A Belgian chemist working alone in a makeshift laboratory in Yonkers, New York, filed a patent in July 1907 for a moldable solid resin made from phenol and formaldehyde. It was the first plastic ever produced entirely from synthetic components, with no molecular predecessor in the natural world. He called it Bakelite, and the fortune it generated would pass through four generations of his family over 74 years. The chemist’s great-grandson, a schizophrenic man named Anthony Baekeland, stabbed his mother through the heart with a kitchen knife in a luxury Chelsea apartment on November 17, 1972, then sat down and called a Chinese restaurant to order takeout.
Nine years later, on March 20, 1981, the same great-grandson was found dead in a cell on Rikers Island, suffocated by an ordinary plastic shopping bag he had placed over his head. A fortune built on the invention of industrial plastic ended with an heir killed by that invention. Between the patent and the plastic bag, the Baekeland family produced a Nobel-level chemist, a dilettante heir who dismissed psychiatry as quackery, a velvet-class mother who tried to treat her son’s sexuality with increasingly extreme methods, and a son whose untreated schizophrenia destroyed everyone around him. Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born on November 14 in Ghent, Belgium, the son of a shoemaker named Charles Baekeland and a housemaid named Rosalia Merchie.
He earned a doctorate with highest honors from the University of Ghent at twenty-one, married Céline Swarts, and emigrated to the United States in 1889. His first fortune came from photography. He invented Velox, a light-sensitive paper that could be developed under artificial light instead of sunlight. It was a revolutionary and convenient medium for amateur photographers.
He sold the company to George Eastman of Kodak in 1899 for $750,000, with Baekeland personally receiving nearly $215,000, a substantial fortune by the standards of that era. Using the proceeds, he bought Snug Rock, an estate in Yonkers, and built a private laboratory where he could enjoy what he called the luxury of not being interrupted in his favorite work. A non-compete clause in the Kodak deal barred him from photographic research for twenty years. So he turned instead to a chemical puzzle that had defeated others before him: the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde.
German chemists had experimented with this combination decades earlier and abandoned it as unworkable chaos. Baekeland insisted on trying anyway. In July 1907, he filed his patent for a controllable process producing a solid, indefinitely durable resin. He named it Bakelite.
Its importance was simple. It was the first plastic made from purely synthetic components, genuinely new under the sun. The commercial implications were enormous. Bakelite could be molded into nearly any shape, resisted heat and electricity, and was cheap to produce at scale.
By the 1920s, it was used in telephone housings, radio cabinets, electrical insulators, billiard balls, jewelry, kitchen utensils, firearm components, and finally components in the atomic bomb program. By the time of Baekeland’s death, the material was being produced at a rate of roughly 175,000 tons annually and used in more than 15,000 different products. Baekeland founded General Bakelite in 1910. In 1922, he merged it with two competing resin companies to form Bakelite Corporation, cementing his control over the nascent plastics industry.
By the time of his death, he held more than 100 patents, received the Perkin Medal and the Franklin Medal, and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Plastics Hall of Fame. But the fortune had been built, and the man who built it was about to discover that building wealth and passing on the discipline that produced it are entirely different matters. George Washington Baekeland, Leo’s son and heir, worked at Bakelite Corporation from 1923 onward but had no desire to manage it. Contemporary accounts describe friction between father and son over money and the direction of the company.
In 1939, at age seventy-five and reportedly at George’s insistence, Leo sold Bakelite Corporation to Union Carbide for approximately $16. 5 million, a sum worth between $200 and $350 million in today’s currency. The sale transformed the Baekeland name from an inventor’s self-made fortune into multi-generational capital, the kind of money that insulates its holders from all ordinary consequences and ultimately corrodes them. Retirement did not suit Leo.
He became increasingly eccentric, spending winters at an estate in Coconut Grove, Florida, and behaving in ways his family found baffling, including walking fully clothed into the swimming pool to cool his body, explaining to anyone who would listen that evaporation is a cooling process. He grew reclusive and spiritually distant from the family his wealth had made. He died of a stroke at a sanatorium in Beacon, New York, on February 23, 1944, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. George’s marriage to Cornelia Fitch Middlebrook produced three children, including a daughter named Cornelia and a son named George Middleton Baekeland, known for the rest of his life as Brooks.
