Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  As a last resort Cinquanta telephoned Gail to ask her for advice.

  ‘Signora. You must tell me. What can we do for him?’ he wailed, unable to disguise his anxiety for Paul’s condition, and knowing that he and his colleagues could lose everything if his illness worsened.

  This was the point when Gail knew for certain that if the kidnap lasted any longer, Paul would die. Nothing on earth was worth that – not Big Paul’s precious principles and his fears for his other grandchildren, nor the fortune of the Gettys nor the problems over raising so much money.

  So she decided that the kidnap had to end. If no one else would end it, she would. If no one else could save her son, she would save him.

  She told Cinquanta to keep Paul as warm as possible and get ready to release him. The ransom would be paid.

  Gail’s determination effectively transformed the situation. Suddenly her single-mindedness became contagious. She spoke to her father, who argued so forcibly on the telephone to Sutton Place that Big Paul finally gave in and agreed that somehow the money would be found. But even now, the old man was typically insisting that he would pay only the portion of the ransom which would be tax-deductible – the boy’s father had to foot the rest.

  This caused problems, as Gail could no longer make meaningful contact with Paul Junior, who was making little sense to anyone. But he did finally agree to his father’s terms. Since he hadn’t got the million dollars which he had to put towards the ransom, Big Paul would lend it to him, at 4 per cent interest, computed annually. But Gail had been led to understand that as a precondition of payment Paul Junior was insisting that she immediately surrender custody of all her children.

  Gail thought she could bear anything by now, but this was the cruellest blow of all. She had endured five months of hell to save her son, and at the moment when she almost had him back, it seemed she had to lose him – and the rest of her children.

  There was nothing to be done, however, and her feelings were no longer terribly important. All that mattered was the money – and to get her son released as soon as possible. So she wearily agreed, even getting as far as making arrangements to get the children to the airport – only to discover there had been yet another misunderstanding and Paul Junior was denying ever having asked for custody.

  This was typical of the atmosphere of drama and distrust which hovered round the kidnap to the very end. But Jean Paul Getty had agreed in principle. That was what counted – even if he would contribute only $2.2 million of the ransom directly. This was all that his accountants told him could be tax-deductible; so he stuck to his demand that his son should pay the rest in regular instalments from his income from the Sarah C. Getty Trust.

  Gail was dreading something else occurring up to the very last, but on 6 December Chace received authorization to withdraw the massive sum of 2,000 million lire in used 50,000 and 100,000 lire notes. All had been microfilmed, and the notes filled three large holdalls which he actually took to the US Embassy on the Via Veneto for safe keeping.

  Even now there was a muddle caused by fog and snow on the autostrada north of Naples, which was in the grip of its worst winter for nearly fifty years. On the first trip with the money, Chace failed to make contact with the kidnappers. Tempers frayed, and Gail was afraid of yet more drama that could prolong the five-month agony. But on 12 December, Chace picked up the three bags from the US Embassy for the second time and drove 250 miles south of Rome to the rendezvous Cinquanta had arranged. Four kilometres to the south of the turn-off to the town of Lagonegro he spotted a man standing by the road, pistol in hand and balaclava helmet obscuring his face. Chace stopped the car, desposited the three bags by the road and returned to Rome. He had been shadowed all the way by members of the Squadra Mobile, disguised as workmen in a van, who had photographed the man in the balaclava.

  Although the kidnap was so nearly over, Gail still had to face the cruellest wait of all. Next day she heard nothing, nor the day after, and she became convinced that, having got the money, the kidnappers must have killed her son. From their point of view it would have made a sort of sense to have taken the ransom and destroyed the evidence – Paul included.

  By the evening of the 14th she was on the edge of despair, convinced by now that what she dreaded had happened. Five months of misery had ended with a silent telephone.

  But at 10.30 at night the telephone did ring. It was Cinquanta. He was very formal. He could have been someone in a bank, confirming that the money had been paid, and that his colleagues were keeping their side of the bargain and releasing Paul within the next few hours. He would be left on a hillside close to where Chace had left the money. He gave a precise description of the spot, adding that Gail should come there on her own to fetch him.

