Uncommon Youth

by Charles Fox

  For the next five years, Paul was adrift in the world. I saw little of him in these years. Slowly I lost the use of my legs and adapted to life riding the chair. I wrote a novel that was well received in Hollywood.

  Martine was living in San Francisco with Balthazar and Anna, the daughter she had with Rolf Zacher and whom Paul adopted. Sometimes she came out to see me. She gave me what little news there was of him.

  He was evidently in London, for we read in the newspapers that he had been caught with a woman one night in flagrante delicto on a bandstand in Hyde Park. Then he called me from the Chelsea Hotel to tell me that he and Patti Smith were going to be in San Francisco and would I have dinner with them. The pair of them, she aglow in the wake of her performance, he high on whatever it was, were excited and enthusiastic. They were a good match that night, very much a couple.

  Then I heard he had been given the lead in a Wim Wenders film, The State of Things. It was being shot in Portugal, all but the last scene, which was to be shot in L.A. I heard nothing more of him for a month or maybe two.

  Martine’s memories of these days are what we have to go on:

  We had a very open marriage. I am from the sixties and I never believed in a possessive relationship. At the same time I was jealous, but I was very connected to Paul. I always saw him as a big part of myself and Jutta, the three of us. One day we would pull through, and have our world and our vision realized. I had no idea how much I would compromise myself.

  Paul and I thought of ourselves as together for the next six years, except that he was gone a lot. He lived in London for a while, in L.A. and in New York. We were “modern nomads,” constantly moving, living on credit. I would go to Munich and renew myself. I went to San Francisco when Aileen, Gail’s mother, died. We stayed with the grandfather, George, for a while. Then we all decided to stay in San Francisco with the kids and not be in L.A. while they were little.

  At one point Paul came to visit me and the kids in San Francisco. He looked very bad. There were many, many times, over and over, every couple of months he would say, “I’m going to quit.” But he never did. We went to Tosca’s bar, and Paul put his arm around me and said, “We will be together when we’re old. We will sit back and look at the mountain.” It was one of his attempts at wanting to get straight, to change his life. He had his own vision that somehow it would work itself out and we would have our enlightenment. None of us had any idea how much was in store, how dark it would get, how much shadow there would be. If you fly up very high, you also fall very low.

  At some point I realized I could not change Paul, all I could do is pull myself together. I was never a drug addict, but I certainly was crazy and irresponsible. It was all about being free, being an artist, and I thought our lives were normal. At the same time the addiction was real. There was time to put it back together. When I look back now, I don’t know what I thought.

  I think he couldn’t change for several reasons. Paul had to work with facing his own dark side. He often behaved with no consideration, no scruples. I have these things in me, too. I can’t just project it all on him. He went through a lot of shit; it was more difficult for him because he had it so easy. He could go through life, living fast and living on credit. In every sense—spiritually, financially, everything. There was so much accumulated. Often we can only change our lives when there is no option. Paul always had so many options. He had his painting, and his words, his writing, his charm and youth, but most of all he had his name, and all the power that went with it. He could get away with murder with no repercussions. He was practically freed of responsibility and consideration for anyone, but then one day was payday. Fortunately I have had faith, to have met Rainer, my guru in Munich, through Jutta, and there was an element in me that took my work with Rainer seriously enough to survive. The constancy of having my whole special family was why I eventually moved to Germany.

  When he came back from Portugal, we were staying in New York on Long Island with Mick Jagger, and Paul tried to drown himself. He walked into the sea and Mick had to pull him out onto the beach. After that, we flew back to L.A. and he went into the rehab hospital.

  I was living in San Francisco with the children and he was with friends. They took him out of the rehab hospital and brought him up here to see you.

  * * *

  I was awakened in the early morning of a gray dawn to see someone sitting on my wheelchair a few feet from my bed. It was Paul.

  I wasn’t surprised, or if I was, surprise was overwhelmed by the shock of how he looked. He was a macabre sight, ashen, bloated, almost as unrecognizable as a corpse dredged from the river. An awful image. An aura of malevolence seemed to surround him.

