"An American fable of enduring resonance...a macabre piece of Americana." -- Newsweek
Savage Grace
The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family
Description
A spellbinding tale of money and madness, incest and matricide, Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks and Barbara Baekeland -- beautiful, rich, worldly -- and their handsome, gentle son, Tony. Alternately neglected and smothered by his parents, he was finally driven to destroy 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, 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.
Reviews
"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
