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May 6, 2008
Incest & matricide
It has taken 23 years for the Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson book, “Savage Grace,” to reach the screen. The Touchstone division of Simon and Schuster is marking the occasion with a new paperback edition of the disturbing and fascinating account of high society incest and matricide.
The book won the best fact crime award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1985, but I didn’t read it until the new version of the book landed on my desk recently. I can see why E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer provided blurbs for the original hardcover edition — it’s the sort of grisly, ghastly true tale of American privilege gone bad that a novelist would have a hard time selling as a credible piece of fiction.
“Savage Grace” traces the disintegration of Barbara Baekeland and her son Tony during the 1960s and early ’70s as they lived a fast life in Manhattan and Europe hobnobbing with such celebrity friends as James Jones, Salvador Dali and various members of the Astor and Vanderbilt families.
Robins and Aronson use the oral history format so we get a multitude of perspectives on the circumstances leading up to and continuing after Tony stabbed his mother to death in their London apartment on Nov. 17, 1972.
Barbara was divorced from Tony’s father, Brooks Baekeland, who was the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune of his grandfather Leo.
Both Barbara and Tony were swept up in the “la dolce vita” excesses of the 1960s. The addition of drugs and sexual license to their already neurotic personalities paved the way to a disaster that did not surprise people who knew the situation — but who could have stepped in to stop what was probably inevitable?
When it became clear that Tony was gay, Barbara decided to straighten him out (and prepare him for marriage) by having sex with her son — this apparently turned into an ongoing affair that completely unhinged both of them.
Although it is hard to imagine a more sordid story, Robins and Aronson make the pages race by. As the reviewer in The New York Times put it, “(the book) has a mythic quality that echoes Greek tragedy.”
Will this complex personal story work as a movie? Can the brilliant actress Julianne Moore make Barbara someone an audience will want to contemplate for two hours?
We’ll find out when “Savage Grace” opens on May 30.
The story did find a director who seems perfect for the project, Tom Kalin, who handled an equally disturbing tale of high society psychosis and murder in “Swoon,” his impressionistic 1992 account of the Leopold and Loeb case.
Posted by Joe on May 6, 2008 1:43 PM