  ‘Please keep him warm,’ she said, mindful of the freezing weather.

  ‘I’ll make sure he has a blanket,’ said Cinquanta. Those were the last words he spoke to Gail, and she never heard his voice again.

  All thought of sleep was over for the night. The police had been tapping Gail’s telephone and passed the gist of the conversation on to the Squadra Mobile, who soon arrived at her apartment. She rang Chace, who came at once. By midnight, she and Chace were in the back of a car from the Squadra Mobile with Carlo at the wheel.

  For most of the way it was snowing heavily, and dawn was breaking when they reached the hillside. The countryside was white, and in the early light there was no sign of Paul. They called his name to no avail. Gail whistled as she and the children used to whistle to each other at Orgia. Paul would have recognized the call at once, but there was still no answer.

  ‘You must be prepared – they may have killed him,’ said Chace, as the men from the Squadra Mobile went on searching the hillside without discovering any sign of Paul. Then they heard one of the men shouting. He had found something at last – an old blanket, and a blindfold. They must have belonged to Paul, and were the first evidence they had that he was still alive. But where was he?

  ‘You know your son,’ Carlo said to Gail. ‘What would he have done?’

  ‘Headed for home,’ she said.

  So the Squadra Mobile drove slowly up the autostrada searching for Paul, with Gail and Chace in the back of a squad car. They saw nothing, but over the car radio they picked up a report from the police. An unidentified male had been found in the vicinity, and taken to the headquarters of the Carabinieri at Lagonegro.

  At the caserma of the Carabinieri in Lagonegro, no one would admit at first that Paul was even there – and when someone did, Gail was told she could not see him as he was being interrogated. The reason for this apparent hostility lay in the fact that she was with members of the Squadra Mobile, who have always been at daggers-drawn with the Carabinieri – and the Carabinieri were determined to retain the credit for ‘rescuing’ Paul Getty.

  But Gail had endured too much by now to bother with such niceties.

  ‘I want my son,’ she said. ‘Let me see my son.’ And the sight of this angry and exhausted woman calling for her child made the officials relent, and finally they brought him to her.

  He was so thin and ill that she scarcely recognized him as he came shuffling in, wearing clothes the Carabinieri had bought specially for him. He was filthy, he could barely walk, and a bloodstained bandage round his head covered the wound where his ear had been.

  Now that the moment they had longed for had arrived, Gail and Paul were both too overcome to speak. They clung to one another, and it was only when she held him in her arms that she knew for certain that the long ordeal was over.

  All that mattered was to get Paul safely back to Rome, and before the Carabinieri could object, she and Chace half dragged him to the waiting car outside and started on the journey home.

  All she remembers of the journey is that ‘Paul and I were both like zombies, and so tense with emotion that we could still barely speak to one another.’

  By the time they reached Naples, news of Paul’s release was on the radio, and at Rome
reporters were waiting for them by the toll booths as they left the autostrada. People were waiting in the street to watch as they drove by. Some of them cheered and waved, but Gail could feel nothing but a sense of total unreality, and relief that the horror of the last five months was over. As yet she had no inkling of the damage that these months had done to Paul – and to her, and to all the family.

  A friend had already booked both of them into a clinic in Parioli, where they spent the next three days recovering before going off on holiday to Austria. On their arrival at the clinic, the doctors had examined Paul and the results seemed reassuring. He was young and strong. Physically he’d soon recover, and with modern plastic surgery, even his ear could be rebuilt.

  ‘And the psychological effects?’ Gail asked.

  Time alone would tell, the doctor answered.

  That afternoon, Gail remembered the date – 15 December, Big Paul’s birthday. He was eighty-one, and she suggested that it might be tactful if Paul telephoned his grandfather to thank him for what he’d done for him and wish him a very happy birthday.

