Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (46 page)

Barbara Hale

The whole place was just a shambles. When I think I let Tony spend the night here! I don’t know how I dared. I don’t know, I just did.

Elizabeth Blow

I was working in the Wakefield Bookstore on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street, right near the Children’s Zoo, and all my friends would stop in to see me. One day Barbara Hale tottered in and described a terrible scene in East Hampton with Barbara and Tony. She said, “I can’t have anything more to do with them, ever—it’s just too much.” She had barely left the store when Barbara Baekeland herself came in and said, “I’ve just had the most delightful dinner at Barbara Hale’s and I want to buy a book for her as a present. What would you suggest?”

I didn’t hear from her for several months after that, but then sometime that summer I got a postcard from Mallorca saying, “Betty darling, I miss you so this summer. Tony and I think of you all the time and wish you were here. He is
much better.
”

Later I heard from Nini, who’d gone over for a while to stay with them, that the scene there was very bad. One night she and Barbara evidently had to flee the house. They sat in the car, frightened to death.

LATE IN 1979
, Broadmoor officials contacted the International Social Service of Great Britain about Tony Baekeland’s case. A “senior intra-country caseworker” recalls that “some alternatives were explored, because there was very definite pressure from
somewhere
that Baekeland leave Broadmoor.”

The pressure was coming, of course, from the unofficial committee of friends. “It was taking far too long to get Tony organized somewhere,” says Michael Alexander, “and I think I rather annoyed Dr. Maguire by putting the heat on.”

Soon an officer from the American Embassy in London was able to report: “Broadmoor appears close to a decision to release Tony Baekeland. He could be back in the U.S.A. in about six weeks.” Indeed, a passport application had been made in his name.

Dr. Maguire remained concerned that Tony’s long hospitalization would make it impossible for him to readjust successfully in America on his own, and informed the embassy that Broadmoor could not in good conscience recommend to the Home Secretary that Tony be released without a guarantee that “a period of social rehabilitation” would follow.

The next piece of news the committee received was therefore not the yes they had been expecting but, rather, the nebulous statement that “Baekeland’s release is not imminent.”

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Sam Green, July 18
,
1972

Phyllis Harriman Mason

I had a good time with her alone and I had a good time with him alone, but when the two of them were together…Several times that summer I thought it was
my
last moment. One night we’d been to dinner at Robert Graves’s house. Barbara was dressed to the hilt, with ropes of pearls, and, coming home, it was full moonlight and she was speeding—she said Tony was bugging her and she wanted to get home. The police stopped us. She said, “You have to put him in jail!” and they looked inside the car and said, “Oh,
Antonio,
it’s
you!
” They obviously
liked
Tony.

All that summer he was on speed. Barbara would find pills in his drawers and she’d raise Cain—then
he’d
raise Cain.

Another time, I was in the back seat of the car and Tony moved the front seat back on my foot. And Barbara said, “You have to say you’re sorry to Phyllis.” She said it condescendingly, as if he were a two-year-old. It didn’t matter whether he said he was sorry or not—my foot hurt.

About halfway through my visit she had to buy some groceries, so I gave her three hundred dollars. She gave me an IOU, which I hadn’t expected at all. She owed money everywhere, I think.

She stole money from me, too—she or Tony. I think it was Barbara, really. I’d gone to Greece for a couple of days, and when I got back to Mallorca my wallet was missing. I hadn’t taken it with me because it had dollars in it which I couldn’t have used there—I always save some for when I get back to New York to take the taxi in from the airport. I didn’t even realize the wallet was gone till I was packing to go home. It had not only the dollars but a lot of my IDs in it. And the wallet was extremely nice, too. I’ve never been able to find another quite like it.

Barbara had tried on all my clothes, too, while I was in Greece.

That summer she was still entertaining all the time. One night she was having a big dinner party, and there was a beautiful chandelier in the dining room that used oil in its cups, and she asked Tony to let it down—it was on a rope, you know—and he let it down all right, he let the rope
go.
It came down with a great crash, and she accused him of doing it on purpose. There was oil and glass all over everything. Barbara was down on her hands and knees cleaning up the oil in her finery. The other guests hadn’t arrived, they were still coming over the mountain.

Tony had a motorcycle that summer, and we could hear him coming from miles away. We’d hear this damn motorcycle coming over the hill, and Barbara would say, “Oh my God, here he comes!” and my heart would sink—
our
hearts would sink.

He had a tape recorder, and he played Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
over and over and over on the terrace, and Barbara would tell him to turn it off, and that would start another row.

Alastair Reid, a poet, came for dinner one night, and he said to me, “Oooohhh, it’s not so good here, is it?” and I said, “No!” and I told him—I was so glad to be able to talk to someone. I’d kept it all to myself.

