Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (31 page)

Our expedition also pioneered a new method of penetrating and exploring otherwise inaccessible regions. Finally, and not least, it developed the Para-Commander parachute, a radical new design based on an invention that allowed high-altitude parachuting for the first time. This design became immediately the standard parachute for every army and air force in the world. It had been tested for the first time in early 1963 by Jacques Istel—Peter Gimbel standing by—on twenty-thousand-foot Popocatepetl in Mexico, and I remember well when I received the telegram announcing their success at my H.Q. in Zermatt. The jump was, I think, to eleven thousand feet, which was more than six thousand feet higher than had ever been achieved before.

That I did not find descendants of Manco Inca waiting up there to kill me—well…too bad?

Finally, after having been almost murdered by some Machiguenga Indians, we made friendly contact with them and brought three of them to civilization. As for the ruins of Manco Inca’s last—lost—city, we had guessed that it would be found on what I called Paddock’s Ridge, but we could not get to it and it was invisible from the air. And indeed that is where it
was
found—by Gene Savoy a couple of years later!

I may say, immodestly, that I was the only one of the four of us who made the famous walk out of the cordillera who was happy doing it. I was, due to my background, in my element. Gimbel hated it—his interests, his training, did not extend to botany and entomology, etc. He just wanted out, while I hoped we might take forever. Jack Joerns, one of the three pilots on the expedition, a Texan, became deeply depressed. Only Peter Lake, a Dartmouth student, maintained his natural gaiety. He was really wonderful—partly, I think, because he had absolute confidence in Peter Gimbel and me. I had guaranteed his parents that I would get him home alive, and I took that promise seriously. He knew it, he knew me, and he believed it. As for me, my strength came partly from the fact that my personal life was in a shambles. I was deeply unhappy over having had to renounce the English girl, my career was shattered, and my son, already far gone in drugs and sodomy at seventeen, was obviously beyond change. Do you understand?

Gimbel called me Ahab—and our friendship ended with that expedition. For one reason or another, one of my closest and most treasured friends, a man I greatly respected and for whom I had deep affection, was lost to me. I asked him why on several occasions but never had an answer. But expeditions are famous breakers of friendships—as are marriages. In our case the break was particularly painful, not only because we had been like Damon and Pythias but because we had never so much as had a disagreement—we had always seen all our problems in the same way and quickly reached our solutions. He had many wonderful gifts that I lacked, and I had those he lacked—and it worked! If we had fought or disagreed, my sorrow over what happened to our partnership would have been nothing to speak of.

Peter Gimbel

It was Brooks who got me involved—he really enticed me into the thing. My identical twin brother, David, had died of stomach cancer at the age of twenty-nine, at which point I started to examine my own life pretty hard and decided that Wall Street, where I had been working, was not the world I wanted to spend the rest of my life in. So now I was looking for something very offbeat to do. In July of 1956 when I was twenty-eight, I’d made a dive to the
Andrea Doria
and in a small way, the way it can happen in a bigger way now, become instantly noticeable—anyway, I was asked by Fairfield Osborn to join the board of trustees of the New York Zoological Society, and a little while later the president of the American Museum of Natural History asked me to join
their
board.

So when Brooks, whom I had met a couple of years earlier, came up with the idea for the Vilcabamba expedition, I was very excited. I was interested in the expedition much more from the standpoint of pure exploration and adventure than from the scholarly/intellectual/archaeological kind of thing that Brooks was interested in—he wanted to find where the last stand of the last Inca had been made and discover the last tomb and so forth and so on. I would have gone in there even if you had guaranteed me that there was no lost city—just because of the romance of dropping into a virtually cutoff island, because that’s what it was—a huge fifteen-thousand-foot-high island rising out of low jungle on all sides. Here was the
unknown,
you know.

Brooks was in Zermatt with Barbara, so we were planning it all by long distance, you might say—by voluminous correspondence. Barbara had broken her leg skiing, really smashed it—a terrible break. So Brooks had—I have to call it an excuse, because it was what he really wanted to do: remain in Zermatt skiing while I organized the whole thing myself. I mean, he was in Switzerland and the guy doing the dirty work was right here—okay?

I have to give him credit, though—he was a brilliant, brilliant land analyst. He could look at a cliff that was covered with jungle and say, “There’s a ledge running there that I think we can traverse.” And he’d be right on the money every fuckin’ time! I question whether we would have gotten out without him.

Scientifically my evaluation is the thing was a complete failure as an expedition—or at least a nonsuccess—but that in terms of a strange adventurous exploratory feat it was a success. And I would say that on the
Geographic
staff it was perceived both those ways. Clearly, the drama of our entry and the long trek out outweighed whatever the magazine’s disappointment scientifically was, because they ran it as a big cover story.

