Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (11 page)

He talked to me also of China and Japan—of Taisho, Emperor Hirohito’s father, who had honored him for creating the first Western industry in Japan—the Japanese Bakelite Corporation. And about Theodore Roosevelt and his beautiful daughter, Alice. And about Harding and Coolidge. But mostly about TR, who he said was the greatest man America had produced after Washington and Jefferson.

His love of and his reverence for America—what it symbolized more than what it was—was the classic immigrant’s, which was why he had named his son after George Washington. “A nigger name,” my father growled, and never used the “Washington.” I always felt I was not his son. My genes told me that I was my grandmother’s.

My grandmother was all to me: teacher, protector, guide—indeed, what any true mother is to any son. There are several basic sorts of women, and their mixtures: mother-woman, sister-woman, child-woman, mistress-woman, wife-woman. My grandmother was mother-woman.

Our minds, hers and mine, were in tune. So were our spirits, in both of which was the same Gallic naughtiness and humor. She loved wit and gaiety, those French virtues, and she herself had them in full measure.

She was attracted to me not only as a mother but as any woman is to an electric young man. We were like lovers. We met always as man and woman. That was our power. It enabled us to see instantly to the heart of things together. I was for my grandmother the surrogate for the missing, vanished, voyaging, discoursing Leo Hendrik Baekeland. I was the young Leo she had loved. He, Odysseus, was gone. I was Telemachus. Even as a young man I was aware of the sexual danger of that transference.

And we became even closer upon her coming death—I mean more aware of what we meant to each other, before a series of hammerlike strokes silenced her forever—not, oh not, quite. When she said to me one day, out of one of our long silences together, “Thank you for existing,” she said to me all that
I
felt, too—and all that I mean when I speak about family and what I call “inheritance,” not necessarily money but that duty and that deep sentiment we should all feel, upwards and downwards in our continuities. I do deeply believe in inheritance, which in my mind goes mystically
both
ways.

We Baekelands are a powerful race. Did you know that the name is famous in Belgium less even than for the great LHB than for the family of robbers who were all captured together and hanged during the Spanish Occupation—a father and his four sons? Whenever I go to Belgium and my name is seen on my passport, those lovely fools, if it is after their lunch and they are feeling cheery, stagger back and make wild gestures of self-defense, crying,
“Les Baekelands! Les Baekelands!”
That great robber family is a national myth. There is violence in my genetic past. I am not sure that anyone else in our family knows about this infamous descent. My beloved grandmother told me. She told me everything.

She died in 1957. The contents of Snug Rock were legally—by her will—up for grabs, starting on a certain date. Everything in the house was tagged by the family—furniture, paintings, rugs, anything of “value.”

I had always had a Prince Hal–Falstaff relationship with my grandmother’s servants—gardeners, chauffeurs, caretakers, cooks, chambermaids, etc. I was living then on East Seventy-first Street, in a house my grandmother had bought and allowed me to live in while I was doing graduate work at Columbia, and when I wished to wash my extremely fast Mercedes-Benz, I would motor up to Snug Rock and visit a bit with the chauffeur and his sister or with the gardener and his wife, who plied me with pasta and
vino rosso
and terrible jokes and that marvelous kind of Italian love that adopts all children—they still treated me like a child. My jokes were worse than theirs.

It was a hot summer day. The gardener gave me a key. I wandered through the rooms, remembering. Both my grandparents were dead. Snug Rock had been left to their daughter. There is a housing development there now, I am told.

I took my time. I spent many long minutes in each room and passage, remembering and trying to learn
something,
wanting—always—to know who I was and why. Why, I kept feeling, have you left me alone? I finally understood that that was not my question. The real question was: What was to become of this whole world now that the marvelous, strong, innocent idealism of the Victorians was gone? I thought of Rome, of the Gracchi—the sundering. And of course I wandered through the empty greenhouses, the dusty laboratory, and down through the grape arbors and vineyards, and—pensively—all through the now ruined gardens.

And, back in the house, I finally climbed up to the tower.

What was my amazement! All the great portraits—engravings a meter high by half a meter wide, matted and framed in their gilded wood—of the illuminati of Heidelberg, Tübingen, Bonn, Göttingen, Leiden, Berlin, Louvain—indeed, of all the great universities of Belgium, France, and Sweden—all in formal court dress with their sashes and orders—all of whom had been my grandfather’s teachers: They were all still there rising along the walls of the mounting stairway. Not a one of them had been tagged!

