Savage Grace - Natalie Robins
Page 33
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
After India, we went to Mallorca, as a sort of, you know, winter drop. Brooks had always loved Mallorca—he had once planned to build a large house there with Barbara.
She didn’t know we were there. And then one day we were going off to Ibiza—it’s a half-hour plane trip, that’s all—and who do we meet in the airport—Ernst von Wedel from Cadaqués. Looking very handsome in those days, and very well groomed and so on. He said, “Brooks—my God! What are you doing here? I’ve been staying with Barbara and Tony, and Barbara just drove me to the airport!” And Brooks said, “Well, keep it quiet. If you see her, don’t say anything.” And of course, Ernst, instead of keeping quiet, rushed off to find Barbara, and very soon on the loudspeaker there came: “Mrs. Baekeland wants to see Mr. Baekeland.” When we heard that, we decided, okay, too bad, our luggage is on the plane but we’re not going to take it, we’ll go back to the house, because we wanted to get away from her and we thought that she would wait for us at the departure gate. But I must say Barbara knew Brooks very well. She knew he would leave the airport and go back to his car and so she was waiting for him out in the parking lot. And when they came face to face, Brooks said—he had been always and still is very proud of Barbara’s looks, but she had become plump, and he said—“You don’t look so young, Barbara.” And she said, “You look one hundred years old!” and from then on they had a good fight. I went away, I retired to the car—I didn’t want to listen. You see, Barbara had said to Brooks, about me, “Get that thing away from me!”—that sort of thing. But that’s normal, that’s normal. So then, after that, we returned to our separate houses, Barbara to Deyá and Brooks and I to our village nearby. But now of course Barbara knew that we were living on the same island.
Eventually Tony came to visit us. He stayed for a few days. This was the first time I had seen him since Brooks and I went away together. It was very uncomfortable, very hard. He left messages for Brooks in the flower pots. I found one—it said, “Daddy, please Daddy, come back to Mummy, she’s so unhappy.” He acted like a little eight-year-old—I mean, the way he resented me.
He never wrote to me from Broadmoor but he wrote about me. I existed in every letter to his father. Oh yes. I was the evil woman who was responsible for everything: I had killed his mother, I had killed everybody.
For a while Brooks had been for Tony’s release someday, but then he began receiving these letters that were so frightening. Tony said I would be the first person he would kill when he came out.
Telegram from Kingman Brewster, Jr., United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, to Cyrus R. Vance, Secretary of State, December 1978
MADE REGULAR VISIT TO ANTONY BAEKELAND AT BROADMOOR HOSPITAL ON DECEMBER 20 AND FOUND HIM IN GOOD HEALTH AND REASONABLE SPIRITS HE HAD NO COMPLAINTS BREWSTER
Helen Delaney
Six years after the matricide, just about the time our embassy in London began looking into Tony’s condition at Broadmoor, an English writer by the name of Nell Dunn—she’d already written a best seller called Poor Cow, and a couple of years ago she had a play on Broadway called, I think, Steaming—published a novel called The Only Child that was obviously based on the Baekelands. She hadn’t known them personally or anything, she’d simply read about the tragedy in the newspapers, and I think she may also have known people who knew them. Anyway, in her book, Brooks is “Daniel,” Barbara is “Esther,” and Tony is “Piers.”
From The Only Child, Nell Dunn, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 1978
With Daniel it was need, obsession, and war, but with Piers it was different, delicate, unexpected, sitting on a sofa with him after school—the light dimming outside the window, [the cat] asleep on the knotted rug—she felt sweetness steal over her—a sweetness she had never known with anyone else….
“You’ve tried to run my life.”
“I didn’t want to run your life. I only wanted to make everything beautiful for you, I only wanted you to be happy. Oh come here,
Piers, hold me and comfort me…I ache, I ache so much I’m dying…Please help me!”
“I ache too, Mother.”
