Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read online

  But my grandfather could not stand her music—that “noise”—and her theosophy, suffragettism, the Prospect House with Harry Hopkins, later an FDR eminence grise, and suchlike “nonsense.” Nor, she had more than once hinted to me, the fact that her French was better than his and that she sometimes disagreed with him. His German was of course better, and this was part of a Teutonic-Latin tension between them. He had married far above himself socially in marrying her—and never quite forgave her that. We know practically nothing about his own family because he was ashamed of them. His father was an alcoholic who ended up—sometimes—repairing shoes, and my grandfather from the age of twelve was, according to my grandmother, the main support for his whole family. That he was a genius there is no doubt—and that he had the most tremendous motivations. That he had adored his mother, though he would never speak of her—or of any of his family—that is not generally known. He simply obliterated the past. There had been no past. Time had started with him. Baekeland time, that is. That is the Zeus of those turn-of-the-century photos, the stern, tall man with the beard. Zeus.

  It was an amused old Pan that I knew as a boy. I imply no sexuality, only humor, joie de vivre, a love of wine and endless—his own—talk. The man who not only would not suffer fools gladly but not at all. The man who stopped people from kissing, giving them a vivid description of the Niagaras of filth in the forms of bacteria and viruses that they were transferring to each other’s foolish mouths. The man who lectured “sillywomen” about the constituents of their lipsticks and creams and the sucker’s prices they foolishly paid for them—all this with the highest and most godly good humor.

  Céline Roll Karraker

  Grandpapa would take us up to his lab and he’d put various chemicals together and make colors or sweeteners. It was very exciting to go up there. And the smells! I can smell them to this day.

  The house is gone now. It burned. But it hasn’t burned in my memory. It was idyllic to be there. A wonderful haven for all of the children.

  There was an incredible bathroom. It was huge. And from the middle of the wall up was a relief of cattails and ferns and birds and it was all colors and was absolutely beautiful. And there was a stained-glass window as well. And in the corner was a square sunken bathtub. And we kids would go in there and make up a batch of soapy suds. We’d go from one part of the bathroom which was all tile and zoom across the floor into the tub, splashing. Grandmother used to say this was Grandpapa’s bathtub and we were not to do that.

  From I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography, May Sarton, W.W. Norton, New York, 1959

  How imaginative it was of the Baekelands—for the Belgian inventor and his wife were our hosts—to insist that Mother and I come to them first, and be cherished and spoiled a little before the serious business of our new life was attempted. Their house, rustic stone and brown shingles, with its turrets and verandas, its stained-glass windows, its large portecochere in front, and all surrounded by expanses of clipped lawn, seemed to me very grand. It had, for instance, a polar bear rug in the drawing room. What luxury to compare with that of sitting on a polar bear’s head! It also had a square glass aquarium, in which lived a small, wicked alligator who devoured raw meat and looked at me with indifferent, beady eyes. The real glory was the master bathroom with its huge bathtub. A bathtub? Rather, a tiled swimming pool, six feet square and sunk two feet into the floor. Around it lay huge sponges from Florida, and shells with rosy mouths that sang of a faraway ocean. In this bathtub, one could be a seal or a mermaid with no trouble….

  I never did feel Dr. Baekeland as a person I knew; rather he seemed to be some frightening masculine force—a god who must be placated, a piece of weather. I realize now that, with his fierce, shy eyes and black mustache, he looked something like Rudyard Kipling; and I realize now, too late, that, though I was frightened of him, he took me into his heart and really loved me in the admiring way of a grandfather with a first grandchild, for he used to come in after I was asleep and look down at me tenderly, and he was amazed that I could play so happily alone. But then, I fear, all I wanted was to run off and be free to go to [the chauffeur’s] house where I felt more at home. On my way there I passed the garage, and above it, I had been told, was the laboratory, a very secret and important place where Dr. Baekeland retired to work like a sorcerer, and no one was ever allowed to go. There he was busy concocting queer things in trays, rather like today’s ice-cube trays, but the cubes were of a hard yellow translucent material, no good as toys, though he gave me some one day—no good for anything as far as I could see. The name of this invention was Bakelite, still in an experimental stage, and not yet the fabulous djinni it would become….