  “Let’s go outside,” I said. He rose from my wheelchair, pushed it beside me, and helped me onto it. He told me, as we stood out on the deck in the dawn, “I haven’t read your book, you know.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does. All my friends have done something, but I’m just a name. I can call up anyone in the world and they will meet with me, but only because of my name.” He spoke quietly, tentatively, as if afraid of being overheard. Slowly we made our way up the ramp and into the house.

  There, in the living room, sat his two companions: his old girlfriend, a rather large young woman, an apprentice opera singer, and a young Englishman, an old Etonian with a nose like the Duke of Wellington’s and a chin like Prince Charles’s. The young man told me proudly of how he had rescued Paul from a clinic in Los Angeles and they had driven up to see me at high speed. Paul did not join us for breakfast; he had gone into town. He came home in the early afternoon and collapsed in the back bedroom, drunk. I wanted to lock him in, to bar the windows of the room where he was passed out, and hold him prisoner. But it was beyond me, beyond any of us.

  That night at dinner Paul was still asleep in the back. I sat with his friends, the two of them bright-eyed, enthusiastically recounting their adventures with Paul, the prize they had liberated from the rehab hospital. They had no sense of what had come to pass, or what their real role was in all of this, no sense that they were facilitating something awful. I groped around for a solution, something to do. Paul had been in L.A. waiting to shoot the final scene of Wim Wenders’s movie. Wenders was in Paris trying to raise more money. The three of us talked into the night around the dining-room table. We went to bed at two. I got up at five to call Wenders in Paris. I wheeled my way into the studio to make the call. Wenders himself answered the phone. I told him that he’d better get here quickly if he wanted his leading man in the last scene. As I was talking, Paul appeared through the French doors, looming over me unsteadily in the half-light, staring down, stony-faced.

  I looked at him and said evenly, “There are better ways to kill yourself than this.”

  “I’m not trying to kill myself.”

  “Well, you’re going to get terribly fucked-up.”

  They left in the late morning. Got back into a big Mercedes. When his friend asked me to sign a book for him, I wrote, “You’re killing our friend with your kindness.”

  I watched them go and with a heavy heart slowly wheeled my way back into the empty house to find that Paul had drunk every drop of alcohol in the place, even the cooking sherry.

  After he’d gone, I once more wished strongly I had kept him with me, or at least persuaded him, talked to him, done something more than I did.

  Martine picks up the story of Paul’s last discretionary days:

  After you, he came to see us in San Francisco. His girlfriend said to me, “I want to marry Paul.” Then he and I went to pick up the kids from school. In the car he said to me, “Don’t ever say yes to a divorce. I just had to say it. I’m going down. I’m watching my own destruction, and I can’t stop it. Just stay with me. I’m all over the place. I’m destroying myself, but don’t say yes to any divorce.” Paul and I had very different friends at this time. I was with Dennis Hopper and Sean Penn and my acting class, and Paul was with so
me nice boys who came across drugs, and they liked to party, but not like Paul. They were harmless, but not interesting to me. I met the girlfriend the first time they came to San Francisco and I thought she is a very nice girl, but she doesn’t understand what’s going on with Paul. It’s come to a point where Paul is finished. He needs to go to the hospital. He doesn’t make sense anymore. He was not even in his body. It was very poignant. I have this letter he wrote when he was in the rehab hospital. He wrote, “Today is my birthday. I am destroying myself. I miss my wife, I miss my children.” He was very paranoid. He had this obsession with Aleister Crowley and black magic, just like his father. He said he heard human voices. He was very, very scared of these voices. He kept pushing his limits. In the end, it was just a question of “Is he going down by himself, or is he going to take someone with him?” When he was in a car or on a motorcycle, he was completely mad. I wanted so badly to understand him better, to be able to talk to him. It’s very sad.

