Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  David Mead

  When I heard Tony had killed his mother, I felt like I’d been at the murder. The year before, out in East Hampton, Barbara all of a sudden raised her voice at me—you know, just over nothing—and Tony came flying in. He was absolutely furious, I couldn’t believe how mad he was. And then instantly it was between the two of them, and I no longer mattered. And they started getting madder and madder at each other, and it got uglier and uglier, and finally the knife point came. He got a knife. I managed to wrestle it out of his hand, but you know what I’m saying—this was the dress rehearsal.

  From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973

  He is a well-built, physically healthy young man with an occasional marked stammer. He appeared normally anxious and depressed for a man in his situation but denied feeling depressed or ever having contemplated suicide. He gave his account with some natural confusion about times and places. On the day of the offence he had a conversation on the telephone in which he heard some reference to his having fallen down a lift shaft; and later began to wonder if this had occurred. After a minor argument with his mother she started to write a letter. He could not read it but knew the meaning and this produced a degree of rage which he had never experienced before. She did not say or do anything to resist his assaults.

  Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

  Barbara wrote to me in Turkey just before he killed her and said, “Rosie, you have such a wonderful influence over Tony, a sort of Nini influence.” Nini, of course, is Barbara’s mother, Tony’s grandmother. She said, “Will you come to London and live in the flat with him for the winter?” I got the letter on the Wednesday and I was making up my mind. On Thursday one of my daughters, Mandy, who’d had dinner with them the night before, sent me a telegram saying, “Mummy, be careful. Things are very difficult in Cadogan Square.” And on Friday he killed her. So.

  And I’ll tell you the other thing. He had a little Pekingese he adored that got lost in the mountains somewhere in Italy when he was a child. He was a child for a long time with us, you see. And this dog got lost and they were desperate, and finally they found it. And after it died, years later, he kept its collar, like Jinty, my eldest daughter, did with her favorite dog. And Barbara took this collar and threw it out of the window into Cadogan Square, and that was what I understood was the thing that was the end.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Cornelia Baekeland Hallowell, December 30, 1972

  Dear Grandmother,

  I just got your letter. I will try to explain as best I can what happened. You know I loved and still love and adore my mother more than anyone in the world. During the time preceding what happened a lot of rather strange things were happening. I think my mind was slightly wacky and I was very much under my mother’s powerful influence. I felt as though she were controlling my mind. Anyway that afternoon my mother was out and I had a strange telephone call from a friend of ours who lives in Wales. She told me that I had fallen down an elevator shaft. I thought this rather strange and yet it had a profound effect on me. She asked me if she could come around for a drink that evening. I told her yes, that we would be glad to see her. Mummy came back a little later and told me that she was annoyed that I had asked our friend to come so early. I can’t remember exactly what started the fight but it began in her bedroom. Then she went into the dining room where the maid was ironing and began to write something on a piece of paper. I can’t remember what it was she wrote but it infuriated me and I tore it out of her hand and tore it up. Then she ran into the bedroom where I hit her, then she ran into the kitchen. I ran after her and stabbed her with the kitchen knife that was lying on the table. As I ran to call the ambulance I saw the maid just leaving the flat. The ambulance took hours to come and by the time it came my mother was dead. It was horrible—I held her hand and she would not look or speak to me. Then she died. The ambulance men arrived and I was taken away in a dreadful state. For several days I didn’t know where I was. Past memories kept flooding into my mind and I felt that I was reenacting parts of my former life.

  Nevertheless I feel better now and even feel that a great weight has been removed from my shoulders. An odd thing is that she told me that I would kill her this summer several times. I thought this the most unlikely thing in the world.

  I wish I could remember what it was she wrote on that piece of paper.

