by Charles Fox
So the story really was flaring up.
My mother told me, “I’ve asked my newsagent to set aside papers for me while you’re here, in case there’s more. The Mail and the Telegraph are covering the story.”
On the weekend I drove back up to London.
When I telephoned my editor in New York to tell him the assignment was in the mail, he said, “While you’re there I want you to go down to Rome and find out what’s happened to this Getty boy. Has he been kidnapped, or is he staging a hoax?”
“That’s the super-rich. I don’t know any of those people.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said.
Owen Summers, veteran crime reporter for the Daily Express, suggested I talk with the paparazzi in Rome. “The king of the paparazzi,” Summers told me, “is a Russian émigré with a name like Crochenkov. Ask any hotel doorman, and he’ll tell you where to find him. Crochenkov will know what’s going on, if anybody does. You may have to slip him a quid or two.”
Looking among my London friends, I made contact with Olivier Bertrand, a Chelsea antiques dealer. He was a friend of the missing boy’s father, J. Paul Getty Jr., who also lived in Chelsea. Getty Jr. was forty and had once been a leading figure in society but was now a recluse. His second wife, Talitha Pol, renowned for her beauty, had been the stepgranddaughter of Augustus John. She had died in Rome, and though the circumstances of her death were hazy, the coroner had listed an overdose of heroin as being the cause. Possession of heroin carries a mandatory seven-year prison sentence in Italy and, whatever the details, Paul Jr. had left Italy and taken refuge in London rather than answer to Italian magistrates. Olivier agreed to try to arrange a meeting. He said Paul Getty Jr. had retreated to No. 26 Cheyne Walk, known as Queen’s or Tudor House, once owned by the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He had bought the house for Talitha in 1964, as a wedding gift. Bertrand agreed to try to get me an interview.
A couple of days later he called back. “Charles, I had a long talk with Paul. I know absolutely everything, and can tell you absolutely nothing other than that Paul said he won’t talk to you. I’m awfully sorry. But look, try getting hold of the photographer who took the nude pictures of Little Paul that Playmen magazine, a sort of Italian Playboy, ran in its August issue. I can give you the name of his agent in Milan.”
I made contact with the photographer, but the phone number he had for Little Paul was no longer in use. However, I found the photograph.
One afternoon, I met a contact in the Chelsea Potter and after a fruitless encounter was standing outside the Chelsea Public Baths on the King’s Road, wondering what on earth to do, when an African-violet Testarossa Ferrari pulled out of the traffic and stopped before me at the curb. At the wheel sat Harri Peccinotti, a fashionable London photographer I’d once worked with. He leaned across the empty passenger seat looking up at me, bronzed aquiline face, wispy Solzhenitsyn beard, black Viet Cong pajamas. “Get in.”
I did, grateful to have somewhere to go. In doing so I fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into another world. A fashionable world of success and excess, a world that swept aside convention, allowing you to paint your Ferrari not the de rigueur Italian racing red, but African violet. Harri suggested we drive around the corner to the Chelsea Arts Club and play a game of snooker.
As he chalked his cue, eyeing the break, I told him of the Rome assignment. “They want me to find out what happened to this Getty boy. I don’t have a clue where to begin. These people have to be well insulated.”
Harri looked up. “Evidently not well enough.”
“There’s no sense going to Rome without a lead. It’s got to be standing-room only down there.”
He took his shot. “A photographer friend of mine, Bob Freeman, was with Paul’s girlfriend’s sister the night he disappeared. They were in a flat in Rome. I’ll ask him for the address.”
I lost the game and we left the club.
I called Freeman. He was in New York, photographing a rock concert at Madison Square Garden.
