Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  As she says, ‘Paul was doing his vie bohème thing, and in Paris no one would have noticed.’ But Rome was different. With the dolce vita dead and gone, Rome in the early seventies had lapsed back into something like an old provincial city, where the cult of the Italian family was still very much intact, so that leaving a sixteen-year-old like Paul to his own devices could later on be made to seem distinctly shocking.

  In fact Paul kept in close touch with all his family in Rome. As he had little money, he was smart enough to get his local trattoria to accept his paintings occasionally in return for meals, but most days still saw Gail driving over to the flat with food for him and his flatmates. When she didn’t, he usually came home to eat and see his siblings. They were devoted to him, so that although Paul was living on his own, the Getty Family Italiana managed to remain a most united family.

  Paul was a strange mixture. Gail described him as ‘extraordinarily precocious, more like a boy of twenty than sixteen.’. After the divorce, his reaction against Lang had made him increasingly idolize his father and the hippie life-style he embodied. Aged eleven, he had been invited for a fortnight to Marrakesh, which naturally struck him as the most glamorous place on earth. He became very fond of Talitha, and her death when he was fourteen came as something of a blow, as did his father’s flight to London.

  Gail recalls that ‘around that time, Paul became very quiet, very locked-in’, and it was because of this that she had encouraged him to paint and mix with others. He still spent his summer holidays with the family at La Fuserna, and had grown to love the people and the romantic countryside south of Siena. Mark, his younger brother, was devoted to him and tells of how they once got lost exploring the woods above the house. As darkness fell and they failed to return, Gail was beside herself with worry, but it was Paul in his role as elder brother who kept his nerve and brought them home in safety.

  One friend of Paul’s who came to stay in Tuscany each summer was Adam Alvarez, son of the writer Al Alvarez. Adam remembers Paul as ‘surprisingly straightforward and nothing like the wild character the press created after the kidnap. But his life was complicated by what had happened in his family. He missed his father and he often seemed unhappy.’

  Back in Rome he changed, for in Rome the Getty name could give him what he undoubtedly enjoyed – the status of a minor celebrity. Someone in the press had called him ‘the Golden Hippie’ and he had earned some easy money modelling nude for a magazine. The nickname was repeated when the police grabbed him on the fringe of a student demonstration and made him spend a night in prison – bringing less agreeable publicity. This seems to have put him on the side of the oppressed, for he was soon adopting a powerful line against the rich, rather as his father used to. ‘The rich are the real poor of the earth. Their malnutrition is of the spirit. One should pity them,’ he said – which sounded better in Italian, and was picked up in the foreign press and duly found its way to Sutton Place, where his grandfather read the piece but made no comment.

  But the old man was unlikely to forget the previous summer when Paul had come to visit him in brightly coloured jeans and sneakers. Grandpapa didn’t approve of jeans or sneakers and the visit hadn’t been repeated.

  It was in early 1973 that Paul began dating Martine Zacher, a pretty German divorcée with a year-old baby daughter. She was a very liberated woman, eight years his senior, who acted in a small alternative theatre. He became fond of her, but saw no reason to be faithful. Since becoming known as the Golden Hippie, he was surprised at how many girls made themselves available.

  Thus in Rome Paul had enjoyed an enviable existence – going to discothèques (where in fact nothing very much occurred), chasing girls, smoking hash and playing at being a dedicated artist. Since he was very young his mother felt that, given time, he would finally grow up and leave all this behind him. Far from condemning him, she believed that, as she put it, ‘rebelling against convention can be a sign of originality, and an indication that someone might be special’.

  But according to Bill Newsom, Paul was behaving as he did because he ‘worshipped his father and was trying to outdo him as a hippie’, this despite the fact that he rarely saw him, and had had little contact with him since he went to London.

  ‘We communicate by occasional postcards and mysterious telegrams,’ said young Paul in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

  On the night of the kidnap, Mark was away in San Francisco with his maternal grandparents, and Aileen was off with friends, leaving Gail with Ariadne and Tara at La Fuserna. But that Sunday morning, something made her feel uneasy and she decided, on the spur of the moment, to drive back to Rome. When she rang Paul, one of his flatmates told her he had not returned.

  This worried her, but there was no further news of him until that evening, when the phone rang and someone with a southern Italian accent asked politely if she were the Signora Getty.

  When she said, ‘Yes’, he answered, like someone from the cleaners telling her her clothes were ready, ‘We have your son, Paul Getty.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said impatiently. ‘He’s here in Rome.’

  ‘No, signora. He is with us. We are kidnappers and have him captive. He is safe, but we will require much money to release him.’

  She stammered that she had no money.

  ‘Then please prepare to ask for it from your father-in-law. He has all the money in the world.’

  It was then she understood her caller wasn’t joking.

  ‘Where is my son?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘I tell you he is with us. He is in good health and he’ll stay that way as long as you do as you are told and arrange about the money. But don’t go to the police. Just wait to hear from us.’

  With which the man rang off – and Gail collapsed.

