Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (56 page)

I came to Nini’s on Saturday morning and the weekday nurse said, “Have you heard?” I said, “What?” She said, “He killed himself.” I was shocked. I went in to Nini, and she said, “Oh, Lena, oh, Tony’s killed himself.” She didn’t cry. She said, “Such guilt I put on the family, and I might as well confide and tell you everything.” She said Frank, her husband, was cleaning his car in the garage with Frank Jr., and Frank Jr. left to do something and when he came back the garage door was closed and the motor was on. I’m afraid she’ll never get over Tony.

Nina Daly

It’s a sad story. It was the biggest heartbreak. It was terrible. But you see, I don’t dwell on it. I can’t. I think about how much I loved him and how much he meant to me. I still wish he was here.

Brooks Baekeland

It was a beautiful ending—in plastic, too!

The terrible thing was that in his secret heart he always thought that in the end I could save him. Like his mother, he was without fear—and Daddy
would
come, somehow, out of
somewhere,
like Superman. They both believed that. You know, there is no such thing, when there is a child, as a divorce. It’s a contradiction in terms. Until their very last moments—for both of them—I was supposed to burst through a door and save them. But the odds they played against were so enormous that even Superman could not have arrived in time.

Courage they both had, but to the point of folly. They were great romantics. I cannot laugh at them. Who can laugh, for instance, at Zelda Fitzgerald? I mourn because I failed them. I failed their unrealistic marvelous dreams. But the word “unrealistic” is a weasel word to the true romantic, who accords the greatest value to that which really is truly and absolutely impossible. Barbara’s mad audacities always made me feel ashamed of myself—as Zelda’s did Scott Fitzgerald. No wonder in his madness that her son thought her a goddess. He gave himself, too, a minor god’s rank, but that was a faerie geste, on dope. And I have no doubt that—his ear against that cold prison floor as though listening to hoofbeats pursuing him to another world—part of him really did believe that she was waiting for him up, up there, where only Mozart and Bach and champagne and “the beautiful people” would flow in the chiaroscuro of Gustave Doré’s enormous canvases, in eternal round, waiting now for him, too, for this world below had become far too vulgar. Henry Aldrich in that corny radio and television series used to always get a laugh saying, “Coming, Mother!”

If I have shocked you, let me remind you that only laughter clears the vision. Without laughter, there can be no seeing of the truth. Tragedy does not allow laughter. It is pity that does. And I have never seen tragedy in all my short, wasted, eager life—only pity. And I see that everywhere around me, and in the markings of my own hand. That is all I see.

Headline, the
New York Times,
March 21, 1981

I
NMATE
K
ILLS
H
IMSELF IN A
C
ELL AT
R
IKERS

Headline, New York
Daily News,
March 21, 1981

P
LASTICS
H
EIR
W
HO
K
ILLED
M
OM AN
A
PPARENT

S
UICIDE IN
J
AIL
C
ELL

Headline,
Daily Telegraph,
London, March 23, 1981

P
LASTICS
H
EIR
D
EAD IN
J
AIL

Francine du Plessix Gray

When Tony died with this thing of putting a plastic bag over his head, Ethel de Croisset called me—she was in New York at the time—and she said, “Don’t you see the relationship to his stealing the baby food that summer in Italy?” I said no. She said, “Well, he chose a baby’s way of dying, didn’t he? Smothering.”

Ethel Woodward de Croisset

He just went to sleep in his little plastic bag, and I saw this as being perhaps his desire to return to the womb.

Eleanor Ward

When I heard he had killed himself, I thought, What a relief for him, what a blessing—out of the agony at last.

James Reeve

So many of one’s friends seem to have died under peculiar circumstances, one way or another, recently. Mine, anyway. A great friend of mine—and kindred spirits are few and far between—I mean, somebody I could tell anything to, and she me—anyway, she had a house in Greece and she was motoring back to France and all of a sudden she got a heart attack for no reason and died. That was that. Very shocking. In a curious way—it’s sort of animal defense or something—I refused to face it. I just put it out of my mind. I didn’t really sit down and think about her being dead. I just think of her as gone away. One
should
sit down and look it in the eye and face up to the fact.

When I heard Tony had died, I was horrified. But then I put it out of my mind, too. I haven’t really thought about it since.

Gloria Jones

I guess it was John Sargent who told me how Tony had committed suicide, and I thought it was the end of the whole horrible story. But you would never write it that way—it’s too corny. How did he get the plastic bag, I wonder.

Rose Styron

It was the perfect ironic end.

Samuel Parkman Shaw

It seemed to me that it was a perfectly normal end to
his
career. It was a good solution, and a not unclever way of doing it. It took some determination—how to get into the bag and stay there until he suffocated. That’s not a bad trick.

