Savage Grace (Movie Tie-in): The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family [Paperback]

Natalie Robins (Author), Steven M Aronson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 2008

A spellbinding tale of money and madness, incest and matricide, Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune; his beautiful wife, Barbara; and their handsome, gentle son, Tony, who destroyed 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 and 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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; Mti Rep edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416571108
• ISBN-13: 978-1416571100
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I wanted to kill him with a brick", April 29, 2008

By 

MJS "Constant Reader" (New York, United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Savage Grace (Movie Tie-in): The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family (Paperback)

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.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A harrowing tale of mother love and excess, January 11, 2008

By 

Angie K. Long "LadyWriter" (Sweet Home Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family (Paperback)

I enjoy true crime tales, especially those that take place among the "beautiful people." Here you have the disintegration of the Baekeland family through the generations. Grandfather created Bake-Lite and made a fortune; son spent it on National Geographic travels. His beautiful wife focused on constant social climbing from her very plebian roots and practiced a twisted "smother love" on their child...and the two spent a great deal of time and energy fighting (sometimes physically) with one another...a real love-hate relationship. Their only son ends up a talented, bright but deeply disturbed young man who commits one murder and attempts to kill a second person - both of whom happen to be family members. I found the book, which compiles letters to and from the featured players along with interviews with many members, friends and aquaintances, very hard to put down. A chilling true story.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN ALL-TIME CLASSIC OF THE TRUE CRIME GENRE, March 13, 2008

By 

skilletlicker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family (Paperback)

An industrious European peasant immigrates to America at the end of the 19th century, invents plastic, becomes a gazillionaire and leaves his heirs a terrible lot of money. A couple of generations later, the fortune begets Brooks Baekeland, a wannabe-genius writer/adventurer/snob, who "marries down" when he makes middle-class Barbara Daly his wife. Barbara's extraordinary beauty is her ticket into the exclusive terrarium of the super-rich. She embraces social and talent-climbing like a religion and, together with Brooks, lives a loud, indulgent, hedonistic life without parameters. Their tempestuous marriage produces one child, Tony, who grows up to eclipse his father in terms of raw talent and then, later, to stab his mother to death with a kitchen knife in a London flat.

Theme-wise, this book has everything - trashy money, smothering mothers, hyper-competitive fathers and sons, closeted homosexuality, sexual thrill-seeking, jet-setting, incest, murder and madness - it's Dominick Dunne meets Oresteia. It's the greatest book you'll ever take to the beach. It's the book that keeps you up all night. It's one of the most scandalous, salacious stories ever told - and it's all true. But the real accomplishment of the book is the format. In lieu of the straightforward black and white factual narration of most true crime books, Steven M. L. Aronson and Natalie Robins collected and artfully collated the remembered vignettes, fragmented glimpses, personal impressions, and eyewitness testimonies of family members, friends, acquaintances and survivors of the Baekeland's dark world. It's a looser but more compelling design that lets the colorful, lively voices of Baekeland contemporaries tell the story all the way to the terrifying, hair-raising, murderous destination. The denouement is at once shocking and perfectly ironic. Two decades after Savage Grace was first published, I am still turning friends on to it and still getting breathless, gushing phone calls about it. Can't wait for the movie.