Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (14 page)

Geoffrey Parsons

They were three of the brightest children I’ve ever known. Little Cornelia—the family called her Dickie—was the most marvelous child. Very beautiful, and full of creative imagination—a real original. She was wounded permanently by her father. She was a brilliant girl and he cut off her education with boarding school, saying that she was not worth educating. Her response to this was the usual one—she married the first eligible man who asked her in order to get free of family. She’s been married three times, I think. Without that father, there’s no saying what her life might have been.

As for Fred, the younger boy, he always wanted to be a composer, but George told him in no uncertain terms that music was an avocation, not a vocation, and threatened to cut him off without a penny if he pursued a musical career. So Fred became a doctor, choosing psychiatry as his specialty. I believe he has written numerous scholarly papers. He’s also an accomplished art historian.

Brooks was seven years older than Fred and about a year and a half younger than Dickie, and he was always the most brilliant of the children. He had a quick eye and a vivid curiosity. He could have been anything he chose to be. Instead, he’s spent his entire life running—from or after something.

Brooks Baekeland

I was a hunter, I smelled a kill far—oh, far indeed, perhaps one life would not be enough. I was running fast always on fresh snow.

Each of my father’s children had to make his own kind of defense.
I
chose—I had no choice—a sulking, black defiance. My whole spirit was in opposition to my father, with whom ironically I shared many physical gifts: alertness, quickness, coordination, speed of decision—all
animal
things. But nothing else, though way down in him there was a sweetness that some, even my mother, recognized was there. There is a child in everyone; it is the child we love. It was the child in Barbara that I had always loved. I love my mother, too, as I love children. She was and is the quintessence of the feminine—loyal, sentimental, fragile, beautiful.

Geoffrey Parsons

Brooks’s mother is much too beautiful for her own and everybody else’s good. Her whole life has been theater, with her own charming self always at stage center. She’s just as smart as vinegar laced with a good mustard but it’s all buried beneath a foot of the best goosedown. The only relation that anyone—man, woman, child, even her own children—can have with her is a flirtatious one, in my opinion. As you can imagine, she’s always had a score of admirers—including, I must confess, myself.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

A lot of pressure to marry money had been put on Brooks’s mother by her family, who’d lost all theirs. Poor Cornelia, you know—she was really sacrificed. She was a very sensitive romantic creature and there was just never any rapport between her and George Baekeland.

How she left him is a fascinating story. She wanted to get away one winter and her friends were all going down to some club in Florida, and George didn’t want her to stay at this particular club. He said, “You can go only if you stay at
my
club.” So she went to his club—alone—and one night there was a fancy-dress ball and she was coming down the stairs and she suddenly caught the eye of this man. He just looked up at her—you know, across a crowded room. Pong! Just like that—love. He went over and asked her to dance.

His name was Penn Hallowell, N. Penrose Hallowell, and he was from Boston and he was married at the time. Now, Cornelia is a very honorable person—I have tremendous love and admiration for her. I think she’s the kind of person who probably, once she met Penn Hallowell, couldn’t bear to stay with George Baekeland and just said to him, “Look, I’m in love with somebody else, let me go.” I mean, she wouldn’t make any bones about it. So anyway, he let her go, but on one condition—she had to give up custody of her children. Fred was only seven at the time, Brooks was fourteen, and Dickie was almost sixteen.

George gave her three thousand dollars a year to live on. And Penn Hallowell didn’t support her, because that was against his principles. He would bring her gifts—he would bring her very
nice
gifts—but he never gave any money. So she was strapped in those years.

The children were all away at boarding school, and on vacations they were with Cornelia as much as with George, even though he had the custody. The only problem the boys ever had with her was getting to
see
her. They always had to make a date two weeks in advance or something, she had so many admirers. She was a good mother, though—so charming and so gracious, and so beautiful!

For years after she left George, Penn Hallowell did not marry Cornelia, because, as I said, he already was married. Everybody knew about them but
they
didn’t know that
anybody
knew and they were always so careful. And when they finally “came out”—after twenty years, which was when his wife died—everybody said, “Oh, finally Penn Hallowell has married his lovely mistress.” He was eighty then and she was sixty-five. He died five years later and she was absolutely distraught. They were lovers right up to the end of their lives.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

He was her man, yes. Brooks told me that she kept his room just the way it was before he died. His little slippers. His little bathrobe, exactly where it was, and so on. I have never been in Brooks’s mother’s apartment in New York. I’ve never been to camp. I was never invited. Brooks never took me. This is why I keep saying, the story is there but I am not in it, I have been a bit player.

You know, she always spoke of her husband as Buck—that was her nickname for him. That’s where she was rather touching and sweet. To marry Penn Hallowell was—I don’t know—the dream of her life.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

George Baekeland married again about two years after the divorce from Cornelia. His new wife came from out West—good American stock, though I heard her father sold watches and inexpensive jewelry. She was absolutely beautiful. And very musical—she played the piano. She’s about eighty now, I guess.

I remember Dickie saying about her, “She’s
lovely
to
look
at, de
light
ful to
know
”—you know. So the children gave their stepmother a hard time but they liked her. Of course, they
adored
their mother.

