Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  Barbara told me that it happened in that house they had in Mallorca, this archduke’s palace, but then, a lot of stuff happened in that house. I mean, it was a real spooky place—huge, no electricity, that kind of stuff. She didn’t give me any details. Oh no. Not Barbara. Barbara was a lady.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  I can believe that she would do anything—including that. I can’t believe that he would, that’s all. There might be something in a woman where she wants to save her child to a point that is beyond credibility, but then the child remains a homosexual boy, and I can’t imagine that he would have found this in any way physically possible.

  Alan Harrington

  I was quoted in Newsweek magazine about something, I can’t remember what, therapeutic techniques, I think, and Barbara called me up and said she wanted desperately to talk to me, and she told me that she had slept with Tony. I said to her I didn’t think it was such a bad thing—I was trying to remove guilt—but now that I think of it, there wasn’t any expressed.

  Barbara Hale

  Sons and lovers—nobody knows the difference anymore.

  Irving Sabo

  Barbara Baekeland was in a writing class I took at the New School in New York in the early seventies with Anatole Broyard. Well, I can only say, she was a presence. She only came a few times when I was there, and I went to dinner with her a couple of times after class. The first time, we went to Bradley’s, on University Place—there were about ten of us—and she just thought it was all so marvelous. We all went Dutch on those occasions, and she just thought this was great. And a week or two later, she read some of her writing in class, her ongoing novel, which dealt with a mother-son incest, as I recall. Well, it was vivid. She was, I think, a good writer. And after that class, some of us were going uptown on the East Side and she invited four or five of us who were in my car to stop up for a drink.

  That was a memorable occasion. She had a collection of antiques the likes of which you don’t get from any ordinary dealer. She had a lacquered Japanese highboy which was an extraordinary piece—it’s very vivid to me because I’ve designed furniture in my time. It was top museum quality. And everything in the apartment was on that scale, it just reeked of great wealth. She offered some bourbon and I like good bourbon, and I asked for some ice and she said, “Oh, you won’t need ice for this. This was made for me, it’s a private batch.” Well, there are distilleries that make special blends for special customers. It’s like having a private railroad car these days. Anyway, it was extraordinary bourbon, real sipping stuff. No ice needed.

  The living room was full of photographs of a very beautiful young man, I would say in his early twenties. She had taken, I believe, a lot of the photographs. What struck me was the way the camera just dwelled on the beauty of this young man. Now this may be hindsight, but they were not the sort of pictures a mother would normally take of a son. After I saw those photographs, I felt that her novel was autobiographical.

  Ethel Woodward de Croisset

  I thought the story of sleeping with Tony was perfectly touching, because I think that was a dream of hers, you know—that somebody could make him whole. I think subconsciously she thought that the reason she had lost Brooks was because her son was a homosexual, you see.

  Brooks Baekeland

  The incest thing. I don’t know. If they had not been taking drugs, I would say, unhesitatingly, no. I would say it was a boutade—a caprice—that came out of Barbara’s taste for the outrageous. Pour épater les bourgeois—you know? But I know nothing about the drugged state. So who knows? I know he loved his mother.

  He loved his mother more than he loved me, but he loved me, too. And he respected me. I was, in a way, his alter ego. He held to me as an exhausted man does to a rock—barnacled and harsh though I was. But I really did love his mother, you see, and I could never forgive him for killing her.

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

  His great improvement in prison may be due to relief from the great strain of his relationship with his mother. He requires further medical treatment but the prognosis for his leading an ineffectual but socially acceptable life under medical supervision is probably better than for some time. This treatment could well be provided in the U.S.A.

  There appear to be two possibilities—to ask the court to make a deportation order and give a short sentence of imprisonment. He is not really medically unsuitable for imprisonment. But I think it would be better to make a Section 65 hospital order to Broadmoor Special Hospital. He would be very soon ready for discharge and his transfer to medical care in the U.S.A. could be arranged fairly simply. In either case he would be likely to spend about a year in England and better in Broadmoor than prison.

  John Mortimer

  What I tried to do at the trial was get the judge to send him straight back to America. The boy was very nice. I mean, I found him very gentle and calm and nice. But off he went.

  Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, June 8, 1973

  Dear Sam,

  I finally had a trial two days ago and was found guilty of manslaughter under diminished responsibility and am being sent to Broadmoor until I am well. Are you planning any trips? The one to India sounded fascinating. When I get out I hope to get a house in Mallorca.

  Love,

  Tony

  Letter from Dr. E. L. Udwin to Cornelia Baekeland Hallowell, June 19, 1973

  Broadmoor Special Hospital

  Crowthorne, Berks.

  Your grandson, Antony Baekeland, will, of course, require very lengthy treatment—this is only to be expected. He gets what medication his treatment requires. He is, of course, on no habit-forming drugs. He has not to associate with people any worse than himself.

  From “Dreams and Realities,” a Lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, October 23, 1931

  Dr. Charles H. Mayo in a recent address stated: “Every other hospital bed in the United States is now occupied by the mentally afflicted, insane, idiotic, feeble-minded, and senile. In addition, there is an enormous number of people almost fit for the asylum.”

