Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (33 page)
45, quai de Bourbon
Dear Joneses—
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to demonstrate my friendship & love for you both as you have done for me so many times (I am ashamed to think about it). Anyway, thanks—it was the full moon, I guess, because
nothing
on the outside can ever be
that
bad!
I love you both.
B
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, October 14, 1965
1, rue Regrattier
Dear Jim and Gloria—
I guess you don’t have to hear from me what I think of what you both did for Barbara the other night. I know that you both love her, and it isn’t for me really to thank you. I would not have bothered you, except that for the first time in a long time I felt I was at the end of my rope. I couldn’t face all that alone. So it was selfish too. But strangely enough, when I wondered who
I
could turn to in Paris, there were only yourselves. It was the first time I had felt quite so lonely in this town. So whatever you feel about me, I must be clear to you what I thought about you. And I knew that you were the only two people in the world almost that Barbara wouldn’t mind knowing about what she had done—that I could call on without injuring her pride. I also feel the same way.
By noon the next day, B, sitting up in her bed, had the shy expression of Alexander bestriding Europe and Asia. But each time she gets away with this, the more dangerous it is. If Franklin had flown a few more kites, he’d have become a pork crackling.
Someday, if Barbara really believes in this kind of ultimate force over the kindhearted (or guilt-susceptible), she is going to make a miscalculation. They all do. She is not half so intelligent as she pretends to herself. It is that which worries me—that and her effect on Tony. He’s still awfully young and tied up.
Anyway, thanks.
Brooks
Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Michael Edwards, June 25, 1966
Mexico
Dear Michael—
Off again very soon to the jungles. It occurs to me that you can use a few months’ rent in advance.
Barbara and Tony skim northwards within the week for a summer of sea-shoring in East Hampton. I go on July 3 to Lima for 2 weeks of wrestling with customs and then off into the unknown again.
Affectionate regards,
Brooks
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Michael Edwards, July 10, 1966
New York
Dear Michael—
Enclosed your check for gas, electric, telephone, etc.
Brooks left for Peru on Sunday. Tony, my mother, and I are installed at East Hampton—pleasant but all too familiar, except for the beach which is superb.
Affectionately,
Barbara
Francesca Draper Linke
One time in East Hampton Tony tried to paint himself blue at my parents’ house. He had this wonderful idea about everyone going blue, this beautiful beautiful shade of blue, and how you’d see these blue people at the chicest places, and everyone would
want
to be blue—there’d be signs saying “Go Blue.” So he went and bought some dye and then he got in the bathtub and tried to get blue, but he came out kind of a mottled greenish blue, and then we went down to the beach and he put all this seaweed on him, and we walked on the sand and he was Neptune—he was very into Neptune. And later we stayed up all night playing music. It was really a magical time. That was when he was still on the great creative fringe. I mean, we all thought Tony was like a god.
From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973
He had few qualms accepting the notion that he was a very special person. During the time he was in a London tutoring school, he saw a psychoanalyst for four months. Following his discontinuance of this school, his last schooling, he lived something of an aimless existence, writing and painting, living in various places such as India and Nepal, with a lot of time spent in Cadaqués on Spain’s Costa Brava, and traveling around on no set schedule.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
Cadaqués
Dear Joneses—
The Gare d’Austerlitz was an
abattoir
when we finally arrived—God how I loathe masses of French, German, American, Jew, Negroes, everyone. Couldn’t possibly have found a porter and couldn’t lift the valise myself. A kind “adjuster of train wheels” helped me and put me in a first-class carriage!
Love to you both,
B
Karen Radkai
Cadaqués was not far from Paris. You went to Gare d’Austerlitz and took the night train and the next morning at nine-thirty you were in Portbou and you took a taxi and you were in Cadaqués by ten—do you see what I mean?
Now in those days Cadaqués was extraordinary. I remember the first thing I saw was a girl on a white horse riding through the center of town, with wonderful long blond hair flowing out behind her. It was Lorna Moffat, Tony’s great friend—he used to bring her all the time to my house.
What we always did in Cadaqués is we had a picnic, daily, with these wonderful chickens and all these fantastic Spanish salads—chick-peas mixed with tuna fish, you know. My picnics were famous. The cooking I did outside on the open fire. I gathered the wood on the beach, one of the way-off beaches. There was thyme growing by the bushes, so all you had to do, you know, was throw the chicken with the thyme on a little fire to have a wonderful thing going. And you’d come home at five in the afternoon you’d take a little nap and then go out for dinner at ten—that was sort of the life we led, you know.
Louise Duncan
The routine is you get up at ten or eleven, you go to one of the two cafés and put your face in the sun to get over your hangover, and then you stagger back up the hill at around four o’clock for lunch and then you stagger back down to the other café.
Karen Radkai
Meliton’s was the café where you played chess. My son used to play with Duchamp. He was small, he was only nine. He learned a lot of good chess there. Man Ray used to come to visit Duchamp and he played very good chess, too.
It was a little group, you see. That part was very nice. But the other part I just couldn’t stand—there were a lot of psychotic aspects to Cadaqués. The whole town was sordid.
