Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  Gail continued visiting Cheyne Walk to look after her family, but she was increasingly upset to see that in her absence, Paul was giving up on his cure completely, and was soon as heavily addicted as before.

  This was the point when Gail concluded that the cause was lost. There were angry arguments and she felt that there was nothing further she could do for him. The children were unhappy, and after one final desperate scene between her and Paul, she decided that no further purpose could be served by their remaining.

  All she wanted was to remove herself and the children as far away as possible from the unhappiness of Cheyne Walk, which for her meant getting to California – first San Francisco, where they stayed with friends, then on to Los Angeles where they finally found themselves a house.

  It was the most decisive move that they could take, and a total break with Europe and the past. Sometimes Gail dreamed of Italy, which appeared an insuperable distance from California.

  As for Paul Junior, after his father died he made an agonized appearance at the memorial service for his father – ashen-faced, wearing dark glasses, and showing such difficulty walking that he seemed to need the support of Bianca Jagger, who came with him. This was the last time he was photographed in public for many years. He missed the children, bitterly regretted not having seen his father before he died, and his health was beginning to deteriorate as the drugs and drink started to affect his circulation.

  For a man who had suddenly become a principal beneficiary of the greatest fortune in America, he could hardly have appeared more wretched.

  But the greatest casualty within the family was still his son, young Paul. He was now a hopeless alcoholic, and financially his affairs were in such chaos that, since his father exercised no personal control, his grandfather, Judge Harris, filed suit in Los Angeles to be appointed his legal guardian on the grounds that Paul was ‘financially improvident’ and ‘unable economically to handle his own affairs’.

  The marriage with Martine had effectively collapsed by now. Paul was bouncing cheques, had given up on college, was drinking more heavily than ever, and was mixing with low-life characters, buying cars on the strength of the Getty name then charging them to members of the family.

  In desperation, Gail invited his old friend, the journalist Craig Copetas, to Los Angeles to talk to him, ‘Which’, as Copetas says, ‘shows how desperate she’d become.’

  Copetas describes how his friendship with young Paul ended. ‘I stayed with him for a few days at the place he was renting off Sunset Strip. He was drinking heavily, but he said he wasn’t happy, and longed to sort life out somehow but it wasn’t possible.

  ‘While I was there his grandfather’s application was due to be heard in the Supreme Court of California, and on the morning of the hearing I drove him and Martine to the court in an old red Chevrolet I’d bought. He seemed quite calm and reasonable, so I said to him, “Paul, this is your chance to show a real change of attitude. Everyone’s pissed off with you, and there’ll be hordes of reporters at the court. Show yourself in a new light. Just for once, be responsible.”

  ‘But suddenly he exploded and started to attack Martine. Underneath everything he had a fearful temper. I think that it was now that I realized that Paul Getty was a lost cause. I stopped the car and bawled him out. He stopped, and I got him to the court, but once again he made a scene, and that was that. I left California a few days later, and never saw Paul again.’

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Drugs And Coma

  After His Father died, it was as if Paul Junior had condemned himself to death in life in his beautiful unhappy house, and the years ticked by as he served his sentence for what had happened to Talitha. His grief alone could not explain his situation, which was also due to alcohol and drugs and money. The alcohol and drugs enabled him to insulate himself from life, and the effortless supply of money permitted him to go on living as he wanted.

  The attraction of heroin is that it temporarily blanks out human misery. For the hour or so following a fix, there is absolute relief from any sense of worthlessness and guilt and from all anxiety. Reality dissolves, and in its place comes the feeling of ineffable tranquillity. The feeling does not last and in the long term the use of heroin has a cumulative effect, leading to yet more anxiety, loss of self-esteem, stifling depression, and a sense of utter isolation. When reality returns, the thought of loved ones can become a source of guilt, which helps explain why Paul saw members of his family so rarely and gave no sign of missing them. Confined within that house of many memories, there were times when he grew morbidly suspicious, and his reclusiveness increased together with his fear and his suspicion of the world outside.

  For company he had his books, and books possess a sympathetic magic of their own, especially books as rare and valuable as those he was collecting – fine bindings from the history of book making, painted manuscripts from the Middle Ages to the present day, and exquisitely printed books from private presses. These were not books to read, so much as books as talismanic objects, books as history, books as individual works of art.

  His books were one of the few escape routes he possessed, for they belonged to the past, and the past is safer than the present. He could enjoy the benediction of the printed page, the smell of leather and the sensual feel of vellum. Books had become his solace, the mistresses he no longer bedded, the family he never saw. He was becoming increasingly well-read, and being clever and methodical he also studied bibliography, learning about the different styles of binding, printing, and the esoteric lore of rare editions. In his scholarly way he started to become invulnerable in a field transcending drugs and money.

  For anyone in his condition it was a considerable achievement, proof that his mind was still as sharp as ever, as he started building up his library. This would be one creation he was proud of, and he was at his happiest in Rossetti’s old studio, which he had made his study, the heavy curtains drawn against the light and his books around him. He was in his mid forties now but looking older – bearded, bespectacled, full-bellied, the drink and the chocolate chip cookies having made him put on weight, giving him an occasional resemblance to the bearded figure of his long-dead hero.

  One of his few regular visitors was kindly Bryan Maggs, king of London rare book sellers, and virtuoso bookbinder on his own account. (His resplendent binding of John Gay’s Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London is on exhibition in the British Museum.) With Maggs to buy for him, his library increased, and all the while he went on sniffing heroin and drinking rum and hardly ever saw his children.

  Being intelligent and rich, there were other interests Paul Junior was able to pursue which also passed the time and brought him no anxiety. One was the cinema. He had a huge collection of old films, and a deep knowledge of the golden age of Hollywood. He also enjoyed British movies from before the war, which became an important source of his enthusiasm for a nostalgic England he had never known but which he loved and felt at home in. Films were a window into life beyond the prison he had built so carefully around him.

  There was another window, too, which opened up more unexpectedly. Living the life he did, there were long periods when sleep was impossible; killing time, he would watch interminable programmes on TV. He was doing this when Mick Jagger came to see him, and inquired why he didn’t watch something more worthwhile.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Cricket,’ said Jagger, switching to a Test Match programme and starting to explain the rules. Paul was hooked. From the days when he and Mario Lanza had attempted to establish baseball in Rome, he had always had an interest in spectator sports, and he enjoyed the subtlety of cricket, together with the drama and excitement it can offer those who take it seriously. As an increasingly Anglophile American he also found an exotic fascination in this curiously English game. Soon he was saying that cricket was to baseball as chess was to a game of draughts.

  With old films, old books, and cricket on TV, he could
fill the longueurs of his solitary life, and seemed set to continue thus until he died – which he gave every sign of doing fairly quickly, as drink and drugs and lack of exercise undermined his constitution.

  From time to time he would enter the London Clinic for a cure, which never lasted; at the same time he received treatment for damage to his circulation and his liver, and for suspected diabetes, along with other symptoms of his precarious condition.

  Meanwhile his children were growing up. Friends of the family often said that Aileen was the child who most resembled him, both physically and with the streak of wildness in her personality. She was intuitively bright and very pretty, with large brown eyes and a sprite-like charm that made her mother call her her Irish leprechaun. But Aileen really liked to think herself a rebel, and after dropping out of her course at the University of Southern California she did most of the things that rebellious young women did in Los Angeles in the seventies, including painting, campaigning against the Vietnam war, and using dope and cocaine for relaxation. As part of her political protest she made artistic collages, including one of photocopied thousand-dollar bills emblazoned with the message, ‘Fight Against Capitalism’. She lived for a period with a jazz pianist, followed by a film director, and attempted to ignore the fact that she would one day be a great heiress, as if the whole idea appalled her. Possibly it really did.