  He looked so bad, I couldn’t imagine that he was the person I had married. I really, really missed him. After he left, I cried like a little girl and I said, “I want my Paul back. I want my Paul back.” I couldn’t accept that something was all wrong, all wrong. My friend was there and she said, “You better wake up.” I was in some deep emotional place that didn’t want to see or believe what was happening, to understand anything. He was at the end. That night I had this awful dream that he had been kidnapped again, and brought into the swamps, and he was going down. I called Gail and I said Paul is in really bad shape, he needs to see a doctor. Then a couple of days later I was out with Balthazar and Anna and when I got back there was a message on my machine, and it was Gail’s voice and she said, “Come immediately, Paul is in a coma, he might not survive.” He was only twenty-five years old.

  It happened in his British friend’s apartment after a party. They thought he was asleep and anyone who knows what happens with heroin overdoses knows that you must wake them up or they slip into a coma. They just didn’t know what was happening. They didn’t have a clue what to do.

  * * *

  After his Hollywood Bowl truffle had a sewage problem, Paul had left L.A. to take up residence in a house on a lake in County Tipperary, Ireland. No doubt the move was encouraged by the country’s most favorable tax laws, but it also made it possible for him to make a rapprochement with his father, who had embraced British culture so thoroughly he had a replica of Lord’s Cricket Grounds built on the fields of his country estate, Wormsley Hall. It also allowed Paul to spend his remaining summers with his mother in her beloved Tuscany.

  * * *

  One weekend I was up on Lake Shasta in a houseboat and, after we docked, the attendant in office called me over. There was a phone call; it was Gail. Little Paul had slipped into a coma. My son, James, now fifteen, took me, and we flew down to L.A. to see Paul.

  We were going to say good-bye, I supposed. Paul was in Cedars-Sinai Hospital, a formidable fortress of a place. Gail met us as we came out of the elevator into a plush, carpeted room. She looked gray and tired. Her usual cheerfulness had turned somber. She seemed relieved to see us. She led us down a hushed, windowless corridor and opened the door to a private room, and there was Paul lying in bed on his back, head turned away from us, auburn hair cut short. He was connected up to lines hanging from IV bottles—a maze of them connected to arms and belly. He was being fed intravenously. There was the hum of electric pumps and the soft hiss of air, presumably being fed into his mattress. We stood looking down on him in silence, as though we were in a church.

  I asked to be left alone with him. When the door was closed, I said to him, “You’ve done it now.”

  At the sound of my voice his head turned on the pillow to face me. It was a shock. His eyes stared at me blindly, like those of a dead fish, only more bulbous. His stare made the hair on my neck rise. A message was transmitted to me as clearly as if it had been spoken in my ear, “We’ve got him now. Why don’t you fuck off.”

  I suppose it was the strength of my own imagination reflected back to me.

  A moon had slipped from orbit, fallen from the sky, crashing into me. For surely he had been a moon, lit from some other source. When Gail returned, we left. James wheeled me back down the corridor. There was nothing to be said. We descended in a silent, empty elevator. Even James was silent. We went from the cool interior into the clammy heat and glare. It was a shock, this other world still here, still going on, unaffected.

  The afternoon sky was washed out, evening coming on. Traffic was building, surging past us, oblivious, slowing, horns, engines blaring, swirling grit into the air to tear our eyes. As we went, the doubt set in, useless and persistent. When I had declined to write his book for fear it might discredit him, had I not denied Paul work, the very thing I had then thought might save him? It was going to be a long drive home, far into the night.

  Some days after we got home there came a long, rambling letter from Paul’s girlfriend. Her handwriting was as florid and generous as she:

  Charles dear friend,

  I liked meeting you, being at your house, talking to you and I very much want to see you again, to talk to you again and give you good news. But every day I call Paul’s doctors and …

  I let the pages fall to the ground as I read them.

  Fragments, that’s all any of it was—the speed of a mind, the intent, the ambition, the means, pieces never joined together, never made into a whole. That was the tragedy of it.

