Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (5 page)

Addie Herder

I ran into Brooks—it must have been early in February 1973. I came into this little brasserie on the Île Saint-Louis, and it was crowded as usual, there was no place to sit down. And there was Brooks, sitting at a table with a woman, and I didn’t want to sit with him. But I was shepherding a black painter by the name of Beauford Delaney, a very good painter—a friend of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller and Jimmy Baldwin—who was having an opening later that day. Beauford was old so he sat down at Brooks’s table. So then
I
had to! Brooks greeted me with all sorts of affection and said he wanted me to meet his wife, you know—which really upset me, because it was too
soon
somehow. Then he said to me, “That terrible boy—he killed that wonderful woman.” And he went on in the same paragraph to tell this new wife how much he admired my work, my collages. Well, he had two pieces of mine, which
Barbara
had bought, many years ago. And after this he wrote inviting me to come visit them where they were living, somewhere in Brittany, and he described the house and how wonderful it was and he listed the people who were going to be there. This was, you know, just after his wife had died!

Gloria Jones

Jim and I were getting ready to go to the opening of Beauford Delaney’s art show and the doorbell rang and Brooks just walked in and we were very cold to him. He said that Tony had killed the woman he loved. He absolutely said that, quote unquote. We were stunned. I said, “Please don’t talk to me,” you know, and he left.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

I was
there.
What happened is Brooks and I lived in the same part of Paris as the Joneses—the Île Saint-Louis—and we were taking a walk on the
quais
and Gloria was at her window, on the quai d’Orléans. She stared at Brooks, who stared back at her, and she closed her window. Nobody rang her bell. Brooks was not silly enough to go ring her bell. You see, everybody would like to have made a
grande geste.

Rosemary Rodd Baldwin

When Barbara was killed, I borrowed everything you can imagine to get back to England. I was living in Turkey, and I got back as soon as I could. My daughter Mandy took me down to the prison. I’d never been to
that
one. Well, after all, I had married a man who was in jail in Turkey, so I knew about prisons, but that’s another story altogether. So I went to see Tony and there he was. Suddenly he looked up and for a moment there was a flash of this old Tony from Ansedonia—of happy days.

Let me tell you, a more normal boy you never saw. Once we went sailing with my daughter Jinty, the one he loved so much, and my son-in-law, Hugo Money-Coutts, sailing from Porto Santo Stefano in a small boat called a Fifer, and on a small boat you really see people how they are. Tony had his guitar with him, and we stopped in the middle of the sea—in the middle of the Mediterranean near Taranto—and he played all night and everybody was so happy. Tony behaved like an absolute angel, an absolute normal absolute angel.

Brixton was the first prison I’d ever been in where you have to talk to somebody behind glass, and we were given fifteen minutes and I found it terribly difficult to talk for fifteen minutes and I was getting desperate, and suddenly I said, “Tony, has your father been over to see you?” And he said, “Yes. Yes he has.” Which wasn’t true. And he brought a comb out of his pocket and he was bending the teeth of the comb, and I realized it had been a mistake to ask him that. So then I burst into tears. And he looked at me and I said, “Well, never mind, Tony, it’ll soon be over. You’ll see—you’ll be out and you’ll come and stay with me in Turkey.”

Richard Hare

Nini said please write to the poor boy, his father won’t go and see him, blah blah blah. This was before Brooks did go finally, I think. Anyhow, Anne felt sorry for him and wrote him a letter, a very careful letter. After all, we’d had some wonderful times at Barbara’s. She had had a lot of exposure on two continents, you know, and she knew everyone attractive and interesting. Dalí came frequently with his puma cub or his pet tiger or baby leopard or whatever it was—he was apparently a friend from Cadaqués. And I remember meeting somebody called the Thane of Cawdor there, which was sort of amusing. He really
was
the Thane of Cawdor—as in
Macbeth
.

Letter from Anne Hare to Antony Baekeland, Undated

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Richard and Anne Hare, January 17, 1973

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

I was on the high seas when he killed Barbara, sailing from New York to Cherbourg on the
France.
And when I got to Paris everybody had seen it in the papers and told me the good news—you know how people are. And within a few days I flew over to London and saw Tony. I was staying at the Carlton Towers and I remember I went down to the lobby and told the doorman to get me a taxi. He said, “Where are you going, madam?”—you know, they’re all dressed in uniform there—and I said Brixton Prison, and he said to the cab driver, without batting an eyelash, “Brixton Prison.”

