Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (32 page)

Brooks Baekeland

The arrow that kills you is shot by an enemy you never see.

I only killed one human—an old man sitting with his back to a tree by a bridge in Germany. There had still been no Hiroshima, but there had been, I think, the awful Hamburg and Dresden and Cologne. About Himmler’s gas chambers, we dewy youths still knew nothing. I had already decided that if I were sent on fighter bombers, to bomb “targets of opportunity”—that is, French and German towns—I would try to destroy cabbages and potatoes rather than young mothers and children.

He was reading a newspaper. He was wearing a bowler hat. We were “attacking” the bridge. My stream of .50 caliber bullets from four wing guns hit him before I even saw him and by mistake, and his bowler hat rolled slowly across the bridge. This was just before the end of the war.

I mourn for that old man still.

From the
New York Times,
“Financier Tells of Trek in Andes,” John Sibley, December 2, 1963

Peter Gable

Tony and I were still in school at the time but we decided that nothing would do but that we go along on the expedition. Why not? We were two healthy, active seventeen-year-olds. So we bearded his father with this idea—you know, “What do you think of the notion that we tag along and fall out of the sky with you and Mr. Gimbel?” We’d spent so much time fantasizing about how much fun it would be, what an adventure—I mean, Tony’s father was a swashbuckler from the word go. Anyway, the thing I remember most about his response was his distinct lack of enthusiasm—not about our participating, because, of course, how could a responsible parent be enthusiastic about that? But he wasn’t even willing to play along with us. He didn’t say, “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea
because
…” or “Gee, that’s a great idea
but
…” He just said no. End of case.

I saw Tony only a handful of times after 1963. We really did just do different things. I mean, I went off to college. In the early seventies sometime, I bumped into his grandmother, Mrs. Daly, on the street and she gave me Tony’s address in England.

Heather Cohane

I went to see him quite a lot in Broadmoor. The first years he was there I couldn’t go, because I was living in Ireland and very involved in my knitwear business and I hardly had time to even visit my children at school in England. But as soon as Jack and I sold our house in Ireland and went to live in London, I started to go to see Tony very regularly. Because I loved him and because I remembered him as a very gentle boy in Ansedonia. Jack would never go with me, because he suffered from claustrophobia—he was afraid of getting locked in.

What riveted me about Broadmoor was, you could not tell who was the inmate and who was the visitor because the inmates were dressed in ordinary clothes. There’d be, you see, two men sitting at a table and I’d say to myself, Now
which
one is the madman? And when the bell clanged, meaning visiting hours were over, I would jump to my feet to see who the inmates were, because they would be going off through one door and the visitors would be going out the other. And I practically never got it right! And this is the thing that fascinated me, and I decided that we were all mad.

Tony told me he went berserk once at Broadmoor because something annoyed him and that he was put in one of the solitary cells for a couple of days. He also said that he got beaten up once, I can’t remember why. But a nice thing is he did develop a very good friend in there, I presume a lover. I don’t think the friend had any parents or anything. It was rather a sad story—you know, nobody to worry about trying to get him out. In fact, he’s still there. You see, in Broadmoor you have no hope if there isn’t somebody campaigning the whole time to get you out. I remember Tony saying that if he ever got out of Broadmoor he would miss his friend very much.

Once I took my daughter Ondine to see him on her way back to school—she was at a boarding school called the Manor House in Wiltshire. She wanted to go with me, though she was only eight at the time. Jack and I had told her what had happened—I mean, she grew up knowing that Tony had killed his mother.

Ondine Cohane

There was a lot of clanging. I’ll never forget all those gates clanging behind us. I liked him. He was nice. But I didn’t talk to him much because I was upset about having to go back to school, so I just listened. He talked about his inmates—the people in his cell—and what they were allowed to do. He told us the rules. My mother told him I loved animals, so he told me about his chicken when he was small and how he used to take it around with him. I felt very sorry for him. I didn’t like to think of him behind all those gates and everything. He wrote my mother later that I was rather a sad little girl, but I was mostly sad to be going back to school.

Heather Cohane

One day I decided that I should take my son, Alexander, who in fact was Barbara’s godson, to see Tony. He was at a very impressionable age, you see—seventeen—and at Eton, and, you know, there were drugs and all sorts of other things around. So I thought it was a very good idea to show him what could happen to you if you did take drugs.

Willie Draper

When I was at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, Tony would send me hashish from Paris, wrapped in tinfoil in an envelope. It was a whole different scene then. Nobody at prep school knew anything even about marijuana in 1963. Believe me.
Nothing. Nobody.
But then pot and all the hallucinogens began to be used in very creative ways, you know. Tony and I would pretend to be sea turtles on the beach in East Hampton where his parents used to rent a house sometimes when they came back from Europe for a couple of months. At this point it was only pot, and we didn’t do it all the time—we weren’t potheads or anything. I mean, you can’t even begin to relate it to the way people smoke pot now. We didn’t do it as a social thing at all.

Alexander Cohane

We drove down from London one Sunday, Mummy and me, just the two of us, and we went through the main gate and then, you know, he came through into this sort of visitor’s lounge. He was taller than me, he was about six foot. Quite good-looking. I mean, a handsome man he probably would have been if he’d been out in the street walking along. We sat down and we just started talking, and we gave him a packet of cigarettes and a whole load of apples and oranges, sort of a selection of goodies—you know, what we sort of call in England “tuck.”

We must have been with him about three hours. He talked the whole time. He told us every detail about killing his mother. I wish I’d had a tape recorder with me, because, you know, I’ve never known anyone who killed anyone. He said she had pissed him off—you know, done something to annoy him—and that he just picked up the knife in the kitchen and said, “You’ve destroyed my life. I’m a wasted human being.”

