Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (34 page)
I’d heard that there was a man who was exerting a tremendous influence over him in Cadaqués and I think probably this was the beginning of Tony’s collapse mentally.
Pico Harnden
Jake Cooper was known around Cadaqués as Black Jake. He was a very handsome Australian who first appeared on the scene as the lover of a woman called Erika Svenssen. She was sort of the sex goddess of Cadaqués and he was the black prince, if you like. He was a tall dark guy who wore a silver earring in his left ear and went around in washed-out jeans and Afghan belts, without a shirt on, and every woman in Cadaqués was amazed by his beauty and his bravado, and the next thing that happened was that Jake Cooper and Tony Baekeland took up together—much to Erika’s chagrin.
Erika Svenssen
I was nine years in Cadaqués and that was my favorite summer, you know? It was so important, that summer. I was at the age then that I thought I was still twenty-one. I hadn’t gone into the other generation yet. I still think I haven’t.
Jake was like a devil. He had a Svengali thing. He had a power over people. He was always causing incredible jealousies and things—people turned against each other. He moved into this farm, this abandoned farm, and he had a sort of entourage, you know, of strange people. They were heavy into trying out mushrooms and drugs in general, and he was also delving into things—whether he got them out of books or what, I don’t know, but I know he kept meeting people, secret people. I think he practiced black magic. He wore little bones and things on his vest. Certain little bones. I would ask him about them and he just wouldn’t tell me, you know. He would say “my magic amulets” or something. I’d never seen any sort of formation of that kind of bones before—the way they were put together. He wore them dangling on his vest, you know. He wore them all the time and all kinds of people that he had around him died. There was a young boy who died. I think there were three who died who were around him. I think he put some kind of spell on them.
Jake was a friend of Dalí. They were making a film together—one of those Dalí-type films showing angels and monsters together, the power that the devil would have over the angel and yet the angel would win out.
Jake had an absolutely wonderful side to him, too, which was innocent and fun and sweet. Magical in a
good
sense.
I remember when Jake and I first met Tony Baekeland. I have a visual picture of the first time we saw him—of his freckles and his red hair, and the sun on him—his body and the whole thing. I can see him in front of me right now.
Barbara Curteis
One day Tony said to me, “You’ve got to put a picnic together.” By this time he was not doing anything at all, and the devil finds work, as they say. So we went down to the beach and picnicked. And a terrible man in black leather, looking like Tony’s Nemesis, came down the beach and fed Tony drugs, and Tony became his thing, his creature. He went right on taking drugs—he went off to Morocco with this man and they brought back belladonna and he ate the whole thing himself and disappeared under one’s eyes to a blob of quivering jelly.
Pico Harnden
Tony and Jake showed up on their way back from Morocco, with God knows how many kilos of hash. My parents were away, and Jake and Tony made brownies in the kitchen. They turned on the entire house.
Everyone
—my little sisters, my brother Mishka, the maids, the dog—consumed these brownies to such a degree that by the time my parents came back everybody was still completely passed out. Jake and Tony had taken off. They were living together in this house that Duchamp had had at one point, right by the water—one floor.
Later that summer I was at Meliton’s and Jake came in and put six or seven cactus leaves down on the table next to my drink. I asked him what he was carrying cactus leaves around for, and he said that he fucked them, and I said, “Now wait a minute!” He said, “I’ll show you.” And he went and got a knife from the bar and sliced the base of one of the leaves open, then he took my hand and stuck it up to my wrist in the cactus and pulled it out, then he put it back in again.
One day our bell rang and Tony was at the door. He ran upstairs in a complete state, he went running straight to my father who was sitting in a chair, you know, and hid behind the chair. My father said, “Listen, Tony, come out from behind there and just sit down and be civilized.” He said, “You’ve got to help me—Jake Cooper is after me! If he comes, just say I’m not here—
please!
” And sure enough, at that very moment, Jake Cooper is downstairs in the street screaming at the top of his voice, “Tooooooony”—this really very seductive sort of rutting call—and Tony is shaking. And of course, my father called down, “Tony’s not here at the moment,” and Jake took off.
