by Charles Fox
Sometimes he would say, “What kind of music do you want to hear? I’ll put on something for you.” But I knew he’d be much happier taping an opera that was on than playing anything I wanted. I understand it now. He had so little time for the things that he liked. I liked to go out on Sundays with our friends and the children for a picnic. He didn’t want to take the children anywhere—they were shooed away. Of course, it irritated me beyond belief. He just stopped doing the things I wanted.
He had been extraordinarily warm, affectionate, but now he started to lose interest in our marriage. It got very heavy. There was no lightness. I was much gayer. I loved going out, loved to dance. He slowly became a recluse, lost his vitality. I’m not talking about sex, just vitality. After a while in Rome he got old. He had to wear his business suit, and he lost his freedom and, to be very honest, I probably had a lot to do with it, telling him, “Do this because it will make your father happy.”
I knew perfectly well that they could never be that close, but it seemed to me that if he made an effort, then maybe his father would be happier. Big Paul wanted to know his father and have his approval and love—an impossible thing to get. It got to the point where I started, in a foolish sort of way, to lose respect for him. I felt he was losing a grip on his character, his personality. It was the suit and the business. He lost his flair.
One day he said to me, “You go on. If you have an affair with anybody, that’s okay with me as long as I know. Don’t ever do anything unless I know it.” It was okay with him, except for this one man, he said, “Anyone but him.” He was afraid he would be made a fool of. That was too much for me. He’s a very broad-minded man, and I guess I didn’t want anyone that broad-minded with me. Right or wrong, there were different morals in those days.
In May of ’63 he went to Beirut for business. I must have been very unhappy, because when he was gone I spent my entire time screwing anybody I saw, including the one he had forbidden. It was just insanity.
One night, while he was in Beirut, I went to the Luau. The owner, Jerry Cherchio, had this Maltese friend who had a powerboat he was racing the next day.
Jerry’s wife, Ruth, knew that I was alone and said, “If you’re not doing anything Sunday, would you like to go? It’ll be fun.” I said, “I’d love to.” She said, “I’ll call you in the morning and come and pick you up.” Lovely. She called and said, “I hope you don’t mind—this man you don’t know called Lang Jeffries, who comes into the Luau a lot, doesn’t have anything to do and wants to come with us. But he has a little Thunderbird and we can’t all fit, so could we use your VW?” I said, “I don’t mind at all.” She said, “You’d better talk to him and tell him how to get to your house.” I talked to him and said, “Do you know where the Appian Way is?” He said, “No.” I said, “Do you know where the Catacombs are?” He said, no. So I asked him, “Well, what do you know?”
Finally they arrived. He got in the car and he was so huge, he made me laugh, he just looked so funny in my little car. The races were really fun. It got terribly cold. He was very sweet and polite and gave me his sweater.
A couple of days later I was in the Luau having dinner with Ruth when Lang came in. She said, “Do you mind if he joins us?” I didn’t mind at all. I thought he was very attractive. He sat and we started drinking lots of red wine and laughing and talking and then it was getting time for me to go. I got outside and I thought, This is dumb, I don’t really want to go home. Why did I leave? I really like him. I had to figure out some way of going back in without looking like a total fool. I made some dumb excuse and sat right back down again and started talking and we had more red wine.
The next thing I knew I woke up in his bed, it was noon, my plane to Beirut was leaving at four, I had a terrible hangover, and I didn’t have a car. Lang said, “Promise me, please, please, that you’ll call when you come back. I beg you.” I said, “Okay!” He got up and got my car for me.
I went to Beirut with a horrible hangover. By the time I arrived, I was in shock. I must have looked pretty awful or marvelous—one or the other. Somehow Paul got out of me that I had slept with the man with whom I wasn’t supposed to. We had a huge fight and didn’t speak for days.
We came back to Rome. I wasn’t back three and a half seconds before I called Lang. Why not? That’s how it was from then on. In July we rented a house in Ansedonia, Porto Santo Stefano. [Big] Paul was working in Rome most of the time. He had become friendly with Gordon Scott, a friend of Lang’s, so it didn’t seem peculiar to him in any way that Lang was always around.
