Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  He once wrote of the Emperor Hadrian that ‘the great traveller had come to a time of life when the inconveniences of travel made him loath to take long journeys’. Now, in his early seventies, he felt the same. He was increasingly scared of travel, and coming to Italy at all had been an emotional ordeal. Since he wouldn’t fly, and wouldn’t risk the Channel ferries, his answer was to board the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton at the start of its transatlantic voyage, then disembark at Cherbourg. Even he admitted that a transatlantic liner was unlikely to be shipwrecked in the English Channel.

  But once in Rome, he felt safe in the haven of his beloved Hotel Flora, and began his tour of the sights that he had always loved. Again he had that strange sensation of déjà vu, of having seen everything centuries before as he strolled through the Roman forum.

  But the sense of returning to the past was at its most intense when he visited his favourite building – the great rotunda of the Roman Pantheon, which was rebuilt in its present form by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 120. He seemed to take a personal pride in it and in its survival, and on seeing the building yet again he explained to Mary something that only he could possibly have thought of.

  Had it ever struck her, he inquired, that the Pantheon was so well built that during the whole time of its existence it had never needed fire insurance? Just think of how much money that had saved, he added. ‘Had it been kept insured since the day it was built 2,000 years ago, the total insurance premiums with compound interest would add up to more money than there is in the world today.’

  It was a sombre thought – and grounds for self-congratulation. But at the same time, as he looked at the building, he realized that Hadrian had missed a splendid opportunity to immortalize his name. The emperor had been too modest in giving credit for the building to its original founder, the consul Marcus Agrippa, whose name he placed in massive letters on the pediment.

  This grave mistake he resolved he would not repeat when he came to build another Roman villa to perpetuate his own memory. He had been considering doing this for some time, and not until 1968 would the work begin. But he had now decided to create a museum near the ranch-house site at Malibu, which would house his furniture collection, items of marble statuary, and the pictures he was buying.

  There had already been discussions on the form of the museum, but against some contradictory advice, he had decided on exactly what he wanted. Some years before, on a trip to Naples, he had visited the site of the fabled villa of the Roman multi-millionaire Calpurnius Piso, which had been buried in volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  Detail obsessed as ever, Getty had taken the trouble to find out all about it. It had been excavated in the 1760s for the King of Naples by a German archaeologist, and Getty had studied his report – together with the plans of the villa, the treasures with which it had been crammed, and the mass of records on papyrus preserved in the volcanic dust, which had given the place its name – the Villa dei Papiri.

  He had been most impressed by it, and since he had convinced himself that he had been the Emperor Hadrian, the Villa dei Papiri took on a particular significance. Hadrian had been a friend of Piso’s and had often visited his villa – which meant that Getty himself must have been there.

  It had once been part of Hadrian’s imperial power to order the construction of temples and great public buildings in the furthest reaches of his empire. Desiring to ‘emulate his spirit’, Getty would now repeat these earlier activities, and recreate this villa which he knew so well in a distant spot he also knew – facing the Pacific on the shore at Malibu.

  It could be made identical with Piso’s villa – the same decoration on the walls, the same plants and shrubs, even copies of the original bronze statues in the gardens. Since he was now as rich as any Roman Emperor, he could make sure that it was filled with even more prestigious treasures than Piso’s. And he could finally correct the error he had made when he built the Pantheon. His name, and his alone, would be recorded in this villa which he would build in California.

  While Getty was still in Rome, the sense of family occasion was completed with the arrival of Ann and Gordon from America. As paterfamilias, Getty was becoming positively benign, and accompanied Gordon to an unusual family occasion – the recording of a full-scale opera in the Naples opera house which Paul Junior was backing to the tune of $20,000.

