that your clock has now arrived back in good working order and I shall be bringing it over to Paris on my next trip. Talking of this, I am provisionally thinking of the weekend of the 24th February, so could you let me know what your plans are for skiing.

  Gloria Jones

  On February 24th, Barbara tried to commit suicide. I spent the day with her—she was packing to go to Klosters, she was happy, and all her friends kept running in and out, you know. She had some very fancy women friends, lovely friends who loved her. De Croy—she was a good friend of hers, she was darling. The lady who took care of her dog. The Princesse de Croy her name was.

  Then at seven o’clock—I think the train leaves at seven-thirty for Klosters—the telephone rang and it was Barbara saying, “I’m going ski-i-ii-i-iiiiiing,” and then there was silence and I knew something terrible had happened, I just knew it, and I screamed, “Barbara, what have you done, what have you done?” Then I ran—it’s about, you know, three blocks—and I guess she’d left the door open and I burst in and there she was—she’d got herself dressed up beautifully in a nightgown and her beautiful beige robe—and she was absolutely gone. She looked dead. I really thought she was dead. I started to scream and I couldn’t, I’d lost my voice, so then I started jumping up and down for the lady underneath to hear, and finally I was able to scream. And then I dialed my house and said to my daughter Kaylie, “Te
ll Daddy to come as fast as he can.” And then the lady downstairs ran up and we called the Htel-Dieu, the public hospital on the Île de la Cité, which is just around the corner, and we also called the American Hospital in Neuilly, and they said they were on their way, too. But the Htel-Dieu got there right away. The doctor ran in and he said, “Well, there’s no heartbeat—nothing.” So he jabbed her with a needle—I think in her chest—God believe me, I don’t know—and then by that time Jim was there and we both went in the ambulance with her.

  From The Merry Month of May, James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971

  She called me again that evening, around about eight-fifteen….

  There was a peculiar sing-song to her voice, a flat quality.

  “Louisa? Louisa? Louisa, are you all right?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I’m fine. I’m going to

  Switzerland.”

  “You’re what?” I demanded. “Switzerland?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Switzerland…. St. Moritz. And you can meet everybody. At least, everyone who is anybody. And you can ski.

  You can ski off the tops of the mountains there. You know. Right off the tops of them, and you can float forever. I’m going skiing….”

  “Louisa,” I said. “Louisa? You’re going skiing?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. I’m going skiing. I’m going skiing,

  Jack. Oh, it’s so beautiful, skiing. Right off the tops of them. And down below there is nothing but the pure, white snow. Pure. And white. No evil, no dirt, no filth. A few cottages of faithful villagers, who love their cows and their land. Don’t want to kill…. Oh, yes,

  I’m going skiing, Jack. Good-bye….” She hung up and the phone went cold stone dead.

  I was in a panic. I didn’t know whether she had flipped her mind or what, but I knew instinctively something bad had happened somewhere…. I ran all the way to their apartment, which was more than three blocks.

  Well, it was a pretty awful scene. A bad scene. In the time it took me to get there after her phone call she had become unconscious and her maid had found her….

  She had left the front door unlocked, so that I was able to barge right in. Had she calculated that, also? So she could leave herself room for me to come and save her? At that moment I thought so.

  Later on, when I saw what she had taken, I changed my mind.

  She had dressed herself for the occasion. She was wearing one of her sheerest, flimsiest robes…. She would do that. Under it she had on a fine-textured white bra through which the two dark spots of her nipples showed like two dark eyes, and below a very brief, very low-waisted pair of panties through which the dark of her triangular bush made itself visibly felt….

  I put my ear to her mouth and nose, but if there was any breathing at all it was very shallow and light….

  On the bedside table there was a large aspirin bottle, totally empty, and there was a large tinfoil plaque of sleeping suppositories, empty also, eight or nine of them. There was also a Nembutal bottle, empty too. I had already noticed that there was a glass and a half empty bottle of vodka on the floor beside her beside the couch. Apparently she had taken enough stuff to kill a whole army. That was when I changed my mind about the unlocked door….

  A French doctor…darted into the apartment carrying his black bag. Apparently he lived around the corner, and the faithful Portuguese had gone to get him….

  “Her heart has stopped,” he said. “I don’t know for how long. I’m giving her a shot of Neosynepheraine. That may start it again. But we must get her to a hospital very fast…. If her heart has stopped for over four or five minutes, she could have serious brain damage. Even if we save her.”…

  The doctor was working over Louisa. And suddenly I became furious. Why are we trying to save her? I thought. If some stupid bitch wants to die, why not let her?…I wanted to go to the big couch and turn her over and kick her in her unconscious ass. What was she doing to us, and how dare she?

