Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  He was also out of money. He was financially incapable, and the relatively small sums he had been receiving from the Sarah C. Getty Trust had been going on the quantities of street drugs he was using in addition to his prescription drugs.

  All this had made him wretchedly vulnerable. So-called ‘friends’ had started taking his possessions, and he had sold off much of what remained – including the red MG from Rome, for which his sister, Donna, gave him $2,000. He could no longer support the children in Italy and was begging Gail to bring them back to Cheyne Walk.

  She was in two minds over this. Part of her dreaded leaving Italy, and she was wary of getting too involved with him again. On the other hand she thought that setting up home in Cheyne Walk might be good both for the children and for their father. Since she and Paul were both alone and were still fond of one another, it also made good sense for them to be together.

  So Gail flew to London for a few days for the first time since the kidnap – only to find things even worse than she expected. She arrived at the weekend. Paul was alone in the house, and since he was out of money yet again, his dealer had left him without drugs and he was already showing symptoms of acute withdrawal.

  That night he was in such desperate straits that she made up a bed in the study to be near him, and stayed with him as the sweating and the writhing started. When he told her that all he wanted was to kick the habit, she promised she would stay and help him.

  There was a drug clinic at Elephant and Castle – one of the poorest areas of South London – which offered addicts treatment every Tuesday, so the following Tuesday Gail took him there and he started on methadone instead of heroin and began cutting back on alcohol. Only when she was thoroughly convinced that he was serious about his treatment did she agree to bring the children back to England.

  *

  It was a bad wrench leaving Italy, and the children hated it. But by now Gail had convinced herself that it was for the best, and the children all seemed glad to be reunited with their father.

  It was decided that Tara should remain in France with his grandparents, and the girls were sent to separate boarding-schools – Aileen to Hatchlands, a finishing school for smart young ladies near Godalming in Surrey, and Ariadne to a boarding-school near Lewes.

  After creating consternation by announcing – as a practical joke – that she was pregnant, thirteen-year-old Ariadne settled down and accepted the routine of an English female boarding-school. But Aileen found the whole idea of Hatchlands very odd indeed. Like a true Italian, she hated being forced to sleep with the windows open, and always seemed to have a cold. She was taught fencing, contract bridge, and etiquette, all of which struck her as absurd. So did the trouble that was taken over teaching her to curtsey properly to royalty. Bored and resentful, she kept a secret stock of alcohol, truanted to London, and used to concoct horrifying stories to scandalize her more gullible fellow pupils.

  Far from turning Aileen into a socially accomplished young lady, a year of Hatchlands was enough to make a rebel out of her for ever.

  At the same time, finding a school for Mark proved more of a problem. As it was hard to get him into a major public school at such short notice, a friend of Gail’s introduced him to the less oppressive world of Taunton School in rural Somerset. Here he came to feel very much at home, was popular with the other boys, loved the countryside, worked hard enough to get a scholarship to Oxford and became a very self-possessed, reflective human being.

  Meanwhile his brother Paul was having problems as a married man of eighteen with an older wife and two young children, Martine’s daughter, Anna, as well as Balthazar, to support. Craig Copetas, a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, who saw a lot of him around this time, recalls that ‘he was obviously extremely strong, and physically appeared to be scarcely affected by the kidnap’.

  But this was deceptive. Beneath the surface, five months of physical and mental torture had played havoc with a personality already at risk, and Gail is convinced that his nervous system was seriously affected by his sufferings. He was finding it impossible to sleep – and when he did, was a constant prey to nightmares and a never-ending sense of dread. But his real problems came from the brandy which the kidnappers had fed him in captivity. He had inherited his addictive nature from his father, and soon it was clear that by starting his dependency on alcohol, the kidnappers had turned Paul Getty into a hopeless alcoholic.

  It was not surprising that he found it impossible to settle down or maintain a close relationship with anyone. Martine often couldn’t cope with him, particularly when he turned to drugs – legal and illegal – to help him through the day and enjoy a few hours’ sleep at night. When he did succeed in sleeping, he would often wake up screaming.

  In her practical way, Martine kept her small family together in Los Angeles, making a home for Anna and Balthazar – and for Paul too, when he needed them. When Grandfather Getty offered him a small allowance on condition that he studied at a university, he enrolled at Pepperdine University in Malibu and opted to study Chinese history. But academic life was as difficult for him as married life, and he was rarely in the lecture hall or the marital apartment.

  When he could he came to England and, according to Gail, he continued to adore his father and romanticize his life. Although he rarely saw him, he was as eager as ever for his approval, and still hoped to gain it by becoming an important figure in the counter-culture.

  This was what really lay behind his continuing obsession with prominent members of the Beat generation. Copetas was able to introduce him to some of the high priests of the movement, like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. He remembers Paul trying to impress Burroughs by giving him one of the earliest Polaroid instant cameras. ‘It was quite a present in those days. But Burroughs just looked puzzled and embarrassed and obviously hadn’t the faintest notion what to do with it.’