John Rakis

As a result of Tony Baekeland’s suicide, inmates are not allowed to have plastic bags in their possession. Also, the correction officers are now told that when they see an inmate lying fairly still and the blanket is over his head, they really ought to check for signs of breathing. Now, many inmates do this to keep out noise or keep the lights from getting in their eyes; Tony of course put the blanket over his head to cover up his intentions.

From the Final Report of the New York State Commission of Correction Medical Review Board in the Matter of the Death of Antony Baekeland at the Anna M. Kross Center, Rikers Island, December 22
,
1981

Miwa Svinka-Zielinski

Tony never talked about taking his life, never once in all those years. It was a waste, his life. All that time I wasted on that boy! I continued to believe that he could be cured. His disease was Barbara.

Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Nina Daly, June 8, 1981

Elizabeth Blow

When I heard about Tony, I went on thinking about the Baekelands. It gets to be an obsession. One thing I’m convinced of is that they—Brooks and Barbara—always loved each other in spite of her impossible behavior and his philandering.

Brooks Baekeland

A large part of what made Sylvie wish to find her eventual freedom from me was my indestructible worry and concern and sense of responsibility for Barbara. Sylvie’s jealousy always was and still is intense. She admired Barbara! A wiser man than I might have saved all those lives and still kept Sylvie. Without Sylvie, without our son, I did not wish to live. I was asking myself Hamlet’s question hour by hour.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

I became important to Brooks—if you can say important—when I left him. That’s all. I don’t think I was his wife, ever. I suffered all the time because I didn’t exist.
That
was my suffering.

Once, for his birthday, I gave him a very pretty silver frame, and later I went up to his study and what was in the silver frame but a photograph of Barbara! I really collapsed. I was still very much in love and I was expecting his baby. And he said to me, “God, you’re badly brought up! How can you be jealous of someone dead?” He had always carried a picture of Barbara in his wallet. Now he has one of me also. Now, yes.
Oh
yes. Now that I’ve gone, yes.

Even now when I speak about this, I am drained. I’m nothing. They are too heavy! That’s why I left. I didn’t leave because I wanted to have an affair with somebody, I left because I thought, Well, the next one is me—I’m going to die, too.

When Tony died, I had already left Brooks. I think he was in the Grenadines. I know he decided not to go to New York. This is the only part that I can say I did not approve of. He should have gone to New York.

Brooks Baekeland

Now I can—and do—travel and live everywhere in the world with a small satchel that I can carry by hand. Of course if I am asked to dine black-tie, I say no. But then, I don’t consort with those sort of people anymore.

I have, really, no possessions left. That is easy now, unwived. It is women, those nesters, those decorators, those competitors for status symbols, that take us naked men out of the jungle and “civilize” us. Every bachelor, if he isn’t a fairy, soon reverts to savage state. But in fact, I was never much attracted by “the things money can buy.” As everyone knows, the best things are free, or almost free. H. D. Thoreau: “A man is rich in proportion to the things he does not need.” The one exception to that rule is of course women themselves. They bankrupt us all.

Sam Green

Tony left half of his trust fund to the servant family at Miramar who looked after the house—after all, he had spent several cold winters on their hearth. The other half went to Nini.

Letter from Brooks Baekeland to Nina Daly, July 19
,
1981

Brooks Baekeland

My life is almost totally solitary now. I know that I shall end up like my grandfather—a dead leaf blown down the city streets—talking and gesticulating to himself. The object of the interest of a kindly—corrupt!—policeman who finally gets him home. And in the end into his straitjacket. And a straighter one, the grave.

And what was left? Death was no end. Oh, no. It never was. That is why I am talking to you. There is no end. There was no end. There is no end. There will never be an end.

Ethel Woodward de Croisset

When Barbara died, I consolidated my idea of never wanting to see Brooks again. He should never have left her and Tony in such distress. I did see him once after that, in Paris, at the wedding of the child of a friend we had in common. He came and sat beside Virginia Chambers, who was blind and so of course couldn’t see him. But when she realized it was he, she refused to speak to him. He then tried to catch
my
eye—he kept walking up and down the aisle. And
I
certainly cut him dead.

Michael Edwards

I saw Brooks with his new wife at a wedding reception at the Ritz. She was carrying their baby on her back—mind you, in the Ritz! Like a papoose. And he came over to me and said it would be very nice if he could rent my flat again at 45, quai de Bourbon, and I thought that was so extraordinary. I just said it wasn’t available.

Barbara Curteis

The minute Barbara was dead, Brooks had an absolute lust to occupy with Sylvie every place he and Barbara had ever occupied. He even went back to Cadaqués one summer. Missie Harnden wrote me, “I’m longing to run into him here so I can cut him dead in the paseo.”

Brooks Baekeland

I am perfectly indifferent to what people think of me. I do not wish to seem more arrogant than I am, but anybody who is not a nonentity wears the blazonry of his enemies with as much relish as he does that of those who love him. I try only to act out of love—for the very few people I do love. The bond between Barbara and me has survived and always will survive.