The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 97

4 Part VlSunday, August 18, 1985 Cos Anfleles Simes Jody Jacobs '1 UP WMJMHUOUIyLUH I I her, she said, came from a neighbor. "She said never once did Natalie not do her pool." Robins: From Poems to Tale of Murder ajsi car Roaming around in Monte Carlo: Paul Anka thrilled the glitzy audience at the Croix Rouge Ball in the Sporting d'Ete Club. Especially when he sang, "My Way," the song he wrote for Frank Sinatra. French superstar Yves Mourousi (the announcement of his upcoming marriage to Veronique d'Alencon was newsy enough to make the cover of Paris Match) was the master of ceremonies. Prince Rainier was in the room, which sparkled with thousands of tiny lights and a lapis blue and turquoise decor, at a table with his daughter Princess Caroline; Caroline's husband, Ste-fano Casiraghi, and his parents, the Giancarlo Casir-aghis; Gant Gaither; Princess Ira de Furstenberg, and Mrs.

Paul Gallico. Prince Albert, Rainier's heir, anchored another table that included his sister Princess Stephanie, Robert Marx (Barbara Sinatra's son), and Prince Hubertus Hohenlohe Saura. More enjoying the bountiful caviar: Monaco's prime minister Jean Charles Rey and his wife; Andre Sant-Mleux, president of Monte Carlo's Societe des Bain de Mer; actress Sydne Rome; the Fred Samuels; Houstonian Maria McRae; Jayne and Henry Berger; model-actress Heidi Mitchell; Nancy and Louis Choppard; Washington's Peter Buse with the Edward Safdies. The summer crowd has grown. Spotted at the Hotel de Paris: Minnie and Dwight Stuart, Vera Swift, Carolyn Whitman who arrived from Portofino.

Lunching on the terrace of the Hotel de Paris were the Duchess of Cadaman with Eti Plesch, who is chartering a plane to bring friends to the Nov. 3 Princess Grace Foundation Gala in Los Angeles (Donina Cicogna and Nancy Choppard are coming along, too); Jimmy Nederlander with Gant Gaither and Virginia Gallico. And the parties go on. Charlene Nederlander gave one on the new terrace at La Chaumiere; Hannah and Gerry Marcow gave another for Serene and Irving Felt (he's now the president of England's Wembley Stadium, and they're buying a flat in Cannes to make the commute easier). The guest lists are interchangeable.

You've been to one party and you automatically know who you'll see at the next Peter and Dolores Bosshard; Yvonne Embiricos, who maintains a permanent apartment at the Hotel de Paris; Prince and Princess Youka Troubetzkoy; the Bergers; Mark Sieff; Olivia (she owns Apocalypse, the Paris disco) and Philippe Val'ere; Mark Sieff; Bert Whitley; Donina Cicogna. diaries included many references to the Baekelands, and Jack's wife, Heather, who was one of a committee of friends who finally got Tony Baekeland released from Broadmoor, the English prison for the criminally insane. "They meant well," Robins said of the group that eventually secured Tony Baekeland's release. "They thought he would be happier at home. The trouble is that he didn't know where home was." Others who gave interviews for the book were an assortment of Vanderbilts, Astors and Guinnesses, and psychiatrists from both sides of the Atlantic.

Natalie Robins spent "three years doing research, more than a summer transcribing our interviews. Steven was sort of the insider since he knew Barbara and Brooks and their friends. I was the outsider and did the research at the Smithsonian (much of it on Leo Baekeland and his plastics empire). In the case of Francine du Plessix Gray (the author) we did the interviews together. I did Styron.

We drove up to Maine to talk to Sylvie Baekeland Skira (first Tony's friend, then his stepmother). The interviews with Brooks Baekeland (England is where he now spends most of his time studying and writing) were all done through the mail. I had an intuition Nina Daly (Barbara's mother) needed to talk about the tragedy." (After his release from Broadmoor, Tony went to live with his grandmother in her New York apartment where, four days after he moved in, he attacked her with a knife. This episode resulted in his imprisonment at Riker's Island where he killed himself.) "She said incredible things. Like loved him so much it didn't Robins said.

Robins believes getting reactions from Brooks Baekeland was "my great accomplishment. His friends said he didn't'want to talk about the tragedy. I never take no for an answer. I wrote to him, compared him to his grandfather, sent him some of my poetry. I had a feeling he would cooperate because it was an opportunity to explain himself.

A few weeks after the book was published Baekeland wrote to the authors. "He said we had created something bigger than the sum of all its parts." It was a strident 1981 newspaper headline, "Plastics Heir Kills Mom," with its chilling reportage on matricide and incest that set Natalie Robins on a different path. A published poet, she was at the stage in her career in which she had decided to "move into prose." As she sipped her tea in one of the private rooms at the Regency Club recently, she explained, "I wanted to write a novel a poet wouldn't write. With lots of action. And when I saw that article I knew it was a book." She contacted a friend, Steven M.

L. Aronson, a fellow editor when she'd worked at Random House. He had known Barbara Baekeland, the victim, and her son, Tony, who was convicted of stabbing his mother to death in their Cadogan Square flat in London and who later committed suicide. He promised Robins he'd help her with the book. Robins said she told him, "I'd found the nucleus for a novel.

And then I realized that the truth was better than anything I could imagine." Eventually, Aronson became her collaborator and the result was "Savage Grace," published this summer by William Morrow "We wanted it to be oral history with a plot and I wound around the narrative an increasing cast of characters." She calls the story line "macabre" and it's told through the eyes and perceptions of those who knew Brooks Baekeland, grandson of Leo Baekeland, the man who invented Bakelite and was called "the father of Brooks' beautiful wife, Barbara, who had been screen -tested in Hollywood and courted by John Jacob Astor, and their only son, Antony. The format is much like that of "Edie," the biography of the tragic Edie Sedgwick by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. Those who cooperated with the authors and were at one time or another part of the Baekelands' lives include the late novelist James Jones (he used the Baekelands as characters in one of his novels) and his wife, Gloria; author William Styron and his wife, Rose; Salvador Dali; Robert Graves; Brendan Gill; Dominick Dunne; Georges Bernier (founding editor of the French art magazine L'Oeil); advertising man and author Jack Cohane, whose MARY FRAMPTON Los Angeles Times Natalie Robins talks about "Savage Grace." Researching the book was like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. "It was a chance," said Robins, "to see the whole picture. And the prospect of filling in the last pieces kept me going." She is completely comfortable with non- fiction research and finds it "totally exhilarating." So much so that she's given up the idea of fiction for the moment and her next book, which she'll start working on in October, will deal with the FBI.

Robins lives in Riverdale, a New York suburb, in "a wonderful house" with her husband of 20 years, New York Times book critic Christopher Lehman-Haupt, and their two children. Husband and wife work at home, he downstairs and she upstairs. They meet in the kitchen when they're getting coffee. She has a "wonderful housekeeper" and calls herself "well organized. I keep my life in balance.

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