Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (24 page)

Barbara was upstairs in a perfumed bath. Before I could even get my wits together, Garbo came out and apologized for being early, saying she was shy and did not want to meet anyone, she wanted only to spend a few minutes with me. So we had a drink and made some sort of conversation and she went, and I was left with the image of the finest
poitrine
under the gauziest shirt I had ever seen. She must have been close to fifty!

All those foolish, social years. My Barbara loved it all so—and she was so good at it.

Patricia Greene

The last I saw of Brooks was just before they moved abroad. I think I was walking the dog and saw him sitting in his car, and I got in and sat down, and he said he thought he’d like to live in Europe, it was a much nicer life.

Alastair Reid

In 1957 I was going to Europe on the
Liberté,
I was traveling Cabin or Tourist, whatever, and Brooks and Barbara were in First Class. They told me they were planning to stay in Europe for quite a while. I got to really know them—I mean, inevitably—on the high seas. They invited me up to their cabin for drinks a number of times, and dinner. And Barbara was always calling up and coming down to whatever class I was in, whereas Brooks, it seemed to me, was making the point that he was in First Class. It was then I began to dislike Brooks intensely.

I was going to Geneva to work on the libretto of an opera with a composer. Then I was going on to Spain, where by that time I was spending half the year, translating Suetonius with Robert Graves and living at his place in Mallorca. I worked with Graves a long time, until I had an almighty quarrel with him, this rather savage falling out. In 1961 I ran off with his girl, one of his “white goddesses,” and we stopped speaking abruptly. Margo—Margo Callas—she was called. Very beautiful. She eventually married Mike Nichols, and then divorced him—she was the wife before the present one.

Brooks and Barbara had taken a place in Antibes for the summer where they said they had spent some time a couple of years before, in a very grand house, and they invited me to stay for a couple of days.

And I did—I stayed with them for three days. A very nice house, just around the edge of the town, on the bay. There was a great thing made of drinks, I remember—you gathered on the terrace, and that was when you began to talk. And they always had a good dinner, too—they had a good cook and we ate well.

Tony was a little nipper then. A pleasant little boy, small enough to be enthusiastic. He and I played with rubber rings and rubber boats at the sea. I noticed that Brooks talked to him as if he were a grown-up, always—there was the impression that he didn’t want any baby stuff. I didn’t feel that there was too much connection between Brooks and Tony. Barbara, on the other hand, was affectionate with him, and one felt relieved that there
was
a connection between her and Tony.

We all used to go down to Eden Roc to swim, and one morning as we were sitting around the hotel pool overlooking the sea, and taking the sun, Brooks told me an extraordinary story about when he was a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in World War Two. It was the very last days of the war, and he was flying over Germany at about four hundred miles per hour—and suddenly, he said, he just saw a green slope ahead of him, and that was the last thing he remembered.

Brooks Baekeland

I got lost when very close to my target and doing about three hundred and fifty miles per hour as I climbed up a long hill. I crashed, in Schweinfurt, near Regensburg, and was reported dead, because I had no memory—couldn’t even identify myself—and because 13th Tactical Air Command pilots had already photographed the top of the long hill where my P-47 exploded and distributed itself—and set fire to the mountain—for one and a half miles, and my young wingman had seen the whole thing, and there was no possibility that I might have survived. When I came to, undead, I found myself (who? I had no idea who I was, or where or why or how) supported by two old German farmers who carefully led me—bleeding and with a fractured skull, two broken shoulders, a smashed left cheekbone, and all my clothes blown off—down off that golden hill into the cold, dark valley. I was from there taken in a German jeep by four soldiers to a military hospital. And all I remembered was that up on the hill I saw fire and smoke, and the irrational thought came to my mind: Something has happened to my mother.

Alastair Reid

Brooks and I always had a good time in conversation—whenever you talked with him about something you could actually lose yourself in, as we did during those days I spent with them in Antibes. Of course, that whole idea of
wanting
to be in Antibes in the first place…They were like the Murphys then.

Brooks Baekeland

Our lives became more and more Europeanized, and I—by accident and by choice—was becoming something of a European myself. I had a strong French background from my French-Belgian grandmother, and I had quite a lot of experience already with France, before, during, and after the war. I also read French.

From 1954 on, Barbara and I began to live more and more in France—also in Austria, Italy, and Spain—and this underlined with a terrible clarity my father’s betrayal of his origins. Barbara had already learned—and climbed—all the rungs of power and
réclame
in New York—
tout pour la parade,
as a French cook of ours once said to me—and we were beginning to lead that life that people later compared to Gerald and Sara Murphy’s.

IF TONY BAEKELAND
had participated in afternoon occupational therapy, he would be returned to his ward at four-thirty—which would leave him with three hours to fill before supper. Although various sports such as football, soccer, tennis, and baseball were available to patients in the late afternoon, Tony preferred watching television or listening to his tapes. “I was always encouraging him to play sports,” says Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, “but he was reluctant. I told him that going out for one of the teams might contribute to an eventual diagnosis of his being cured, and he said he’d think about it.”

