by John Pearson
Chapter Twelve
New Beginnings
Meanwhile, In Rome, life was looking up for Paul Getty’s favourite family, who had now moved on from Piazza Campitelli to a family house on the Via Appia. By 1962 they were six in number – two more children, Mark and Ariadne, having been born in 1960 and 1962 respectively.
With the children born so close together, they formed a tight-knit family; the eldest, red-haired Paul, particularly adored his father. He remained his grandfather’s favourite too, and was a bright, unusually affectionate small boy.
But although the family seemed so united, Paul and Gail were very much innocents abroad and the unreality of Rome started to affect them. It is hard to describe the atmosphere of the Italian capital in the early sixties. It was very much a pagan city. Today’s traffic and pollution hadn’t started, and something about the city’s beauty and antiquity gave the sense that life in Rome was richer, sexier, and more instantly enjoyable than in any other city in the world. Like most things in the Eternal City this was largely illusory, but the fact remains that Rome at this period seemed extraordinarily exciting – particularly for young, good-looking foreigners with money.
Apart from Rome itself there was another reason for the feeling in the air. Attracted by the reputation of the Italian movie industry, and the weakness of the Italian lira, in the spring of 1962 20th Century Fox had just begun production of one of the most expensive, crisis-riddled film epics of all time – Cleopatra. Further productions followed, including Clint Eastwood’s Italian-made ‘Spaghetti Westerns’, all of which brought actors, writers, US dollars, and a touch of glamour to the night life of the city. Paul and Gail found their social life improving.
An American friend remembers them from the summer of 1962. ‘There were parties almost every night. It seemed that none of us had any worries, and Paul and Gail appeared the most carefree of all. Paul was elegant and slim and very bright, and Gail seemed particularly pretty with her short hair and great vitality. They made the perfect couple, and I remember thinking how enviable they were – and how lovely it would be to be so rich and married with four nice children. Looking back they both seemed just a shade too perfect.’
Which, of course, they were – but they did enjoy themselves. They could afford sufficient help to look after the children, and made a host of friends, including the writer William Styron and the film director John Huston. Paul and Mario Lanza spent a lot of time together working out a way to bring American baseball to Italy, while Gail loved dancing at clubs like Lollobrigida’s on the Appia Antica, or the famous Ottanta Quattro in the Via Margutta.
Gradually they found that they were leading almost separate lives, and differences in their characters began to show. Gail was gregarious, loved parties, and was high on energy. Paul was different. Part of him wished to be a glamorous playboy, but as Gail says, ‘he didn’t realize how glamorous he was, and anyhow was much too shy to do anything very much about it.’ His other side was extremely serious and hankered after books and learning.
Life in Rome had done nothing to resolve the two sides of his personality. He had begun to hate his work with Getty Oil Italiana, he was responsible for a large young family in a foreign city, and he had the feeling that something in his life was seriously adrift. He told Gail that what he really wanted was to be an oceanographer.
As this seemed impossible, he became discontented. He was drinking and became increasingly reclusive. Often, when he and Gail were going out, he would change his mind at the last minute and decide to stay at home reading. Whenever possible he avoided driving. He had always been an introvert at heart, and was showing signs of opting out from the life around him.
This left Gail to enjoy the dancing and the parties on her own. As she admits, ‘I really wasn’t the maltreated wife, Saint Gail, who stayed at home while Paul was out swinging around. To be honest it was rather the reverse.’
‘One of the qualities Fellini’s La Dolce Vita failed to encompass was monogamy, and it was probably impossible for the marriage to have lasted in the midst of so much worldly glamour. So-called open marriages rarely do – particularly if there are differences of personality between the partners. Inevitably Gail fell in love with someone else. And just as inevitably – being the character she was – she decided that she had to go.
Lang Jeffries was almost entirely Paul’s antithesis – and Paul, who knew and liked him, was surprised as well as rather shocked when Gail confessed she was in love with him and wished to live with him.
