Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (20 page)

She agreed right away that I could take Tony in my little bathing-suit group. He had sort of a batik bathing suit and he was redheaded and oh gosh…He was always my favorite. And one day a little later on that summer Barbara or Brooks took me aside and spoke to me about Tony’s stutter, and I said, “He doesn’t stutter.” So they said, “He doesn’t stutter with
you?
” I said, “Not at all.” So at that point they hired me on as a baby-sitter for whenever they went out in the evening or went away for the weekend.

Daphne Hellman

Once at their place on the Cape when I was there for dinner, Barbara and Brooks got Tony to read the Marquis de Sade out loud. He didn’t read particularly well. He was doing it because he’d been commanded to. It struck me as very peculiar. Maybe it was to help him get over his stutter. Maybe it just seemed peppier than having him read from
David Copperfield.

Barbara was the social one and Brooks was the curmudgeon. I remember one day I came upon them walking in the rain at night having some terrible fight. I guess Brooks flirted a good deal. Of course, Barbara was always hitching a ride with the milkman or somebody and being absolutely charming with them. She really was able to absorb people’s flavor and get pleasure out of them.

Barbara Hale

Bob Hale and I went up to Truro to visit them. I’ll never forget sitting on the beach and seeing Ben Sonnenberg trotting along in his Georgian manner—looking perfectly awful, you know, in a bathing suit. He saw that there was this perfectly beautiful redheaded girl sitting with me and he came up to us and said, “Wouldn’t you like to share my little picnic?” Well, he had this very elaborate picnic basket such as you’ve never seen in all your life, filled with pâté and lobster sandwiches and stuff like that—this was his pickup deal, and from then on Barbara saw a great deal of Ben Sonnenberg in New York. I remember Brooks came down to the beach with Tony and joined us.

Daphne Hellman

Tony and my daughter Daisy as little kids on the Cape were inseparable. I remember them crowing like roosters on the roof of that rough-and-ready house that Brooks and Barbara were renting right on the beach. Crowing was just something Tony and Daisy did at that time. It was very annoying to everybody. Barbara and Brooks got sort of fed up.

Daisy Hellman Paradis

We used to get into mischief together, at Ballston Beach, and go and raid the local farmer’s garden. Once, we took our clothes off in our garage, and when cars came we jumped up and down and yelled, you know—and my father came by and he was rather amused.

I never had great feeling for Barbara at all, to tell you the truth—as a child, I didn’t like her. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, of course, but it didn’t seem to me she had a whole lot of affection for Tony. Or for me, you know—or for kids in general. She was somebody who was always sort of saying “Oh
darling,
” you know, this and that, but there was something sort of not so real there. Artificial maybe.

Tony wrote to me a couple of years after he killed her. I didn’t answer because I really didn’t know what to say, you know. Jesus Christ! What do you say to somebody who’s killed his mother?

Helen Miranda Wilson

I remember very little about him—that he had red hair and freckles, that I played with him when I was very young, with him and Johnny Frank, the writer Waldo Frank’s son. I’d better identify him as Waldo and
Jean
Frank’s son, because Waldo was married a number of times. Johnny’s now a paramedic and ambulance driver in San Francisco. Anyway, we all used to play together in the summer, and Tony Baekeland was a real brat and a bully. Yeah, a bully—and I was a pretty hefty little kid. You want me to tell you what I really remember about him? It’s pretty funny actually. I remember us playing up in the woods and somebody went to the bathroom—I think it was him—you know little kids—and I think he scooped some up in his hand and chased me with it. That’s it, that’s my recollection of him.

Jonathan Frank

Tony and I were real close when we were little kids, up till we were eight or nine. And we were both terrible! In fact there was another boy, Johnny Van Kirk, and the three of us were inseparable—we were called the Terrible Trio. The grown-ups used to call us that. But it was a fond name, even though I’m sure we
were
terrible.

Johnny Van Kirk

My mother used to make up stories about us—“Black Johnny,” “Yellow Johnny,” and “Terrible Tony.” It was a threesome.

The only reason for the “Terrible Tony” was because he was always off on some very imaginative rant or other. He had a fantastic imagination, he just knew no bounds. Tony was not ordinary. No, I would say he was extraordinary.

He was certainly the wildest of the bunch. I spent a lot of time at the Ballston Beach parking lot with him, blocking off large sections and flooding them with water from his house, making vast, swamp wonderworlds between the parked cars. He was always inventing mad games for us to play. Johnny Frank and I would go out and buy toy trucks and guns and stuff, but Tony would invent them right out of his head. Mostly fantasy games, role-playing games. And he had a capacity for involving you in them—you would forget your inhibitions and become a part of it all very easily.

He even convinced us that if we would rub this strange funny clay from the dunes on ourselves, we could fly. We’d literally spend hours running down the cliff and jumping off as far as we could, convinced that we had flown a little farther each time—with a little more clay! And it was Tony’s ability that really allowed us to do this. There was a kind of persuasion that he had. He was very forceful at that age. And it was a good time.