  [Dr. Baekeland’s wife] was known to everyone as Bonbon, a name so appropriate that it must have been used by St. Peter at the gate of Heaven, for kindness flowed from her in every sort and size of package, tangible and intangible. Her presence was a present. A small, round woman with bright, dark eyes under a mass of fuzzy gray hair, she wore for as long as I can remember the same round beaver hat and long beaver scarf over a suit she had recopied exactly every year. She could not have worn the beaver hat in summer, yet I see her so clearly in this hat and no other that she must be painted in it here. She came from an intellectual bourgeois family in Ghent, very much like my father’s, but now she had moved into a different world, she had not changed. It was only that riches became her so well, as if she had always been intended to be a fairy godmother; she had the rare gift of transforming money into joy, her own joy and everyone else’s, so there was no bitterness in it. Some of this I came to know later, but from the beginning she had my unwavering devotion because I sensed in her a dimension like saintliness, like poetry, which set her apart. Concrete evidence of this was the fact that because of her feeling for animals she would eat no meat. I loved animals, too, and even made resolves to follow her example, but then when everyone else at table except Bonbon accepted the breast of chicken or young lamb, apparently without a qualm, I forgot my resolve…. Bonbon did not blame us cruder beings, nor make us feel guilty; that was her triumph. When she and I sat shelling new peas from the garden on the back veranda…I felt a wonderful sense of security and something like being at home, at least for a little while. I could talk to her, I found…. I loved her Belgian accent, the way she said “Meerses” instead of “Mrs.,” an accent that gave character to everything she said. She was very American in her lavishness, but she was also still so Belgian and so unsophisticated that she was, as I see it now, the perfect bridge from my Belgium to my America.

  New York with Bonbon was Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron Building, Woolworth’s (at that time still the skyscraper), and she had the newcomer’s pride and delight in the city, as if, almost, it had been her own creation…. And New York was the Plaza Hotel where we had tea among the palms, and ate little many-colored iced cakes, while, at Bonbon’s request, the orchestra played a soulful rendition of the “Song of the Volga Boatman,” and were rewarded with a crisp ten-dollar bill taken over to them on a silver plate. Perhaps I loved her so much because her taste remained the taste of a child, and her love of life, her excitement (as years later when she waved her hand at all of Yonkers glittering with electric lights and said proudly, “Every one of those light bulbs has Bakelite in it”) was as innocent as a child’s.

  Céline Roll Karraker

  My grandmother told me she cried for five years in French when she came here to live, and she went back to Belgium whenever she could. My grandfather did exactly the opposite. She never lost her accent. He lost his as fast as he could and named his son George Washington Baekeland.

  When he sold Velox to Eastman Kodak, he bought Snug Rock for my grandmother, but he resented the socializing that went on in it. He didn’t want any part of that.

  From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, April 27, 1907

  The complications of our unnecessarily complicated living irritate me. If I could do without inconveniencing my wife I certain
ly would go and live somewhere where we could dispense with servants and lead a simpler and more natural life. But my wife cannot live without some so-called “Society,” a stupid conventionalism and the cause of all our unwarranted conventional and complicated living. What do we want such a large house for, and why all these servants? Why all that complicated trash of unnecessary furniture? All this complication becomes more and more irksome to me. Trash—vulgar—idiotic—trash.

  Céline Roll Karraker

  Grandpapa was a great proponent of the simple life—physically. Lived it himself. In fact, my grandmother said—and you know, she believed in reincarnation—that he was a monk in his former life! After he retired he lived down in Florida, in a very simple house.

  Brooks Baekeland

  The Anchorage in Coconut Grove had belonged to William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner,” and my grandfather used to crow with delight in telling the Victorian elite who dined with him that “that great bag of wind did not have a single book in his house except a Bible!”