Jake Cooper
Ah, it’s an end-of-the-road-like village, Cadaqués. It’s a town that has rocks, stones, of a special quality all around, and people going there, usually after a very short while, after their second day there sometimes, go through very tense strange feelings. Quite a lot of people get very upset. It’s a trapped feeling. I remember Dalí used to say it was something under the ground that could make men sterile and that made them very nervous. There was some great strange energy there in Cadaqués. I think it’s one of the most special little towns I’ve ever seen.
I was called Black Jake, I suppose, because I dressed in black. A girl who I used to be involved with—actually, she gave me the first acid trip I ever took—said I should throw all my clothes away and I should just wear black and silver, and—I don’t know—that’s what happened. Friends took all my clothes to a flea market—they got rid of all my tweeds and things like that, and for many many years I did just wear black and silver.
I was with Erika Svenssen and we were sitting on the terrace of a little café and just behind us was somebody who said a few words to Erika and this person was sitting next to Antony Baekeland, and that’s the first time I saw Antony. I saw him quite a lot after that, and then we went together to Morocco, and then we got this little house for ourselves in Cadaqués.
Antony was involved in extreme yoga then. In winter he used to sit naked in front of the open window, doing breathing exercises—first through one nostril, then the other—following the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
He painted quite a lot and he was always painting the eye of an eagle. That eye he used to reproduce and reproduce. He painted it once on the wall of our house. I think it’s been painted over.
One day he got spaced out of his own head and went to walk in the mountains and it was quite stormy weather. And when he came back, he was in a very high state from his walk in the storm. He said he was going to have a shower at a friend’s because there wasn’t any hot water in our house, and it was quite cold. So I said okay, and while he was out having that shower his mother turned up from Switzerland. She said, “I’m Antony Baekeland’s mother and I’ve come to take him away.” And I was really taken aback, I didn’t know what was happening. She said it again, “I’ve come to take him away,” then she said, “Where are his things?” She just took a few of his things, not really even the things that he used very much. She just took odds and ends. “I’m going to take Tony now,” she kept saying. “We’re leaving today. I’ve just arrived and I’m going. Tony and I are going today.” And then she disappeared up the road to where he was having his shower. And she took him back with her to Switzerland and then off to that island—Mallorca. And I never saw Antony again till Broadmoor.
Barbara Curteis
I had telephoned Barbara in Gstaad when I saw the state Tony was in and she came back to Cadaqués to fetch him. Brooks was in Ibiza and
wouldn’t
come. And the next day, the day after she was meant to have taken Tony back with her to Gstaad, I was on my way to Barcelona and stopped in some café—and saw Barbara’s rented car going in the opposite direction from Switzerland. They had indeed set out the previous day but it turned out that Tony didn’t have his passport with him, and Barbara had said to the authorities at the frontier, “
My
son doesn’t need a passport.” I mean, even Barbara admitted she’d been pretty offensive—she’d kicked and spat and so forth. Anyway, the two of them were taken off in a paddy wagon, and they spent the night in jail in Gerona, the provincial capital of that end of Catalonia—he in the male and she in the female jail. “Oh, a
charming
jail!” Barbara said. “
Perfectly
delightful!” And then she made a remark I’ll never forget, it has a sort of echoing horror for me. She told me proudly that she’d said to Tony as they were being led away in handcuffs, “Here you are, darling, at
last
—manacled to Mummy!”
CALLING IT QUITS
IN 1977
, an unofficial committee of concerned friends of Tony Baekeland began looking into the possibility of having him freed. The group consisted of Heather and Jack Cohane, Michael Alexander, Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, and the Hon. Hugo Money-Coutts, whose family controlled London’s exclusive Coutts Bank, and whose wife, Jinty, was a daughter of the Baekelands’ old friend Rosemary Rodd Baldwin.
Tony’s aunt, Elizabeth Archer Baekeland, who was living in London at the time, refused to be drawn into the group. She says, “The people who were helping Tony all believed that his violence was spent when he killed his mother. But Tony’s uncle, Fred Baekeland, my former husband, always believed the exact opposite. He said to me, ‘Nonsense. Tony’s capable of killing other people. He’s highly dangerous and always will be, so don’t ever try to get him out of Broadmoor.’”