We had a little motor sailor, about twenty-five feet. Neither of us had the first clue how to sail, and it didn’t sail very well anyway. People used to wait on the pier to watch us come in and dock and they’d shout, “Here come the Gettys!” Once Paul and I went out in it and the rudder broke and Lang saved us. He was a fantastic sailor. It was an insane summer; we laughed from morning to night, even [Big] Paul. He wasn’t going out with anyone, we were happy. He’d come up from the office on the weekends and sometimes he’d stay a little longer. We’d take the house for a month and then the d’Almeidas would take it for the second month. The house was packed with people. It was insane. I’d get up at six in the morning and cook these incredible meals. We had eight bedrooms and there were people everywhere: Gordon Scott; Brett Halsey; Brett’s girlfriend, Amber Tomasini; Lang; Bruce Balaban.
The party never stopped. I don’t think I slept the entire summer. We’d dance till five in the morning, go to sleep for a couple of hours, get up at nine, start drinking beer, breakfast, Bloody Marys till lunch, wine through lunch, and then a little tiny rest or lots of swimming and then on into the cocktail hour, then dinner, then up to this funny nightclub in Porto Santo Stefano—the Stega, the witch—with cute little English girls as waitresses. Very popular with the lads and the lads took me everywhere. They knew Lang and I were seeing each other and I got treated like a little puppy dog.
The minute [Big] Paul went back to Rome to work, they’d call, “Come on, Gail,” and off we’d go. In August we met a man with a beautiful yacht. I pretended I was living on his boat, but I was really living in the guest cottage with Lang. I’d get up at five in the morning and dash back to the boat and pretend I had slept there. The man with the yacht wanted a crew to sail to St. Tropez and jokingly said, “Why don’t you come and cook?”
So I did. There was this man from Texas, an Indian, Lang, a count from England, and myself.
I asked Paul if I could go and he said, “Yes, I guess so. Lang will take good care of you?”
And I said, “Yes, he will, but what about your birthday?”
He said, “I know what we’ll do. I’ll come up to Genoa and go on part of the way with you for my birthday.”
“Wonderful.”
It was a fantastic trip. Terrible storms and me cooking standing on my head and translating an Italian script for Lang, we all had fun. We met Big Paul in Genoa and we hadn’t left the port for five minutes before he started throwing up everywhere. He was so sick he had to get off in Monte Carlo. We went on. We were supposed to go all the way to Mallorca, but Lang and I got off in St. Tropez. There was just too much going on. We took a taxi from St. Tropez to Nice and flew back to Rome.
Finally one night we went to a dinner party, Big Paul with his French girlfriend, I with Lang. It was too much for me. Things weren’t as free then. Nobody really was. I thought, Why are we staying together? Was it fair to the children for me to stay with their father? Do they get enough out of our being together, or is it going to get worse and worse? Are they going to suffer from the tension that had already started? [Big] Paul didn’t want to break up the marriage. I was the one who pushed it. I told myself I was doing it for the children. Even before I met Lang, I had left [Big] Paul two or three times. There’s no actual reason why I finally left him. I just couldn’t be with him anymore.
I left [Big] Paul on the first of February in 1964. As he was leaving for the office, I told him, “I’m s
orry but I think we should separate. I’m leaving.” He was really upset, destroyed.
I left that day. I had already fixed up a little house, packed things that would fit, like lamps and paintings, into my little red VW and just went back and forth. I broke up with Lang, too.
We moved into a sweet little house I had found in Parioli. It was a safer area for the children and there were trees. I turned the garage into a room. Whilst we were in the process of moving, Little Paul got sick with measles, so he was still in the big house and I used to go back and forth. By now Paul was seven. Everyone said I was out of my mind.
Big Paul was living with his French girlfriend, so the children didn’t go to his house. He came to us, or we’d all go out. He often made an appointment and then didn’t show up. The children would wait for hours. What does one say? I didn’t want to put him down, so I invented some kind of excuse.
Little Paul loved his father, and now his allergies or whatever they were got worse and he blinked a lot.
In ’64 he went with his father to England for Christmas.