  The budget did not stretch to one of the Verdi operas Gordon would have liked, and his brother had chosen one of Mozart’s lesser-known operas, ll Re Pastore – The Shepherd King. It is the story of a lost inheritance and the rediscovery of a king disguised as a shepherd boy in the sunlit world of classical mythology. As the old man and his two sons heard the ravishing Lucia Popp sing the lead part in one of the happiest of Mozart’s operas, the music may for once have matched the mood with which they faced the future.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Roman Weddings

  In December 1966, as if to underline the part that Rome was playing in the fortunes of the Gettys, Paul and Talitha married in the very place where Gail had wed Lang Jeffries a few months earlier, and Jean Paul Getty had married Teddy Lynch in 1939 – the city hall, the Campidoglio, crowning the Roman Capitol, the central point of ancient Rome itself.

  It was a spectacular setting for a marriage, with its views across the ruined Roman Forum, and the nearby Palace of the Senators of Rome. The ancient equestrian bronze statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius still rode the plinth designed for him by Michelangelo, and the antique statues of Castor and Pollux, guardians of Rome, flanked the steps descending to the city. The wedding photographs show Talitha in mink-trimmed bridal mini-skirt, holding a lily, and looking like the sixties flower-child she was, between two smiling adults, Paul and Penelope.

  Paul at thirty-four was better-looking than he’d ever been, and the smile gave just a hint of the shy charm people still remember. Penelope, in her beautifully tailored coat, was standing proxy for the bridegroom’s father, who was too busy making money to attend. (According to one story, he told a visiting oil tycoon that he didn’t know about the wedding.)

  Not that Getty Senior would be greatly missed – at the ceremony or at the ensuing bridal lunch at the Casa Valadier restaurant, in the Borghese Gardens. Still less was he missed at the big, all-night reception held in the apartment of a sculptor friend. It was a memorable affair, one of several ‘parties of the year’.

  Next morning the bridal pair rose early and departed for an extended honeymoon in Marrakesh.

  Of course the old man had known all about the wedding, but he had disapproved of everything to do with it. For by now he had fallen out of love with handsome Paul Junior – which, combined with escalating troubles with the Naples refinery, placed a further strain upon his love affair with Italy.

  Behind Getty’s changed attitude towards his once-favourite son lay rumours he had been hearing concerning him and Talitha. Both, it seemed, had recently become hippies, and had joined the counter-culture of the sixties with extremely worrying dedication.

  By being in Europe, Paul Junior had in fact originally missed out on the hippie cult when it started in his native San Francisco. But it might have been devised with him in mind; and now, like the man in Molière who suddenly discovers he has always spoken prose, Paul discovered he had always been one of nature’s hippies. The Eastern-born Talitha encouraged him, and flower power, self-fulfilment and the drug-hazed lure of the magnetic East had entered both their lives with a vengeance.

  A sort of gentrified hippiedom was the perfect way of life for a couple like Paul and Talitha. With its cult of non-violent anarchy, self-expression, and rejection of Western materialism, the hippie movement was particularly adapted to the easy rich with nothing very much to do. Almost overnight nobody in Rome had been cooler and more hip than Paul and Talitha, but not even charming Paul could manage to combine the hippie ethic with the oil industry. Nothing seemed more soul-destroying than the activity from which his family derive
d its money, nothing more crucifying than to have to work in a dark suit in the offices of Getty Oil Italiana. So the offices of Getty Oil Italiana rarely saw him any longer.

  Nor did Gail and the children see much more of him, although they were all still living in Rome at the time. One afternoon the family had been enjoying an English film at the Fiammetta cinema and noticed a bearded hippie enter, wearing long hair and small John Lennon glasses. Only young Paul recognized him as his father.

  Soon after this, Paul and Talitha had gone to Thailand, where they had conducted their first serious experiments with drugs. Back in England someone at Sutton Place made sure that the old man saw a magazine with pictures of his son, bearded, long-haired and dressed in what the caption called ‘a tie-dyed green velvet outfit that would have made any hippie green with envy’.

  Old Paul was not impressed, for unlike his son he was emphatically not a natural hippie, and although the Emperor Hadrian had worn a beard from the age of thirty-two, he had always had a powerful dislike of facial hair.

  At Sutton Place there was also no dearth of information over what was happening in Rome, and in particular over the affairs of Getty Oil Italiana. Angry words were shouted down the telephone.

