Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (22 page)

Letter from Antony Baekeland to James Reeve, February 12, 1976

James Reeve

The really disturbing thing was this mother bit. You see, in his letters to me he always said to give his regards to my mother.
My
mother! I’d probably mentioned my mother to him in passing but no more than that.

I had this recurring nightmare that he’d be let out. He had told me once, certainly, how lovely it would be to come and stay with me in the country, down in Somerset, and this haunted me, because what was I going to do if for some reason he
was
being let out and he said, “I want James Reeve to come and pick me up”?

I suppose I would have done it. But I remember being warned that he could be frightfully dangerous. I mean, anything could have set him off, poor chap.

When you went to see him, you went in through a great big massive gate. Then there was a little door, and sitting behind a desk was a man who took your parcels if you’d taken presents, and there was a ledger where you wrote your name and you said whether you were a friend or a relation. And then you walked through this tiny cubbyhole and there was another door, and you were let in, and then there was a huge great courtyard. You walked down one side of it, like a sort of cloister, and there was another locked gate, with a guard standing there who opened that, and then you would go down a corridor where the kitchens were, and this corridor went on endlessly. And finally there was this great big mausoleum of a room with a stage, a piano, windows, and dotted around were these sorts of little tea tables where we would sit and have our tea. Two or three guards sat on a bench, watching. If your back was turned to them, you could have slipped anything to your friend or relation, and taken anything back. Which was extraordinary!

I wondered to myself where Tony had got the clothes he was wearing, because they just weren’t the sort of clothes he would wear. Not that they were rag-and-bone-men’s clothes, they were just what my grandmother used to call “lower-orders” clothes. They didn’t fit well on Tony. I mean, he was rather distinguished-looking in his sort of slovenly way. The materials were all wrong—I mean, nylon jackets and things didn’t look right on him. The impression was that the clothes were just castoffs, from a murderous plumber or something, who happened to have died the night before.

One always had the feeling he could very easily have supposed that one’s interest in him or visits to him were just out of a sort of macabre fascination. And this is why one had to tread a very careful line jollying him along. I soon discovered that if Tony had a visitor, he didn’t want to sit there and talk about Broadmoor. I respected that. He wanted to have news of the outside, which was a shame, because I was dying to ask all sorts of questions, like what were the bathrooms like, what were the dormitories like. And were the beds comfortable. They obviously weren’t. But you couldn’t ask him. He hated that. And actually, morbid curiosity may have had a place the first few times I visited, but then it evaporated, I can tell you that.

Whenever I wrote to him, it was difficult because one didn’t want to dwell on his side of things, so naturally one would just talk on about one’s life. In one of his letters to me—here it is—one line says, “I wish you had done what I had suggested, i.e., come at two o’clock.” Actually I remember that day. I deliberately hadn’t come at two—to cut short the thing. “So we could talk at length,” he wrote. Which meant, of course, two hours. “Also so I might have shown you the really beautiful pictures of my mother which I felt would have interested you. I don’t think I told you, but she was a great Artist.” With a capital “A”! “And I’m trying to find some of her remarkable paintings which were lost with the other things at 81 Cadogan Square.” It’s all so complicated, isn’t it? I mean, you pick up a letter to look at one sentence, and three others are underneath it.

Well, my friendship with Tony was a bit different. Visiting someone in an institution like that is not like having a friend, it’s like looking at an animal in a cage. I mean, it has to be!

Every time, I had to screw my courage up to the sticking point to visit him, because, I mean, I also had my personal hangups about the place. It reminded me of Rugby, where I was sent, which is about the nastiest form of public school in England. It wasn’t what the authorities did to us, it was what the other boys did that was so appalling. They used to roast you over fires when you arrived and were sort of a new creature, and they used to heat up the backs of those old-fashioned metal hairbrushes and brand your bottom with them. Three boys committed suicide while I was there. It was a Victorian institution very much like Broadmoor. So it nearly made me sick going to visit Tony, because even all the smells were the same—sweat and urine and cabbage water and damp walls and blocked drains and uncouth lavatories.

And then I would find this pitiful, wan, pasty-faced creature with the bitten nails and the light-red oily hair. It was
not
attractive. Nothing attractive about it. Not that life should be attractive all the time, I know, but it would have been nice to find one ray of light there.

The thing that used to shatter me was his having to be got from being asleep. He shouldn’t have been allowed to go to bed in the afternoon—except, you see, a lot of the time he was drugged. It was very obvious sometimes that he was drugged up to the hilt. This is the pitiful thing—they’d rather the patients were quiet, so they’d rather they just went to bed in the afternoon. They haven’t got the skilled staff to look after those difficult creatures. If each one of those prisoners had had an interested psychiatrist, it would have been a very different matter.

