by John Pearson
Not that any of them could possibly have guessed the crucial role which Italy would henceforth play in all their lives – particularly as their first reaction to Milan was by and large unfavourable. The pleasures of Milan take time and patience to discover, and the youthful Gettys hated the climate, didn’t like the food and couldn’t understand the language.
Also it was clear that Paul would never make a businessman. But he applied himself, attempted to understand the complications of the oil business, and when his father told him, ‘always wear a dark suit’, duly purchased one.
It was during this honeymoon period between the father and the reunited son that Paul made a gesture which touched the old man more deeply than one might have thought.
Twenty-five years earlier, when twenty-one-year-old Ann Rork (as she still was) gave birth to her premature son aboard ship off Genoa, there’d been a muddle over naming him. When the ship stopped at the next port of call, the infant had been small enough to be taken ashore in a hat-box and was officially registered by the Italian notary in La Spezia. The proud father had wanted the child named after him – Jean Paul Getty Junior – but the notary misheard him, and promptly named the child ‘Eugenio’ instead.
‘Eugenio’, meaning ‘healthy offspring’, was a popular name in positive-thinking, Fascist Italy, but back in America it was less acceptable and inevitably became ‘Eugene’. Paul hated it, never used it, and now that he was back in Italy took the occasion to change his name officially to the form his father had intended. Eugene Paul was now no more. Jean Paul Getty Junior took over.
While the renamed Jean Paul Getty Junior was basking in the unusual rays of fatherly approval, his siblings were having an altogether tougher time of it. Plump George, although officially singled out as his father’s principal heir and successor, and appointed vice-president of the Getty-owned Tidewater Company, was more than ever haunted by his father – and by those letters which began ‘My Dearest George’ and ended up ‘Your Ever-loving Father’. Getty Senior never ceased his eagle-eyed surveillance of every corner of his empire, and his letters criticized in minutest detail the mistakes and failings of his conscientious but cruelly frustrated eldest son.
George was now in his mid thirties, father of three lively daughters, and something of a pillar of polite Los Angeles society. But as someone said of him, he would have ‘made a splendid manager of a small-town, Midwest hardware store’ and found command of a major oil company, with a father sniping from the sidelines, something of a nightmare.
Ronald’s lot was equally uncomfortable. A journey with his father to the Neutral Zone in 1956 had failed to bring them any closer, and although his fluency in French and German fitted him to be manager of the Getty-owned Veedol company in Hamburg, where he was a considerable success, relations with his father were as cool as ever. (They were not helped by George’s habit of penning unbrotherly notes about him to his father and by Ronald sending similar letters about George’s failings in return.)
The truth was that Getty was still harbouring resentment for the trouble he had had from Dr Helmle all those years before; and when Ronald married pretty Karin Seibl in Lübeck, Germany, in 1964, the billionaire would see no reason to break the habit of not acknowledging any of his children’s weddings.
Even the sunny Gordon had his troubles when he took Paul’s place in the manager’s office in the Getty installation in the Neutral Zone. Acting on father’s orders, he refused to pay the customary bribe to the local Emir; but then insisted on supporting a female member of his staff against the Emir’s jurisdiction. She had been discovered having an affair with one of the Emir’s subjects – an offence for which the penalty was death by stoning. By refusing to accept this, Gordon had to suffer house arrest from the Saudis when it was discovered that he had helped the woman flee the country.
It was an episode reflecting well on Gordon as a human being, but it failed to impress his father as a businessman, who felt that the girl had known the rules, and should have paid the price. Besides, he was now on good terms with the Saudi king, and wanted to remain so. So Gordon was rapidly recalled and sent to manage what was now the Spartan Trailer Company in Tulsa. When he tired of this, he quietly returned to Berkeley to finish his degree in English.
Getty was clearly not a sympathetic father, but the most unflattering picture of him in this role comes from that summertime of 1958 when he was making so much sentimental mileage out of his ‘little family’ in Milan.
It was at this time that his twelve-year-old son Timmy was undergoing further surgery in a New York hospital, which was meant to mark the end of a long period of agony. Half blind, and with his forehead disfigured by the removal of a large tumour, he was about to endure cosmetic surgery to remove his scars.
While Timmy waited for his operation, he would telephone his father every day, begging him to return to America to be with him. He would also send heart-rending little messages. ‘I want your love Daddy and I want to see you.’
But Getty’s heart did not rend easily, and as always business came before his children; every day he would patiently explain to Timmy that he loved him too, but that Daddy’s work prevented him returning to America just yet.
The operation took place on 14 August. Getty was in Switzerland at the time, on a long-standing invitation to visit Baron Thyssen Bornemisza, the industrialist and art collector, who was almost as rich as Getty, and whose great collection infinitely surpassed anything he could ever aspire to.
He was flattered to be invited by such a very grand collector, and even had he been prepared to risk his life in a transatlantic flight to New York, it would have been unthinkable to cancel such a visit. He enjoyed great houses, was predictably impressed by the Thyssen pictures, and had actually returned from the Thyssen villa to his hotel in Lugano when a hysterical Teddy finally reached him on the telephone in the early hours of Monday, 18 August. Beside herself with grief, she sobbed out the news to him. Timmy, their own beloved son, had not survived the operation.
