Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (15 page)

When my father died and his will was read, I immediately understood what it meant and what had happened. He had disinherited me by an indirect means. He had left to his wife
outright
—rather than in a marital trust that would have given her the income for life, with the corpus going to later generations—most of the money he himself had made on the sale of the Bakelite Corporation to Union Carbide. This, despite how at the dinner table he always used to inveigh against women, saying—according to his lifelong doctrine of misogyny—“Don’t ever leave money outright to a woman but always in trust.” So now any future inheritance from my father was left hanging. It is thanks to the generosity of my grandparents only that I am self-supporting.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks said that the antagonism between his father and mother had been so great that that was why his father had cut off the children. He also said that his father had sold out the business without even consulting his children.

From the Last Will and Testament of George Baekeland, October 31, 1958

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

It was Henry Gassaway Davis, a friend of George Baekeland’s who had been disinherited by his own father and was very bitter about it, who persuaded George to disinherit
his
kids, saying, “I didn’t inherit any money and look at me—I’m very successful.” So George’s second wife now has all those millions, and nobody knows who she’s going to leave them to when she dies. Of course, Leo Baekeland had left his grandchildren money.

Brooks Baekeland

Henry Gassaway Davis was a powerful and charming figure who had always dominated us all. It was he who engineered the disastrous sale of the Bakelite Corporation to Union Carbide, just before the mightiest rise in the history of the chemical industry, which topped in 1946. During this time Bakelite—if my father wanted out, which he did, and which was the whole point—ought to have gone public under a new president, after which the family shares could have been sold and reinvested in something like the young IBM. But all that makes no difference now. What happened was that he made the worst choice possible. Still, fortunately for us, there was very strong surviving moral pressure from what my father’s parents had wanted for their family, and this caused him, though in the end he left half of his personal estate outright to his second wife, to leave the other half to his children and grandchildren, if mainly in trusts.

It was fate that brought together those two child-haters, my father and Henry Gassaway Davis, the much-and so-many-times-disastrously married Henry Davis—including to two Vanderbilt girls. The drunken and violent father who would disown him used to hold a cocked and loaded revolver to Henry’s head when Henry was a boy, and as so often happens—perversely—the mistreated child, instead of having learned compassion, learns or inherits the same species of brutality.

TONY BAEKELAND’S DAY
at Broadmoor began with a nurse shouting to him—and his dormitory mates—to wake up. From the moment he got out of bed, his every move was supervised—going to the bathroom, brushing his teeth, washing, shaving. He could enjoy the luxury of a bath or shower only one day a week.

“Tony remained in a bad way for quite awhile,” Dr. Maguire says, “but eventually, with medication and the realization that he was a member of society and part of a therapeutic community, he was able to receive visitors other than his immediate family.”

Under the Mental Health Act of 1959, tribunals were created to give patients certain safeguards. Confined to Broadmoor under a Section 65 restriction order, Tony Baekeland was entitled to one review every two years. On August 22, 1974, he was granted a tribunal to review his sentence. It was determined that Tony Baekeland, after little more than a year at Broadmoor, was not ready to leave. Within several months, however, he was moved to Gloucester House, where patients are accorded a few more privileges; cutlery, for instance, is not counted after every meal. But after a short time at Gloucester, it became clear that he still needed the more protective atmosphere of Cornwall House.

All the houses had small courtyards, called “airing courts,” where the patients could walk, but the airing court at Cornwall was distinctive—a patient, using his own money, had planted it with flowers and bushes. Now Tony Baekeland would once again be walking there.

“In the airing court,” a patient had written, “you walk round and round, lost in your own private thoughts. There are various games you can play to make it less boring, like counting the stones on the bricks on the wall or counting the number of steps it takes you to get round the court. But it’s all exactly the same, day after day.”

Tony Van Roon

I was a nurse at Broadmoor for some of the time that Tony Baekeland was a patient there. I left in September 1979 to take up a post in Coventry.

I think Tony was in Cornwall House when I worked there. Of course, he might have been in Dorset, the long-stay ward—I also worked there. It was one of the first wards to be upgraded. Well, they stuck some paint on the walls, but they called it modernizing. I know he wasn’t in Norfolk—maximum security—which is where I worked the most. No, the contact I had with him was in Cornwall.

What’s it like in Cornwall? Well, you go in through the front door, and immediately to your left is a stone staircase going up to the second and third floors. If you go past the stairs and go right, you’re in Ward One, which is just one very very long gallery.