  Less of an extrovert, her sister Ariadne was too much a traditionalist to be a rebel. But just as she had been the tomboy of the family, so she was still comparatively wild, with the mercurial personality and emotional ups-and-downs of her Irish ancestry. After studying at Bennington College in Vermont, she took up photography, specializing in landscape and architecture. She was already promising enough to have acquired her own New York dealer.

  Mark was the one member of the family not to have succumbed to the lure of California. After his English education, he appeared as resolutely Anglophile as his father, but his English accent and exterior were deceptive. His Italian was as fluent as his English, and having been born in Rome he regarded Italy as home. He had been young enough not to have been as seriously affected by his parents’ divorce and the ensuing dramas as Paul and Aileen – but unlike his brother Paul, the absence of his father sometimes made him seem old beyond his years, as he did his best to take his place. He was sensible and caring and responsible, qualities whose rarity among the Gettys made them particularly valuable.

  Mark was not the only member of the family who was missing Italy. After the trauma of the kidnap they had all kept anxiously away, but their mother, Gail, tended to regard Los Angeles as something of a place of exile. She still owned – and longed to see – the house at Orgia, which was now closed up, while Remo the gardener kept an eye on it for her.

  Finally they felt that they could keep away no longer, and early in 1980, Gail and Mark and Ariadne returned for the first time since the kidnap. Anxious to discover what had happened to the house, they did not stay in Rome but hired a car at the airport and drove at once to Tuscany. On reaching Orgia they heard that Remo had died just before Christmas. As he had been ill for some time beforehand, he’d been unable to look after the house and they found it had been badly vandalized.

  It might have been a symbol for the family. But despite the mess and filth, it was still like coming home. This was where Gail and the children had been happiest, and despite the memory of the kidnap, they were determined to have the house restored. They sensed that they belonged here, and decided to return.

  They felt safe in Orgia, for here in this open country, with the vines and the dark red soil, there was none of the closed-in atmosphere of Rome. Besides, they couldn’t live their lives avoiding danger any longer. As Gail said, it was better to face the risk of kidnap than hide away for ever.

  After Italy Gail and the children were back in Los Angeles in March for Aileen’s engagement party. Tiring of her film director – or he of her – Aileen had spent some time with Elizabeth Taylor’s son, Michael Wilding Junior, and through him had got to know his younger brother, Christopher. They had fallen in love, and having been together now for practically two years, they wished to marry. But although everyone liked Christopher, who was handsome, kind and charming, marrying him was not that simple.

  From the start it was evident that any wedding that involved a Getty and a son of Elizabeth Taylor was a forbidding undertaking. The Hollywood protocol would be as complex as at any royal wedding; the publicity could be a nightmare; and both families had problems of their own to add to the confusion. Christopher, who was still devoted to his former stepfather, Richard Burton, insisted that he would have to be present – as well as his mother, who was now married to US Senator John Warner. The filming schedules of the two major film-stars, if nothing else, made this difficult – and on the Getty side there seemed little chance of bringing the members of the family together in tolerable harmony. There was certainly no way of persuading Paul Junior to take his daughter up the aisle.

  The marital logistics seeming insuperable, Gail suggested giving an old style American engagement party for the couple – after which they could ‘elope’ and marry later, at their leisure. Both rather gratefully agreed, and on 17 March Gail held a formal engagement party in their honour for a hundred and fifty at her house at Brentwood

  To give her blessing, Elizabeth Taylor made a regal appearance at the party ‘shimmering in pearls’, and Aileen, dressed as a bride with flowers in her hair, wore a Hollywood style engagement ring of imperial jade, surrounded by diamonds.

  The Gettys were represented by Paul and Mark and Ariadne, and Hollywood by Sissy Spacek, Dudley Moore, and Roddy McDowell. Timothy Leary came to represent himself, and at the end of what Aileen called ‘my surrogate marriage party’, the bridal pair ‘eloped’, and married secretly soon afterwards in a chapel on Sunset Strip.