ONCE A WEEK TONY BAEKELAND,
along with five of his fellow patients at Cornwall House, was escorted to the canteen, where he was free to purchase, among other things, candy, cigarettes, soap, coffee, and tea. A patient was not allowed to handle cash himself; rather, all purchases were charged to his hospital account, into which his money had been placed. Each month he received a computer printout of the status of his finances.

“Tony could be very kind to others,” Dr. Maguire says. “In fact, I had to protect him from being overgenerous. I initiated a request for a protector through the Court of Protection, which is a branch of the Supreme Court in England, and Tony’s money was eventually placed under the protection of a court-appointed guardian, who inquired into his needs and then apportioned the money to him. Usually it is given in a yearly sum, but I convinced Tony’s guardian to give it to him in six-month installments. He was also receiving an allowance from his father, and there was quite a lot of money from other sources as well, including income from investments in New York.”

By the beginning of 1976, Tony Baekeland had adjusted to hospital routine, both social and therapeutic. “He had a chronic illness, of course,” says Dr. Maguire, “but he fluctuated—he had ups and downs. His true basic personality would show through every now and then. His kind of illness was not strictly an illness that depends on the environment. It was genetic.

“Tony was well read,” Dr. Maguire adds, “but he had something a lot of schizophrenics have—a kind of pseudointellectuality about things. I’ve been involved with schizophrenics for a long time, because they’re not boring—they’re very interesting, in fact. There’s a certain truth to everything they say. I find this fascinating, because it all
seems
so true, yet they can’t function normally. And when they commit criminal acts, they always, in some way, manage to tell the world what they’re going to do before they do it.”

Tony Van Roon

I knew that Tony Baekeland was fairly solvent but I didn’t know he was, you know, exceedingly rich or anything. But what I would say is always the sociopathic element in Broadmoor would take great advantage of people who were like that and would be their friend until there was nothing left. I do remember that when he went to the canteen he certainly always made adequate allowance for what he’d need in the week. But the thing was, as soon as he got back to the ward, people would say, Well, you don’t need all that, why don’t you give me some, and he was really a very nice guy, you know. So the problem was he would give things away, particularly if he saw somebody who was less fortunate.

Patricia Greene

He was always very sensitive as a child. He was a will-o’-the-wisp child, in a way—now you see him, now you don’t. At his parents’ dinner parties he would fly in and out, like quicksilver.

He would come to our house, but our children would not so often go there. He would come to us because we were more of a family, I think, and he rather liked that. I think Brooks and Barbara were rather social. I think they were
quite
social. He went to his grandmother’s when they went out at night—I would see him walking down the street with his parakeet in a cage and his pajamas over his arm.

One Halloween I took him around the block. We made our costumes in those days, we didn’t buy them, and I made one for him. Then I went around with the children. They were quite small. I remember Tony was overwhelmed with the excitement of it. And he ran off through the night, down the block, and I was quite alarmed because he just disappeared. We chased after him and finally caught up with him and he was just running, running, running, in a wild manner. And then we all went around the block together. The block was very nice in those days. At the Paul Mellon house, the butler answered the door and offered us apples on a silver tray. Those days are gone forever.

I remember Tony had some mice or something in his room, and of course he had the little bird, and I suppose he had fish. And when he would come to our house he would look at
our
animals—we may have had a white rat that impressed him, too. That was more of his link with my boys than anything else.

There was a vacant lot across the street from us—they had torn down the building—and I think there were rats which intrigued Tony and our boys, and I said, “You’d better stay away because you might get bitten.” Our boys pretty much stayed away, but I think Tony used to go through the boards again and again and poke around and I think that upset Barbara, because I remember her speaking to me about that as a concern—how she could keep him away from the building. I guess Tony just had this enormous interest in any sort of animals.

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

Patricia Greene

One of the first times I met Barbara, she said, “Oh, Tony’s raising moths in my closet.” And I thought that was enchanting, so I looked and, sure enough, in a shoe box he had some moth cocoons, and she twinkled and was merry over that. I must say I adored her for that—
I
was always saying, “Get the moths
out
of my closet!” And
she
had mink coats and very expensive clothes in hers.

Brooks Baekeland

I am practically certain they were praying mantises—the cocoons given us by Alan Priest, who was Curator of Oriental Art at the Metropolitan Museum at that time and our friend Aschwin Lippe’s immediate superior. Anthony Quinn, who came to see about renting our house and who opened the closet in Tony’s room where they had just hatched out in their thousands, may remember his astonishment. He did not take the house. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy did.

Patricia Greene

We invited Tony to our place in the country mainly because one of our sons had gone over to see some of his moths and was intrigued. You see, Tony was really just the boy-next-door type thing. The second time he came to the country, he developed warts from the frogs. There’s apparently a little virus that they carry. I think Barbara was pretty horrified at that. He didn’t come again.