Teddy needed consolation, and in his own dry way Getty attempted to console her. Normally grief and human feeling failed to reach him, for he had long been able to retreat into the cool inhuman world of business, but this time something about his child’s death caught him. Faced with death, he was always vulnerable, and totally alone. When the call to Teddy ended, it was still too early to think of working, and knowing he could not get back to sleep he took out his diary.
‘Darling Timmy died two hours ago, my best and bravest son, a truly noble human being,’ he began, but he could not continue.
‘Words are useless,’ he concluded, and shut his diary.
Fortunately he still had Gail and Paul Junior and baby Paul, conveniently installed in the second floor apartment in the middle of Milan, to take his mind off Timmy’s death. And since he was often in the city, running his affairs from a suite in the Hotel Principe e Savoia, he enjoyed seeing them and sometimes took them away from the heat of the city at weekends to smart hotels like the Villa d’Este on Lake Como.
But Paul and Gail and baby Paul apart, there was a further reason for his steadily increasing interest in things Italian. It was not solely the affairs of Golfo Oil which were bringing him so often to his favourite peninsula, but a married woman of a certain age with one of the most magical houses in that magical country.
He had met her in Paris through his social arbiter and friend, the rich Commandant Weiller. She was a stately blonde, tipo Ingrid Bergman, married to a gloomy Frenchman who, being French, was naturally unfaithful to her. And she, being glamorous and very grand and Russian, was plainly ready for a passionate affair.
Thus began Getty’s long and uncomfortable relationship with thirty-six-year-old Mary Teissier. She was elegant, and a little mad, something generally put down to her having had a grandfather who was second cousin to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Her husband, Lucien, had a house in Versailles where they spent the summer, but he also owned the Villa San Michele, on the slopes of F
iesole, close to Florence. Some said the villa was designed by Michelangelo. The gardens were exquisite. The rooms were furnished with museum pieces. From the cloistered dining-room an unrivalled view of Florence lay below. And Teissier had turned his villa into an exclusive small hotel for the very rich. Whenever Mary Teissier was there, Getty’s name began appearing on the guest-list.
She had much that appealed to Paul Getty – lineage, style, human warmth and a considerable knowledge of the world. The fact that she was also jealous, improvident, and congenitally unpunctual, as only a relation of a Tsar could be, merely added to her attractions.
It was because of all of this – and because of her status as a married woman with a demanding husband – that the courtship of Mary Teissier took considerably longer than Getty habitually expended on the pursuit and bedding of a simple mistress. Love was mentioned. So was marriage. As he travelled between Milan and Naples, Getty made frequent visits to the Villa San Michele. But 1959 began with Mary Teissier still more or less attached to her grey-faced husband.
Now that Fortune magazine had robbed him of his precious anonymity, Paul Getty’s days as a vagabond billionaire were numbered. He still loved living in hotels – where he could eat frugally off the hotel menu, save money by washing his own underwear in the wash-hand basin (his excuse being that laundry washing powder damaged his skin), and guiltlessly enjoy the women he had always listed – by name, colouring and city – in his black address book.
But ever since those few uncomfortable days in Paris, his personal safety and security had begun to worry him. So did reporters and would-be fortune-seekers. He clearly needed an established European base from where he could run his empire, enjoy his privacy, and savour his women and his valuable possessions.
Originally he thought of France – but the memory of barricades outside the Hôtel Georges V obsessed him. France might well be on the edge of bloody revolution. And, much as he loved it, Italy was little better. One place alone still beckoned him with memories of gentle meadows, gracious country houses, a deferential populace, and a well-fed aristocracy: the haven of gentility and peace, with the world’s fattest, most secure financial institutions – England.
Getty was rising sixty-six, and his wealth was steadily accruing at an effortless half a million dollars daily, when the most capable member of his entourage, Penelope Kitson, introduced him to George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland.
Although the largest landowner in Scotland, His Grace, who had never been particularly bright, had somehow contrived to be short of money and was finding it awkward to maintain Sutton Place, the Tudor mansion he had purchased forty years before from the self-made press lord Viscount Harmsworth. (Before feeling sorry for the Duke, one should remember that he currently owned a Mayfair mansion next to Claridges, a somewhat smaller stately home in Surrey, plus Dunrobin Castle, Golspie House and the curiously named House of Tongue in Sutherland.)
Getty, with that truffle-hound-like nose for sniffing out a bargain, offered the needy duke some £60,000 for his now unwanted Tudor hideaway – approximately two hours’ income from the Neutral Zone and exactly half what the Duke had paid Harmsworth for the place forty years before. Sutherland accepted.
Much work and money would be needed to make Sutton Place fit for even a self-denying billionaire to live in. And practical Penelope would spend many months selecting curtains, carpets and furniture and taking charge of builders, plumbers, electricians and upholsterers on his behalf. He also bought a seventy-foot table from the castle his old friend, the American press lord William Randolph Hearst, had owned in Wales, two grand pianos, and several pictures. ‘I must not spend any more on pictures,’ he wrote in his diary.