The first door on the right is the charge nurse’s office, and then all the way down on the right are the cells. They were the usual sort of prison-type cells. The only difference was there was only one in a cell. On the left there are windows looking over the terraces, and occasional sort of bathroom areas and toilets, and then, farther down, a huge sort of communal lounge. The second floor is just a duplicate of the first floor.

On the right-hand side of the lounge was a snooker table and a card table, and on the left-hand side was a curtained-off area with rows and rows of chairs, easy-type chairs, with a television sort of on a platform in the front. And these were very drab and very dark areas.

The third floor, Cornwall Three, was what we called a dead ward—it was only used at night, for sleeping.

In the morning the breakfast would be cereals, bread, eggs, and on Sundays bacon and eggs or baked beans. A very very basic breakfast. And then at lunchtime there would be sort of a standard meat and two vegs. No soup to start with, just a main course. Then in the evenings it would be sort of a hot-type meal. In Cornwall they could order one night a week from a local fish-and-chips shop, and it was brought in by hospital transport. It was offered to every house one night a week on a rotation.

One of the things I found about Tony was he was always on his own. He never really had that much to do with nursing staff. You have to understand that the nursing staff at Broadmoor is less therapeutic and more custodial in role. That’s not how it’s supposed to be but it’s how it is. That’s one of the reasons I used to grit my teeth, you know—because we weren’t known as nurses, the patients either called us “sir” or “screw.” So it was difficult for a lot of them, particularly those who were isolated anyway, to sort of break through the lines and actually have a lot to do with nursing staff.

I had quite a few chats with Tony but they very rarely got into too much depth because he suddenly would realize that I was a part of the system and he was frightened by the system. I mean,
I
was frightened by the system, and I worked there! In fact, I was petrified of it. I mean, Broadmoor is a hospital but it’s not that healthy a place.

Another thing I always felt was that there was a lot of remorse in Tony about what had happened, and because of that he had to be constantly coping and coming to terms with the situation he was in. I think that he sort of thought, “Well, here I am now and I’m here because I did this,” but he could never understand why he did it—which is the key thing with a lot of people who I met there, they couldn’t understand
why.
Quite often I would see Tony just sitting there and appearing to be miles away.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Rosemary Rodd Baldwin, December 21, 1974

Gloria Jones

Where
did
Barbara come from? Boston? And didn’t she go to Hollywood or something? She married very young, I think.

Nina Daly

Barbara met Brooks and they started going out right away and it didn’t take too long before they got married. Brooks is the most charming person. I used to feel badly that he didn’t have some kind of important job. The grandfather did. And the grandmother was a brilliant woman, too—Bonbon. It’s a brilliant, brilliant family. Brooks’s father was a businessman. Perhaps Brooks was spoiled a bit. He might have been, you know.

Brooks Baekeland

The fact is, I took a little girl from nowhere but who was smart and ambitious and had flair, and put her on the public scene. I educated her, taught her to draw and paint, and I supported her social ambitions. Socially, she was a most gifted woman—and exemplified all the things my grandfather most despised. I, personally, was a social zero. I was completely devoid of social ambition, it meant nothing to me. But Barbara’s happiness, for many years, did, so I played along, and in the end, long before the end, became disgusted with myself for having wasted my own gifts that way. Of course, I also loved her, and I have always felt protective of the women in my life. I still support her mother.

Nina Daly

Nina Lillian Fraser was my name. But my mother never called me Nina, she called me Lillian. I like Nina a little bit better. It’s shorter.

We were five children—three girls and two boys. The oldest was a boy and then I was next. And then there was another boy, and then my sister Alice was next, and then in five years my mother had Genevieve—I adored her, I was seven years older than her—Genevieve Agatha Fraser. Irving died in the war. And then Ralph eventually died. Alice and I are the only two living now. She looks quite a lot like me. She used to have red hair a little darker than mine.

My mother stayed home, you know—took care of the house. It was in the country, in West Roxbury, up near Dedham. We usually had a maid do the chores. And my father worked on the railroad, one of those big railroads. He was an accountant and something else there he did.

I had two grandmothers living, and one grandfather, and one great-grandfather. But I don’t remember my great-grandfather.