“Come here then, let’s comfort one another. Let’s hold one another till we go to sleep. Take me in your arms, Piers.”…
“I suppose the truth is that my mother has always been the love of my life, yet she’s never given me what I needed. Support in being myself. Belief that what matters to me is as important as what matters to her. And then my father hasn’t liked me since I was about twelve. I’m a disappointment to him. We have nothing in common yet we are bound together by steel rope, bound, it seems, not by love and pleasure.”
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Brooks went to see Tony in Broadmoor. The first time, I made him go. I thought it was too impossible to have a child in prison and not go see him, and I hammered and hammered and hammered, and finally he went.
But I shouldn’t say I made him go because somebody who doesn’t want to go won’t go, either. After that first visit he said—but you must understand it as coming from someone who was very hurt rather than someone arrogant—he came back and told me, “Tony has a ghastly cockney accent.” Brooks has a sense of theater, a sense of glamour and so on, and if his son suddenly had a cockney accent, it said a lot. It was a question of how alienated his child had become, how this child was not even his anymore, couldn’t connect to anything anymore.
Brooks Baekeland
There was Tony talking Cheapside after a short time. I was disturbed by how quickly he had been imprinted.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, Undated
Broadmoor
Dear Miwa—
My father came to see me on a surprise visit and it was good to see him but not so good as I had hoped—he is, however, coming again with his wife, and they plan to spend a few days in a nearby hotel and see me every day. There is so much in me that I want to express, and such emotion that wants to come out, you have no idea.
Forgive this short scribble.
All love,
Tony
Letter from Antony Baekeland to James Reeve, December 17, 1978
Broadmoor
Dear James—
I feel so wonderfully well these days—my grandmother Nini will be very pleased with me.
I thought you might be very busy and that would be the reason for your not writing.
I have a feeling things will be very big and tremendous when I get out, but still I have no idea of when that will be. I am hoping very much that you will be able to get away to visit with me in
Valldemosa.
Love,
Tony
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, September 12, 1969
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Dear Michael,
I wish you could come here for a visit. Cruised the Greek Islands in June with a neighbor of yours in the South of France. Bernie Pfriem—nice fellow. Do look him up.
Write!
My love—
Barbara
Bernard Pfriem
It was a two-week cruise. Emily Staempfli had chartered a big yacht. We met the boat at Athens and it took off from there for the islands. We went to Rhodes but we didn’t get to Crete, we went to the northern islands. I almost didn’t go—I was just about to start teaching an art course at Sarah Lawrence and I was hesitating because I wanted to work. But this architect friend of mine who was going, Peter Harnden, got angry with me for even thinking of passing up an opportunity like this. None of us realized at that time that Peter was beginning his lung cancer. It was not long after that that he had a lung removed. And then he got it in the second one, of course—it was a year or two later—and he had a second operation. And then he died. And later his wife Missy, who was also on the cruise, died—of leukemia.
Then there was this friend of Emily’s, a man whose name I can’t remember anymore—a tall, thin character who did little lands
capes and had a house in Spain. He was the only drip on the whole sea voyage. He did nothing, nothing, he didn’t even talk at meals. He’s dead too now.
Then there was Sam Green, a very very good friend of Emily’s who in fact had arranged for her to charter the yacht. I knew Sam very well by the time of that cruise. He was always at Emily’s apartment in New York, and he organized a lot of her parties for her—you know, with Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and so on. He was funny and amusing and chatty.
And then of course there was Barbara, whom I’d not met before. I liked her enormously. She was bubbly and she had sort of a Marilyn Monroe kind of effervescence—and even that kind of flesh, I would say.
That made seven of us. And there was a crew of something like fourteen.
The thing between Sam and Barbara started on that cruise. By then, of course, Barbara was a free agent—her husband had left her. Actually, Sam and I were the only eligible males on board, and she was glorying in the idea of having a romance, which she was desperately in need of. She was always touching you and laughing and being seductive and so on.