Let me interrupt myself for a moment. You will see what I am getting at in a minute. In 1945, just after the war in Europe ended, I used to commandeer a sergeant driver and a corporal and a big car and explore Swabia rather than sit on the air base at Stuttgart and twiddle my thumbs—play poker, screw the local German girls. I discovered the German atomic energy laboratories underground, the ME-262 factories, also underground, and Hechingen, where the last Crown Prince of Prussia and the German Empire was being detained by the French. I went up to Castle Hohenzollern in Hechingen over their protest and made the acquaintence of the lonely Kaiser’s son. We became close friends. He was a total innocent and could have been David Windsor’s twin brother. He lived there alone with his French mistress, and I managed, at his urgent request, to frustrate his wife, who wished to join him there—I had connections in SHAPE. I supplied him with cigarettes, and, as he sat in his bedroom in the rumpled disorder of his silk nightclothes and sheets, he supplied me with the inside story of Hitler’s Third Reich.

It is a long story, but all I want of it now is this: He took me around the castle and showed me his ancestors’ portraits—and hearts, all in their golden goblets in niches protected by small glass doors—and a family tree going back to 815, I think—an ancient and redoubtable royal family, of which he made graceful fun. He had nothing of pomposity, and all he seemed to be interested in was news of his English cousins and the latest in sports over there—horses, of course. I came to see him many times. In later years we corresponded.

Now, what I want you to understand is that the rising tier of the intellectual great of Europe that mounted up and up into the tower at Snug Rock, and then went all around the walls of the great tower room, was an aristocracy as truly mighty—and conscious of it—as the Hohenzollerns. Not hereditary, but no less awesome.
These
were my grandfather’s real ancestors. And mine. And of this modern world.

And up in the tower of Snug Rock nothing had been disturbed, for there was nothing up there of “value.” There was only the cooing of pigeons.

ON HIS ARRIVAL AT BROADMOOR
on June 6, 1973, Tony Baekeland, according to hospital procedure, was given a number—6787—a bath, and a preliminary medical checkup. No medication of any kind was administered so that his psychiatric condition could surface and be observed. He was brought a cup of tea and some bread and jam, and placed in solitary confinement.

On his second day he was moved to the special admissions ward, where he would remain for the next two months. In early fall he was transferred to Cornwall House, a three-story building that resembled a tenement more than the ducal residence its name suggested. There he was assigned to a second-floor ward, which consisted of dormitories, single rooms referred to by the patients as “cells,” and a large dayroom where patients could read, play music and games, listen to the radio, or watch television. Occasionally there was a movie. During the Queen’s Jubilee Week, James Bond films were shown; another time there was a screening of
The Exorcist,
at which several patients were observed “laughing away with great relish” in the middle of one particularly grotesque scene while other, more heavily tranquilized patients simply sat by themselves and stared into space.

There was an area off the dayroom of Cornwall House in which meals were served, and also a small kitchen that patients could use at authorized times. All cutlery was counted both before and after meals; if anything was missing, the patients were searched.

They were provided only a locker and an iron bed. For anything beyond these bare necessities they had to depend on the generosity of relatives or friends. In Tony Baekeland’s case, his grandfather, George Baekeland, had left him a trust fund, one half of the principal of which would come to him in three years, when he turned thirty, the other half when he turned thirty-five.

Tony Baekeland shared the dormitory with as many as sixty men at one time. The beds were packed tightly together, with sometimes only inches between them. High up on the dormitory walls were blue lights that were never turned off, so that it never got completely dark.

Patients were locked in the dormitories at night, and bathrooms were off-limits. If anybody needed to use the toilet, he had to resort to the chamberpot under his bed, in full view of everybody. “They were plastic, since a pot of any other kind might be turned into an offensive weapon,” a staff member explains. Often there wasn’t even toilet paper.

“We are wheeling and shining with the
crème de la crème
of European high life,” Barbara Baekeland had written to Sam Green three years before. “The Marquis and Marquise de Surian arrive next week—and the Earl of Shaftesbury is just across the way here. Hope to climb on skis up to the Hospice de St. Bernard with him next week. Adelaide d’Eudeville’s cousin, the Comte de Vogue, is here and it is peaceful and restful. Flew around in a private plane yesterday—took the controls, made a right turn and almost zeroed in—no, not quite true. But had a good look at the countryside.”

A good look at the countryside was one of the few things at Broadmoor that Tony Baekeland could enjoy, and it would be filtered not only through barred windows but through the tranquilizers with which he was often heavily sedated. Sometimes when he stood by the window too long, he would be reprimanded by a nurse.

“I asked him, ‘Tony, what do you get as medication?’” says Miwa Svinka-Zielinski. “He wrote me four different names. He said he got one kind in the morning, another kind in the afternoon, and another in the evening, and once a week he got this and that. I showed this list to a psychiatrist friend of mine in New York and he said they were all strong tranquilizers. The worst thing was he was not getting any treatment—he saw a psychiatrist only once a month.”