He said, “I spent the week in Rome with Paul before he disappeared. I don’t know what happened. Come to my studio when I get back to London and I’ll give you an address for the twins. From what I know of Paul,” he went on, “I don’t think it’s a hoax. He didn’t seem to have the determination, stamina, or personal organization to pull off a thing like this. I mean, he’s a really nice guy, but not terribly together. What’s odd is that he was talking casually about wanting to make a film on the perfect kidnapping, with an Italian actor friend. You should get a hold of Roman Polanski. Getty was spending a lot of time at his place while I was there. Maybe Roman knows something.”
Polanski was working at 20th Century-Fox in Los Angeles. I telephoned. He recalled, “When I first met Paul in Positano, he was playing the hippie. Later, when I saw him in Rome, he had cut off his long hair and seemed to have changed his outlook. We had a large house in Rome with a garden and a swimming pool, and he often came there to swim and lie in the sun. He seemed like a very nice young boy, well mannered and highly intelligent. I find it very unlikely that he organized his own kidnapping in order to collect a ransom. The boy didn’t seem that interested in money. Like most of his peers, he seemed to have rejected it as a curse. He wasn’t the adventuresome kind to get involved in something like this. Although that’s the first thing people might suspect, I think it’s very unlikely. I’d like to know what is really going on.”
Polanski had several contacts in Rome. “But I think,” he said, “that you should knock on doors gently and expect to get some of them shut in your face.”
Freeman had a studio on Fulham Road. Its walls were covered with his photographs. Portraits of the Beatles, famous actors, celebrities of one stripe or another—it was all about success. Slim and tanned, he wore a denim shirt and pants, and a piece of turquoise on a silver necklace. He said he had left Rome the morning of July 9 and had not had contact with anyone there since. He gave me a piece of paper. On it were the names Martine and Jutta Zacher, and an address: Via Di San Onofrio, 24.
* * *
On the edge of the Campo dei Fiori in the Tiziano Hotel, the desk clerk, a fleshy, smooth-faced young man, left his cage and showed me up the staircase. My room was large with a tall window. For all its white walls and high ceiling, ubiquitous Italian brown predominated. When the clerk had withdrawn, I went to the window and stood looking out across the Via Vittorio Emanuele to the church that backs onto the Piazza Navona. The boy’s grandfather had married his fifth wife, Teddy, here in Rome in 1939 after the war broke out. Earlier, at the turn of that century, wishing to return to some simpler life, J. P. Morgan had wandered these streets, mingling anonymously with ordinary citizens. Getty had been more fascinated by the business opportunities that arose in the exodus of wealthy Jews faced with mounting fascism. He spent a lot of time in Berlin in the 1930s.
When I came down, the clerk was sitting in his elegant cage reading a newspaper. I told him why I had come. His eyes brightened; he gave me a conspiratorial look, evidently happy to be taken into my confidence.
I showed him the address on the photographer’s notepaper. He pointed to the name “Zacher” and gave me a glum smile. “All Romans are trying to find those women. The paparazzi will pay fifty million for a picture of these. A photograph of the boy will sell for much, much more. Every day there is something in the newspapers. Today there is the mysterious American.”
He turned the pages of the newspaper he was reading to show me a photograph of a severe-looking man scowling at the camera, evidently caught off guard. The man was tall with short-cropped gray hair. He wore a raincoat, the collar turned up.
“Who is he?” he asked. “This man was asking many questions about the Golden Hippie to people in the cafés.”
“I wonder who he works for,” I thought aloud, and then asked him where I could get a taxi.
The taxi took me down across the river and turned up a cobblestone street that climbed the hill on the fa
r bank. I got out into a warm night. Two men passed by me down the hill, engrossed in conversation, the liquid sound of Italian floating in their wake. The girls’ names were not on the panel. However, it was the right address, or at least the one the London photographer had written down. One call button was gouged out; an empty brass socket stared like a blind eye. This was the apartment the paparazzi were looking for.
For some time I waited beneath the trees, out of the shadow, so that I would not surprise anyone. No one came and no one went. At last I rose and, treading on uneven cobblestones, made my way to the foot of the hill and took a taxi back to the hotel. The clerk sitting high up in his cage was eager to know what had transpired in the big world beyond the revolving front door. He plainly admired my effort even as, in his great worldliness, he was not surprised to hear about the empty socket.
He looked sternly but not unkindly at me, as if he wanted me to know that in the end we were together in this adventure, he and I. “I tell you, everyone wants them. What can we do?”
“I’ll write to them.” I was not ungrateful to have a partner in this affair, even if, by and large, a silent one.
In my room I wrote to Martine Zacher on True stationery, telling her that I came from New York and Bob Freeman had given me her name and that my magazine would make a deal in exchange for her story. Once more the clerk called for a taxi. As we waited, he told me how much he approved of this strategy. Back at the twins’ apartment I slipped the letter through the mail slot and returned to the hotel. As I came in the clerk beckoned and handed me a sheaf of clippings. “I made these for you,” he said.
He took me by surprise. “I am most grateful.”
“I am here for to help you. I will tell you what they say.”
Between the two of us, with me correcting his English, we read the clippings. It was a quiet evening in the hotel and we were scarcely interrupted.
It was immediately clear that the Italian journalists were having a field day with this story. On July 14 Il Messaggero asked, WHO IS THE BOY WHO HAS VANISHED?
Who is J. Paul Getty? “He’s only 16,” cries Martine Zacher, 24, a German girl and last flame of the young Getty, “but already at this age he was thinking like an old man of 69. He has the tormented soul of an old artist. He is a strong character. He likes to live day to day, to make his own money…”
The article explained that they were living like many of the other hippies in Trastevere, demonstrating against capitalism, against Vietnam. He had once been arrested at one of these demonstrations for fighting with police. According to another friend, “The only time he ever went to a nightclub was when he managed to sell one of his paintings.” Then he’d invite all his friends and treat them and spend all he had. He gave no thought to tomorrow. She said that he refused to take money from his father and grandfather. The article reported that he had lots of women: not one constant companion, until Martine Zacher. She was described as tall with curly hair, very much like the actress Maria Schneider. He had been living with her in Vicolo della Scala 50, in a small apartment on the first floor. In addition the article quoted a crying Martine Zacher saying, “He is a boy with a heart. He has talent. He is intelligent, with a mature vision of life and he scorns the useless things. He’s much older than his age. I don’t believe that this is a joke.”
If these twins were as hard to find as the desk clerk suggested, then they had said what they had to say and gone underground. If they had nothing to hide, why disappear? Probably to avoid the paparazzi. It was odd that the newspaper would say that he was uninterested in the family money and at the same time speculate it was a hoax to extort money from his family.
On July 19 and 20, Momento Sera focused on the boy’s absent father in an article entitled “Paul Getty II Between Talitha and the Great Old Man.” It explained that J. Paul Getty II, heir to probably the largest fortune in the world, grew up at Sutton Place in England, in immense rooms of his father’s mansion hung with paintings of the Renaissance masters. It speculated that “the limitations of his father have become his own and are probably the reason why his marriages fail.” It reported that he met Talitha Pol in Rome and lived with her in a palazzo in Via Venezia, but she died “in strange circumstances,” after which Paul returned to London. Since his son had been kidnapped in Rome, if he returned, he would have to face some very difficult legal questions about Talitha’s death.
From what I knew, Paul Junior was raised in San Francisco by his mother, Ann Rork, after a brief marriage to the patriarch had ended in the mid 1930s, but a cold English castle is a more dramatic setting. The beautiful Talitha Pol was one of those legendary characters from London’s Swinging Sixties.
And then another article addressed the main issue at last. The headline read: KIDNAPPING: TRUE OR FALSE?
There followed a long list in two columns. The information that most interested me was:
A true kidnapping:
The ransom letter, beyond a doubt, is in the boy’s handwriting. As for Gail Getty, a mother would never be in agreement with a son to devise such a trick. She has heard the voice of the kidnapper and is sure that it is no joke. However, is it possible that the mother can have been taken in by a joke played on her by her son?