I felt I owed an explanation to Old Paul, so I went to see him. I’m very forthright with him. I don’t think many people are, they just say “yes.” I wanted some kind of relationship between the children and their grandfather. He sees all his grandchildren. The only person he doesn’t see is Big Paul, and Big Paul’s the only one who loves him. The others don’t love him at all.
Big Paul met me at the London airport—heavy scene. I went down to Sutton Place to see Old Paul.
He said, “You’re so nice to come tell me. You’re amazing because you don’t want anything from us.”
It was all very beautiful at Sutton Place, a superb Tudor mansion, full of art. There’s a huge cedar tree on the lawn. He keeps lions and cubs. He visits them every day. He has a head like a lion.
He has ten or fifteen Alsatians to guard the place. Two or three are all right and allowed in the house in the house in the day; the rest are vicious, trained to kill, they’re turned loose in the corridors at night. You can’t leave your room.
I don’t think he knows much about life or people. He gets something in his head and that’s it. Not much wisdom there. He’s always thinking about his business. That, and the news and politics and things he thinks might possibly affect him eventually.
That Christmas, Big Paul went to a cocktail party given by his close friend Claus von Bülow, and met Talitha. She was engaged to Knighty, the Irish White Knight, but it was love at first sight between Big Paul and Talitha, and the White Knight went off on his charger or drooping mule, very upset. Big Paul went back and forth between London and Rome until Talitha came to Rome.
When I went back after that Christmas, I took up with Lang again. He was a lot of fun, a good giggle, incredibly good sex life. He had a little Fiat and I had my funny little house. His friends were all nutty and silly and it was just one big laugh.
Paul, still in shock at being separated from his father, suddenly confronted by another man, unrefined and insensitive, didn’t share his mother’s delight.
Paul:
A couple of months after we moved in, Lang announced he was going to live with us. My mother didn’t ask us. This is where the resentment begins. When Lang came, we moved into a two-story duplex across the street.
Lang was an actor playing in gladiator films, Hercules, those kinds of things. Physically he was a big man, a powerful man. He used to be a lumberjack—really dumb. I couldn’t get along with him. All of a sudden this new guy comes in. It got to a point of extreme bourgeoisie, like naps. At twelve I still had to sleep two hours. Everybody had to, very rigid. I had to go to sleep at nine-fifteen.
It was heavy with Lang. I was pretty straight then. I didn’t like people drinking. It made me furious. People getting drunk, swearing … vulgar. We didn’t get along at all. That whole life just turned me so off.
He tried to dominate me. That’s a thing that no one can do.
The area where we moved to is where all the Fascists live, and the Americans. I just didn’t like the American community, the American actors. They thought they were really hot shit, they used to bet on who wouldn’t speak a word of Italian. Called them wops. They were vulgar people and I was very modest then.
I’d bring home a report card and it would show I’d been absent. My mother would say, “Don’t think your father wouldn’t mind.” I hardly ever saw my father.
This is when the trouble really began. At the end of the year, I got kerosene in the boiler room and I sprinkled it round in the entrance to the school, the foyer, on the blackboard and the furniture. And then I threw a match on it and went up and said to the boarding master, “Strange, I think I smell burning.” They called the fire brigade and then questioned me. My mother came and picked me up right afterwards. She was enraged. The headmaster sent a telegram saying, “Please don’t come back.” She sent me to my father.
My father picked me up at my mother’s house in his Jaguar. He was with his new girlfriend, Talitha. She was very attractive. Her father was Dutch and her mother was from Bali. Rich, dark hair, like Bianca Jagger. Very frail, amusing, gay, light. They were very happy. I liked her, and she liked me. It was a pretty day. We drove forty-five kilometers to my grandfather’s castle.
My father felt that he could handle me. He thought my mother and her husband were idiots, that it was because of them my grades were bad, which was right. He wanted me to live with him. We were friends, incredible friends.
