Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (27 page)
Tony was stealing Thaddeus’s food! To eat—in this house brimful of food. You see, he wanted to be a baby. He’d never
been
a baby. He wanted to be mothered. Or maybe he wanted to identify with
our
baby, because he’d never had any proper parenting from his own parents, and maybe at that point we were giving him more parenting than they were.
Tony was a complete victim of the whole thing. But a victim of the most curious kind—under this deceitful veneer of affection and praise, this unbelievable and constant praise that went on—“This child is so gifted…. Isn’t he beautiful!…And his painting and his poetry, and his schoolwork!” I mean, every afternoon this child was praised, praised, praised, but deep down he was completely left out of everything.
Ethel de Croisset came to stay with us for a few days toward the very end of our time in Ansedonia, and she saw through all this immediately—and she knows what parenting is. She’s been a remarkable parent herself, and
her
parents were marvelous—I mean, Elsie Woodward was an extraordinary mother, and the father was extraordinary, and Ethel was absolutely appalled by the way the Baekelands were bringing up Tony.
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to James Jones, February 17, 1966
New York
Dear Jim:
I have taken the liberty of writing Ethel, with you as substitute, into my will as the guardian of Tony’s person and U.S. Trust Company as the guardian of his property in case both Barbara and I should grow wings (or perhaps a forked tail, in my case) before Tony is 21.
Duties are just about nil except for tender hand holding and the offering of dry Kleenex, but the law demands a “guardian of the person” for all minors. Tony loves you both and just about no one else that I can think of in the fuddy-duddy generation, so that is why.
Affectionately—Love to Gloria,
Brooks
P.S. St. Anton for about ten days, then back in Paris.
ASPIRING AND PERSEVERING
OFTEN THE BROADMOOR STAFF
would “look the other way,” in the words of one nurse, when it came to sex. “As long as it didn’t get out of hand. Even by day there were areas of the wards that weren’t very closely supervised. You only had five nurses on duty for every forty or fifty patients, so you couldn’t possibly patrol all the areas all the time.”
“I have the distinct impression that Tony did have relationships at Broadmoor,” says Michael Alexander. “He was quite happy, so they must have let him have some sort of sex.”
James Reeve adds, “Tony only talked to me about things he thought I would approve of, though I often wondered what the story really was. I did try once to draw him out on the subject of sex at Broadmoor, but he was very reticent.”
“There is a great deal of homosexuality in the hospital,” reports David Cohen in his 1981 book
Broadmoor.
“On the whole, what sexual activity exists seems both rather cheerless and loveless.” One patient describes Broadmoor in the book as a “homosexual brothel.” Another explains, “If you haven’t got any women available, there does come a point when you just burst.” Yet another offered that he felt rather tender toward another patient simply because “I
am
quite tender.”
“The authorities sometimes break up couples after having ‘tolerated’ the situation for some time,” Cohen elaborates. “Fear that they may be split up arbitrarily makes relationships even more brittle.”
Broadmoor authorities are at pains to point out that homosexuality is not at all uncommon in sexually segregated institutions, be they mental hospitals, prisons, or schools.
Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971
From ages 11 to 14, he spent the school year in Paris and then summers in Italy. At age 14 he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, but was forced to leave because of his grades.
James M. Hubball
I was Tony’s headmaster at Buckley School, a long time ago. I have a vague recollection that when Tony went to Exeter, there was an episode in which he was found hiding in the laundry chute—for what reason I never knew. The last I heard of him was that he was living in London.
Sara Duffy Chermayeff
When he got thrown out of Exeter, the evening he came home, Barbara called me and we had a long talk. I don’t know what exactly he was kicked out for. She always said, you know, “They don’t understand him—he’s an artist.”
Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971
At age 15, he ran away from another private school.
From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, February 7, 1910
George is today fifteen years old. At his age I was I believe in the same mental condition as he is with the difference that he has had the benefit of better intellectual environment. I had to do everything by myself and find my own way. The only help I had was the encouragement of my beloved mother.
