by Charles Fox
Victoria:
I rang on the Sunday all day and there was no reply—not all day, but the morning and most of the afternoon—and about four o’clock Paul stormed through the door and said, “She’s dead.” That was it.
Before her death I was Paul’s mistress. Afterward, I was no longer the mistress. I was nothing. My status was not only unofficial but sub-anything. I’d been playing with something that had suddenly turned bad.
Immediately after Talitha’s funeral, I went back to Tuscany. I don’t think any of us will ever know what really happened. But I think she was so disordered that she wouldn’t even have been positive enough to take an overdose. You’d just take too much of this and too much of that. I think that’s the frame of mind one comes to an end in, really.
Paul doesn’t realize how much Talitha’s death affected the children. I know he doesn’t. In ’72, when Little Paul was here in London, I confronted his father. I said, “Has it ever occurred to you that Talitha’s death not only ruined your life and my life, it absolutely freaked out Little Paul? You have no idea.” He said, “You are mad. He hardly knew her.”
Little Paul adored Talitha. She was a figurehead of beauty and glamour and everything that is living, and she is dead. Little Paul used to sit with me for hours on the stairs at Cheyne Walk, asking about her.
For his part, Lord Thynne remembered:
Paul could have possibly saved her, but he flapped. Even though I hadn’t seen her much, I really was very, very upset. I found myself feeling rather embarrassed about it suddenly, saying, “Christopher, really. You only see her two or three times a year. Why are you making this fuss?” Christopher Logue and Ralph Steadman made this memorial, a poem by Logue and illustrated by Steadman:
Endlessly moving clouds but no sign of you
For three nights running I have dreamt of you
Thank you for coming.
Nicolette Meers was in the desert when she heard the news:
This old friend and I had been planning a camping trip in the Spanish Sahara. We pitched our tents on the beach and we used to drive into a place called Tisnet to pick up some meat and a loaf of bread and we’d cook our meal in the evening. One day I was unwrapping the lamb chops or whatever they were and I read “La Femme de l’homme le plus riche du monde est morte.” That was how I found out that Talitha had died. It was such a gory way to get the news—on a piece of bloodstained Moroccan newspaper.
[Big] Paul must have been totally out of it. That state where hours pass and you can’t get it together. Junkies are utterly ruthless, there’s no moral code with them. They don’t give a fig for anything. Junk totally dehumanizes you.
Big Paul’s immediate reaction to Talitha’s death was to bolt, get out of Rome, go back to Bangkok, the place where he and Talitha had spent their honeymoon, where there was opium. Interestingly, now that he was in trouble he turned to his son and invited him to come away. Gail, alarmed, refused to allow Paul to go with his father and instead sent him on a long Mediterranean cruise and then to the country. Big Paul finally persuaded Victoria to join him.
Paul’s account of the episode is characteristically vague, but telling nonetheless.
Paul:
My father called for me, so I went. He was on the farm of an Irish poet, Patrick, who is mad, mad. When Patrick’s first wife, Lola, put her head in the oven, he had come to my father’s house. Now my father went to his. It was strange comedy. My father wanted to take me to Thailand, but my mother said, “No way.” He wanted to take Victoria, and she wouldn’t go, so he took Jerry Cherchio. They went to Bangkok, where he was supposed to get a cure, but he spent three months in an opium den and never got out. My father didn’t talk about Talitha dying. He didn’t realize it for a year.
Victoria at first refused Big Paul’s entreaties to join him in Bangkok.
Victoria:
I had a dog I was devoted to, an Alsatian called Las, a beautiful dog. I didn’t want to leave her and go to the Far East. It wasn’t just an excuse. To me it seemed a proper reason why I couldn’t go, but then someone poisoned Las the day the astronauts were coming back from the moon. Las took a long time to die. That finished me.
I hadn’t really reacted to Talitha’s death, but then the dog died. Nothing will ever hurt me again comparatively. First Talitha, then the dog—whack. I sat in a chair for thirty-six hours without moving. I didn’t know what was going on.
Paul sent me a final telegram: “If you don’t come, I’m going to do something dreadful.” I got on a plane to Bangkok.
Jerry met me. He’s a funny guy. He was so sweet to me. He was wonderful, so patient with Paul, so good to him. He came over at the drop of a hat if things were too much. God knows he didn’t get anything out of it. He was a true friend, a wonderful man. When I arrived in Bangkok, he flew back to Rome.
For Paul, the trouble with his mother’s well-intentioned plan to get him out of the way by sending him on a cruise on his girlfriend’s father’s yacht was that the father refused to allow his daughter to come and so Paul was left alone in the company of the kind of bourgeoisie he so disdained. Upon his return, Gail sent him back into the countryside of Tuscany, and for a while at least the problem of what to do with Paul was solved.
Paul:
Then my father wrote from Bangkok, saying, “Come over. Have your mother organize it.” My mother didn’t want me to go. She sent me on a cruise on my girlfriend’s family’s yacht. Her father owns a factory. He’s a Fascist, the kind that goes with other women and leaves his wife at home. They wouldn’t bring my girlfriend. That brought me completely down. He took friends from the days when my mother was still with my father, and Talitha’s supposed friends—painters, sculptors, heads, and freaks from Milano. Everybody was sorry for me, pretending nothing had happened. But they were still cutting down Talitha. It was unbearable.
It was a long sail from Naples to Ischia to Capri, the Aeolians to Sicily, to Calabria. A big yacht, a lot of work. Sometimes it was so rough the boat rocked at a ninety-degree angle. I hated it. Some of it was great—my understanding of nature, the power of it. We saw whales and dolphins. I loved it when they set the spinnaker. They had a wooden thing with flaps that they towed behind. I had a mask and the thing could go down underwater and up. Scuba diving was fun.
But it was heavy, too—I didn’t like my mother’s friends, straight people. My mother’s girlfriend and her husband, the painter, were there. My mother’s girlfriend would go out early in the morning on a little motorboat with another woman’s husband. It makes me so down, that kind of thing. They’re a turn-off, these middle-aged, martini drinking, sex-crazed bourgeoisie. I slept on deck, couldn’t sleep below with those people.
We listened to the same tape, “Hey Jude,” for three weeks.
When we got back, my mother sent me to John Patrick’s farm in Tuscany. I was very down. They were so busy running around trying to figure everything out, they forgot me there. It’s a great farm in a county where a lot of English people live. The feminist Germaine Greer, who showed the world her cunt, all these people. Oxford students come in the summer to help on the farm. He has thousands and thousands of acres of grapes. The farm was beautiful and John Patrick far-out. His son and I fought fires, swam in lakes, and slept out. They were kind. My father was their good friend. A very simple life, drinking wine and playing charades in the evening, no electricity, feeding the pigs. They gave me a goat I called Kate, and two pigs, Messalina and Jane IV. After a while I felt better.
For a brief while in Bangkok, Victoria and Big Paul carried on as if Talitha’s death had never happened, but then the depth of Big Paul’s opium psychosis broke through and it was then that Victoria realized she had become both a surrogate for a dead wife and, no longer the mistress, the nurse.
Victoria:
Paul was so happy to see me. He met me at the airport and we seemed to latch on to where we had left off before Talitha’s death, holding hands, laughing, terribly happy all the way. It wasn’t just m
e. I wouldn’t have been like that if he’d been down. I can hardly remember this person as I am talking about him. He’s certainly not that way anymore. For about four or five days we were ecstatic—but it seemed like two weeks. Shopping in Bangkok, buying beautiful tribal dresses, a lovely time.
One night in the hotel I woke to sobbing. Paul was in the bathroom. I got up and went in and found him stumbling around, crying, talking to Talitha in his sleep. It stopped me in my tracks. I put him back in bed and calmed him down. He opened his eyes and, looking at me, said, “I’ll never forget you.” He thought I was Talitha. In that moment I realized that things were absolutely different. I had been euphoric. From then on I was looking after a sick person. He was never the same again. Paul insisted that we go to all the places where he and Talitha had gone on their honeymoon and stay in the same rooms. He told me he was looking for Talitha’s ghost. We went to Penang and all sorts of places where they had been together, and finally I took him back to Bangkok.
There, Victoria fed Paul opium, reducing his intake, and he went from 140 pounds to 175 pounds and reportedly never looked better. When news came out about Talitha’s heroin overdose, Victoria went to London and Big Paul went back to Rome.
Why Big Paul returned to Rome when he knew of the coroner’s report may be another demonstration of how disconnected he still was from reality.
Jerry Cherchio:
After two months, the coroner, tired of waiting for the bribe Ruspoli had promised him, published his true findings. He reported that he had found a needle mark, and Talitha had died of a heroin overdose. There was no mention of a doctor present at the time of her death. Ruspoli and the doctor had split and pocketed the $25,000, and didn’t pay the coroner.
6.
At the end of his idyllic summer in the Tuscany countryside, Paul, too, returned to Rome, to his mother’s house in Parioli. He was fourteen. It was then that he first smoked marijuana and was reunited with his father. It was a realization of Gail’s fears, although how much she knew and what she could have done about it are moot questions. What is clear at this point is that she had lost control of her son altogether, thrown up her hands, and handed Paul—for better or worse—over to his father in London, the lion’s den as Victoria put it.
So Paul’s dream to live with his father came true at last.
Paul:
A man and his old lady I met in the street gave me a ride. All of a sudden he said, “Do you smoke?” and I said yes. I thought he meant cigarettes. He lit a pipe. I didn’t know what to do. So I took it in and coughed my arse off. When he dropped me off, he said, “Come and see me.” From that day forward I turned on—spaced-out on drugs. I saw the light. I went home and walked up the stairs with this feeling. Better than my first woman. I really felt like hot shit.
When my father just came back from Thailand he wanted to get together with me and we saw a lot of each other. He met my girlfriend, too. I even got him to go and meet her parents. I got close with him. We were giving each other dope and he’d say, “Bring some friends over and we’ll watch Scorpio Rising and The Great Dictator.”
I was sitting with my girlfriend and my father getting stoned. We were sitting on the couch by Talitha’s bamboo chair. We were talking and laughing our heads off about why Victorians covered the seats, and listening to the test record of Sticky Fingers before it came out. It was recorded in Marrakesh and I played the tambourine and my father played drums. They were singing “Wild Horses”—at the end it says “Oh baby.” Right at that point, Puddy, Talitha’s big Persian cat, jumped up on the record player—a flame came up, whoosh, out of Talitha’s chair. I can still show you the hole. I’d only smoked a little bit.
My father said he was going to London because Talitha was trying to communicate with him. I stayed in Rome. I was at the beach when it came out in the papers about Talitha’s death, that she had overdosed on heroin. Nobody really knew why it took so long.
Lang was in L.A. I couldn’t stand my mother anymore. She didn’t like me because I didn’t like her. There was no man in the house. I ran out and came back late. I got into dope and dealing dope with my friend Richard. Him and I were dealing. He was my best friend. He’s probably my best friend ever.
We sold dope to Elton John, Charles Bronson, Tony Curtis. A lot of dope—we had money. It was a trip. Nobody else was doing it. We were kids. Full of money, motorcycles; we became independent.
I left my mother’s. I just ran away. That day I was in a cab with my girlfriend and we passed a demonstration and we got out, and there were Fascists running around and I said, “I’m really a Fascist. I really dig these people.” It’s strange the things you think.
Then I went to [stay with] my father’s friends, Bob and Sarah. This was Christmas, I remember. Have you been to Piazza Navona at Christmas? All these stalls, and it looks incredible. I stayed two months with Bob and Sarah. They chanted. And that’s where I got into Buddhism, to Nisban, Sha Sha … They were into it, so I got into it. Now I know it’s fascism. They were Nichiren Shoshu, and I chanted every day for three or four hours. The whole time I thought I was free, but at the end I found out my mother sent them money every week. Then one day I became a celebrity. They took a picture of me sprawled out on the floor dressed like a hippie and sold it to a big magazine and then—whoosh—I became the “Golden Hippie,” a rebel. It was a complete change from the very cool country life in Tuscany.