Of the unofficial committee, Miwa Svinka-Zielinski alone recognized the need for caution in the selection of a hospital for Tony if and when he was discharged from Broadmoor and repatriated. “I believed,” she states, “that Tony had a classic love/hate relationship with his mother and that his sickness was absolutely only connected to her. I was convinced, after seeing him all those years in Broadmoor, that his illness would not surface again.”
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, May 14, 1976
Visitor’s Name:
Mrs. Nina Daly
Relationship to Patient:
Grandmother
Summary:
Thinks he looks and behaves so much better than last year. There’s no one who has any interest in sponsoring him outside hospital, either in U.K. or U.S.A., in his welfare, or who would be prepared to spend a penny on him, except herself, and she is not well off. She was informed that there is no certain date by which Tony will be discharged.
Brooks Baekeland
I had reason to hope that Tony’s mind might clear one day in the peace and quiet of Broadmoor Hospital where he had friends and where, he repeatedly told me, he was happy.
Many people with his symptoms had, after the age of forty—for reasons as mysterious as schizophrenia itself—gradually become calm and peaceful citizens. I was hoping for that. Occasionally he still wrote me violent, paranoidal letters, which I forwarded to his doctors. They worried me—not for myself but for him, since some English and American friends with strings to high places were trying to get him set free. It was a sentimental, well-meaning movement—which worked and was tragic in its consequences. I was against all their energetic and romantic efforts to open the cage door for this gifted hawk who I feared would soon swoop down on some helpless prey.
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, May 24, 1977
Visitor’s Name:
Mrs. Nina Daly
Relationship to Patient:
Grandmother
Summary:
Saw Mrs. Daly in waiting room and she is more frail and in a wheelchair.
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, June 3, 1977
Visitor’s Name:
Michael Alexander
Relationship to Patient:
No blood relationship
Summary:
Has known Tony Baekeland since 12 years. Was very close to family prior to and after the time of the manslaughter. Mr. Alexander was helpful, clear, and incisive. Is eager to help in whatever way he can, especially if repatriation is sought.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, November 3, 1977
Broadmoor
Dear Miwa,
I hope very much to be discharged before too long. I have some dreams to tell you. The first one was that I was with a great friend of mine who was building a house and I remember watching him put pink stucco on a wall. The next was that again I can fly. I let loose a bird at Michael Alexander’s house—later we became brothers. Next I dream that a man accuses me and René Teillard of confessing one another: I associate this with life prior to the French Revolution. My last dream was that my father lives with Sylvie in a mountain chalet—he scolds me but later forgives me.
I try nowadays to be less careless and more careful in the things
I do.
All the best.
Love,
Tony
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, October 14, 1967
Dear Michael,
Two important items:
Carolina says you are coming on the 25th. I have a cook laid on and wondered if you might not like to have her do a dinner for
you?
She’s an angel and very good—can do a marvelous curry with almonds, figs, bananas, etc. I order a sorbet from that marvelous place, have smoked salmon first, and it’s a delicious repast—with Carolina we can do 14.
Wednesday night I gave a small dinner for Marcel and Teenie Duchamp, and Sunday 15 for dinner when Tony arrives with a
friend!
Am so pleased!!
Duncan Longcope
I remember Barbara telling me that Tony had a girl and that she liked her a lot. She referred to her as Robin Redbreast. Just in fun—I mean, you know, that sort of verve of Barbara’s. She said, “Oh, isn’t it nice that Tony has a girlfriend!”
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
It’s easier to say to your mother and to your father that you have a girlfriend than a boyfriend. When they said to him “Where were you tonight?,” it was easier to say “I was with Sylvie” than “I was with Jake.” I can honestly say that Tony used me as a screen—a smokescreen for all the shady parts of his life. I mean his boyfriends, who he couldn’t very well present to his parents.
After that summer in Cadaqués we came back to Paris—I mean Tony came back and I came back—and I received a phone call from him saying please come and have dinner at his parents’. And I thought, Two grouchy parents…. I’d never met the parents.
Brooks Baekeland
Tony had asked Sylvie to be his “girlfriend.” That was an invention from the beginning to try and cover up his affair with Jake Cooper, with whom he had been found in our bed at 45 quai de Bourbon by a friend of ours only just before we came back from a trip to Scotland. The friend thought at first that Tony was in bed with a girl. The concierge—Madame Laurant, who knew better—was scandalized and asked me if Madame Baekeland and I were “
au courant des choses qui se passent ici quand vous n’êtes pas là.