  That summer further links were forged between Italy and the Getty family when Mark returned to Rome and met Domitilla Harding. Just twenty, with the face of a Sienese madonna, she was the daughter of an American businessman and an Italian mother. Her father’s family came from Boston, but her mother, Lavinia Lante della Rovere, belonged to one of the oldest families in Rome. Domitilla’s uncle was that same Prince Ladislao Odescalchi who had owned the Posta Vecchia and sold it to Mark’s grandfather, and the Lante della Roveres themselves had once possessed one of the loveliest houses in Italy, the famous Villa Lante at Bagnaia, near Viterbo, which had been in the family for generations until Domitilla’s grandmother sold it in the 1950s.

  At the end of the summer Mark had to return to England to start studying PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. But because of Domitilla he seemed certain to return to Rome as soon as possible.

  With the children growing up, even the disordered life of Mark’s unhappy brother Paul was showing signs of calming down. At the beginning of 1981, six years after the kidnap, he was still heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol; when frustrated or provoked he could be as impossible as ever. Surprisingly he was still married to Martine, but he saw her rarely and had found himself a new ‘fiancée’ – a smart Italian girl from a very smart Italian family, Emmanuela Stucchi-Prinetti. It was a good sign that he was beginning to work at last, in the one area he’d always dreamed of – the movie industry – working from 1978 as assistant to the film director John Schlesinger, then as an actor with an old friend of Martine’s, the German avant-garde director Wim Wenders.

  Wenders’s early films, with their uneasy themes of alienation and male wanderlust, might have been tailor-made for Paul. He could easily identify with Wenders’s characters, and after playing several minor parts was offered a major role by Wenders early in 1981 – that of a writer in his latest film, The State of Things.

  Through his acting Paul was showing signs of coming to terms with life at last. In the past there had been his adolescent dreams of impressing his father as a figure in the counter-culture. This had never worked, despite his hippie li
fe-style and his attempts to associate with some of the heroes of the beat generation. But now, when least expected, he found himself becoming a success in avant-garde cinema. Wenders was happy with the early scenes of the film, which they had shot in Portugal. More filming followed in Paris, and Paul actually enjoyed his time there. He had Emmanuela with him and seemed happier with her than with any of his other women: although still heavily dependent on his daily bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, he was almost clean of drugs.

  Then in March he returned to Los Angeles with gentle, dark-haired Emmanuela to shoot the final footage for The State of Things in Hollywood. They stayed with friends, and Paul seemed happy to be back in familiar Los Angeles. But soon he had to face another crisis. He found working in a Hollywood studio none too easy, and once shooting started he discovered that he couldn’t act and drink – so gave up drink. For an alcoholic this was a considerable shock to the system, and to help him cope with his withdrawal symptoms his doctors prescribed a formidable mixture of drugs, including methadone to help him sleep, and Placidyl, Valium and Dalmane to calm his nerves.

  Despite so many pills it was still hard for him to sleep, and he tended to wake early, which was why on the morning of 5 April Emmanuela was particularly worried when she couldn’t wake him from the deepest slumber. He was inert, and scarcely breathing. Thoroughly alarmed, she had the sense to call an ambulance.

  Everyone suspected drink or drugs. What had actually happened was that, unable to cope with the pharmaceutical cocktail the doctors had prescribed, Paul’s badly treated liver had failed to function, causing a temporary cessation of oxygen to the brain. By the time he reached the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood he was in the deepest coma.

  Someone had telephoned Gail before the ambulance arrived, but as she was staying out at Santa Barbara it took her an hour and a half to reach the hospital. By the time she reached her son he was just alive, on a life-support machine, with symptoms of damage to the brain from lack of oxygen. When Gail asked the doctors what she could do for him, all they could say was ‘Wait.’ So once again Gail waited.