  As author of The Naked Lunch, Burroughs was a hero to young Paul, while, as Copetas put it, ‘The only thing that made Paul interesting to Burroughs was that his name was Getty and he’d been kidnapped by the Mafia and had his ear cut off.’

  Later that year the trial was held in Lagonegro of seven men accused of varying degrees of involvement in the kidnapping of Jean Paul Getty III. In Italy it is rare for kidnap victims or their families to risk attending trials that involve the Mafia. But Gail and Paul were determined to confront their ex-tormentors.

  Worried by the risks they would be taking, Paul Junior insisted that they had advice from the former SAS man he had been using as a security expert himself since the kidnapping. As a professional the SAS man was so worried by the prospect of a Mafia trial in the heart of Mafia-dominated country that he seriously suggested having Gail and Paul flown into Lagonegro from Naples each morning by helicopter. To Gail this seemed excessive, and they settled for staying in Naples for the period of the trial, and travelling to court by car each morning.

  Paul was wearing his hair longer now than ever to hide his lost ear, and many commented on how well he looked. But he and Gail found the trial more upsetting than they had expected – particularly having to encounter the sullen faces of the accused staring at them from the iron cage where they were kept inside the court.

  They were dangerous-looking characters, but since the kidnappers had always worn their masks, Paul could not recognize any of them. Nor when she heard them speak could Gail recognize the unmistakable voice of Cinquanta. None of the ringleaders seemed to be among them, for as usual in Mafia trials, the godfathers were wherever godfathers go when trouble comes. One of the top suspects was a leading figure in the N’drangeta called Saverio Mammoliti. He was said to have been in charge of the affair, but the police could never catch him, despite the fact that he appeared quite openly to get married in church at the nearby town of Gióia Táuro just before the trial.

  Nor was the ransom money ever found, apart from a small amount discovered on one of the accused. This meant that more than 3 million Getty dollars, i
n carefully marked Italian lire, were currently helping to equip Mafia laboratories producing heroin and cocaine.

  The accused, who were found guilty, received between four and ten years’ imprisonment in conditions of maximum security. But Gail felt that no punishment could match the cruelty the kidnappers had inflicted on her son. Some years later a member of the gang who was still in prison wrote to her begging her forgiveness and saying that a word from her would help his chances of release. She didn’t answer.

  Throughout most of 1975 Gail and Paul Junior seemed to get on well together in Cheyne Walk, partly because the house was big enough for both to live relatively separate lives. Gail found the house more beautiful than she remembered, but also faintly sinister – ‘a living tomb’ she would later call it.

  No, she assured one interviewer, she and Paul had not remarried, nor did they intend to do so.

  But now that they were back together, she was shocked by how much he had changed, and the damage which his way of life had caused him. Thanks to his regular Tuesday visits to Elephant and Castle, however, he was showing signs of definite improvement, and during that summer he actually enjoyed a fortnight’s holiday with Mark, taking him to stay with friends in Ireland. It was the first time he had been away so long from Cheyne Walk since Talitha’s death.

  *

  Throughout this period the ageing Jean Paul Getty had been trying not to think too much about the future. He had spent his lifetime building Getty Oil – but what was to become of it?

  ‘I’m a bad boss,’ he admitted gloomily in a moment of rare candour. ‘A good boss develops successors. There is nobody to step into my shoes.’

  Theoretically the whole purpose of creating the enormous fortune in the Sarah C. Getty Trust had always been to enrich what he liked to call ‘the Getty dynasty’. But here again he had been having doubts. What hope could there be for a dynasty riven by disaster and dissent? Penelope told Ralph Hewins that at times the old man was haunted by the thought that ‘the Getty dynasty would end with him, and his empire would be divided up, never to reach the same peak again’.

  Sometimes he even went so far as to blame himself for what had happened. Having sacrificed his family to success in business, he wondered if the sacrifice was worth it.

  To counter such gloomy thoughts, during the summer of 1975 he tried becoming something he had never been before – a loving grandfather at the centre of a big united family, ‘Mr Family himself’ as Gail called him. At different times all the grandchildren would be invited to Sutton Place together with their parents.

  At one time Gordon and Ann brought the four boys, Peter, Andrew, John and William. On another occasion George’s first wife, Gloria, brought her daughters, Anne, Claire and Caroline. And Ronald and his blonde wife, Karin, came with Christopher, Stephanie, Cecile and Christina. Gail and her children were regularly invited to Sutton Place for the weekend.

  Naturally they went, for money is a great healer, and Gail found her ex-father-in-law as charming to her as ever. It was as if the kidnap had never happened, and by keeping off the subject, he and his grandson, Paul, began to get on rather well together.

  Later the old man seemed surprised at how much he had actually enjoyed this novel exercise in family togetherness, and would write of how these visits had made 1975 ‘a most reassuring summer for Grandfather J. Paul Getty’.

  Trying to convince himself of what he wanted to believe, he added that the warmth of family affection showed that ‘despite everything – be it wealth [sic], divorce, tragedy or any of the other myriad conditions and tribulations of life – the Getty family is family and will continue to be one’.

