by Charles Fox
Gail corrected her son’s memory of this time:
Paul wanted to stay there alone when everybody left and go to school in Marrakesh. Nobody ever had that in mind at all. In fact, his father knew perfectly well that he couldn’t possibly take care of any of his children. Of course it wasn’t possible, for obvious reasons. Little Paul has this fantasy that he was forced to leave Marrakesh because of political trouble, but it wasn’t that. It was just the end of the holiday.
I’ve heard him talk about a scene where the foreign minister came ’round for dinner and two days later they were watching television and this man was executed. The man did go to dinner and subsequently he was killed. But in reality he was executed much later on.
Paul was flown home. It was Easter time. He was blissfully happy and arrived with all these gifts. He had spent every penny he had on gifts, for the family, and for me. It was the only time he went to Marrakesh.
I suppose he wished I would have come to the airport, but I had the other children. Lang met him at the airport and drove him up to the country. They did a fine number on each other.
5.
Thus Paul was plunged into a different nightmare. The more the conflict raged, the worse the combatants behaved.
Paul:
It was a shock to arrive at the Rome airport expecting to see my mother and finding Lang Jeffries to drive me all the way to Tuscany, because we had a house in Tuscany where my mother lives now. A big house. They had just bought it. A five-hour drive in the car with him. We really hated each other. Real hate. He went through this trip of “now we’ll educate you how you should be,” and I had to spend entire days building walls. He was trying to dominate me.
That summer they put me to work. Made me work all the time, and incredibly strict. And I tried to run away once. I thought I was going to walk from Siena to Rome. And I started off, but somebody brought me back and Jeffries beat the living shit out of me. It was a whole summer in the country. Can you imagine how closed-in I felt? Three months of absolute hate, of real bullying me around. I wished I was dead. He beat me till I was bleeding. I think now that he really dug doing those things. The nanny was there, and I remember she fixed me up and cleaned me up and I said to her that I was going to see this guy go down really back. It’s got to all happen back to him.
I hated my mother, too, because she was digging it. She probably was worried about it but couldn’t get out of it. She loved him so much. He was probably a good ball, I don’t know. He was just a bully. In front of his friends he’d lie in the pool on a mattress and order me to get him a drink. I’d have to get in the water and bring it to him, and then he’d tell all his friends, “See what a good servant I have?” I was completely silent, but word got around to him that I told everybody that I hated him.
He probably didn’t hate me. It was just the way he is. It was probably that I didn’t like him. I just didn’t like actors, people that drink, or people that listen to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I just didn’t like it. The way he treated my mother. Fucked around and really fucked my mother up.
Gail was indeed at her wits’ end in knowing how to control her son. She seemed to admit as much when she said that she couldn’t remember whose idea it was for Little Paul to board. She thought it might have been his father’s. In any case, she was against boarding schools.
As she predicted, Paul didn’t like Notre Dame. He started in the autumn of ’68 and was there two years, coming home for vacations at Christmas, Easter, and summers. He only saw his father once or twice and Talitha not at all.
Paul:
It was a very tough school, priests, horrible. Oof! Incredible discipline. No imagination, just terrible priests. The big four-thousand-people school, with its boxing matches, was so impersonal after St. George, with its great English humor, nice people, theater, drama, and fencing. They made me box, and of course I’d get the shit beaten out of me. I got beaten there a lot. Used to have this thing called the bo-bo, which was a ruler with holes in it so that it would move quicker through the air.
I hung out with older people in the class and they influenced me badly. I didn’t get it then, but they were friendly because I was a Getty. I didn’t get along with those kids at Notre Dame. They were stupid. I became introverted. Straight as could be. My mother thought I was smoking dope here, but I never did. I was straight. I belonged to TIP. You know TIP, Turn In a Pusher? I was really straight. They thought I was a pusher, and I spied on people. I tipped in this famous actor’s son.
I corresponded heavily with a girl, Bobby. Her father was an opera singer. We’d write at home and give letters to each other every day. I still have the letters. She gave mine back to me. I have the collection, incredible, with little drawings.