I was first in Cadaqués for
Vogue,
to photograph Melina Mercouri, who was doing a film there. Diana Vreeland was then editor-in-chief of
Vogue
and she said to me—you know how fantastic
she
is—“Get Melina on the beach in a bathing suit with Dalí putting eggs of emeralds and rubies in her hand!” So Melina says to me, “Darling, I can never get into those bathing suits, I’m not Brigitte Bardot, you know.” So then I had to go and see Dalí and see if
he
would cooperate. I’d met him already once, in ’51, in Venice, at Charles de Beistegui’s great costume ball at the Palazzo Labia, which I was photographing for
Harper’s Bazaar
—Cecil Beaton was doing it for
Vogue.
And Dalí was so charming and nice then, I can’t tell you—just like a perfectly normal human being. Now, of course, he’s so corrupt he’s close to being—I don’t know what, dear—Hitler, you know.
So I went up to his house in Port Lligat—that’s the twin village to Cadaqués. You went by the cemetery of Cadaqués to get there, in those days over a dirt road. Dalí had an interesting house, it was so old. As I walked in he gave me some pink champagne and he said, “Come with me, I will show you my studio,” and he showed me this enormous, strange room, sort of octagonal almost it was. He said, “Here is where I masturbate.” He thought I was going to be shocked, you know, but I just paid no attention.
And Dalí set the tone for the whole village.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
Cadaqués
Dear Jim and Gloria,
This place is surreal and very fake except for the natives who loathe everyone and cast a spell on us all. The morals are so crappy & awful & hypocritical that you
can’t
take them seriously—the cripple being helped in and out of the boat by the mistress of her gigolo husband who loathes them both and tries to attack, each night, the baby-sitter who is Tony’s girl and tells him everything. Balthusian symbols abound and
trompeurs
and pleasure-seeking. Marvelous!
I swim in the sea, comtemplate suicide, think that somehow I must do something to justify something and I don’t even know what it is!
Anyway it’s the classic Mediterranean summer. Not for the likes of me. I need the cool northern fogs & tides to keep me sane.
X
B
Elsa Mottar
The whole thing was just so impossible, you know—one just didn’t know what to do with Barbara. You never knew what was going to happen next, so whenever she appeared on the scene, everybody’s nose would be out of joint. She and Brooks were always flying away from each other and then coming back together again, and it was a totally mixed-up relationship that you could never make heads or tails of. I mean, you didn’t know if they were really interested in each other or if they just stayed together because of Tony.
George Staempfli
I remember one scene at Barbara Curteis’s. She had a terrace outside her bedroom, and that’s where she gave all her parties—it had a wonderful view of the harbor. And Brooks was there one night, and Barbara Baekeland suddenly appeared downstairs and marched into the house, and he had to flee over the rooftops—literally! Another night Barbara Baekeland was found wandering around the streets of Cadaqués stark naked.
Brooks Baekeland
Barbara Curteis and I were having a coffee together on her terrace. We heard the row downstairs as Barbara forced her way in and past Nuri, the Curteis maid, and came charging upstairs. To avoid the mayhem I foresaw if Barbara found me there, I vaulted over a parapet down onto the terrace of the adjoining house. I must have landed very softly, for to my astonishment I found—in a layout identical to that of the house I had just left—a French couple in bed sound asleep. I was sure that they would wake up as soon as La Baekeland started to sound off on the terrace next door, and I could only hope that they would understand my predicament and not give me away. The row between the two Barbaras was loud—the Baekeland part of it, for Barbara Curteis kept a ladylike cool—but the couple never awoke.
Barbara Baekeland was never seen running naked through the streets of Cadaqués, but she was seen in many towns running in her nightgown—in pursuit of a fleeing husband. What few people besides Tony and myself knew was that Barbara in a rage would only be satisfied with physical combat. If you feared—or refused—to hurt her, you were forced to run away from her. Because I loved her, I sometimes found these midnight chases amusing—but not always. For years she embarrassed and exhausted me.
Daphne Hellman
I was visiting Lily Auchincloss, who had taken a house in Cadaqués, and I saw Brooks in an open car, with his head in his hands, as if in despair. He was just sitting in the parked car, right outside the place they were renting. He said to me, “Go up and speak to Barbara. I can’t.” And when I knocked at the door she thought at first I was Brooks and wouldn’t let me in, but when she realized it was me, she let me in and said, “Get me a drink. Brooks won’t get me a drink.” She was in a very peculiar state. But then later that summer I went on a couple of picnics with the two of them and things had gotten more peaceable.
Thilo von Watzdorf
Remember that book
Piano Mécanique
by François Rey? They made a film of it. It was really a lousy book but it did show Cadaqués in the mid and late sixties, a mixture of Saint-Tropez and the Rome of
La Dolce Vita.
It was just the worst place at that time for a kid of that age who was very impressionable.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
When I first met Tony, that summer of ’67, he was very much in love with a young man in Cadaqués—Jake Cooper, a great beauty. Jake was the type who would stop in the middle of town and oil his body, and he always had a court of young men around him—Tony Kinna, Ernst von Wedel, people like that.
Tony was, let’s say, a basically well-brought-up little boy, and he was mixing with a whole crowd that was rather shabby. In Cadaqués everyone mixes—it’s the great joy of people who usually have regular lives and in summer suddenly they are with people who are not their sort and it’s very exciting.
Voilà.
So Tony was seeing people who were not his sort and they were taking a lot of money from him, of course. And he came totally under Jake Cooper’s spell.
Elizabeth Blow