  The plantation-style house was deliciously cool—made of blocks of pure-white coral and terra-cotta roofs. Its windows in winter were always open, as were its doors, and its greatest charm was a central patio, hung with orchids. It had a fountain jetting high in its center. There was an aqua-marine swimming pool at the front of the house, where one “bathed,” not “swam.” But what I remember now, when I close my eyes, is the perfume of the flowering trees and that so-characteristic soft interminable clack-clack-clack of coconut palm fronds, day and night—it never stopped—and the windjammer-creakings of the great bamboo groves from Sumatra, towering to one hundred and fifty feet, down near the anchorage itself, which had been made for my grandfather’s yacht, the Ion. By day the wind blew in over the sea, and by night it blew out again.

  Our nearest neighbors were, through a narrow jungle to the north, the Mathiesons of Olin Mathieson Chemical—lovely people—who also owned the uninhabited offshore island which was then a coconut plantation which faced us and them about a mile away and was later made famous, or infamous, by Nixon and his pal Rebozo; and, to the south, the Thomas Fortune Ryans, who built a rococo Italian palace, in bad taste. The Anchorage was a simple, lovely place. As was Coconut Grove itself. There was no tourism then, there was no fear and there was no disgust.

  Céline Roll Karraker

  Grandpapa lived there alone for six months of the year. My grandmother joined him for a couple of months in the winter.

  He ate everything out of a can—without heating it! He used to say to us, “Children, this is the best way of all,” and he’d open a can of Campbell’s split-pea soup and put a little seawater in it and stir it up, and then he’d eat it. Then he’d open up a can of sardines and eat that. And then there was the first instant coffee at that time, called George Washington, and he’d put that in hot water and drink it.

  He had no servants, except outdoor people. He adored botany. He was a close friend of the great botanist David Fairchild. He and my grandfather planted the place with all kinds of wonderful plants. We children could pull fruit right off the trees!

  Patricia Greene

  Barbara and Brooks, before they moved to that penthouse on Seventy-fifth Street, lived two houses down from us on Seventy-first Street, and little Tony was a little younger than one of our sons and a little older than the other—an enchanting child, very elflike—and he used to come around and play in a very imaginative way. He was very very fond of natural history, and actually, one of the nicest stories about Barbara, who was a beautiful woman—a mischievous look in her eye!—was that when Tony was a baby, I think it was probably during World War Two, she was down in Florida with him and some great naturalist was there and said to her, “Oh that lovely little child, don’t give him any toys to play with, let him play with nature,” so she did. And instead of playing with building blocks and trucks and things, he grew up playing with rocks and sticks and mosses and frogs and crickets.

  Brooks Baekeland

  David Fairchild. “The aged angel,” I used to call him. He always allowed me to come up to his laboratory at the Kampong, his house in Coconut Grove, and interrupt him. I used to walk there all by myself—he lived about two miles away. For me he was a kindly, playful, learned, imaginative human being with a kind of beauty in him that suggested something holy, not Christly but Pythagorean. He was also of course a famous host to all the world’s great; everyone in the world came to his house.

  He used to like to see how much information I could hold in my head. His own theory, which I was offered at the dining-room table at the Anchorage, was that one could remember fifty-five thousand different species but not more. I remember the Nobel biologist Dr. Hermann Muller was having dinner with us that night. When I was a little boy, I thought that “doctor” simply meant someone who was a man and who had white hair, since all the men I met who had white hair were Doctor something or other. When LHB and David Fairchild were together, the talk was all of enzymes. How far ahead of their time those two giants were!

  Céline Roll Karraker

  Grandpapa never wore real shoes. He always wore sneakers, white sneakers. He just thought they were sensible and cheap. He used to go to the Chemists’ Club and the University Club in them. So he was an individualist and a character. I have a picture of him and Mark Twain all in white, because that was what Mark Twain wore, too.