The marriage collapsed in the mid-1930s when George’s wife fell in love with a married man of the velvet class. The divorce, in which she gave up custody of the children, was an early sign that the emotional instability distinguishing later generations of the family was already present in the second generation. Those who knew the family described George himself as stern and moody, skilled with his hands, but entirely incompetent in matters of emotion and the heart. The family’s documented psychological fragility extended further.
Brooks’s sister Cornelia later married a Swiss-born investment banker named Hans Ditesheim, who committed suicide in March 1961, despairing over his declining health, by jumping from the roof of a building he owned in the Bronx. Brooks Baekeland, by all accounts, was spectacularly talented and spectacularly lost. A gifted student, he began doctoral studies in physics at Columbia University before abandoning them to focus on writing, a career he claimed to pursue for the rest of his life without producing a single completed, published novel. He inherited what he liked to describe, quoting a novelist, as the kind of money that meant he never needed to please anyone, seek anyone’s approval, astonish anyone, or impress anyone.
His only verified period of achievement came in exploration. In 1963, Brooks co-led an expedition to the Vilcabamba mountain range in Peru, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the New York Zoological Society. The team parachuted onto a remote plateau at 10,500 feet in the Andes and spent about three months cutting 150 miles on foot, by raft, and by canoe between the Apurímac and Urubamba rivers, searching for traces of Inca gold and lost cities. Brooks wrote the expedition report himself for National Geographic magazine.
Decades later, he recalled the ordeal as a nightmare. The expedition remains the only clear, externally confirmed accomplishment of his adult life. He could parachute into a lost world and survive three months in the jungle, yet he could not finish a novel, maintain his marriage, or pay for his son’s psychiatric treatment. The contrast between physical courage in Peru and moral cowardice in everything that followed is the central truth of Brooks Baekeland’s biography.
The courage was real, and so was the cruelty, and both existed in the same man without contradiction. The wealth that funded his adventures also funded his right to walk away from anything that bored him, including fatherhood. Those who knew him described him as arrogant, charming, and cold. He later wrote about his wife in a novelist’s style he never achieved in any other writing, describing her as a wild animal and a glowing, flaming lioness.
These descriptions carry an unmistakable tone of a man admiring his wife’s beauty the way one might admire a dangerous animal in a cage. He recounted with evident pleasure a physical fight in a hotel bathroom, in which he threw Barbara to the ground and put his foot on her chest while she sank her teeth into his leg. The anecdote was told as black comedy, revealing how marital violence was treated within the family story as a kind of thrill rather than a crisis. Barbara Daly was born on September 28, 1921, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Frank James Daly and Nina Lillian Fraser Daly, known to everyone as Nini.
Nini had suffered a nervous breakdown years before Barbara’s birth, meaning the psychological instability that would later engulf Barbara and her son had already touched the previous generation. In January 1933, when Barbara was eleven, her father committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide from his car’s exhaust in the family garage. It was reportedly arranged to look like an accident so the family could collect his life insurance policy. The impact on eleven-year-old Barbara was the trauma that shaped her later life.
The loss of her father to a staged and concealed suicide was followed by her move with her mother to New York City, where they lived at the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue, supported by insurance money. Hotel life in Manhattan placed Barbara inside the social machine she would spend the rest of her life trying to master, and the machine responded with the enthusiasm it always shows toward beautiful, charming women who arrive without money and instinctively know how to acquire it. With striking beauty, red hair, and a magnetic, troubled presence, she worked as a model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in her late teens and was ranked among the ten most beautiful girls in New York. She was also, from an early age, a psychiatric patient under the private care of the prominent neurologist Foster Kennedy, who reportedly remarked upon hearing of her engagement, “God forbid that they should have a child.
” This warning, which survives only through indirect accounts and should be treated as folklore rather than documented fact, was completely ignored. The continued circulation of the warning suggests how early and how widely those around Barbara recognized her psychological instability, and how completely those warnings were overridden by the combination of beauty, charm, and social ambition that defined her public persona. A brief Hollywood screen test with Dana Andrews led to no professional progress, but it produced a lasting friendship with an aspiring actress named Cornelia Fitch Baekeland, Brooks’s sister, who introduced Barbara to her brother in the early 1940s while he was training as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. According to multiple accounts, Barbara accelerated the courtship by falsely claiming she was pregnant, and the couple married quickly in 1942.
