Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (9 page)

Our nearest neighbors were, through a narrow jungle to the north, the Mathiesons of Olin Mathieson Chemical—lovely people—who also owned the uninhabited offshore island which was then a coconut plantation which faced us and them about a mile away and was later made famous, or infamous, by Nixon and his pal Rebozo; and, to the south, the Thomas Fortune Ryans, who built a rococo Italian palace, in bad taste. The Anchorage was a simple, lovely place. As was Coconut Grove itself. There was no tourism then, there was no fear and there was no disgust.

Céline Roll Karraker

Grandpapa lived there alone for six months of the year. My grandmother joined him for a couple of months in the winter.

He ate everything out of a can—without heating it! He used to say to us, “Children, this is the best way of all,” and he’d open a can of Campbell’s split-pea soup and put a little seawater in it and stir it up, and then he’d eat it. Then he’d open up a can of sardines and eat that. And then there was the first instant coffee at that time, called George Washington, and he’d put that in hot water and drink it.

He had no servants, except outdoor people. He adored botany. He was a close friend of the great botanist David Fairchild. He and my grandfather planted the place with all kinds of wonderful plants. We children could pull fruit right off the trees!

Patricia Greene

Barbara and Brooks, before they moved to that penthouse on Seventy-fifth Street, lived two houses down from us on Seventy-first Street, and little Tony was a little younger than one of our sons and a little older than the other—an enchanting child, very elflike—and he used to come around and play in a very imaginative way. He was very very fond of natural history, and actually, one of the nicest stories about Barbara, who was a beautiful woman—a mischievous look in her eye!—was that when Tony was a baby, I think it was probably during World War Two, she was down in Florida with him and some great naturalist was there and said to her, “Oh that lovely little child, don’t give him any toys to play with, let him play with nature,” so she did. And instead of playing with building blocks and trucks and things, he grew up playing with rocks and sticks and mosses and frogs and crickets.

Brooks Baekeland

David Fairchild. “The aged angel,” I used to call him. He always allowed me to come up to his laboratory at the Kampong, his house in Coconut Grove, and interrupt him. I used to walk there all by myself—he lived about two miles away. For me he was a kindly, playful, learned, imaginative human being with a kind of beauty in him that suggested something holy, not Christly but Pythagorean. He was also of course a famous host to all the world’s great; everyone in the world came to his house.

He used to like to see how much information I could hold in my head. His own theory, which I was offered at the dining-room table at the Anchorage, was that one could remember fifty-five thousand different species but not more. I remember the Nobel biologist Dr. Hermann Muller was having dinner with us that night. When I was a little boy, I thought that “doctor” simply meant someone who was a man and who had white hair, since all the men I met who had white hair were Doctor something or other. When LHB and David Fairchild were together, the talk was all of enzymes. How far ahead of their time those two giants were!

Céline Roll Karraker

Grandpapa never wore real shoes. He always wore sneakers, white sneakers. He just thought they were sensible and cheap. He used to go to the Chemists’ Club and the University Club in them. So he was an individualist and a character. I have a picture of him and Mark Twain all in white, because that was what Mark Twain wore, too.

In Florida, Grandpapa wore white ducks and a white shirt with his white sneakers. And when he got hot, he’d walk right into the swimming pool—with all his clothes on! And then walk out of the pool, saying, “This is the way to keep cool. The evaporation keeps you cool.”

And this physically very simple kind of life was carried even to the house in Yonkers. We’d all be at Snug Rock for a lovely traditional Sunday dinner and he would have his instant coffee and his Campbell’s soup and his can of sardines served to him on a Bakelite tray, right at the table with everybody else.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

A couple of summers ago I went to Block Island to see Brooks. His cousin Céline Karraker had told me he was spending the summer there, and I just arrived. I was afraid he’d flee if I told him I was coming—he’s strange that way. I went to the house he was renting and walked right in. I had heard he was having an affair with some woman from New York who had divorced her husband for him, so I asked him about that right away. And he said, “She was such a good cook we used to have to spend two hours every day shopping and then two hours preparing the food and then we’d eat for another hour and then, because I don’t want to be a male chauvinist pig,
I’d
wash the dishes and there’d be ten dishes and five pans, and I just got so sick of the whole thing I finally threw her out.” I said, “Who cooks for you now?” And he said, “Simple—Sunday I have a pound of hamburger, Monday I have a pound of potatoes, Tuesday I have a pound of spinach, and so on. So I have
one
dish,
one
pot,
one
pan.”

Brooks Baekeland

I am a man of very simple tastes. My mother calls me a monk. Some of my peculiar habits now—unhabits, in fact—make me think of my grandfather as I knew him in my boyhood. LHB kept only one “business suit.” I haven’t even got one. Three years ago I discovered that I had fifteen shirts—I threw away ten of them; that I had ten handkerchiefs—I threw away eight of them; eight pair of shorts—I threw away five of them; umpteen trousers—I kept two: umpteen-plus sweaters—I kept three…and so on.

My father kept four or five perfectly pressed white suits in a closet in his office—these were the summers before air-conditioning—and showered and changed several times a day. I remember Ben Sonnenberg, the public relations “genius,” telling me how much he resented seeing him on the train to Fairfield, in the boiling August evenings, so perfectly dapper and unwrinkled—all military-style. And how much he preferred my portly, rumpled, and perspiring grandfather, whose joviality he also liked. Ben sometimes rode with one or the other of them in the elevator at 247 Park Avenue.