Suzanne Taylor
Tony was at Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts, with my son David, who told my husband and me, knowing we knew the Baekelands, that Tony had run away from school to go to the Caribbean and write poetry. And David said, “Guess what he was taking with him!” It went all around the school, you see. I mean, he was going off to write poetry, right? And he was taking a hatchet and a flashlight and I think a rope hammock! He never did get there—he was caught at the airport.
Katharine Gardner Coleman
I was having lunch with Brooks and Barbara one day when Tony came in from school with his little traveling case. I mean, it wasn’t vacation time. He had walked away from, you know,
another
school. And I said to Barbara and Brooks, “Here’s some free advice for you.” I had boys then that were older than Tony, you see. I said, “You just
cannot
let him come home. Don’t even let him
think
that he can come home. He’s got to get through, and then at the end of the school year, if the school hasn’t been successful, find him another one.”
He was just sent to his room and told they’d talk about it later.
Brooks Baekeland
I was very disappointed to discover that the flame of curiosity and intellectual determination—capacity for, belief in, work—that might, for instance, have made a scientist out of Tony was lacking. Whether that was genetic or due to the values he was being brought up in I cannot say. In any case, I had already educated him to the point where he was ahead—in some directions—of his science teachers in the various prep schools he went to.
Two things had become clear—to me, not to his mother—by that time: one, that he was bright enough—and even talented enough—to embark on any career one could think of, and two, that he was bone-lazy. There is a myth that very bright people can accomplish a complete academic program without ever opening a book, to coin a phrase. That is false. In fact, the very, very bright open more books than anyone else. Usually. Therefore my son soon puzzled me, for I had spent every summer, wherever we happened to be at the time, tutoring him mornings to bring him back to the surface, as it were, for his entry in school the next fall. He would always start at the top of his class and end up at the bottom, with strong suggestions from the schools that he be taken out.
As he was entering puberty he also began to be a disciplinary problem in his schools—“subversive,” “a bad influence,” etc. But I went on tutoring him right up to the time that he and his mother announced that he wanted to go to Oxford. He had never been able to finish high school and had even been asked to leave a school with the academic standards of Avon Old Farms.
From the Catalog, Avon Old Farms School, Avon, Connecticut
Aspirando et perseverando
—aspiring and persevering: the School motto is more than a figure of speech to members of the Avon community. The motto is a reminder of the way of life that governs the hearts and minds of the people who make up the School. Boys discover at Avon that aspirations
can
become realities and that perseverance is vital to the attainment of both individual and community goals.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
Avon Old Farms
Avon, Connecticut
Dear Gloria and Jim,
Now that I’m more or less installed in school I can write. Getting back here was a bit unpleasant, but everything feels very normal after a few days. I’m going to see Rosie Styron pretty soon about those poems. This school is a real waste, so what I might do is leave at Christmas and come to London, go to a Cramming school to see if I get these A-level exams and see if I can get into Oxford next year.
Anyway I’ll probably “aspire and persevere” at least until then.
Love,
Tony
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Christopher Barker, Undated
Avon Old Farms
Avon, Connecticut
Dear Christopher,
This school is the most ridiculous farce. I really don’t see why I’m coming here at all. Even the teachers are minus-I.Q. people. But I suppose I must stick it out. I’ve been in the infirmary with bronchitis, and got so bored I finally just left. This horrible nurse kept bringing me trays of teas and jellies instead of my dinner.
Read a poem called “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” by Ernest Dowson.
Yours,
Tony
Avon Old Farms School Memorandum to Antony Baekeland, October 5, 1963
On two occasions you have
escaped
from the Infirmary via the window. If you should feel called upon to do this again, you should keep right on going because we are not going to condone such behavior in the future.