Sometimes patients mobilized themselves to the point where an entrepreneurial skill emerged. “Surprisingly, in an environment like Broadmoor, very imaginative things
can
go on,” a staff member comments. A group of patients, including Tony Baekeland, once got together and ingeniously brewed beer in the bathroom area—out of raw material smuggled into the hospital by visitors. “While it was fermenting,” one of the nurses recalls, “the patients—to maintain the temperature in the room—kept taking hot baths! Despite all the time and energy spent on this very elaborate enterprise, the patients lost out in the end—they were caught by a supervisor just as the beer was ready.”

Ironically, Tony Baekeland’s great-grandfather, a determined violator of Prohibition, also brewed his own beer. Found among Leo Hendrik Baekeland’s private papers was one titled “A Simple and Rapid Method for Making Beer.”

The result was a drink of about three-and-a-half to four percent alcohol, which fermented in anywhere from forty hours to five or six days, according to temperature. “Stronger beer,” Dr. Baekeland advised, “takes more time.” In Broadmoor there was all the time in the world.

Elizabeth Blow

I think it started going wrong when they sold their house in New York and moved to Europe and then started moving around in a sort of rootless way. They never bought anything, they never had a home in Europe, they just rented houses in various resorts. Mainly, though, they were based in Paris—that’s where they knew Gloria and Jim Jones and so forth.

Gloria Jones

Jim and I were having a drink at the Ritz bar, we’d just come back from the bank or something, and she just came over and said, “Hello, I know who
you
are.” Like that, you know.

Brooks Baekeland

Because I was the shy one, of course it
should
have been Barbara who first talked to them, but it was I who saw Jim and Gloria sitting in the “alley” that faces on the garden to one’s left as one walks through the Ritz lobby toward the rue Cambon and the bar. Jim was wearing a pair of Hollywood “shades,” and as they both looked up at Barbara and me, I said to him, “That’s a lousy disguise.” He said in his gravelly voice, “Do I know you?” I said, “No, but I know who you are. You wrote a masterpiece.” He grinned and invited us to have a drink.

Gloria Jones

We saw quite a lot of them, I guess, in those times, and they seemed all right—they had wonderful parties. They had this little house on rue Barbet de Jouy, 40-bis I think it was, and once a week, probably, we’d go to dinner there.

I remember she had a bed down in the living room, sort of a Louis Seize lounge where she slept—which I thought was funny, because Brooks had a bedroom upstairs, which I never saw. She sort of made a thing about that—that she slept in the living room. And they had two Spanish servants. They lived, you know, very well. She decorated beautifully, and she was a good housekeeper, too.

Tony was young, I think he was going to school in Paris—a day school. Sort of vaguely I remember him coming home with bird cages and birds. He was a nice little boy. Barbara gave him all the attention in the world as a child.

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria Jones, Undated

Gloria Jones

She was a loyal good friend, she was fun, she was appealing. And she really knew how to dress. I mean, she always had one
real
Chanel suit and then two or three made by this wonderful fat lady we used to go to.

Addie Herder

Barbara used to take me to the openings at Chanel, and we were given proper seats and deference because of her. She also knew a good dressmaker—a charming woman, maybe Rumanian, very talented—who ran up little numbers for us. I think they were fifteen dollars or something, for beautifully tailored summer frocks in linen. The dresses she made us were as elegant as you could get anywhere in Paris. She later became the designer for Hermès. I mean, how would I ever have got to have anything like that if it weren’t for Barbara? Barbara knew where to get everything.

I liked her, because she was funny, and wicked, and because she extended her friendship to
me
in a way. It wasn’t really friendship, but still, for her, it was something. What I mean is we were not socially equal in the sense that, although we had many of the same friends, I never entertained and I didn’t go to all the fashionable watering holes unless I was taken. When I came to Paris I was practically a waif. Barbara didn’t know me but I was under the aegis of Gloria and Jim Jones, so I just came along with the package for her. She was also a genuine admirer of my art, my collages, and said so, to other people.

Gloria Jones

Barbara was doing the
chasse
when I first met her—you know, hunting. She loved that. She had the costume and everything—for jumping over fences and killing a deer, a boar, I don’t know what the hell kind of animal it was. She had a streak of that craziness in her.

Brooks Baekeland

In the
chasse à courre
you do not jump over fences or anything else. Only in one place in France—in Pau—was there a proper hunt which “took fences”
à l’anglais.
At Chantilly, where Barbara rode, the boar was not hunted—only the stag.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

She was the boldest rider ever—she’d get on
any
horse and it would be rearing and bucking and Barbara was always just laughing. She had tremendous courage. You had to pay a thousand dollars a year to join the thing at Chantilly and have maybe three hunts, and you had to dress in red velvet with hats and feathers. And she was always in on the kill. Everything Barbara did she did well.

