Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (38 page)
Gloria Jones
When she got a little better, she came and stayed with us in this house we rented with Clem and Jessie Wood in a place down in the Lubéron called La Coste. She drove there herself, so she was in good shape. It was at Easter-time.
Clement Biddle Wood
Barbara was with us for a few days. She was in a very sort of fragile condition, but she was putting a good face on things and trying very hard to be a good sport, not to bore us with her troubles. Naturally we were all worried that she might try to pull the same thing again then and there, and she knew that we were worried about this, yet I also had the feeling that she was somehow trying to put her life back together again.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, April 23, 1968
Dear Michael—
I very strongly suspect that B and I will be back together soon after September 1st and that the storms will all have blown over. But I think you should keep that surmise to yourself. I may have to go to the States for a while but Paris has become home to me.
Affectionately—
Brooks
P.S. I am about to leave for Thailand. Your letter just caught me here in Nepal. Morgan’s will always forward.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, Undated
Michael dear—
I hope all is well with the apartment. I have joined Tony in Cadaqués. He wanted me to come and has been a source of constant gentleness & concern since my arrival a week ago. It seemed the best thing for me to do under the circumstances. We listen to music, study, see no one, walk, swim & explore and I feel myself beginning to mend again. I seem to be getting better here—anyway I am happy being with my son.
We have rented Avie von Ripper’s house on Mallorca for 2 months—from the 15th of June until the 15th of August. It looks comfortable and will provide us with a refuge until I know what to do. At the moment the prospect of a reconciliation—though I still want it—looks dim. I think I shall probably go to New York on the 15th of August and take back my apartment there. It is an easier place for me to begin to reconstruct my life and maybe I can find some interesting work to do.
I am coming to Paris to see Carolina and straighten out my affairs. I have been told that I must see a lawyer as B has not behaved properly toward me financially. I am very low on funds and have simply taken this house & told B’s lawyer that he will have to pay for it.
I don’t think he and I can live together again unless we both change. I hope to re-find my creative and better self in these next few months, working and living quietly with Tony, my mother, and my animals. As far as I can tell from Brooks’ present path he is in the process of losing his better self and was very harmful to Tony during all this terrible time. I cannot risk such destruction & violence ever again. As Heidegger said, “the dreadful has already happened”—well, it has and it is time to begin again.
Much love,
Barbara
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, August 23, 1968
Dear Michael—
As you know, Barbara has returned to New York. Tony, after passing through Paris just long enough (I imagine) to make a shambles of 45, quai de Bourbon, has gone on to Frankfurt and from there out to New Delhi, etc., to join me. He arrives tomorrow.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
I had come back to France to see my children, who were with my parents for the summer, and I had brought with me a money order from Brooks to bring Tony to India. I made arrangements with the Morgan Bank so Tony could come and pick up his air ticket—we were to leave together on the same plane. I waited at the departure gate and he never came. We found out later that he had picked up the air ticket, changed it, and gone to Ireland to be with a friend of his from Cadaqués, Ernst von Wedel.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, Undated
Michael,
I just don’t know what will be the final result for B & myself—but whatever it is I think it may take some time to work out—maybe 6 months more. I just can’t say. But we shall not be returning to the life we lived before. I hope we shall see a lot of each other and share some (the best) aspects of life together again—but the whole thing: God forbid.
Affectionately as always,
Brooks
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, September 16, 1968
New York
Darling Michael—
B wants to come back. Had a meeting with his lawyers & cousin last week to listen to his proposals. Have a few of my own to make—one of which includes a proper house
somewhere
—so we shall see.
New York a joy. I am enjoying my apartment enormously and my life here. Each weekend away and two exciting offers of jobs—one with Andy Warhol & the other with the 2 Maysles brothers.
If, as Brooks writes, he intends to let 45, quai de Bourbon go, I may want to keep it on myself. Just paid the rug bill & lampshade bill which have followed me around since May.
Love,
Barbara
Letter from Michael Edwards to Brooks Baekeland, September 23, 1968
Dear Brooks,
When the screens and Barbara’s other pictures are down, all the walls will have to be made good and repainted; also the depredations on the sofa and chair made by her dear four-footed friends will have to be repaired, but, on the other hand, Barbara only recently put a lot of money into the place for a nice new carpet and went halves with me on the new curtains, so I suggest we call that quits.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, October 15, 1968
Kashmir
India
Dear Michael—
Barbara and I are still at a standoff as far as our futures are concerned. I doubt very much whether we shall be taking up residence again at 45, quai de Bourbon.
Entre nous,
I am devoted to her and I think she is to me, but our life together, behind what the public sees, has been a rather violent and chronically contested conflict of tastes, styles and policy (on all counts, including most seriously, and perhaps disastrously, the bringing up of our son, water now under the dam) and I finally had enough of it. She is stronger than I (in some ways); she could have gone on; but I saw long ago the approaching day when we would have to separate if only in the formal sense of that word—i.e., the day of my ultimate weariness and exasperation. She is a splendid and adorable woman. Not her fault, not mine either I think—we just created too much heat together in the same 4 walls, all the 4 walls we ever inhabited!
God knows when, if ever, I will have a home again.
Most of our old friends in Paris now consider me to be such a heel, cad, bounder, rotter, hairy-at-the-heel and downright scallywag that they do not deign to acknowledge my occasional friendly letters from the Far East. So I am “as one dead” to all “decent” people. (I was not surprised. People love battles—other people’s battles—and enjoy taking sides when no blows can fall upon
them.
Every disputation on a street soon gathers its crowd.)
With much love—
Brooks
P.S. I am leaving Kashmir, but would be obliged if you would keep even that location confidential as a personal favor.
Letter from Michael Edwards to Brooks Baekeland, November 4, 1968
Dear Brooks,
Barbara telephoned me the other day terribly anxious to know where you were and whether you were going back to New York, especially as she had heard a rumour that your clothes were going to be sent back there. I told her that I had heard from you but that I could not give her any indication that you planned to go back to America in the foreseeable future.
As far as your clothes are concerned, by all means have Carolina take them over to your studio, but don’t worry about them if you want to leave them at Quai de Bourbon since, as I told you in my last letter, Carolina fusses over them periodically, so they will come to no harm; ditto any of the rest of Barbara’s furniture.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, January 6, 1969
Hotel Ritz
Barcelona
Darlings—
I will be in Paris the night of the 15th and would like to have dinner with you either the 15th or 16th. Will you drop me a line to the hotel in St. Moritz?
I have been in Spain since the 16th of December by way of the Caribbean. Tony came for 5 days to Mallorca with me after we spent Xmas together in Cadaqués. He was
mad
about the place. B has fled back to Thailand, everyone says in very bad shape. I now have Louis Nizer for a lawyer & am much happier.
Dying to see you both and the children. If you haven’t time to write, just expect me. Will be in Paris only 3 days to clear out flat—
Hugs & kisses,
B
CRUISING
IN 1978, AFTER TONY BAEKELAND
had been in Broadmoor for five years, the authorities still considered his condition “severe” and did not feel he was ready to be released. Nonetheless, the unofficial committee of his friends continued in their efforts to have him freed.
Miwa Svinka-Zielinski felt that Tony ought to be in a setting where he could receive regular therapy on a one-to-one basis. She suggested a halfway-house arrangement. But he resisted this idea—he wanted to be on his own when he got out, he said. “I kept telling him,” she says, “that if he ever wanted to get out of there he would have to behave rationally. ‘Don’t tell Dr. Maguire you want to be independent the minute you are free,’ I told him. He had to have some sort of a transition from this place to real life.”
Miwa Svinka-Zielinski herself explored various alternatives for Tony’s care in the event of his repatriation. “I asked myself some questions, such as: What is his exact clinical status? Is there anywhere in England where he can stay as a transition before being sent to New York? Can he really function outside a hospital or halfway house? Can he be persuaded to have others handle his money for him in the U.S.?”
Visitors that year reported that Tony’s eyes seemed vacant. This disturbing symptom was one of the reasons Dr. Maguire was reluctant to take seriously the requests of the unofficial committee. “Our hospital is designed for patients who are violent,” he explains, “and as soon as their behavior is tolerable, we are bound to send them to less secure places. This is the logic I followed with Tony.”
In February, a consul officer from the American Embassy in London made the first of what would be eleven visits to Broadmoor to assess Tony Baekeland’s condition. Sarah Fischer, a member of the consulate, recalls that “the psychiatrist seemed to care very much about Tony and thought he would be happier back in the United States—he hoped in an institution similar to Broadmoor.”
Consular Officer’s Report on Visit to Antony Baekeland, February 10, 1978
I had a nice visit with Mr. Baekeland in the “great hall” at Broadmoor. He seemed happy and content, with no serious complaints. He said that his doctor had mentioned returning him to the USA, but he didn’t know much more about it.
