Free Ebook Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family, by Natalie Robins, Steven M.L Aronson
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A spellbinding tale of money and madness, incest and matricide, Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks and Barbara Baekeland -- beautiful, rich, worldly -- and their handsome, gentle son, Tony. Alternately neglected and smothered by his parents, he was finally driven to destroy the whole family in a violent chain of events.
Savage Grace unfolds against a glamorous international background (New York, London, Paris, Italy, Spain); features a nonpareil cast of characters (including Salvador Dalí, James Jones, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and European nobility); and tells the doomed Baekelands' story through remarkably candid interviews, private letters, and diaries, not to mention confidential hospital, State Department, and prison documents. A true-crime classic, it exposes the envied lives of the rich and beautiful, and brilliantly illuminates the darkest corners of the American Dream.
- Sales Rank: #637888 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Touchstone
- Published on: 2007-12-18
- Released on: 2007-12-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.50" w x 5.50" l, 1.03 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"An American fable of enduring resonance...a macabre piece of Americana." -- Newsweek
"The true and harrowing story of an Upper East Side New York family whose cultivation of taste, pursuit of social distinction, and fashionable expatriatism led its members to drugs, to apparent incest, to murder, and to suicide." -- E. L. Doctorow
"Jet-set expatriates in a murder case -- how fast we turn the pages. Savage Grace has to be the best oral history to come out since Edie." -- Norman Mailer
Fascinating...A family saga with plot twists worthy of Dynasty or perhaps just Tennessee Williams -- it has a mythic quality that echoes Greek tragedy." -- The New York Times
"A classic...a chilling wedding of Mommie Dearest and Long Day's Journey into Night." - The Washington Post
"The sizzling, spellbinding story of the rich and powerful Baekeland clan, who owed their money to Bakelite, the original plastic. A snake pit of love triangles, sexual betrayal, and incest, culminating in the crime of crimes, matricide. Features a dazzling cross section of society, literature, and the arts." -- Daily News (New York)
"Overwhelmingly compelling.... This tale of aberrant Beautiful People is horrific and potent." -- Boston Herald
"An epic portrait of a family.... The Baekelands, on a collision course with disaster, typify the American dream gone sour.... A sobering and sordid story, with the incestuous mother and son as its stars." -- The Milwaukee Journal
"A story of spectacular decadence -- of money, madness, and matricide....The cast of brilliant characters includes James Jones, William Styron, Patricia Neal, Alastair Reid, Brendan Gill and Francine du Plessix Gray....Seldom has there been so devastating an exposure of consequences, for the most sophisticated people, of failure in the simplest duties of love." -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
"The story is evoked with arresting detail...the power of horror." -- Time
About the Author
Natalie Robins's books include Copeland's Cure, The Girl Who Died Twice, and Alien Ink. She lives in New York City.
Steven M. L. Aronson is the author of HYPE. A former book editor and publisher, he lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The Crime of Crimes
Friday, November 17, 1972, dawned hazy and cloudy, but by three o'clock the sun was shining with unaccustomed benevolence for London. The leaves in Cadogan Square had turned and were dropping in the gardens. All her life -- and she was only fifty when she died, a little later that afternoon -- Barbara Baekeland was partial to fall colors. Even in summer, when everyone would be wearing white, she persisted in dressing like an autumn leaf. The rust-colored skirts and bronze shoes she favored suited her beauty -- the bonfire of red hair, the milkmaid skin. A friend had once said of her that she had the quality of intelligent flamboyance.
Whether in Boston, where she was born to a family of modest means called Daly -- or Hollywood, where once upon a time she was given a screen test -- or New York and Paris, where she created salons for herself -- or such resorts as Long Island's East Hampton, Ansedonia on Italy's Argentario, and Cadaqués on Spain's Costa Brava, where she was forever taking houses in season and out -- or, finally, in London, where she had acquired a penthouse duplex in Chelsea -- Barbara Baekeland could be counted on to turn heads.
"London ends by giving one absolutely everything one asks," Henry James wrote in his preface to The Golden Bowl; the city was, in his opinion, "the most possible form of life."
"London with its six-times-breathed-over air seems such a dream," Barbara Baekeland wrote to a friend in New York that November Friday. "Had Le Tout London here last night My oeuvre has had a great success -- everybody loved what I've done to the flat."
The very first thing one saw on entering the apartment was the portrait of a beautiful boy holding a large beetle. The subject was Barbara Baekeland's son, Antony, who had sat for the fashionable portraitist Alejo Vidal-Quadras one afternoon in Paris when he was eleven or twelve. Tony was twenty-six now, and something of a painter himself.
He also liked to write. In Paris, the novelist James Jones had taken an interest in his work, and now he was being encouraged by the poet Robert Graves. Graves was a neighbor on the island of Mallorca, from which Tony had come back to London with his mother in September.
The Baekelands had always had the freedom to travel at will. Tony's great-grandfather, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, had invented the first totally successful plastic, Bakelite -- "the material of a thousand uses." Tony's father, Brooks Baekeland, liked to say, "Thanks to my grandfather, I have what James Clavell has called 'fuck-you money.' Therefore I need not please or seek to please -- astonish, astound, dazzle, or be approved of by -- anyone."
