Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (30 page)

Brooks Baekeland

My reaction to all this was not simple. I knew that professional writing required amongst other things a tremendous amount of discipline—guts?—and solitude. That Tony was articulate and “a born writer” in every sense but the above, I had long known, and that had already impressed a lot of our other friends. With Michael Alexander’s good influence, I was, if not hopeful, not entirely skeptical either.

Again, to make a long story short, it began to be evident that Tony was having a lovely time in London with his swishy friends but was not writing. Whatever else a writer does or does not do, he writes. He cannot help it, it’s compulsive. And Tony was not writing.

Thinking how discouraging it all was, I offered him a deal. In retrospect I do not think it was a wise thing, but I thought it might help him then. I told him I would buy whatever he wrote
by the word
and try to get it edited and published for him. Which he had asked me to do, so that the only new thing here was my—rather crass—financial inducement to try to make a writer write—that is, to make him stop leading his playboy life enough at least to finance it. A few hours a day would have done it.

It was really a rotten idea, and I tell you this because it now makes me laugh. Laugh?

And then Tony began to become
persona non grata
—just hints from Michael Alexander—and his sojourn at Michael’s ended. There were some damages to pay.

And that was the end of “writing,” which is what Tony’s mother, having abandoned all hope of his becoming a biologist, had hoped that he would do.

Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras

Barbara was always highly stimulated by literary people. She felt
those
were the social prizes.

Bowden Broadwater

Mary McCarthy when I was married to her always thought Barbara Baekeland frivolous and intellectually pretentious, and I must say I quite agreed.

Georges Bernier

The first time I ever met Barbara Baekeland, she said, “Tell me, Georges”—you can imagine how flabbergasted I was as a Frenchman to hear myself called by my first name by someone I hadn’t known for more than five minutes—“was Marcel Proust a homosexual?” I must say I had to laugh, because this was at a time when you couldn’t open up a literary supplement anywhere in the world without reading about Proust—Proust, Freud, and Joyce were the Big Three—and this question that was preying on Barbara Baekeland’s mind was of course almost the first thing anybody ever addressed in Proust.

Ben Sonnenberg had called to tell me there was this
wonderful
American couple that had just arrived in Paris that he very much wanted me to meet, whereupon, a few days later, I was invited for dinner at the Baekelands’, whereupon Barbara had immediately asked me this amazing question.

Then Brooks began carrying on about what a wonderful fertile intelligent mind his son had because he would get hold of flies and remove one wing and watch what the equilibrium was, and then he would remove the other wing and see how it worked at
that
point—and sometimes the legs would be broken, so that was another interesting thing. I found Brooks’s attitude extraordinarily odd. You know, that kind of sadistic behavior is quite common in children, but one seldom sees a father who thinks it is marvelous. And then after dinner the child himself was produced. I said to myself when I walked out of their place that night, I never want to see those people ever again.

I did in fact see
her
once after that. We were both the guests of Ethel de Croisset at a restaurant near Notre Dame, called Quasimodo—Marcel Duchamp was also there. You know, I admired Marcel and I was rather
agacé
that he was wasting his time with the likes of Barbara Baekeland.

She continued to invite me to their dinners, of course, but I had—and still have, for that matter—a great technique for stopping these things in the bud: sudden frost.

Brooks Baekeland

My technique was flight, although once, in Klosters, both of us naked in a small hotel bathroom, I held Barbara down with my foot—approximate region, her thorax—while she sank her strong, white teeth as deep as she could into my calf. I thought the situation so funny—though I dared not let her up—that I enraged her still more by laughing. I really loved her, you know. This “fight”—and there was one almost every night, sooner or later—came about because I refused to take her to the Chesa Grishuna that evening—again!—for dinner. I believe it took at least a half hour for the adrenaline to burn out of her veins. But before that she was a wild animal, a flaming, beautiful tigress. In thirty years I only hit her once—and that was not intended.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Brooks told me that sometimes in the middle of these horrendous battles of theirs he would say, “Barbara, I have to go to the loo,” and she would suddenly calm down and sit patiently while he went to the bathroom, and then resume screaming when he came out. But one time in Paris the fighting was so terrible he just left and went to a very elegant hotel. He got in bed and said, “Thank God, now I’ll have some peace,” and started reading, and then suddenly the armoire door flew open and out came Barbara—“Darling, I’m here!”—and they had a fantastic evening together. You see, he had told her when he stormed off which hotel he was going to, and she had somehow gotten there ahead of him and said to the desk, “I’m Madame Baekeland,” and they had let her up.

Peidi Gimbel Lumet

Barbara carried on fiercely and dangerously for years. There was that headlong pitch of hers, on the down. Once we were in Zermatt together. I was skiing with a Swiss guide I’d skied with in St. Anton for a few years, and Barbara used to sort of come around corners and join us or try to—she was sort of tailing us. And she was skiing too fast for how she skied—she had skied much less than I had—she was sort of going pell-mell. And she broke her leg really badly. I mean, it was very self-destructive.