Letter from Antony Baekeland to Christopher Barker, Undated
Avon Old Farms Avon,
Connecticut
Dear Christopher,
I’m sitting in my room after a shower listening to some Bach harpsichord music, one of my main pleasures here. I managed to get out of swimming practice with a half-feigned sore throat. School life on the whole is very boring, in spite of the certain thrill of being in the sixth form. As we did last year, several of us sneak out late at night to do evil. On weekends, or when we can, we buy masses of food and liquor. After the last bed-check, at 12:00, we all somehow manage to get out of our dorms (I just jump out my window), past the night watchman, and meet at the chapel. From there the six of us proceed into the depths of the forest (the country is very heavily wooded) to the little cabin we built last year, cook our steaks and drink our Irish coffee and sing. Very nice too—heh heh. We manage to squeeze some excitement into a regimented existence.
I actually have a bat who lives in my room—in the rear of my closet, to be exact. He suddenly moved in last Wednesday. Every morning and evening I leave the closet door open for an hour so he can get in and out. And I never close my window, so he can get in and out of that easily enough. I found out to my horror that over the summer something had happened to my blue suit. Rats or moths or something ate enormous holes in it. I’ve been wearing a dinner jacket to dinner and no one has said a word yet. Very odd.
I suppose you’re surrounded at Princeton by a lot of ostentatiously rich crewcut dummies.
They
, my dear Christopher,
are
the U.S.A. They are legion. Like the stars. Probably very nice.
Pretty depressing though, I suppose.
I sometimes start to grope for my identity when I’m lonely. One really hasn’t lost it at all, it just steps into the shadows…
Yours,
Tony
Peter Gable
After Buckley, when I was ten or eleven I was shipped off to Choate, where I was a very bad boy. I was sent down from school. I don’t remember what my crime was—it was probably being a smart-ass. Then I was sent to some hideous school in Greenwich which has long since gone out of existence, and I stayed
there
for a while—Tony meanwhile was at Exeter or Brooks—and then I fetched up at a somewhat backwater boarding school outside of Hartford. Avon Old Farms School. The beach upon which I was washed up.
And it was quite amazing—the first day of school, who should I see but Tony! And we fell on each other’s necks—how have you been and so forth and so on. Now when we were little boys at Buckley, Tony and I had the sort of telepathy that children can have with each other—I mean where whole paragraphs can be left out because you know each other so well, you have a continuity of experience where even the slightest little trigger puts you both on the same track. Anyway, there had been this hiatus of three or four years, and now, the long and the short of it is, the magic was gone.
I
was a little different,
he
was different.
Tony was most decidedly no longer “just another kid.” All his brilliance and genius, dimly perceived by me as a child, was becoming more difficult for
him,
I think. I remember him in English composition class at Avon—his vocabulary was quite an astonishment even to his teachers. At Avon if you were bright you stood out, and Tony had a brilliance above and beyond anyone else in the school. Still, I don’t think he excelled in his studies.
Brooks Baekeland
When
I
went there, Avon Old Farms was an interesting school. But it was not an educational institution in the usual sense. What had appealed to my father when he sent me there was that the students milked cows, cut trees, worked in the fish hatchery, plowed, raked leaves, bound books, and worked in a carpentry shop. The fact that some of the boys came with a string of polo ponies or an airplane was not what interested him. Not all of the boys went on to college—I suspect most did not, and of those that did, damned few went to Princeton, Harvard, and Yale.
I had an altogether easy ride at Avon—I spent a quarter of my time fencing, an eighth on team sports, and much of the rest on ornithology. And I was admitted to Harvard, where I might have chosen to study Chinese bronzes or cultural anthropology or Russian history or French literature or comparative religion or philology or the art of glassblowing in the Renaissance or architecture from Egypt to the Bauhaus, but since I was a Baekeland, none of these “frivolities” were open to me. What I did, and my family never knew, was audit them all—in those days, for I think eleven dollars you could audit any course you wanted, which meant sit in on the lectures, read the books, make a fuss in class, and even take the exams, but you could not get the credits. At the same time I was taking a heavy course load leading toward a biochemistry major. Why biochemistry? God knows, but I knew it would please my family—or rather, not shock them. I was expected to become a scientist, to do something satisfactory for the family—as for myself, I was as unmotivated as a loose-skinned pup, nine-tenths curiosity.