  When she recovered, it was as if her world had suddenly collapsed as well. She had never felt thoroughly frightened before, but she now experienced real terror, blanking out all other feelings, and leaving her weak and shaking. All her thoughts of Paul were suddenly of the vulnerable child she remembered, with his private weaknesses and fears. He had been a shy, extremely loving child, and she could not stop thinking how frightened he must be and how easy it would be for his kidnappers to hurt him.

  She had always felt at ease with people, particularly Italians, and she loved Italy. But Italy was suddenly a foreign land.

  ‘I felt utterly alone, and I had to find out what in God’s name I should do.’

  Her first reaction was to ring her parents in America, who did their best to reassure her and said she must certainly contact the police, which she did, telephoning the Carabinieri station in the nearby Piazza Euclide. Then she called her ex-husband, Paul, in London.

  They had recently been drawing closer to each other. Paul was on his own but seemed more in charge of his life than at any time since Talitha’s death. Gail had spent part of May with him at Cheyne Walk – since when few days had passed without them speaking to each other on the telephone.

  So when she broke the news of what had happened, they shared the sense of shock and horror for their child. Both were in tears, and since Paul seemed even more upset than her, Gail found herself trying to console him. It was only when she said he must contact his father to raise money for the ransom that he seemed to move away.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘We never speak to one another.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to speak to him myself,’ she said. But before she could the Carabinieri had arrived.

  The Arma dei Carabinieri pride themselves on being a tough, hard-headed corps d’élite who help hold Italy together in spite of the most corrupt governing class in Europe. What they lack in imagination they make up for in cynicism and knowledge of the world – and are rarely over-sympathetic to what they see as rich, indulgent foreigners living in their midst.

  Three local officers were commanded by one Colonello Gallo – Colonel Cockerel – ‘who looked and behaved exactly like a rooster’. They were soon joined b
y officers from Carabinieri headquarters who grilled her for the next five hours – chiefly about her and her son’s private lives. She repeated the words of the telephone call verbatim, but they made little attempt to hide their doubts about the kidnapping – and about young Paul himself.

  ‘We know your son, signora. He is probably with a girl or with his hippie friends. He will almost certainly turn up.’

  The Carabinieri left at around 11 p.m. and it was agreed that because of the Getty name, and the danger to the other children, the press were not to be informed. But someone did inform them and it wasn’t Gail. Within twenty minutes the Italian press was on the line, followed by ABC New York, NBC Chicago, and finally CBS from London.

  By then there was no point in Gail denying the kidnapping, and next morning it was the front-page story of Rome’s daily paper, Il Messaggero. The story followed the line the officers had taken during Gail’s interrogation.

  Under banner headlines, ‘Joke or Kidnap’, most of the article concentrated on the character and lifestyle of the ‘Golden Hippie’, and suggested that quite probably Paul, ‘famous for his wild hippie life-style’, had gone off with a girlfriend, or some of his wilder acquaintances. There was no reference to Gail’s conversation with the kidnappers or to a demand for a ransom. As far as Il Messaggero was concerned, Paul had simply ‘disappeared’.

  But the article changed the situation. In the first place, it would take some time for the element of doubt over the kidnap to go away – and endless complications would ensue until it did. More serious still, since the Getty name was always news, the chance of dealing with the kidnap quietly behind the scenes was over from the start.

  Gail’s flat in Parioli instantly came under siege from journalists and television crews desperate for a story, making her effectively a prisoner with Aileen, Ariadne and Tara – for as well as being trapped by the media, she also had to stay within reach of the telephone waiting for the kidnappers to call.

  Although it is often seen as the great Italian crime par excellence, kidnap was rare in Italy until the early seventies when Luciano Liggio, the Milan-based capo dei capi of the Sicilian Mafia, developed it as a means of raising capital for the Sicilians’ rapidly developing international drugs cartel. It was then that it began to flourish, and the Sicilians had many imitators. The smartest were probably the students in the Red Brigades, who kidnapped and murdered ex-premier Aldo Moro in 1978 with terrible efficiency, just as the crudest were undoubtedly the Calabrians from the South of Italy.

  The Calabrian Mafia, the N’drangeta, was an ancient, loosely linked federation of mafioso families from this poorest part of Italy, who for centuries had been making money from protection rackets on the local peasantry. Recently some of the younger, more ambitious members had been contemplating kidnap as a quicker source of profit.

  Paul’s captors were a gang of petty criminals from Calabria with tenuous connections with the N’drangeta. Gail believes that someone in the trattoria where he sold his pictures fingered him to them. Until now there’d always been an unspoken rule among mafiosi against harming or involving foreigners, but Paul was so vulnerable – and everybody knew his grandfather was so extremely rich – that the thought of kidnap must have seemed a foolproof source of easy money.

  The planning apparently took some months. There was no problem trailing him, as he had absolutely no awareness of his danger. Seizing him was just as easy, and once they had him in their car his captors held a chloroform-soaked pad across his face, then drove him through the night, still gagged and blindfolded and more or less unconscious, till they reached the desolate countryside they knew in the toe of Italy.

  Here they kept him captive, much as they kept their animals – generally in cattle-huts or shelters in the woods. To begin with they were not so much cruel to him as callous, as Southerners tend to be with animals. He was chained by the ankle, but since his captors all wore masks, they removed his blindfold except when they were on the move.

