by John Pearson
One of the benefits of wealth is that you can always shelve your problems, keep your lover, buy an unhappy wife a house in another country, and thus solve everything and nothing.
Thus too a sort of compromise was reached. Paul would go to London with Talitha, where they would buy a house together so that she could set up home with Tara, start her life afresh and undergo a cure for heroin addiction. Paul meanwhile would continue living in Rome with Victoria, but also visit Talitha and Tara as often as he could in London. Talitha promised she would visit him in Rome with Tara. In this way life could cheerfully continue. No one would be hurt. Everybody would be happy.
In its day, Queen’s House on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk must have been one of the loveliest houses in London. Built beside the Thames in 1707 and sometimes erroneously attributed to both Wren and Vanbrugh, it had been modernized by Lutyens in the 1930s, and was still one of the most desirable residences in this most desirable quarter of the city when Talitha and Paul first saw it.
(Its new owner, hoping to exorcise its ghosts, has returned it to its original name of Tudor House, but throughout this period it was always known as Queen’s House.)
It possessed a forty-foot-long drawing-room with original eighteenth-century panelling and splendid views across the river, a fine old garden once part of the original Chelsea Manor, magnificent gates by an anonymous Surrey ironmaster, and one of the prettiest dining rooms in London.
But for Paul its immediate attraction was that for several years in the 1860s it had been home to one of his heroes, the poet and Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which Rossetti founded with the painters Millais and Holman Hunt, held a special place in the hearts and minds of the hippie generation of the sixties, who saw them as Victorian precursors of much that they believed in – romantic idealism, a carefree and non-judgemental attitude to sex, and, in Rossetti’s case, a strong element of drug-induced hallucination which they detected in his painting.
Queen’s House was one of the shrines of the Brotherhood, for it was here that Rossetti came to live in 1862, after the mysterious death a few months earlier of his favourite model, whose features haunt many of his paintings, his auburn-haired, drug-addicted wife, Lizzie Siddal, who had consumed an overdose of laudanum in his presence.
Rossetti’s story fascinated Paul. For whatever the reasons behind Lizzie’s death, it had clearly marked the painter down like a sudden stroke of high romantic doom. He was at the height of his powers as an artist, but from the moment he entered Queen’s House, Rossetti’s guilt and grief for his dead wife started to obsess him. Already addicted to chloral, one of the Victorians’ preferred narcotics, he relied on it increasingly to calm his nerves and alleviate his sadness, drinking it in quite alarming quantities, despite attempts by friends like the poet Swinburne and the novelist George Meredith to stop him. Under the influence of drugs he became increasingly reclusive, his health gave way, and he died at the age of fifty-four in 1882.
Paul was excited by the strong associations between Queen’s House and the Pre-Raphaelites and seemed unconcerned by the gloomy nature of the story – and by any parallels it might hold for him. On the contrary, after feeling so much in common with the Pre-Raphaelites and having purchased the house, he was anxious to restore it as much as possible to what it must have been in the years when the painter lived there.
By a strange coincidence Poppet and Willem Pol also knew the house, but in a guise very different from the gloomy haunt of Rossetti during his ‘chloralized years’ of the 1860s.
Lutyens’s modernizations had banished the murk and cobwebs of the past, and the house had been owned in the 1930s by the Queen’s stockbroker, urbane Hugo Pitman, who was a friend of Ian Fleming’s and a patron of Augustus John. Poppet could remember going to the house on several occasions as a child and seeing her father’s pictures hanging on the walls. She even remembered meeting Queen Elizabeth (the present Queen Mother) there. Pitman was always rumoured to have been in love with the Queen, and Poppet’s memories of drinking champagne in Queen’s House with a real queen made the house seem very special.
Because of this she was shocked to see decorators putting dark paint on to eighteenth-century panelling, hanging sombre-coloured curtains, and installing modern central heating. The Queen’s House she remembered was a place of gaiety and light with open fires in the rooms, and she felt unhappy as the house took on an atmosphere of curious ill-omen, which it must have had when Rossetti lived there.
