Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (47 page)

That was a very nice, extremely extravagant thing of her to do—especially since this was after the parade had passed for her, you know. I saw very little of her after the sale went through, because the son was such a disaster and they were sort of a package deal. I did have them both to a couple of parties in my new house. During one of them, Tony came over and told me how much he liked me, how sympathetic he found me. Then he phoned the next day and said could we have lunch, and I said, “No, not today,” and he said, “Well,
what
day?” and I finally said a day.

I took him to a place on the King’s Road called the Arethusa, which is now defunct. It was owned and run by a trendy fellow called Alvaro and it was a very
louche
sort of club with sort of remnants of the swinging sixties, and therefore people were not easily shocked there, you didn’t pay much attention one way or another—it was always loaded with all sorts of major-and minor-league celebrity types.

So we sat down and I said, “How are you?” and Tony said, “I’m just terrible.” I said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “Well, uh…” He said something like, “Can I speak frankly to you?” And I said, “Ya, I mean, Tony…” And he said, “I really would like to feel I can rely on you as a friend.” I said, “Well, Tony, we scarcely know each other.” I mean, I just did
not
want to have any sort of friendship with him, quite honestly, because he seemed too much like a ticking time bomb and not anyone who I had any interest in on any conceivable level, you know. And he said, “Well, uh, what’s happening is I’m having an affair with my mother.”

And I remember I said, “Oh, come
on
—you and your mother do have a very intimate relationship and that’s fine,” and that sort of thing. He said, “No no no no! I am
fucking
my
mother!
” And he said it loud enough, in the Arethusa, which was quite bustling and where people tended to talk fairly loud—for England anyhow—so that several people turned around, and I said, you know, “Relax, Tony.” He said, “Well, that’s it. And I don’t know what to do—I feel desperate.” I said, “It’s awful if you feel desperate about it. Quite honestly, I think any number of things are all right if they don’t hurt people outside the relationship.” And then he sort of said again, he said, “Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you?” I said, “Tony, why do you want to tell
me
this? I’m sorry it’s happening and that it’s distressing you. But you know, if you don’t want it to continue, then just stop it.” Then he got quite hysterical, and it was very embarrassing—hideous, as a matter of fact.

The point is that I really did not want this information, I did not like the laundering of, you know, his family’s washing all over
me,
and I did not want it in a club where I was a member.

Oddly enough, at the time I knew of another mother and son who were having an incestuous relationship, which was really quite successful. These, by the way, are the only two cases of mother/son incest that I’m personally aware of. But both mother and son had told me about this affair they were having, and
they
were anything
but
anguished over it, they were quite amused by it, in fact. I mean, they ended up being very good friends—it was just something they did for a little bit. And I just thought, you know, this is terribly ironic—that just suddenly, in a period of about six months, I should have these two pieces of information, neither one of which I particularly wanted to have.

So anyway I told him that it seemed to me his life would be far simpler if he didn’t live with his mother. And he said, “Where would I go? What would I do?” And I said, “The world is full of places. Do you have any money of your own?” And he said he really didn’t yet. And I said, “Well, Tony, you could do something that a lot of people in the world do—you could get a job.” He said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Just get a fucking job. Go to Paris, get a job
there
—go back to the States. Do
anything.
” I said there were also a lot of people in London who he could probably work out an arrangement with where he could share a flat. I said that the pressures of living with his mother were obviously enormous and he should just put some time and distance between them.

And here we still are in this restaurant, this
club,
and he’s really I mean not quite shouting but damn near it. And finally I say, because, I mean, the headwaiter and so on are kind of rolling their eyes at me, “Listen, Tony, maybe we should just go for a walk.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “Look, this isn’t something that I really want to go on discussing here.”

There was never any question in my mind that what he was telling me and what I was hearing was true—none whatsoever. And I’m usually fairly skeptical. I mean, there was just the passion with which he said it.

And I know it went on with his mother beyond that point because he did phone me some time later and he said, “Oh God, this thing still seems to be going on.” And I remember saying, “Tony, it takes two people, you know.”

F. Clason Kyle

I met Barbara and Tony less than, as it turned out, a month before her death. I met
her
first, at a party given for the Victorian Society, on whose American board of directors I served.

I was winding up a two-and-a-half-month stay in London, writing an A-to-Z series on the metropolis’s offbeat travel attractions. I might have had more time for the Baekelands if I hadn’t been pushing to get all the photographs I needed, and I was also anxious to get home to Columbus, Georgia, by Thanksgiving. Anyway, I enjoyed meeting Barbara sufficiently to ask if she would be interested in attending a lecture on Irish Georgian architecture by an old friend of mine, the Honorable—and blue-eyed—Desmond Guinness, who would be speaking in tandem with Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin. The duet was scheduled for a few nights later at the Irish Club, just off Eaton Square. She said she would be delighted to come, and did so, bringing her son along.

I was surprised to see him, because I certainly had not invited him, not even knowing that he existed. But then, the more the merrier, and he added another body to the talk’s attendees.

The next time I saw Barbara was a few nights later when I invited her and Tony to have dinner with me at the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower on Sloane Street. Besides having good meat, the restaurant was convenient to the Baekelands’ flat on Cadogan Square and mine on Wilton Place.

Dinner went well, I recall. And Barbara asked me back to see their penthouse flat and have a nightcap. On the walk there, Tony, who had been relatively quiet during dinner, suddenly opened up and began telling me—because I was a journalist, I guess—about some writing that he had done. He asked if I would be willing to take a look at it. He said it was a mystical tale about a rabbit or an animal of some sort, I can’t remember exactly which.