So I went and I waited with everybody else waiting to see the prisoners. And then they called my name out and said booth number seven or whatever. I hadn’t seen Tony in I guess ten years. He said immediately, “Oh thank you for coming, Aunt Liz.” He was absolutely charming. I was sort of afraid to mention what had happened. I don’t think we did mention it. It was all small talk—you know, “How have you been? What have you been doing? Have you been writing any poetry? Have you been doing any paintings?” And
he
was talking, too. Fifteen minutes I was with him. Then right after that he wrote me a letter and said, “Thank you for visiting me. I love you, Aunt Liz. You remind me of Mummy.” And I thought, Wow! I’m next on the list! Sam Shaw, my lawyer, said, “Don’t go to see him again, don’t do anything, and
don’t
answer the letter.”

Miwa Svinka-Zielinski

I saw him in Brixton that January. He knew that he had killed his mother and I talked to him about that and he said, “I dream about her often. She comes to me in my dreams and says that she is not at all angry.”

I met Tony and Barbara both in 1970 in East Hampton. When I met him I didn’t know that he was the son of Barbara. He looked very
sympathique
and I asked him whether he wrote poetry, because I said he looked just like a poet to me. He had some kind of a way about him, sort of something lyrical. So he was very pleased, and that’s why he started to be very friendly with me. He told me that he was also a painter. Then he gave me a fish, a painting of his. I have it somewhere. I like this fish very much—it has very good color.

Sam Green

Barbara was always telling me—I mean, over and over again—how artistic Tony was. Well, he did have lots of esoteric façade, let’s say. I met her on a cruise of the Greek Islands in 1969—Emily Staempfli, a mutual friend, had chartered this big yacht—and Barbara and I became, shall I say, best friends overnight. And right after the cruise I went to stay with her in Mallorca—which is when I met Tony. And right after that, I went to stay with my friend Cecil Beaton in England, at his country house. Cecil was dying to meet Barbara because I had such good stories to tell. They never did meet, but, based on what he had heard about Barbara and Tony from me, he wrote a novella that telescoped them into the future—he had the son kill the mother at the end!

Letter from Sam Green to Antony Baekeland, April 6, 1973

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, April 15, 1973

ON THE MORNING OF JUNE
6, 1973,
Tony Baekeland was driven from Brixton Prison to Central Criminal Court, known to the general public as the Old Bailey—there finally to stand trial for the murder of his mother.

Built on the site of the notorious Newgate Prison and skirted on its east side by Deadman’s Walk, an open passage along which condemned men once took their final steps to keep their appointment with the hangman, the Old Bailey is virtually synonymous with English judicial history and drama. It is here that the infamous Dr. Crippen was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. And it is here that Oscar Wilde sat in the dock and heard the judge sentence him to two years’ hard labor, intoning: “That you Wilde have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is…impossible to doubt.” And it was here on this June morning that Tony Baekeland became a statistic: one of the 4,509 persons tried at the Old Bailey during the year 1973.

The trial of
Regina
v.
Antony Baekeland
officially opened the moment the High Court judge, who traditionally presides only at the most serious cases such as murder and offenses under the Official Secrets Act, was escorted into the courtroom by an alderman and a sheriff of the City of London, both in violet robes. The judge’s robe was red—indeed, he is known as the Red Judge—and adorned with slate-colored silk trimmings. Over the robe he wore a black stole fastened with a wide, black belt; over the stole, slung across his right shoulder, he wore a scarlet band. His neckwear consisted of a starched wing collar and two plain white bands hanging down in front. On his head was the English judicial headdress—a wig, abbreviated from the reign of Charles II to one with a single vertical curl at the back and two short rows hanging down behind. In his hands he carried white gloves and a folded square of black silk known as the Black Cap—a relic from the days when it was placed on his wig as he passed the death sentence.

Since the trial of Tony Baekeland was being held during the summer months, according to ancient custom, sweet-smelling English garden flowers had been strewn on the bench and the ledge of the dock.

