Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (45 page)

I followed in a cab. I wanted to make sure everything was okay—that he was put in the proper hands. I went to see him later and he was peaceful.

Then I went to have my nose looked after. They said it was broken, and they set it and sewed it up, and a couple of days later I had an operation. The plastic surgeon did an absolutely marvelous job—a fellow named Smith. It looks the same, feels the same, sounds the same.

I turned over the whole divorce file to Barbara the next day and that was it—I don’t know that I ever saw her again. They kept Tony at Metropolitan probably five or six weeks. The police asked me if I wanted to bring criminal charges and I said no.

From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5
,
1973

Willie Morris

Those two! I always sensed disaster, I really did—the mother and the son were so askew. There’s one dinner party she gave in East Hampton that I’ll never forget. It was in the late fall of ’71—I remember my black Lab, Ichabod H. Crane, had just died and I was in mourning. I went over with Muriel Murphy and the strangest thing happened—after dinner Barbara turned on me! For no reason at all. I was behaving myself quite well. But she ordered me to leave her house. I was totally flabbergasted. The other guests were embarrassed by it. It was as quick as a Mississippi thunderstorm. And so Muriel and I left.

But the next morning—I remember it so well—the son walked from their house to Muriel’s, which is over on Georgica Pond, and delivered a note of apology from Barbara. It was a very sweet note. And I scribbled a note back telling her not to worry about it.

Then another funny thing happened. Saul Steinberg had been at that dinner, and I guess he was pretty much taken aback by the little incident, too, because he graciously gave me—he brought them over a few days later—a beautiful pair of watercolors which he had done for me, which he called
Yazoo.
That’s my hometown in Mississippi. He titled one of them
Yazoo in the Winter
and the other
Yazoo in the Spring.
But Saul’s a real gentleman, he didn’t mention that little episode.

Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras

Barbara and Tony were spending fall and winter weekends in that little house on the beach. I was worried about her. Once she parked a car she’d borrowed from Richard Hare on the wrong side of the Montauk Highway—facing traffic. It was towed away, and she had to come into the East Hampton police station to deal with it. The officer was sitting at a desk rather high up and Barbara said, “Come down off that desk up there! What kind of place is this, anyway?” And then when he did come down, she said, “Well, get a pencil so you can take this down right!” And he said, “I can’t do it down here. I need the desk to write on—also my pencil’s up there.”

Eventually I called Paul Greenwood, a policeman who used to moonlight by driving me into New York occasionally and who’d been in the station the day Barbara came in. I said, “I just want to show you where Barbara Baekeland’s house is, in case I ever have to call you to get over there quickly.”

Paul Greenwood

I was the sergeant on duty when she came in about her car. She was very, very, very emotional, very upset, and, you know, she proceeded to look down upon everyone there and give us the devil. She really was raising hell. She had on a long, funny-looking gown. We didn’t have a chance to do any talking, she did all the talking—she insulted everybody. We just listened and let her get it off of her chest—we let them ventilate when they get that excited, then they’ll cool off and you can reason with them.

I think she had her son with her, but I’m not sure about that. She was a Baekeland by marriage, right? And Baekeland was the name of the man that invented Bakelite originally, right? Well, she certainly acted like she was from the hufty-tufty there, you know—very haughty individual, I thought.

Gloria Jones

I saw Barbara for the last time that winter, I guess. In Long Island. And she looked ratty—for Barbara, who always wore these marvelous furs and beautiful robes and the Chanels, you know.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

You have to understand that Barbara had been a great beauty. She was losing her looks, and her husband had left her for someone much younger. She would write to Brooks saying, “I’ve been to the doctor, he finds me amazing. He thinks I have the body of a thirty-year-old,” or, “My looks still stop traffic”—I remember
that
expression. She was terribly
accrochée
to this—holding on, holding on to this
fiercely.

Frederick Combs

I kept hearing from everyone how beautiful she’d been, and then Tom Dillow asked me over to her place in East Hampton for drinks—I remember it was the dead of winter. The son was there, too, and he was just sitting by the fire and we were having a perfectly, you know, average conversation when all of a sudden he leaps out of his chair toward his mother. He got within a few feet of her, and, I mean, his grimace and everything was incredible—a look of just total hatred. Then he just stopped in his tracks and went back to his chair by the fire, a rocking chair as I recall. It was a terrifying moment, but she reacted as though nothing had happened and was seemingly more involved in how to calm
us
down, you know, and just get the conversation going again. I remember later she told us he had been burning the furniture in the fireplace that afternoon. Imagine being a stranger and sitting with someone and having them talk about the burning of furniture as though they were just simply saying would you like another cube of ice in your drink, you know. It was real casual.

Dominick Dunne

I met Barbara Baekeland when she came to the screening of a film that I produced. It must have been 1971 or ’72. She stayed on afterward to discuss the picture. I saw her a few times after that and once fetched something for her from her London apartment that she wanted in New York, a mink hat I think it was. I didn’t know her very well, but I had several friends who were very close to her, and I had heard stories about Tony attacking her, particularly a tale of an attack he made on his mother at their house in East Hampton when friends of mine were present. The story was more or less dismissed at the time—“He didn’t really mean it,” that sort of thing—but became horrifying in retrospect after he actually did kill her.

In 1982, my own daughter, Dominique, was attacked and murdered by a former boyfriend. She had become frightened of him and broken off the relationship. It was not the first time that he had attacked her—there had been two previous instances. The thing that haunts us all, my wife and sons and me, and that we have to live with, is that none of us thought in terms of murder. It simply never occurred to us that the man was a killer. Afterward, when it was too late, all the warning signs became clear.

