Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (25 page)

Incidentally, both Joneses had been completely taken in by Barbara’s act of being a Back Bay Brahmin—an act which I sometimes regarded tenderly and sometimes with contempt but which I still financed, to my ruin. The Joneses meanwhile thought of me as a parvenu—I was the shy and quiet one.

Jim was actually as shy as a girl. He was a very intelligent, kindly, feeling, sensitive man. A girl. A girl that snarled. The idiot world was “took in” by the snarl. I loved Jim. I did not love Gloria—she hadn’t his touching reasons. She was just a tough Mafiosa broad. Her greatest quality was that she loved Jim—don’t knock it.

Will Davis

I thought Brooks was pretentious. Barbara, too. They were trying to model themselves after Caresse and Harry Crosby but they just didn’t have the equipment. You know, the English have a phrase for people like Brooks and Barbara—“light, dangerous people.”

I liked Barbara all right—I loved her laugh—but I didn’t approve of her. I mean, I’m very conventional about women. I essentially like them to behave, and Barbara didn’t know how to behave. She was a madcap.

I started to flirt with Barbara the first time I ever met her. Brooks and I were sitting in the front of this cab and Barbara was sitting in the back between Jim and Gloria Jones—this was in Paris, in the spring of ’61—and I had my arm around the back of the front seat and I started to let it go up and down Barbara’s legs while having a conversation with Brooks. Jim and Gloria both thought this all extremely funny, and Barbara herself was nearly hysterical with laughter. What I was saying
was
reasonably funny, but of course Brooks didn’t understand why they were all breaking up like that.

Oh, she was very pretty, very pretty, and good legs and stuff like that, but the more I saw of her, the less I was drawn to her
that
way. What she had was, she had more energy than anyone I’ve ever known. You couldn’t tire her out—no matter how late you stayed up at night you could
not
exhaust her.

Duncan Longcope

I had been living in Paris for perhaps a year before I met her. But I had once seen a very good-looking woman with a Pekingese in the café opposite the Brasserie having a
tartine
in the morning. I thought she was English. We didn’t speak or anything. And then later a friend took me to meet the Baekelands, and, I mean, there she was—Barbara.

She had a real
élan vital.
She could carry an evening despite whatever mood Brooks was in. You never knew—usually he played along, he was a decent enough social type, he didn’t sulk and stuff—whatever his particular position may have been at that moment in regard to the rest of the female world.

They liked to walk quite a lot, I remember. I often saw them walking on the
quais,
and they were quite charming on those occasions. I walked with Brooks now and then myself, and it was possibly on one of those walks that he told me he had his mail sent to another address in Paris, I supposed so that he could have his privacy.

Eileen Finletter

Brooks was always very secretive, and more than a little somber, while she was gay and happy, but they looked good together—they looked rich and self-assured. I used to see them at the Joneses, who had kind of an open-house thing every Sunday night—mostly Americans, a lot of Hollywood people, a lot of writers. One night the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court appeared—Earl Warren. Sometimes Jim would read a chapter from his latest book, and Barbara, I remember, would sit there looking up at him as though he were God or something. She’d say, “Oh, how
beautiful!
” I mean, she’d gush, and it would drive me crazy.

Addie Herder

I remember Barbara at the Joneses reading a wonderful story to us that
she’d
written, about a trip where she and Brooks and Tony went walking somewhere in places that were not urban—some kind of exploratory hike—and how on this excursion there was a struggle between the parents for possession of the boy.

Brooks Baekeland

I found a great many stories in Barbara’s London apartment after her death—with her writing teacher’s comments on them. The only thing I saw that had not been written by
me
was her so-called novel, which was frankly pretty lamentable—and so designated by her instructor in his tactful way. Barbara, while she had the most essential thing for a writer—passion—could never have been a successful one. You have to brush your teeth, put away your clothes, make your bed, pay your rent…you must have some respect for order. Good writing is damned difficult. Spoiled girls don’t do it.

Eileen Finletter

One Sunday at the Joneses, Tony was standing next to Barbara behind the bar, which was high, like a church pulpit, and she had her arm negligently draped around his shoulder and she said to me, “Oh, what a lovely day it’s been! Tony and I spent the entire morning lying in bed reading the papers.” And since my own son was about the same age as Tony, I was shocked, because I thought, My God, if I did that to
him
—I mean, in front of a roomful of people. She wanted me to have the impression that it really
was
in bed. And Tony didn’t move, he just stood there smiling. And I thought, That’s odd.

Paul Jenkins

Barbara Baekeland had a glorious side to her nature, too, but one night at the Joneses’ I saw something from another point of view and my anger just surfaced from that, from suddenly sensing the son’s curious kind of despair. What was his name again? He was kind of like a wild James Dean.

Barbara and I had crossed swords before on a couple of occasions. She came to an opening of mine once and made some frivolous remark, and you know how tense you get on those occasions. I thought, you know, basically, that she was an undermining person. But she was a frequent guest at Gloria and Jim’s, which is where I held forth, and when she came in I always felt guarded to some extent after the flip kind of way she’d treated me and so I gave her a wide berth. But on this particular occasion I just let her have it, there was nothing in me that could
refrain
from letting her have it. I can’t quote myself, I can’t even paraphrase myself—it was just a concentrated salvo of what an insensitive and
dangerous
mother I thought she was.