He said to us, “It’s ruined my life in several ways to be in here.” And he said that it was just absolutely hopeless and depressing to look out at the countryside and not be part of it. Then I remember him very clearly saying, “I feel my mother’s presence around me all the time, I love her so much. She’s in every tree.”

AFTER TONY BAEKELAND
had been at Broadmoor for three years, he began to wonder if he would ever be allowed to leave. “He was showing great improvement,” says Miwa Svinka-Zielinski. “He sounded quite reasonable on the whole, and he even began to consider what he might do if he got out. He told me he thought perhaps he would teach.”

But even though Tony might be feeling better, the legal obstacles surrounding his release were still tremendous. An average stay at Broadmoor is six or seven years, but some patients—and Tony was one of them—are there under restrictions that make it all but impossible to leave. In Tony’s case, not only would Dr. Maguire have to be convinced he was completely well, but the Home Secretary would have to concur that a discharge was in the best interests of society as well as of the patient. It was not unusual for cases as complex as Tony’s to be bound up in red tape for years.

“I’ve got a patient who’s been here for seventeen years,” Dr. Maguire points out. “And sometimes a patient may need to stay for twenty.” According to a former superintendent at Broadmoor, “half the patients would be perfectly safe to release but the problem is to know which half.” In fact, out of its population of approximately 750, Broadmoor releases an average of 104 patients a year.

Early in 1976, Tony told a visitor, “I would like to come to New York if I could see Dr. Greene instead of being hospitalized.” After a visit that Dr. and Mrs. Greene made to Tony that year, they discussed at length with Broadmoor authorities the practical difficulties that would be involved in his rehabilitation: He had no relatives—except for Mrs. Daly, who was elderly and frail—who were willing to take responsibility for him.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, February 9, 1976

Michael Edwards

We moved around in much the same group of people in Paris, and in due course, when I decided to move back to London, they—Barbara particularly—wanted to rent my flat at 45, quai de Bourbon. They’d been living on rue Barbet de Jouy for four or five years by then. I had already rented the flat to somebody, but when it did become available I let them have it—inexpensively, I might add—on the condition that I could stay there myself whenever I liked and that if I needed to have a party there, they would plan to be away that night. This arrangement worked out very well for all of us, and I must say they lived there reasonably happily for a while. The house belonged to Prince Antoine Bibesco, who had been such a great friend of Proust’s, and I remember that
that
pleased Barbara.

My flat was the
entresol
of the house and it was perfectly suitable for
me
, but I mean, for
them,
for the two of them living there the whole time, it was a bit small, though I think it was largely she who lived there. Brooks lived there only sometimes. Tony also slept there every now and then but he wasn’t around very much that I knew of.

The flat had three rooms—quite a big living room and then a little room next to it which Barbara used as a bedroom—at least I think she did, in due course—and then upstairs it had a little bedroom which was behind a bathroom that was completely Art Deco. The thing about the flat is it has the most marvelous position—it looks out on the Seine on three sides. A glorious view, especially from the bathroom, which is right on the prow.

Letter from Michael Edwards to Barbara Baekeland, June 15, 1965

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, July 13, 1965

Johnny Van Kirk

I ran into them in Mexico. I was walking down the street and I just recognized Tony—the red hair! It was funny. I hadn’t seen him for years and he didn’t recognize me. I stopped him, and that’s how we got together.

Tony had these two boyfriends with him. They were American or British, both blond. That’s all I remember about them. Tony had run across some pot and we all went off and got high together in this hotel room, high above the main avenue. I remember it had no windows, just sliding glass doors, open to the street fifteen floors below. And we sat there on the edge of this sheer drop smoking a joint and talking about the old times on Cape Cod.

The Baekelands were staying with this friend of theirs who had a very beautiful ranch and I went out to visit them there. Mostly I just hung around the pool, talking and so on, catching up with Mr. Baekeland’s travels and so forth and Mrs. Baekeland’s life in Paris.

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, August 20, 1965

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Barbara used to rent her penthouse out whenever she could, for the money. There was one period when she was renting it to
me
—by the night! I was having an affair with a very powerful dramatic big-businessman, who was married, and I didn’t have a place in town and I wanted, you know, to set up a nice ambience for him, which of course that
was.
So she would let me have it at a hundred dollars a night and she would go and stay with her chum Emily Staempfli.

Elizabeth Blow

A friend of mine—well, a very vicious woman, who really didn’t like Barbara very much—called it a mistress’s apartment. It
was
a place where a man would set up a woman. She had all these things in it—that big book on the stand with colored illustrations that was open always at a certain page, that marvelous mirror, the whole decor really, and the terrace where they gave the marvelous dinner parties. But it was not a sort of place to
live
in, it was not a home at all.

Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, Undated

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated

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

Barbara Curteis

Brooks never provided a stable residence for Barbara. From the time he sold the house on Seventy-first Street, they just had little places—nookeries of great elegance, to be sure. But there was no room—in
any
sense—in any of these places for Tony. He didn’t even have a proper bedroom. And Brooks and Barbara were constantly fighting—it was their only form of communication. Tony once said to me, “My parents are both very young souls.” I found it a perfectly valid remark, if one excludes the Eastern religiosity of it—he
was
more mature than either of his parents. Barbara really enjoyed making those scenes. If somebody said something she didn’t like, or even if she didn’t like
how
they had said it, she felt morally bound to slap their face or throw whiskey in their face and rush off into the night. And of course, every time Brooks threatened to leave her for another woman, she would try to kill herself.

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated