Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (26 page)

Villa Boncompagni
(Villa Nistri after July 28)
Ansedonia

Dear Jim: Gloria:

We are getting squared away finally (“you squares!”). We have found a comfortable villa on the water, rented from Pieri Francesco Nistri, a famous pal of II Duce and a great War Criminal; but I love him. It turns out that we are sitting in a nest of Etruscan remains: in fact, two hundred yards above us through the gorse is the ancient city of COSA, an Etruscan, then a Roman stronghold, where the American Academy in Rome has had a bunch of archaeologists digging for nearly a decade.

We swam off a small island here the other day, just made it back in a sudden storm that came up, but the island was worth visiting to

Tony. Millions of seagulls and some sort of native partridge are nesting on it. What would interest you most, I think, is the underwater archaeology around here. There are rocks, small islets, islands and reefs all ready and waiting to wreck ships. There must be plenty of dead galleys and galleons lying on the bottom around here.

Do you think you would be tempted to pay us a visit at some time convenient to all of us in August or September? I’ll be in touch with you. Are you having fun? How’s the baby?

Love,
Brooks

He recalls being most happy when he spent entire days by himself. He states, “I was taken by my parents to all their friends’ houses, so I really grew up more in my parents’ generation than in my own.”

Wednesday.
Ansedonia is somewhat barren, the villas are too close together, the mosquitos at times are devils, but it was a thoroughly pagan, never-to-be-forgotten Tuscan summer.

There is a breathtaking ruined temple on a hill; the view is stupendous, up and down the coast in both directions, but Heather is still convinced she saw a somberly clad sinister ghost sitting on a low wall of the temple at eleven o’clock one morning and it was hard to drag her back again at any hour.

By coincidence Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, son Tony, Millie their deaf Pekingese, a rooster and a Siamese cat turned up two days after we arrived, settled into a villa a few hundred yards away from the one Heather has rented for us, which belongs to Prince Antonello

Ruffo di Calabrio, whose sister has just married Prince Albert, the

Belgian King’s brother. The Baekelands have added greatly to our stay. Later Simone Lippe with Thilo, one of her two sons, and Alexis

Lichine and his wife also dropped by.

Everything around us was so harmoniously peaceful and the Italian landscape so serene with the freshness of nature! Yet, wherever the eye wandered, ruins evoked visions of a fugitive splendor, which had been in all its glory during ages long gone by, when human ambitions and human might tried to rule this enchanting corner of the world.

Ansedonia

Dear Gloria & Jim—

Our beds haven’t had a chance to cool and this certainly hasn’t been what I’d call a tranquil summer but it’s been fun. Yesterday a large contingent dove for gem coral. We almost lost one languid

Englishman—very exciting! Tony brought up one perfect amphora and we have masses of fragments. Why don’t you write to Klosters
right away
for reservations for skiing. It would be fun to be there together.

Have started painting but it does not go well.

We miss you—

B

Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

The following summer, 1961, Brooks and Barbara rented
my
house, and we did the most fantastic things together.
Long
before the Kennedys started their great river travel, we were going down rivers, these marvelous Etruscan rivers in Italy. And millions of people came and stayed with us—old, young—Lucy and Alan Moorehead. And Tony was wonderful. My servants all adored him. He used to train crickets to sing in different keys. I remember, when he was going back to school in America, he gave me two crickets which sang in totally different keys and I absolutely nearly went mad, I couldn’t get to sleep at night. He always had all these animals—partridges, turkeys, and everything you could find outside. He would take them up to his room and study them, and he would draw the most beautiful drawings of them.

Now this second summer there were terrible scenes between Barbara and Brooks all the time. She was being difficult and impossible, and Tony, whose room was right over their bedroom, heard all these rows going on. You see, Brooks was the passion of Barbara’s lifetime and that summer he was having a walk-out with some debutante that he’d met. And that was,
I
think, the beginning of the unhappiness—that primeval flutter.

Francine du Plessix Gray

When Brooks and Barbara asked us to share a house with them in Ansedonia, it seemed like such a good idea because I’d been very tired after the birth of my first child, and I was expecting a second, and Cleve and I had rented out our own house in Connecticut for the summer, to a couple who gave us wonderful money. And with that money we were able to share the fee with the Baekelands. I mean, it was a way of resting and not having too many responsibilities—and we
thought
we were going to have a lot of fun.

It was a very large house, we each had a big section to ourselves. And there was a large staff. It was Rosie Rodd’s house, the haunted house. Totally haunted. Really. Cleve trusts ghosts and likes them, I’m terrified of them, but we both felt it. I refused to walk in the door alone. He had to come with me.

Cleve Gray

It was a very strange house. It had a very long, very dark corridor, and I would say that around six in the evening you started feeling these swooshing presences—it’s the only way I can explain it. And at night, after dinner or whenever it might be, when we went up to our room, we both couldn’t get into the room soon enough and shut the door, because there
were
these…these…these
things.
I think the Baekelands both accepted the fact that it was haunted.

I used to wake up at dawn and hear this absolutely beautiful Arabic song, it seemed to come from the garden, and one day I said to Barbara, “The gardener has the most marvelous voice.” She said, “
Do
we have a gardener? There’s no gardener here.” I said, “Well, the man who comes every morning very early to the garden and sings this Arabic song.” Well, she got all upset. She said that Rosie Rodd’s lover, an Arab, had disappeared about six months before, in Africa—he had been an agent with the British government and had apparently been murdered—and she said that it was he who was haunting the garden. Well, that isn’t my kind of ghost. Except that I did keep hearing that song.

Francine du Plessix Gray

The house was right under the walls of one of the great Etruscan towns, called Cosa. When we were residents at the American Academy in Rome in 1979, almost twenty years later—which is the place that has done all the digging—we were often in the company of one of the world’s great archaeologists and classical scholars, Lawrence Richardson—a very very British-type American, very elegant. And the kind of man, the kind of Victorian rationalist, who you would think would absolutely dispel the idea of the existence of ghosts.

Larry came to dinner one night at the Academy and we started talking about ghosts and he said, “My dear, I’ve lived with them from the time we started digging—Cosa is
filled
with ghosts. Of
course
you heard ghosts in Rosie Rodd’s house! That whole
wall
is a necropolis. What did you expect—there’d be no ghosts?” He kept us up to two a.m., and I thought of this whole haunting of this…of this doomed couple by ghosts who were now being certified by this great archaeologist. That’s a very interesting metaphysical symbol.

That summer the Baekelands went out every single day on this yacht that they chartered from a local fisherman. And they just sat and drank masses of wine and jabbered and gossiped with this duchessa and that principessa and yet another contessa this-and-that. We did it twice and we never did it again—two boat trips and we retreated completely into our shell.

Luckily we had for, oh God, a few lira a day, a local girl who took care of the baby—which is another thing we could never have afforded in the States—and twice a week we drove to a marvelous town called Saturnia where there are these sulfur waters that heal everything and that make you sleep beautifully and so on.

Brooks Baekeland

It was miles and miles up in the mountains. Once, during a rainstorm, we had chairs and a table and umbrella brought out and had lunch served to us, with the warm sulfurous waters gushing out of the ground and spreading into a small river up to our navels. At that time there was only a simple café-restaurant—all in open farmland—and we never saw anyone else when we were there. We often drove up at night under a full moon.

Francine du Plessix Gray

That summer we also made an extensive tour of the Etruscan places—Cleve was buying black Etruscan ware, and Brooks used to help him find it. We got museum pieces for practically nothing and we brought them back wrapped in our baby’s diapers. And Cleve would do watercolors, and I was painting, too, at that time—this is years before I was a writer.

It was Brooks who was trying to write a novel, or whatever. Trying or pretending, nobody
knew.
But I mean, he was definitely bitten by that terrible American neurosis which
I
think should go into medical dictionaries, which is somewhere between obsession and paranoia—novel-writing, the idea that you’ve got to write a novel in order to prove yourself. And Brooks seemed to me to be absolutely tainted with that disease. Well, you see, he was a romantic, and he wanted to write a romantic book—I think he wanted to be Hemingway.

And Barbara pretended that she wanted to paint but that her life was too busy to allow her to. Of course, she was creating her own mayhem. She had a studio in the garage into which she went
once
the whole summer we were there. Everything was this dispersion toward other people, you know—this trying to make an impression, this thing of having people around all the time, which had to do with her being so terrified of facing herself and facing her own center, her own gravity. It was a totally dispersed energy, Barbara’s.

I never found her as entertaining as Cleve did, because I think he was sort of sexually charmed by her. She wasn’t my kind of woman. I like women who are intellectually more centered than I am. I mean someone like Ethel de Croisset. I like very rigorous personalities. I cannot
stand
dispersed personalities, and all my close women friends have been women who are more powerful than I am. I need women who are stronger than I am. I’m pretty strong, but I want them even stronger.

And Barbara at that time was all parties, parties, parties—well, the way the Murphys were. You know, I mean, in a way they were Murphys with no talent. Which is a terrible thing to say—Murphys with no talent. I mean, Gerald Murphy was a pretty good painter, you know.

Cleve Gray

Barbara wasn’t a bad painter at all. She was a very very talented person. She thought she could do everything. Well, of course, she
did
everything, but none of it was quite good enough.

Brooks I always thought was extremely intelligent. I remember Peter Gimbel, several years later, saying to me, “Do you think Brooks is going to turn out all right?” And I said, “God, Peter, if
Brooks
isn’t going to turn out all right, I can’t imagine how anybody will.” You see, I was still very impressed with him. He seemed to me perfectly balanced, I didn’t see
any
of his imbalance. His ideas were all very sound.

I remember he said to me that summer, “I have a terrible fate in store for me.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, I have to remember my family—my grandfather, my father, every member of my family became senile fairly early. There’s no question that that’s what’s going to happen to me, and this is what I dread.” But I think this was a romantic idea—you know, that he thought about himself that way.

I remember he made fun of Barbara’s chasing titles, but then he got wrapped up in it himself, I guess. I mean, any title—any possibility for a title—she would just go zooming at it. One thing that always amused Francine and me—in the entry hall there was a table and on the table was a bowl and in the bowl Barbara always had scores of visiting cards which would all be left so you could see them—“Duchesse de Croy,” “Prince de Lippe,” “Principessa de Colonna.”

Francine du Plessix Gray

And then the bills she was paying or the letters to her poor mother in New York, her poor little Irish mother—the nonglamorous things—were always way at the bottom of the bowl. But always on top were the titles.

I disliked them much earlier than Cleve did. I wanted to wash my hands clean of them.

Remember the ending of Evelyn Waugh’s
Handful of Dust
? That’s the ending I see for Brooks. Exactly that kind of ending.

Once we were having dinner at the Gimbels’ in New York, and Peter kind of grumbled something about how fake the happiness was between the Baekelands. I said, “Oh, but they always talk so much about their happiness!” and he said, “That’s just what I mean.”

During the time we spent with them in Ansedonia she would hint that they’d had no sexual contact at all all summer. She had some kind of menstrual problem, she was bleeding all the time and refusing to see a doctor, and the bleeding problem was deterring her from having sex.

I don’t know if Brooks was fooling around or not. I mean, he would probably pretend he was going off to study some wild plant—he would do it with the utmost elegance. And that was Brooks all over—he was very much to the manner born. He had the most European sense of manners about those things.

But now, the most incredible thing of that summer comes down to Tony. Very often we would have dinner alone with him because I was feeling kind of weak from this pregnancy that was so close to the other one, and the social life bored me, as it always has in my life. So in the evening Cleve and I would mostly stay at home, so we were a lot with Tony, because every time his parents went out he was left alone, and if we had gone out also, then he would have been totally alone. And we had the most delightful conversations with him—he was a total charmer. He was off to Exeter that year.

And not a
hint
of anything wrong in him except for that stammer, which would go in and out. I mean, like many stammerers, he would sometimes talk for half an hour without stuttering. I had a stuttering problem as a child myself, I was the same kind of stutterer—and I had a definite lack of attention from my mother, and a lot of psychiatrists have new theories of how stammering is an attention-getting device, subconsciously of course. And the only, only hint that there was something deeply wrong in him was this.

I should begin by saying the house was crammed with food. I mean, Barbara was the kind of woman who had no sense of moderation, and it drove my kind of abstemious frugal French nature crazy—I having lived, you know, under the Occupation, knowing what hunger was like and so on, seeing these hams and chickens and roasts being thrown out or given to the peasants, and three turkeys being bought instead of one. I mean, the house was so full of food you didn’t know what to do with it.

We had brought baby food from France with us for our six-month-old son, because French baby food is notoriously marvelous, so much better than American, and Italian baby food is well known to be not nutritious. Anyway, we had two months of French baby food in Ansedonia with us, packed in vacuum crates—cans of puréed veal and puréed beets and puréed spinach and so on. And about the fifteenth of July we noticed that there were these strange gaps in the rows.

And a few days later the peasant girl who was looking after our son said to us, and I think she began to cry—we had enough Italian to get the gist of what she was saying—“It is Mr. Tony. I have seen him do it. He comes in at night when the baby is asleep and steals the baby food.”