Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (19 page)

Miwa Svinka-Zielinski

I got him lots of crayons and paper so that he could do something, and they did not give them to him. I asked one of the psychiatrists there about this and he said, “That takes him from reality.”

Tony Van Roon

Tony worked in the handicrafts shop—it was sort of something that he wanted to do and it was backed up by medical staff. Everybody—nine times out of ten—is put out on work detail, it’s supposed to be on therapeutic lines. Handicrafts was very much a sort of time-passing area. Tony used to go over there to paint. It would have been very difficult for him to do actual painting on the block in Cornwall—to do that, he would have had to be on what they call “house parole.”

From my point of view, I saw him as a fairly sort of stable person. That’s not saying that he didn’t have a mental illness, but that he appeared to have accepted the environment he was in and just got on with everything from day to day, but kept a wide berth of most people, particularly anybody in authority. I think that becomes a way of life in that environment. You think, “Well, is that screw in a good or bad mood? If he’s in a bad mood I’d better not say anything ’cause I might get a kick on the ear or whatever.” I think the way of thinking of most people who had any sense was to just keep a low profile, because once you started sticking up for your own rights and other people’s rights, not only was it ignored, but it was thrown back in your face quite often by excessive use of medication—which was always justified by medical staff. I’m not saying that the medical staff colluded. What I’m saying is that all it took was for a sort of senior nurse to say, “This patient is becoming a bit psychotic,” for the doctors to justify upping the medication.

Patricia Greene

The first time we visited him, it was a very shocking experience—he looked so bad. He was pretty shabby, and we got him some clothes—a pair of pants and some socks—and we brought him stuff to eat.

The second time, we found him much better—there was a year between visits. And this time he was paunchy. We asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted music, classical music I think it was, and I said I thought he ought to have some shirts—we felt it would pick him up a little.

You know, Barbara had brought him to see my husband professionally. At the time Justin didn’t tell me. He would never speak of friends or their children if he were treating them. Several times I met people in his waiting room and I was surprised. I saw Barbara there once and I was totally surprised.

I don’t really remember how we first met the Baekelands, whether it was on the street with the children or whether a friend introduced us. I just remember being enormously impressed with Brooks and Barbara. He was cold and dark and she was warm and light—it was like they were Yin and Yang. I thought they were the most fascinating couple I’d ever seen. I remember Barbara with a big fox fur hat. She said, “It’s just my skiing hat.” To me she was glamorous, and that hat was the cat’s meow!

And she rode horses. She’d get up at six in the morning to go off and ride somebody’s Irish hunter in the park. Brooks said to me once, “I can tell when she gets up in the morning—the bed goes up like that and she’s gone.” So that’s what I remember—that she would get up at six to ride a fiery horse in the park and Brooks would let her go.

There was a painting of Barbara in their house—she had her hair down and very red lips and a very décolleté dress—and I remember studying that and wondering if that was the real Barbara or not.

Brooks Baekeland

I commissioned that painting, a pastel, from Pal Fried, a Hungarian who’d studied under Monet in Paris and who signed all his pictures Fried Pal—last name first,
à l’européen.
He was one of those painters who can do brilliant sketches, which they then proceed to ruin. He had already done an earlier portrait of Barbara for me, which I had
watched
him ruin—I gave that one to Barbara’s mother. This one I halted at the right moment—I made him stop. He was offended but agreed. Later he went out to Hollywood and painted people like the Gabor girls and Marilyn Monroe, but this was probably the best portrait he ever did. It’s the one that I reclaimed from Barbara’s Cadogan Square apartment after her murder. Sylvie much resented my having it, and it was always hidden away. She finally destroyed it—by accident, she said, and I believe her, but Freud might not have.

Elizabeth Blow

The first time I ever saw her was at one of the Art Students League balls, which in those days were great events—sort of like the Beaux-Arts balls in Paris. Everybody went to a great deal of trouble over their costumes. This one was a literary ball, the theme was literature, and I wore an old beautiful red velvet skirt that was made in tiers of French ribbon and a black bodice—I was
Le Rouge et le Noir!
A lot of the men didn’t know what to do for their costume so they just put a towel around their heads and made their faces up with some kind of dark brown paint and went as Hindus. Fred Mueller, who I was engaged to, was very blond and Germanic-looking, and
he
went as a Hindu—he looked absolutely marvelous. And I think Brooks was dressed that way, too—he was tremendously attractive, just one of the handsomest men I’ve ever met in my life.

Anyway, when I went to the ladies’ room, there was this beautiful girl there. She was
not
dressed in costume, she just had on a perfectly ordinary dinner dress. We got to talking and she told me she’d just had a son. And she talked about her son—she was very happy, she was thrilled to death.

We saw the Baekelands a lot after that night, mostly in their house. It was a rather conventional house, considering the personalities
in
the house.

Heather Cohane

My husband Jack told me this story about the Baekelands. It was long before I knew either of them. It must have been about the time Tony was born. They were all having dinner in some restaurant—Jack and his wife before me, and I think Aschwin Lippe and maybe
his
wife, Simone, and Brooks and Barbara—and they were playing this game: “For a million dollars would you eat a pound of human flesh? Would you go to bed with the first person you met after going through a revolving door, for a million dollars?”—and so forth.

Brooks must have answered yes to
that
question, because Barbara was saying to him as they left the restaurant, “Oh well, if
that’s
the way you feel,
I’ll
just go off with the first man that comes along in a car!” And she dashed into the middle of the street and flagged down a car with four young men in it. She jumped in and it took off. And of course, Jack and his wife and Aschwin and Simone and Brooks were left there with their mouths open, watching her disappear.