Brooks Baekeland

Barbara was not an official
membre de l’équipage
but an
invitée
and so had no right to wear the hunt costume, which was green and black, and didn’t. Le Baron de Thierry, the adjoint Master of the Hunt who was an elderly, gallant man who had the best chef in Paris, had quite a penchant for Barbara. He called her, she told me,
“ma chère petite chose.”
In France, of course, a proper gentleman shows gallantry to all women, and the women expect it.

Paule Lafeuille

Barbara Baekeland was a student of mine in Paris. She was strikingly keen on improving her already fluent French. She used to come to me punctually twice a week, and she studied her lessons better than any of my other students. The sessions we had together were for me time spent with a dear friend. We spoke—in French—of every interest we had in common: literature, theater, music, art, and life in general. Barbara was extremely fond of Paris and got along amazingly well with the French, whose way of life she appreciated and partly adopted.

She was a woman of delicate artistic taste. When she moved from the rue Barbet de Jouy, she chose unhesitatingly the most beautiful part of Paris to settle down in: the section of the Île Saint-Louis called “the prow of the boat,” an old and picturesque area teeming with memories of the past. She adorned her cozy seventeenth-century apartment there with genuine antique furniture, beautiful paintings, Persian rugs, and a selection of lovely pastel-colored materials.

Barbara had many glamorous French friends but she also led a very elegant life among the American circle in France. On my part, I knew quite a few of her intimate American friends: Virginia Chambers, Ethel de Croisset, Dorothea Biddle, Kitty Coleman.

Barbara’s most characteristic qualities were broad-mindedness, charm, grace, and kindness. My heart aches thinking of her, and that does not help.

I never tutored Tony. I remember her saying how much she adored him and admired his talent as a poet.

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

Karen Radkai

École Active Bilingue is the name of the school in Paris that I think he went to at one point. It’s on the rue Bourdonnais, near Champs de Mars. It’s where children from abroad often go.

Tony’s parents as such drifted in and out of Paris. I had dinner with them there once, and I couldn’t wait to get out of their house—you couldn’t have even a conversation with them they were so busy name-dropping.

Katharine Gardner Coleman

They gave very nice dinners. I was living in Paris—I was Kitty Herrick then, the Widow Herrick. And they were renting a house from this wonderful architect friend of mine, Burrall Hoffman, and his adorable wife, Dolly. Burrall built what’s often described as the finest house ever built in America, you know—Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay in Florida, for James Deering, the industrialist.

At the Baekelands’ I met a great many people
I
never would have seen, ever in my life, anywhere else—some quite fascinating Americans. I mean, that’s about the only time I met Ben Sonnenberg—wasn’t he the man that had the place on Gramercy Park? And she had the Art Buchwalds there once—I would have given my eyeteeth to have had the Buchwalds for dinner. Barbara had a way of absolutely attracting—well, I mean,
everybody,
men, women, and children.

As you can gather quite well, it was Barbara who was my friend. She was just like that huggable, warm, adorable little dog she had. It was a Peke, and I mean, the hair and the cuteness—everything.

My feelings were perfectly congenial and all that, in the beginning, with Brooks. He was a good enough host, a good enough guest, and at one stage I thought he was quite a good father. At
one
stage.

He looked just like that Siamese cat they had. Those slit eyes! Well, I’m allergic to cats—maybe that’s a part of it, I don’t know.

Paul Jenkins

The first time I saw Brooks, he was with Jim Jones at this fancy fencing place on I think the avenue Hoche. There he was, fencing away. He looked pretty good, too.

Brooks Baekeland

I fenced with the French team at the Cercle Hoche, the oldest dueling club in France, in both épée and fleuret. I had already studied saber with the Santelli brothers in New York and was being considered for Olympic training while a freshman at Harvard.

I took Jim Jones to the Cercle Hoche. I took him also to Klosters to ski, but never mind. He had told me that he had been a Golden Gloves champion. I found he couldn’t box his way out of a wet paper bag—in fact, he refused to put the gloves on with
me!
He had no speed or coordination or eye and so soon gave up fencing. He was hopeless on skis, too—hopeless in all the Hemingway things he so aspired to. So he
wrote
about them. I did not despise him for any of this—I was touched. I understood one of the springs of a novelist for the very first time: imaginative compensation.

The fact is, he wrote one impassioned, true, and very fine book,
From Here to Eternity.
He ruined his life as a writer—I told him so—by trying to live with the nobs, not only the Hollywood and other big-money sets, but the French aristos. He was horribly flawed by his snobbery and a whole display of social-defense complexes—falsities that marred his work: all the worst American values. Celebrity and the open signatures of wealth—all the things my grandfather laughed at—were uppermost in his life. His
generous
life, I hasten to add, for Jim was a walking heart.

He was a small-town boy from the Midwest. He would have made a perfect target for Sinclair Lewis. His “taste”—a concept so important to Barbara, who was just as big a snob but who had the woman’s keener tracking insights—was awful, embarrassing. Barbara and I were as far in taste from Jim and Gloria as Gerald and Sara Murphy were from Scott Fitzgerald. But this, too, is a kind of snobbery.