Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  With love to you both, Tony

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  I was on the high seas when he killed Barbara, sailing from New York to Cherbourg on the France. And when I got to Paris everybody had seen it in the papers and told me the good news—you know how people are. And within a few days I flew over to London and saw Tony. I was staying at the Carlton Towers and I remember I went down to the lobby and told the doorman to get me a taxi. He said, “Where are you going, madam?”—you know, they’re all dressed in uniform there—and I said Brixton Prison, and he said to the cab driver, without batting an eyelash, “Brixton Prison.”

  So I went and I waited with everybody else waiting to see the prisoners. And then they called my name out and said booth number seven or whatever. I hadn’t seen Tony in I guess ten years. He said immediately, “Oh thank you for coming, Aunt Liz.” He was absolutely charming. I was sort of afraid to mention what had happened. I don’t think we did mention it. It was all small talk—you know, “How have you been? What have you been doing? Have you been writing any poetry? Have you been doing any paintings?” And he was talking, too. Fifteen minutes I was with him. Then right after that he wrote me a letter and said, “Thank you for visiting me. I love you, Aunt Liz. You remind me of Mummy.” And I thought, Wow! I’m next on the list! Sam Shaw, my lawyer, said, “Don’t go to see him again, don’t do anything, and don’t answer the letter.”

  Miwa Svinka-Zielinski

  I saw him in Brixton that January. He knew that he had killed his mother and I talked to him about that and he said, “I dream about her often. She comes to me in my dreams and says that she is not at all angry.”

  I met Tony and Barbara both in 1970 in East Hampton. When I met him I didn’t know that he was the son of Barbara. He looked very sympathique and I asked him whether he wrote poetry, because I said he looked just like a poet to me. He had some kind of a way about him, sort of something lyrical. So he was very pleased, and that’s why he started to be very friendly with me. He told me that he was also a painter. Then he gave me a fish, a painting of his. I have it somewhere. I like this fish very much—it has very good color.

  Sam Green

  Barbara was always telling me—I mean, over and over again—how artistic Tony was. Well, he did have lots of esoteric façade, let’s say. I met her on a cruise of the Greek Islands in 1969—Emily Staempfli, a mutual friend, had chartered this big yacht—and Barbara and I became, shall I say, best friends overnight. And right after the cruise I went to stay with her in Mallorca—which is when I met Tony. And right after that, I went to stay with my friend Cecil Beaton in England, at his country house. Cecil was dying to meet Barbara because I had such good stories to tell. They never did meet, but, based on what he had heard about Barbara and Tony from me, he wrote a novella that telescoped them into the future—he had the son kill the mother at the end!

  Letter from Sam Green to Antony Baekeland, April 6, 1973

  Fire Island, New York

  Dear Tony,

  It is difficult to write to someone who has a great deal of time on their hands, as you do, because there can be so many interpretations of what is said, if the words and phrases are dwelt upon for too long a time. It will be easier if you simply give this one a once-over (which is the spirit in which it is being written) and then discard it.

  So you’re in prison, awaiting trial. Yet another adventure for you—but this one is taking so long. You must be bored rigid. Since you are the one with all the time on your hands, how about a letter from you describing what it is like to be in prison? Do you have any friends among the inmates? Do they allow books to be sent to you? How about visitors—are you allowed any in the way of friends (not just lawyers)? If so I shall try to stop in and see you when I come to England. Which shouldn’t be too far away in time.

  In comparison with your confinement I have been even more compulsive in my activeness. I spent December and January in India and Ceylon and can hardly wait to return to the former.

  I have a little house on the beach here to which no one comes. It is a cold gray windy rainy day, and I’m looking out over the water just so happy to be here and not at some chic Sunday brunch in N.Y.

  Now, keep your spirits up and make an effort to write me—not so much your plans—because we don’t know what will happen with your trial—but how things are. That would be interesting to me. I hope that Mr. Wuss is being looked after.

  Love,

  Sam

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, April 15, 1973

  Brixton

  Dear Sam—

  Your letter just came and I am very happy to hear from you at last—more happy than I can tell. I shall try to answer your questions. Yes, I am allowed visits and books. Mr. Wuss is in the country with friends or family of the Turners, who took care of the flat on Cadogan Square. I had a sweet note from Mrs. Turner that he is being well taken care of. I wish you would take him as I cannot have him here. The trip to the Far East sounds very exciting. I had a similar reaction to it. Yes it is very boring here but I try to be good and not to fret. I am quite lucky—I just had a visit yesterday from two close English friends. I had a visit recently from Muriel Murphy, and Emily Staempfli has sent me books three times. She is so sweet to think of me here. I haven’t heard from my father in a dog’s age although I have written many times. Your house on the beach sounds very romantic and beautiful. You ask me what it is like to be in prison—just exactly as one would imagine. It has become routine to me but at first it took a good while to get used to being shut up. Sam—I want to tell you something very important. Do you remember all the bad luck we had in Mallorca? Well I think it all came from me and I think I was jinxed. For me it was an exquisite torture to be in such a beautiful spot and among such kind people as the family that looked after Mummy and me—Maria and Sebastian—and to be unable to enjoy the beauty or reach out to them. I do so wish we could all be together again. I spend most of my time fighting evil in myself—I have a bloody mind, Sam, and I don’t know what to do about it but I fight it with everything I’ve got. Sam, another thing is that I have so much in my heart that to let it all out at once would surely kill me. Those last days in Cadogan Square were terrible. I can’t tell you exactly what happened but I completely lost my head. I miss Mummy very much. I hope my trial comes up soon. I want very much to go back to Mallorca. Perhaps you will come to visit me if I go there. I hope not to get a big sentence.

  Love,

  Tony

  4

  THE TRIAL

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 6, 1973, Tony Baekeland was driven from Brixton Prison to Central Criminal Court, known to the general public as the Old Bailey—there finally to stand trial for the murder of his mother.

  Built on the site of the notorious Newgate Prison and skirted on its east side by Deadman’s Walk, an open passage along which condemned men once took their final steps to keep their appointment with the hangman, the Old Bailey is virtually synonymous with English judicial history and drama. It is here that the infamous Dr. Crippen was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. And it is here that Oscar Wilde sat in the dock and heard the judge sentence him to two years’ hard labor, intoning: “That you Wilde have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is…impossible to doubt.” And it was here on this June morning that Tony Baekeland became a statistic: one of the 4,509 persons tried at the Old Bailey during the year 1973.

  The trial of Regina v. Antony Baekeland officially opened the moment the High Court judge, who traditionally presides only at the most serious cases such as murder and offenses under the Official Secrets Act, was escorted into the courtroom by an alderman and a sheriff of the City of London, both in violet robes. The judge’s robe was red—indeed, he is known as the Red Judge—and adorned with slate-colored silk trimmings. Over the robe he wore a black stole fastened with a wide, black belt; over the stole, slung across his right shoulder, he wore a scarlet band. His n
eckwear consisted of a starched wing collar and two plain white bands hanging down in front. On his head was the English judicial headdress—a wig, abbreviated from the reign of Charles II to one with a single vertical curl at the back and two short rows hanging down behind. In his hands he carried white gloves and a folded square of black silk known as the Black Cap—a relic from the days when it was placed on his wig as he passed the death sentence.

  Since the trial of Tony Baekeland was being held during the summer months, according to ancient custom, sweet-smelling English garden flowers had been strewn on the bench and the ledge of the dock.

  Three sharp knocks on the door of the judge’s dais signaled the black-robed usher to open the court with the proclamation: “All persons who have anything to do before My Lords the Queen’s Justices at the Central Criminal Court draw near and give your attendance. God Save the Queen.”

  The counsel representing the Crown wore a long silk gown, long-cuffed black tailcoat, and a waistcoat with flaps to the pockets. Representing the defendant was the barrister-writer John Mortimer, who would later create the character of the portly liberal barrister “Rumpole of the Bailey”; he was garbed in the traditional Tudor gown.

  To the left of the barristers sat the wigged and gowned clerks of the court, whose function it was to swear in juries, take prisoners’ pleas, and record verdicts.

  As the trial was getting under way, Tony Baekeland, who had been sitting impassively in the accused’s enclosure at the center of the courtroom, exclaimed, to no one in particular, “I would rather have buggered a prosecutor than killed a peacock in paradise!”

  Neil Hartley

  I had been out of town working on a film and when I got back to London, at a dinner party John Mortimer, who was a friend of mine and my partner Tony Richardson’s and who was always involved in these bizarre cases, said, “I’m representing this interesting case—this boy who killed his mother.” And suddenly I was told that the papers had been full of it.

  Barbara Baekeland had bought the apartment on Cadogan Square from me and a friend of mine, Jim Robertsen, and that was really my only association with her. I went back two or three times to parties there. She was pleasant enough. Just before she was killed, we talked—I think the day before—and she said she was having a party that night and she wanted me to come.

  I must say I didn’t like the way she had done up the place. I mean, I preferred it the way I had had it. I’d bought it from an Italian antiques dealer on the King’s Road—he had done it up for himself and lived in it for a number of years, and he’d done a beautiful job, but she…I mean, it had a very deep stairwell from the floor below up to a kind of studio room which was the living room, and the stairs had a lovely banister, been there for a long time, and she took it all out. I don’t know how people escaped without killing themselves going up and down those stairs! Things like that I thought were odd, but, you know, women have their own taste.

  After her death I was contacted by her husband to see if I was interested in buying the apartment back, which I thought was a real creepy idea. He showed up in London while the son was being held in prison.

  Brooks Baekeland

  Barbara’s murder by her own son was a kind of grotesque, inartistic accident. She should not have died the way she did. It was not so much her kind of death as his kind of…She had a kind of greatness—no, a real greatness—of heart, and her murder was illustrative not of her but of that crapule, her son. That she had partly made him into a crapule is also true. They were both genetic defectives. But he was also my son, and I had fought against that in him all his life and failed. I would give anything to have been able to help him. I never could.