  Brave words – but they seemed distinctly forced when checked against reality. For the truth was that few families could have been more disunited than the Gettys, and it was impossible to regard them as an American dynasty in the making, like the Kennedys or the Rockefellers. And ironically, the truth was that most of the family disunity had been caused, directly or indirectly, by Jean Paul Getty.

  Even at eighty-two he could not resist playing one son off against another. His current favourite, as far as he had one, was the previously despised and frequently ignored Gordon. Gordon had been appointed along with Lansing Hays as a trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, and he and Ann were the only members of the family whom his father had seen fit to invite to London for his eightieth birthday party.

  Gordon’s show of independence by suing his father in that long and hard-fought battle over his income from the Sarah C. Getty Trust continued to work wonders both for his morale and his personal prestige, and relations started to improve.

  From having been, by Getty standards, on the edge of poverty, Gordon was now distinctly affluent. The increased income of Getty Oil was reflected in the earnings from the Sarah C. Getty Trust, and Gordon and his brother Paul Junior apparently received $4,927,514 in the twelve months prior to their father’s death.

  This meant that Ann and Gordon were free to live the life they wanted, and almost from the start they made it clear that they would not be following the sort of penny-pinching billionaires’ existence exemplified by Gordon’s father.

  Ann had a strong flamboyant streak which Gordon followed, so that when they found themselves a house it was one of the largest, most spectacular private houses in the whole of San Francisco, an Italianate four-storeyed mansion on the peak of Pacific Heights, designed in the early thirties by the prestigious architect Willis Polk.

  Like Ann and Gordon it was considerably larger than life. It had a courtyard with Italian-style frescoes, more than a dozen bedrooms, and unrivalled views across the bay from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz. It had been something of a white elephant, and they got it fairly cheaply since it was going to require a lot of money to make it habitable, let alone the sort of house that Ann had set her heart on.

  So buying it had been a sort of proclamation of intent. Gordon and Ann were rich, they were at the very top of San Francisco, and they were going to enjoy themselves.

  Ronald’s life remained considerably less enviable than absent-minded Gordon’s during that summer of 1975. Indeed Gordon’s growing affluence emphasized further still the gross unfairness of poor Ronald’s continued disinheritance. While Gordon was drawing his millions from the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Ronald was paid his bare $3,000.

  On top of this, the business he had set such store by – his grandly named Getty Financial Corporation, a conglomerate of property and fast-food restaurants – had yet to show a real profit.

  But after that summer’s visit to Sutton Place with Karin and the children, Ronald was more hopeful than he’d been for years. Father had mellowed, and he got on better with him than he ever had before. Indeed, he had personally assured him that justice would be done. He had also made him a trustee of the museum at Malibu, and an executor of his will. All this seemed to point to one thing and one thing only – that at his father’s death Ronald would be placed where he always should have been, in a position of equality beside his brothers as full beneficiary of the Sarah C. Getty Trust.

  The only member of the family not to be invited down to Sutton Place that summer was the old man’s namesake and former favourite son, Jean Paul Getty Junior. During the worst moments of the kidnap, Getty had refused to speak to him, and now, as old age took its toll, he still stood firm.

  Paul Junior became deeply upset by this and still telephoned Penelope Kitson from time to time begging her to intercede on his behalf. But it was always the same reply: ‘Not until he comes off drugs.’

  But although his father wouldn’t see or speak to him, there was no way Paul Junior could be displaced as a principal beneficiary of the Sarah C. Getty Trust. As a drug addict, he was not considered fit to be a Getty, but financially Jean Paul Getty Junior was already set to be a multi-millionaire.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Posthumous Pleasures

  It Was Odd how little consolation Jean Paul Getty actually derived in his old age from the enormous fo
rtune he had spent his life creating. There had always been something curiously unreal about the vast amounts of money he had conjured from the earth, and because he was always so determined to preserve the fortune from extravagance and taxes, it was as if he had never entirely possessed it.

  Just as he had never known quite how large it was, so he had always been uneasy when using it except for the business which preoccupied him even now – that of making even further vast amounts of money.

  Over the years, money had taken on various aspects for him – money as power, money to make more money, and in a deeper sense, money to justify himself before his parents and his conscience. But there was never cash to be enjoyed as any normal person might have enjoyed it by the simple act of spending. Because of this, it was as if his money cheated him; and since he had made the fortune in his own image, this meant that he was finally cheated by himself.

  He couldn’t change his nature any more than he could change his face, and here he was, trapped in the person he had carefully created in order to create the fortune. In the past he had made himself an isolated figure in the interests of secrecy and strength – but now his isolation merely left him lonely. His face, which he had trained so carefully to reveal nothing of his feelings, had become a mask incapable of registering anything at all – even the terror of mortality that never left him. He had made himself immune to love and pity – and now at the age of eighty-three he was incapable of feeling love for anyone. As some are colour-blind, so he was people-blind, having schooled himself for years to ignore the distraction of ordinary emotions.