Consular Officer’s Report on Visit to Antony Baekeland, March 10, 1978
Mr. Baekeland and I had an animated conversation during my visit. He stated that he was in “fine” health, and seemed in good spirits, although he said that he was “vegetating” at Broadmoor as inmates in his ward were not afforded the opportunity to do anything of substance during waking hours. However, he felt that Broadmoor was treating him as well as could be expected. Following our conversation, he had a chat with two guards; this chat appeared to be quite friendly and enjoyable for all concerned.
Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, May 3, 1978
Visitor’s name:
Mrs. M. Svinka-Zielinski
Relationship to Patient:
Friend
Summary
: As before, she discussed Tony’s needs with brisk chatter and with an air of official authority while in fact she has no standing in the case except as a “friend” of the family. She intends to seek out names and addresses of hospitals in New York which might be more accessible to Tony from a financial point of view. Has promised to call with these details in the near future.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, August 30, 1978
Dear Miwa,
First of all I would just like to tell you how much your visits have meant to me over the last five years. Had a very interesting dream about that nice Princess Pallavicini you brought to see me.
I am learning all kinds of new and interesting things about the nature of the Universe. The weather has been relatively cool, except for a few hot days. I feel quite ready to face the world. I am getting very tired of being here and I greatly wish they would let me out. A great and wonderful friend of ours called Ethel de Croisset just sent
Michael Alexander some money to try to help get me out.
I want to go back to Mallorca. Miramar, our house there, has a beautiful old garden, and a chapel and cloisters. The very old palm trees were brought there more than a hundred years ago. There are miradors or look-outs all up and down the mountainside and the view of the sun setting into the vast blue sea is truly something never to be forgotten. I spent most of the happiest years of my life there, mainly in the company of the Mallorquin peasant family who lived downstairs and looked after the land.
Robert Graves lives nearby in Deyá and I came to know him quite well while I lived there. He told me my poetry was excellent, which was encouraging. I spend my days now in a happy dream of what I will do in the garden and cloisters when I go back there and what repairs will have to be done to the house to make it comfortable again.
Love,
Tony
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, August 28, 1969
Miramar
Valldemosa
Mallorca
Michael dear—
Tony and I have been sharing a house—the old residence of the Austrian Archduke Luis Salvador in Valldemosa. We have been so happy here I hope to keep it forever. It has been practically given to us by his daughter who wants us to stay.
I lost out on a beautiful flat in Paris. Am on to another on
Cadogan Square in London but what to do with our great feline friend the fine Mr. Worcester?
Will be returning to New York in November to try to settle my affairs with Brooks, who has refused me a divorce. The bills (unpaid by him) still go on and the little he gives me is just enough to clear expenses here. All my rent money from New York goes straight to my lawyers who are not able to accomplish anything as B refuses to communicate. Meanwhile he has ended up living just down the road here. And to think that one of the Ten Commandments is “Love
Thy Neighbor”! Never mind, I try—if, at times, it seems the greatest irony of all.
Brooks Baekeland
I wanted a divorce. What I refused were her terms: “I’ll take every penny you have, you bastard!” She thought that Louis Nizer would arrange that for her.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
After India, we went to Mallorca, as a sort of, you know, winter drop. Brooks had always loved Mallorca—he had once planned to build a large house there with Barbara.
She didn’t know we were there. And then one day we were going off to Ibiza—it’s a half-hour plane trip, that’s all—and who do we meet in the airport—Ernst von Wedel from Cadaqués. Looking
very
handsome in those days, and very well groomed and so on. He said, “Brooks—my God! What are
you
doing here? I’ve been staying with Barbara and Tony, and Barbara just drove me to the airport!” And Brooks said, “Well, keep it quiet. If you see her, don’t say anything.” And of course, Ernst, instead of keeping quiet, rushed off to find Barbara, and very soon on the loudspeaker there came: “Mrs. Baekeland wants to see Mr. Baekeland.” When we heard that, we decided, okay, too bad, our luggage is on the plane but we’re not going to take it, we’ll go back to the house, because we wanted to get away from her and we thought that she would wait for us at the departure gate. But I must say Barbara knew Brooks very well. She knew he would leave the airport and go back to his car and so she was waiting for him out in the parking lot. And when they came face to face, Brooks said—he had been always and still is very proud of Barbara’s looks, but she had become plump, and he said—“You don’t look so young, Barbara.” And she said, “
You
look one hundred years old!” and from then on they had a good fight. I went away, I retired to the car—I didn’t want to listen. You see, Barbara had said to Brooks, about me, “Get that thing away from me!”—that sort of thing. But that’s normal, that’s normal. So then, after that, we returned to our separate houses, Barbara to Deyá and Brooks and I to our village nearby. But now of course Barbara knew that we were living on the same island.