At their stunningly attractive flat, conversation was vigorous for about an hour while Barbara and I sipped on our brandies. Tony had bade us goodnight immediately upon arrival, courteously saying that he had enjoyed dinner. And I think he had. I had responded, equally sincerely, that I looked forward to reading his story.

Unexpectedly, there was an exceedingly noisy racket from the kitchen area beneath us. Barbara seemed to pay no attention, until Tony—clad only in knit shorts—appeared in the salon, brandishing a large kitchen knife. He ranted about the room, gesturing wildly, but never making a threatening move at either of us. Then he vanished, as quickly as he had appeared. However, some commotion continued below.

The understatement of the century would be to say that I was startled. Barbara had remained passive and composed throughout. Quietly, she explained that he had recently threatened to kill her. “I’m not afraid of him,” she said, more than once.

I said, “Perhaps I should leave. My being here has obviously upset him.” I quickly had assumed that Tony was jealous of my being with his mother, or of her being with me—three can be a crowd. Before I could leave, the phone rang and I heard Barbara apologizing to another tenant in the building for the disturbance.

She then led me down four or five flights of stairs, allaying my fears for her safety and refusing my offer of sanctuary. An elderly gentleman, dressed in bathrobe and pajamas, stood in his doorway on one of the landings. He said, “Mrs. Baekeland, this must not continue. I can’t have my sleep disturbed in this manner.” I think he also added something about his concern for her security. She assured him—
and
me—that Tony was having treatment and that things were all right.

Alastair Reid

When I heard that Lindsay Jacobs had agreed to see Tony and was going to take up the case, as it were, I thought, What a relief, because he’s a doctor who enjoys considerable fame for picking up people when they’re really on the edge and bringing them back to life.

Dr. W. Lindsay Jacobs

After seeing Antony Baekeland and his mother separately on a couple of occasions, I called the Chelsea Police Station to tell them I thought something was going to happen over at 81 Cadogan Square and could they put a guard there. The officer in charge said that they were not really allowed to do much of anything until something actually happened.

On November 15, 1972, just two days before the matricide, I saw Antony and his mother together and they were jointly willing that he go into hospital. I had arranged for a bed on Monday November 20th.

F. Clason Kyle

The evening that Tony ran around the flat with the kitchen knife proved to be the last time I saw Barbara, except for one day in Knightsbridge shortly before my return to the States. I was in a taxi and she was walking on the sidewalk, wrapped in a dark cape and clutching several shopping bags. I waved to her. She waved back, but I am not certain that she recognized me—it was more the sort of wave one gives to a friendly hand fluttering from inside a passing car, while at the same time experiencing the uncomfortable feeling that maybe the greeting really had been meant for the stranger strolling two feet to one’s left.

Sue Guinness

I saw Barbara two days before he killed her—I had lunch with both of them, in fact, in London, in their flat. And Tony was definitely in a very peculiar state. He had painted his shoes and all his clothes with gold stars, and he just sat there and rocked backwards and forwards with his arms crossed across his chest. I said to Barbara, “Do be careful,” and she said, you know, “He’ll never harm
me.
”

Well, I knew firsthand that wasn’t so, because she used to stay with me in Kensington Square when she rented out her flat and, once, Tony turned up from somewhere or other in the middle of a dinner party. He ran upstairs and got her passport and tore it up, then he threw various things down the drain, and then he came into the dining room and insulted her and said that he was going to kill her—in front of quite a number of witnesses. Anyway I got him out of the house—I think he was staying at some hotel that Michael Alexander had got him into.

The following day he came back and he said he wanted to go and see
The Devils
by Ken Russell—do you remember that film? And Barbara and I agreed to do that with him. He became very peculiar after seeing it—he sat on the stairs of the cinema rocking backwards and forwards. Naturally Barbara got terribly worried and said that she didn’t want to be on her own with him. And luckily he went off.

But the next day he rang up asking for his mother. I said that she had left, which wasn’t true—she had just gone to the American Embassy to get a new passport. He said, “Oh, I see.” And then I went out to do some shopping. When I came back about twenty minutes later, I found Barbara lying on the pavement with a mackintosh rolled up under her head and a great patch of her hair missing on one side—she was looking pretty dazed. There was this rather nice man standing over her—it was he, in fact, who had taken his mackintosh and given it to her.

And Tony was in the window—of
my house
—screaming and shouting that he was going to
get
everybody, that anybody who came near was going to get it—he said he was going to kill
all women.
He had a carving knife.

What happened while I was out was that he had turned up and our housekeeper had let him in—after all, he’d been coming to our house for years and he was the son of an old friend who was staying there, and she didn’t realize that Barbara didn’t want to see him, you know. So he was waiting for Barbara when she came back from the embassy and he jumped on her. Apparently he pursued her through the house, she got out the front door and down the steps, and he caught up with her and was trying to drag her into the square by her hair and throw her in front of cars. She was hanging on to the gate and he was slamming it backwards and forwards on her thumb.

When I saw her lying there, I ran down the road and rang up the police from the greengrocer’s. They arrived with dogs—by this time we had a crowd of I suppose about thirty to forty people standing outside the house saying there’s a maniac in there. When Tony saw the police, he went running off behind the house, down the gardens and across various streets.

Then the ambulance came round. I rode with Barbara to St. Charles’s Hospital in Kensington, and she was not in a very good state at
all.
The thumb was broken in three places and she was there for a couple of days. She said to me from her bed, “It’s worth any amount of pain to save Tony from himself.”