A couple of hours later she came home, having evidently got rather cold feet. Barbara was very beautiful in those days, so I mean, that was quite a crazy thing to do in New York City, a
dangerous
thing to do in New York City. Very crazy and very dangerous.

From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished

Elizabeth Blow

When Fred and I had our first child, we were living down in Greenwich Village in a very tiny apartment. Then we moved to Fiftieth Street and Second Avenue, to a railroad flat over a liquor store. Then we were going to have a second child so we had to move. And Fred found this incredible house on Seventy-second Street, which we rented for only one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month from this couple who were going to England for two or three years—he had a Rhodes Scholarship.

It was mammoth—five floors—and Fred, poor Fred, would come home from work and haul himself up to the top floor, the old maids’ quarters, which he was redoing so we could rent it out. Whoever rented it was going to have to use our staircase.

We ran an ad and a very nice lady and her daughter-in-law, a widow, turned up and they were absolutely delightful. It came out as we were talking to them that the older woman was Barbara Baekeland’s mother. She was lovely-looking, and over the years she has never changed very much. I mean, she had nothing of the sort of smashing looks of her daughter but she was very pretty, very kind of birdlike, always very nicely dressed. She always had a sort of prim-and-proper look about her.

I think we charged them one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. They made the place absolutely charming. The sitting room in the front they fixed up with great taste, and the little kitchen that Fred had put in. They didn’t entertain very much, but Barbara came over a lot to see her mother, and that was how I really got to know her so well. And of course Tony would come over all the time to spend the afternoon with his grandmother. He adored her. And she adored him. And whenever Brooks and Barbara would go away for the weekend, he would come and stay over.

Nini was a fascinating person at that time because she was quite neurotic, you know. She never could sleep very well, she had to have all the blinds pulled down—there couldn’t even be one single ray of light coming in—and still she could not sleep a wink. I remember her thousands of times leaning over the banister. I would say, “Hi, Nini, how
are
you?” and she would say, “Oh hi, darling. Didn’t sleep a wink last night—I’m a wreck.” She was always saying “I’m a wreck.”

As far as one could see, they were a very happy little family. Brooks and Barbara appeared to be the ideal couple, with this charming little boy whom they both loved—no, I don’t think
too
much, you can’t love someone too much. Of course later it did become too much.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

One summer I visited Brooks and Barbara on the Cape, Ballston Beach in Truro. It was once my stepfather’s beach—Ozzie Ball, Sheldon Osborn Ball. He owned from Truro to North Truro, two miles of oceanfront. Zeckendorf offered him three million dollars for it, but he
gave
it all to the national parks.

Tony and I played together all day. He was so bright, he was way ahead of his class. I mean, I could spend the whole afternoon with him and have fun, and I’m not a child lover to that extent. I mean, I treat children like grown-ups—if they don’t give me the same thing as a grown-up, I don’t want to be with them. And Tony could give me the same as a grown-up—you know, opinions, feelings, wonderful observations. I would say his best time was up till the age of about four.

One afternoon, he and I watched a praying mantis on the boardwalk, and then he sat and drew the mantis and then he drew some birds—really wonderful. And later that night when Barbara was putting him to bed, I heard her say—over the partition that divided the rooms—“Tony darling, who do you love more, Liz or Mummy?” And he said, “Mummy, of course.” And I thought, if at
four
she’s giving him that kind of signal…

Dodie Captiva

I knew them from the Cape. I can’t say I knew them intimately. I mean, I knew them about as well as people do when one lives there year-round and the other comes for the summer.

I used to go once a year to visit New York and I was walking up Fifth Avenue, north of Rockefeller Plaza, daydreaming, when I suddenly caught sight of something familiar out of the corner of my eye—a woman and a small boy. He was five, maybe six—little enough to almost have to be held by the hand. They were strolling and looking into store windows, and when I came abreast of them I looked at the reflection in the window and saw that it was Barbara and Tony. They were so enraptured with each other—whatever they were doing, whatever the conversation was—that my red flag went up!

Sara Duffy Chermayeff

I was in Truro with my parents, I was sixteen years old and I had just learned to drive and I didn’t have anything to do, and one night my father and mother said, “Now Sara, pull yourself together and
do
something. Now what can you do?” And what came up was that I could make a little children’s camp. Well, it turned out to be a big business—I ended up with, like, fifteen children. I charged ten dollars a week. I made a lot of money—for
me.
My mother had this station wagon and I used that to pick up the kids. I took them to Gull Pond on the Truro-Wellfleet border—we took Oreos and apple juice and we’d go swimming. You know how people always say, “
Those
were the days,
I
remember those days,” but I
do
remember. I mean, now Gull Pond looks like, you know, Ocean City, Maryland, but when I went there with my little group, there wasn’t a house on it.

Originally I had Edmund Wilson’s little daughter, Helen Miranda, who’s now a quite established painter, and Daphne Hellman’s three children, Daisy Hellman, Digger St. John, and Sandy Bull, who became quite a big rock star. And one day Daphne when I was drumming up business said, “Some people called Baekeland have rented a house on Castle Hill Road, and they have a little boy.” So I drove right over there and this woman in a brown bikini was washing the car. She was
gorgeous.
I mean, she was just everything, I mean the most…I mean, I don’t think Marilyn Monroe had come alive yet—right? I think this was before Marilyn Monroe. I was sixteen and Tony was seven, so it was 1953—was Marilyn Monroe in business in ’53? I don’t know about whether she was there in history or not, but for
me
I had just never seen anybody as glamorous as Barbara Baekeland. And I followed
that
star for many years.