But it wasn’t just the skiing. She was possessed. The house where we were all staying, Brooks and Barbara and Heather and Jack Cohane and I, was sort of a chalet on top of a rise of land, and the moon was very full. I had the feeling Barbara was just going to turn into a creature we’d never imagined. There were these transformations going on at night that you could see. A couple of times she packed her suitcases and piled them on the
schlittens
—you know, those wooden sleds—and she’d start to keen and wail, and I think maybe Brooks went out and got her and brought her back in.

From
A Walk in Winter Woods,
Brooks Baekeland, Unpublished

Heather Cohane

It was always the moon, either the full moon or the new moon. A lot of people are affected by it. My mother had an admirer who was the first person I ever knew who was affected by it. He’d be with us and then suddenly he would lose his temper and rush out, and sometimes he’d stay away for three days. We would pass him in the street and he wouldn’t even say good morning, how are you. And then when the moon had gone through its cycle or whatever, he’d come back as if nothing had happened. And when we shared the house with the Baekelands and Peidi Gimbel in Zermatt, with the Matterhorn looming up right next to us, I noticed that with Barbara, too, it was the moon. It came on very suddenly and she would go very round-the-bend.

Postcard from Brooks Baekeland to Nina Daly, January 12
,
1963

Brooks Baekeland

I took a series of questions with me to Zermatt that winter of 1963: How do you get an exploring team into a lofty, jungled, tropical mountain range that is unmapped? How do you supply it? How do you defend it? How do you get it out again?

From
National Geographic,
Vol. 126, No. 2, August 1964

Brooks Baekeland

What compelled me to undertake such a journey? The fact that no one had ever parachuted anywhere near such altitudes before. But there was another reason, too, in 1963. I had fallen deeply in love with a young English girl—she was fifteen years younger than I was, the daughter of a diplomat friend of mine in Paris—and this had occasioned Barbara’s first—of four—suicide attempts when I had asked for a permanent leave from her excitements and expenditures, from her way of life. Faced with becoming a murderer for the sake of freedom, I gave up my English girl and went into the desert, so to speak, for I knew now that Barbara would never give me my freedom. I knew that I was bound to that monster of green-eyed jealousy for life. So I took up exploring as a profession.

The fact is, at this time in my life I did not give a damn whether I lived or died. I still don’t, and that has always been a great strength. Many people who know me fear me for that reason. Even dogs are aware of it and treat me with circumspection. But I feel no arrogance in this thing—it is a proof, to me, of failure. That, you will see, is what allowed two people as basically different as Peter Gimbel and me to become partners for a while.

It was a funny partnership—which he never understood. I mean, spiritually I was very old, he was very young. In the end he felt—and perhaps he was—betrayed. For some astigmatic reason of his own, he hero-worshiped me—
then.
Later, he discovered the hollowness of his error.

He was then, and may still be, caught up entirely in the balls-around-his-neck Hemingway ethic of grace under pressure. I have always believed that real bravery is of the intellect, not of the balls. But this Hemingway style was very much in fashion then. I openly derided it. Not that I am in the easy anti-Hemingway camp, either. Never was.

“Brooko,” said Peter, “we have got to go down there! We have got to see that country.” He was always a magnet for challenges. What intrigued him most was the danger of being killed by those wild Indians! As for myself, not being in the bravery game, I needed that excuse to escape Barbara for months at a time.

I was of course also intrigued by a very interesting four-hundred-year-old mystery: what had happened to Manco Inca, Atahu-alpa’s brother, and his two hundred thousand soldiers when they had fled down into the Alta Selva, the backside of the Andes, from the Spanish.

Up in my eyrie at Zermatt I decided that they must have settled somewhere at the southern end of the Cordillera Vilcabamba. They were pursued by the Spanish rabble but disappeared—and then a silence, a silence of over four hundred years. I liked that a lot.

In the prospectus that Gimbel and I wrote for the expedition—we were applying for funding principally to the National Geographic Society, whose owners, the Grosvenors, were old family friends, and to the New York Zoological Society, of which Gimbel was then a trustee—we carefully made no mention of lost Inca cities, etc. That would never have done—would never have gained us the money we needed. So we made it into a scientific expedition. And my argument for this—which sold our project—was that the island cordillera rose practically from sea-level altitude out of the Amazon plain to heights just short of snow and ice and therefore contained a whole series of climates and therefore flora and fauna from the tropical to the arctic, and that, because of the “island’s” separation from the main mass of the Andes rising to the West, a variety of unknown species of animals, plants, and insects could—over millions of years—have developed in isolation there. I proposed that we make the expedition for purposes of biological exploration. If I mentioned the disappearance of Manco Inca four centuries earlier in the general direction of this cordillera, it was strictly in passing.

Since we failed to land our biologists on top of the cordillera, the expedition was a formal failure in terms of its main objective. In every other way it was a success. Until such time as a freak of weather permitted the cordillera to be mapped by photogrammetry, our map was and would remain the only accurate one of the region. The reason it had gone unmapped for so long is that everyone who had ever entered and tried to traverse it had died—thirteen expeditions had left their records and their bones. It was a place of death. We were the first team to actually traverse the cordillera and lived to tell the tale.