Alastair Reid

I stopped off to see Barbara on my way back from—well, let me tell you the most ironic story of that summer. Borges was in Spain, and he came to Mallorca for two or three days to rest and he sent me a telegram—I’d often translated his work and we were friends. So I went down to Palma to see him. He was with María Kodama, who travels with him and looks after him, and he told me about this pilgrimage that he had just made to see Graves. Graves’s wife, Beryl, leads Borges, who’s totally blind, into the room where her husband’s lying, totally gaga, not knowing what anything
is,
and she takes Borges’s blind hand and joins it to Graves’s senseless one, and they shake hands. And that’s the meeting between Borges and Graves: Nobody met anybody.

This took place up in Deyá, which Graves has always regarded as a sacred village and indeed chose because
deia
is the Latin word for “goddess”—hence his kind of, you know, enormously romantic summers. Summer was always the high drama in Mallorca. Summer was the high drama.

When I got to Barbara’s and Phyllis Mason said terrible things had been going on, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about until dinner, which was just Phyllis, me, Barbara, and Tony. Barbara started to taunt Tony about how she knew he didn’t want to be there with her and so on, and finally he got up and took a wine bottle and smashed it against the wall. I was rather shocked by the eruption. And Barbara roared with laughter and seemed immensely relieved, as if she’d gotten the reaction she’d wanted out of him. And so I realized that they were locked into a relationship that depended on their power to hurt each other all the time—they were both living off it. And Phyllis and I—it was during this dinner that I first thought of it—were relegated to being, as it were, spectators.

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

Cecelia Brebner

According to Antony, they were both on drugs that last summer in Mallorca and she would perform the most extraordinarily immodest feats.

Alastair Reid

I still didn’t think that the impetus for violence was coming from Tony. I felt it from Barbara, and I felt Barbara’s desperation that night. A few weeks later, I saw them at a dinner party in Deyá—this must be by now early August. Barbara came over to me immediately and began to talk. She was talking a great deal then. She was frantic, pouring everything out, complaining—how was she going to manage, what was she going to do, where was she going to go next. These were the problems. But there was no continuity in her preoccupations.

Tony was off in another room playing chess, which is the only apparent connection he had with people in Deyá. Then the guy he was playing with came into the room where we were and said that Tony had turned around toward the wall and was just sitting there in a total catatonic trance. And he sat through that whole evening totally clutched by himself like that. I asked the others there about him and they said that was why they had him over to play chess—to take him out of himself, to get him connected to other people. These people in Deyá, crazy as they probably were themselves, had just accepted Tony and were bearing him along, as small villages always bear their crazies along with them. I mean, it was more or less an accepted fact that Tony was over the edge. And then people began to talk about—I began to hear rumors of—you know, Barbara and Tony, how Barbara had been sleeping with Tony.

I took Barbara aside. She was very humble, she said she didn’t know what to do. I said, “You’ve got to get Tony to a doctor, and there’s somebody I know who can really handle this.” And I gave her the name of Lindsay Jacobs in London.

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

Heather Cohane

Barbara was having the flat on Cadogan Square painted and she needed a place to stay while she was in London, and she asked Jack and me where
we
stayed when we came over from Ireland. We always stayed in a place called Eleven Cadogan Gardens, sort of a private hotel, a smart bed-and-breakfast-type place. There was rather a fierce man there called Mr. Reeder who let one in and ran the place. Well, one time we arrived and straightaway Mr. Reeder said, “Some
friends
of yours were here. The Bakers. I had to call the police.” We drew ourselves back and said, “Well, we don’t know any people called Baker. They can’t have been friends of
ours.
” But as we went up to our room, Jack said, “I wonder if ‘Baker’ could have been ‘Baekeland.’” So when we went down, we sort of bravely said to Mr. Reeder, “Was it ‘Baekeland’ by any chance?” And he said, “Yes,
that
was the name.” So we said, “Well, what happened?” and apparently Tony had tried to stick a pen in Barbara’s eye in the hallway.

Letter from Barbara Baekeland to Sam Green, October 23
,
1972

Jim Robertsen

Barbara bought the apartment on Cadogan Square off of Neil Hartley and me—we owned it jointly. Sam Green had said, “I know someone who’s looking for a place, let me introduce you.” Everyone in London wanted the apartment because it was really pretty fabulous, but
she
said, “I’ll pay cash.” She agreed to give it to us in three checks spaced a couple of weeks apart. We banked the first one, wrote checks on it—and it bounced! I got hold of her right away and she said she was sorry and gave us another check—and that one went through. And a little later she sent around the largest chunk of caviar that any of us had ever seen. I suppose it was probably fifteen pounds of caviar; it came from Fortnum’s and it was in a huge blue tin. I phoned everyone I knew, I mean everyone who I really adored who was crazy about caviar, and said, you know, come over.