  Love,

  Tony

  Helen Rolo

  I remember the knives, I do remember the knives. I rented that apartment from Barbara Baekeland for a couple of weeks in 1972. It was within a few months of when she was killed. I didn’t even know her particularly well. I thought she was attractive and charming and that she lived a very happy kind of life—I mean, to have an apartment in New York and a house in Spain and also an apartment in London. A happy-from-the-outside-looking-in life, that is—because I remember when I called to discuss the details of renting the place she suddenly had to hang up. She said, “I’ll call you back—I’m having a problem with my son.”

  It was a rather grisly apartment. You had to walk and walk and walk to get up there, you just went up vertically at a ninety-degree angle, up and up and up, at least four flights. I knew it wasn’t an elevator apartment but I certainly hadn’t expected to walk up that far. And when you finally got to the landing and opened the door, having walked all that way—opened the door to the apartment gasping—you really had to have a strong heart!—and a strong hand to carry your luggage—you walked in and collapsed when you saw that there was another bunch of steps to go up—it was a duplex!

  And it was spooky because in the foyer, straight on in front of you, was a portrait of her son with a light on it. I don’t know how old he was in the picture. He was fairly young, I’d say not even a teenager. I’d never met him, I’d never even seen him. But there was his portrait to greet me right inside the apartment.

  Directly to the left of the foyer was a doorway to the kitchen. I remember there were pretty cut-crystal glasses—sort of little scotch-and-water glasses. And later of course, I remembered those knives. I had used those knives—long ones, short ones.

  To the right of the foyer was a bedroom. It was the only bedroom that I can think of. It was the only room that seemed a little bit cozy. There was another room off the foyer and that was a room that I never even walked into except twice, I think. Once I walked in and said, Oh, I never want to go in there again, and then I think I went in there again to see whether I didn’t want to go there again. I kept the door shut. That was the spookiest room of all. I assumed it was the dining room because there was a dining table. I don’t know why but there was a lot of small tight grillwork around—it reminded me of what you might see in Morocco, but without the sun. It was ice-cold in there. There was a small cot, somewhere on the side. Maybe that’s where the son slept. It was a hard room, that’s the only way I can describe it.

  Oh, and the color of it—oh, a horrible horrible…I’m looking at a bottle of Montclair mineral water with a dark blue top, a mean blue, and the whole room was a mean sinister blue, very gloomy and dark.

  The living room was the whole top floor of the house. You put the light on and the first thing you saw was a decapitated bull’s head with horns. There were a couple of Louis Quinze chairs of sorts, and a couple of floppy leather beanbags. The carpeting was brown, the room gave the impression of a lot of brown. And then there was a bench, a park bench, one of those old metal or steel benches from the seventeenth century—with a cold seat if you sat down on it. I’m beginning to visualize things that I’m sure weren’t there, like a street lamp. I don’t know, that just came into my mind. Because of the park bench, I guess. It might have been there, too.

  It was a room without much natural light. The windows were slightly below waist-level, I guess because it was the top of the building. And not such a nice view of the gardens, either.

  In a funny way it was a rather glamorous room. I gave a small cocktail party there, as I
recall. I hardly ever used it—it wasn’t a room you wanted to sit in.

  But most of all I remember the knives. I wouldn’t have remembered them particularly, except after I heard they’d been used for purposes other than those they were usually used for, I did remember. There was nothing unusual about any of the knives. I remember a bread knife—a long bread knife, with a wooden handle. There weren’t that many knives. It was a very minimally outfitted kitchen, so certain things you remember, I guess.

  They were knives I was handling, for Christ’s sake! I used to cut lemon peel for martinis with them. The idea that I had used the knife or even touched the knife that had killed somebody made me sick. I’ve never even killed a little insect. I can’t even do that very well. It was a terrifying awful feeling to think that I’d touched a weapon.

  Miwa Svinka-Zielinski

  A son killing a mother is Greek tragedy but this is much worse—much much worse. I think that she killed him.

  Samuel Parkman Shaw

  That’s a real question—who killed who. It was a real dance, a minuet.

  2

  IN CUSTODY

  AROUND FIVE P.M. ON FRIDAY, 17, 1972, Tony Baekeland was escorted unhandcuffed from 81 Cadogan Square by two police officers; it is not the custom in London to use handcuffs unless a person is violent when arrested.