Eventually Tony came to visit us. He stayed for a few days. This was the first time I had seen him since Brooks and I went away together. It was very uncomfortable, very hard. He left messages for Brooks in the flower pots. I found one—it said, “Daddy, please Daddy, come back to Mummy, she’s so unhappy.” He acted like a little eight-year-old—I mean, the way he resented me.
He never wrote to me from Broadmoor but he wrote
about
me. I existed in every letter to his father. Oh yes. I was the evil woman who was responsible for everything: I had killed his mother, I had killed everybody.
For a while Brooks had been
for
Tony’s release someday, but then he began receiving these letters that were so frightening. Tony said I would be the first person he would kill when he came out.
Telegram from Kingman Brewster, Jr., United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, to Cyrus R. Vance, Secretary of State, December 1978
MADE REGULAR VISIT TO ANTONY BAEKELAND AT BROADMOOR HOSPITAL ON DECEMBER 20 AND FOUND HIM IN GOOD HEALTH AND REASONABLE SPIRITS HE HAD NO COMPLAINTS BREWSTER
Helen Delaney
Six years after the matricide, just about the time our embassy in London began looking into Tony’s condition at Broadmoor, an English writer by the name of Nell Dunn—she’d already written a best seller called
Poor Cow,
and a couple of years ago she had a play on Broadway called, I think,
Steaming
—published a novel called
The Only Child
that was obviously based on the Baekelands. She hadn’t known them personally or anything, she’d simply read about the tragedy in the newspapers, and I think she may also have known people who knew them. Anyway, in her book, Brooks is “Daniel,” Barbara is “Esther,” and Tony is “Piers.”
From
The Only Child,
Nell Dunn, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 1978
With Daniel it was need, obsession, and war, but with Piers it was different, delicate, unexpected, sitting on a sofa with him after school—the light dimming outside the window, [the cat] asleep on the knotted rug—she felt sweetness steal over her—a sweetness she had never known with anyone else….
“You’ve tried to run my life.”
“I didn’t want to run your life. I only wanted to make everything beautiful for you, I only wanted you to be happy. Oh come here,
Piers, hold me and comfort me…I ache, I ache so much I’m dying…Please help me!”
“I ache too, Mother.”
“Come here then, let’s comfort one another. Let’s hold one another till we go to sleep. Take me in your arms, Piers.”…
“I suppose the truth is that my mother has always been the love of my life, yet she’s never given me what I needed. Support in being myself. Belief that what matters to me is as important as what matters to her. And then my father hasn’t liked me since I was about twelve. I’m a disappointment to him. We have nothing in common yet we are bound together by steel rope, bound, it seems, not by love and pleasure.”
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Brooks went to see Tony in Broadmoor. The first time, I made him go. I thought it was too impossible to have a child in prison and not go see him, and I hammered and hammered and hammered, and finally he went.
But I shouldn’t say I made him go because somebody who doesn’t want to go won’t go, either. After that first visit he said—but you must understand it as coming from someone who was very hurt rather than someone arrogant—he came back and told me, “Tony has a ghastly cockney accent.” Brooks has a sense of theater, a sense of glamour and so on, and if his son suddenly had a cockney accent, it said a lot. It was a question of how alienated his child had become, how this child was not even his anymore, couldn’t connect to anything anymore.
Brooks Baekeland
There was Tony talking Cheapside after a short time. I was disturbed by how quickly he had been imprinted.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, Undated
Broadmoor
Dear Miwa—
My father came to see me on a surprise visit and it was good to see him but not so good as I had hoped—he is, however, coming again with his wife, and they plan to spend a few days in a nearby hotel and see me every day. There is so much in me that I want to express, and such emotion that wants to come out, you have no idea.
Forgive this short scribble.
All love,
Tony
Letter from Antony Baekeland to James Reeve, December 17, 1978
Broadmoor
Dear James—
I feel so wonderfully well these days—my grandmother Nini will be very pleased with me.
I thought you might be very busy and that would be the reason for your not writing.
I have a feeling things will be very big and tremendous when I get out, but still I have no idea of when that will be. I am hoping very much that you will be able to get away to visit with me in
Valldemosa.
Love,
Tony