I became weirder. I saw a girl, Bobby, a lot, tortured her. I wasn’t nice to her, and it came back to me.
Then my father got in touch with me and said, “Come to London.” He sent me a ticket. Bob and Sarah gave it to me. Later I found out my mother had given it to them. I never saw my mother, never said good-bye, even. I was still turned against her.
I was happy to go to London. I told my Bobby, “I’ll probably be gone a long time, so get your rocks off.” I went with Mario, the driver for my father, the driver who had driven for Getty Oil for years and who later testified against me.
I hadn’t seen my father for a year. Now he was interested in me. He was very into me going to boarding school. The family has this thing about boarding school. It’s crazy. They’ve never gone themselves.
Queen’s House is across the river from Battersea Park. Did you ever see the house? It’s beautiful, the Rossetti house. Strange vibrations in that house. Rossetti was a strange man. It was a hangout for all those people, Rimbaud, Gabriel Rossetti. Aleister Crowley and all these people were there often. They were doing laudanum, downers made from morphine and opium. Very strong, like heroin. You smoke it. That’s what Rossetti died of, an overdose. Have you read “The Burden of Nineveh” and “A Last Confession”? Limbo characters, the strange, beautiful people that die young. Rossetti didn’t go out very much. In the house, there’s a little painting of him reading poetry to others. He wrote beautiful poetry. They came from Paris and they’d just smoke all day and indulge in prostitutes; they were into black magic. The man who had built the house had married three times, and each of his three wives died in the house. The place has terrible karma. When you’re in it, you really feel it. I promise you. Very weird, but fabulous.
I could live in that house. It’s just so beautiful. The last time I was there, Talitha had put a parachute in the staircase that went all the way downstairs, curled around, strange colors. I think Talitha and my father lived there in ’68, the Swinging London time. Now he doesn’t do anything but sit and read about the people who lived in the house. He’s completely fascinated by them, he knows all the history. Rossetti had a mistress, she lived with him in the house, he did all these paintings of her. She died there from an overdose. No one knows how it happened. It’s like Talitha.
He listens to opera and reads. He has a bookbinding place upstairs, a big white room. He has machines there to rebind old books, but he never uses them. He has a lot of rare old books, a Gutenberg [Bible], and the Bible Thomas à Becket was holding when they killed him. He watches movies on the television in the study
. It has these huge bay windows and it’s full of pillows. He sleeps there. Talitha’s sitting room, her study, a little room painted yellow, was upstairs. The secretary, who just recently left because she wasn’t paid, used to be in it, but now it’s locked up.
When Bill Newsom, my godfather, who was my father’s best friend, came to London, he slept in my room. My father was downstairs. Bill’d just come from the airport. He crashed out. He woke in the middle of the night and thought he heard crying. He thought it was because he was so tired, and went back to sleep. He woke up again. Something pressing on his chest, and he kept hearing crying. Something touched him. He couldn’t move. He screamed. My father, I’m sure, was there, but he didn’t answer. He does this all the time. Bill shouted, “Get out. Leave me alone!” and at this moment it moved away, the pressure. Then he went downstairs, and my father said, “It was Talitha trying to talk to me.”
The first day I was in London, I went to Piccadilly Circus to buy drugs. I showed Victoria. I already had a good relationship with Victoria from the summer in Tuscany. She said, “You’ve been ripped off.” They sold me Ampex or something. I told her, “I’d really like to try some coke.” So she turned me on to two lines of coke. I’d never done anything like this before. Incredible.
I tried to convince my father to see Clockwork Orange. He said, “No, I don’t want to see it, it’s violent.” He hasn’t been out to see a movie since Fantasia on my fourteenth birthday. So Victoria and I did some coke in the bathroom and went to Leicester Square to the premiere. I saw Clockwork Orange twenty-three times. I really dug this freak trip, being odd. Anyway, that night her friend came, Fiona Lewis. I think I mentioned her. She’s an actress. All these girls around. They would go and tell people that they’d fucked me, and I loved it. I would be terrified if anyone approached me, but I loved the attention. A chip off the old block, they call me.