But by the spring of 1960, Paul Getty would proudly take possession of something he had never really had before – a home.
Chapter Eleven
La Dolce Vita
Rome Is Traditionally a dangerous place for romantic foreigners with money, and the city had never seemed more dangerously seductive than at that moment in the autumn of 1958, when the newly named Getty Oil Italiana moved offices from Milan to Rome, and Paul and Gail followed.
They found an apartment in the historic Palazzo Lovatelli in Piazza Campitelli, one of the smallest and most enchanting squares in the oldest quarter of the city. There was a fountain opposite the great baroque church of Santa Maria in Campitelli, and around the corner were the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, built by Julius Caesar. After Milan it must have seemed like entering a different country in another century, and Piazza Campitelli made the perfect setting for a Roman idyll.
Gail was pregnant for the second time, and there was still so little traffic on the streets that she used to hire a horse-drawn open carriage when she went out shopping. In July 1959 she had a daughter and they called her Aileen after Gail’s mother.
Paul had a burgundy-coloured MG sports car, which was much admired by the Italians, and sometimes for weekends they would drive to nearby towns like Tivoli and Palestrina. Rome could have hardly seemed more beautiful, but life was not particularly exciting – most of the young Gettys’ social life consisting of occasional dinners with older couples, usually Americans connected with the oil industry.
Paul enjoyed exploring Rome, started learning Italian and continued to collect his books and records. He was twenty-six and in that dangerous state of waiting for something wonderful to happen.
But Rome in fact was not as sleepy as it seemed in Piazza Campitelli. When the Gettys came the great period of the Italian cinema was already drawing to a close, but legendary directors like Visconti, Rossellini, and de Sica were still working in the Rome studios of Cinecittà. The greatest of them all, Fellini, caught the atmosphere of the period with a film which actually appeared that autumn. It was a vivid portrait of the decadence and glitter of Roman society which centred round the Via Veneto. The hero, a journalist (Marcello Mastroianni), while despising the life that he is leading, finds himself unable to escape as he seeks in vain his true identity.
Fellini called his film La Dolce Vita – The Sweet Life. And before long, Paul and Gail would be tasting something of la dolce vita for themselves.
During that summer, old Paul was busily reliving his love affair with a very different Italy through his continuing romance with golden-haired, demanding Mme Teissier. Early in 1959 she left her husband and the Villa San Michele and became his full responsibility.
Her son Alexis still believes that something more than simply sex and money was involved. ‘It was the sense of power that Getty exuded. She was utterly obsessed with him. From the day they met until the day she died there was absolutely no one else.’
Getty was in love with her – as he was with all his women – but this didn’t mean that he could possibly be faithful to her, and he secretly enjoyed her jealous rages. He certainly provoked them over his other women – even at the dinner table – and she was particularly jealous of his friendship with Penelope, which she could neither tolerate nor change nor really understand.
Poor, insecure unhappy Mary Teissier! Her chronic unpunctuality annoyed him. Her drinking shocked him. And her unpredictable Russian temperament ultimately bored him. But there was something about her – possibly her sense of style and those grand Romanov connections – that always kept a certain hold on him. And during these early days of their affair she acted as his guide to the upper reaches of the Italian nobility, which for reasons of romantic snobbery held such enduring fascination for him.
In Rome she pulled every string she knew to get him into that most improbable bastion of Roman snobbery – the exclusive Circolo della Caccia, the Rome hunting club. Patterned on a traditional English hunt, the Circolo was dominated by aristocrats jealous of the one thing Getty secretly admired and envied – their titles and their ancestry. And they in turn enjoyed the chance to blackball this parvenu American who possessed the one thing most of them admired and envied – vast amounts of money.
He would ha
ve made a curious huntsman, but how he would have loved to have been a member of the most exclusive club in Rome as he entered its discreet headquarters on the Largo Fontana Borghese. His failure to get elected hurt him deeply – and increased his growing discontent with Italy.
As a consolation, when he visited Naples and his new oil refinery at Gaeta, Mary was able to introduce Getty to what passed for the cream of Neapolitan society, including several dukes and princes – no big deal in a country boasting nearly 200 dukes and practically as many princes – but it made him happy. Then she spoiled things by persuading him to buy an island called Gaiola in the Bay of Naples.
Gaiola was tiny, and he bought it sight unseen when Mary mentioned that its previous owners had included the Emperor Tiberius, the Fiat heir, Gianni Agnelli, and the Earl of Warwick. Since she was always short of money, Mary was attracted by the prospect of the $7,000 commission on the deal – but was smart enough to keep this from her lover. (As she said, he would have wanted it.)
The day dawned when Getty came to take possession. Gaiola was beautiful, but had a melancholy atmosphere; and one look at the thirty yards of sea between it and the mainland was enough for Paul. He emphatically refused to step aboard the rowing boat to take him over, and after a hurried meal, he packed his bags and, Mary’s lamentations notwithstanding, never ventured there again.
As Penelope remarked, ‘If you’re that rich, what’s another island?’
Besides, by now he had bought a more suitable establishment near Rome – from someone with an even more resounding title than the Earl of Warwick – Prince Ladislao Odescalchi.