Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (16 page)

Marjorie Fraser Snow

Barbara was hoping to go to Bennington. Her plans were sort of made in that direction. But then of course her father died and her plans kind of changed.

Barbara and Nini moved to New York. I remember having dinner with them at the old Touraine in Boston the night before they left.

A bit later, a famous illustrator by the name of McClelland Barclay saw her someplace and I think said something to the effect that she was one of the ten most beautiful girls in New York City that he had ever seen. And on that basis, I believe, she was offered a screen test or whatever they call it—not your usual-type screen test, better than that—and she and Nini went out to Hollywood together.

Brooks Baekeland

McClelland Barclay did a lot of
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Saturday Evening Post
covers, but it was his illustrations of stylish, strikingly beautiful women for the legendary General Motors advertising campaign “Body by Fisher” that made him really famous and that, by the way, propelled the phrase into the language. As I recall, he was also a judge in one of those Miss America pageants. What he did of Barbara was just a daub—you would never have recognized her. It hung for years in the entrance of “21.”

In Hollywood, she was given some small normal contract—the kind the studios get everyone to sign to hold them—while a screen test she made with Dana Andrews was being evaluated.

Marjorie Fraser Snow

Barbara did not care for Hollywood at all, and she and Nini came back to New York. They had their car shipped back by rail—they just wanted to get out of there!

I think they stayed for a short time at Delmonico’s when they got back, and then they lived for a time on Central Park South and then they had an apartment someplace on Park Avenue. I visited them there and we would drive up the Hudson to the Sleepy Hollow Country Club—I think that’s on the Rockefeller estate. It was a lovely place to ride, with a lovely indoor riding area.

Barbara Hale

When she met Brooks, she’d been having this big romance with John Jacob Astor. The fat one. I met him later and I said, “Oh,
you
knew Barbara Baekeland!” and he was furious. I don’t know why. I guess he just thought it was none of my goddam business, you know.

Phyllis Harriman Mason

Mrs. Daly almost got Barbara married off to John Jacob Astor. Barbara was supposed to get the famous emerald ring. I felt that Mrs. Daly was responsible for all Barbara’s flights of fancy. She had brought Barbara up to be a duchess.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Nini was trying to get Barbara into society—and into what she called “the mon.” My mother-in-law, Cornelia Hallowell, used to comment on now Nini would always refer to money as “the mon.” I mean, to Cornelia money is money, it’s not “the mon.” There is no pet name for it. The Baekelands put all their sort of dislike of Barbara’s background onto Nini. Well, she
was
very obvious. Barbara had a lot more polish.

Elizabeth Blow

I think there was a part of Nini that probably did want to exploit Barbara. Here she had this really extraordinarily beautiful and talented daughter. They were sort of like little adventuresses coming to the big city, because they came from—where
did
they come from?—no, not Boston proper at
all
—they came from West
Roxbury,
which is, you know, really the wrong side of…I mean, nobody comes from West Roxbury, Waltham, places like that. Nobody ever even talked about them. I mean, they didn’t
exist.
Even Newton was a little bit going too far out of the magic circle already, and Newton Centre was considered
very
déclassé—it certainly was in
my
day. So Nini and Barbara, these sort of lace-curtain-Irish type of people, weren’t in the picture at all.

I mean, I was born in Boston and entered into this kind of society from the time I was five years old when you started going to dancing school in the Somerset Hotel, the Somerset ballroom with the gilt chairs. In those days it was Mr. Foster’s Dancing Classes—the little girls were all dressed up—and you proceeded through that. Then you went to the subscription dances, and the last subscription dance was the most elegant and the most exclusive—it was called the Friday Evenings and there you had your first glass of champagne. And then you came out.

Katharine Gardner Coleman

Barbara never played up the Boston side of it at all. My father was Bostonian, as you may know—G. Peabody Gardner. Now, Brooks’s mother married an extremely nice man from Boston—her second husband was a terribly terribly nice man and a great great friend of my father’s. Daddy thought the
world
of Penn Hallowell.

Luba Harrington

Barbara came from very ordinary people. Now the Baekelands maybe weren’t so great, but it’s a better family. Barbara took over a good friend of mine, Domenico Gnoli—an artist, a marvelous artist—just because he was from a good family. From one of the best families in Italy, as a matter of fact. The
Count
Domenico Gnoli. So she latched on. And when he died—he was only thirty-four—liver cancer—she was running around at the church receiving people, because she felt they were important. I mean, she was acting like a close friend of the family, and she never even knew his mother, never knew his sister. That’s how she was—she was a latcher-on-er.

Do you happen to know the derivation of “snob”—s-n-o-b? I used to teach linguistics and crap like that at Yale. In Italy, in, I don’t know, maybe the thirteenth, maybe the twelfth century, a lot of nouveau-riche Italians tried to get their kids into the schools where the noble families sent their children by offering the schools a ton of money, so finally what the schools did was start a new category which the nobility called
sensa nobilita
—without nobility—because not only weren’t these nouveau-riche noble, they didn’t even have the instincts of nobility.

Barbara Curteis

Barbara adopted this irrepressible redheaded Irish persona to cover up whatever deficiencies she thought she had. She didn’t know things that everyone else knew or that she assumed everyone else knew and that in fact they probably did know, and she couldn’t entirely catch up with the head start that the people she wanted to know had on her. And this persona that she’d adopted eventually took over.