For the roughly 750 patients at Broadmoor, there were only four psychiatrists, working one day a week each. “With the best will and the best scheduling in the world, I could only manage to see each patient for two hours every three months,” a former Broadmoor consultant explains.

But Dr. Maguire insists, “Tony Baekeland consumed a great deal of my care. He told me I was the only one who would listen to him.”

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, November 12, 1973

1. Einstein hides a stop sign from the police: I associate this dream with secret, occult, or hidden things.
   
2. I come back to my best friend [Jake Cooper], and we travel the world together; I see a fox eat a squirrel: I associate this with the library of our house on Seventy-first Street where I was brought up.
   
3. My grandmother Nina Daly embraces me during a party given by a fellow here and myself; during the party I cut up gobbets of meat: I associate this with the swans on Georgica Pond in East Hampton where as you know we rented a house for several years.
   
4. I dream that I can fly and go all over the place: this dream of flight I associate with freedom. I have always wanted to be able to fly.
   
5. That I am a successful writer and poet: I associate this with a manor house that my mother and father rented one summer in France. It had a beautiful garden and a large
   potager
   where I used to hunt for insects.
   

Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971

Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, December 9, 1973

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks and Tony were different in a million ways but they were alike in the sense that for both of them there were no rules anywhere. They had the sense of “we are beyond rules, outside laws.” Yet Tony was brought up permissively while Brooks had been very strictly brought up. Later, of course, Brooks transgressed. He was the Baekeland son who rebelled, breaking a pattern and going off in different ways—oh yes.

Brooks Baekeland

I was always free. I was always successful in everything I wished to do. But I despised success. I despised money and show. I laughed—a grave offense to those who cannot laugh! I thumbed my nose at my father and at the sheepism of Man. Subconsciously he knew that I derided all that he did not dare not to be. I was not only a black sheep but far, far worse—I was a laughing black sheep who made him doubt his money-god.

My first wife was one of
them.
And Barbara’s poor son got his values from her—most of them—but he was torn in a war in his own soul.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks’s father was dead when I met Brooks, but echoes of him were with us all the time. I think that Brooks is very much like his father, though he always compared him to Louis XVI—that is, a man in a very prominent position who wanted his privacy and would rather play in the toolshed.

There was opposition there. Perhaps Brooks’s father didn’t respect Brooks enough—I don’t know. They were two men chasing each other. But isn’t it the classic story of the great captain of industry like Brooks’s grandfather who founds a big thing and leaves so much money it dilapidates the lives of those who inherit it?

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, March 24, 1908

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, July 16, 1908

Céline Roll Karraker

My mother, Nina Baekeland Roll, who died several years ago, never liked either of her parents—she was a very rebellious sort of child, I guess. I think her brother got all the attention. You know, in a European family the son is the preferred one.

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, January 28, 1910

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, January 30, 1910

Brooks Baekeland

When I was in my teens, LHB would invite me to lunch in New York at the Century or the University Club. Impressed by my dapper father on the importance of correct dress for every occasion, I would appear at these amazing convocations in a proper dark suit—all shined and polished and tongue-tied—and LHB, with a Packard specially built for him so he could wear a top hat in it and get in and out almost without bending, would arrive in his one and only suit for town and the inevitable sneakers. He would poke fun at my sartorial splendor and lecture me on the delusion of “appearances.” I was not old enough to guess, then, at the deep and divisive philosophical chasm that separated him—the exuberant, joyful immigrant and self-made man—from the Grand Duke, as we children called our father.

LHB talked to everyone and anyone who would listen or could teach, and had no prejudices. No—he hated fools. His son, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer’s typical second-generation American, became an elegant and a bigot, and was—I mean it seriously—ashamed of his famous father. He was ashamed of LHB’s barefooted beachcombing, ashamed of the
Ion,
because it was not a proper yacht but a sort of Bahama-going houseboat with a couple of “niggers” aboard—a disorderly laboratory that could put up a sail of sorts and where LHB could cook his “disgusting” meals, jump in the “ding” and go hobbling about bare-assed over the beaches of the thousands of unnamed keys, with a small magnifying glass, a notebook, a penknife, and a lemon—no doubt talking to himself. Who in hell else
was
there to talk to? I ask the same question myself!

You see, there was a tension in this family that extended over three generations, and that was reenacted between Barbara and Tony and myself—a tension between two fundamentally different views of life. I do not care, for instance, what other people think of me, and that was a source of the bitterest philosophical difference between myself and Barbara Baekeland, who lived and fought for what the French call
la parade
—appearances, what other people think, etc.

My father also cared too much about what others thought of him. He had not inherited
his
papa’s burning-glass mind. That was not his fault. But he had no sense of humor, and without that a person is better off dead. Oh, he liked jokes and retold them. That is not a sense of humor.

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, December 11
,
1909