There were only two doubles—Emily had, of course, the master state-room, and Peter and Missie Harnden had the smaller one. Then there were two adjoining rooms off to the side. Barbara had one, and Sam and I flipped a coin for the other—to be next to Barbara—and Sam won.
After that, Barbara and Sam were together all the time. They both loved swimming, and whenever we would anchor they would swim long distances together. It was all great fun and games, and warm. Oh, sometimes Barbara would lash into a serious discussion, whether it was about politics or whatnot I can’t remember, but she was vocal. Anyway she seemed to be happy, and I thought she looked radiant. When we docked, the three of us would go off to bazukis, or whatever you call them, and drink and dance.
Sometimes Barbara would talk about Tony. She always said she wanted me to meet him. One night she told me that she had slept with him. She was very honest about it—she said she had done it to break him of his homosexual tendencies. She talked about it as though it were a therapeutic act that she was doing.
I remember at one point she and I were walking together, she was holding my arm, and she told me she was attracted to Sam because he reminded her so much of Tony. “They look alike and they have kindred spirits”—that’s how she put it. I think she was sort of apologizing to me for why she was having this affair with Sam and not with me, because, in a sense, we had kind of an innocent flirtation going.
And then after the cruise, she and Sam went off together to meet Tony.
Sam Green
It was a geezer trip, and Barbara was the only one who was not a geezer. She was beautiful, she was lively, she was imaginative, she was exciting. And every time I would turn a corner or go to a quiet dark place on the deck, there she’d be.
Well, she was kind of wonderful. I keep thinking that all of that froufrou and title-dropping was a part of my growing up, which lasted for a long, long time. I was twenty-nine when I met her—she was, I guess, about forty-seven—and I hadn’t been around that much. I was directing this funny little museum of contemporary art down in Philadelphia. I mean, I’d never been on a yacht before!
On the cruise I learned that she was recovering from a bad time with her husband. We became great friends, and I didn’t think that it was anything more serious than that. I mean, I was disinclined to have an ongoing affair with a woman needy of having an affair.
She told me she had a big house in Mallorca. She said, “You must come.” And it was convenient—I think I had ten days, or something, to kill. She had told me over and over again about Tony, how wonderful and spiritual he was, how kind of confused he was and how he didn’t have anyone to influence him as interesting as me, and wouldn’t I please come and look at him and, you know, sort of help him out. Well, I was more interested in seeing the nice house in Mallorca.
On the boat she had presented it as a palace, a major palace. What it was was a run-down finca. Miramar, it was called. It was set on a wonderful precipice, about two thousand feet above the sea—it had the best vista in all of Mallorca. It also had a thirteenth-century chapel, and formal gardens but they were all overrun with weeds. I mean, it was a gone estate. And Barbara was renting it for what it was worth—which was nothing. I mean, a hundred a month or something. And she’d cajoled this wonderful servant family, Maria and her husband Sebastian, into providing food and doing this and that—and never paid them!
While I was there she became very possessive of me, and after I left she inundated me with letters everywhere I went.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Sam Green, August 15, 1969
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Darling Sam—
How much we miss the pleasure of your company. Come back soon.
The night you left, the light was all gold & mauve and a wind came up. Everything seemed sad. But then the next morning we did the I Ching and it told us that a “friend” would be crossing the great water to join us soon and that we would vanquish weakness by joining and multiplying our power.
Tony liked you so much. I’m glad. I do, too. I hope he finds his way—maybe you can help him to.
Thank you for all the incredibles and the grass. I’m so happy I’ve had a trip and you’re right—things don’t look quite the same. Will they ever?
Tony is off at Deyá. Wuss is always hungry. Everybody wonders why you went away. Tell us.
Love—
Barbara
Letter from Sam Green to Barbara Baekeland, August 15, 1969
Saint-Tropez 9 France
Dear Barbara,
Well, I certainly hope that things have calmed down since I left Mallorca. I have begun to commence my own life, and am enjoying it. I went from Palma to Nice and spent a great night in a hotel near there. The next day I arrived at Tony Richardson’s little village above Saint-Tropez, where I plan to spend about another week. Then I go to Athens for my cruise with Cécile de Rothschild.