Brooks Baekeland had movie-star good looks. He also possessed what many of his peers considered to be one of the finest minds of his generation. A brilliant amateur land analyst, in the early 1960s he had conceived, planned, and executed a parachute jump into the Vilcabamba mountain fastness of Peru in search of a lost Inca city. He never found the city but his exploits filled most of an issue of National Geographic. Somebody had once described him as an intellectual Errol Flynn.
Tony's father was now living in France -- with, everyone said, Tony's girlfriend.
At one o'clock on Friday, November 17th -- "Fridays are always suspect, don't you think?" she had once said -- Barbara Baekeland called out goodbye to Tony, leaned down to stroke her Siamese cat, Worcester, affectionately called Mr. Wuss, and set out to keep a lunch date she had made at her party the night before with an old friend from Spain, Missie Harnden, who was also now living in London, in a rented house on nearby Chapel Street.
Barbara Baekeland arrived in a particularly extravagant mood and launched at once into a postmortem of her party. Missie Harnden's seventeen-year-old son Michael, whom everyone had always called Mishka, cooked the lunch -- filet mignon wrapped in bacon, green beans, and a tossed salad -- which he served with a Spanish red wine. They ate in the big kitchen-dining room, whose walls were covered with the black, blue, and green abstract paintings of Arshile Gorky, to whom the house's owner had once been married.
"Barbara's theme that day was Tony," Mishka Harnden recalls. "Her theme was persistently Tony -- how marvelous he was, how talented. Everything was always absolutely rosy and happy -- 'Tony adores London, Tony's mad about the flat.' "
At three-thirty, Barbara Baekeland got up to leave, thanking the Harndens for the "marvelous lunch" and mentioning that Tony was cooking dinner for her that evening.
At approximately seven o'clock the telephone rang in the house on Chapel Street. Missy Harnden answered. It was the Chelsea Police Station inquiring as to the time of Barbara Baekeland's arrival and departure that afternoon. They would not say why they wanted this information; all they would say was that something had happened. But a few seconds later Missy Harnden heard herself being asked: "How well did you know the deceased?" She was too shocked to answer, and handed the phone to Mishka, who had just come into the room.
At the end of the conversation the police requested that they both come down to the station to answer a few additional questions. Missy Harnden could not bring herself to go, so Mishka went alone. "It was very clean, very sterile," he remembers. "A quite natty English police station."
Once there, he would find out what had happened.
Detective Superintendent Kenneth Brett, Retired
I was called to the address of Antony Baekeland and his mother, but cannot remember how the call was made -- by the ambulance service or other agency. On arrival I was told that a maid, believed to be Spanish, had run from the house because of a quarrel between Antony Baekeland and his mother. The flat was not disordered. I saw in the kitchen the body of Mrs. Baekeland. She was dressed in normal clothing -- I seem to remember it was a dress. She was on her back. Very little blood was seen. There was a knife on an adjoining worktop or draining board. This was a kitchen knife and showed signs of blood.
There was a small wound visible in the victim's clothing in the region of the heart. I recollect that death was caused by a severed main artery. A doctor certified she was dead, and arrangements were made for the body to be removed to a mortuary after examination by a forensic officer. The only other sign of violence -- which was discovered at the postmortem -- was a bruise above the right ear, but this did not have any real significance as it could have been caused by the victim's fall to the ground.
Antony Baekeland was, on my arrival, in a bedroom, sitting on the bed, using the telephone to phone, I believe, a Chinese restaurant to order a meal. I cannot remember the exact conversation I had with him, but Antony Baekeland was intimating that he was not responsible for the crime. I have a vague recollection that he may have mentioned that his grandmother was responsible. He was completely unconcerned.
You know, he considered himself an artist, and we did find a rather large painting, said to have been done by him. It was the weirdest thing imaginable -- we just couldn't make out what it was.
I seem to remember that his father was not called immediately as we had to discover his whereabouts. Mr. Baekeland came either the next day or even later -- from France.
Antony Baekeland was taken to the Chelsea Police Station. He was interviewed, and much of what he said was incoherent, rambling. I cannot remember what his statement contained, except the opening sentence was so unusual that it has stuck in my mind. He said it all started when he was aged either three or five and he fell off his pogo stick.
Pamela Turner
I was the service tenant at 81 Cadogan Square, but I was not on the premises when he stabbed her. When I got home I saw the ambulance outside and I wondered what was going on. Then the ambulance men came down from the top floor and asked me if I knew Tony and I said I did. I used to pass the time of day with him -- you know, have a chat -- although his mother was always very protective of him. And they said would I talk to him on the telephone while they got the police. And I rang him from my phone and had a long conversation with him and he told me how he had been out for lunch with his grandmother. Well, I knew she was in New York. He was quite calm, quite lucid, and chatted to me -- he was always polite and nice, I never thought of him as a violent person -- and in the meantime the ambulance men on their phone in the ambulance got the police. Tony had called for the ambulance himself. And then the police came and that was that.
