by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
When I got to Barbara’s and Phyllis Mason said terrible things had been going on, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about until dinner, which was just Phyllis, me, Barbara, and Tony. Barbara started to taunt Tony about how she knew he didn’t want to be there with her and so on, and finally he got up and took a wine bottle and smashed it against the wall. I was rather shocked by the eruption. And Barbara roared with laughter and seemed immensely relieved, as if she’d gotten the reaction she’d wanted out of him. And so I realized that they were locked into a relationship that depended on their power to hurt each other all the time—they were both living off it. And Phyllis and I—it was during this dinner that I first thought of it—were relegated to being, as it were, spectators.
From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973
In Mallorca he said that he had had a mystical experience when he and his mother had thoughts in common, that their thoughts bounced off one another so that the whole house shook, and that they later considered it would be unsafe to live there.
Cecelia Brebner
According to Antony, they were both on drugs that last summer in Mallorca and she would perform the most extraordinarily immodest feats.
Alastair Reid
I still didn’t think that the impetus for violence was coming from Tony. I felt it from Barbara, and I felt Barbara’s desperation that night. A few weeks later, I saw them at a dinner party in Deyá—this must be by now early August. Barbara came over to me immediately and began to talk. She was talking a great deal then. She was frantic, pouring everything out, complaining—how was she going to manage, what was she going to do, where was she going to go next. These were the problems. But there was no continuity in her preoccupations.
Tony was off in another room playing chess, which is the only apparent connection he had with people in Deyá. Then the guy he was playing with came into the room where we were and said that Tony had turned around toward the wall and was just sitting there in a total catatonic trance. And he sat through that whole evening totally clutched by himself like that. I asked the others there about him and they said that was why they had him over to play chess—to take him out of himself, to get him connected to other people. These people in Deyá, crazy as they probably were themselves, had just accepted Tony and were bearing him along, as small villages always bear their crazies along with them. I mean, it was more or less an accepted fact that Tony was over the edge. And then people began to talk about—I began to hear rumors of—you know, Barbara and Tony, how Barbara had been sleeping with Tony.
I took Barbara aside. She was very humble, she said she didn’t know what to do. I said, “You’ve got to get Tony to a doctor, and there’s somebody I know who can really handle this.” And I gave her the name of Lindsay Jacobs in London.
From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973
He came with his mother to London and was seen by Dr. W. Lindsay Jacobs in October 1972. His impression was that patient suffered from schizophrenia and that his mother appears to have given him his prescribed tranquillisers rather irregularly. She told the doctor that he was reasonably calm though always disturbed by the parents’ impending divorce and by his inability to retain consistent contact with his father.
Heather Cohane
Barbara was having the flat on Cadogan Square painted and she needed a place to stay while she was in London, and she asked Jack and me where we stayed when we came over from Ireland. We always stayed in a place called Eleven Cadogan Gardens, sort of a private hotel, a smart bed-and-breakfast-type place. There was rather a fierce man there called Mr. Reeder who let one in and ran the place. Well, one time we arrived and straightaway Mr. Reeder said, “Some friends of yours were here. The Bakers. I had to call the police.” We drew ourselves back and said, “Well, we don’t know any people called Baker. They can’t have been friends of ours.” But as we went up to our room, Jack said, “I wonder if ‘Baker’ could have been ‘Baekeland.’” So when we went down, we sort of bravely said to Mr. Reeder, “Was it ‘Baekeland’ by any chance?” And he said, “Yes, that was the name.” So we said, “Well, what happened?” and apparently Tony had tried to stick a pen in Barbara’s eye in the hallway.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Sam Green, October 23, 1972
81 Cadogan Square
London, S.W. 1
Dear Sam—
Brooks is arriving from Brittany in a few minutes—met by Michael Alexander at the airport. I am hoping that he will be able to help me with this problem of Tony—who has not been at all well. In any case, something should be resolved in the next few days.
I do not see myself locked up here with him. He has been quite violent—not only with me but with stewards on airplanes, waiters and the like.
I am trying to arrange accommodations for him with the
Countess of Darnley, who lives outside London—if he agrees to staying on here and undergoing treatment. Am seeing the best man in London & one of the best in the world.
Comme d’habitude, I am struggling with this but finally see some hope of a possible solution.
I didn’t speak to you about it on the phone as you have been so very concerned and kind and I am embarrassed to involve my friends any further in my problem. But thank God I have them and they have all been wonderful—especially you and Michael Alexander and Sue Guinness.
Love,
Barbara
P.S. Found the flat impeccable and looking very handsome.
Jim Robertsen
Barbara bought the apartment on Cadogan Square off of Neil Hartley and me—we owned it jointly. Sam Green had said, “I know someone who’s looking for a place, let me introduce you.” Everyone in London wanted the apartment because it was really pretty fabulous, but she said, “I’ll pay cash.” She agreed to give it to us in three checks spaced a couple of weeks apart. We banked the first one, wrote checks on it—and it bounced! I got hold of her right away and she said she was sorry and gave us another check—and that one went through. And a little later she sent around the largest chunk of caviar that any of us had ever seen. I suppose it was probably fifteen pounds of caviar; it came from Fortnum’s and it was in a huge blue tin. I phoned everyone I knew, I mean everyone who I really adored who was crazy about caviar, and said, you know, come over.