  In Florida, Grandpapa wore white ducks and a white shirt with his white sneakers. And when he got hot, he’d walk right into the swimming pool—with all his clothes on! And then walk out of the pool, saying, “This is the way to keep cool. The evaporation keeps you cool.”

  And this physically very simple kind of life was carried even to the house in Yonkers. We’d all be at Snug Rock for a lovely traditional Sunday dinner and he would have his instant coffee and his Campbell’s soup and his can of sardines served to him on a Bakelite tray, right at the table with everybody else.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  A couple of summers ago I went to Block Island to see Brooks. His cousin Céline Karraker had told me he was spending the summer there, and I just arrived. I was afraid he’d flee if I told him I was coming—he’s strange that way. I went to the house he was renting and walked right in. I had heard he was having an affair with some woman from New York who had divorced her husband for him, so I asked him about that right away. And he said, “She was such a good cook we used to have to spend two hours every day shopping and then two hours preparing the food and then we’d eat for another hour and then, because I don’t want to be a male chauvinist pig, I’d wash the dishes and there’d be ten dishes and five pans, and I just got so sick of the whole thing I finally threw her out.” I said, “Who cooks for you now?” And he said, “Simple—Sunday I have a pound of hamburger, Monday I have a pound of potatoes, Tuesday I have a pound of spinach, and so on. So I have one dish, one pot, one pan.”

  Brooks Baekeland

  I am a man of very simple tastes. My mother calls me a monk. Some of my peculiar habits now—unhabits, in fact—make me think of my grandfather as I knew him in my boyhood. LHB kept only one “business suit.” I haven’t even got one. Three years ago I discovered that I had fifteen shirts—I threw away ten of them; that I had ten handkerchiefs—I threw away eight of them; eight pair of shorts—I threw away five of them; umpteen trousers—I kept two: umpteen-plus sweaters—I kept three…and so on.

  My father kept four or five perfectly pressed white suits in a closet in his office—these were the summers before air-conditioning—and showered and changed several times a day. I remember Ben Sonnenberg, the public relations “genius,” telling me how much he resented seeing him on the train to Fairfield, in the boiling August evenings, so perfectly dapper and unwrinkled—all military-style. And how much he preferred my portly, rumpled, and perspiring grandfather, whose joviality he also liked. Ben sometimes rode with one or the other of them in the elevator at 247 Park Avenue.

  I said my grandfather kept only
one suit for town. But there’s the story my grandmother used to tell about how she finally tricked him into buying a new dark-blue suit. This story involves a neighbor of theirs in Yonkers, the famous lawyer Samuel Untermeyer, who also owned a very pretentious estate somewhere to the north. LHB held him in scorn as a lawyer—as he did all lawyers, calling them jackals and hyenas. The Untermeyer estate was full of copies of Greek statues and picturesque Greek ruins and Greco-Roman terracing. It was ridiculed by LHB.

  Well, one day in Yonkers my grandmother saw a shop that sold men’s clothes. She went in and made a deal with the owner, after she had selected and bought an expensive blue serge suit of LHB’s size for—let us say—one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The deal was that the owner was to show it in the window for twenty-five dollars but not “sell” it to anyone but LHB, who, of course, he knew of—people today have no idea how famous LHB once was. Then at dinner that night my grandmother told my grandfather that she had seen a beautiful suit of imported English serge selling for twenty-five dollars. “Oh, no, Céline—maybe one hundred and twenty-five but not twenty-five. There you have made a mistake.”

  “No mistake, dearie—twenty-five,” she insisted.

  And so they argued. They even made a bet.

  The next night LHB arrived home crowing with delight. When he could stop laughing, he explained how he had just “done in” that old Shylock Sam Untermeyer. LHB had gotten off the train from New York and gone directly to the shop, where he had seen the suit, seen that my grandmother had been right, and bought it. On the way home to Snug Rock, he had fallen in with Sam Untermeyer, shown him the suit, and sold it to him for seventy-five dollars!