by Charles Fox
Fiona was Victoria’s best friend. She was beautiful, seemed destructive like Faye Dunaway. I’ve always been attracted to really destructive women. They always want to fuck everybody else’s man. Fiona was staying at the house then. I kept complaining about not having a room to come across in. Victoria got Fiona into it, but when she came on I was too shy.
Victoria, caught somewhere between her fear of hypocrisy and her role as a surrogate mother, defends Fiona and refutes Gail’s assertion that she slept with Paul.
Victoria:
Fiona was staying in our house. She asked me, “Do you know what happened this morning? Little Paul came in and said, ‘I’m going to get into bed with you.’” He never did, I believe her. Those were things in his mind. When George d’Almeida told me Gail thought I had been to bed with him, I thought, My God, I may have done a million things but that wasn’t one of them.
I made cardinal errors. I gave him the odd snort of coke. He knew what was going on in the house. He wasn’t a bloody fool. But it does sound incredibly irresponsible to give someone a snort at whatever age he was. It is indefensible, I know, but if you’ve got him in the lion’s den you can’t lie. You’re lying if you don’t include him. I made a hopeless mess of it. I couldn’t have done worse if I had tried. In the end he felt that I was a traitor to him. His father felt I was a traitor. His mother thinks that not only did I screw him but I turned him on to drugs. It was simply not true. I put my foot in everything, badly, but I’ve never had any physical contact with Little Paul at all. It would be out of the question.
When I came back to London I found that Talitha’s closest friends had a terrifying loathing for Paul and me. It was just an extremely bad time. It was a year after Talitha’s death and I was in a rotten way, looking back on it but not realizing I was, but doing my bit—keeping superficial things together, like the house, and remembering to look for a school for Little Paul.
I was playing this impossible role. I was exactly half the age between him and his father. For Paul it was a phenomenal bother to have an adolescent about the house. He thought I’d be more reasonable with his son and I thought I was. I’d say, “Yes, you can go out, but don’t be too late.” I said, “I expect you are going to smoke dope and stuff but don’t overdo it.” The first day he was in London I said to him, “If you’re going to walk about, do please try not to buy drugs, (a) because we’re extremely paranoid here and (b) because you’re bound to get ripped off.” The first day he came back and said, “I’ve bought some acid.” I made him show it to me. I said, “I bet it’s Ampex.” It was those little green pills that stop your breath from smelling. He’d bought them for a pound each. I said, “I told you so.”
He went through a number of bum purchasing escapades in the Piccadilly Underground.
Disaster struck when “Cockney Pauline,” a friend of Victoria’s, came to the house with real LSD.
Paul:
My father was sending me to a psychiatrist. Every two days I’d have to take a train down to Winchester to see him. Then I met “Cockney Pauline.” She had acid on sugar cubes wrapped in cellophane. I bought a whole bunch from her. I kept it in the fridge, the best place to keep acid. I did some every day.
One night I was on acid watching a late movie with Victoria in the bedroom. At one point I went to my room, up the little staircase. It used to be Tara’s nanny’s room. It’s a dark yellow. It creaks all the time. You know, these old English houses.
I had a strange trip in that room. I had been reading [The] Panic in Needle Park. Junkies. I had a record player and I had bought Lexington and the Ants. I lay down and the whole bed looked like it was full of ants. The whole bed was moving. I screamed. My father came in. I yelled at him: “Hey! Look there. Ants on the bed.” Of course, he said, “There’s nothing there.”
By the bed there was this big chair. I had left my coat and hat on it and somehow they changed into a little hunchbacked monster with no face. All the time he was making fixes with needles and ODing. People were walking in and out of the room and saying, “It’ll be okay.” On acid, everything you’ve been doing the days before is in some way brought back. As in a dream. I called the fire department. At least, that’s what Victoria told me. I’m only going by what people told me. Three days this trip went on.
In the garden, in those walls, those little walls, there was a strange paranoia. At the side was bamboo. It turned into the boys they have in Clockwork Orange. Paki-bashers with boots with golden toecaps, rockers, throwing stones. I hid behind those horrible big white flowerpots, right under the window, and they were throwing things, and I was throwing things back. Twenty, sometimes thirty whole battles and me screaming to them, “You fuckers!” Details, absolute details, buttons, everything. It’s incredible, acid. When I was behind that flowerpot with the little lemon tree, Victoria’s head came out of it. Straight out. Then came Lord Lambton’s head. I touched them. They spoke. It was weird. I can still feel how it felt, perfectly normal. I was by myself. Only when I looked in the windows, I freaked out. I went to the doors. Everything was locked. My father had locked me out. He invited five or six friends to come and look at me out there freaking out.
They spent the whole day looking through the windows at me. At one point, I picked up all the leaves in the wheelbarrow and there’s this little garden house ’round the corner and I went and lay down in there, and then the whole thing started to go whoosh.
The day before I had been talking to Victoria about magic, how to be able to do whatever you want to do. I was sure she said something about knowing someone who could teach you how to walk through walls. Some guy that could do it.
I went back to my father’s door. I tried to break in then, I tried to walk through the walls. I was completely black and blue. I’d go like this for hours. I got into this whole thing about “Do it again,” because slowly, slowly and I could feel the cells, the matter splitting. I really thought that if I could get into it enough, I was sure I could do it. Slow, and slow until you get the right concentration.
Underneath the house, there’s a basement. Stairs go up. Here’s the garden. Stairs go down to the kitchen there. Stairs go to the study. First I went downstairs. I went crazy. I could see the two workers there. I got this iron bar. I wanted to break the glass. Then I went to the studio; my father’s door was closed. I looked through the windows. Tony Lambton, remember? That minister of the RAF was looking out. He wouldn’t let me in, so I climbed on the drainpipe to Talitha’s room on the second floor. There’s a balcony. I really had to get there. That’s where the acid was. I was on the drainpipe. For some reason Aron Vejak, a childhood friend, appeared on the second floor. He gave me his arm but I couldn’t reach it.
Victoria gave her own account of Paul’s trip:
His father woke me at two on Sunday afternoon and said, “There’s something unpleasant going on outside. My son is on an acid trip. He’s threatened the servants with an ax and he’s halfway up the fucking drainpipe.”
Well, I got dressed in about two-point-five seconds, took a snort, and rushed downstairs. Big Paul came after me saying, “You will not go out. I have shut him in the garden. You’re not to see him.”
I went into the garden. Little Paul was halfway up the drainpipe, forty feet off the ground. He came down like a monkey and said, “Dad’s trying to kill you.” I didn’t know whether he was having me on, how much was acting, how much was real horror. I said, “Yes, I know. Let’s go out to Richmond Park.” So we did. As we drove he tried to get out of the car several times.
We were in the park for hours sitting under a tree. He was beginning to come down, but still spaced out, talking about smack [and a] woman, who was going to get him laid. On the way back we stopped at a hamburger joint. His father never forgave me for interfering, for taking him out. He said, “If he was locked in the garden, he was locked in the garden and there he should bloody well stay!” There was no question of “Have you ever had a bad trip?”
Paul continued the st
ory from this point:
When we came home from the park I crashed out. When I woke up, I had slept for, like, forty hours—an incredible amount—and there was a nurse there, poor nurse. She’s my father’s nurse, a fantastic lady—big, fat old lady, great, incredibly strong, very protective. She’s, you know, for heroin. She comes once a month, stays at the house and they do a cure. She was so nice to me, never said a word, tried to calm me down.
When I woke up, I realized, My God, my father’s flipped out. I went downstairs, not realizing what I had done. The neighbor woman came in and said, “You really fucked up my garden.”
My father told me to write five hundred lines. In the end I got out of it and we settled for an essay on what I thought drugs would do for me.
The next day he came crying in my face and I was really heavy with him. I wasn’t into my father so much; I tortured him. I said the most terrible things to him. Really, I dug torturing him. I think I hated him. I said, “In Rome, the kids at school all say that you’re a junkie,” and he started crying. I said, “It’s all right.”