I certainly do remember my two grandmothers. Oh, I loved them both. There’s one I worshiped. I used to think she was a saint. On my mother’s side. Mary Margaret was her name. Guess how many children she had! Fourteen. I didn’t know many of them because they were spread out. Fourteen children, and everybody worshiped her. She was so handsome. We used to comb her hair, I remember. Then she would part it in the middle, and she would take it down and turn these two pieces in the front
in,
and then she’d get those in the back and put them in a little tug. Sometimes I used to ask her, Let me do it.

I met my husband Frank up in Boston. It was wintertime, and he had bought a Stutz Bearcat car at the end of the summer, and I was so furious I said, “You’re going to freeze to death,” so then he went out and got a raccoon coat to wear in the open car.

I was married at eighteen, and I was a mother at nineteen. I was awfully sick, though, after my son, Frank, was born. I had a terrible breakdown. It was a difficult birth, you know. I was only nineteen and he was a big baby. He weighed ten pounds. Barbara weighed ten and a half. I had her when I was twenty-eight.

She was so beautiful. She was seen by an artist somewhere. He got in touch with her and then he painted her. And she did quite a lot of that work. She was a model. She was in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar.

She was very bright. She took French lessons when she was little, I think. She was supposed to go to college but something happened and I forget now what it was. She should have gone. Too bad.

I went to visit Tony in Broadmoor so many times, and every time I went there I just loved it. It was up a high hill. I always took a taxi. But I walked it once. I’d take him bags of food. I’d buy a big bag of fruit—oranges and grapefruits, anything that was in season. And I’d sometimes take him steak. You could cook if you cleaned the kitchen up. And I’d always buy two, so he’d have one for a friend. He was so natural and so loving. He used to talk about almost anything. He used to talk about his dreams.

Marjorie Fraser Snow

Nini just doted on Tony. Of course, I don’t know the whole story, I don’t know why Tony did what he did, because I wasn’t close to Barbara those later years. I think of her often. What a tragedy.

Barbara was my cousin. My father, Irving Fraser, was Nini’s brother. He died when I was three months old. Barbara and I had a great many wonderful experiences in our growing-up years. She was almost, in many ways, a sister to me. She was a lovely child, she was really one of the most beautiful girls you could ever see. Her coloring was absolutely gorgeous, and of course that beautiful red hair. She was a very popular child and always had a lot of personality.

We lived in Westwood and they were in West Roxbury, in a lovely section, way up on a hill. They had a lovely large house, with a very large porch with columns or pillars going up.

Barbara had her own room, and lots of beautiful toys and dolls. I know she attended public schools at different times but it seems to me there was a time when she did go to a private school for something, I can’t remember what.

I remember she liked to wear mostly casual country-type clothes, as we all did then—tweeds and cashmere sweaters and skirts, and loafers or saddle shoes. It was sort of a uniform in those days.

We both loved horses and riding and dogs and dog shows. We spent a couple of summers together on the Cape, around Dennis. Later Barbara with her own family—Brooks and Tony—rented farther along the Cape, in North Truro. One of the houses they rented was up on Corn Hill overlooking Cape Cod Bay. It was a very nice house. Contemporary. All glass in the front.

Barbara loved to swim. She took chances in the ocean—she wasn’t afraid of anything. In fact, the two of us nearly drowned at one point off of Plymouth, playing in the surf when the Coast Guard had told everyone to stay off the beaches because of a storm at sea. And that didn’t bother us at all. We went out into the surf because of course the waves were so tremendous that it was wonderful, better than the usual-size waves. But the undertow was fantastic.

We started to go backwards two strokes for every one forward, and Barbara started to panic a bit, she started to scream, and I reached out and said, “Let’s take each other’s hands and pull together.” And we did and we gradually inched to where we could find a toe on the sand, then we collapsed. And of course the Coast Guard had been called, because Nini couldn’t see us in the ocean from the upper porch because the waves were so big, and of course our bathing caps had been ripped off. We received quite a talking to from the Coast Guard officer for disobeying the rules.

Ethel Woodward de Croisset

One day, in the early sixties I think, Barbara was staying with me in my house in Spain—years before all the terrible things happened—and the sea was quite violent. She was doing some
ski nautique
, some waterskiing, off the beach there.
I
would have been afraid—I’m rather a fearful person. She was in a bikini, and there was nothing to protect her at all, with all these boats everywhere—she could have had her leg cut off by one of the propellers. But Barbara had absolutely no sense of fear. She was a violent person, you know. She perhaps as a young woman
used
her violence to get what she wanted. It was her character.