Brooks Baekeland

When Barbara left Hollywood and came back East, she did so expecting to be sued by the studio but not giving a damn. She was—joy to Mama!—now considering giving in to John Jacob Astor’s strenuous and stertorous courting. Have you ever seen a picture of him? He looked very like Louis XVI and was dubbed by
Time
the “Pear-Shaped Prince of the Idle Rich.” His father went down with the other gentlemen on the
Titanic,
singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

But after the screen test, the studio decided not to try to keep her. Miss Daly was not, they could see, of rich thespian ore. In fact, she would have made the worst actress in the world.

Peidi Gimbel Lumet

It was a terrific aging actress role that Barbara Baekeland eventually played. She couldn’t get over the fact that she’d been John Jacob Astor’s girlfriend for a minute. It was a theme, it was consistently there. It was her notion of herself and that’s what her behavior was based on.

Brooks Baekeland

I am not sure why Barbara changed her mind about John Jacob Astor.
I
may have been the innocent reason. In any case, he was still married at the time to Tucky French. He married various tarts, but Tucky was not one of them. Hers was a family as “distinguished” as his own. But it was at this time, according to Barbara, still—or again—a dewy young photographer’s model, living with her mother far above their means at the old Delmonico’s, that John Jacob Astor made her an offer of three million dollars—money in those days—if she would wait for him until he could get a divorce from Tucky French.

Now, I do not remember the exact order of events—whether Barbara turned down the bribe before or after she met me. I was a pilot trainee in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the time, and had been invited by my sister Dickie, who lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with her first husband, to come for the weekend—I had a leave—and meet a pretty girl who was a “poet.”

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Dickie and Barbara had probably met in Hollywood. Dickie, you see, was in the movies, too. She was in
Cover Girl
with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. They wanted her to stay on but she hated it, she hated it as much as Barbara did. Dickie was quite impressed with Barbara. I mean, they’d be bound to like each other, because they were both very verbal and bright and very beautiful. And later, as a matchmaker, she had Brooks and Barbara for the weekend, and there’s no question—that weekend was momentous.

Brooks Baekeland

I found a remarkably beautiful and staggeringly self-assured young woman whose pretentions to poetry puzzled me when I plumbed them. She thought it would be wonderful to be a poet, but she had no training in words, and I hurt her feelings by calling what she showed me “marmalade.”

To skip a banal story of sex and still embryonic violence that might interest the readers of a woman’s magazine, during a heated zigzag from Ridgefield to the Adirondacks to the lacy-fluffy abode of mother and daughter at Delmonico’s to, finally, Pinehurst, North Carolina, Miss Daly strongly intimated to me that she was pregnant. I took her across the border, to Bennetsville, South Carolina, and for two dollars—the court fee—and ten dollars—for a wedding band—I made her into Mrs. Brooks Baekeland and myself for the next thirty years into “Barbara’s husband.”

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

I
heard John Jacob Astor followed them all the way down to South Carolina, trying to prevent Barbara from marrying Brooks. But she was madly in love with Brooks,
and
she thought he had a lot of money—a lot more than he had, I imagine.

Brooks Baekeland

I soon realized that, whether Barbara was pregnant or not—and she was not—I had not married a soul mate but a powerful and ambitious antagonist. She was a far more brilliant and a far stronger personality than I ever was or could be.

Shortly before I met her, though I did not know it until long after, Barbara had been a patient of the famous psychoneurologist Foster Kennedy. Because of my disagreements with my father—essentially the strain that is set up in a young man of overly passionate nature between his desire for freedom at any cost and his desire not to bring dishonor on his name—I had been “introduced” to Foster Kennedy earlier myself. Besides my grandfather, he was the first intelligent man I had ever met—I mean known on an intimate basis, could talk to, could make myself understood to, could seek and take advice from. It was an almost rhapsodic experience. He asked me out to dinner to meet people like Jerome Kern, Robert Oppenheimer, Wystan Auden, and a galaxy of British diplomatic and military stars—his cousin was Chief of Staff of the British Army, Field Marshall Sir John Greer Dill.

Meanwhile my father was tremendously impressed and puzzled by the fact that the man who charged the highest psychiatric consulting fees in the world was charging him nothing for seeing me—and telling him nothing, either. It was Foster who said to me one day, “Brooks, there is something very big and important going on. You should be a part of it. Go up to Montreal. Get in the Air Force. I know the Air Marshal. I’ll ring him.” And that is how it happened. I left almost overnight.

I asked Barbara not to come to Canada while I was still in training, but she came anyway. I did not go to meet her. My then very close and dear friend the poet Howard Nemerov, one of nature’s gentlemen, met her instead and comforted her. I ignored her. I mistreated her. I did everything I could imagine that would put a girl off, but I had forgotten her persistence.

It gives me pleasure to think for a few minutes now about Barbara as she was in those first years, during my training and subsequent instructorship in Canada. She kept insisting on following me about on my postings, first as a trainee in #13 Elementary Flying Training School, St. Eugene, Ontario, then at Uplands Advanced Flying Training School at Ottawa, then at #1 Instructor’s Flying Training School at Trenton, Ontario, and then in a long series—Aylmer, Gananoque, Kingston, St. Hubert’s in Montreal—where I taught the death-defying youth of the British Commonwealth, plus a good bit of Texas, how to dogfight and kill with machine guns, rockets, bombs, and lousy jokes—we could have ended the war four years earlier with
those,
properly employed.

Barbara stayed in local rooming houses, even at one time above an undertaking parlor—the smell reminded me of Bakelite. I had a forty-eight-hour pass every two weeks. I was nuts about flying, about everything I was learning and doing, but I was not nuts about my wife.