On the marriage certificate, Barbara listed her occupation as painter and Brooks listed his as writer, self-descriptions that flattered ambitions neither of them actually fulfilled. The marriage produced one child and lasted two decades, ending with a kitchen knife in a luxury Chelsea apartment. The young Baekelands settled into a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Barbara immersed herself in a role she had been rehearsing her entire life: hostess to the brightest names of the era. Guests at their parties were said to include Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, William Styron, Dylan Thomas, Salvador Dalí, and Yasmin Aga Khan.
From the outside, the marriage looked exactly like the life Barbara had fashioned for herself after a childhood marked by tragedy and modest circumstances. Beneath the surface, the marriage was troubled almost from the start. Both spouses had affairs. Barbara was prone to severe mood swings, heavy drinking, and periods of deep depression.
The household was run with a level of emotional intensity that would have destabilized any child, let alone the one born on August 28, 1946. Their only child, Anthony, always called Tony, was born into a marriage that was already falling apart. From 1954 onward, the family adopted what one account describes as a gypsy life, moving between East Hampton, London, Paris, Zermatt, Cap d’Antibes, and Italy before settling around 1960 in Paris. Tony’s childhood was built almost entirely on airports, rented villas, and the unpredictable emotional swings of parents absorbed in their own selfishness.
This instability was later cited by many psychiatric analysts of the case as a major contributing factor to Tony’s eventual collapse. The instability itself was a recognized pathological pattern among a certain class of inherited wealth. Money enough to live anywhere, with no obligation forcing the family to live in any particular place. Tony needed steady schools, lasting friendships, a stable therapeutic relationship, and a home base that remained the same from year to year.
Instead, he got a childhood measured in plane tickets and changing mailing addresses, overseen by parents whose own needs dominated every place they occupied. In 1963, Brooks became infatuated with the daughter of an English diplomat, fifteen years his junior, whom he had met in Paris. When he asked Barbara for a divorce, she attempted suicide. Brooks ended that relationship, and the marriage limped on for another five years, but the pattern had already set.
The marriage survived on crises rather than stability, and each crisis left Tony more isolated and less able to build an independent life that might have saved him. According to the accounts gathered in the definitive oral history of the case, Tony’s psychological difficulties were evident early. As a child, he was said to pull the wings off flies, a detail his father chose to interpret as evidence of scientific curiosity rather than a warning sign. He developed a stutter, and several accounts recall his early awareness of attraction to men during boarding school years, with active pursuit of male partners in his mid-teens.
His artistic talent, sometimes encouraged by his parents, produced images that disturbed those who saw them, including, according to one account, a painting of his mother decapitated and surrounded by snakes. When he briefly attended an art school in New York, the college registrar was said to be horrified by the disturbing content of his work. The diagnosis came only after violence had already erupted. Tony was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia after beating his mother unconscious with a cane, an assault that should have led to immediate and ongoing institutional treatment.
Instead, it provoked his father’s contempt. Brooks Baekeland’s response to his son’s mental illness, by all surviving accounts, was denial laced with disdain. He dismissed psychiatry as moral quackery and refused to pay for ongoing treatment, reportedly describing his son at one point as the incarnation of evil. This stands as one of the most consequential and best-documented failures in the case.
A wealthy family that could afford any psychiatric intervention available in the Western world left a schizophrenic young man without substantive treatment because his father found the entire discipline of psychiatry unworthy of respect. Violence escalated through Tony’s late teens and early twenties in a pattern any trained doctor would have considered a psychiatric emergency. There were strangulation attempts, threats with knives, an incident during a dinner party, an attempt to drive a pen into someone’s eye, and, according to one witness, a moment when Tony brandished a kitchen knife in a journalist’s face. The incidents were frequent and severe enough that no responsible parent could mistake them for teenage rebellion.
Yet Brooks continued to refuse treatment, and Barbara continued to believe she could manage the crisis herself. In 1967, twenty-year-old Tony met a bisexual Australian nicknamed Black Jake in the Catalan fishing village of Cadaqués, who introduced him to hallucinogens during a side trip to Morocco. Alarmed, Barbara drove to Spain to retrieve her son. While the two were detained overnight at the French border over a passport violation and handcuffed together, Barbara said a phrase later remembered by a family friend: “Here you are, darling, finally handcuffed to Mama.
” The remark was intended as a kind of black comedy, but at its core was a woman who could not let go of a son she was simultaneously trying to save and control. The combination of a mother who could not loosen her grip and a father who had already left left Tony without any adult in his life capable of seeing him as a person rather than a problem. To understand what Barbara Baekeland did next without justifying it, it is necessary to recall the psychiatric consensus of that era. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973, the year after Barbara’s murder.
