In January 1933, when Barbara was aged 11, her father Frank committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust of his car in the family's garage.
[citation needed] After Barbara falsely told Brooks Baekeland that she was pregnant,[6] the couple quickly married in California.
[8] From the summer of 1954 onward, with Antony aged eight, the Baekeland family led a nomadic seasonal existence, maintaining their home in New York while being mainly based in Europe.
Renting houses and villas in London, Paris, Zermatt, Cap d'Antibes, and many parts of Italy, Barbara and Brooks continued to live extravagantly, entertain guests, and have affairs.
From 1960 onward, the family's main base was an apartment in Paris, where during one party, Brooks met an English diplomat's daughter who was 15 years his junior.
[citation needed] In 1967, with the family based in Switzerland and the Catalan resort of Cadaques in Spain, the 20-year-old Antony met Jake Cooper, a bisexual Australian man.
When Mrs. Baekeland was informed of this by her friend Barbara Curteis, she traveled by car to Spain to bring her son back to Switzerland.
She pursued Green relentlessly; when she returned to the United States that fall, she walked barefoot across Central Park in the snow wearing nothing but a lynx fur coat to demand entry to his apartment.
[13][14] During his young adulthood, Antony displayed increasingly regular signs of schizophrenia with paranoid tendencies, and his erratic behaviour caused concern among family friends.
[18] Upon his release, Antony, then aged 33, flew directly to New York City to stay with his 87-year-old maternal grandmother, Nini Daly.
After eight months of assessment by the psychiatric team at Rikers Island, he was expecting to be released on bail at a court hearing on March 20, 1981.
[7] Antony returned to his cell at 3:30 PM EST on March 20, 1981, and was found dead by suicide 30 minutes later, having suffocated himself with a plastic bag.
The movie–starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne, Hugh Dancy, Elena Anaya, and Unax Ugalde–was based on the book of the same name.
He referred in particular to the ménage à trois scene, which depicted Barbara, Antony, and Sam Green in bed together having sex.