Richard Hare

My wife and I used to drive Barbara and Tony out to East Hampton on weekends. They didn’t have a car or anything, and I remember one day as we were leaving—we left Fridays around one o’clock—Barbara took me aside and said, “Richard, Tony isn’t quite himself, he’s stopped taking his pills, but don’t worry about it because I’m going to get him on the pills again.”

All the way down in the car he was making these funny little nursery rhymes and, you know, singing to himself. So when we got to their house I took Barbara aside and said, “Barbara, I think it would be wise for you both to spend the night at
our
house. I don’t like the idea of you being alone in the house here, with Tony not being quite right.” She said, “Don’t worry a thing about it. He’s going to be fine.” And I said, “Will you call me the first thing in the morning?” and she said, “Richard, I’ve been through this a hundred times before.” The next morning she did call: “Oh, we had a lovely dinner”—you know.

That night, they came for drinks. We sat by the fire and he was pretty well-behaved. He rather liked it in our house because it was a big old East Hampton house, 1796 it was born, and he rather liked that whole idea, and he had a lot of feeling about the house and it was quite calming for him, I think. He seemed perfectly under control until Barbara said, “I’ve brought some lovely sketches that Tony’s done.” He became quite antagonistic toward her then but she was able to placate him very nicely.

Early that Monday morning Barbara Hale called me and told me what had happened over at her place the night before. I was relieved it hadn’t happened in
my
house, because
I
would have called the police, you see, and Barbara Baekeland would never have spoken to me again.

David Mead

I was strictly a nonhistorical facet in all of this. I was married at the time to Deirdre Cohane, the daughter of the Baekelands’ old friends Jack and Mimi Cohane. I can’t remember how we got out to East Hampton, to tell you the truth. I guess we drove out—or did we take the train? No, we must have driven out in a rented car. That’s vague to me, how we got there. I certainly know how we got
back
—in pieces.

This was January 1972. It was a really nasty day. It was snowing and blowing, and Barbara’s house was right on the beach, and the sea was threatening to wash it right over the dunes. We were going over to Barbara Hale’s for dinner.

Now this is the first time I ever met Barbara Hale. It was about seven, I guess, when we got there, and dinner wasn’t quite ready, and Barbara Baekeland and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking and talking. We were on our first drink, then our second drink, and it was very pleasant—no problems at all. We were talking about all kinds of things in general but I remember specifically what we were talking about when it began to happen—we were talking about European architecture, something which I know nothing about but which I
thought
I knew something about. In other words, I was pontificating or something. And all of a sudden, out of the blue Barbara Baekeland said, “Good
God,
you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Now this is the first time I’ve ever seen her angry or even upset about anything. And she really lashed into me, she attacked me with a real force. I remember the conversation so well only because I was trying to figure out what it was that I had said that might have made her so angry, and as I was trying to figure this out—trying to play it back, so to speak—she was still going on at me. I think maybe the third drink or so had just done it, you know.

Tony was in the living room but when he heard his mother’s voice raised in anger, he came rushing in and said to her, “
You
don’t know what
you’re
talking about!” He sort of took over for
me,
and met her on
her
level, which was pretty high and angry. And I was just of no consequence at that point. He accused her of being a whore, and she accused
him
of being a homosexual, you know—“homo” I think was the word she used. “What could
you
ever do with a woman?” she said. Something to that effect. At that point he took an egg off the counter and smashed it on her face. Then she threw something at
him.
She became defiant—“Aren’t you a crass slob for doing that to me!”

Then he took a knife. He just taunted her with it. And she thrust out her chest and said, “I dare you!” Like that. And that’s when
I
stepped in. I concentrated on the knife. He wasn’t really paying attention to me, his eyes were completely focused on her, and they were livid. The whole thing was like some sort of cheap Hollywood movie. I mean, they were eyeball-to-eyeball and the hatred was electric, it was absolutely electric.

He held the knife up, and I simply went for his wrist, twisted it, and just took it away from him. And he didn’t even know I did that. He wasn’t even aware of me! She was still saying, “I dare you! I dare you!” And they were still glaring at each other. And then he went for her throat. He started choking her. He was wrestling her to the floor, and I stepped in between them and we all went crashing down—the three of us—and we actually rolled out the kitchen door into the snow.

Well, I finally fought him off her. He went inside, and she got up, and I went over to her and I said, “Are you okay?” and she was trembling and hysterical and she slapped me across my face as hard as she could and said, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” and got in the car and drove away.

I went back in the house and
I’m
beginning to tremble now so I have a couple of brandies. And Tony announces he’s going to bed at Barbara Hale’s. He was completely calm again.

So Deirdre and I spent the night at Barbara Hale’s, too. My only plan for the rest of the evening was to get as drunk as I could as quickly as I could, and I succeeded. The next morning when I came down, Tony was already at the table, Barbara Hale was making breakfast, and it was a nice day, a beautiful day, so I said to him, “After breakfast I’d like to have a talk with you. Why don’t we go for a long walk.” And we did—we walked all over the place. I told him that I really thought he ought to get away from his mother, that they were both tearing each other up, and he was saying how he agreed, it wasn’t good. I thought I had made some good points and, you know, reached him a little bit, and we got back to the house, and just as we walked in the door the phone was ringing and Deirdre picked it up and it was Barbara Baekeland. Deirdre said, “Hi, Barbara, how are you? Yes, Tony’s here,” and she gave the phone to him, and he went, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay,” and hung the phone up, and of course both Deirdre and I leaped on him, we said, “What’d she say, what’d she say?” And he just very calmly said, “She’ll be by to pick me up in half an hour.” And he walked away. And half an hour later she picked him up and drove off with him, acting of course as if nothing had happened.