  ‘Any idiot can be a businessman,’ said Paul Junior – which was rather like the Prince of Wales informing Her Majesty that any fool could be a monarch.

  It was shortly after this that his father’s latest mistress, the notorious Duchess of Argyll, had calmly announced at lunch at Sutton Place that she had heard that Paul Getty Junior was on heroin. Getty had been deeply – indeed painfully – shocked. He had a genuine horror of drug addiction, and it was now that he broke off relations with his son until he promised to desist. Paul Junior wouldn’t promise – and it wasn’t long before he was tendering his resignation as general manager of Getty Oil Italiana – which his father, as head of the company, accepted.

  This left Paul without a job – but not without his income, which that year approached $100,000, from Grandma Getty’s trust.

  It was early summer. The tourists were already in the city, and the penthouse flat was airless in the Roman evenings. Now that Paul was jobless, were the newly-weds feeling a touch of that Roman sickness known as accidie – the boredom that afflicted monks and courtesans?

  ‘Carpe diem,’ says the inscription that recurs throughout the city on its monuments and public buildings.

  ‘Carpe diem – Seize the day.’

  They did.

  Le Palais Da Zahir (mixed French and Arabic for ‘the Pleasure Palace’) had belonged to a French property developer called Monsieur Aigret, who had bought it twenty years before as a speculation and couldn’t sell it. It had been standing empty ever since, in the picturesque ancient quarter of Marrakesh known as Sidi Mimoun.

  Enterprising Bill Willis – fashionable, high-camp, American interior decorator – had shown it to Paul and Talitha while they were there on honeymoon, and they had fallen in love with it and bought it for $10,000. Since then Bill had been restoring it for them with typical panache, repairing ancient woodwork and mosaics, finding them decorative objects, furniture and carpets in profusion, and having tiles specially baked in Fez to replace antique tiles which were missing.

  Paul had known handsome Bill when he still owned the small antique shop at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Bill had always had an instinct for the very rich, which is a prerequisite for success in his profession, and he was most successful. (Since then he has done over villas for Alain Delon, Yves St Laurent, and the sister of the King of Morocco.)

  When Da Zahir was finished, John Richardson (distinguished biographer of Picasso) found it sinister, but most of the other visitors thought it fun and loved it.

  It had a blue front door (blue against the evil eye), four separate courtyards (in one of which Talitha planted roses), spectacular views of the Atlas mountains from the roof, and an air of timeless beauty and decay, which was part of the charm of old-world Marrakesh before they built the ring-road and the modern airport.

  ‘Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe’ – and nowhere more seductively than here in Marrakesh, ‘the most southerly town of civilized history’, as Sacheverell Sitwell once described it.

  Since the wartime days when Allied statesmen like Churchill and Eisenhower came here to enjoy the climate and the scenery, the town had become fashionable as a staging post on the hippie trail to the East. With Paul and Talitha in residence, Da Zahir was becoming part of the trail itself.

  ‘The house was a dream, like so much round Talitha and Paul,’ says a visitor remembering that summer. ‘It was always en grande fête, always a perpetual party with fascinating and amusing people and something wonderful occurring. It might be jugglers and fortune tellers or musicians. One evening a Moroccan general turned up just like that with his private troupe of dancers. Thanks to Talitha, the food was quite delicious – when it came.’

  As hosts Talitha and Paul were not wildly rich, certainly not in the class of hyperwealth of millionaire American expatriates like Peggy Guggenheim or Barbara Hutton. But they possessed the Getty name, with its promise of imminent riches, which was somehow more exciting than the ponderous reality of total wealth.

  Even then this somehow marked them out from all their guests. Not that their guests were poor themselves or boring. Au contraire, they included literary geniuses like Gore Vidal, serious celebrities like Mick Jagger, and cosmopolites as socially impressive as Prince Dado Ruspoli.

  But as son of one of the richest human beings in the world, Paul was starting to project a touch of the revered apartness once dispensed by minor European royalty. Two centuries earlier, he might have been a dauphin to a Bourbon king. Now he and Talitha were becoming members of a lonely superclass with rules and tastes and mores of its own.