  He sat silent and self-absorbed as the unmarked car made its way through the narrow streets of Chelsea, one of London’s most fashionable and historic districts. Richard III and Sir Thomas More once lived there, as did the writers Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde and the painters Turner, Sargent, and Whistler. Bounded on one side by the Thames, Chelsea is bordered on another by the smart shops of Sloane Street with which Barbara Baekeland had felt strong kinship, and by the boutiques, restaurants, and discotheques of the bohemian King’s Road that had so fascinated her son.

  Tony Baekeland walked through a side entrance into the modern-style Chelsea Police Station. He was told that he was being detained pending his first appearance in lower court on Monday morning, November 20. He was then taken to his cell. It contained, in addition to a toilet, a bench bed with a regulation foam mattress and a couple of blankets. “In view of the charge,” a Scotland Yard official recollects, “he was watched closely to make sure he’d not harm himself.”

  The next day the London papers headlined the matricide. “The life of the wealthy American woman who had a villa in Spain and apartments in Paris and New York ended as she died screaming from the blows of a knife attacker in her penthouse near Buckingham Palace,” the Evening News reported. “The 50-year-old—she looked much younger, said neighbours—was in the American film business,” the story erroneously went on, “and her work as a film executive took her all over the world on locations of films about romance, adventure and murder.” It was true that Barbara Baekeland had her flickering moment in Hollywood, making a screen test with Dana Andrews, but that had been a long time before; and she had indeed been at the center of a world of romance and adventure all her life, only never in the capacity of a film executive.

  In New York, the Daily News bannered: “MOM IS SLAIN: NAB YANK SON.™ The New York Times headlined: “BRITISH CHARGE AMERICAN, 26, WITH SLAYING OF MOTHER.”

  In Barbara Baekeland’s hometown, the Boston Sunday Herald quoted her Cadogan Square neighbors: “‘They appeared to be wealthy globetrotters. They were both witty and charming. She was very attractive and looked about 30. She had a wardrobe full of expensive furs…. Ambulance men said the flat was in a mess and it was difficult to recognize her.’”

  By now, reports of the murder were being circulated in all the many places the Baekelands had lived, and friends were rallying to console Barbara Baekeland’s widowed mother, Nina Fraser Daly, in New York.

  Nina Daly

  Oh, Barbara was beautiful, I thought. She was noted as a beauty, you know. She had lovely hair. I used to have naturally curly hair when I was little, but no more. I’ll be ninety in two days, the 27th of May. That’s old, you know. Barbara’s hair was an orangy red, and mine was just red but it wasn’t that sharp red you see on redheads that stares you right in the face. And Tony was another little redhead.

  Barbara was a natural beauty. She was so natural herself. And she loved people. Oh yes. She was so sweet and kind and loving. She was a wonderful daughter. I miss her so. I used to see her every day. She was a great companion. We were very close, very close.

  She worshiped him. And he loved her. He loved her more than he loved anybody. His mummy. He loved me next, and then he loved his father next, after me. He loved his father but they weren’t as close as Barbara and Tony or Tony and I. His father wasn’t one of those fathers that goes gaga all the time, but he was good to him and gave him what he wanted and everything that he needed—a bicycle and things like that.

  I worshiped Tony. He was a dear. He was always trying to do something for you. I lived nearby. I used to walk down the street with him. The happiness he gave me! We’d have lovely walks together, through the park. He loved nature. He could tell you the name of every bird that ever flew. He used to draw birds all the time.

  She took him everywhere. Everywhere she went she took him. She never tried to get rid of him. I was always ready to take him. We both loved him the same. She was a good mother. She just had the one child. I wish she had had more children.

  She was a good wife, too. I love her husband. Brooks. He was awfully kind to me. Just like a brother. He’s six-four, and so good-looking. The grandfather invented the plastics, you know.