It wasn’t any good at Notre Dame. I wouldn’t do sports. I wouldn’t study—my grades went down I began to say I was going there and I wouldn’t go. I just wandered around. I would come home with a report card full of bad grades and absences. My mother said, “Don’t think your father’s going to like this.”
He came home between the terms. When his father did come to visit him, it was with Victoria.
Victoria:
Big Paul and I went over to Gail’s house in Tuscany and met Lang and the children. Gail was frightfully together, with all the children in their right place. It was Paul’s first proper family scene for years. Little Paul had had such a bad report and I remembered they walked off into the garden. Paul was so upset at Little Paul’s report—not angry-upset, just genuinely worried about what was wrong. It was the only time I saw Paul being what I call a proper father—worrying about what he could do for the boy. After this great walk around the garden, Little Paul was sitting out there, crying because he had failed his grades. I never saw Paul be a proper father again except to be proud of his son when it suited him.
At home Lang, too, was in trouble. His drinking had led him into fistfights and his spaghetti James Bond films had been released and had as they said in Hollywood, “gone into the toilet.”
Gail:
One afternoon, after he’d been doing all these numbers in school, I heard sobbing. Lang and Little Paul were in the living room. Lang was saying, “Please tell me what it is. If only you would tell me, maybe I could help you. You go ’round corners and you really won’t come out and say what it is. Is it your father? Is it me? Do you resent me?”
Lang may have been very unpleasant in some ways, but in others he was extraordinarily patient. He did really want to help Paul and the other children. Paul cried, “I want my father.” They both sobbed and held on to each other. It went on for a long time.
Gail suggested Lang return to Hollywood to look for work there and decided to have Paul properly medically examined. She recalled:
Lang had no work. I talked him into moving and giving one more try to California. He said, “I just don’t want to leave here. Please, no. I have a terrible feeling that if we leave here, our marriage will break up. Let’s stay.”
I said, “Stay for what? Why don’t you give it a try? If it doesn’t work out, we can always come back.” I pushed and pushed and finally he went to Hollywood to visit.
While Lang was gone, Paul developed a serious tic. He started to roll his right eye up into his head. I took him to doctors in Rome. Their answers didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to take him to his old pediatrician in Los Angeles for a full examination.
Lang called from Los Angeles and said, “You stay there, I’m coming back.” And I said, “No. no. We’re coming; I have to take Paul to his pediatrician.” And that was the end of it.
When we got to Los Angeles, the pediatrician said Paul was in excellent health. We went to psychologists and psychoanalysts and took him for all sorts of motor tests, very advanced games. Everything was all right. All these doctors got together and discussed it and then one doctor prepared a lengthy report. I still have it. They said that basically any problems he had stemmed from rejection by his father. It confirmed what I had though
t. I don’t particularly like assigning blame, but it’s just that. Rejection, rejection, rejection. Whether or not he has been, he feels rejected by his father.
Lang and I stayed on in Hollywood, but Lang’s reputation had preceded him as a drinker and there was no work. He had no money, nothing. We all tried to live together and it wasn’t very successful. That depressed him.
I came back to Rome. Things went downhill from there. In June of 1971, Lang came back to work it out with me. He said, “Let’s give it one more try.” We lasted about ten days. I said, “Let’s forget it.”
In June of 1971, Paul was expelled from Notre Dame. Hazily he summed up his academic career.
Paul:
I got kicked out of Notre Dame. My mother came and took me back to Rome. I went, like, four months to high school. What’s the last? Eighth grade or tenth grade? Which is twelfth grade—high school? Junior high school is what—seventh, eighth, and ninth? I did half of ninth and half of tenth. I was two years above the other students. The other kids were seventeen. I remember Morocco was ’68 and Swinging London was ’68 too. So it has been five years. Incredible how time passes.
That summer my mother came to me and just said, “Talitha died.” I burst out in tears, but my mother said, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s okay.” It was strange. The night before I had thought a lot about Talitha.
My mother told me not to tell the kids. We went to Rome that day. On the journey down, I was in tears the whole way, and the kids were asking, “What’s wrong?” My mother said, “Shut up, Paul.”
We went to the beach. It was my sister’s birthday. Lang drove up in the Rolls-Royce with another woman, his girlfriend. He took us for a drive—my mother, this woman, and us four kids. As we drove he told the children, like it was nothing, that Talitha had died, right in front of this woman.
The summer after Paul’s Easter in Marrakesh Talitha gave birth to a son. They christened him Tara Gabriel Gramophone Galaxy Getty.
After the birth of the boy, Big Paul and Talitha began taking separate paths. According to her, Big Paul got very paranoid and, after a few months, Talitha couldn’t take Rome anymore. She said she was going to take their son and move back to London. She assumed that if she did, he would follow, although Big Paul made it clear that he had no intention of leaving Rome. Everything he wanted was there: Ruspoli, opium, sex scenes …
Victoria, the mistress, was there too, waiting in the wings on the farm in Tuscany, a couple of hours from Rome. She recalled happier times.
Victoria:
We all went to bed together once. I don’t think she or I particularly wanted to and I think we both did it for Paul. I don’t think he wanted to either. It was one of those things. And he had to leave to get an airplane or something and she and I were left talking. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I felt completely at one with her. We knew each other so well. As different as we were in every way there was some kind of contact or joining up. I was devoted to her; that sounds mad, and Paul never knew or would want to know that. I really don’t think there is another girl like her. A lot of people who knew her very well hear me laugh and they say, “My God, that was just like Talitha.” We both had the dirtiest laugh.
Lord Thynne was there in London when Talitha returned from Rome with her baby and moved back into Queen’s House on Cheyne Walk, just around the corner from where he lived on Battersea Bridge Road. Big Paul sometimes flew in from Rome and spent time with Talitha and the baby, but as Lord Thynne remembered:
More and more, Big Paul stayed in Rome. The last time I went ’round, he wasn’t even there. She told me she wasn’t happy and things were pointless. She said, “I have to leave him, I really must get out of it,” but it struck me as one of those remarks. I just took her back after the party. Nothing. I’m showing that she wasn’t just a sleep-around. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She began seeing Hiram Keller, an American screen actor, a considerable man about town in those days.
Talitha’s liaison with Hiram Keller didn’t last. Alone with her infant son in the tall and somber Queen’s House, she grew increasingly despondent. Her health faltered, her robustness, her laughter. She was very much aware that in Rome, Victoria was continuing to see Big Paul although she had promised she would not.
Victoria:
I last saw her in March of 1971. She thought I had betrayed her. I wrote her a letter and made her a promise and, not being together enough about it, the promise was broken. It was about going to meet Paul in Rome. He told her and so I went to see her in Cheyne Walk. I had left Paul. I wasn’t seeing him anymore. She was in a bad way, very unhappy. She was freaked out about people coming in the house, eating, drinking, and freeloading generally. We had this talk and we made up.
According to people, the last two months she really lost her vivacity. She looked cold and miserable and ill. I think she was doing a lot of mandies [Quaaludes] and vodka. Paul didn’t realize, I’m sure, how bad a state she was in. She’d put on a lot of weight and she was having trouble with her thyroid.
She faithfully kept diaries, made novels of her life. The last entry, made two or three days before she left for Rome, says something like, “I hear my baby crying in the next room but I can’t even get up to comfort him. If I die I want to be buried under a big oak tree in a country churchyard.”
I was in Rome the day Talitha came from London. Big Paul had asked me, “Please stay. Not in the house, but stay around.” And I said, “No. This is between you both. I’m going back to the country.” I rang on the Saturday and I talked to Talitha. She sounded quite happy and I said, “Why don’t you come up to the country next week?”
There are two accounts of Talitha’s last days in Rome. They differ, and the differences serve to form a clearer picture of the whole. Paul puts the blame on the mafiosi called in by his father. Jerry Cherchio, owner of the Luau, the tiki bar and restaurant where Gail had met Lang, where the expatriate American movie stars and Dolce Vita crowd mingled with the mafia, gives a much fuller account. He was Big Paul’s confidant, it’s true, but the detail he goes into makes you wonder if he was someone else’s, too.
Cherchio:
When Big Paul didn’t come to London, as Talitha thought he would, she decided to go to Rome and make one last attempt at reconciliation. She had filed divorce papers with lawyers in Amsterdam. She flew there from London, told her lawyers to halt the proceedings and not send the papers to Paul, and flew on to Rome to see her husband.
Unknown to Talitha, the lawyers in Amsterdam had sent the divorce papers to Paul anyway. Talitha arrived and Paul told her, “We’ll talk about it later.” She went off and spent the night somewhere else and she came back the next day two hours after Big Paul had received the papers. He turned on her, shouting. She tried to seduce him. He spurned her. She went into the bedroom and took a massive dose of heroin, and lay on the bed, her back to the door, holding the empty vial. Paul left the apartment for several hours. When he returned, he looked in on her, saw her apparently asleep, poured himself a drink, and remained in the living room for some time before he checked on her again. It was about four-thirty in the morning. She was breathing rapidly, intermittently. He tried to wake her and couldn’t. Then he went to the phone and called me, but I was out of town. He called Dado Ruspoli, and Ruspoli came over. Ruspoli said, “Don’t worry, my wife has these things all the time.” They made a concoction of mustard, salt, and hot water to make her throw up. They forced it down her throat, but it had no effect. They called an American doctor, Dr. Mario Lanza’s connection. They had a lot of difficulty reaching him. They didn’t get through to the doctor until seven in the morning. He came over and gave the comatose Talitha an injection to bring her around. Nothing. They called an ambulance. She died on the way to the hospital.
Possession of heroin, use or sale in Italy, is seven years automatically. The doctor told Paul he would have to pay the coroner $25,000 to keep heroin from being mentioned on the death certificate. Paul agreed to give the money to Ruspoli
to pay the bribe. They put an empty bottle beside the bed and claimed to the police that Talitha had taken an overdose of barbiturates. They said nothing of a doctor having come.
In Paul’s account of her death, he once more endeavored to protect his father.
Paul:
For some reason she got on a plane to Rome to tell my father they shouldn’t get divorced. She arrived in the morning. He said, “We’ll speak about it some other time,” and went out. The whole day she was in bed dying. That’s why my father is what he is. He’s completely guilty of himself. They had both taken too much barbiturates and junk with people at Number One, awful people—they weren’t friends. They were around because they had the dope. They were the people involved in the Number One scandal. You know, the disco scandal. Italian dope dealers. Heroin and coke.
Some of these people came back to my father’s place that night. They went in to see her, said, “What’s wrong with Talitha? She’s still asleep.” She was almost gone. My father said, “We’ve got to call an ambulance.” They said no. They held him down and said, “We’re going to get in trouble.” They convinced him. In the end they did call an ambulance, but she died on the way to the hospital. They could have saved Talitha. They had hours and hours. It’s not a flash thing—you can be saved.
They could have brought Talitha to a hospital. But there were all these people holding my father down. He’s wanted for murder, you know. He can’t go to Italy. Murder charge, which is almost what it is. He knows it too. She did it herself. It wasn’t a needle scene. I think it was purely accidental. I remember the amounts she took. She could have been saved. These people thought only of themselves. Fucking Italians.
Talitha’s death triggered the nightmares Nicolette had predicted, and spewed chaos that, in Paul’s case, marked him for the rest of his days. At first her death seemed to envelop Big Paul in a kind of euphoria. This compounded his inevitable guilt and grief. He fled to Bangkok and there took refuge in opium. He called on Victoria, desperate to have her join and comfort him. She went. For a time it was as if Talitha’s death had never been, but soon Victoria found herself become a phantom surrogate for Talitha. Talitha’s death was a turning point in all their lives.