That was a very nice, extremely extravagant thing of her to do—especially since this was after the parade had passed for her, you know. I saw very little of her after the sale went through, because the son was such a disaster and they were sort of a package deal. I did have them both to a couple of parties in my new house. During one of them, Tony came over and told me how much he liked me, how sympathetic he found me. Then he phoned the next day and said could we have lunch, and I said, “No, not today,” and he said, “Well, what day?” and I finally said a day.
I took him to a place on the King’s Road called the Arethusa, which is now defunct. It was owned and run by a trendy fellow called Alvaro and it was a very louche sort of club with sort of remnants of the swinging sixties, and therefore people were not easily shocked there, you didn’t pay much attention one way or another—it was always loaded with all sorts of major-and minor-league celebrity types.
So we sat down and I said, “How are you?” and Tony said, “I’m just terrible.” I said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “Well, uh…” He said something like, “Can I speak frankly to you?” And I said, “Ya, I mean, Tony…” And he said, “I really would like to feel I can rely on you as a friend.” I said, “Well, Tony, we scarcely know each other.” I mean, I just did not want to have any sort of friendship with him, quite honestly, because he seemed too much like a ticking time bomb and not anyone who I had any interest in on any conceivable level, you know. And he said, “Well, uh, what’s happening is I’m having an affair with my mother.”
And I remember I said, “Oh, come on—you and your mother do have a very int
imate relationship and that’s fine,” and that sort of thing. He said, “No no no no! I am fucking my mother!” And he said it loud enough, in the Arethusa, which was quite bustling and where people tended to talk fairly loud—for England anyhow—so that several people turned around, and I said, you know, “Relax, Tony.” He said, “Well, that’s it. And I don’t know what to do—I feel desperate.” I said, “It’s awful if you feel desperate about it. Quite honestly, I think any number of things are all right if they don’t hurt people outside the relationship.” And then he sort of said again, he said, “Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you?” I said, “Tony, why do you want to tell me this? I’m sorry it’s happening and that it’s distressing you. But you know, if you don’t want it to continue, then just stop it.” Then he got quite hysterical, and it was very embarrassing—hideous, as a matter of fact.
The point is that I really did not want this information, I did not like the laundering of, you know, his family’s washing all over me, and I did not want it in a club where I was a member.
Oddly enough, at the time I knew of another mother and son who were having an incestuous relationship, which was really quite successful. These, by the way, are the only two cases of mother/son incest that I’m personally aware of. But both mother and son had told me about this affair they were having, and they were anything but anguished over it, they were quite amused by it, in fact. I mean, they ended up being very good friends—it was just something they did for a little bit. And I just thought, you know, this is terribly ironic—that just suddenly, in a period of about six months, I should have these two pieces of information, neither one of which I particularly wanted to have.
So anyway I told him that it seemed to me his life would be far simpler if he didn’t live with his mother. And he said, “Where would I go? What would I do?” And I said, “The world is full of places. Do you have any money of your own?” And he said he really didn’t yet. And I said, “Well, Tony, you could do something that a lot of people in the world do—you could get a job.” He said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Just get a fucking job. Go to Paris, get a job there—go back to the States. Do anything.” I said there were also a lot of people in London who he could probably work out an arrangement with where he could share a flat. I said that the pressures of living with his mother were obviously enormous and he should just put some time and distance between them.
And here we still are in this restaurant, this club, and he’s really I mean not quite shouting but damn near it. And finally I say, because, I mean, the headwaiter and so on are kind of rolling their eyes at me, “Listen, Tony, maybe we should just go for a walk.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “Look, this isn’t something that I really want to go on discussing here.”
There was never any question in my mind that what he was telling me and what I was hearing was true—none whatsoever. And I’m usually fairly skeptical. I mean, there was just the passion with which he said it.
And I know it went on with his mother beyond that point because he did phone me some time later and he said, “Oh God, this thing still seems to be going on.” And I remember saying, “Tony, it takes two people, you know.”
F. Clason Kyle
I met Barbara and Tony less than, as it turned out, a month before her death. I met her first, at a party given for the Victorian Society, on whose American board of directors I served.
I was winding up a two-and-a-half-month stay in London, writing an A-to-Z series on the metropolis’s offbeat travel attractions. I might have had more time for the Baekelands if I hadn’t been pushing to get all the photographs I needed, and I was also anxious to get home to Columbus, Georgia, by Thanksgiving. Anyway, I enjoyed meeting Barbara sufficiently to ask if she would be interested in attending a lecture on Irish Georgian architecture by an old friend of mine, the Honorable—and blue-eyed—Desmond Guinness, who would be speaking in tandem with Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin. The duet was scheduled for a few nights later at the Irish Club, just off Eaton Square. She said she would be delighted to come, and did so, bringing her son along.