Three sharp knocks on the door of the judge’s dais signaled the black-robed usher to open the court with the proclamation: “All persons who have anything to do before My Lords the Queen’s Justices at the Central Criminal Court draw near and give your attendance. God Save the Queen.”

The counsel representing the Crown wore a long silk gown, long-cuffed black tailcoat, and a waistcoat with flaps to the pockets. Representing the defendant was the barrister-writer John Mortimer, who would later create the character of the portly liberal barrister “Rumpole of the Bailey”; he was garbed in the traditional Tudor gown.

To the left of the barristers sat the wigged and gowned clerks of the court, whose function it was to swear in juries, take prisoners’ pleas, and record verdicts.

As the trial was getting under way, Tony Baekeland, who had been sitting impassively in the accused’s enclosure at the center of the courtroom, exclaimed, to no one in particular, “I would rather have buggered a prosecutor than killed a peacock in paradise!”

Neil Hartley

I had been out of town working on a film and when I got back to London, at a dinner party John Mortimer, who was a friend of mine and my partner Tony Richardson’s and who was always involved in these bizarre cases, said, “I’m representing this interesting case—this boy who killed his mother.” And suddenly I was told that the papers had been full of it.

Barbara Baekeland had bought the apartment on Cadogan Square from me and a friend of mine, Jim Robertsen, and that was really my only association with her. I went back two or three times to parties there. She was pleasant enough. Just before she was killed, we talked—I think the
day
before—and she said she was having a party that night and she wanted me to come.

I must say I didn’t like the way she had done up the place. I mean, I preferred it the way
I
had had it. I’d bought it from an Italian antiques dealer on the King’s Road—he had done it up for himself and lived in it for a number of years, and he’d done a beautiful job, but
she
…I mean, it had a very deep stairwell from the floor below up to a kind of studio room which was the living room, and the stairs had a lovely banister, been there for a
long
time, and she took it all out. I don’t know how people escaped without killing themselves going up and down those stairs! Things like that I thought were odd, but, you know, women have their own taste.

After her death I was contacted by her husband to see if I was interested in buying the apartment back, which I thought was a real creepy idea. He showed up in London while the son was being held in prison.

Brooks Baekeland

Barbara’s murder by her own son was a kind of grotesque, inartistic accident. She should not have died the way she did. It was not so much her kind of death as his kind of…She had a kind of greatness—no, a real greatness—of heart, and her murder was illustrative not of her but of that
crapule
, her son. That she had partly made him into a
crapule
is also true. They were both genetic defectives. But he was also
my
son, and I had fought against that in him all his life and failed. I would give anything to have been able to help him. I never could.

Even as a small child he was aberrant. And then as he was entering puberty it became clear—finally—that he was not only homosexual but a practicing one. That was a terrible shock to his mother, who fought against it with him, ferociously. She may even have died in one of their fights over this. She simply could never accept it, try though she did—gallantly, desperately, despairingly—in their last disorganized years together.

Sam Green

Barbara just thought Tony was the Messiah and the greatest child that ever was. Nobody was good enough for Tony. She would rent castles in Italy or Spain or wherever and invite important nobility—shall we say specifically the daughters of important nobility. Later on she would invite older girls, hoping that the inevitable would happen. What I mean is she would set Tony up. She tried it time after time and it just didn’t work. Finally she got a little more desperate and aggressive about it and when Tony himself finally invited a girl to Cadaqués for a holiday—she was from Paris and a few years older than he was—Barbara practically instructed her to seduce him. Now this is the part of the story that really intrigued Cecil Beaton. In that novella he wrote, he gave Barbara the name “Emily,” Tony the name “Jonathan,” and “Dolores,” I guess, represented Sylvie. Thank God it never got published! Cecil was a photographer basically, but when he wrote he always settled for the most superficial frame around the picture. He revealed incredible tawdriness in his prose. But I hasten to his defense: He never displayed it elsewhere!