  Talitha’s unsuspecting parents arrived at Da Zahir on a fortnight’s holiday late that autumn. Finding the gardens lit by camphor flares, huge fires of olive logs blazing at each end of high-beamed rooms, jasmine and wood-smoke flavouring the air, and delicious meals consumed at night on priceless rugs beneath the stars, their first impressions were predictable – Arabian Nights, no less, they murmured to each other.

  But they also felt uneasy from the start about Talitha and Paul, who frequently seemed moody. Also about the number of freeloading guests, whose presence could infuriate their son-in-law, so much so that the Pols heard him shout to Talitha to kick them out. When this happened Talitha became depressed.

  Then it rained – heavily – and despite the tasteful work of Mr Willis, the roof leaked. And finally it dawned upon the Pols that there were reasons other than rain and guests for Paul and Talitha’s moodiness. As Poppet put it, she and Willem realized that the diet in Da Zahir was not confined to orange juice and charbroiled baby lamb and onion tart.

  The local cakes from Mr Very Good the Baker had curious ingredients, as had the home-made jam with the lingering aftertaste which everyone apparently enjoyed. In Poppet it produced heightened colours and everything moving in slow motion. Willem said he would have preferred two double Scotches. Poppet soon discovered to her cost that as well as drowsiness, drugs could induce extreme loquacity in others.

  One night at dinner she was seated next to a nice young man with long blond hair who fell asleep between courses, resting his head upon her shoulder. When he awoke, he started begging her to let him take her with him on a trip, explaining that, although LSD was wonderful, you needed somebody beside you until you grew used to it.

  *

  Despite so many charming people, the drug scene of Da Zahir failed to captivate the Pols, and when they left for France soon afterwards, they were uneasy for the future of the Getty marriage.

  Their unease lifted somewhat when a son was born to Talitha in Rome on 30 May 1968 – but the given names worried them: Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramaphone Getty.

  ‘Rich kid with daft name’, as a newspaper in Paul’s home town San Francisco put it.

  Then Talitha and Pau
l were off on their travels again – ‘Come East, young lovers, the journey not the arrival matters’ – taking with them baby Tara G. G. G. plus scatty English nanny, bound for Indonesia and Bali to rediscover people and places Talitha remembered from her shattered childhood.

  But the Pols’ old house in Bali had been destroyed. The nanny’s culinary skills stretched no further than scrambled egg, and while Tara was developing a lifetime aversion to it, Paul and Talitha were forming a taste for something more exotic. What Paul wanted more than ever now was happiness – along with love and peace and the heightened self-awareness only drugs could bring. So did Talitha. But her letters to the Pols began to hint that she was not entirely happy. Heroin was giving her a sense of mounting persecution and unease – and spots on her face which also worried her. By now both she and Paul were totally addicted.

  When the Pols visited them in Rome they were shocked at the change they saw in both of them. Even Poppet knew enough to realize that the ingredients of Mr Very Good’s cookies were not the cause.

  The enchantress’s spell was broken. Privately Talitha told her father that she couldn’t cope and was frightened and wanted to return to London. For Tara’s sake she felt she must escape from drugs and hippiedom and Italy.

  Soon after this a friend of Talitha’s, passing through Rome, called at the apartment in Piazza Aracoeli on the off-chance of seeing her. Not realizing that Talitha was back in London, and finding the house wide open, she entered and walked up the stairs to look for her. No one was about, but hearing music from the top of the house, she went to investigate. Instead of Talitha, she discovered Paul recumbent on cushions on the floor, smoking opium. Lost in another world, he did not notice her.

  With the marriage breaking up, neither spouse was being faithful, and there was now another woman on the scene – Victoria Holdsworth, former model and one-time wife of Lionel Brooke, the last white rajah of Sarawak. Victoria was young and very beautiful, and since she had been brought for a holiday to Marrakesh, Paul had been seeing her a lot, so that she dates the beginning of their long and intermittent love affair to this period. But although Paul was infatuated with Victoria and grew to depend on her, he also stayed deeply and possessively in love with Talitha.