Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (37 page)
Paule Lafeuille
I visited her daily at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Her friends used to take turns by her bed, and every day one of them, in order to entice her to eat, would present her with some delicacy that their cook had prepared. As for me, living next to Petrossian’s store, I could bring her a slice of smoked salmon or a few grains of fresh caviar. Our efforts were rarely successful. She would push her plate aside and say, “It is delicious…. How sweet you all are.”
She loved to confide in me at length about her distress, and I can tell you that her words were Gentle Love itself’s. She seemed not in the least resentful of Brooks’s desertion and only kept repeating, “All I want is to see him once in a while. I shall not be able to live if I cannot occasionally set my eyes on him….” Heartbreaking. By the way, I had also taught French to Brooks. I never did again from then on. I made a decision never to see him again. I made it the very moment I heard of his flight to the Far East and the subsequent dramatic events. In February 1973 he wrote to me from a village in Brittany asking if I would consider meeting his new wife who—I quote him—was not being too well treated by Barbara’s old friends. This letter has remained unanswered.
Ethel Woodward de Croisset
She came out of her coma in exactly the same mood that she’d gone into the suicide, you see—which was one of total frustration because she couldn’t get ahold of Brooks. And I think it’s a miracle that she in some way didn’t try to take her life
again,
but probably one doesn’t do that sort of thing. What I mean is that the attempt hadn’t been a cleansing sort of thing. She came out absolutely wild it seemed to me—and to Gloria. All this I think appears in one of those books of her husband’s.
From
The Merry Month of May,
James Jones, Delacorte Press, New York, 1971
.
I put in a call to Harry in Rome…. “Louisa’s in the hospital,” I said.
“Oh? She is? What for?” Harry said.
I was beginning to feel irritated. “A suicide attempt,” I said….
There was a pause on the line. “I suppose if she dies, I’ll have to come back, won’t I?”
“If you want to get her buried, you will,” I said furiously. “I know I sure as hell ain’t going to do it.”
“Oh, somebody would,” he said. “Edith de Chambrolet. Have you called Edith?”
“No, not yet,” I said. “I was trying to keep it quiet.”
“Well, call her. Call Edith. She’s a do-gooder. She loves to do good works.”…
He had told me to call Edith de Chambrolet. I did. I had met Edith at their place for the first time, and afterwards had had dinners with her frequently at her place. Large dinners, always very formal, eight to twelve people. Edith was a remarkable person. She was one of the richest women in America, and had married some impoverished French Count and had four sons by him…. She spoke with just about the broadest drawling “A” I have ever heard, and had stary eyes….
Together we walked over across the bridge and down past Notre-Dame to the H
tel-Dieu….
As we walked in through the bed rows of beat-up, near-dead people, she said, “Isn’t it marvelous, now? Extraordinarily efficient.”
I was tongue-tied, and felt totally incapable, with her there.
“Now, Louisa,” she said at the bed, lifting up one side of the plastic oxygen tent. “We must stop all this nonsense. We must pull ourselves together and I know that you will.” She let the tent flap drop. “We’ll talk to her again a little later. Let it sink in, first. I’m sure she heard us. In her unconscious.”…
Harry remained adamant about not coming back unless Louisa actually died. And even then he was not absolutely sure….
They moved Louisa, in an ambulance, to the American Hospital in Neuilly. The whole thing was handled by the American-trained French doctor we knew who worked there, and whom all of us, including Edith, used as our doctor…. His name was Dax…. I did not feel up to riding out with her myself, but Edith de Chambrolet went with her….
I talked to the American Hospital doctor…. “She was just about as dead as you can get,” he said equably, “without actually dying.”
From
Time
Magazine, Review of
The Merry Month of May,
Timothy Foote, February 22, 1971
Among the [book’s] victims is Harry’s wife Louisa. Jones turns her into a near vegetable as the result of an attempted suicide…. Letting the lady live on in some domesticity or other would have been a truer and crueler fate.
Brooks Baekeland
A novelist is a cannibal and may eat his friends for his professional purposes—Jim Jones always did. I could not read
The Merry Month of May
—trash. I am the only person alive, along with Sylvie, who knows
all
the truth—and therefore
the
truth. And the truth, when deeply seen, is always greater than any fiction. In its depths—but only there—reality not only seems to imitate art but surpasses it.
From
Saturday Review,
Review of
The Merry Month of May,
John W. Aldridge, February 13, 1971
Even with all due allowance for his evident faith in human credulity, Jones cannot really expect us to believe any of this. His people, given the intellectual sophistication he attributes to them, would scarcely behave in this way.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
We left together exactly on the 24th of February, and that’s the day she tried to kill herself. Each time Brooks had tried to leave her before, she had done this. The first time was up at camp, in the Adirondacks—she took pills and he had to rush her across the lake in a rowboat to a doctor.
Samuel Taylor
I remember one night during the sixties my wife Suzanne and I were at the Baekelands’ for dinner—Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn were also there—and Barbara said, “Guess where I was at five this morning!” and we said, “Where?” and she said, “At Bellevue Hospital,” and she showed us the bandages on her wrists. And being very gay about it, you know—very charming about it.