From an Untitled Novella believed to be by Cecil Beaton, Unpublished

Barbara Curteis

When Tony was twenty-one or twenty-two he said to me, “You know, I’m still a virgin.” And a couple of months later he met Sylvie. She was one of the groupies in Cadaqués—French, hippyish. And Tony said to me—this is so sad and moving in light of what happened later—he said, “Sex between men and women—people talk about it and make such a big hoohah about it and they say it’s so complicated and everything, but when you meet the right girl everything just falls into place.” Sylvie was his first girlfriend, you see. He brought her to meet Barbara and Brooks in Paris—brought her home like a kitten bringing its first killed mouse, and laid it at their feet.

That Christmas they rented Emily Staempfli’s house in Cadaqués—Barbara, Brooks, Barbara’s mother, Mrs. Daly, and Tony and Sylvie. An
in principle
happy Christmas: Mammy, Pappy, Granny, the Only Child, and the Only Child’s Girlfriend.

But Sylvie took another look at Brooks and said, you know, “There’s more money in it for me if I go with the father than if I go with the son.”

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

I think that that’s a good story. People say I caught the Baekelands. The Baekelands do their own catching, very easily—believe me.

You know, I’m not in the least prudish, and if I had had an affair with the son and then with the father, I would say so. It wouldn’t bother me in the least to say so.

I met the son first—in Cadaqués, in the summer of ’67. He was six years younger than I was. He had that pretty complexion of his mother’s. He didn’t have that sort of mad face that he had afterward, of which I only saw photographs. He was soft-spoken, very bright, very gentle. Affectionate. I don’t mean toward me, but toward his dog—he had the most charming relationship with the little dog, who he called Digby. “Mr. Digby, will you be good?” Very sweet.

I was going through my first divorce, and Tony and I became great friends.
Not
the way people say—that there was a love affair. It’s so absurd—because Tony was a homosexual from the day he was born, I think. But a lot of homosexual men like women—as a companion, to talk to and so forth. We were like brother and sister in a way. Of course, later, when I went away with his father, he resented me terribly.

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

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Before they separated, Barbara told Brooks, “You know, I could get Tony over his homosexuality if I just took him to bed,” and Brooks said, “Don’t you dare do that, Barbara!” Fred, my ex-husband, Brooks’s brother, told me that Brooks told
him
that—now this is brothers!

Eleanor Ward

It comes back to me now—the very clear clear clear tone—that she did tell me that she slept with him, because I lived on the next street and I remember leaving her apartment on Seventy-fifth and walking down Lexington and walking back to Seventy-fourth in a state of shock, you know—that anyone could do that to their son. She…She let him put his filthy thing inside her.

Willie Morris

I always heard that the mother and the son had slept together. That’s what everyone told me. I had no way of knowing whether it was true but it was certainly the talk of the East Hampton set.

Tom Dillow

Barbara told me that it happened in that house they had in Mallorca, this archduke’s palace, but then, a lot of stuff happened in that house. I mean, it was a real spooky place—huge, no electricity, that kind of stuff. She didn’t give me any details. Oh no. Not Barbara. Barbara was a lady.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

I can believe that she would do
anything
—including that. I can’t believe that
he
would, that’s all. There might be something in a woman where she wants to save her child to a point that is beyond credibility, but then the child remains a homosexual boy, and I can’t imagine that he would have found this in any way physically possible.

Alan Harrington

I was quoted in
Newsweek
magazine about something, I can’t remember what, therapeutic techniques, I think, and Barbara called me up and said she wanted desperately to talk to me, and she told me that she had slept with Tony. I said to her I didn’t think it was such a bad thing—I was trying to remove guilt—but now that I think of it, there wasn’t any expressed.

Barbara Hale

Sons and lovers—nobody knows the difference anymore.

Irving Sabo

Barbara Baekeland was in a writing class I took at the New School in New York in the early seventies with Anatole Broyard. Well, I can only say, she was a presence. She only came a few times when I was there, and I went to dinner with her a couple of times after class. The first time, we went to Bradley’s, on University Place—there were about ten of us—and she just thought it was all so marvelous. We all went Dutch on those occasions, and she just thought this was great. And a week or two later, she read some of her writing in class, her ongoing novel, which dealt with a mother-son incest, as I recall. Well, it was vivid. She was, I think, a good writer. And after that class, some of us were going uptown on the East Side and she invited four or five of us who were in my car to stop up for a drink.