Marlene Wagman-Geller

       In the opening scene of The Graduate, a family friend offered Benjamin Braddock advice, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics.” While Mr. McGuire suggested the synthetic held the key to the success for the family of the inventor of plastic, the substance molded a fate that could have sprung from the hand of Hades.

        A saga of madness and mayhem had its genesis in the early years of the twentieth century. Leo Hendrik Baekeland, an immigrant Belgium chemist, invented Bakelite from his barn in Yonkers, New York. He referred to his brainchild as “the material of a thousand uses,” and it became the staple of everything from telephones, toilets, artificial limbs, to chunky bracelets popularized by Coco Chanel. Bakelite also played a crucial role in the creation of the atomic bomb. Leo appeared on the 1924 cover of Time Magazine and thus began a dynasty of deep pockets.

     The 1960s desperate housewife who would make Wisteria Lane seem a drama-free zone was Boston born Barbara Daly. From her parents, she inherited her beauty-titian hair and chiseled features; however, her DNA may have carried psychological instability. Her mother, Nini, had suffered a mental breakdown before her daughter’s birth; when Barbara was ten, her father, Frank, poisoned himself in his garage with exhaust fumes as his son, Frank Jr., looked on from a window. He followed his father’s lead and died when he crashed into a tree.

        When Barbara was in her late teens, mother and daughter took up residence in Manhattan’s Delmonico Hotel, a cost financed by Frank’s life-insurance payout. The address was one of the city’s most expensive, but they hoped it would provide Barbara a fertile hunting ground for an eligible husband. To their mutual distress, a relationship with John Jacob Astor failed to lead to holy matrimony.

       Barbara was one of New York City’s most beautiful women and appeared on the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The magazine exposure led to a Hollywood screen test that she hoped would make her a silver screen siren. Her aspiration did not pan out though it did lead to a friendship with fellow aspiring actress Cornelia “Dickie” Baekeland who introduced her to her younger brother.

      By the third generation, the plastic fortune had produced Brooks Baekeland, who had been a brilliant student before he had abandoned physics for writing just before he had completed his Ph.D. at Columbia. He became a writer who never wrote, a fact that filled him with self-loathing. He was strikingly handsome, entertaining at dinner parties, and a possessor of a dazzling bank account. Brooks boasted he had “f*** you money,” a variation of his grandmother’s adage, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.” Brooks was the poster boy for the evils of easy money, and he was intimate with a number of the Seven Deadly Sins.

       Although Barbara’s IQ never matched Brooks’, she was savvy enough to lure him into matrimony by informing him she was pregnant. However, besides the non-existent baby, she kept another secret: she shared her parents’ mental instability. Shortly before the couple’s meeting, Barbara had been a patient of the celebrated New York psychiatrist Foster Kennedy. Later the doctor revealed that through their therapy sessions, his patient had unnerved him to such an extent he hoped she would never have a child. A short while later the phantom pregnancy became a real one and produced Anthony Baekeland. 

     Barbara raised Anthony, who they called Tony, in a fashion that placed the letter “s” before the word “mother.” By the time of her son’s birth, her relationship with her husband was strained, and she felt her son would serve as a marital anchor. Brooks’ parenting was mainly to keep his only child at arm’s length. Part of his negativity towards his wife and son stemmed from his own sense of impotence; he was aware he was the under-motivated, over-leisured scion of a grandfather in whose accomplished footsteps he could never follow.

     Ostensibly, the Baekelands enjoyed an enchanted life, and their social milieu was the moneyed, American dolce vita set; Barbara proved a nimble social climber. She became a culture-vulture, entertaining the celebrated in her lavish home. The crème de la crème were drawn to their lavish dinner parties, lured by their famous forebear and his beautiful wife, hosted in the enormous wood-paneled living room on the Upper East Side. The seating cards held the names Salvador Dali, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, who came in equal measure for finest of food and risqué after- dinner dessert. At one gathering, the men hid behind a screen, obscured from the waist up, and removed their trousers; wives had to guess which bottom belonged to which husband.

      One of the points the warring Baekelands agreed on was their belief Tony was a child prodigy, and he was the centerpiece of their strange soirees. On one occasion, Barbara and Brooks had Tony read aloud from the Marquis de Sade’s erotic writings. Another time Brook described how his son had pulled the wings off a fly to see how it would affect its balance. While he thought it showed his son carried the scientific gene of his great-grandfather, most viewed it as sadism, and several posh schools expelled him.

      Battling boredom, the Baekelands relocated to Europe and became jet-set gypsies, hoping on the continent to attain the happiness that had eluded them back home. They rented villa after villa in fashionable resorts, and wherever they hung their hats, Barbara was careful to leave in full view a bowl full of visiting cards, carefully arranged so others could see that James Joyce, the Duchess de Croy, or the Prince de Lippe had been their guests. In some of their residences, Greta Garbo would pop in for drinks, and in Cap d’Antibes, in the South of France, they were pleased their neighbor was Freddy Heineken, the Dutch beer baron. Guest William Styron was enchanted with Tony and pronounced him a young Adonis. Tony often had play dates at various beaches with celebrity children such as Princess Yasmin, daughter of Rita Hayworth and the Aga Khan. He amused himself at the seashore by playing with crabs, which for him meant tearing them apart. 

