Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (21 page)

I certainly perceived Barbara Baekeland as being extraordinarily
something,
you know. I also remember what I perceived at the time to be a rather stormy relationship with her husband. Oh, they would fight, they would fight. I can remember hearing them. Tony and I both sort of listened, though we probably couldn’t make out the exact words that were being spoken. My mother and father were having a rather rocky time, too, so raised voices amongst adults in a household was not foreign to me, I didn’t think what I heard over at the Baekelands was that strange, you know. But the volume!

Tony’s father I remember as being austere and uninvolved—very much of a shadow figure. He once took Tony and his mother and me for a picnic one Saturday into some countryside. I remember so clearly being in the back of the car—he kept a Mercedes convertible at the time, I think—a sports car—the top was down, it was a beautiful fair-weather day, and Tony and I were bundled in the back. We buzzed up to where there was a beautiful glade with a pond and I guess we had our lunch and then Tony and I wandered off to play. But the interesting thing is that this and one other time are the only occasions I can remember—and Tony and I were close close friends for several years—when I was in the company of both his parents.

When summers would come, Tony would disappear to some foreign clime until fall, then we’d both be back in our short trousers and blazers, hiking off to school.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks and Barbara were two very powerful people who had their own fight together, and the little boy was sort of a puppet in between. He was trained by these parents to be brilliant. You know, you can teach a child to say the Latin word for “monkey” as easily as to say “monkey,” and he was trained that way. I’m completely against it.

Even when the son was in Broadmoor, Brooks was ordering him, “You have to show remorse!” The son would say, “Absolutely not!
You
have to.” There were letters, there were letters constantly. One would say, “
You
killed Mummy!” Which is a point of view. And the other one would say, “You didn’t hit your mother with a banana, you hit her with a knife!” So. The thing that Brooks could never understand is that his son never showed him that he felt the slightest remorse.
That,
Brooks couldn’t understand.

Brooks Baekeland

No matter how crazed he was, there was always a cool, lucid center that
knew
, and he certainly knew that I held him responsible for what he had done. I would not play the “diminished responsibility” game that all the others played and that he wanted
me
to play, too. I insisted on being his conscience.

Mishka Harnden

I’m sure Tony was born fairly unstable. On the other hand, all of what he went through when he was a kid certainly scrambled him for good. He was like that dog they had, you know—he was a slightly larger Pekingese. “Tony, do this! Tony, do that!” “Yes, Mother.” I mean, Tony Perkins in
Psycho
—you know? I mean, it gets to be that close.

Yvonne Thomas

The way she would praise him and show you everything he’d written or drawn! Both of them did. They wanted the boy to be a genius. That’s what struck me. And made me feel uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable with the boy because I felt
he
felt he had to be something.

You know, when you impose yourself on your children like that, it’s because you want them to be more than
you’ve
been. I think they were very ambitious and that nothing had happened with their ambition. She was always talking about what they were
going
to do. They wanted to do a coup of some sort, either in literature or in…I thought they were silly. She represented something sort of social—purely social—to me. I thought the way she entertained and her conversation and that crispy sort of voice were affectations—everything was something that didn’t interest me that much. Especially at that time. Now I don’t care, you know. But then I was very strict—everybody was—about exactly the style that you chose to be. I became an Abstract Expressionist painter and it changed my life—it changed a lot of my views, a lot of my values. I didn’t see too much of the Baekelands after that.

But oh, the son was shining as a little boy! But then when he turned into adolescence, one didn’t hear so much.

Willie Draper

Tony was the
most
brilliant and the
most
refined—and the most creative and the most sensitive—so he built the most walls the most quickly and his ability to communicate his feelings was lost the quickest. Tony right from the beginning was a marked man. I knew him at Buckley, I knew him the whole damn time. I mean, just the whole way through, you know, we were tight. But then I phased him out of my life because he was too negative for me, and my sister Checka filled the spot, she was going through more similar things.

Tony and I got stabbed trick-or-treating and stuff together—I can’t remember whether we actually got stabbed or whether we almost got stabbed. These roughnecks followed us back from the park and they cornered us, and we were ringing the bell at Tony’s house and nobody was coming down. Another time we had our bikes stolen in the park and some policeman took us around in the patrol car and everybody pointed at us like we were criminals.

He had—
both
of us had—very intense mothers, you know. I loved Barbara. I mean,
she
loved
me
, first of all, and part of the time Tony would be really jealous of me because—you know how it is—he’d get along really good with my mother and I’d get along really good with his mother.

Barbara was very loving—it’s just that she was so intense emotionally, and her moods would change, based on her relationship with her husband and her whole Celtic character. She was just, you know, a wild woman. Sometimes it was just…it was frightening.

But Tony was a great guy, a great guy—he burned with such a pure flame.

The biggest mystery in my life is
why
we choose what we choose, because we do choose—in the end we have total responsibility for what happens to us. And, you know, what ignorance is it, what is the mechanics of what makes someone like Tony who has all of this potential…? I think it’s emotional starvation, myself—I mean, it really has a lot to do with just very basic things.