  For one so young he did his best to keep his dignity. When he complained about the dirt, they took him to wash in nearby streams. He had nothing to read, but they gave him a radio – on which he heard reports about the ‘mystery’ of his kidnapping. They fed him cold spaghetti and tinned tuna-fish and water. They told him that as long as he did as he was told he would not be hurt and his ordeal would soon be over.

  At this stage his captors seemed highly confident – and were clearly counting on a speedy deal to make their fortunes. Since the boy’s grandfather was so rich, they were certain there would be no problem finding the money for the ransom.

  ‘Ci sentiremo’ – ‘You’ll be hearing from us’ – were the kidnapper’s final words to Gail before ringing off, and she stayed like a lover by the telephone waiting for the call to come. But kidnap is a form of torture and they let her stew. For ten long days and sleepless nights she had no hint of whether her son was alive or dead or what had happened to him.

  Not that she sat by her telephone in silence. She was plagued throughout the day by telephone calls – supportive calls, abusive calls, and even obscene calls, none of which made life easier.

  She had still been unable to make contact with Big Paul at Sutton Place, as he was never available and never rang her back. Nor did she hear from Ann and Gordon in America. Thinking herself totally abandoned by the Gettys and left to face the music on her own, she had never felt so lonely in her life, and as day dragged after day, with the promised call from the kidnappers never coming, she became convinced that something unspeakable had happened.

  At night she could not sleep for fear of the nightmares that pursued her. Did the silence mean the kidnappers had killed him? What if they never rang? What if she simply never saw her son again?

  But finally they did communicate with her – not by telephone, but through the post, in a colourful, artistically-done collage of letters cut from magazines, briefly setting out the kidnappers’ demands for a ransom. They were asking for ten miliardi of lire, roughly 17 million dollars, a considerable sum even by Getty standards, which could come from one source only, the eighty-one-year-old family patriarch back in Sutton Place.

  Shortly after this, Gail received a second letter – this time from Paul himself. It had been posted in Rome, and her heart missed a beat when she recognized his writing on the envelope. The letter started by telling her what she knew already, that he had been kidnapped, but gave no clues as to his whereabouts or the identity of his captors. He simply wrote that he was safe and well, and added a fresh warning against going to the police.

  Clearly writing at the kidnappers’ behest, he concluded by begging her to speak as soon as possible to his grandfather about the ransom. If his captors failed to receive the money swiftly and in full he would be ‘badly treated’.

  The letter ended with a line that made her blood run cold.

  ‘Pay up, I beg you, pay up as soon as possible if you wish me well. If you delay it is very dangerous for me. I love you. Paul.’

  *

  Paul Junior still refused to talk to his father about the ransom, and although Gail continued ringing Sutton Place, Getty Senior was never available. This puzzled her. Big Paul had always been extremely charming to her in the past, but now it was clear that he wished to have no contact with her.

  By now he had, in fact, made his attitude to paying ransom money all too clear in a statement issued to the press. Jean Paul Getty was standing firm on what he claimed to be a matter of principle. As he put it in his statement: ‘I have fourteen grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.’

  As a public statement warning off other potential kidnappers this was fair enough. There was presumably a chance, however minimal, that payment of a ransom for one child might conceivably encourage somebody to kidnap another, and the statement also squared with the law in Italy, where the payment of a ransom to kidnappers is theoretically against the law.

  But all of this was hypothetical. In
Italy it has always proved impossible to forbid the payment of ransom money to release a loved one, just as the reality was that Getty’s eldest grandson and namesake, Jean Paul Getty III, was actually in the hands of criminals and at that very moment in danger of his life.

  As everybody knew, his grandfather – and he alone – could pay virtually any ransom demand and barely notice. So could he seriously intend to leave his grandson in captivity? What if the boy became sick or was tortured? Would he still stick firmly by his principles, and high-mindedly refuse to save him?

  Getty made it clear that his reasons for doing so had less to do with principle than with his personal feelings on the matter. In the first place there was his puritan disapproval of his so-called ‘hippie’ grandson. He had heard enough about him to believe that he was like his father, and he wanted nothing to do with either until they changed their ways.

  He also blamed the boy for getting kidnapped in the first place, and thereby involving him, his grandfather, with the dreaded Mafia. For the truth was that the old man had been terrified of kidnap even before Paul disappeared. This was why he had never stayed for long at La Posta Vecchia (where he had kept the loaded shotgun in his bedroom), and at Sutton Place was already taking serious advice from his personal security expert, Colonel Leon Turrou.

  For several years Turrou, a Frenchman and former CIA agent, had studied the techniques of kidnap prevention and had written a book on the classic case of the 1930s, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in America. A scared old billionaire like Paul Getty was an ideal client, and by now the Colonel had placed him in a state of semi-siege at Sutton Place, with armed guards in the house, lethal Alsatians in the grounds, and the latest in surveillance technology almost everywhere. Impressive locks and a bulletproof steel plate were fitted to his bedroom door, and armed guards with unsmiling faces drove before and after his Cadillac on the few occasions when he ventured out.