”
Anyway, when Tony wanted to bring Sylvie home to meet his, he said, “amazing” parents, she was curious and agreed. Later when the story that “Brooks stole Tony’s girlfriend” made such nice waves in the lives of the bored—and of course it had been Barbara who had started that in order to “prove” that her son was not a homosexual and that his father was a cad—Tony got sympathy and even a kind of passport to decency by not denying it. It meant nothing to him that both Sylvie and I knew better.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
I was quite young, perhaps younger than my years, and I saw Brooks and I thought he was the most dashing man I’d ever seen, and I saw Barbara and I thought she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen. Usually with a couple there’s one very handsome and then a toad right next to it. But they were both so handsome. They were dazzling. And I certainly never thought that Brooks would look at me because to me he was a grown-up, he was forty-seven and he was married and that was it.
They started inviting me to all their dinners. I was the “nice young thing” that you put at table and so forth.
There was a game between Brooks and Barbara that was very near to
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
—a great game in public, you know, where he would drive her to tears on a little matter. I mean, they wouldn’t go
too
far but she would have very pretty tears and he would say, “Look how good she looks with tears! Doesn’t she look handsome with tears?” That sort of thing. Which made me feel that I was sort of part of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
and what were they going to do with me, these two. I felt like a puppet between their hands.
Duncan Longcope
Robin Redbreast or whatever her name was was staying in the same hotel that I was living in, the H
tel Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Louis en Lille. I assumed that Tony had, you know, visiting privileges, but one day I saw him knocking on her door and in a sort of pleading tone asking to be let in, and this went on for a long period, but the door did not open, as I remember, and he went away. I did one day see Brooks there, which sort of surprised me.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, Undated
Mon cher—
I suppose you are zipping about the planet as usual? I am bacheloring here for a few days while B. skis in Switzerland with a pack of lusty females.
Affectionately, Brooks
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Barbara couldn’t stand to be in any one place for long. It was October, then it was November, November was boring, so she decided she would have to go skiing, and it was when she left to go skiing that finally Brooks called me. I couldn’t believe it, because then it
meant
something. We went out to dinner together, on the Île Saint-Louis, and we had, I have to admit, a wonderful time. We spoke…
he
spoke and I was fascinated, I can tell you—and that evening I absolutely fell in love.
I stopped being the family friend very soon after that. I couldn’t stand it, because on one side I was in love with Brooks and on the other side Barbara had taken a liking to me and she was trying to arrange things between Tony and me—romantic things. She thought that I should consider him as a nice future husband. She kept telling me that one day Tony would be a very rich young man.
She didn’t know about me and Brooks. She didn’t want to know, of course. Not only that, but I think that she thought that
I
certainly was not anything to beware of.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, November 27, 1967
45, quai de Bourbon
Dearest Michael—
We are in the middle of making a whole series of decisions—should we buy a large property in Mallorca and build on it, or should we build a small house next to the Bordeaux-Groults at Cadaqués—an
endroit
that seems to have a fatal fascination for us! We are spending Xmas there in Emily Staempfli’s house—very snug, very expensive, with my mother who is flying to Barcelona to join us. Tony is already there and his little robin, Sylvie, comes, too, along with Michael Alexander. Should be very gay.
Always affec.—Barbara
Michael Alexander
I was staying with them the Christmas Tony brought Sylvie down as a guest. She was
his
girlfriend originally. And in fact, Brooks took her over. I think it was a quite quick take-over. I think it was going on all the time I was staying there.
Letter from Michael Edwards to Barbara Baekeland, February 2, 1968
Dear Barbara,
You will be glad to hear that your clock has now arrived back in good working order and I shall be bringing it over to Paris on my next trip. Talking of this, I am provisionally thinking of the weekend of the 24th February, so could you let me know what your plans are for skiing.
Gloria Jones
On February 24th, Barbara tried to commit suicide. I spent the day with her—she was packing to go to Klosters, she was happy, and all her friends kept running in and out, you know. She had some very fancy women friends, lovely friends who loved her. De Croy—she was a good friend of hers, she was darling. The lady who took care of her dog. The Princesse de Croy her name was.