  What is the outlook for the next generations? Is it not time to put less pride in the increasing number of our populations, and to look more into the matter of quality? It is quite right that we should try to restrain the immigration of undesirables. But shall we continue forever to encourage the promiscuous breeding of the unfit, degenerates, criminals, and the insane, while keeping on ignoring the biological facts of heredity? If so, more unemployables, more hospitals, lunatic asylums, poorhouses, and prisons.

  In the past, raw Nature left to act by herself seemed more merciful than our present civilization. By exercising her rigors, she improved the race through the elimination of the unfit and by favoring the intelligent, the strong, and the healthy.

  The Bible tells us that the fall of Adam and Eve started after they had eaten the fruit of the tree of Knowledge. Whatever that may mean, I believe that ignorance—ignorance of scientific facts—is the real “original sin,” the sin that has been and still is today the principal cause of our sorrows and of the martyrdom of man.

  PART II

  BROADMOOR

  1

  THE MATERIAL OF A THOUSAND USES

  ON JUNE 6, 1973, Tony Baekeland was transferred from the city of London to the small, picturesque village of Crowthorne in the Berkshire countryside. The narrow lanes were ablaze with wildflowers and lush with ferns, the village gardens an iridescent display of irises, peonies, and petunias. The large wooden sign reading “BROADMOOR SPECIAL HOSPITAL—NO THROUGH ROAD™ struck an inharmonious note.

  “The excellent road invited us to speed on and yet the sensation of loveliness was so predominant that we preferred to stop frequently to better enjoy the charmingly reposeful landscape,” Tony Baekeland’s great-grandfather had written of this same countryside sixty-six years earlier, in a privately printed volume.

  Tony B
aekeland would not have the same opportunity to linger that his celebrated ancestor had had. He was driven up a winding road past a cluster of white cottages to the place where he would be detained indefinitely, “at her Majesty’s pleasure.”

  The red-brick Victorian institution called Broadmoor Special Hospital was built in 1863 as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It is surrounded by a wall of uneven height that weaves snakelike through open fields. With its pink-blossomed trees that line the road in front of the main buildings and its rows of daffodils hugging the walls, Broadmoor looks like a friendly New England college campus. But its blue-uniformed nurses look more like guards and in fact belong to the Prison Officers Association; and all staff members are required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Patients’ mail is routinely censored, and occasionally even books are withheld on the grounds that they are “bad influences.”

  “At Broadmoor, security is the first consideration,” a staff member says. “We are always concerned with the escape and welfare of our patients, since we’re dealing with very violent and dangerous persons here.”

  Of the approximately 750 patients at Broadmoor, many have committed “heinous, headline crimes”; more than a quarter have committed homicide or attempted murder. There are also patients who have committed no crime but who are mentally ill. There are over twenty attempted suicides a year, and it has been estimated that at any given time Broadmoor houses between 200 and 250 psychopaths. Indeed, it has been described as “the asylum of last resort.”

  A Dent of London clock sits above the impressive entrance gate through which Tony Baekeland was led that June 6th into a small courtyard. From there he was taken down a passageway to a door where he heard what would become a familiar sound to him: the jangle of the large metal keys carried by every Broadmoor attendant. The door was unlocked for him, then locked again.

  Tony Baekeland was now in the main body of the hospital, which consisted of eight residential “blocks.” In 1969, in an attempt to abolish prison terminology, the blocks were renamed “houses,” Block A becoming Kent House; Block B, Cornwall House; Block C, Dorset House; and the other blocks becoming Essex, York, Somerset, Lancaster, and Norfolk.

  From A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Horseless Age Press, New York, 1907

  The farther we went away from London the better became the roads. We were driving through a lovely, rolling country, with a smooth highway and green fields. Now and then we met a cheerful-looking cottage, its stony façade made lovelier by some creeping tea roses. Carpetlike lawns, tastefully laid-out gardens, with very old trees, and everything cared for to perfection—all this gave us a strong impression of pretty, rural England.

  The main part of the house under the hospitable roof of which we were going to stay had been built in Shakespeare’s time, in the quaint architecture of that day, and the modern additions had been made in tolerable conformity with the original style.

  The ensemble, with the surrounding gardens and lawns, made a delightful specimen of an English country house.

  The liberal supply of rain which makes the British climate so humid is also the main reason why, in that country, it is possible to produce such well-kept lawns, better than are to be found anywhere else, and which look more like immense green carpets.

  There, the lawn extended to a sort of terrace, with a green stairway, and reached out toward a very tastefully arranged rose garden. Stately trees, several of them many centuries old, were artistically grouped all over; giant yew trees next to imposing cedars of the Lebanon; exotic-looking araucarias in proximity to glossy-leaved hollies, the latter with trunks almost a foot in diameter. A shady pathway lined by tree-like rhododendrons led toward an old church. Everything was harmony and every detail gave evidence of centuries of good care and good taste. Yes, this is undoubtedly the secret of these striking effects of English landscape gardening, which seem so hard to imitate successfully.

  The place just described is merely a representative of hundreds of others, some larger, some smaller, but in all of them the landscape gardening has been the result of a slow and well-studied process, extending through many generations and carried out by a succession of owners, the children being able to follow the improvements which their fathers planned.

  Dr. Thomas Maguire

  Inside the walls the fact is you’ll find it’s lovely green, with flower beds that the patients take care of, and rather nice trees and all that sort of thing. The hospital has forty acres of land—tennis courts, a swimming pool, and football grounds, as well as gardens. It’s not like a prison where the inmates always see the walls. When you’re inside you can hardly see the walls, because they drop down in places. They’re somewhat higher in the areas where the patients are likely to try to make an escape.

  Tony was very, very ill in the beginning—he had to be dressed and he had to be taken to the bathroom.

  He idealized his mother, you know. He was very sorry and showed great remorse. He often said, “Oh, how a few moments of frenzy changed my life!” The fact is it wouldn’t have changed his life, because his illness was just part of a whole picture. There was a deep sickness in the family, and a lack of discipline that too much money will often create.

  He was fond of his father. He wrote him bad-tempered letters occasionally but then, within the week, he might turn around and write him an affectionate one. That’s the way his illness was.

  He had ideas of grandeur about who he was. He thought he was a great painter. He wasn’t, but he wasn’t bad. He told me that his great-grandfather was included in some encyclopedia.

  From Science Magazine, November 1984

  The toast of society as well as industry, Leo Hendrik Baekeland appeared on the cover of Time magazine in September 1924.

  From Time Magazine, May 20, 1940

  FATHER OF PLASTICS

  This week Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute presents one of its coveted gold medals to a man who is much less known to the public than are the changes his work has wrought in the many common things people use, from toothbrush handles, telephones and false gums, to airplane bodies. Even more than most scientists, the man is publicity-shy. He is Leo Hendrik Baekeland, inventor of Bakelite, “Father of Plastics.”

  Born in Flemish Belgium 76 years ago, young Leo became an ardent photographer…. He entered the University of Ghent as its youngest student, graduated in 1882 summa cum laude, promptly became an assistant professor of chemistry…. He emigrated to the U.S. and went to work for a photographic supply manufacturer. Then he started his own consulting practice, invented a quick-action photographic printing paper called Velox, organized Nepera Chemical Co. to manufacture it. George Eastman of Eastman Kodak bought him out.

  Legend has it that Eastman paid Baekeland $1,000,000, several times the minimum sum on which the young inventor had set his mind. At all events, he found himself, at 35, rich enough to do what he pleased. He converted a stable in his backyard into a laboratory. He found that phenol (carbolic acid) and formaldehyde interacted to make a non-melting, non-dissolving solid like nothing in nature. This was Bakelite, foundation stone of the synthetic plastic industry. After forming General Bakelite Co. (later Bakelite Corp.) to exploit his discovery, Baekeland methodically listed 43 industries in which he thought it would be useful. Today it would be hard to find 43 in which it is not used.

  From the Bakelite Review, a Periodical Digest of Bakelite Achievements Interesting to All Progressive Manufacturers and Merchants, Volume 7, Number 3 (Silver Anniversary Number, 1910–1935)

  Millions of uses…. radios, clocks, bottle caps, baseball caps, phonograph records, lamps, fountain pens, pencils, washing machine parts, shaving brush handles, toilet seats, costume jewelry, artificial limbs, coffins, pipes, cigarette holders, saddles, overcoat and suit buttons, subway strap hangers, control devices for submarines, battleships and destroyers, automobile parts and gear wheels.

  From The Story of Bakelite, John Kimberly Mumford, Robert L. Stillson Publishing Co., New
York, 1924

  Wherever wheels whirr, wherever women preen themselves in the glitter of electric lights, wherever a ship plows the sea or an airplane floats in the blue—wherever people are living, in the Twentieth Century sense of the word, there Bakelite will be found rendering its enduring service.

  From Fortune Magazine, April 4, 1983

  THE HALL OF FAME FOR U.S. BUSINESS LEADERSHIP

  The Business Hall of Fame’s “Roster of Past Laureates”—leaders whose achievements have endured—includes Andrew Carnegie, Pierre Samuel Du Pont, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, Edwin Herbert Land, Cyrus Hall McCormick, Andrew William Mellon, John Pierpont Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller, David Sarnoff, Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr., Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Washington, Thomas John Watson, Jr., Eli Whitney…

  Elected this year to the Business Hall of Fame: Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863–1944).

  From Selected Writings, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Bakelite Corporation, New York, 1944

  How did I happen to strike such an interesting subject as that of the synthetic resins? I can readily answer that I did not strike it haphazardly; I looked for just such a subject for a number of years until I found it among the many lines of research which I undertook in my laboratory. And, between 1905 and 1909, I obtained an insoluble, infusible substance which we call oxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride now known as BAKELITE.

  From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, March 8, 1909

  After my lecture the boys were singing once in a while the B-A-K-E L-I-T-E song which goes

  “B-A-K-E-L-I-T-E

  Stands for Bakelite

  Ten times better than graphite

  And what’s the name

  Every photographer of the country knows

  Velox—Velox!”

  When I went to the station I was escorted by the whole bunch—about thirty—marching like soldiers and singing the Bakelite song.