The castle, Ladispoli, stood on the sea north of Rome, near Cerveteri, near Lake Bracciano, by the airport. Five feet from the sea, large grounds, a thousand acres. Flat country, tropical. There are palms and gardens. They hunt wild boar and African game—not my father, but the guests. The grounds are surrounded by a big wall. It’s where John Huston filmed The Bible, the Garden of Eden. There’s still this extraordinary Joshua tree with a snake and an apple; Huston painted it pink. My father, Talitha, and I had a picnic under it. We took lots of photographs.
When we came to the house, my grandfather was there. My grandfather didn’t like Talitha with my father. He didn’t think much of her, which is unfair. He came from London to oversee the rebuilding; it was a ruin, probably two hundred years old, burned out since the twenties. It was a nothing burned-down house.
They found an Etruscan town under it. The town went from in front of the house to all the way out to the sea. You could swim through these ruins, we found tombs.
He put a million pounds into it. Now it looks like the San Simeon of William Randolph Hearst, an enormous house—like, fifty bedrooms, three stories high with elevators.
My grandfather just fascinates me, this paranoid old man. He has this incredible, $100,000 alarm system—guards all the time. All night some guy would have to walk from one [door] to another and if he didn’t get to the next one in thirty seconds, the whole thing will go off. He has bars on his windows and motorboats that patrol, and barbed wire all ’round. That fascinated me. We went to Naples with him and drove around with him. I saw this nice house, and I said, “Oh, that’s great.” He said, “Oh, we should find out about it,” and he bought it. A house off Naples, with a guesthouse and an island, which he has never been to again. [Gianni] Agnelli sold it to him—you know, the Fiat guy. It’s great, with a helicopter.
He has a lot of art treasures, but he’s going to sell them because these fucking Italian authorities clamped down on that sort of thing, so they took almost complete possession of the house. Now it’s for sale.
My father bought a house in London, the Rossetti house, and a palace in Marrakesh, and the most beautiful house in Rome on the Piazza Venezia near the Campo d’Olio. I’ll draw you a little map. I’ll show you. This is the Victor Emmanuel monument. Here’s Campo d’Olio. The church, here there’s a fountain, here there’s a road, here there’s a building, here there’s a little fountain again. That building on the corner, that’s it. It’s probably eleven levels—four terraces, top floor enormous, immense, a
whole loft sort of thing.
The bathroom was nice. He always had something about bathrooms. It was painted red and there were all these little posters and things, and one was “Fuck Communism”—a big poster in the American flag. It was all marble, a big step to go up to the bathtub, immense, a strange shape. An enormous birdcage with live birds in it. A little stuffed alligator, enormous plants inside and an organ at the window. A huge pipe organ. He really loved his bathrooms.
The room next to where I slept was very modern, with a Jackson Pollock painting.
He had a fantastic Magritte, which was of little trees, then a horse and the horse is split between two trees. I smuggled that into England for him. My father sold that for nothing, for coke.
And there’s this painting of Talitha undressing in three stages. Very long, mostly pencil and watercolor. The first one is with black hair, strange Bali look, with a bra. The second one is with half a bra and blond hair, and in the last one she’s nude with purple hair.
When my father got together with Talitha, I got much closer to them and away from my mother and my stepfather. They always talked so badly about Talitha and my father. I hadn’t seen my father much up until he met Talitha. I got very friendly with her, more friendly with her than with my father, and told her that I wanted to see more of him. She encouraged me.
She was beautiful, with this incredible oriental look. Mild, just mild. A little like Martine and Jutta. Only she was the first. It was just a strange charm. She was the only woman of her kind, with great friends, who did drugs and who was very into sex and relationships with everybody. She was like the first one of her kind. She flipped me out. Beautiful, always beautiful. I was a little bit in love with her. I was the pet, you know. I always liked that.
I wanted to stay with them, to live with them, but they were going off to Bangkok, I think, so I had to go back with my mother.
Gail recalled how it was when Little Paul came home:
Lang had resentments and insecurities and jealousies about who the children were and about my marriage to their father—he couldn’t do enough to equal the way I had lived in those days. He was constantly buying gifts for the children and me, anything to outdo the Gettys. He bought me my first Rolls-Royce—for my birthday he gave me a gold candelabra, gold flat[ware] service, jewelry, rings, bracelets, diamonds—spent everything. He was really very nice to the other three children.