  Barbara did all these paintings. Everything in the apartment here she did. She painted so well, and she painted quite a lot, too.

  That’s Cape Cod up there. We went there as children in my family. Always went to Cape Cod. There was a big thunderstorm coming up, and I walked over to where she was, and she said, “I’m painting that now, Mother.” And I said, “Oh, yes, I see, dear.” So I always loved that picture. There was a great big cloud just like that in the sky that day, you’d think it was coming down and sitting on top of your head.

  She was left-handed, you know. She couldn’t do anything with her right hand. She just started being left-handed and I didn’t change her. I’d rather she be right-handed. I think it’s so natural. I can’t do anything with my left hand. It seems so awkward to see a lefty. I’d see Barbara turning the paper and writing with that left hand. I was afraid Tony was going to be, but he wasn’t. We didn’t try to change him, but he turned out to be a righty. Oh, Barbara worshiped him.

  Michael Alexander

  He told me that there was a bit of a struggle or something and that he got the knife into her—one single thing. He happened to do it in the wrong place, that’s all—the heart. And then, he told me, he had sort of a problem about what the hell was he going to do about it, and this shocked me—he said he thought about putting it out of his mind!

  Of course, his granny was always encouraging him to think it wasn’t his fault. She didn’t believe he could possibly have done such a thing. Because he was such a gentle boy, you know. Her blue-eyed boy.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  Nini was just devastated. I used to go and see her after Barbara’s death—until she became too difficult. She kept going on about Sylvie, how all this never would have happened if Brooks hadn’t run off with “that bitch, that bitch, that damn bitch.” On and on—about how first “that bitch” took Tony away and then she took Brooks.

  Brooks Baekeland

  After years of resisting, and after wearing out four lawyers, starting with Louis Nizer, Barbara had finally agreed to give me my freedom. When Sylvie and I received the telephone call in the house I had built in Brittany telling us that Barbara was dead, we thought she had committed suicide, for it was November 18, 1972, our thirtieth wedding anniversary. “I give you your freedom and my life”—that would have been typically Barbara.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  When this happened, Brooks’s cousin, Baekeland Roll
, and his wife were staying with us. I always took the telephones because Brooks was too grand-ducal to ever answer the telephone, so I answered and it was the police in London who said, “We believe that Mrs. Baekeland has been killed.” I came back to Brooks with this news and we, neither of us, believed it really. Brooks said, “She’s again found a way to get at me.” And then they called again, and it was true. This time they said, “We believe her son is involved.” And I put down the telephone. I was frightened. I was so frightened I remember very well I fell into a sweat—you know, I smelled like a bad animal—it was something so abominable, and I rushed upstairs to the cousins.

  It was a horrible thing for me, but for Brooks…he suffered the way you could not imagine. Brooks went out hollering in the garden. He was desperate. He was horrified that Barbara had died. That the boy had done it was something else.

  We left Brittany and we went together to London. Brooks didn’t have the heart to go and identify her, so it was Baekie Roll who did. Brooks never saw her body, but what his cousin saw was that Barbara had a black eye, and he told Brooks, and I think that hurt Brooks more than anything—that she would have had a black eye on top of everything.

  Brooks Baekeland

  He told me when he returned from the identification that there were a lot of bruises—he had tears in his eyes. He had never liked Barbara but was deeply affected by this visual evidence of brutality.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  We were staying in a hotel that we thought wouldn’t be too conspicuous, because of the press and so on—Blake’s Hotel—but it turned out anyway there were a lot of rock-and-roll stars staying at the same time. And Brooks kept seeing lawyers and police and so on because of the inquest. And afterward, he had her cremated. She had been three weeks in the morgue.

  Meanwhile Brooks had been given everything that was in her apartment by the police. Every piece of her mail he made me read, because he said it would hurt him too much to read it. And then there were the cassettes! Barbara had made a whole series of cassettes of a novel she was writing. The police said they were very damaging documents for the Baekeland family and he should take them. Can you imagine writing about going to bed with your son!