  After this, I only saw him occasionally, when we went down to L.A. Sometimes we stayed for the night. Finally there came the meeting where once more he asked me to write this story.

  I had been working on another book, a medical memoir, when all this happened. I went back and forth between this memoir and the book of Paul’s story, so progress was slow on either hand. There was also the matter of my deteriorating health.

  Gail, now seventy, had telephoned. I was in the intensive-care ward of a hospital near San Francisco. She said in that same cheerful voice, “Paul and I are in Squaw Valley. He likes to sit-ski.” It was a surprise to hear they were in California, for Paul had already left L.A. and moved to tax-friendly Ireland. Martine said that he lived in a castle beside a lake. When I told Gail the work was almost finished, she paused, and then she said, “Well, you know how I feel, but we must respect Paul’s wishes.”

  In April of 2003 came the news that Big Paul had died. He was in the London Clinic. I got the impression that he pretty much lived there.

  He had planned a winter sail in the Caribbean aboard his yacht, the Talitha G. He invited the Matsons, sent his jet down to Devon where they now lived to pick them up and bring them out to join the party. At the last minute, doctors adjudged Big Paul unfit to travel. He called the Matsons and told them to carry on without him, come and tell him of the voyage on their return.

  He died while the Talitha G was at sea. Fiammetta Rocco wrote in London’s Independent newspaper:

  SIR PAUL GETTY [HE WAS MADE A KNIGHT OF THE REALM AFTER HE GAVE SO GENEROUSLY TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY], QUIET BILLIONAIRE AND PHILANTHROPIST, 18 APRIL 2003

  “Paul is a much-loved figure,” Prime Minister John Major said of Getty in 1994. “And when I say much-loved, I mean for what he is—not just what he’s been able to give.” …

  Often anonymously, and without seeking anything in return, Getty became Britain’s greatest private philanthropist, giving away well over £200m in the last 20 years. His best-known gifts were the £50m he gave the National Gallery in 1985, £20m to British Film Institute, £5m to St Paul’s Cathedral, £5m to the Conservative Party, £1m to Canova’s Three Graces, £1m to the Churchill Papers. He supported small projects over big ones and schemes that helped to rehabilitate prison inmates and young offenders, preserve old churches and small village cricket clubs, and help women driven by stress to self-mutilation. His J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust advertises itself simply as “Supporting Unpopular Causes.”

  His wife, the former
Victoria Holdsworth, whom he married after a long friendship at the end of 1994, was a guiding hand into the outside world that Getty often found so frightening.…

  When I read these words I realized Paul had not “got to his money” as Marcello had put it, but that Big Paul had spread his father’s fortune across the land, just as Little Paul might have done if Marcello had been right when he predicted that Paul would do great things for his generation. So, some suffering had been relieved, some peace and beauty restored just the same.

  * * *

  It was another two years before I could finish the book Paul had asked me to write when we had sat in the Caffe Trieste in North Beach, San Francisco. Voices freed at last from imprisonment in one closet or another for thirty years had a powerful and disturbing effect on me. It was like bursting into a silent cathedral wherein some barbarous deed had been done. What to do with it now? Who to send it to? If the words they had spoken had been a shock to me, heaven knows what they would do to those whose past they represented.

  I thought of Balthazar, Paul and Martine’s son, now thirty. He had for some time seemed destined to follow his father into the never-never land that lies beyond the overdose. But now he clearly had gotten over any drug issues and was busy with his family and his music and acting career. What effect would this story have on him? Wasn’t it Little Paul’s decision to let his son know these details?

  I decided to send the typescript to Martine. She had been there when Paul had asked me to write this story, and had long urged me to put it down. She was in Los Angeles visiting her daughter, Anna, who had herself given birth to a daughter. She said she was about to return to Munich. I asked her to review the material in case there were things I had gotten wrong, mailed the typescript to her, and waited for the explosion. It came sooner than I expected. She e-mailed a day or two later: