by John Pearson
The doctors did everything they could to bring Paul back to consciousness, but couldn’t hide their anxiety when he failed to respond. Then a few days later came a further cause of worry; X-rays revealed water on the brain, which was causing it to swell alarmingly. As something of a last resort the doctors turned to a revolutionary technique known as ‘deep hibernation’, which had never before been tried on human beings. Drugs were employed to send the patient into an even deeper coma, then he was gradually restored to his earlier condition.
Three days of deep hibernation cured the swelling of the brain, but Paul remained unconscious, showing only the faintest signs of breathing.
‘He was alive,’ says Gail, ‘but only just – in the deepest of deep slumber, like the sleeping beauty. You could have pushed pins into his feet and he’d still have given no response or shown the faintest sign of waking.’
By now the doctors had nothing further to suggest – except more waiting. And it was then that Gail understood, as she had understood when Paul was kidnapped, that it was up to her to save him.
Realizing her total ignorance of coma, she visited the university bookshop and in the medical section bought everything she could discover on the subject. There was not a lot. Since 1981 the knowledge and treatment of coma has advanced substantially, but at that time there was one medical journal which gave her what she was seeking – an article on ways of maintaining brain activity in coma victims. Certain methods were suggested – continual talking to such patients, reading a book aloud to them, or playing them their favourite music. The theory was that, although unable to respond, the patient could often take in much of what he heard. Maintaining mental activity is all-important to prevent coma victims lapsing into silent inactivity.
Since then this treatment has become widely accepted, but at the time the doctors tended to dismiss it. It made sense to Gail, however. More important, it offered her and the family something positive that they could do for Paul instead of hopelessly watching him become a vegetable.
She organized members of the family to give him round-the-clock attention. ‘The aim was to make sure that there was always someone with him, either reading or talking to him or playing him his favourite music’ It was hard work, but suddenly the watchers by the bedside found they had another helper.
Mark was back at Oxford when he heard the news about his brother. He did not know that by leaving the university he would probably forfeit his chance of a degree. But as with the kidnap, he felt an obligation to be with Gail and his brother at a time of crisis. A male presence was required, and since his father was unable to provide it, it was up to him to take his place. By 8 April, three days after learning of Paul’s disaster, Mark was on the twelve-hour flight to Los Angeles.
From now on he took responsibility for part of the night shift looking after Paul. Gail would stay at the hospital every evening until midnight, then Mark would take over until dawn. During the day, Aileen and Ariadne took turns to read and talk to their brother. Martine joined them. Despite the problems of their marriage, she insisted she was still Paul’s wife, and that she, and not Emmanuela, was the one to be with him. As usual in a trial of wills, Martine won.
There is something quietly impressive in the idea of a family asserting its presence to avert a tragedy and willing a dormant loved one back to life. But as the days ticked by it looked as if it wouldn’t work.
‘With Paul just lying there,’ says Gail, ‘it was sometimes hard to tell that he was even breathing, but we tried ignoring this, staying as positive as possible, and talking and joking with him as if nothing very much had happened.’ Attempting to stay cheerful, she recounted incidents to Paul that she thought might still amuse him. Sometimes they played his favourite records, and all the time they continued talking without the faintest notion of whether he heard or understood a word they said. Sometimes it seemed a pointless exercise. But as there was nothing else to do, they continued night and day for more than five long weeks. And through it all, Paul lay still and silent as a statue.
One of the problems was that there was no way of telling how much damage had been done to his brain or how impaired he’d be if and when he did revive. All that the doctors knew, and the family suspected, was that the longer he remained unconscious, the worse his chances of recovery.
By the sixth week the doctors were no longer trying to disguise their feelings. With modern medical technology, there was no particular problem keeping Paul alive indefinitely – but everybody knew that past a certain point his hope of recovery fell dramatically – and that this point was fast approaching.
Typically, Gail was refusing to accept this. She still insisted that her son was going to recover – but for the others what they were doing was starting to appear a sad and rather hopeless exercise. Then on 14 May, nearly six weeks after Paul went into coma, came a glimmering of hope.
It was Mark who witnessed it, during one of his vigils through the small hours by his brother’s bedside. Tired of talking, he had been playing Paul one of his favourite records, Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, and as the loud, romantic music boomed out above the motionless figure of his brother, Mark noticed that something was happening. Tears were running down his brother’s cheeks. Six weeks into coma, Paul was weeping.
Or so it seemed – except that when Mark summoned the duty doctor he was quick to damp down his excitement. He had known this before with coma victims, and it was usually a speck of dust causing minor irritation to the eye.
But Mark and Gail were convinced that Paul’s tears must have come in reaction to the music. This was the only thing that gave them hope that Paul still had a future. But for several days, nothing further happened. Paul was as deep as ever in his coma, and it seemed as if the doctors had been right as usual.
To pass the endless hours at the hospital, Gail had been inviting old friends of Paul’s to his bedside, and it was one of them who started reminiscing about the practical jokes he and Paul had played at school together. Some of the jokes were quite outrageous, and his friend soon had Gail laughing. When they stopped they realized that someone else was laughing too. From the direction of the bed, quietly but unmistakably, Paul was joining in.
This was proof at last that Paul really was emerging from his coma and would live. According to Gail, ‘None of us quite believed it, and of course we were all in tears and highly emotional. But from that point on the coma started lifting, very slowly like a light being slowly turned up in a room.’ In medical terminology this process is known as ‘lightening’.
As Paul recovered consciousness, the doctors could finally assess the damage. It was as bad as the gloomiest had suspected. Although able to feel sensation in his body, he was virtually paralysed from the neck down. He was blind except for extremely limited peripheral vision. His speech, though audible, was seriously impaired. With such appalling disabilities, it seemed a final mockery that his intelligence remained completely unaffected.
The doctors were very kind to Gail when they talked about the future. But she wanted the truth, not kindness, and they gave her their honest opinion. They told her that Paul’s only real hope of living out what remained of his life was flat on his back in a bed in an institution.
*
After more than six weeks struggling to keep hope alive, this was more than Gail could take. She was exhausted and the strain was telling. But just as she wouldn’t give up hope when Paul was kidnapped, so she refused to give up now.
She said there could be no question of leaving her son to such a fate. But the doctors, still believing that they had to do their duty, insisted on telling her that quadriplegics as impaired as Paul were almost always better off in institutions properly equipped to look after them, and providing full-time nursing and the specialist treatment they needed. Attempts by loved ones to look after them invariably ended in disaster. However devoted relatives like Gail might be, the exhausting nature of the task ended by destroying the private life of anyone rash enough to take i
t on.
‘Then that’s a risk I’ll have to take,’ she said.
Had Gail had any doubts about doing this, they were banished now by Paul himself. Whenever he realized that she was in the room he’d start to weep and with an enormous effort enunciate a single word.
‘Home!’ he’d whisper.
Then, in case she hadn’t understood, he would repeat it.
‘Home! Home!’
So the work began that would occupy Gail’s life for many years. Attached to the house in Brentwood was a guest house with a swimming-pool. Once it was equipped with the facilities of a private clinic it would prove ideal for Paul to live in with his helpers.
Over one thing the doctors were soon proved right – when they had warned her of the strain of looking after Paul upon her private life. Emmanuela felt this too. Her parents did not have much difficulty convincing her that there was little future as the fiancée of a quadriplegic, and she decided to return to Italy. Martine, on the other hand, was once again a source of strength, and the two children, Anna and Balthazar, treated Paul exactly as they always had. Oblivious of his disabilities, they were soon clambering into bed with him and loving him as much as ever.
Fortunately Gail could hire nurses to provide the expert round-the-clock attention that her son required, together with the cleverest doctors and most practised physiotherapists in California. None of this would be possible without large amounts of money. But since Paul was a Getty, and money was the one thing which the Getty family possessed in such abundance, she thought this shouldn’t be a problem. As so often in the past, where money and the Gettys were concerned, Gail was wrong.
Chapter Nineteen
Recovery
When Her Son Paul came out of hospital, Gail was being helped financially by her father and by Paul’s uncle Gordon, who had bought the house where she and her family were living and was still providing everything his nephew needed. But for the long term this was clearly wrong. Gordon was immensely rich but so was Paul’s own father, and he, not Gordon, should be paying for the treatment of his stricken son. He could obviously afford it countless times over, but when Gail began sending the bills to Cheyne Walk, they were returned – unpaid. Angry telephone calls ensued, and Paul Junior made his extraordinary position absolutely clear. Although a multi-millionaire, he was adamantly refusing to meet his son Paul’s medical expenses.
To begin with nobody could quite believe it, and Gail’s lawyer sent a calming letter trying to explain the situation – only to produce a fresh refusal. As she explains, ‘Along with Gordon a group of us were paying for Paul’s treatment and after a while it just seemed crazy and unjust to go on doing so. The very last thing any of us wanted was the publicity of suing, but with Paul refusing to listen, there was finally no alternative.’
As Gail expected, there was much unfavourable publicity for Jean Paul Getty Junior when in November 1981 he instructed his lawyers in Los Angeles to oppose Gail’s court application for payment of $25,000 a month towards their son’s medical expenses. The presiding judge was sufficiently shocked to rebuke Paul in court, saying that ‘Mr Getty should be ashamed of himself spending far more money on court obligations than living up to his moral duties.’
Even as close a friend as Bill Newsom described his behaviour as ‘bizarre’, adding that Paul had ‘books in his library that cost more, much more, than it would have cost to look after his son for years’.
So what was going on?
The truth was that young Paul’s coma had come at a bad time in his father’s life. During a cure in Switzerland, Victoria had met Mohammed Alatas, a young Saudi businessman, and had fallen in love with him. She had once again given up hope of a satisfactory married life with Paul, so when Alatas proposed, Victoria accepted.
