Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  Nina Daly

  All Barbara’s things were expensive. She had all her clothes made, she hardly ever bought them. I guess most of them were made in Paris. She had a nice, a lovely dressmaker there. I had some things made in Paris, too, you know. People used to ask me where I got my suits and I’d say, “Well, I guess most of them were made in Paris.” Tony liked clothes. Barbara bought him his clothes, but he had things made, too.

  Barbara’s clothes were all good-quality. And that’s the thing that I care about, the quality of the material. The ones that I have, they’re all good material. They last a long time. They last forever. They never really wear out.

  Poor Grace Kelly. I feel terrible about her. I think it was a terrible shame what happened to her and her daughter—you know, the little one. She went berserk, you know, sort of. But you never know. You have to accept it and take it. Make the best of it. The best you can. You can’t sit and weep over it. That doesn’t get you anywhere. You never know what it all will be until it is yesterday.

  3

  AWAITING TRIAL

  ON MONDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 20, 1972, Tony Baekeland appeared in lower court. There he was formally charged with the murder of his mother and remanded to Brixton Prison.

  He was transported in a police van to a district so different from the London he knew that it might have been another country. The squalor of Brixton is alleviated only by a colorful market where anything can be purchased, from exotic fruits and vegetables to such old cockney delicacies as jellied eels.

  The van, turning down a narrow, two-lane road lined with soot-stained brick buildings, proceeded through an open gate. Ahead was a second gate, controlled from within Brixton Prison and opening onto a barbed-wire courtyard patrolled by guard dogs.

  Tony Baekeland had traveled a great deal in his life, and over some grim frontiers, but never over one as forbidding as this. The four-story Victorian-style buildings that loomed in front of him looked like a cross between a factory and a low-income housing project.

  The cell he was assigned had been built for single occupancy, but due to overcrowded conditions he would have to share it with two other inmates.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to James and Gloria Jones, Undated

  Dear Jim and Gloria—

  I am in prison at Brixton in London. You must by now have heard what happened. I feel much better for the rest I am having here and I feel a lot clearer in the nog. I’ve had a lot of visits from my London friends and this has cheered me up a great deal. I thought of you both a great deal all summer. I would like very much to hear from you—letters cheer one up as you can imagine. So much has happened in the last few years that I am having a little trouble sorting it all out. I have a great deal on my mind and need someone to talk to.

  Yours with love,

  Tony

  Toby Ross

  I went to visit him in Brixton just a couple of days after he killed his mother. What happened was my friend Catherine Guinness wanted to go and she didn’t want to go alone, and we were both sort of friends of his from Spain, from Cadaqués, so we decided we’d go together, and it was very strange. I mean, he didn’t seem to know he’d killed his mother. He asked Catherine how his mother was. He said something like “How is my mother? Is she well?” And Catherine and I just both went into instant shock. I figured out later that maybe he was aware of the fact that he’d stabbed her but he just wasn’t sure whether he’d killed her or not.

  Neither Catherine nor I knew really what to say to him. We were only there for about fifteen or twenty minutes, the legal limit. There was a meeting room that you came into, with little booths. It’s not like that anymore—I know, because I was put in Brixton a year later myself—for having a passport that was out-of-date. The English are kind of funny, you know. I said to them, “Listen, I have dual nationality. I have two passports. I came in on my American one and it expired while I was here, but I have an English one.” And they said, “Sort it out with the judge,” and they threw me in Brixton for two days. The charge was “illegal immigrant.”

  When I was in there myself, the visiting room was entirely different from the way it was when I was there visiting Tony—you could actually sit at a little table and have physical contact with the person you were speaking to, you could touch them and you could kiss them hello. But when I saw Tony, there were two little booths with plate-glass windows and a little telephone you picked up and spoke through—just like in that old film Birdman of Alcatraz.

  Catherine Guinness

  I went to visit him because I felt sorry for him—he was a friend of mine and I liked him. I just sort of sat and we chatted about this and that in a booth and he was sweet as usual. He said he wanted a copy of Dante’s Inferno, so I sent it to him. You see, when I knew him, I just felt he was one of the gentlest people I’d ever met. I met him in Cadaqués one Easter. I remember going for a walk with him and my father, and he was sort of talking about the soul and how he was trying to find out about his innermost depths—he felt his soul was sort of like an onion and you had to peel all the layers. You know that theory—there are various layers and you can get down if you really try, by sort of meditating and thinking.

  Karen Radkai

  Look at the photographs of him! Look at him, what he looks like. I took him along on a picnic. Oh, he made drawings! He was as companionable, as gentle as a lamb. These must have been done about 1966. I made them in Cadaqués.

  I’ll tell you something—my first impressions are always absolutely right. I mean, I very rarely fail. The first time I looked at Cadaqués, I said, “This reminds me of Camino Real”—you know, the Tennessee Williams play. There was an absolute aura of decadence about it, a kind of strange decadence, remote almost. There were some extraordinary characters walking around, I can tell you. They lived out Surrealism almost, do you know? I mean, Cadaqués had nothing whatever to do with anything else I’ve seen on the Mediterranean.