  At Sutton Place, the old man was in his study when the call came through and one of his women came to tell him who was on the line.

  ‘It’s your grandson, Paul. Do you wish to speak to him?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Dynasty

  Behind The Grim façade which Jean Paul Getty managed to maintain throughout the kidnap, things were beginning to go wrong at Sutton Place.

  This had nothing at all to do with his commercial interests, which had never looked brighter. The worldwide oil shortage following the Arab–Israeli Yom Kippur war of October 1973 had quadrupled the price of oil from $3 to $12 a barrel on the international market, and shares in Getty Oil were rising steadily. During 1975 the old man would increase the company’s cash dividend from $1.30 to $2.50 a share, thus incidentally awarding himself a record income for the year of $25,800,000. By then he and the Sarah C. Getty Trust between them would be worth a staggering $2.4 billion.

  But this flow of wealth could not prevent an ill-defined but most disturbing feeling which had started to affect him. It was something he had not experienced before, and was as painful as it was unexpected. At the age of eighty-two, one of the richest men in the world was experiencing a sense of failure.

  It had started two years earlier, shortly after his eightieth birthday party at the Dorchester Hotel, which had been arranged by the Duchess of Argyll. At the party everything had still been wonderful. When his friend the Duke of Bedford had proposed the toast – ‘May the many witty and lovely ladies around him grow even wittier and lovelier’ – everyone applauded. President Nixon had sent his daughter, Tricia, especially to represent him; and at midnight the President himself had telephoned from Washington with birthday greetings to his loyal supporter and generous contributor to the Nixon funds, his good friend, Jean Paul Getty.

  But a few months later the unthinkable had occurred. His confidante and friend Penelope Kitson left him. When she told him she intended getting married once again, to businessman Patrick de Laszlo, he had done everything he could to stop her, including using the ultimate Getty sanction – cutting her from his precious will. He was upset to find this made no difference – but was mollified when the marriage failed some months later, and Penelope returned to see him.

  ‘I won’t say I’m sorry, dear,’ was all he said – and quietly reinstated her into his will and her cottage on the estate. But Penelope’s show of independence had upset him, as had reactions to something else that meant a lot to him – the official opening of his museum at Malibu at the beginning of 1974.

  Getty’s architect, the amiable Englishman Stephen Garrett, had always had his doubts about the whole idea of recreating this Roman villa by the shores of the Pacific, and had tried to warn his patron. But Getty wouldn’t listen, and had continued to follow every detail of the construction from 6,000 miles away in Sutton Place. But when it was opened, Getty’s precious dream-child was greeted with almost unanimous derision by the press. ‘Vulgar’, ‘tasteless’, ‘straight out of Disneyland’ were among the reactions, and the London Economist was particularly snooty. Art historians, it said, would be pushed to decide if Jean Paul Getty’s folly was ‘merely incongruous or genuinely ludicrous’.

  As usual when faced by something that he didn’t like, the old man narrowed his already very narrow lips, and said nothing. But coming right on top of widespread criticism of his behaviour over the kidnap, these reactions to his museum genuinely shook him. Later he would write of young Paul’s release having been ‘the finest and most wonderful birthday present of my life’. Few believed him.

  Faced with a similar situation, poorer men had mortgaged homes, borrowed what they could from friends, even gone into bankruptcy in their attempts to find the money for a grandchild’s ransom. And it did not entirely pass notice that while Getty had refused to find the money on the grounds of his so-called principles, he had finally overlooked his principles when he had to; also that by delaying payment of the ransom for as long as possible, he had actually forced the kidnappers to drop the asking price from their original figure of $17 million to $3.2 million – a saving of some $13.8 million.

  As a businessman this was something he was certainly aware of. And if it meant that to achieve it his once favourite grandson had been forced to suffer a five-month nightmare with the Mafia, he presumably felt the price worth paying.

  But now he must have had his doubts. For the kidnap proved a genuine disaster to the family as well as to Getty himself. The boy’s own sufferings had barely started, and in different ways the damage would continue spreading, bringing yet further misery and grief for years to come.