Nancy Perkins Wallace
My brother saved Barbara’s life once. Mike was staying with Barbara and Tony in Cadaqués and she took an overdose of something, and they had to drive her in the car, screaming and yelling at her to stay awake—driving wildly through the night to some Costa Brava hospital.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Paris was the fourth time, and Brooks just…he couldn’t…he had to get away from her. That didn’t mean he didn’t love her. He did, and when she begged him to come back, I was terribly afraid that he would. Everybody thought, Brooks is off on a fling again, he’s forty-seven, he’ll come back. But I know now that he would never have come back to her, never—because she was too powerful, she was someone who would take the air you breathe—borrow it and leave you gasping. You just couldn’t exist with her around. Barbara tried everything to keep him—if a man is about to leave you and you take one hundred pills of Nembutal, that’s a pretty good way to make sure he’s not going to leave you.
Elizabeth Blow
You know, Sylvie had also tried to kill herself. Well, I mean, the story is so absurd, but
possibly
it happened.
I
believe it happened. According to Barbara, Sylvie had tried to take a lot of pills and been put in the hospital, and Brooks and Barbara had sat up all one night after this thing occurred and they had decided that they would go on with their life and their marriage, that they would live together forever and that they really loved one another. And then there was a call from the hospital, a desperate call from Sylvie saying she wanted to see Brooks, and Brooks said, “Look, Barbara, I think I really should go over to the hospital. I’ll come right back.” And he went over to the hospital and Barbara never saw him again. He left the hospital with Sylvie and fled to Rome.
Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Gloria and James Jones, Undated
The American Hospital
Neuilly
My darling Gloria & Jim—
What would I do without you? He won’t come back as he is a man that goes deeply into relationships and he will just become more & more fond of this girl—who first tried to get Tony & when that failed picked on Brooks. He is so guileless he won’t see through her and though I don’t mean to denigrate the feeling she has for him, she is, I think,
intéressée
. The last two times I saved my marriage by going to him with no pride and saying I was sorry. This time I have less pride and really think what I’ve been through has changed me. He had to leave without seeing me for if he saw me he loves me too much to have left me there tied up like a hog for slaughter. I feel that if I could only talk to him everything will be all right.
I haven’t seen my Spanish beau since last Spring & then just for lunch to tell him I was through. He never meant as much to me as the hair on Brooks’ head! Whoops—as
a
hair on Brooks’ head.
The trouble is now everyone knows and if I am ashamed he must be more ashamed. This is what will keep him from coming back to me.
When she was ill I urged him to go and see her in the clinic so that if anything happened that was serious he would not blame himself. She has
kept
him from seeing me & had the gall to write me a hypocritical letter in which she says she only wants him for a few months. I can’t find the letter now—the doctor probably took it.
I know that with all the glamour & newness of traveling he won’t come back. But would you, Jim, tell him I’ll come and join him whenever he wants me to on a few hours’ notice?
When I get out of here I want to go down to Mallorca, for that is our one chance to build a life together—with our son.
I don’t talk about the girl to anyone. Let them wonder. I simply say B has gone to India. But I won’t be able to face anyone when I get out. My life just means nothing to me without B or Tony.
Please try to come to see me—
XX I love you—
B
P.S. My bill for 3 days was over $100—I’ve got to get
out
of here! I’ll have no money left.
Jim, he will tell you in his letter that he is madly in love, etc., etc. But that day when we talked for 40 hours he was so
relieved
to be out of it all. He said she had no imagination and would eventually bore him. He said he had never been bored an instant with me. He said he liked the feeling of having her love him and her sexual newness. She’s got 2 children and no visible means of support. I adore Brooks and can learn to control the vicious side of my nature and let him love me the way he always wanted to. Please tell him he should come back to me. He needs advice.
Brooks Baekeland
Barbara and I talked all night—one of the things she said to me was, “But who will take care of you when you are old?”—and I did tell her in the end that I would not go away as I had planned. I made that decision thinking of Sylvie’s youth and Barbara’s age—Sylvie was twenty-seven and Barbara was forty-six, not an age at which it is easy to make a new life. I was certainly not thinking of myself! And I certainly never ran down Sylvie to Barbara. What caused me finally to go ahead with my original plans was that Barbara could not stop badmouthing Sylvie—and me—and I realized then that she would go on making me “pay” for this love for the rest of my life, that nothing would change, that this was my last chance.
Clement Biddle Wood
A very strange thing happened when Barbara was at the American Hospital. My wife Jessie—whose mother, Louise de Vilmorin, by the way, was a friend of Barbara’s—had been arranging flowers in our apartment and this big cut-glass vase that had belonged to
my
mother just sort of came apart in her hands and she was cut on the wrist, exactly on the vein. I made sort of a tourniquet and I rushed her to the American Hospital. And as we were walking in—Jessie, you know, holding her bandaged wrists and blood sopping and pouring on the floor—along comes Barbara, with Ethel de Croisset. Barbara is just at that moment checking out, and she sees Jessie and she says, “
Oh,
my poor Jessie! Oh,
dear!
Oh, I understand
completely
about this”—you know, assuming naturally that it was a suicide attempt, that Jessie had slashed her wrists. And Ethel said, “No, no, Barbara, you’re not to worry yourself about
that
—Jessie’s just fine,” and sort of hustled her along. It really was the damnedest coincidence. It’s the kind of thing you couldn’t put into a novel.