  It had enormous beauty, really extraordinary beauty. Cap de Creus, this marvelous mountain, these huge gray rocks, the sea that glistened—I’ve never seen the sea glisten that way. But it was a Nordic sea—strange, you know. It wasn’t that Mediterranean glistening, it was a dark sea. But there were big rocks, and mountains, and wonderful wonderful rows of fishermen’s houses going up and up, and a wonderful golden church with a wonderful light coming through.

  I really do take photographically what I feel, not what I intellectualize—do you know what I mean? What I see and what I feel, and this is what I felt.

  Mishka Harnden

  Do you know John and Dennis, the Meyer twins? They were friends of Tony’s from Cadaqués—sort of flower children. They used to pose for Dalí a lot. And they were actors, sort of, too. Do you remember Women in Love, the Ken Russell film? There’s a pair of twins in it that look very Indian—well, that’s them. Anyway, they had this wild idea to take Tony out of Brixton and up to this farm they had in Wales or Scotland and just have him get far from the madding crowd—that kind of thing.

  Phyllis Harriman Mason

  I wrote to Tony in Brixton to say I was very saddened by his news—I made it very ambiguous. He wrote back and said he felt so much better now than he had before.

  I spent that last summer with the two of them in Mallorca, June to September, and in spite of everything that went on, I had a nice summer. Robert Graves came to the house several times, and one night we went to dinner at his house. Afterward Barbara and Tony had a big argument—Tony said Graves wasn’t a great poet and Barbara said he was. But she also said, “The more I see of him, the more he gets to look like an old woman.”

  Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras, June 29, 1972

  Miramar

  Valldemosa

  Mallorca

  Averell Harriman’s niece, Phyllis Mason, is staying with us. Last week Robert Graves came to lunch and saw Tony’s poems. He wrote him a marvelous letter.

  We are settling into this beautiful place. The house
was designed by the Archduke Luis Salvador and is unique and distinguished if not very comfortable. Little by little I hope to make it more so, but we live here, at present, in an old-fashioned way. If there ever were a place where one could find peace and tranquillity, this is it.

  Alastair Reid

  That summer I watched in horrified fascination and that summer was tearing the tops off everything.

  There’s this enormous great semicircle of mountains where Barbara and Tony were living in Mallorca that’s like an amphitheater. It’s as though it invites the people who are there for the summer—or compels them—to give themselves up to the demands of the landscape and act in a certain manner. It’s really the perfect setting for Mediterranean ritual drama.

  In fact, the whole landscape of Mallorca has always reminded me of Greek tragedy, and that’s what I said to Phyllis Mason, when I went down to swim with her, and it was then, when we were sitting after swimming, that she said that something terrible was really happening. I wrote her after Tony killed Barbara. She was the only person I did communicate with, because of that.

  Phyllis Harriman Mason

  You’ll laugh when I tell you this but after she died I went to a psychic to try to make contact with her, and during one session some woman actually materialized—some apparition—and she had on a flimsy sort of see-through gown, very décolleté and provocative, and I said, “That’s Barbara!”

  Ethel Woodward de Croisset

  Barbara had a violent Irish streak in her. She wanted everyone to do what she wanted. I mean, she was a redheaded dominating person. She wanted to move everyone about. When I thought about it, it seemed to me that what happened was the most ordinary termination of this wild life.

  Tony wrote to me a lot from Brixton—letters which were so terribly sane. You know, people who are nervously upset or mentally upset can write with such clear writing, a very clear steady hand, and say such logical things.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Gloria Jones, Undated

  Dear Gloria—

  Thank you for your lovely letter. I am feeling a lot better now. It is very sweet of you to write. I also got a letter from Ethel which was very cheering. How exciting about Jim’s new novel. Please give my best to Mrs. Chambers. Life here is very quiet. I get a lot of reading done and am getting my head together!

  Yours as ever with love, Tony

  P.S. Very happy to hear about Kate’s marriage. I remember her very well and send her my best.

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

  On admission to prison Baekeland had been extremely disturbed for a time and when asked to write an account of the offence wrote and drew several pages of frankly psychotic content. However he improved fairly rapidly, and when I saw him he was quite cooperative and composed and said he felt much better than for many months.

  When he was twenty-one or twenty-two his parents separated. Antony had since been living with his mother in Mallorca and England, and his father lives in Brittany with a woman of thirty-five whom Antony once regarded as his own girlfriend.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  Brooks and I were married on January 24, 1973—two months after Barbara died. But by then I had been living with him for five years and I had had it—yes. Because I was very conventional in those days and I was very humiliated to be living with someone whose wife I was not. I thought that during those years certainly a divorce could have been obtained, and it had not been obtained—for whatever intricate reasons there were between them. And the charm had gone, and I was ready to leave Brooks. Perhaps this is why he finally did something—he could feel that I had had it.

  I married him because my heart really went out to him when she died, because I saw how he was suffering. You can’t leave someone in that state. Everybody will tell you how, you know, I was trying to get all the Baekeland money. This is grotesque. When she died it was the most horrible moment of my life, it really was, because I understood that certain events will not allow you to live, even to exist. After I married Brooks I saw that instead of having a husband, I had a widower on my hands.