A rugged, all-American former actor from Los Angeles, Jeffries had been married to the film star Rhonda Fleming. He was a great sportsman – golfer, yachtsman, tennis player – and he had come to Rome to make low-budget Roman television epics which, as Gail says, ‘he didn’t take too seriously’.
Paul and Aileen inevitably resented him, but Mark and Ariadne came to like him, for, if nothing else, Lang was dependable.
Paul was genuinely upset that Gail wished to leave him, but they had a pact that they would never lie to one another. Paul had had love affairs himself, so couldn’t argue when she said she was in love. They were still fond of one another, and made the sort of pact affectionate couples often do when their marriage dies upon them.
Gail would have the children and set up home with Lang in a new apartment. Paul would also move. (Gail in fact would find a flat for him.) And as she was breaking up the marriage, she felt she had no financial claim on him, so there was no question of alimony. Nor at this point was there any talk of remarriage. Paul begged her not to think of getting a divorce, and she agreed. They would all remain in Rome, stay friends, and Paul of course would see the children as and when he wanted.
It seemed the best solution – if a very Roman one. ‘We were absurdly civilized,’ says Gail. ‘It might have been better if we’d not been.’
Left to himself, it was now that Paul Junior decided to enjoy himself, and despite his shyness and his love of privacy, he seems to have had a great success with women. Von Bülow loyally describes him now as ‘incredibly handsome and sexy’, and probably overstates the number of his Roman conquests when he says that ‘he slept with more beautiful women than his father’. (Perhaps the claim depends on how one interprets ‘beautiful’.)
On the other hand, there may be something in the implication that Paul was secretly competing with the old man’s exploits as a womanizer. It was very much a game for him, and friends who knew him now insist that his love affairs were always tactful and discreet – ‘not blatant and exhibitionist like so many visiting Americans with their women’.
Nevertheless the Getty name would prove a great advantage when it came to stars like Brigitte Bardot, who was in Rome making Le Repos du Guerrier (English title, Love on a Pillow) in 1962.
At this period in Rome, Paul was drifting. He found no pleasure in his work for Getty Oil Italiana, and had little of his father’s self-control deriving from the need to make a lot of money. Paul knew quite well that, work or not, he would finally inherit his due portion of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, and was currently marching to an old Italian tune. It was entitled Dolce far niente – sweetly doing nothing.
In Rome there had always been an accepted role for rich young men like him to play. Nothing vicious or particularly depraved. The young signore desires to enjoy himself before shouldering life’s burdens, which come soon enough. He wishes to relax, drive slowly round the city, meet interesting people and be gracious in return, collect books, eat well, drive down to Positano or up to Santa Margherita, lie in the sun with someone pretty, drink, get laid, and then next day begin again. Dolce far niente.
Happiness. Like everyone in Rome Paul simply wanted to be happy. So did Gail, but in Paul’s case the search for happiness would lead him to the love which would all but ruin his life.
Talitha – pronounced Tah-lee-tah – Pol was as pretty as she sounded, with doll-like face, an eager, sexy nature, and a sense of happiness that spread to those around her. She was that perilous r
arity, an enchantress, and only in retrospect does one see the danger enchantresses can bring to others – and ultimately to themselves. For those who fall beneath their spell expect too much, indulge them to excess, then blame them when the spell is broken.
Although she lived in London, Talitha was Dutch. Her father, Willem Pol, a handsome painter, had married pretty Adine Mees, from a well-to-do Amsterdam family, in 1936. Three years later, they found themselves in Java on a painting expedition as war began in Europe, and the German invasion of their homeland kept them in Indonesia.
In September 1940 the Pols were still in Java when Talitha was born, and rather than bring her back to Europe they moved on to Bali – where they were captured and interned when the Japanese arrived in 1943. In captivity their conditions were appalling. Willem was parted from his wife and baby daughter, and although they were reunited after the Japanese surrender, Adine never fully recovered from her sufferings. She died in 1948.
When Willem remarried, three years later, it was to the child of a celebrated British painter of an older generation – Poppet, daughter of Augustus John. They bought a simple London terrace house in Chilworth Street in Paddington, but spent their holidays in a cottage in what was then the sleepy village of Ramatuelle, near St Tropez in the South of France.
Having no children of her own, Poppet acted as a mother to Talitha, who particularly needed affection after the horrors of the prison camp. Talitha grew to love the South of France, and she and Poppet and her father were extremely close.
Like many spoiled pretty girls, Talitha longed to be a film star and was actually in Rome in 1963 as an extra in a five-second crowd scene in the all-providing Cleopatra. On this brief visit she did not meet Paul Getty Junior, and afterwards, apart from carnal propositions from various producers, her career in films seemed over. Not that this worried her unduly. With her looks and her family connections she could enjoy a lively social life in London, and then get married.
For an enchantress like Talitha this shouldn’t have been difficult. As a friend of hers remembers, ‘She had a penchant for attracting clever older men, but actually preferred the company of younger smarter ones.’ Some of them were very smart indeed. Lord Lambton knew her, Lord Kennet thought her ‘an absolute knockout’, and Lord Christopher Thynne fell in love with her. But the last also remembers ‘how difficult Talitha was to keep as a girlfriend because she was a most tremendous flirt, or rather an overflirt, and I never knew where I was with her’. Nor, it seems, did any of her lovers.
For she was not as carefree as she seemed, and still bore the mental scars from her childhood in the prison camp. Lord Christopher tells of how he once jokingly made the sign of the evil eye at her by pointing two outstretched fingers at her face, and how she cowered away. He asked her why, and she told him that his gesture reminded her of how the camp guards used to push their fingers into the children’s eyes to hurt them.
Much of her flirting served as a cover for her insecurity. What she needed was someone young and rich and handsome to look after her – someone exactly like the now unattached Paul Junior. All that was needed was the catalyst to make this happen.
In Gothic tales there is often a doom carrier who emerges from the shadows, plays his fateful part, and then departs on his separate unhappy destiny. With Talitha and Paul, this role was played by Claus von Bülow. After Jean Paul Getty’s death in 1976, von Bülow would leave England for America and marry the heiress, Sunny von Anersberg, who had inherited a seven hundred million dollar fortune from her father, the American utilities multi-millionaire, George Crawford. And there is an eerie symmetry in the way von Bülow, who would one day find himself accused of trying to murder his glamorous rich wife, was already pointing Paul and Talitha to an equally harrowing disaster.
Von Bülow was living in a grand apartment in Belgravia, and inevitably knew Talitha. Shortly after New Year, 1965, he invited her to dinner. Like many at the time, Talitha was fascinated by Rudolf Nureyev, who had just defected and was starting his career in London with the Royal Ballet. She had already met him at Lee Radziwill’s house in Henley-on-Thames, and von Bülow told her he was coming and promised to place her next to him at dinner.
But the temperamental Cossack never came, and von Bülow sat Talitha next to Paul instead. Paul was in England visiting his father, and had not expected to encounter anyone so pretty and amusing in London.
*
Next morning, at the house at Chilworth Street, Talitha complained of a cold and told her father she would lie in late. Willem, having heard her returning in the small hours, guessed it was probably a hangover, and left her to sleep it off.
But later that morning, Poppet Pol returned from a shopping expedition to discover a young man on the doorstep with a bulky cardboard box of flowers. He asked where Talitha Pol lived, and when she asked him who he was he introduced himself.
He was invited in, and having charmed the parents, Paul Getty Junior invited Talitha to Sutton Place to meet his father.
Surprisingly she failed to impress him, for the ancient amorist possessed a prudish side which disapproved of modern girls in mini-skirts. But if Talitha and old Paul failed to hit it off, this did not stop her sensing the attractions of his son. When Lord Christopher saw her a few days later he knew at once his hopes were over. Soon afterwards, Talitha and Paul Junior flew to Rome together.
This was the last the Pols would see of them till early summer, when they came to stay at Ramatuelle. Willem found Paul ‘more likeable’ than ever – easy to talk to, erudite, and still a little shy.
At this point there was still no talk of marriage. But everywhere he went with Talitha people remarked on what a handsome, happy pair they made together.
Armngiarsi – a particularly Italian word for a particular Roman speciality – literally, ‘to arrange oneself.
In the spring of 1966, life was arranging itself around the Roman Gettys with the deceptive ease which is another speciality of the city. The sun was shining, Gail had settled down with Lang in a large flat in a modern quarter of the city, and Paul and Talitha were living happily together in a penthouse apartment of some luxury next to the Carlo Pontis in Piazza Aracoeli.
At the very centre of ancient Rome, the venerable church of the Aracoeli, the altar of heaven, derived its name from the altar which the Emperor Augustus supposedly erected in a temple on the site after seeing a vision of a virgin and a child.
Thus, as well as being in a highly fashionable location, Paul and Talitha were living in one of the most historic parts of ancient Rome. They were also near the city’s famous ‘Wedding Cake’ – the great white marble monument to the first King of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel; and close at hand was the balcony from which the elder Getty’s one-time hero, Mussolini, had harangued the Roman multitude in Piazza Venezia.
But that was in the past. For the present, now that everyone seemed happy with the current dispensation, it was time to sort the situation out as fairly and as fast as possible.
Despite their earlier agreement, Paul and Gail had finally divorced, but since it was so amicable and Gail got nothing, they decided to invite their mutual friend Bill Newsom to help arrange the details of the children’s settlement. A successful lawyer in San Francisco, he had been at St Ignatius with Paul and Gordon. Everybody liked and trusted Bill and he knew the law. Invite him over.
So William Newsom arrived in Rome. He had always been extremely fond of Paul – but he was also wary of him. He responded to his charm, his cleverness, his wit, all of which were reminiscent of his mother Ann’s – but he also remembered something of his wild side from the past.
But here in Rome Paul was happily in love – and Paul in happy mood was the most irresistible of mortals. (When the black mood descended, things were different.) So Bill Newsom found it relatively easy to arrange the details of a settlement for the children.
As Gail was not requesting alimony for herself, Paul readily agreed to pay approximately a third of his after-tax income a
s child support. In 1965 this meant a third of $54,000 plus medical and educational expenses. It was also agreed that above $54,000 there should be a sliding scale so that if Paul’s income rose above a million dollars, 5 per cent a year of it should be paid annually into trusts of which Paul, Gail, and Bill Newsom would be trustees.
An additional clause was inserted in the settlement. In order to protect the children from fortune hunters while they were still young, it was decreed that any of the children would be disinherited from the benefits of the trust if they married before the age of twenty-two.
It all seemed generous and straightforward – not that this would stop the agreement causing trouble in the future. But like everyone that summer, Paul simply wanted everybody to be happy.
Bill Newsom felt the same, and as he boarded his plane at Fiumicino for San Francisco, he was hopeful for the future of his friends.
It seemed that everything was working out, and the perfect weather, continuing through August and September, made this a celebratory Italian summer for the Gettys. Wishing to have somewhere far from Rome where they could take the children, Gail and Lang discovered a Tuscan house called La Fuserna in the tiny village of Orgia, to the south of Siena. The house was absurdly cheap but needed renovating, while the village was still miraculously unspoilt, the countryside spectacular, and everyone who stayed there loved it. For the children this would become their favourite home – the place where they would spend their holidays, play with the children in the village, and hunt for mushrooms in the nearby woods in autumn.
Meanwhile in Rome even old Paul appeared in his nearest to a sunny mood when he arrived at the Hotel Flora with Mary Teissier.