  Michael Edwards

  I was meant to be there that night. That’s why I don’t think she ever intended at that stage to commit suicide, because she could have chosen another moment which would have been less likely to be interrupted. I mean, she was expecting me that night. I was flying over from London to see her, we were going to talk about the flat—replacing curtains or something like that—and my plane was late, and when I finally got to 45, quai de Bourbon, I saw the concierge, Madame François, and she said, “Madame est morte, Madame est morte,” and I went up there, and there she was lying rather like The Death of Chatterton, all pallid and everything, on the carpet. Gloria and Jim Jones were there, and the pompiers, the ambulance men, were just about to take her away, to the Htel-Dieu.

  Gloria Jones

  They took her into the hospital and while she was being pumped out, the doctor came out and he said, “C’est très mal.” He said, “What could she have taken?” He told me to go back to her place as fast as I could and bring back every bottle, everything. So I did.

  Dr. Jean Dax

  She had taken a large dose of Nembutal, which is always a bad medication to take, and also vodka.

  Gloria Jones

  It looked very bad for, I don’t know, eight days. Really bad. She was in the—it’s called the chambre de ressuscitation, where they have everybody under cellophane, you know. She was under total—what do you call it? intensive care? She was hooked up. So here was this beautiful red-haired thing, absolutely naked, under the cellophane, you know, with this red pussy—she really had one! So white and so beautiful and it was so awful to see her like that.

  From The Merry Month of May, James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971

  I had never been inside the Htel-Dieu before. It faced on the square called Place du Parvis Notre-Dame just in front of Notre-Dame, which is where they used to pull people apart with horses for having committed some crime or other. The assassin of Henri Quatre was dismembered that way there. Htel-Dieu had a medieval look about it, at least from the outside, and I believe it had been started, a long way back, as a maternity hospital….

  They told me that her condition was very grave. She was surviving, in the new intensive care unit, but she was not showing any signs of recuperating….

  For some reason it seemed this case had been taken on by all the young nurses and doctors of the intensive care unit as a personal challenge….

  They had her under this plastic tent, completely nude. A young nurse was constantly in attendance. Louisa’s body (I hesitate to say

  Louisa) was constantly sweating profusely, and the nurse was constantly mopping her off. There were tubes up both her nostrils, and her arms were strapped down to the bed. Above her left arm hung a glucose bottle, its needle taped into a vein in the arm. If I had ever wondered about her nipples and her bush, I did not have to wonder any more.

  Telegram from James Jones to Antony Baekeland, Undated

  1.45 P.M.

  TONY BAEKELAND CADAQUÉS SPAIN IMPERATIVE YOU CALL ME

  JAMES JONES

  Clement Biddle Wood

  Jim called me and said, “Do you have any idea how I can get hold of Brooks?” and I said, “Now what’s the problem?” and of course he told me, and I said, “Well, maybe he’s left some sort of forwarding address at his bank.” And then Jim said, “How well do they know you at the Morgan Bank?” and I said, “I have quite a good friend there, he’s a vice-president or something.” So I went to him and I said, “I’ve got to find Brooks Baekeland fast,” and he said, “Well, he’s left very strict instructions that his whereabouts are not to be given out to anybody,” so then I said, “Here’s what’s happened,” and he said, “Well, under the circumstances, we’ll tell you where to reach him, but just keep the bank out of it. And if he has to be called, you do it, not some third party.” And so, although I did not know Brooks Baekeland well, it was I, not Jim Jones, who called him in Rome—Jim talked to him later. I said, “Listen, Brooks, I know th
is is an intrusion on your privacy, but Barbara has tried to kill herself.” And he said, “Oh God—again! Clem,” he said, “this is the fourth time that she’s done this. She pulls this on me every time. It’s one reason I didn’t leave an address. It’s an obvious bid for sympathy. She wants me to come running back, but this time I’m not going to budge.” And I said, “Listen, I think it’s more than a bid for sympathy, because if that’s what she intended it to be, Brooks, she’s overdone it, because she damn near died,” and I gave him what details I knew about that—I told him she was in a coma. And he said, “Well, if she dies, you know where I am.” That chilled me, and I said, “Listen, Brooks, for Chrissake, I understand how you feel about this, but I think you might be here because they really think she may be dying.” He said—and this is what really chilled me—he said, “When I met Barbara she was nothing, she was just this sort of redheaded Irish kid. I practically picked her out of the chorus line,” and, well, after that, there really wasn’t much to say.

  Brooks Baekeland

  The fourth and last time Barbara “committed suicide” was signalized to me at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome, where I was stopping on my way out to the Far East with Sylvie in February 1968. Barbara had thought I was still in Paris and would rally round quickly as I had always done before. That did not work this time partly because I was not there and partly because Sylvie called up the Htel-Dieu and spoke to the physician in charge and discovered that Barbara was out of danger, though I knew there is always a risk of permanent brain damage. Later Jim Jones told me over the phone, “She’s been in a coma for thirty-six hours.” But it was Gloria, who took the phone away from him, who told me that I had to come back and to whom I said that I would never reply to that blackmail again and that this time I was never coming back.