Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  In Brittany we didn’t have a cassette machine in the house, we had a record player, but we had a cassette machine in the car. Brooks played them in the car. For hours and hours! Yes. Until I broke down in front of him and he got earphones so he could listen to them without me having to listen.

  Gloria Jones

  Jim and I were horrified. It was the worst thing we ever heard. We were in Paris and we went to London and tried to help. I called Scotland Yard and I said, “I think I’d like to talk to you.” So these two marvelous policemen came, and we were staying at a wonderful hotel, not Claridge’s, the other good one, the really good one—the Connaught. And there was a bar there—you know, all stocked—and they said, “We don’t drink as a rule but, you know, all right,” so we gave them a couple of drinks and they were thrilled with us and we all sat around and I said, “I think you ought to know that she probably aggravated Tony. Can I give some money for cigarettes for him? I want to help him, you know. Can you get him a lawyer?” They wouldn’t let me see him. It was only the day after or two days after. They said they were doing everything.

  I asked if I could bury her, you know, because I felt that Brooks wouldn’t do anything about that. They said I couldn’t. Brooks did have her cremated later. I think her mother has the ashes.

  Barbara Curteis

  Jim Jones wrote a novel about the Baekelands, you know—The Merry Month of May. But he wrote it in 1970, before the denouement.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Ethel de Croisset telephoned us that Tony had killed Barbara, and I felt shock and horror.

  You know, Mr. Wuss was a present of ours to Barbara in 1963—one of five Siamese born that year to our own beloved cat, Astarte, whose son Fabrice, Wuss’s full brother, I buried only last year at the fine age of twenty-one. Couldn’t we all wish for such a peaceful and late age!

  Just a few days after hearing about Barbara, I bumped into Peter Matthiessen at the Styrons’ and he said to me—we said to each other—almost simultaneously we said—“Are you ever going to use it? Are you ever going to use it?” Use it in a book, you know. And we both said no. Peter said, “I can’t do it, I don’t think you can do it. I’d keep away from it.” You know, there’s only one title for the Baekeland story and it’s already been used—An American Tragedy.

  Cleve and I met them at a party in New York in the middle fifties and we made this passionate kind of instant friendship with this very flamboyant girl with red hair and a huge smile and all those very prominent big teeth. I always remember the mouth—my mother, Tatiana Liberman, would say, “She’s very pretty but she has too much gum.” And here was this handsome millionaire that she was married to, Brooks Baekeland. And the first impression we got was that they were the ideal couple.

  In the summer of 1960 we shared a house with them in Italy. Tony was just about to turn fourteen, and he was ideally beautiful—you know, glistening and angelic and with beautiful manners and a sweet smile. When we were a newly married couple in New York trying to have children, Cleve and I used to say to each other, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our child looked like that!”

  Rose Styron

  We had a house in Ansedonia during the summer of 1960 and the Baekelands were neighbors. We had mutual friends, Gloria and Jim Jones, who had told us they were there, but they looked us up, I think. Well, they were very good-looking, very sociable, fairly snobbish—I would say Barbara particularly liked the grand Italian life.

  I liked Tony. I really liked him a lot. He was a very lonely but self-sufficient boy, and I liked his gentleness with animals. I remember going up to his room a couple of times and he had all sorts of snakes and animals. I liked the fact that he seemed to want to hide from whatever else was going on in the family and keep to himself. The two or three times we were over there I just found myself gravitating to him. I guess I probably knew him better than I knew Brooks or Barbara, who I didn’t have much connection with.

  I remember Gloria talking to me a lot about Barbara. She was always telling me what the latest chapter was in the Baekeland saga. And one detail after another was so fantastic.

  Gloria Jones

  After Barbara died, Muriel Murphy, this really great friend of all of ours, sent me one of Barbara’s Chanel dresses. Barbara really knew how to dress, you know—she always had the real Chanel. I guess Muriel had gotten the dress from Mrs. Daly. I was in Haiti, staying at the Oloffson Hotel, and Muriel asked Bill Styron, who was on his way there, to deliver this package to me. I opened it and put the dress on and it was bloodstreaked all down the back. It was the kind of dress you would wear to be stabbed in. Later I asked Muriel, “Why did you send this dress to me?” And she said she hadn’t noticed the bloodstains. I was so freaked that I buried the dress, I actually dug a hole in the ground out in the back of the hotel. That dress is buried in voodoo country, in Haiti behind the Oloffson Hotel.

  William Styron

  I didn’t know exactly what was in the damn package. I knew it was some kind of garment, but I didn’t have any idea that it had any bloodstains, nor was I present when Gloria opened it. But I’m sure Gloria is accurate.

  I remember in Ansedonia that summer there was a lot of partying, a lot of going out on boats, and Brooks had one of those Mercedes sports cars, and there were a lot of drives in the Mercedes sports car with Tony around. And Tony was an absolute young Adonis—if you can be an Adonis at that age. I mean, he was a beautiful kid, he was just charming, and I had no inkling certainly at that time of anything potentially weird. I do think possibly I sensed a “Mother’s darling boy” relationship—not a terribly uncommon relationship with an only child. But I thought he was terrific. Bright. A little withdrawn, maybe. But he was just a figment to me, because I never really got to know him outside of this vision of this beautiful lad—great swimmer and that sort of thing. And a serious young man.

  I had the sense of a small little family, a couple and their lonely boy, who were sort of misplaced out of some Scott Fitzgerald novel. Barbara and Brooks seemed a bit like Daisy and Tom Buchanan but in a different era and somewhat fish out of water for that reason.

  I remember exactly where I was when I learned about the murder. I’m in the room right now, up here in Roxbury, Connecticut, where I was that Sunday, whatever date it was. And I was just leafing through the Sunday Times, as we all do, and there was a column of print that said something like “Young man stabs mother in London” and of course the names were right there, and it just shocked the hell out of me. Had I known more about them, their connection, I probably would have been less astounded. But I knew nothing of any stirrings or rumblings psychologically.

  God, it’s a fascinating story, and the horror of that kid is classic Greek. I do think that the terrible quality of the whole story has got some resonance about our period in some curious way. It has some very large metaphorical meaning.

  Brendan Gill

  I was trying to remember when it was I first met Barbara and her husband and it was a night when Rose and Bill Styron were there and I think it was at Tom and Sarah Hunter Kelly’s house in New York, on Seventy-first Street. I remember talking with Brooks about the fact that he had jumped into the Peruvian jungle. He was a true adventurer, the opposite of an adventuress. I was fascinated by his account, also because of my interest in his grandfather and Bakelite—that’s just my kind of thing: inventions, making good in America. Brooks seemed tall and heroic because—well, it would be like Lindbergh. My definition of a hero is a man who tests himself by a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last; he’s not competing in the world at all, he’s competing only against himself. And that’s what it seemed to me Brooks was doing—testing himself.

  Barbara was a very good-looking girl. I also liked her spirit. She was of an affirmative disposition. She always made you feel good, so that made her a wonderful hostess, of course. I think one of the reasons a great partygiver like Ben Sonnenberg liked her so much is that he liked women who were sunny, who were never dow
n, who didn’t need to be brought up to something, and he probably also admired her because he always admired women who were adventuresses—I mean, women who had succeeded—and she evidently had been one of those.

  Pico Harnden

  I was living around Europe at the time and I used to call my mother and my younger brother, Mishka, in London every two or three days to see how they were doing, and one day my mother said, “It’s finally happened.” And I said, “What happened?” And she said, “Barbara has been killed by Tony.” And I—I started laughing. Because everybody knew it was only a matter of time before it happened and finally it did happen and, well, you know, it was so absurd it was almost funny. But my mother was a very religious person and she got very angry because I was laughing, but she was laughing, too, because even my mother, who was the least cynical person you could find, knew how the story was going to end. There was no other ending to the story.

  Ethel Woodward de Croisset

  You know, there was a charming woman, Missie Harnden, a Russian princess, born a Vassiltchikov—her husband was an architect who had built me a house in Spain—and after Barbara died she came to see me. She had been to this cocktail party on Cadogan Square the night before Barbara was assassinated. There was this crowd of people there and the boy was evidently looking in some strange bright-eyed way into space, and Missy thought, I must warn Barbara. She had this feeling, you see. And then she had not done it, and now she felt terribly badly. She was a very—could one say puritanical?—Russian. You know how Russians are when they’re really good people—they’re so straight. She was somebody that was so straight and so good, you know, and she felt she’d failed Barbara.

  Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras

  I called Saul Steinberg when I heard—just to talk about Barbara to someone. It’s so much easier in a small town when something like this happens. People gather in the street and you can rush out and talk about these things. In New York you can’t do that. Saul spoke of Barbara’s whiteness, her white skin, her Irish skin, white lovely skin, red hair—her fresh marvelous look.

  Jasper Johns

  She was beautiful.

  Andy Warhol

  Oh yeah, I remember her. But after I heard how she got killed I just wanted to forget her.

  Robert Beverly Hale

  I was simply having a cup of coffee in Chock Full o’ Nuts and there it was in the evening Post. It was a great shock. I can’t tell you how attractive Brooks and Barbara were and how they attracted people. I never met anybody more charming than that couple when they were organized and underway. Way back, of course.

  William Thayer

  I was over in London painting Ambassador Annenberg when it happened and I saw it in the headlines and realized, My God, that’s Tony Baekeland! I even thought of going and doing something, then I thought, Well, it’s none of my business really—I mean, she’d been killed and there was nothing I could do, and he’d been hauled off to jail. He was a damn good artist, too—awfully good.

  Michel Negroponte

  I bumped into him in the elevator about a year before—my parents lived in their building in New York—and he invited me up to their penthouse for a drink. He I guess at that point had just come back from Paris and was going to some art school in New York. I remember I just talked to him for about an hour in his room—he had this tiny little room. And I remember being astounded by his paintings, which were so incredibly bizarre. Some of them I think were even portraits of his mother—decapitated and with serpents sort of wrapped around her neck. And those were paintings that he had done recently. I think two or maybe even three were actually hanging in the living room. And then a few months after that I was going up in the elevator and I saw the headline in, you know, the Daily News or whatever it was—“Wealthy mom slain by…”—and, I don’t know why, it just flashed—I had this strange feeling that it was the Baekelands. And then I looked down the page and it was, in fact. There was something about maybe just being in that elevator where I had run into Tony, especially because I couldn’t forget those paintings. It seemed to me that the entire series of events that happened afterward were really kind of mapped out in them.

  Ambrose Gordon

  I read it here in the Austin, Texas, newspaper, where the name Baekeland was all garbled, but the ages and details checked out enough so that I was pretty sure it must be them, and then sometime later it was confirmed when Brooks wrote me about it. The newspaper account said they looked—that she looked extraordinarily young and that they looked more like—that they didn’t look like mother and son so much as like…the newspaper certainly couldn’t have used the word “lovers,” but it at least planted that suggestion in my head.

  Richard Hare

  It was a Sunday morning, I was in East Hampton, and I usually get up at seven, seven-thirty, and walk to the village to get my Times. And when I got back home I opened it up to read with my breakfast and I hadn’t turned more than two pages when I saw this article datelined London. Well. I said to my wife, “Anne, you won’t believe what I’ve just read in the paper!” Then the telephone rang and it was Liz Fondaras. She said, “Richard, have you read the New York Times?” I said, “Have I! I was just going to dial you.” And of course we commiserated with each other. And five seconds after we hung up Barbara Hale called. I was just about to call her. She said, “Richard, can you believe it?” I said, “I can believe it. How about you?” She said, “Well, I certainly can believe it. It was bound to happen any minute!” Well anyhow, we all lived through that.