Little sadist. A compulsive liar, saying something like that to my own father. It was terrible to see him cry. What had I done?
The last days he started writing me notes, my father, in the same house. He’d write weird things, strange things. What an act, what a circus it was, using all these incredible words telling me not to swear, not to lie, and not to laugh.
Then one day he just called the driver to take me to my grandfather’s. I had a golden ring in my ear and a pair of jeans with green and white stripes with stars, no shoes, and that Leon Russell shirt. My father said, “Are you going like that?” I said yes. I was into these things about [how] “clothes don’t make the man.”
He gave me a movie camera and said, “Byron [the driver] will be here soon.”
It is a measure of just how disconnected Big Paul was from reality that he expected his eighty-year-old father to be able to handle a drug-crazed fourteen-year-old. This was the first real communication the old man and Big Paul had since Talitha’s death. Old Paul hadn’t seen his once favorite and angelic grandson for several years.
Paul:
My grandfather has an enormous piece of property outside London, about six thousand acres—immense. There are rivers, dams, houses. There’s a village in it, very beautiful. Beautiful English lawns—all daffodils. Hedges all clipped, all shapes—birds, elephants, horses. There’s a maze. There’s a nice church there and a graveyard.
The house is enormous. It looks Russian, with those onion domes on top. The wings come out towards you as you look at it. It goes like this and like that. And there’s a statue in front, very nice, very clean. It was all done in Pompeii red clay around the time of Henry VIII. He had it as a country home for Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and he’d go hunting there. Cardinal Woolsey bought it and after that Cromwell. Very good families. My grandfather paid nothing for it. There are incredible books in there—old. There are some weird medicine books I’ve looked through. Astrology books.
My grandfather met me at the door. I took a shot of him. He said, “Do you always dress like this?”
They were having a meeting planning the museum in L.A. He said, “You can stay here and we can learn, understand each other.” He told me he would look for a school, a day school. He wasn’t even going to send me to boarding school. He was fond of me. He was looking for his successor. He wanted a Paul. He didn’t believe that my father could do it. He said my father was a hopeless businessman. And he said, “Your father and Talitha disillusioned me and my only heir has died. You can do it. You have the talent.”
I said to him, “No. I’ll never get into the oil business.” I was very heavy into ecology, very heavy to him. Surprised he put up with it. I would say, “You have ruined this planet,” and he would laugh.
It was fun, that time. I worked with him on the museum a lot. We had just opened his house to tourists. Lots of people would come. I would show them around. It’s open almost every day. There are secret passages, priest holes, and a chapel. An immense room with a throne at the end of it where Henry VIII sat. I have a shot of [my grandfather] walking around with some tourists.
His office looks out onto the gardens, a very simple office. Big white room, very, very big. Two armchairs, a desk. He always sits in the same armchair.
There are two swimming pools—one outside and one inside. He swims every day. An enormous Olympic-size swimming pool. He likes the water hot, hot, hot. The vegetable garden is copied after Washington’s in Mt. Vernon.
I’d bring him his mail in the morning and we’d go through the whole thing. The mail that came in there, you wouldn’t believe. They’re just weird, the letters to my grandfather, treasure maps burned with matches around them, crackpot ideas. He has a printed letter for people who ask for money. That’s what I did for a long time—put them in envelopes and sent them off. It’s a very funny letter. It says, “You are one of the three thousand people who write me daily asking to contribute to your cause. If I gave you each five pounds I’d go broke in the next twenty-six years (some outrageous figure). I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped you.” He signs each one and sends them off. Every letter. Some of the things—you die laughing.
He likes Greta Garbo and loves New York and talks about Oklahoma. I think he lost touch when he moved to England in the fifties. [Francis] Bullimore, the butler, runs the whole show. Parkes is the valet. They’re English. They’ve been with him for twenty years. They travel around with him.
I never got along with Bullimore. He’s white with rosy cheeks in this dark house. Hands white and pink, completely clean. White, white. It’s impossible to tell his age. He’s starting to have white hair.