Tony told me his grandmother had stabbed Barbara. I loved Barbara's mother, Mrs. Daly. I remember her as a dear little old lady quite happily going up all those six flights of stairs! She used to come here and take over, like the head of the family.
Whenever Barbara rang me from the States, she'd say, "Hello, this is Barbara of MGM." She told me that she worked in public relations for MGM, but I don't know whether she really did or not. She would ring occasionally, mainly to tell me she was coming to England and would I get milk, etc., in for her. I also looked after all her plants, merely because I am extremely fond of house plants, and in fact I still have a weeping fig of hers.
She was a very beautiful, flamboyant woman. I particularly remember a black gown she wore, a very low-necked black gown. She wore it with a huge diamond crucifix dangling from a chain. She was magnificent, and she went out a lot. I suppose the most terrible memory I have is of the plain wooden box being brought down the stairs by the policemen, and opening the main doors for them to pass through. I understand that the next day was her wedding anniversary.
The night of the stabbing, I got concerned about Mr. Wuss -- you know, the cat. There was a policeman guarding the flat and I asked him if he had seen a cat. He told me, "There's no cat." But I kn...
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
"I wanted to kill him with a brick"
By MJS
I first read this book when it originally came out. I was in high school and like many teenagers I was prepared to see parents as the source of most teenage troubles. After reading this book, I promptly wrote my parents a nice letter about what swell people they were. I was that grateful not to have had Brooks and Barbara Baekeland for parents.
This is the rare book that proved even better than I remembered when I reread it last month. It starts with the murder of Barbara Baekeland by her son then goes back in time to beginnings of the Baekeland fortune through the passionate but ill-fated marriage of Brooks and Barbara until it catches up with the murder and the sad denouement of Tony's life. As one reviewer here has noted, this is not a traditional narrative but an oral history. The transcripts of interviews are presented without comment - very much like Jean Stein's great Edie and Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil - and the speakers reveal far more about themselves than any narrative could.
If there is a villain in this story, for me it wasn't Tony Baekeland, who clearly suffered from serious mental illness but his father Brooks Baekeland. Rarely have I come across a character in fiction or nonfiction who made me want to slap him so hard or so often. Early on one former friend of the Baekelands' talks about wanting to kill Brooks in the street with a brick. By the end of the book you may, like me, find this to be a perfectly reasonable response because Brooks is a piece of work. In fact, he's a complete jerk. If I'd been Tony's lawyer I'd have used the fact that Tony had the opportunity to kill his father yet didn't as Exhibit A in the fact that Tony was insane. Whether he's yammering on about how much he was like his brilliant grandfather, complaining about the fact that Tony couldn't stick with anything (this from a writer who only managed to write one short story and didn't finish his PhD!) or basically abandoning Tony after he's released from Broadmoor, Brooks Baekeland is a loathsome individual. His blatant homophobia and sheer lack of compassion will take your breath away. Other characters come across as clueless or careless but Brooks is downright diabolical in his self-absorption.
As an evocation of a time, a certain type of ultra-privileged couple (the sort with artistic pretensions but little talent or commitment) and a mind boggling selfishness, Savage Grace is a book to read and reread. It's suited for True Crime and biography fans. As noted, if you don't like oral histories you probably won't like it - there is very little narrative holding the interviews together. When the author wants to describe Riker's Island, she presents her description as an interview, for example. If you enjoy hearing the story from the mouths of those who lived it, Savage Grace is a book you won't soon forget.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Confusing and various viewpoints
By margaret elahwal
This is a very interesting case ALTHOUGH I'm not fond of the various voices in the book. I personally do not like such an approach wherein the author flips back and forth between various family friends and relatives to unfold the story.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Savage Grace
By Morag Baillie
I saw the movie first and found it very disturbing. But it was interesting and I had to go to Google to find out what happened to the son after what he did to his mother. That just further intrigued me so I had to read the book.
I thought the book was good. I would have preferred if it had not been written in the form of letters and diaries, the whole book was put together in that way, it was disjointed for me.
However I am glad I bought it as it did tell the whole story, and the pictures in the center were very enjoyable.
The book, as always, tells a much more consise story of what happened in that family. It's an American Tragedy really. It got me to thinking that matriarchal incest is probably much more popular than reported.
It was a sad, tragic tale, of a mother who was a narcist, a father who was emotionally absent, and the boy they turned into a monster. They designed him, as surely as Dr. Frankenstein made his monster.
Even though Tony ended up horribly insane, my heart went out to that little boy that was so warped and so angry that he reacted in the way, finally, that he almost was hard wired to. I was surprised that he took his grandma out too later on, but with so much anger I guess she got the after shock.
I would recommend anyone to read this book, but only if you enjoy reading about the dark side of families. The movie was good, but ended after Tony did what he did to his mother, there was too much left unsaid, the movie ended before their saga did. So if you have to pick one, pick the book.
There is such a thing as too much money, too much idle time, and incest between mother and son, and it is a combustable combination.
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