This had left Paul feeling more alone than ever back in Cheyne Walk. His intake of drugs and drink increased, and the more isolated and drug-dependent he became, the more his anxieties and fears grew. During the period when young Paul had been in coma, his brother Mark telephoned back to England almost every day with news for his father, who became as painfully affected by his son’s ordeal as he had been in the early days of the kidnap. And once again he tried blanking out the anxiety and the pain of thinking.
What happened then provides a good example of how drink and drugs can actually distort reality, leading to emotional disruption and personal disaster. For, without making spurious excuses for Paul Junior, there was a sort of addict’s logic to his behaviour over the medical bills. His refusal to pay them was generally seen as a recurrence of his father’s meanness, but this was not the case at all, and his actions were really not concerned with money.
They were partly the result of the typical addict’s neurosis over what he thought was happening behind his back. They were also his own strange way of attempting to play down what had happened to his son. For once he could convince himself that he was being cheated over these medical expenses, he could shift his sense of guilt for what had happened on to those he told himself had done the cheating. Stuck in his fastness in Cheyne Walk, he could even make himself believe that his son’s appalling disabilities weren’t as appalling as the dishonest doctors said they were. They had simply been exaggerated to extract money out of him; by challenging them, he could expose those lying doctors and prove that his son’s condition was far less serious than they claimed. He wasn’t the fool they took him for. And if he refused to pay a penny, he might even force them to admit that his son wasn’t really sick at all.
Predictably, when it didn’t work like that, Paul felt more rejected and guilt-obsessed than before – which made him more drug-dependent than ever. After the judge’s remarks in the courtroom in Los Angeles, his lawyer, Vanni Treves, flew specially to Los Angeles to see young Paul on his father’s behalf. He confirmed everything Gail and the doctors said, and the pathetic state that Paul was in. Paul Junior was finally convinced, and paid what he should have paid from the beginning. There were no more arguments, but the damage had been done – principally to Paul Junior himself. As a result of what had happened, his family inevitably turned against him.
‘Gordon is light, and my father is the dark side,’ Aileen told a journalist. And locked away in the house on Cheyne Walk, Paul Junior became more wretched than ever and determined to have done with his family.
Even Mark, loyallest of sons, was firmly on the side of Paul and Gail after so many bitter angry things had been muttered down the telephone from London.
This abrasive contact with his family and its sufferings brought further threats to Paul Junior’s precarious stability, and he reacted as he always did: by relying more heavily on his trusted sources of relief, which produced the inevitable relapse, followed by a further lengthy stay in the London Clinic, which was becoming a home from home for him.
While what was left of his health and self-esteem were undergoing yet another battering, Gail and the children in America were doubly grateful for level-headed Uncle Gordon, who, in contrast with his brother, was happier than he’d ever been.
In a Paris bookshop just the year before, Gordon had found a copy of the poems of the nineteenth-century American mystical recluse Emily Dickinson, some of which struck him as ideal to put to music. Inspired by the poems, he overcame whatever had been holding him back as a composer and, in a fevered period of work, produced settings for thirty-two of them – from which he finally created the song cycle he entitled The White Election.
The White Election marked the beginning of a whole new life for Gordon and the beginning of his true ambition – to become a serious composer. All his enthusiastic energies went into it, and this was the point from which he always claimed his life had really started.
As a composer he had great ambitions. As he put it, ‘composers are remembered by posterity when businessmen are forgotten’, and he staked his claim in no uncertain fashion. ‘I should like to be a composer who is remembered alongside the masters of the past, like Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner
, Mahler and Brahms. Maybe it’s hubris to put my name in that group. And maybe hubris is a damned good thing.’
Gordon’s confidence and newly found creative happiness formed the greatest contrast to his brother Paul’s addictive misery. Gordon was a genuinely happy man, with everything he wanted now as well as money. For Gail and the children, he was what they would have loved his brother to have been – supportive, kind, and quietly concerned about them all.
But Paul Junior had started to suspect his brother of usurping him in his family’s affections, and grew jealous of everything he represented.
It was typical of Gordon to be the only one who didn’t seem to notice his brother’s change of attitude or to take offence, and he continued treating him as if nothing very serious had happened. It was here that the brothers’ shared passion for the opera took on a particular importance as a slender bridge between them. Gordon would send Paul information about the great singers that they both enjoyed.
‘Domingo greater than ever at la Scala.’
‘Pavarotti greater still,’ Paul would answer.
After the dramas of the year before, 1982 started with a period of calm throughout the family – and witnessed the beginning of a partial recovery for paralysed young Jean Paul Getty III.
At first he had seemed so terribly afflicted that his grandmother Ann’s first words on seeing him had been, ‘They should have put him down to end his misery.’
Muscular cramps were causing him excruciating pain, and his body was so stiff and rigid that even the touch of bedclothes on his limbs was intolerable. Agony, tears, periods of deep depression followed, but after a while something miraculous began. To almost everyone’s surprise, Paul started showing extraordinary willpower as he struggled to make something of the little that was left him.