*
Once Talitha and Tara were in residence, none of this seemed to matter any longer. Talitha loved the house, and her return to London soon became a great success, as her London social life began again. She was not as deeply addicted to heroin as Paul; alcohol had been a greater problem. She had little difficulty giving up the drug for periods and by the summer of 1970 she seemed completely cured of heroin and hippiedom and Rome. She also seemed cured of Paul, and had even got on friendly terms with his father. The old man was still refusing to speak to him, but occasionally took Talitha out to dinner.
Inevitably she found herself a new young lover, and she had finally got to know her old hero, Nureyev – and was said to have been the only woman he was ever physically in love with. Soon the trips to Rome with Tara tailed off. By the spring of 1971 she plucked up courage to inform her husband that she wanted a divorce.
It is a measure of his lack of contact with reality that Paul was genuinely shocked. He insisted he was still in love with her, and the prospect of losing her made her doubly precious. So he begged her to return to Rome at once to talk things over. At first she was reluctant, but her lawyers told her it would strengthen her position over a divorce if she could show that she had tried for a reconciliation. So on the morning of 9 July she caught the morning plane to Rome.
That evening she visited Paul in their old apartment, but the meeting ended badly and she returned to spend the night at the Dutch embassy in Rome (conveniently, her aunt Lot Boon was married to the Dutch Ambassador), promising to return to continue the discussion next evening.
On her second night in Rome, Talitha returned to Piazza Aracoeli at around nine thirty. The atmosphere was calmer than the night before, for Paul had made it clear that he definitely wanted her back and was even prepared to change his way of life if that was necessary. He would give up both his drugs and his mistress if she promised to return to him.
If anyone knows for sure what happened then, it’s Paul.
Somehow he persuaded Talitha to stay, and finally she fell asleep in the terrace room on the roof of the apartment, with its views of the Roman Capitol where she had married Paul just five years earlier.
Some time after ten o’clock next morning Paul awoke. Talitha did not.
Chapter Fourteen
Casualties
Jean Paul Getty himself had been in Rome shortly before Talitha’s visit, and invited Gail and the children for a few days’ holiday at La Posta Vecchia. She and her family still enjoyed the old man’s favour, and she particularly recalls a luncheon at the house in honour of rival oil-man Dr Armand Hammer, head of Occidental Oil, who was also visiting the city.
Even now old Paul took an old man’s pleasure in provoking jealousy among his women. Placing Gail beside him, he had whispered, ‘Just watch this!’ – knowing that the presence at table of his latest mistress, the voluptuous Mrs Rosabella Burch, would inevitably upset the insecure Mary Teissier. But in fact Rosabella provided a more engrossing spectacle by flirting outrageously throughout the meal with the aged but patently entranced Dr Hammer.
During this short stay in Rome Getty had still refused to contact Paul, and returned to England at the end of June without seeing him. However, he insisted that Gail and the children should stay on for a few days longer if they wished. They did, and because of this had just got back to Orgia when Gail received a call from her distraught ex-husband late in the afternoon of 11 July. He told her what had happened and how Talitha had been t
aken to Rome’s Villa del Rosario Clinic in deepest coma. There they had tried to resuscitate her – unsuccessfully – and shortly after midday she had died without regaining consciousness.
He sounded so desperate that Gail decided to drive to Rome at once to be with him. She found him overwhelmed with grief and terrible remorse. He couldn’t face returning to Piazza Aracoeli, so she suggested that he went to La Posta Vecchia instead. He agreed and, as he seemed inconsolable, she stayed with him.
Everyone mourned Talitha, and not least Gail and the children. As she says, ‘Talitha played no part in the break-up of our marriage, and we’d grown extremely fond of her.’ The funeral was held in Amsterdam, where Talitha was buried in a simple grave beside her mother. Those present included Paul, the Pols, a few close members of the family, and Talitha’s old admirer Lord Lambton, who had flown in from London with three of her one-time girlfriends.