I said my grandfather kept only one suit for town. But there’s the story my grandmother used to tell about how she finally tricked him into buying a new dark-blue suit. This story involves a neighbor of theirs in Yonkers, the famous lawyer Samuel Untermeyer, who also owned a very pretentious estate somewhere to the north. LHB held him in scorn as a lawyer—as he did all lawyers, calling them jackals and hyenas. The Untermeyer estate was full of copies of Greek statues and picturesque Greek ruins and Greco-Roman terracing. It was ridiculed by LHB.

Well, one day in Yonkers my grandmother saw a shop that sold men’s clothes. She went in and made a deal with the owner, after she had selected and bought an expensive blue serge suit of LHB’s size for—let us say—one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The deal was that the owner was to show it in the window for twenty-five dollars but not “sell” it to anyone but LHB, who, of course, he knew of—people today have no idea how famous LHB once was. Then at dinner that night my grandmother told my grandfather that she had seen a beautiful suit of imported English serge selling for twenty-five dollars. “Oh, no, Céline—maybe one hundred and twenty-five but not twenty-five. There you have made a mistake.”

“No mistake, dearie—twenty-five,” she insisted.

And so they argued. They even made a bet.

The next night LHB arrived home crowing with delight. When he could stop laughing, he explained how he had just “done in” that old Shylock Sam Untermeyer. LHB had gotten off the train from New York and gone directly to the shop, where he had seen the suit, seen that my grandmother had been right, and bought it. On the way home to Snug Rock, he had fallen in with Sam Untermeyer, shown him the suit, and sold it to him for seventy-five dollars!

I remember how my grandfather used to come to wake me up before sunrise in those early Florida years, give me a boiled egg and a hybridized grapefruit taken off one of his own trees—and then lead me out in the still-sleeping dewy dawn to see the rabbits and land crabs. Coconut Grove was still very wild in those days; the roads were all of crushed white coral.

Imagine an old man in loose, white, unpressed, probably mildewed cottons, a long shirt over them, and one of those still-worn white-cotton, crushable sailing caps, and a mousy-haired boy, his small, grubby hand in the baseball-mitt-sized big one of LHB, both of them talking continuously, neither listening to the other, and heading for a sail in the dinghy to Mathieson Island.

On the way the small boy learned all about outriggers, centerboards, sideboards, Medusas, man-o’-war birds, the main sorts of ocean waves—surficial and bottom-resonant—the prediction of weather from cloud formations, the various ways to treat snake bite, and—“But, Grandpapa, we have forgotten to bring our lunch!”—answered by Pan’s chuckle: “The best lunch you will ever have awaits you. The sea gives it to us.”

In the bottom of the tiny boat was a machete, and it was with this that LHB showed me how to open coconuts and husk them and then pierce two of their three eyes to get the delicious milk. We ate coconut meat, crabs, tropical oysters, sour oranges, and the orange hearts of sea urchins.

He never stopped talking, telling me the Latin names of the plants—many of which he had introduced from his travels all over the world—and the insects and birds and mammals, saying it was just as easy to learn a name that was the same anywhere as one that changed from language to language and country to country—which is, of course, why Tony knew as a small child the Latin names of so many things, for I continued with him LHB’s practice. From the time Tony started talking, which was early, I decided to give him the Latin names, when I knew them, for plants and animals. By the time he was ten he could read, understand, and remember the contents of texts like Buchsbaum’s
Animals Without Backbones.
That was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual bond between Tony and me. And it was not just intellectual and bookish but field-explorative.

Elizabeth Blow

If you saw Tony with Brooks, I don’t think you would connect the fact by looks that they were related. He had Barbara’s brown eyes and her red hair. He was just a marvelous-looking little boy. And at four years old he was already constantly prowling around and investigating insects and birds—he had a natural instinct for creatures of this earth. He knew all about them and he could be very instructive. I’ll never forget the marvelous remark he made to me one afternoon. He said, “B-Betty”—he stammered, you know—“did you know that b-b-butterflies have…” I can’t remember for the
life
of me what it was, it was some special thing that butterflies have—and it was something that I didn’t know. I quoted it for years because it always amused me so. It was that slight stutter, the combination of the “B-Betty” and the “b-b-butterflies” and the actually hard information which he proffered to me.

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

Brooks Baekeland

Psychiatrists—who are professionally amoral—never understood my reluctance to enthuse about their abracadabra. They were interested in their tricks, and in drugs to numb rage, while in Tony I clearly saw the play of Good and Evil. That was a question not only about him but about a whole generation.

From “Dreams and Realities,” a Lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, October 23, 1931

Brooks Baekeland

I remember the hold of my grandfather’s large, soft hand, and the rich flow of humor and information that never stopped pouring out of him during our walks those educative, garrulous, affectionate mornings, while the house and the village still slept and only we two were awake and aware of it.

On our returns, with the sun up and the house awake, he would disappear—where, a small boy did not know. It was to study, I now know. I later discovered that whenever he stood—he always seemed to be standing—leafing through some large tome, he was not leafing. He was reading every single word. He had remained a European and an intellectual.