You know, he did some drawings at our house in town. I must say they were quite different. Most boys were drawing rockets or airplanes and things like that, and he would be drawing more imaginative stuff—fanciful animals.

Barbara used to do paintings of insects. Very large. Mostly representative. They were very good. I remember she worked very hard one summer on Cape Cod, and she came back with an exhibit in the fall. I remember meeting her before the show and she said, “I’m a wild woman, I’ve been painting like mad all summer, I just couldn’t stop, and I’m on my way to the hairdresser!” And her hair
was
standing out. She
was
a wild woman.

It was a charming show. You walked up some stairs in this very small gallery and Barbara was greeting people. I have a mental picture of her standing with her lovely hair and her lovely complexion and pretty dress. She had little white kid gloves on. I was impressed with that—white kid gloves! She was soft. I can see the little white kid gloves around her little plump hands—she wasn’t plump but she gave the impression of being so. I commented on the gloves and she said, “I don’t like to touch all these people, I guess.” So that was a sidelight I remember of her character. Of course, people did wear gloves in those days.

Marjorie Fraser Snow

She studied under, I believe, Gonzalez, I think on the Cape and also in New York at the Art Students League, and also under Hans Hofmann. I think she had a one-man show somewhere in New York. I think she got very fine reviews, as a matter of fact. I know she had one on the Cape. And Nini was so proud of her!

Patricia Greene

Barbara was very proud of her mother for taking a job at the Museum of Natural History. Mrs. Daly apparently didn’t have to work at that point, although at one time I know she had rather a hard time making ends meet. It must have seemed like a dream to have Barbara marry all that plastic money! But later on, Mrs. Daly said she was bored just sitting around and she wanted to do something. Of course Tony was delighted when she went to work at the museum—after all, the Museum of Natural History! That was right down his alley.

I just took it for granted that he’d be a naturalist. I thought he’d go on and pull himself together—you know, that he’d get to be a rather eccentric naturalist of some sort. Or a painter.

Jonathan Frank

When I visited Tony in New York, we used to cut out to the museum where his grandmother worked. Basically there was sort of a loose connection because we would report to her but we were pretty much on our own—and we were really young at that point.

We used to play outdoors a lot and I’d say we preferred it that way. At night we would escape to the bedroom and we had a game where we would climb up on a cupboard way up high and then jump down on the bed, pretending that we were pterodactyls—you know, flying dinosaurs.

Nina Daly

I went looking for a job and I got one in the gift shop at the museum and we got a vacation in the summer for two weeks and we got holidays. I really enjoyed it. I would have liked to have done something else after I finished there. I would have liked to have worked in some store or something, if it had been a nice store. Anything to keep busy, to get out of the house in the morning.

Tony would stop in and see me an awful lot. I loved that. He used to come and spend about three nights a week with me, too. It was to keep me company because I was alone, you see. And I had lived with them for a while, because I hadn’t gotten used to living alone. You have to get used to it if you’re not used to it. My sister used to come and stay a lot with me. She never had any children, so she used the family’s children. She loved children. I love children, too. I miss them now.

Tony went right nearby to the Buckley School. He liked it there. He was doing great. He was a good student, he always read and read and read and read. When he was in Broadmoor, he’d write me for some books he wanted and I’d send him some Shakespeare and others.

Teacher’s “Comments” on Antony Baekeland, French Class, Buckley School, New York City

Peter Gable

I met Tony in the second or third grade at Buckley, which was a very competitive school academically. He was not a peculiar child to another child—to
this
child—but he was certainly different because of some of his enthusiasms and abilities. I mean, he was uniquely brilliant—brilliant in ways that another child wouldn’t appreciate, I think.

His artistic abilities were spectacular—he loved to draw birds, you know. He was a baby Audubon. I remember once we were out playing in the park—we were old enough to be unchaperoned, eight or nine or something—and I captured this pigeon. I don’t think it was an entirely healthy bird, it was a basic Central Park shit-on-the-statues pigeon, and Tony took it from me and tucked it under his coat, and we rushed it back to his house on Seventy-first Street, and it was there for some time, flying free—first in his room and then having the run of the floor. The pigeon rather liked us, as I recall. In any event, it ultimately either conferred lice upon us or there was some fear that it would or whatever, and it was dispatched, I don’t remember how. But I certainly remember Tony’s sketches of that pigeon, in either pencil or pen and ink.

Every day after school we’d go home together to his house and stuff. You know, he was my best friend, and
his
house was more entertaining than
my
house. I mean, he had an area in his room where he raised orchids. I think that was a passion of his father’s. I remember a rather enormous fishtank-like proposition with a controlled environment, in which these exotic flowers grew.

I remember his mother as being striking and a flamboyant and vivacious person. She was certainly more animated than the mothers of other friends. I mean, when you’re a child, what do you know of the adult life? You know your parents, their friends, your teachers in school with whom you probably have some sort of distant relationship, your baby-sitter, the elevator man—in those days everybody had an elevator man; when I was a child the only adult you addressed by his first name was the elevator man.