Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (4 page)

Codicil to the Last Will and Testament of Barbara Baekeland, April 25, 1972

1. I give to my mother, NINA FRASER DALY, if she survives me, my Coromandel Screen.
   
2. I give to my mother-in-law, CORNELIA HALLOWELL, if she survives me, my yellow Eighteenth Century Clock.
   
3. Both of the articles referred to above are presently located in my apartment at 130 East 75th Street, New York City.
   

Tom Dillow

I helped Nini clear out the apartment, and she gave me Barbara’s
Larousse Gastronomique,
the wonderful thirties edition—you know, the great big one with the color prints of the best kitchens of the time, those wonderful huge kitchens in France. We even cleared off the stuff from the terrace, the trees and all that. I was there for two or three days helping Nini go through all the stuff—Barbara’s wild-animal rugs, those leopard toss pillows, the Audubon lithos, that eighteenth-century Mexican crucifix she had, the Louis Seize breakfast table…Then I called up Vito Giallo, the antiques dealer up the street, to come on over.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks hasn’t got a cushion from that apartment. Nothing. He made a point of not touching anything and letting Nini have it all because, you know, her first words when Barbara died had been, “Send me Barbara’s jewels from London so that Sylvie doesn’t wear them!” She thinks, poor little woman, that I’m terrible, that I was the wrecker of this fabulous trinity—God, mother, and son. It’s normal—she can’t think otherwise. Her daughter was her dream.
I
think Nini is very well loved and very sweet. “Send Barbara’s jewels so that Sylvie doesn’t wear them!” You can imagine how I would have worn her jewels!

Nina Daly

All Barbara’s things were expensive. She had all her clothes made, she hardly ever bought them. I guess most of them were made in Paris. She had a nice, a lovely dressmaker there. I had some things made in Paris, too, you know. People used to ask me where I got my suits and I’d say, “Well, I guess most of them were made in Paris.” Tony liked clothes. Barbara bought him his clothes, but he had things made, too.

Barbara’s clothes were all good-quality. And that’s the thing that I care about, the quality of the material. The ones that I have, they’re all good material. They last a long time. They last forever. They never really wear out.

Poor Grace Kelly. I feel terrible about her. I think it was a terrible shame what happened to her and her daughter—you know, the little one. She went berserk, you know, sort of. But you never know. You have to accept it and take it. Make the best of it. The best you can. You can’t sit and weep over it. That doesn’t get you anywhere. You never know what it all will be until it is yesterday.

ON MONDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER
20, 1972,
Tony Baekeland appeared in lower court. There he was formally charged with the murder of his mother and remanded to Brixton Prison.

He was transported in a police van to a district so different from the London he knew that it might have been another country. The squalor of Brixton is alleviated only by a colorful market where anything can be purchased, from exotic fruits and vegetables to such old cockney delicacies as jellied eels.

The van, turning down a narrow, two-lane road lined with soot-stained brick buildings, proceeded through an open gate. Ahead was a second gate, controlled from within Brixton Prison and opening onto a barbed-wire courtyard patrolled by guard dogs.

Tony Baekeland had traveled a great deal in his life, and over some grim frontiers, but never over one as forbidding as this. The four-story Victorian-style buildings that loomed in front of him looked like a cross between a factory and a low-income housing project.

The cell he was assigned had been built for single occupancy, but due to overcrowded conditions he would have to share it with two other inmates.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to James and Gloria Jones, Undated

Toby Ross

I went to visit him in Brixton just a couple of days after he killed his mother. What happened was my friend Catherine Guinness wanted to go and she didn’t want to go alone, and we were both sort of friends of his from Spain, from Cadaqués, so we decided we’d go together, and it was very strange. I mean, he didn’t seem to know he’d killed his mother. He asked Catherine how his mother was. He said something like “How is my mother? Is she well?” And Catherine and I just both went into instant shock. I figured out later that maybe he was aware of the fact that he’d stabbed her but he just wasn’t sure whether he’d killed her or not.

Neither Catherine nor I knew really what to say to him. We were only there for about fifteen or twenty minutes, the legal limit. There was a meeting room that you came into, with little booths. It’s not like that anymore—I know, because I was put in Brixton a year later myself—for having a passport that was out-of-date. The English are kind of funny, you know. I said to them, “Listen, I have dual nationality. I have two passports. I came in on my American one and it expired while I was here, but I have an English one.” And they said, “Sort it out with the judge,” and they threw me in Brixton for two days. The charge was “illegal immigrant.”

When I was in there myself, the visiting room was entirely different from the way it was when I was there visiting Tony—you could actually sit at a little table and have physical contact with the person you were speaking to, you could touch them and you could kiss them hello. But when I saw Tony, there were two little booths with plate-glass windows and a little telephone you picked up and spoke through—just like in that old film
Birdman of Alcatraz.

Catherine Guinness

I went to visit him because I felt sorry for him—he was a friend of mine and I liked him. I just sort of sat and we chatted about this and that in a booth and he was sweet as usual. He said he wanted a copy of Dante’s
Inferno
, so I sent it to him. You see, when I knew him, I just felt he was one of the gentlest people I’d ever met. I met him in Cadaqués one Easter. I remember going for a walk with him and my father, and he was sort of talking about the soul and how he was trying to find out about his innermost depths—he felt his soul was sort of like an onion and you had to peel all the layers. You know that theory—there are various layers and you can get down if you really try, by sort of meditating and thinking.