Bullimore’s a faggot. Weird flashes of him. I’d be in the bathroom and he’d knock on the door and say, “Can you manage, sir?” I said that for years after. My English-accent joke was “Can you manage?”
Parkes takes the pictures. My grandfather says, “Parkes, get the camera.” There’s a whole room next to the office full of photographs. That’s mostly all that Parkes does. He polishes the silver and the camera.
Kathy’s the cook. She’s about forty-five, fifty, enormously fat. She’s Irish. She adores me. She made me shortbread cookies. I think there’s only one little maid. Nobody remembers her name and nobody remembers what she looks like. She just polishes the silver. That’s all.
Derek is the game warden, the animal trainer, and the security guard. He takes care of the dogs and the lion. Great little lion, Nero, incredibly strong. Really sweet. Margaret the Duchess of Argyll gave it to him. I’d play with it every day on the lawn in front of his study window so he could see.
A school chum of mine came. His father owns a famous hotel. We did acid. I opened the study door and asked my grandfather, “You want to meet a friend of mine?” We slid down the fire rope. Not good. We got the golf cart stuck in the mud and a tractor had to come. We drove the tractor into a wall. Secretly that day we hitchhiked to London to see Cockney Pauline to buy more acid. We came back that night and I had a fight with some Paki-bashers and got in quite late.
I never changed. I should have. It got heavy. My grandfather kept on saying, “Why are you dressed like this?” He gave me money to buy clothes and I went out and bought something else outrageous. I fucked it up. The guy really wanted to do something for me but I fucked it up. There’s a point when even when you’re not taking, it’s just one big acid trip.
He’s very generous. He gave me everything I wanted. He was very nice to me, and understanding. Then Victoria wrote me a twenty-page letter in brown ink and it’s this whole long thing, saying, “It’s okay. You have to understand your father. He’s so down about Talitha.”
I think of how tolerant [my grandfather] was. How ridiculous I was. How those things that were so important become nothing. Like when a new girlfriend left me, I was going to throw myself off the terrace. And now I think of it and I laugh. That’s why it’s fun to hav
e brothers and sisters. I just look at them and I laugh.
I really wish I was older. Either I wish I was thirteen again and I could start all over, or I wish I was twenty-four. I wanted to go back, I wanted to see my mother. So I went back to Rome.
Odd that he chose thirteen and twenty-four. He was thirteen when he went to Marrakesh and he would be twenty-four when he ODed. His entire discretionary life lay between these two numbers.
7.
When Gail heard that Paul was leaving his grandfather and returning to Rome, she knew well what she was getting back. She often talked to Old Paul on the telephone and she had followed Paul’s progress in London, a period she dismissed dryly as “his King’s Road number.”
She had done her best to get him out of Rome and she had failed—or, rather, he had. When he bounced back, she didn’t make a great effort to contain him. It was beyond her. He was beyond them all. They were reaping the whirlwind.
It would be a relief to Gail in some ways to have him out of the house. The family was horrified when she let him loose. “What is she doing … utterly irresponsible,” they cried. But by now Gail had no option but to watch him go out into the diaspora with her usual equanimity and optimism and the hope, however pious, that he would be equal to the big world and that it would treat him well.
Gail:
I offered to take Tara after Talitha died. I had to find a house in three days, so I took one on Via Archimedes. It had at least six bedrooms, four drawing rooms, a huge dining room, a library, and it was furnished. The furnishings were so un-me. I’m sure it was all very nice, but it was in that Embassy style. You know, those Roman embassy houses? They all look the same; pale ivory damask on Louis XVI chairs. I was working at my clothes shop at that time so I could pay off my debts. Getting up at seven and coming back late because I was doing the accounts every night. It was an awful time, unfair to the children, which is why I quit. Tara’s nanny, a young girl, was looking after them. There were just too many children for her to cope with. There were always twenty for lunch on Saturdays because Mark [Paul’s younger brother] would say, “I’m bringing two.” Then Paul would say, “I’m bringing Kenlen, plus three,” and so on.