The police refer to the whole business as a delicate “game of chess.” They are therefore taking it seriously.
The kidnappers have asked for 300 million lire [approx. $550,000] in what could be an astute game to keep drama to a minimum. It seems certain that the money has been readied to pay for the boy.
A hoax:
For the first time ever, the authenticity of a kidnapping is in question. Paul Getty has been living a life where all kinds of people do all kinds of odd things. They also find many ways of not doing anything at all. Inventing a kidnapping would be a perfect way to make some money.
Gail Getty’s attitude in the first days of the child’s disappearance was not that of a woman worried about her son. One must not forget that when Martine Zacher received Paul’s letter, she did not find the mother at home. She was at the cinema with the man with whom she is living.
The overly dramatic tone of the letter itself seems false. In it, Paul expresses his fear of being killed but only in very rare cases do kidnappers “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” Above all, he keeps on underlining and trying to convince the mother that this is no joke. No kidnapped person has even thought of not being taken seriously by his family.
And finally, Paul asks more than once that the business should not be taken to the police. However, Martine quickly telephoned the police when she didn’t find Gail Getty at home, although she had read Paul’s remonstrations. The disappearance of Danielle Devret, described as Paul’s girlfriend, and the last person to have seen him, also seems curious.
And why shouldn’t Paul’s mother have been at the cinema before she was brought the letter? It was all rumor and speculation. With a family this wealthy, nothing was beyond imagining, or the writer’s bias. Where was the truth? Where did it leave those of us with deadlines and no time to find out what was really so?
A few days later, the matter seemed to explode, with speculation mingling with fantasy. In an article titled “Explosive Revelations by the Actor Rick Boyd: Paul Will Play Himself in a Film About His Kidnapping,” Boyd says in the script there may be a lot or very little of the truth. The leads would be Paul and Danielle Devret. The director, Martine Zacher. Summarizing the script, Paul Getty III goes to a nightclub, Treetops, with a couple of friends and his fiancée. At about two in the morning he quarrels with the girl and he leaves with his friends. They get into a green VW painted with flowers and drive to a village north of Gaeta. They board a motorboat put to sea and head for Capri. Now the friends, who had told Paul it was a joke, change their behavior. The young grandson of the world’s richest man becomes a victim, forced to do what his so-called friends tell him. The boat changes course to a remote island. A few phone calls are made, letters are sent demanding money.
T
he article reported that actor Rick Boyd had made ninety-six films and was often in the newspapers. It ruminated that his story would seem to serve him as a character, but it could be that he did know what he was talking about.
The paper noted that Avvocato Iacovoni had stated that Gail Getty had not moved from the castle in Paoli for three days. “The valiant lawyer does his best in this maze of information. It is not easy for the police, either.”
Rick Boyd seemed to me one of those jumping onto the bandwagon to gain a little publicity for themselves. Avvocato Iacovoni, Gail’s lawyer, was the man to meet. On the other hand, Boyd might be right. Maybe it was a hoax that had gone wrong.
A few days later, papers wrote that “Gail Getty really is alone,” noting that she “is not a mother who ruffles easily. She doesn’t tear her hair. She doesn’t weep. She doesn’t shout. Her desperation is cold.…”
Observing that young Paul did not have the compassion of the ordinary people, it reported that despite the vast wealth, there was no help from the family. In fact, it was the grandfather who was the first one to wash his hands of the business. “Gail Getty is alone.” No one else could raise the money, nor could she even hope for the “solidarity of other mothers.”
The paper wrote that “her son is one of the do-nothings who wander around Piazza Navona from evening to morning always looking for forbidden experiences.… When Paul asked if he could go off and taste life on his own, she opened the front door for him, gathering him back every time he needed her, like one does with hungry kittens. This is why a woman like Gail Getty is alone.”
