years ago. And after this he wrote inviting me to come visit them where they were living, somewhere in Brittany, and he described the house and how wonderful it was and he listed the people who were going to be there. This was, you know, just after his wife had died!
Gloria Jones
Jim and I were getting ready to go to the opening of Beauford Delaney’s art show and the doorbell rang and Brooks just walked in and we were very cold to him. He said that Tony had killed the woman he loved. He absolutely said that, quote unquote. We were stunned. I said, “Please don’t talk to me,” you know, and he left.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
I was there. What happened is Brooks and I lived in the same part of Paris as the Joneses—the Île Saint-Louis—and we were taking a walk on the quais and Gloria was at her window, on the quai d’Orléans. She stared at Brooks, who stared back at her, and she closed her window. Nobody rang her bell. Brooks was not silly enough to go ring her bell. You see, everybody would like to have made a grande geste.
Rosemary Rodd Baldwin
When Barbara was killed, I borrowed everything you can imagine to get back to England. I was living in Turkey, and I got back as soon as I could. My daughter Mandy took me down to the prison. I’d never been to that one. Well, after all, I had married a man who was in jail in Turkey, so I knew about prisons, but that’s another story altogether. So I went to see Tony and there he was. Suddenly he looked up and for a moment there was a flash of this old Tony from Ansedonia—of happy days.
Let me tell you, a more normal boy you never saw. Once we went sailing with my daughter Jinty, the one he loved so much, and my son-in-law, Hugo Money-Coutts, sailing from Porto Santo Stefano in a small boat called a Fifer, and on a small boat you really see people how they are. Tony had his guitar with him, and we stopped in the middle of the sea—in the middle of the Mediterranean near Taranto—and he played all night and everybody was so happy. Tony behaved like an absolute angel, an absolute normal absolute angel.
Brixton was the first prison I’d ever been in where you have to talk to somebody behind glass, and we were given fifteen minutes and I found it terribly difficult to talk for fifteen minutes and I was getting desperate, and suddenly I said, “Tony, has your father been over to see you?” And he said, “Yes. Yes he has.” Which wasn’t true. And he brought a comb out of his pocket and he was bending the teeth of the comb, and I realized it had been a mistake to ask him that. So then I burst into tears. And he looked at me and I said, “Well, never mind, Tony, it’ll soon be over. You’ll see—you’ll be out and you’ll come and stay with me in Turkey.”
Richard Hare
Nini said please write to the poor boy, his father won’t go and see him, blah blah blah. This was before Brooks did go finally, I think. Anyhow, Anne felt sorry for him and wrote him a letter, a very careful letter. After all, we’d had some wonderful times at Barbara’s. She had had a lot of exposure on two continents, you know, and she knew everyone attractive and interesting. Dalí came frequently with his puma cub or his pet tiger or baby leopard or whatever it was—he was apparently a friend from Cadaqués. And I remember meeting somebody called the Thane of Cawdor there, which was sort of amusing. He really was the Thane of Cawdor—as in Macbeth .
Letter from Anne Hare to Antony Baekeland, Undated
New York
Dear Tony,
This is an awfully difficult letter to write, and I do hope that you will understand if I do not express myself with much finesse. I loved your mother very much, but that feeling did not stop with her, it very definitely included you. I’m sure you are going through agonies of remorse so I won’t dwell on that, only the positive things.
Richard and I want to keep in touch with you. That is the primary purpose of writing. Even with all the ugliness, we remember