       A teenaged Tony sought release from his psychological torment and took to painting; his portraits often displayed a decapitated Barbara. His parents remained in denial until, on a vacation from boarding school, he informed them he was homosexual; they reacted as if they had touched a live wire. Brooks was appalled and began to refer to Tony as “her son.” In 1967, the family was vacationing in the Spanish town of Cadaques where Tony met Jake Cooper, a handsome young Australian. He was known by the epithet Black Jake and lived in an abandoned farm with a hippie entourage who were into magic mushrooms and black magic. The twenty-one-year-old Tony was hypnotically drawn to his circle and readily bought their friendship when he paid for their drugs. He also fell in love with the leather-clad Cooper. Frantic, Barbara convinced him to return with her to their home in Switzerland. Mother and son were stopped at the border because Tony did not have his passport, and in the ensuing scene, replete with Barbara kicking and spitting at the immigration officials, the police arrested them, and they spent the night in jail. As they were led off in handcuffs, Barbara made a chilling remark, “Here you are darling, at last manacled to Mommy.”

     The family dynamics were a Petri dish where unsavory elements were fermenting. One of its ingredients was Brooks’ wandering eye, and in 1963, he fell in love with a British diplomat’s daughter fifteen years his junior. When he asked for a divorce, his wife’s response was to take an overdose of pills. She survived, and her husband gave up the girl, not wanting to be complicit in his wife’s demise. To prove she was still attractive to other men, and hence make her husband take notice, Barbara had her own affair with a Spanish physicist. However, this backfired when Brooks offered her a generous annual allowance if she would grant him a divorce now that she had her own lover. She declined and spiraled even further into an emotional abyss.

         Tony, still grappling with his sexual preference, brought home a French girl, Sylvie, who he had also met in Cadaques. Barbara was ecstatic and repeatedly told the young woman if she married into the Baekeland family, she would be an heiress. Sylvie was happy to oblige; however, she set her sights on the father rather than the son, and Brooks was happy to oblige. When Barbara discovered the affair, she underwent another botched suicide. Sylvie, frantic Brooks would give her up, also attempted to take her life. When both his wife and lover survived, Brooks chose his mistress.

          The betrayal fractured his wife and son’s ever-fragile psyches, and in the summer of 1969, they ended up in Majorca, in a home loaned to them by an Austrian Archduke. The estate was a cliffside villa where the woman who had charmed the heirs to the Astor and Baekeland fortunes seduced another wealthy man-her son. She embarked on the incestuous relationship in the hope of curing his homosexuality. The role of acting as his mother’s de facto husband played havoc with Tony, and his behavior became increasingly bizarre. Under these conditions, Mother Dearest and son rented a penthouse in the tony section of Cadogan Square in Chelsea, London. At this point, it was difficult for the Baekelands to lower the bar on family dysfunction: they had dappled in adultery, divorce, drugs, and incest, yet more horror lurked.

       On an afternoon in 1972, Barbara had lunch with her Chelsea neighbor, a Russian princess, and when she returned home, she became embroiled in a ferocious fight with her twenty-six-year-old son with whom she had maintained her Oedipal relationship. An enraged Tony released his pent-up fury and plunged a knife into his mother’s chest. Afterwards, he made two phone calls-one for an order of Chinese food, the other for an ambulance. By the time the paramedics arrived, Barbara Baekeland was deceased. Tony told the police, “It was horrible. I held her hand and she would not look at me. Then she died.” He claimed the murderer was Nini Daly, his grandmother, who was currently in New York. Barbara’s Siamese cat, Mr. Wuss, was cowering under the bed. When Brooks learned of the mummy-murder, he told Sylvie, “She’s again found a way to get at me.”

       The heir was found guilty of manslaughter with diminished mental capacity and sent to Broadmoor, a Dickensian hospital for the criminally insane. When friends came to visit, he always inquired after his mother’s health. After several years, a well-connected family friend, who believed Tony’s issues had died along with his mother, orchestrated his release. Brooks, who had married Sylvie with whom he had a son, believed his first-born should remain permanently behind bars. Tony returned to the States and went to live with his Grandmother Nini. Tony spent most of his time indoors, playing morbid music in front of a shrine to Barbara; it consisted of candles and her photographs with her ashes as the centerpiece. Six days after he had moved in, he opened the door to the maid and told her to call an ambulance-he had stabbed his eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. He had wanted to have sex with his grandmother, and upon her refusal, he slashed her eight times. A judge sentenced him with attempted murder and sent him to Rikers Island Prison where prisoners preyed on the trust-fund inmate. Denied bail, he returned to his cell and “the material of a 1,000 uses” found one more. Tony died-either from suicide or murder-from suffocation brought about by a plastic bag that covered his face-the material behind the fortune that had made the Baekelands one of America’s most envied, and most tragic, families. Their story bears witness to the sour side of la dolce vita. Brooks never wrote the great American novel, but his life with Barbara could be encapsulated by the title of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Beautiful and the Damned.