Aversion therapies, hormonal treatments, and various forms of conversion interventions were considered legitimate, if controversial, medical practices by segments of the psychiatric establishment throughout the 1960s. Public opinion was overwhelmingly hostile, and openly gay men faced professional, legal, and social penalties as a matter of course. Barbara’s belief that her son’s sexuality was a problem to be solved was, in this context, an extreme but not aberrant application of the prevailing medical and social ideology of the era. She appears to have concluded that if Tony’s sexual orientation could be corrected, some of his broader disturbances might also resolve.
Her efforts began with attempts to arrange female companionship for Tony, including, according to several sources, hiring women to redirect his inclinations. These interventions reflected Barbara’s conviction that her son’s orientation was the source of his illness rather than a separate and unrelated fact of his identity. This conflation of sexuality and psychosis was something the psychiatric profession itself was still committing at the institutional level, and Barbara, without any formal training, was committing it at the most intimate and damaging level imaginable. When these measures failed, the accounts describing what happened next diverge sharply in credibility.
This is the most controversial element of the entire case. The claim, as conveyed by several friends interviewed in the documented oral history, is that Barbara began a sexual relationship with her son in the summer of 1969, explicitly describing it to friends as a therapeutic intervention. One friend recalled Barbara calling him to tell him she had done it, and that he told her he did not see it as so terrible. A painter gave a similar account, saying Barbara was very frank about it and described the act as if it were therapeutic.
In contrast, a direct rebuttal came from the gallery owner who became Barbara’s lover and later her executor, who stated plainly that he did not believe she had sex with Tony, and that he thought she was simply enjoying shocking people. This report treats the incest claim as disputed. It rests on hearsay from friends whom Barbara told herself, a woman with a documented history of telling provocative stories, rather than on any physical evidence or testimony from Tony. What is clear, whether incest occurred or was fabricated for shock value, is that Barbara Baekeland’s attempts to change her son’s sexual orientation escalated over the years into a campaign of boundary violation that no psychiatrist of any era would have endorsed.
The psychological pressure this campaign placed on a young man who was schizophrenic, already isolated, without a father, and without any stable external relationship contributed directly to the catastrophe that followed. Barbara believed she was saving her son. She was creating the conditions under which he would eventually kill her. Yet the final rupture came from a completely different direction.
In Cadaqués, Tony began a relationship with a young woman named Sylvie, the first girlfriend he had ever brought to his parents’ home. Barbara, hoping that a heterosexual relationship would stabilize her son, actively encouraged the connection. Instead, Brooks Baekeland, Tony’s father, then in his mid-forties, began an affair with Sylvie. Barbara discovered the betrayal in February 1968 and attempted suicide with an overdose mixed with vodka, but was saved by a friend.
In the end, Brooks chose Sylvie over his family, divorced Barbara, and married Sylvie, with whom he had a son. Barbara was saved from her suicide attempt by Gloria Jones, wife of novelist James Jones, and Sylvie herself reportedly took an overdose amid the turmoil. That means Brooks’s affair caused two separate suicide attempts by two different women within a few weeks. That marriage also ended in divorce, and Brooks went on to marry a third time.
The pattern of serial attachment and abandonment mirrored at the adult level the kind of cruelty his son experienced in childhood. The psychological impact of this betrayal on Tony cannot be overstated. His father had done something worse than hurt the family. He had taken the only girlfriend Tony had ever presented as evidence, however fragile, of the kind of connection his mother had spent years trying to engineer.
For a young man already diagnosed with schizophrenia, trapped in a suffocating psychological relationship with his mother, and subjected to extreme interventions around his sexuality, losing Sylvie to his father closed off Tony’s last serious attempt to form an independent adult relationship. From that moment forward, mother and son were entirely alone. After her divorce from Brooks, cut off from any stable external relationship and having lost the only girl Tony had ever presented to the world, the two sank into a suffocating, volatile mutual dependency. Observers later described it in terms resembling shared psychotic disorder, in which the delusional framework passes from one person to another living in isolation with them.
Whether this clinical description is accurate is for specialists to determine, but the dynamic it describes, a controlling mother and an isolated, dependent son without outside relationships, matches exactly what every eyewitness saw in the Baekeland home in the years between Brooks’s departure and Barbara’s death. The warnings came from every direction and intensified as the months passed. By the summer of 1972, Barbara and Tony were living together in a rented apartment at 81 Cadogan Square in Chelsea, London. In late July, Tony tried to push his mother into traffic outside the building, stopped only by his physical weakness and the intervention of a friend named Sue Guinness.
Police arrested Tony on suspicion of attempted murder, but Barbara refused to press charges. He was briefly admitted to the Priory, London’s famous psychiatric hospital, and quickly released to the care of the mother he had just tried to kill. On October 30, 1972, less than three weeks before the crime, psychiatrist Dr. W.
Linsley Jacobs examined Tony and delivered a blunt warning to Barbara: “Your son is going to kill you, and I think you are in great danger. ” Barbara’s response was simply that she did not believe it. Jacobs was so concerned that he called Chelsea police to request preventive surveillance, but was told officers could do little unless something actually happened. Two days before the crime, Sue Guinness had lunch with Barbara for the last time.
Tony had painted gold stars on his shoes and clothing and was rocking back and forth in agitation. Guinness warned Barbara again, as she had before, and as the psychiatrist had three weeks earlier. Barbara’s response, according to the account preserved in the oral history: “He would never hurt me. ”
The psychiatrist told her she would die.
A friend who had seen Tony try to push his mother into traffic warned her she was in danger. Police declined to intervene, while the son who would kill her was upstairs painting gold stars on his shoes and trembling back and forth in a state of agitation anyone outside the family would have recognized as a psychiatric emergency. The gap between the warnings Barbara received and the actions she took in response is the gap the Baekeland fortune was designed to fill. Money had always insulated Barbara from consequences.
It insulated her from her suicide attempts, from her husband’s affairs, from the harsh childhood she imposed on her psychologically fragile son, and from every boundary she crossed in her campaign to change his sexuality. She appears to have believed, until the moment the knife entered her chest, that her wealth would insulate her from this consequence as well. At midday on Friday, November 17, 1972, Barbara had lunch with a friend, a Russian princess, eating filet steaks and beans and drinking Spanish red wine. She left around three-thirty, remembering that Tony was planning to cook dinner that evening.
Back at the Cadogan Square apartment, Tony was there with the family’s Siamese cat, while a Spanish maid was ironing nearby. During Barbara’s absence, a friend of Tony’s had called and was scheduled to visit the apartment. When Barbara returned, she objected to the visit. An argument broke out between mother and son, so frightening that the maid fled the apartment.
Tony later described what happened next in words blending coherent narrative with unmistakable delusion. He felt his mother was controlling his mind. He struck her. She ran toward the kitchen.
He followed, picked up a knife from the kitchen table, and stabbed her once, severing a major artery near her heart. Police arriving at the apartment found Barbara lying on her back on the kitchen floor with a single stab wound. Tony was in his bedroom on the phone, ordering Chinese food. The detail, confirmed by multiple sources and described by the detective who arrested him as evidence of complete indifference, became notorious.
The cat was found hiding under the bed. In his initial statement to police, Tony gave a delusional account claiming that his elderly grandmother, who was in New York at the time, had stabbed Barbara. He also told the arresting officer a detail that seemed both absurd and heartbreaking: that it all began when he was three or five years old and fell off his teething ring. At Brixton Prison awaiting trial, he was said to ask visitors about his mother’s condition, whether she was all right, in a clear dissociative denial of what he had done.
Once he accepted the fact of her death, he wrote to his grandmother that a great weight had been lifted from him. Barbara Baekeland was fifty-one years old. The fortune that funded every villa, every party, every dinner with Garbo and Dalí, every failed attempt to treat a son whose illness required care rather than discipline, had ended with a woman dead on a kitchen floor and a son ordering Chinese food beside her body. The Spanish maid who fled the apartment was the last person to see Barbara alive.
The detective who arrived to find Tony on the phone was the first person to see him as he had become: a man so detached from reality that killing his mother and ordering dinner occupied the same emotional level. Tony Baekeland was charged with murder and tried at the Central Criminal Court in London, the Old Bailey, in 1973. He was defended by John Mortimer, Queen’s Counsel, the lawyer later famous as the creator of the fictional barrister Rumpole of the Bailey, who reportedly described his client as gentle, quiet, and very friendly. The trial centered on the English legal principle of diminished responsibility, which reduces a murder charge to manslaughter if the defendant’s mental state substantially impaired his responsibility for the killing.
The court accepted that Tony’s documented schizophrenia met this standard, convicted him of manslaughter, and committed him indefinitely to Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security British psychiatric institution for mentally disordered offenders. Inside Broadmoor, Tony worked in the craft shop and appeared to visitors to be relatively stable. These visitors included actress Patricia Neal, brought by a mutual friend, and his grandmother Nini Daly, who traveled from New York to see him. Hospital files recorded a stark discrepancy in Nini’s level of concern.
She seemed less distressed by her daughter’s death than by the fact that her grandson was in trouble, a note that prompted one clinician to say she seemed just as crazy as the rest of the family. The campaign to secure Tony’s release was led by a member of the family that founded Coutts bank and reached diplomatic levels, with cables exchanged between the American embassy in London and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in Washington over the terms of Tony’s possible deportation to his homeland. Brooks Baekeland opposed his son’s release throughout, believing Tony was inherently dangerous and capable of killing again. Tony was released from Broadmoor on July 21, 1980, on condition of deportation to the United States.
But the transitional housing arrangements meant to receive him never materialized, and his medication doses were gradually reduced until they were stopped entirely by the date of his release. Instead of being accompanied by qualified medical staff, Tony was escorted across the Atlantic by a family acquaintance named Cecilia Prebner, a woman who had met him only once before and who was said to have consulted contacts at Kensington Palace and a Danish prince for advice before agreeing to accompany a mentally disturbed killer across the ocean. The absurdity of this arrangement, in which social connections replaced medical infrastructure at every stage, is itself a summary of how the Baekeland family had handled Tony’s illness from the start. Upon arriving in New York, Tony moved into the apartment of his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother on the Upper East Side.
Six days later, on July 27, 1980, he stabbed her eight times with a kitchen knife, breaking her collarbone and ribs. She survived. The attack confirmed what Brooks had predicted and what every psychiatrist who examined Tony had warned: that he was capable of killing again, and that no amount of diplomatic cables or social connections could replace the ongoing psychiatric care he had never received. Tony was charged with attempted murder and detained on Rikers Island awaiting trial.
The cell he entered was the last room he ever occupied. While at Rikers, Tony gained access to his trust fund and reportedly distributed about £20,000 within months, some as protection payments and some as gifts. On March 20, 1981, he was awaiting a bail hearing. But the hearing was postponed because his British medical records had not yet arrived from England.
He was returned to his cell around three-thirty in the afternoon. About thirty minutes later, guards found him dead, suffocated by an ordinary plastic shopping bag he had placed over his head. He was thirty-four years old. Whether this was suicide or something else has never been definitively resolved.
Brooks Baekeland reportedly harbored suspicions that his son may have been killed by another inmate, though the official account treats it as self-inflicted. Brooks’s written elegy for his son, later quoted in the press, was as harsh as ever and entirely devoid of warmth: an intelligence failure of monumental proportions. The symbolism of the manner of death did not go unnoticed, then or later. A family fortune built on Bakelite, the first true synthetic plastic, ended with an heir suffocated by a cheap disposable plastic bag.
The definitive account of the entire story, Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, published in 1985, gathered nearly 200 recorded interviews, letters, diaries, and hospital and State Department documents into an oral history that won the Edgar Award for best fact crime writing. The 2007 film adaptation, directed by Tom Kalin, starred Julianne Moore as Barbara, Eddie Redmayne as adult Tony, and Stephen Dillane as Brooks.
Novelist William Styron, asked about the story’s meaning, said it had enormous metaphorical resonance, describing the horror of “that child” as Greek classicism. The story the Baekeland family left behind is, on one level, a psychological tragedy. A young man with schizophrenia who received no treatment, subjected to years of boundary-violating interventions by a mother who could not distinguish care from control, killed the person who was simultaneously his primary caretaker and his first tormentor. On another level, it is a case study in what happens when enormous inherited wealth removes all ordinary restraints from family and marital dysfunction.
Brooks Baekeland’s money freed him from the need to please anyone. That same freedom allowed him to dismiss his son’s diagnosis as quackery, abandon his family for his son’s girlfriend, and move between three marriages and multiple continents without circumstances ever forcing him to build the stability his son and ex-wife so clearly lacked. The wealth bought villas and dinner parties with Garbo and Dalí, a childhood spent in five-star hotels across two continents, and an entire life in which no one ever heard the word “no. ” It bought the father the freedom to dismiss his son’s illness as quackery, the mother the freedom to confuse intervention with control, and the son the freedom to deteriorate without anyone outside the family having the power to stop it.
What it could not buy was the only thing the family needed: the willingness to confront what was happening within it.