Brooks wrote a story about his mother called “The Shrike.” I don’t think it was ever published but we all read it. A shrike is a bird that kills its prey with its beak, and the story was based on the fact that five men were supposed to have committed suicide over Cornelia. There was
one,
definitely. And all this upset the kids terribly.

Brooks Baekeland

The story was “The Grosbeak” and it was pure invention, although the protagonist, Zachariah, his father, and his mother, were all modeled after myself and my parents. Nothing ever happened in my mother’s life like what I told in that story. At least not that I know of.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks’s mother was a great beauty. That’s one of the reasons she and Barbara got along so well—Brooks says because of that Great Beauty Club that you have in America. Also, Barbara was, I think, very clever with her mother-in-law—she tried to please her very much and did.

Brooks’s mother is a very difficult person. She came to visit us in Brittany. Brooks had said to me in advance that she was a prima donna. All these Baekelands have egos that are tremendous and there’s not much room for anybody else.

Brooks has a great
coquetterie
of mentioning his age all the time, which can be a sort of vanity if you look very handsome and yet you say, “I’m as old as Methuselah,” so that then the other person has to say, “My goodness, you’re handsome!” So whenever Brooks would say how old he was, his mother would say, “Stop annoying us with your age.
Do
stop talking about your age
all
the time!” She disliked me right away, very much. Because I had replaced Barbara. And because I didn’t pay court to her at all. She told me, “Sylvie, why don’t you put some makeup on? A woman always looks better with her face made up.”

Nina Daly

Mrs. Hallowell was devoted to Barbara and Barbara was devoted to her. She’s a beautiful woman, you know. A blonde. Blue eyes. Nice figure. She was Tony’s other grandmother.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Mrs. Hallowell wrote to Tony right after he killed Barbara. She was horrified, of course. I can’t say that she wasn’t horrified from the heart—I don’t know—but she was certainly horrified by the scandal. She’s, I think, in a way an old-fashioned person—no, not old-fashioned, conventional—and she really doesn’t think this is a very nice story. She never liked anything Tony did that wasn’t proper behavior. I mean, she didn’t think it was very attractive for her grandson to come to lunch at the Ritz or some decent tea place dressed like a hippie, let’s say.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

I think the drama of it got Cornelia more than anything. I mean, to write and say, “Tony, why and how did you kill your mother?” shocked me a bit. Fred was shocked, too—everybody was shocked. She wanted me to read Tony’s reply. I just couldn’t, though I must admit it was hard to resist.

Brooks Baekeland

My poor Barbara. She was in so many ways a marvelous person. And—though the world knew it not—impossible. I always felt that I was not a great enough man for her. What she needed was a Henry VIII. But of course she finally had him—in her son, and he chopped off her head. So to speak.

To tell you truly, I think there is only one true kind of love, and that is the love of a mother for a child—utterly brave, loyal, forgiving, generous, and without a jot of self-love in it. That said, I believe that insofar as we really love one another—when we do, and it is rare—it is in this way.

I must now tell you of the last time I saw my poor father. I think it was in 1964 or 1965. I knew he had not many years—or even months—to live, and I went up to Connecticut to see him. I do not suppose that I had spent a total of more than twenty-five hours with him in the previous twenty years.

His wife had left us alone together. He was confused—not just in the philosophic sense, but medically. He was far gone in senile dementia. To entertain him I had brought some slides of the expedition in Peru that I had made with Peter Gimbel the year before. I showed them to him in the living room. He understood nothing, or little. And then, seeing that I was not succeeding in entertaining him, I said that I would now be going back to New York, would someone drive me to the station.

He offered to come with me. His young gardener drove; my father could no longer drive a car. It was while we were driving to the station that I realized—and I am sure
he
realized—that we would never see each other again. As we stood together on the railroad platform, on an impulse I took him strongly in my arms and kissed him, hard,
à l’européen.
I was forty-three. He was seventy. We had not kissed—we had hardly shaken hands—a dozen times in all my life. Both of us were suddenly crying and speechless. Both of us, now that it was too late, asking the other for forgiveness, I for having so disappointed him, he for having been such a lousy parent, and God knows what else—everything, all the
malheur du siècle
, all that we might have done, should have done, did not do, all the beauty lost, all the love not loved.

From the
New York Times,
February 1, 1966

G
EORGE
B
AEKELAND OF
B
AKELITE;

S
ON OF
P
LASTICS
M
AKER
I
S
D
EAD

Special to the
New York Times

Fairfield, Conn., Jan.
31

George Baekeland, former vice president and director of the Bakelite Corporation and a sportsman, died today. He was 70 years old….

He hunted big game and shot grouse on the Scottish moors. A crack trap and skeet shot, he wrote
Gunner’s Guide,
published by Macmillan in 1948.

Mr. Baekeland was also a yachtsman and fisherman and had ridden in point-to-point races. He painted water-colors and made etchings, too.

Surviving are his widow; two sons; a daughter; a sister; and four grandchildren.

From the Last Will and Testament of George Baekeland, October 31, 1958

Brooks Baekeland