  Will Davis

  What month was she killed? November? My own child had just been born and I can remember saying to my wife, “I can’t shake this Baekeland thing.” I mean, it was like something out of the Oresteia. The closest thing I ever experienced to it is the first time I saw morgue activity—autopsies and stuff. I was fine during them but when I got outside I couldn’t get the formaldehyde out of my nostrils, I couldn’t eat red meat for weeks.

  Then, way after she was murdered, Brooks sent me this photograph of her in the mail. God, I’d kill that man if I saw him again, I’d absolutely take a brick and kill him in the street! It was a color photograph, and he had written on the back, “From Barbara the lion-hearted.” Because that was what I used to call her—a lioness. Women never mind being called either lions or tigers. They don’t want to be called armadillos or camels, but lions and tigers are fine.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Barbara was a fine animal but quite untamable. Her two leading—and I think great—characteristics were pride and courage, both highly exaggerated and therefore dangerous. She was a born fighter and died in battle.

  Francesca Draper Linke

  I dreamt that I saw Barbara—she was in this incredible penthouse apartment somewhere and we were talking and it was like she was the one that was alive and Tony was the one that had been killed. It was very strange because it was almost like in the act of what had happened she had been released—she was happy, she was happier in this dream than I’d ever seen her in life.

  Richard Hare

  The memorial service in New York was at St. Vincent Ferrer, I think—on Sixty-sixth and Lexington. And we weren’t invited. Anne and I weren’t even told where it was, so we didn’t go, unfortunately. It wasn’t in the paper, it was all done by telephone and that was it.

  Phyllis Harriman Mason

  As I went in, I saw Daphne Hellman with a black hat on. It was such an awful service. Everybody was looking around to see who was there and hobnobbing. I was, too. There was also some kind of service in London.

  Letter from Brooks Baekeland to James and Gloria Jones, November 24, 1972

  There will be a mass given by Barbara’s friends who knew her well and remember what was lovable and brave in her, at St. Mary’s, Cadogan Gardens, at 6:30 p.m. on November 30.

  She would have been happy to know you had been there, too. I know that. I write for her—not for myself.

  From the Last Will and Testament of Barbara Baekelan
d, April 21, 1972

  I, BARBARA DALY BAEKELAND, of the City, County, and State of New York, give all of my property, real and personal, of every kind and wherever situated, to my trustee, hereinafter named, to invest and reinvest it and pay the net income there from to or for the benefit of my son, ANTONY, during his life.

  Codicil to the Last Will and Testament of Barbara Baekeland, April 25, 1972

  I give to my mother, NINA FRASER DALY, if she survives me, my Coromandel Screen.

  I give to my mother-in-law, CORNELIA HALLOWELL, if she survives me, my yellow Eighteenth Century Clock.

  Both of the articles referred to above are presently located in my apartment at 130 East 75th Street, New York City.

  Tom Dillow

  I helped Nini clear out the apartment, and she gave me Barbara’s Larousse Gastronomique, the wonderful thirties edition—you know, the great big one with the color prints of the best kitchens of the time, those wonderful huge kitchens in France. We even cleared off the stuff from the terrace, the trees and all that. I was there for two or three days helping Nini go through all the stuff—Barbara’s wild-animal rugs, those leopard toss pillows, the Audubon lithos, that eighteenth-century Mexican crucifix she had, the Louis Seize breakfast table…Then I called up Vito Giallo, the antiques dealer up the street, to come on over.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  Brooks hasn’t got a cushion from that apartment. Nothing. He made a point of not touching anything and letting Nini have it all because, you know, her first words when Barbara died had been, “Send me Barbara’s jewels from London so that Sylvie doesn’t wear them!” She thinks, poor little woman, that I’m terrible, that I was the wrecker of this fabulous trinity—God, mother, and son. It’s normal—she can’t think otherwise. Her daughter was her dream. I think Nini is very well loved and very sweet. “Send Barbara’s jewels so that Sylvie doesn’t wear them!” You can imagine how I would have worn her jewels!