  Addie Herder

  I ran into Brooks—it must have been early in February 1973. I came into this little brasserie on the Île Saint-Louis, and it was crowded as usual, there was no place to sit down. And there was Brooks, sitting at a table with a woman, and I didn’t want to sit with him. But I was shepherding a black painter by the name of Beauford Delaney, a very good painter—a friend of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller and Jimmy Baldwin—who was having an opening later that day. Beauford was old so he sat down at Brooks’s table. So then I had to! Brooks greeted me with all sorts of affection and said he wanted me to meet his wife, you know—which really upset me, because it was too soon somehow. Then he said to me, “That terrible boy—he killed that wonderful woman.” And he went on in the same paragraph to tell this new wife how much he admired my work, my collages. Well, he had two pieces of mine, which Barbara had bought, many years ago. And after this he wrote inviting me to come visit them where they were living, somewhere in Brittany, and he described the house and how wonderful it was and he listed the people who were going to be there. This was, you know, just after his wife had died!

  Gloria Jones

  Jim and I were getting ready to go to the opening of Beauford Delaney’s art show and the doorbell rang and Brooks just walked in and we were very cold to him. He said that Tony had killed the woman he loved. He absolutely said that, quote unquote. We were stunned. I said, “Please don’t talk to me,” you know, and he left.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  I was there. What happened is Brooks and I lived in the same part of Paris as the Joneses—the Île Saint-Louis—and we were taking a walk on the quais and Gloria was at her window, on the quai d’Orléans. She stared at Brooks, who stared back at her, and she closed her window. Nobody rang her bell. Brooks was not silly enough to go ring her bell. You see, everybody would like to have made a grande geste.

  Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

  When Barbara was killed, I borrowed everything you can imagine to get back to England. I was living in Turkey, and I got back as soon as I could. My daughter Mandy took me down to the prison. I’d never been to that one. Well, after all, I had married a man who was in jail in Turkey, so I knew about prisons, but that’s another story altogether. So I went to see Tony and there he was. Suddenly he looked up and for a moment there was a flash of this old Tony from Ansedonia—of happy days.

  Let me tell you, a more normal boy you never saw. Once we went sailing with my daughter Jinty, the one he loved so much, and my son-in-law, Hugo Money-Coutts, sailing from Porto Santo Stefano in a small boat called a Fifer, and on a small boat you really see people how they are. Tony had his guitar with him, and we stopped in the middle of the sea—in the middle of the Mediterranean near Taranto—and he played all night and everybody was so happy. Tony behaved like an absolute angel, an absolute normal absolute angel.

  Brixton was the first prison I’d ever been in where you have to talk to somebody behind glass, and we were given fifteen minutes and I found it terribly difficult to talk for fifteen minutes and I was getting desperate, and suddenly I said, “Tony, has your father been over to see you?” And he said, “Yes. Yes he has.” Which wasn’t true. And he brought a comb out of his pocket and he was bending the teeth of the comb, and I realized it had been a mistake to ask him that. So then I burst into tears. And he looked at me and I said, “Well, never mind, Tony, it’ll soon be over. You’ll see—you’ll be out and you’ll come and stay with me in Turkey.”

  Richard Hare

  Nini said please write to the poor boy, his father won’t go and see him, blah blah blah. This was before Brooks did go finally, I think. Anyhow, Anne felt sorry for him and wrote him a letter, a very careful letter. After all, we’d had some wonderful times at Barbara’s. She had had a lot of exposure on two continents, you know, and she knew everyone attractive and intere
sting. Dalí came frequently with his puma cub or his pet tiger or baby leopard or whatever it was—he was apparently a friend from Cadaqués. And I remember meeting somebody called the Thane of Cawdor there, which was sort of amusing. He really was the Thane of Cawdor—as in Macbeth.

  Letter from Anne Hare to Antony Baekeland, Undated

  New York

  Dear Tony,

  This is an awfully difficult letter to write, and I do hope that you will understand if I do not express myself with much finesse. I loved your mother very much, but that feeling did not stop with her, it very definitely included you. I’m sure you are going through agonies of remorse so I won’t dwell on that, only the positive things.

  Richard and I want to keep in touch with you. That is the primary purpose of writing. Even with all the ugliness, we remember a marvelous, talented, sensitive, and understanding friend: You!

  Richard, and hopefully me, will be in London in February. We would like to see you, if you would like to see us. You have many friends, dear Tony, who would like to help if it is possible. Could we be put on your lawyer’s list of “Concerned Friends”? So that we know your whereabouts.

  We want another Tony Baekeland drawing to hang near the beautiful one you gave us last Xmas!

  With love,

  Anne

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Richard and Anne Hare, January 17, 1973

  Brixton

  Dear Anne and Richard—

  What a wonderfully consoling letter. For a while I didn’t know whether I was coming or going but now I am feeling a lot better and people are taking good care of me. I feel more myself. I have a lot of reading to do and so I keep myself occupied in this and in writing letters. I would love to keep in touch with you and would very much like to see you both in February. I shall never forget all the kindness you showed us last winter. I have had a number of visits from friends and this has kept me very happy.