The Pols were numbed with grief, Willem in particular. Shortly afterwards he had a heart attack, from which he never fully recovered. But it was Paul who appeared most riven at the funeral. With Talitha gone, he realized he loved her more than ever. Stricken with remorse and guilt, he could not forgive himself for what had happened and for having been incapable of saving her.
But what exactly had occurred that night in Piazza Aracoeli? Since Paul himself refused to say, the sequence of events was never clarified and the facts behind Talitha’s death remain a mystery.
According to the death certificate signed by doctors at the clinic, death was due to cardiac arrest and high levels of alcohol and barbiturates were discovered in the blood. As Talitha was known to be a heavy drinker who sometimes took barbiturates to offset the effect of alcohol, there is no reason to doubt the facts recorded on the certificate. Barbiturates and alcohol taken together in large quantities can be a lethal combination which could certainly have accounted for her death.
The point was that, as a heroin addict, Paul was in a vulnerable position and could not risk saying anything himself about the circumstances of Talitha’s death. Possession of narcotics was an indictable offence in Italy, often carrying a penalty of imprisonment, and things would almost certainly have turned extremely nasty for him if the police had initiated an official inquiry and his addiction had been revealed.
To avoid this and stay safely out of Rome until the situation cleared, he opted for a period in Bangkok – which he had loved when he visited it with Talitha in happier times. In Thailand drugs were available if he needed them, and he would have peace and quiet to recover from her death and decide about the future. To keep him company Gail persuaded one of his oldest Roman friends, the Runyonesque ex-restaurateur Jerry Cierchio (famous proprietor of Jerry’s Club on the Via Veneto) to go with him. If anyone could stop Paul brooding, it was Jerry, and during their two-month absence Paul did his best to come to terms with what had happened.
But once back in Italy it was clear that he would never forgive himself. Paul was obsessed with it. Sometimes his grief became unbearable, making him rely on drugs more heavily than ever – which fuelled his anxieties and sense of guilt, until they formed a vicious circle.
The children were affected too, and Gail had to cope with them on her own – as well as with two-and-a-half-year-old Tara. For when the child’s future was discussed, she had said at once, ‘Tara’s place is with his family here in Rome.’
Simultaneously she had had to deal with Paul, who relied upon her more than ever for advice, and whose state of mind was not improved by growing rumours that the true cause of Talitha’s death had been not barbiturates but an overdose of heroin taken in his presence.
There was no evidence to support this, and it was, ipso facto, unlikely that having finally got off heroin herself, and then made Paul’s addiction such an issue over their separation, Talitha would have suddenly succumbed to the drug on her second night in Rome. It was equally unlikely that, had she really died from heroin, the doctors at the clinic would have missed the evidence. It has been asserted that an autopsy conducted eight months after Talitha’s death revealed traces of heroin in the body. If this is true it still does not prove that heroin was the cause of death. The combination of alcohol and barbiturates would still have been a more likely cause. Also in a former heroin addict like Talitha, traces of the drug could have been deposited a considerable period before she died.
For a while nothing happened, but as Paul was a fairly well-known addict, rumours continued. He spent Christmas with Gail and the children. Then in the new year came reports that, following widespread speculation, an examining magistrate would finally conduct a full inquiry into the nature of Talitha’s death. He would, of course, wish to interview her husband, Paul Getty Junior.
The inquiry was fixed for the beginning of March. In the second week of February, Paul flew to London, never to return to Italy.
It would have taken a braver man than Paul to have stayed in Rome and faced the Italian drugs squad to clear his name before an official Italian inquiry. In the first place, he would have had to face simultaneous trial by the Italian media, with world press and television eager for the story. Every item from his private life would have been sensationalized – along with details of his most intimate relationships – with Talitha, with Victoria, and with Gail and the children. Innocent friends would inevitably have been involved.