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

BY PARACHUTE INTO PERU’S LOST WORLD
by Brooks Baekeland
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR AND PETER R. GIMBEL

Cramped in the airplane with our bulky gear, Peter Gimbel and I looked out of the open door and then, questioningly, at each other.

A year of careful preparation had brought us to this moment of decision far above a remote spur of the Andes of southeastern Peru….

Brooks Baekeland

That was not
my
“colorful account” in the
Geographic.
My piece—“too subjective”—was totally emasculated and rewritten by a
Geographic
hack for that thirteen-year-old girl who lives in Sioux City, for whom every issue of that amazing magazine is always written. I did not give a damn. I had a wonderful summer, mostly paid for by National Geographic Society funds, and my own vanity was not involved.

Ethel Woodward de Croisset

Brooks asked me to have a look at his article for the
Geographic
before it was published. Now it had some very good things, wonderfully described things, in it, but it was badly punctuated, full of misspellings, so I did some editing, you know—just little, simple things to the English, which I did on a separate sheet of paper. Then I gave it to Barbara, whom I happened to be seeing, and said, “Give this to Brooks. I did a little editing.” I’d actually taken great pains with it. And Barbara was outraged. She said, “I wouldn’t
think
of showing this to him, and don’t
you
ever mention it! Just tell him it’s wonderful. He mustn’t be discouraged.” And she tore it up. I felt very bad, I hadn’t realized…. But it shows you how she protected him, always telling him he was a genius. All of this sort of thing was to
keep
him.

You know, Barbara had a love affair with a Spaniard and it was all so Brooks would realize that she was more attractive than he seemed to think her. She told me that she’d met him in New York, right when things were going very ruggedly. She had suddenly discovered—she hadn’t known—that Brooks was dragging around looking for other women. A little later she found out that he had an affair on with an English girl.

She didn’t like her Spanish friend at all—very soon she’d had enough of him. But she played the game that she was going to leave Brooks and run off with him. And she told me that Brooks begged her not to go, that he was very moved and all of this. I think the Spaniard was terrified that she
was
going to go off with him—he faded out of the picture when he heard
that
threat.

She may have slept with him
once.
You know, she was fundamentally an Irish Catholic, brought up very severely in Catholicism, but I think that then she got into this very sort of Café Society group of people, but of rather an intellectual sort, and she probably had some false Freudian ideas as well. But she was basically extremely correct.

Brooks Baekeland

Barbara told me that her Spanish lover, who was, ironically, a physicist, did not have enough money to support her properly. I offered her $12,000 a year, the equivalent of about $72,000 today, if she would leave me and marry him. It was to be my wedding present to them both. Barbara knew that I meant it, that I would not break my word. But he could not park a car properly and she did not like his feet, she told me. I gave up.

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated

From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished

Peter Gimbel

Once at Jack Cohane’s house Barbara put her arm around my neck and tried to wrestle me to the floor to force me to have it
her
way—she’d gotten angry at me because I didn’t agree with her about something.

Here she was, hanging on to me. I didn’t try to shake her or push her or anything. I was so mad I just wanted to let her humiliate herself. Finally she started to giggle, because she saw how really absurd it was.

Let me tell you something more about why I felt taken advantage of by Brooks. Having shown up for the expedition as close to the time of departure as was possible—I mean, just in time to help me with the last of the preparations and to go through his parachute training—what did Brooks do shortly after the expedition was over but leave again for Europe. Leaving me to mop up. And oh God, the mopping up! You can’t imagine—information the
Geographic
wanted, returning equipment to the people who supplied us, filling out reports, just a lot of busy work. But believe me, that’s very much the way he is. You know, he’s never asked me why I feel the way I do about our partnership. Looking back, I suppose he did me a kind of favor, because from that period of my life on, I’ve never been somebody who’s been particularly easy to take advantage of.

Peter Lake

Brooks got to be a god on our expedition! No, seriously, for a few minutes he
was
one. About two-thirds of the way into the trip Peter Gimbel, Jack Joerns, and I were drinking from the river when we were surprised by some Indians who had snuck up behind us with bows and arrows and were clearly going to kill us—they thought we were evil spirits or something. And then Brooks came up from behind and surprised
them.
Now, these Indians didn’t have any facial hair, they had long straight black hair on their heads, and they were short, and there, suddenly, was Brooks—you know, tall, bald, with a gray beard. We got this letter about a year later from some missionaries that said the Indians had thought Brooks was some kind of god and that that’s why they had spared us.