Tomorrow I go alone to Jeanne Moreau’s for lunch.
We had a very strange visit, didn’t we? I have done nothing but think about it. Heaven help us, what a situation! The combined efforts of de Sade and Tennessee Williams couldn’t have done it justice. The awareness-heightening of the drug only intensified the possible repercussions. That night of the wind I got up five times and bolted my doors. In that beautiful place, that peaceful, enchanted, lovely place—to think that I disturbed it! I was truly afraid.
To love Tony is irresistible. The burden he is bearing is almost too much. I hope he has the strength to hold it until someone comes to take it from him. It’s tragic that Brooks is so small that he can’t help him—because Brooks is what’s needed. When I think of the despair he leaves in his wake, it makes me murderous. But Brooks, eventually, is his own problem, no one else’s. All I have to offer you is liking and some understanding. Please accept them. There are many kinds of love.
Sam
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Sam Green, August 22, 1969
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Darling Sam—
Got your letter yesterday. I had three (maybe four) of the happiest days ever with you. You were a merry and adorable companion and Tony & I both adored having you. I’m sorry you were feeling oppressed and attacked (why else lock—bolt!—your door?). No one will ever disturb you or force gifts upon you that you do not wish to give or accept in this house—our house. Our time together was not a playlet of Williams or a monstrous evocation of de Sade—but an acting out in a truly classical & beautiful way of a very old myth. Because we are veterans of this century we were unable to be really free and it is perhaps better that we were not, for some of us have fragile psyches and the strain would have been great. I do not want you to blame yourself. Both Tony & I love you and you mustn’t make something that has (if unconventional) radiance take on a sordid backwash of tired old F
reud.
I would be happier if Tony were to fall in love with a beautiful & gifted girl. I would like him to experience marriage, fatherhood, the really extraordinary harmony and fitting and complementing that can exist between a man & woman. I had it once and it is a rare and beautiful thing. Perhaps he must go through other friendships first—I don’t know. Anyway he is 22 and must make his way in his own way. I can only offer him love and confidence, which is what I have tried to do.
If you want to come back—please do. If you feel our situation is too “charged,” tell me so.
You’re very honest, Sam, and it is a joy for me to have you as a friend. You are a good one and I believe you will always be my friend. You could be Tony’s, too—and you could help him. He is worth it.
Whatever I once had has been squandered in a reckless wanton way, but I do have still a capacity for love. I think you love me (in one of your ways) and, as you so wisely said, there are many kinds of love—to give and receive them can be only good. So don’t fret.
Keep in touch with us. Maybe you should take a year off and come to live here?
Anyway thank you for your dear letter—and thank you for bringing forth in me that which I think is the finest & best I have to give.
We miss you—Betty Blow is here now but it is not the same as having you. We were so peaceful & happy together and needed no one else. It was a special time.
Do write.
My love—
Barbara
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, August 24, 1969
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Dear Sam—
There is a great deal I would like to ask and tell you but it is a peculiar thing that whenever I sit down with a pen my ideas seem to fade away. I will try, however. I hope that perhaps you can help me. I realize that what I must do involves loving another person and since I have never had the slightest attraction to women, this means that it must be a man. I think that much of my development stopped at an infantile stage, perhaps to enable me to go on with a certain kind of thinking which otherwise I would have been unable to continue. Anyway I am wondering how I can change this now. I really do not think I can go on much longer. The trouble is that when I am humiliated I no longer feel very amorous which is quite natural I feel. Please forgive these personal matters but I must discuss it with someone and I am sure you understand. As long as I feel bad and nasty and mean, which all these ghastly love songs make me feel—“Baby why did you leave me,” blah blah blah—it is difficult for me to want to hear those screaming imploring voices, and difficult for me to feel worthy and nice enough to touch another person.