But the real danger was that any inquiry would inevitably expose details of his own addiction. Irrespective of what had happened to Talitha, this would soon lead on to a court case with the likelihood of prison at the end of it.
The judge issued a request for Paul ‘to come here voluntarily and give what help he can to the inquiry’. Hardly surprisingly he got no answer, and although for a time Paul was dreading extradition back to Italy, his fears proved groundless. It would have been unusual for the Italians to have asked for extradition of a witness in a case involving foreigners whose own government was not demanding action.
So the inquiry into Talitha’s death was inconclusive and the file stayed open, but Paul could never return to Italy. With his children still in Rome, this meant that their already slender contacts with their father all but ended.
More serious perhaps, by evading the inquiry Paul deprived himself of any chance of explanation – or of public expiation – for his wife’s demise. The most unlikely accusations – that she had taken a massive overdose of heroin, that Paul had actually provided it, even that he had helped inject her, were never answered, and whatever actually took place on that July night in the apartment in Piazza Aracoeli would have to rest between his conscience and himself.
With all this hanging over him, Paul returned to the house he owned beside the river where a century earlier his hero, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had come to brood over the death of beautiful Lizzie Siddal. This was the house where Talitha had also lived until recently, and which Paul had so carefully restored to the state it had been in when Rossetti lived there. Now it seemed he had succeeded all too well, and, thanks to an eerie trick of fate, he found himself reliving the whole grim saga of Rossetti’s downfall.
This was probably an important factor in Paul’s subsequent behaviour. Heroin addicts are often imitative, finding security and satisfaction in mirroring the life-style of another addict. In Paul’s case he might almost have been Rossetti, and there was a disturbing symmetry in the way he seemed to duplicate his actions. This very house had seen Rossetti become increasingly reclusive, haunted by remorse, and relying on ever greater quantities of alcohol and chloral, until his health was virtually destroyed. Paul’s behaviour was identical, except that he had more effective twentieth-century soporifics.
But the cause of his misery was so similar to Rossetti’s that the words employed by Hall Caine, Rossetti’s first biographer, to describe his plight could have applied to him: ‘Above all it was my impression that Rossetti had never ceased to reproach himself for his wife’s death as an event that had been due in some degree to failure of duty on his part or perhaps to something g
raver.’
For somebody like Paul, England, unlike both Italy and the United States, possessed one great advantage – its official policy towards narcotics. In England, addiction was regarded as a medical rather than a social problem, and addicts who registered with a doctor could legally receive their drugs on medical prescription. In theory the dose should steadily diminish, as the aim of the ‘treatment’ was principally therapeutic.
Thus, for Paul, London was something of a haven and he discovered a doctor who was happy to call on him at Queen’s House in his Bentley.
With Paul in residence, the house became as idiosyncratic as it had been in Rossetti’s day. Rossetti had kept a menagerie (including his famous wombat) in the garden but Paul had a number of stuffed animals in the house itself. In his bedroom was a more puzzling memento – a wooden model of a flying-boat. This was in fact a model of the legendary Spruce Goose, the huge wooden flying-boat obsessively constructed by another son of an oil tycoon who made himself a notorious recluse, Howard Hughes. Paul did the same now, as he shut himself away and made the house a shrine to Talitha’s memory and a ghetto for his own oblivion.
Everything to do with Talitha was lovingly preserved, including her clothes and letters, her photographs and the portrait painted by her father.
On the face of it, his was a deeply tragic situation – bereaved, addicted, cut off from those he loved and from his beloved Italy. But one can also see the dreadful consolation that it offered someone of Paul’s increasingly reclusive temperament – and why it kept its hold on him so long. Here, in the very house where a romantic poet had destroyed himself with drugs while mourning his beautiful dead wife, he could do the same, joining a hazardous tradition of narcotic self-destruction. He and the ghost of Dante Gabriel Rossetti could come together in their grief around the memory of the beautiful departed.