I remember going in the autumn once and all he wanted to know was what the countryside looked like. Pitiful, really. And so few people visited him. That was the thing that I found unforgivable. So many of the fashionable friends never went near him. They couldn’t be bothered! I suppose all that circle was just vapid butterflies. How else do you explain it? They were all a lot of Fitzgerald dustbags!

From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished

Drue Heinz

I knew the family early on in their life in New York, when the little boy was about seven years old and his father was writing a scientific thesis. They were a charming, intellectually inclined family, who seemed at that time very together and set for a happy life.

Alastair Reid

Barbara invited me to a cocktail party soon after meeting me at Ambrose Gordon’s. Their house had an enormous paneled living room and I realized then that they must be impressively wealthy. Clearly she collected people, because she talked about having a salon and so on, and she had picked the people who were there that night. She was certainly capable of having a salon, she was just exactly the kind of person who should have had one. She sparked, she was the center. People paid attention and she paid attention to them, too—enormously. And Brooks was very laconic and, you know, cool and hanging back, while she did the whole thing for him, and I could see that he had acquired her because of her vivacity.

James Kingsland

I never knew quite what Brooks was doing, he was always doing something—either writing a novel or dabbling in mathematics. It was occasionally referred to lightly at dinner parties, but I assumed that it was nothing very serious other than keeping him occupied during the day. Later on he went into exploring and stuff like that. He was a guy with a lot of ideas and energy who was looking for things to do.

Brooks Baekeland

I had combated my father from childhood to live by the principles that my grandfather had taught me—I had taken them literally, thanks to his and my grandmother’s love, to a point where I could say, when asked what my “occupation” was, that I had no more “occupation” than had had Socrates when he sat in the shadow of a wall in the Agora. I meant no arrogance. I thought of myself as a simple cobbler—of the mind. Stitching thoughts. What could be humbler than that? But people took offence.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

It seems to me that Brooks has had the great problem of finding his own field, which he hasn’t. And Barbara was certainly an excuse for his not having done anything particularly with his life and with his talent. He liked to say that he couldn’t do this or that because
she
had to be going here and there.

Céline Roll Karraker

Barbara changed tremendously from the time I first met her. Brooks, sort of like my grandfather, didn’t like that life—and yet he was not strong like my grandfather to keep his own life.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

I can remember being at their house once when Barbara was carrying on in her very social way. And when I left, Brooks followed me out, he said, “I’m so sick of all this.” You see, he was already fed up with it, but then he gave in—it was comfortable, it was easy. He became just like Barbara in some ways, because he said to me one time, I remember, “I was shooting with the Duchess of Sutherland,” and I said, “Who’s that?” and he said, “You’ve never heard of the Duchess of Sutherland? Why, she’s the richest woman in Scotland!”

Brooks Baekeland

The only English duchess I ever met was the ex-Wally Simpson. Correction—I had a conversation in Paris many years later with Nicole, the Duchess of Bedford. We both lived on the Île Saint-Louis and we had both employed the same cook. But that doesn’t really count—Nicole Bedford was born French.

Francine du Plessix Gray

The Baekelands entertained like no one else in New York; they had a kind of largess for it. It had a kind of European touch—there wasn’t this ghastly long cocktail period, you know. It was orderly, and it was beautifully catered—marvelous food and marvelous wine. And it was very lively, it was more like a Parisian salon in a sense—there was a combination of money and intellect. In America, especially at that time, in the fifties, people didn’t know the difference between Isadora Duncan and Inigo Jones, you know. I mean, the WASP ruling milieus were just rather illiterate, you could
not
have an intellectual conversation.

The Baekelands gave Cleve and me a fabulous engagement party—just maybe twenty, twenty-four people—and afterward, I remember, we played a kind of game where there was a curtain lowered to a certain level and the women sat in the back of the room and the men took their trousers off—we got to see their BVDs and so on—and they did this kind of chorus-girl dance behind the curtain and the women had to guess whose legs belonged to whom—you know, which are my husband’s legs! Then they switched—the men went on the other side and the women did it.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

There were always a lot of games. If the evening wasn’t going well, Barbara always had a great feeling for what to do to sort of pick it up. She was a wonderful hostess. I never went there without having a good time—
ever.

The turning point in Barbara’s social life came, as far as
I’m
concerned, when she met Marjorie and Fairfield Osborn Jr. He was the president of the New York Zoological Society and son of the director of the American Museum of Natural History—they were very well-connected culturally, socially, everything, absolutely, and from then on they were her closest friends. They adored her and they introduced her to all of society, including Prince Aschwin Lippe, Prince Bernhard’s brother, and Barbara was just adored by all these people. The Osborns got her going on the fast track.

I remember Barbara saying to me before one of her parties, “Now you’ve got to look your best tonight, Liz, because all the most beautiful women in New York are going to be here.” I remember Patsy Pulitzer—she was a model,
very
beautiful. And Tennessee Williams was there that night.