  Even as a small child he was aberrant. And then as he was entering puberty it became clear—finally—that he was not only homosexual but a practicing one. That was a terrible shock to his mother, who fought against it with him, ferociously. She may even have died in one of their fights over this. She simply could never accept it, try though she did—gallantly, desperately, despairingly—in their last disorganized years together.

  Sam Green

  Barbara just thought Tony was the Messiah and the greatest child that ever was. Nobody was good enough for Tony. She would rent castles in Italy or Spain or wherever and invite important nobility—shall we say specifically the daughters of important nobility. Later on she would invite older girls, hoping that the inevitable would happen. What I mean is she would set Tony up. She tried it time after time and it just didn’t work. Finally she got a little more desperate and aggressive about it and when Tony himself finally invited a girl to Cadaqués for a holiday—she was from Paris and a few years older than he was—Barbara practically instructed her to seduce him. Now this is the part of the story that really intrigued Cecil Beaton. In that novella he wrote, he gave Barbara the name “Emily,” Tony the name “Jonathan,” and “Dolores,” I guess, represented Sylvie. Thank God it never got published! Cecil was a photographer basically, but when he wrote he always settled for the most superficial frame around the picture. He revealed incredible tawdriness in his prose. But I hasten to his defense: He never displayed it elsewhere!

  From an Untitled Novella believed to be by Cecil Beaton, Unpublished

  Emily continued to feed her son with young ladies. One day she got hold of a girl who was pretty much of a tart. I guess she wasn’t, of course, a whore picked up from the street, but she was a well-known, loose young woman around Paris named Dolores. Emily invited this Dolores down to the house in Portofino which she and her husband had rented, thinking that she’d make things easy for Jonathan. Well, playing a role that most mothers don’t—I mean it was very odd for her to produce a tart in order that her son should be initiated into the rites of love—Emily had a well-deserved disaster dumped on her. The result is Emily is left alone—with the son who is also alone.

  This all happened in Portofino, which, as you know, is quite a tight community, and the arrival of a tart was remarked upon by all those gossips. So you can imagine the excitement when Dolores, who was asked as a set-up for Jonathan’s entertainment and satisfaction, succeeded in seducing his father.

  Barbara Curteis

  When Tony was twenty-one or twenty-two he said to me, “You know, I’m still a virgin.” And a couple of months later he met Sylvie. She was one of the groupies in Cadaqués—French, hippyish. And Tony said to me—this is so sad and moving in light of what happened later—he said, “Sex between men and women—people talk about it and make such a big hoohah about it and they say it’s so complicated and everything, but when you meet the right girl everything just falls into place.” Sylvie was his first girlfriend, you see. He brought her to meet Barbara and Brooks in Paris—brought her home like a kitten bringing its first killed mouse, and laid it at their feet.

  That Christmas they rented Emily Staempfli’s house in Cadaqués—Barbara, Brooks, Barbara’s mother, Mrs. Daly, and Tony and Sylvie. An in principle happy Christmas: Mammy, Pappy, Granny, the Only Child, and the Only Child’s Girlfriend.

  But Sylvie took another look at Brooks and said, you know, “There’s more money in it for me if I go with the father than if I go with the son.”

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  I think that that’s a good story. People say I caught the Baekelands. The Baekelands do their own catching, very easily—believe me.

  You know, I’m not in the least prudish, and if I had had an affair with the son and then with the father, I would say so. It wouldn’t bother me in the least to say so.

  I met the son first—in Cadaqués, in the summer of ’67. He was six years younger than I was. He had that pretty complexion of his mother’s. He didn’t have that sort of mad face that he had afterward, of which I only saw photographs. He was soft-spoken, very bright, very gentle. Affectionate. I don’t mean toward me, but toward his dog—he had the most charming relationship with the little dog, who he called Digby. “Mr. Digby, will you be good?” Very sweet.

  I was going th
rough my first divorce, and Tony and I became great friends. Not the way people say—that there was a love affair. It’s so absurd—because Tony was a homosexual from the day he was born, I think. But a lot of homosexual men like women—as a companion, to talk to and so forth. We were like brother and sister in a way. Of course, later, when I went away with his father, he resented me terribly.

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

  He attached special importance to certain emotions and incidents, emphasizing especially that he was devoted to both parents and that they continued devoted to one another, that their separation had disturbed his peace of mind. He wept when describing this.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  Before they separated, Barbara told Brooks, “You know, I could get Tony over his homosexuality if I just took him to bed,” and Brooks said, “Don’t you dare do that, Barbara!” Fred, my ex-husband, Brooks’s brother, told me that Brooks told him that—now this is brothers!

  Eleanor Ward

  It comes back to me now—the very clear clear clear tone—that she did tell me that she slept with him, because I lived on the next street and I remember leaving her apartment on Seventy-fifth and walking down Lexington and walking back to Seventy-fourth in a state of shock, you know—that anyone could do that to their son. She…She let him put his filthy thing inside her.

  Willie Morris

  I always heard that the mother and the son had slept together. That’s what everyone told me. I had no way of knowing whether it was true but it was certainly the talk of the East Hampton set.

  Tom Dillow