I was surprised to see him, because I certainly had not invited him, not even knowing that he existed. But then, the more the merrier, and he added another body to the talk’s attendees.
The next time I saw Barbara was a few nights later when I invited her and Tony to have dinner with me at the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower on Sloane Street. Besides having good meat, the restaurant was convenient to the Baekelands’ flat on Cadogan Square and mine on Wilton Place.
Dinner went well, I recall. And Barbara asked me back to see their penthouse flat and have a nightcap. On the walk there, Tony, who had been relatively quiet during dinner, suddenly opened up and began telling me—because I was a journalist, I guess—about some writing that he had done. He asked if I would be willing to take a look at it. He said it was a mystical tale about a rabbit or an animal of some sort, I can’t remember exactly which.
At their stunningly attractive flat, conversation was vigorous for about an hour while Barbara and I sipped on our brandies. Tony had bade us goodnight immediately upon arrival, courteously saying that he had enjoyed dinner. And I think he had. I had responded, equally sincerely, that I looked forward to reading his story.
Unexpectedly, there was an exceedingly noisy racket from the kitchen area beneath us. Barbara seemed to pay no attention, until Tony—clad only in knit shorts—appeared in the salon, brandishing a large kitchen knife. He ranted about the room, gesturing wildly, but never making a threatening move at either of us. Then he vanished, as quickly as he had appeared. However, some commotion continued below.
The understatement of the century would be to say that I was startled. Barbara had remained passive and composed throughout. Quietly, she explained that he had recently threatened to kill her. “I’m not afraid of him,” she said, more than once.
I said, “Perhaps I should leave. My being here has obviously upset him.” I quickly had assumed that Tony was jealous of my being with his mother, or of her being with me—three can be a crowd. Before I could leave, the phone rang and I heard Barbara apologizing to another tenant in the building for the disturbance.
She then led me down four or five flights of stairs, allaying my fears for her safety and refusing my offer of sanctuary. An elderly gentleman, dressed in bathrobe and pajamas, stood in his doorway on one of the landings. He said, “Mrs. Baekeland, this must not continue. I can’t have my sleep disturbed in this manner.” I think he also added something about his concern for her security. She assured him—and me—that Tony was having treatment and that things were all right.
Alastair Reid
When I heard that Lindsay Jacobs had agreed to see Tony and was going to take up the case, as it were, I thought, What a relief, because he’s a doctor who enjoys considerable fame for picking up people when they’re really on the edge and bringing them back to life.
Dr. W. Lindsay Jacobs
After seeing Antony Baekeland and his mother separately on a couple of occasions, I called the Chelsea Police Station to tell them I thought something was going to happen over at 81 Cadogan Square and could they put a guard there. The officer in charge said that they were not really allowed to do much of anything until something actually happened.
On November 15, 1972, just two days before the matricide, I saw Antony and his mother together and they were jointly willing that he go into hospital. I had arranged for a bed on Monday November 20th.
F. Clason Kyle
The evening that Tony ran around the flat with the kitchen knife proved to be the last time I saw Barbara, except for one day in Knightsbridge shortly before my return to the States. I was in a taxi and she was walking on the sidewalk, wrapped in a dark cape and clutching several shopping bags. I waved to her. She waved back, but I am not certain that she recognized me—it was more the sort of wave one gives to a friendly hand fluttering from inside a passing car, while at the same time experiencing the uncomfor
table feeling that maybe the greeting really had been meant for the stranger strolling two feet to one’s left.
Sue Guinness
I saw Barbara two days before he killed her—I had lunch with both of them, in fact, in London, in their flat. And Tony was definitely in a very peculiar state. He had painted his shoes and all his clothes with gold stars, and he just sat there and rocked backwards and forwards with his arms crossed across his chest. I said to Barbara, “Do be careful,” and she said, you know, “He’ll never harm me.”
Well, I knew firsthand that wasn’t so, because she used to stay with me in Kensington Square when she rented out her flat and, once, Tony turned up from somewhere or other in the middle of a dinner party. He ran upstairs and got her passport and tore it up, then he threw various things down the drain, and then he came into the dining room and insulted her and said that he was going to kill her—in front of quite a number of witnesses. Anyway I got him out of the house—I think he was staying at some hotel that Michael Alexander had got him into.
The following day he came back and he said he wanted to go and see The Devils by Ken Russell—do you remember that film? And Barbara and I agreed to do that with him. He became very peculiar after seeing it—he sat on the stairs of the cinema rocking backwards and forwards. Naturally Barbara got terribly worried and said that she didn’t want to be on her own with him. And luckily he went off.
But the next day he rang up asking for his mother. I said that she had left, which wasn’t true—she had just gone to the American Embassy to get a new passport. He said, “Oh, I see.” And then I went out to do some shopping. When I came back about twenty minutes later, I found Barbara lying on the pavement with a mackintosh rolled up under her head and a great patch of her hair missing on one side—she was looking pretty dazed. There was this rather nice man standing over her—it was he, in fact, who had taken his mackintosh and given it to her.