I can only confide one other thing. Having been brought up in a particular way myself, I probably saw a mirrored reflection of my own mother in Barbara. And although I didn’t see much of Tony, the brief moments I did, it was very vivid to me that he was trapped in something that there was no…I would look at him and I’d think there but for the grace of God went I—although I don’t think I would have gone to the length Tony did. Of course,
my
mother was also out of reach.

I remember when my mother came to my first opening and we went to the Cedar Tavern afterward, Marisol came up and bent over and said, “And how iz zee dominating mozzer?” Then I got into a fight with somebody at the bar who had made a remark to my mother as we walked past, and he just happened to be Charlie Egan, the art dealer—he was the first to show Bill de Kooning and Franz Kline. Anyway, I slammed him into a cigarette machine. But usually at the Cedar Tavern
something
happened, somebody got a beer in their face or something like that—so it was a good climate in which to rid yourself of the frustrations and ignominious vicissitudes of being an artist.

Anyway, that night at Jim and Gloria’s I could see that Barbara was doing something bad to someone who had no drive, purpose, or focus. Her son was what I would call a psychological object for her. It was very strongly clear to me that this young man was being psychically exploited to the fullest extent. He was a human sacrifice, to Oedipal emotions. It’s what I would call incestuous betrayal. She might have never touched him and yet you could tell he was being smothered alive.

Sue Railey

I felt that he never had a chance—perhaps his father really didn’t bother enough about him and his mother bothered too much. I think that if Brooks had been a different type of father, maybe…But that’s a big maybe.

I met them when they first came to Paris, I can’t remember what year that was. I lived there for thirty-three years. My husband went over there to our embassy and he fell in love with France and when it was time to be sent somewhere else he said he’d never leave Paris and he never did till he died. We saw a lot of Brooks and Barbara. They had a very quick, easy contact with people. And a marvelous house, a little pavilion. It was like a doll’s house, in fact. They entertained a bright group. I would think that they would have felt that they could easily have been Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Brooks Baekeland

The Murphys—no, Barbara and I were not that way, although I understand why people who are romantic and like tradition would see us that way. Gerald and Sara Murphy had no energy. They entertained people who did. They sucked up others’ energies and taught them—the brutes—style, fifty years ago called “manners.” All their guests acknowledged the lessons. I may say that Madame Ethel de Croisset falls into the same class—a benefactress to brutes and to princes.

These are exquisite people. Barbara and I were never exquisite—cultivated, Proustian. We were a bit mad, especially my beloved Barbara.
Mad.
I was mostly smiling, not behind the arras but in a window seat, watching. But Barbara gave penny for penny.

The comparison between us and the Murphys comes from our being spoiled and loving the arts and being in France after a war. We never were that stable—purring, gracious, collected, surrounded by our domestics. We could have been. Barbara never understood that in order to pay for something you wanted tomorrow you might have to give up something today. Order. She never had understood order. We were
not
the Murphys. We were more like ruined royalty. We were two gulping bankrupts. I tease—or rather, I repeat what I used to tell her. Barbara could have given lessons in extravagance to Jackie Kennedy. She had spent all her insurance money from her father’s death, then all her mother’s, and now she was spending two-thirds of
my
money.

Did you know that she was a sometime shoplifter, too? So was Tony. A small thing, right? No. Truth, honesty, are things that are indivisible. A whole generation forgot that. But what was worse to me—almost—was the sheer bad taste. I could understand a starving mother stealing for her children, but these two playbodies stealing luxuries for the mere excitement of it? No.

Thilo von Watzdorf

They were traveling all over the spas of Europe, the places where one should be “seen,” when I first met them. They had this white Mercedes 190SL, with a cat in the back and Tony in the back, and they were traveling through Europe for months on end.

They rented this place in Ansedonia, where my mother and stepfather had bought an old farmhouse near where the Dutch royal family later bought
their
property—my stepfather, Prince Aschwin de Lippe, is Prince Bernhard’s brother. The Baekelands, like my mother, had got their house through an eccentric Englishwoman named Rosie Rodd, now Rosie Baldwin—there was a whole tribe of English there, friends of Rosie’s and friends of her three beautiful daughters. I must have been sixteen that summer, a couple of years older than Tony. He gave the impression of being the typical case of a son of well-to-do American parents who just played all year round. He seemed to me to be very shy, very much of a loner, and I sort of romanticized about that because I felt that there was something so crazy in the structure of his life. I could never even figure out where he went to school, or if he ever did.

Michael Alexander

They lugged him around from place to place, they were always sort of getting a house here and a house there. I met them in Ansedonia with my friend Rosie Rodd. Tony was just a sort of nature boy then. I can tell you that nobody thought he was a violent person.

I used to go and see him in Broadmoor, poor dear. It’s not an unpleasant place, I assure you. It’s not exactly a hellhole. Oh, maybe some of them do go a bit berserk from time to time, but you don’t get the impression of one big roaring madhouse. They all look like perfectly harmless people. However, that’s not the point, is it? Tony, between you and me, was perfectly happy there, all things considered.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Rosemary Rodd Baldwin, Undated