Karen Radkai

Look at the photographs of him! Look at him, what he looks like. I took him along on a picnic. Oh, he made drawings! He was as companionable, as gentle as a lamb. These must have been done about 1966. I made them in Cadaqués.

I’ll tell you something—my first impressions are always absolutely right. I mean, I very rarely fail. The first time I looked at Cadaqués, I said, “This reminds me of
Camino Real
”—you know, the Tennessee Williams play. There was an absolute aura of decadence about it, a kind of strange decadence, remote almost. There were some extraordinary characters walking around, I can tell you. They lived out Surrealism almost, do you know? I mean, Cadaqués had nothing whatever to do with anything else I’ve seen on the Mediterranean.

It had enormous beauty, really extraordinary beauty. Cap de Creus, this marvelous mountain, these huge gray rocks, the sea that glistened—I’ve never seen the sea glisten that way. But it was a Nordic sea—strange, you know. It wasn’t that Mediterranean glistening, it was a dark sea. But there were big rocks, and mountains, and wonderful wonderful rows of fishermen’s houses going up and up, and a wonderful golden church with a wonderful light coming through.

I really do take photographically what I feel, not what I intellectualize—do you know what I mean? What I see and what I feel, and this is what I felt.

Mishka Harnden

Do you know John and Dennis, the Meyer twins? They were friends of Tony’s from Cadaqués—sort of flower children. They used to pose for Dalí a lot. And they were actors, sort of, too. Do you remember
Women in Love
, the Ken Russell film? There’s a pair of twins in it that look very Indian—well, that’s them. Anyway, they had this wild idea to take Tony out of Brixton and up to this farm they had in Wales or Scotland and just have him get far from the madding crowd—that kind of thing.

Phyllis Harriman Mason

I wrote to Tony in Brixton to say I was very saddened by his news—I made it very ambiguous. He wrote back and said he felt so much better now than he had before.

I spent that last summer with the two of them in Mallorca, June to September, and in spite of everything that went on, I had a nice summer. Robert Graves came to the house several times, and one night we went to dinner at his house. Afterward Barbara and Tony had a big argument—Tony said Graves wasn’t a great poet and Barbara said he was. But she also said, “The more I see of him, the more he gets to look like an old woman.”

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Elizabeth Weicker Fondaras, June 29, 1972

Alastair Reid

That summer I watched in horrified fascination and that summer was tearing the tops off everything.

There’s this enormous great semicircle of mountains where Barbara and Tony were living in Mallorca that’s like an amphitheater. It’s as though it invites the people who are there for the summer—or compels them—to give themselves up to the demands of the landscape and act in a certain manner. It’s really the perfect setting for Mediterranean ritual drama.

In fact, the whole landscape of Mallorca has always reminded me of Greek tragedy, and that’s what I said to Phyllis Mason, when I went down to swim with her, and it was then, when we were sitting after swimming, that she said that something terrible was really happening. I wrote her after Tony killed Barbara. She was the only person I did communicate with, because of that.

Phyllis Harriman Mason

You’ll laugh when I tell you this but after she died I went to a psychic to try to make contact with her, and during one session some woman actually materialized—some apparition—and she had on a flimsy sort of see-through gown, very décolleté and provocative, and I said, “That’s Barbara!”

Ethel Woodward de Croisset

Barbara had a violent Irish streak in her. She wanted everyone to do what she wanted. I mean, she was a redheaded dominating person. She wanted to move everyone about. When I thought about it, it seemed to me that what happened was the most ordinary termination of this wild life.

Tony wrote to me a lot from Brixton—letters which were so terribly sane. You know, people who are nervously upset or mentally upset can write with such clear writing, a very clear steady hand, and say such logical things.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Gloria Jones, Undated

Dear Gloria—

Thank you for your lovely letter. I am feeling a lot better now. It is very sweet of you to write. I also got a letter from Ethel which was very cheering. How exciting about Jim’s new novel. Please give my best to Mrs. Chambers. Life here is very quiet. I get a lot of reading done and am getting my head together!

Yours as ever with love, Tony

P.S. Very happy to hear about Kate’s marriage. I remember her very well and send her my best.

From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks and I were married on January 24, 1973—two months after Barbara died. But by then I had been living with him for five years and I had had it—yes. Because I was very conventional in those days and I was very humiliated to be living with someone whose wife I was not. I thought that during those years certainly a divorce could have been obtained, and it had not been obtained—for whatever intricate reasons there were between them. And the charm had gone, and I was ready to leave Brooks. Perhaps this is why he finally did something—he could feel that I had had it.

I married him because my heart really went out to him when she died, because I saw how he was suffering. You can’t leave someone in that state. Everybody will tell you how, you know, I was trying to get all the Baekeland money. This is grotesque. When she died it was the most horrible moment of
my
life, it really was, because I understood that certain events will not allow you to live, even to exist. After I married Brooks I saw that instead of having a husband, I had a widower on my hands.