Sara Duffy Chermayeff

I saw Tony every day, every single day when he was at Buckley. I’d gotten married when I was twenty, to Ivan Chermayeff, and we lived just a block away from the Baekelands. Barbara was very happy for me—I mean, she liked Ivan because he had, God knows, the scent of success on him. She gave me for my wedding present some very pale emerald earrings, which were very like the rings she used to wear—she told me they had been Brooks’s grandmother’s or something and that she had had them reset—two emeralds with two pearls. I mean, I was her darling baby-sitter, right? And, I suppose, to give her credit, which I
don’t
like to do, ’cause I’d like to
kill
her, I suppose she really thought I was a lovely girl. You know, because I adored her—anything that she said went with
me.

Ivan and I had this funny railroad flat on Seventieth and Lexington, right over the bus stop, and every day, from the time I was twenty until I was twenty-three, Tony came to me on the way home from Buckley, because Barbara might or might not be home. I mean, I lived just that far away from them—I was
right there
. At three o’clock in the afternoon he’d come in the back—he had a little strap with his books and a little hat. He had a key to my house. Ivan was at work and I’d be trying to write my novel and trying to clean up my house and trying to think my thoughts. And we’d go home to
his
house together.

It was everything I ever thought would be the perfect house. You came in and the dining room was there—I must have had a million meals in that dining room—then you went up the stairs and Barbara took you in to a sort of fawn-colored library, quite a small room—and she had those green rings dripping off her fingers and her feet hanging off the ottoman like nobody’s business. And back there was her bedroom, with lace all over the bed. She was often in bed, with all sorts of men sitting around—Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg…I never saw Brooks there. She had a salon. And I mean, all I thought was, That’s the way to live!

Tony’s room was on the top floor. It had a skylight and a little tiny sort of wire balcony. I sure remember his room in that penthouse on Seventy-fifth Street that they moved to later on! I mean, in
her
room up there, she had the leopard-skin bed, the seven thousand Chanel suits in her closet—right?—and then there was Tony’s room—the maid’s room! I don’t remember when it was, but I began to see that Tony was just breaking to pieces, that they were killing him. They were a perfect couple, for that—to destroy the boy.

Brooks Baekeland

When you came in at 136 East 71st Street, you were in a marbled foyer. You then went up some stairs to a living room with windows the width of the whole front of the house. At the back, on this same floor, looking over a garden, was the dining room. Tony’s room was on the third floor, not the top. In the penthouse at 130 East 75th Street, there was no maid’s room. Tony’s room had been made out of a small library. He—nor anybody else—was ever supposed to live there. He was supposed to be in boarding school when we used that place. But because he kept getting kicked out of his schools, we were forced to take him there. It was too small an apartment for three people, and was in fact ideal for one. Barbara had one Chanel suit at that time.

Sara Duffy Chermayeff

Oh, I can remember her movements when she would say—she would always say—“I’ve found this
marvelous
…”—right? That was a word she used all the time—“marvelous, marvelous.”

Last spring it was a beautiful day and I went down to the Strand Book Store—they have books on the street down in front, many many books—and I bought
The Letters of Madame de Sévigné
that I’ve always wanted. And I didn’t notice it for a long time but later I saw that the book was signed “Barbara D. Baekeland, 1942—New York.” It must have come from her books in the penthouse that were sold after she died. I mean, how bizarre!

And then I thought, God, in 1942 she was already collecting
The Letters of Madame de Sévigné!
Now I don’t even know if she ever read them.
I
have them now and
I
haven’t read them. She obviously already had something in mind. I mean, Madame de Sévigné had a salon.

Brooks Baekeland

I had bought a selection of the letters of Madame de Sévigné for Barbara in English—she could not read French at the time. She had never heard of Madame de Sévigné, the most celebrated correspondent of the seventeenth century. Madame de Sévigné did not have a salon, but she did have an only daughter living in the south of France whom she wrote to from Paris practically every day for twenty-five years, dispensing court and literary gossip and proffering the most tender expressions of maternal love. She also wrote to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld—the one who said that we all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others.

Sara Duffy Chermayeff

She—they—they were really false, the Baekelands. False. False to everything. When I first saw them as glamorous, I guess
I
wanted to be false, but when I began to understand how
Tony
felt, I saw them as—terrible, both of them.
Both
of them
terrible.
I mean, I feel they never attended to what was serious—neither one of them
ever.
They just took on this idea of what was
life
. What did they have in mind? Imagine, I mean, going to live on the Île Saint-Louis! Who did they think they were? The Murphys?

I mean, when I knew Tony I was only a few years older than him and I didn’t have any children of my own. But once I had children and I knew the responsibility that it takes to bring them up, I realized what total bullshitters the Baekelands were, with their
goddam
salons—well, it just isn’t fair. I mean, I resented my parents—everybody resents their parents in one way or another, I suppose, right?—but, boy, I survived, and when you get down to it, you have to hand that to your parents in a weird way—right? They didn’t
kill
you. And the Baekelands
killed him.

And he was a wonderful little boy. I was a very romantic young girl and I had read D. H. Lawrence’s
Rocking Horse Winner
and, you know, that’s what he was—he was like a little literary boy, he was like all the boys in English novels. And that’s what she had him be. He’d be brought in on a string and shown. She just didn’t leave him alone. Not for one second.

I went to Broadmoor to see Tony with Missie Harnden, who I knew from when Ivan and I had a house in Cadaqués for five years, and all he kept saying was, “I’m free, I’m free now, I’m free.” He said it to both of us—“I’m free now.”