  This was not evident at once. After the kidnap, Gail and her son spent two months quietly recuperating in the Austrian mountains with Aileen, Mark and Ariadne. The mountains calmed their fears, restored their spirits and they were soon enjoying life again. Years later Aileen would be remembering this holiday as the last time she had been carefree and completely happy. The rest of the family felt much the same, and they returned from Austria believing that the nightmare of the kidnap was over and forgotten.

  It was a good sign that the kidnap had made curiously little difference to their feelings for Italy, and once Gail was safely back in her house at Orgia she shrugged off suggestions from her friends that she might possibly be in need of therapy.

  Young Paul had been reunited with Martine by now, and it was only when he returned to Rome to be with her, leaving Gail alone at last, that she realized how right her friends had been. ‘For suddenly and without warning, I quietly fell apart.’

  She was hit by nightmares from the period of the kidnap, followed by uncontrollable fits of weeping. She took to bed in the depths of black depression. Then slowly, painfully, she pulled herself together.

  At this stage, Paul appeared less affected by the kidnap than his mother. This was partly the effect of youth and partly because he had the strong-willed Martine to depend on. For the first time in his life, he found himself enjoying a settled relationship with a girlfriend; and that summer, when Martine discovered she was pregnant, he acted in accordance with the bourgeois principles he had previously rejected – and proposed.

  It was a happy wedding, held before the mayor of Sovicille, the seat of the local comune, with virtually the whole of Orgia attending. Conscious of her condition, Martine wore a simple dress, and it was Paul who really stole the show. His hair had grown again and he made a striking figure in his specially tailored black Mao suit with dark red piping and his new white gymshoes.

  Coming so soon after his release, the wedding was inevitably something of a media event, with the Italian press and television out in strength. Far from disliking this, Paul obviously loved to be the centre of attention – so much so that when a photographer from the London Daily Express became delayed and missed the wedding, Paul insisted on going through with it aga
in for the photographer.

  Those who knew him insist that this was not exactly vanity. In his longing for media attention he was seeking something that he desperately needed – a true identity which he hoped to find in the role of some sort of cult celebrity.

  Just before Christmas he and Martine left Italy for Los Angeles, where they planned to live, and it was in the suburbs of Tarzana (named after the hero of the town’s founder, Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels) that in January 1975 Martine gave birth to a son. Resisting the temptation of naming him Tarzan Getty, they called him Balthazar. Balthazar was one of the three wise men in the Bible, and if the family was going to survive, a little wisdom wouldn’t come amiss.

  By marrying Martine, Paul had made something of a sacrifice; for by marrying before the age of twenty-two, he had disqualified himself from any income from the trust his father had set up in 1966, after the divorce, to support the children. This age bar was originally inserted to protect Aileen and Ariadne from potential fortune-hunters, but now it ruled out Paul as well.

  He made a virtue of despising what he hadn’t got, but from now on lack of funds was to be one of Paul’s perpetual problems. He found it particularly galling to have the Getty name without the Getty money. He knew that one day he would inherit a fortune from the Sarah C. Getty Trust – but in the meantime he was having quite a problem to survive.

  It was around March 1975 that Gail began receiving pressure from Paul Junior to bring the children back to England. Whenever they spoke on the telephone he sounded so depressed and lonely that she was genuinely worried about him.

  Sensing that there was little hope of marrying him or bearing his children, Victoria had left him, undergone a cure and married for the second time – to Oliver Musker, an amusing young London-based antique dealer who was in love with her.

  It was after her departure that Paul really hit rock bottom. The only person looking after him by now was a former minicab driver called Derek Calcott, who did his best to ensure that there was something in the house for him to eat – generally chocolate chip cookies and chocolate ripple ice-cream, both of which were bad for him but amply satisfied his addict’s craving for something sweet. Feeling helpless and abandoned, he was otherwise completely on his own in a house which had become as gloomy and neglected as himself.