Uncommon Youth

by Charles Fox

  “Jutta said that she liked him too but in another way, that they could be friends, that he was fucking up their whole relationship. We just tried to speak with them. But the old man said, ‘You are a whore, we saw it that he gave you the money so we can fuck you.’ Then we said we’d take off our clothes if they didn’t give us the injections. So they untied us and let us in the bathroom. We found these gowns that we put on. We talked. Jutta said we must just stay. We had to calm them down because they were completely crazy. I started to cry, my nerves were so finished. But you know it was our fault, too. I don’t blame them completely because maybe it was provoking for them somehow.

  “Ciambellone phoned Paul, but they spoke in Italian and I didn’t understand. They knew that I was with Paul and they were so jealous and thought, How can he get one of them? We are not good enough. Something like that. Then we came out with the gowns on and this older man, the fat man, took me on the bed and Ciambellone pulled Jutta down on the carpet.

  “Ciambellone said, ‘You are stupid. We could make you the best life. You can have so much money. We can buy you a house and we will only come there once a week.’ Then they tied us up again and the old man threw me on the floor and jumped on me and strangled me so hard that I thought, Now it’s really over. All the time I was watching my handbag to see if they’d take the money back. I thought, I’m going through hell; at least I want the money to make my film.

  “They put us back on the bed and said, ‘You must be very hungry.’ One of them went out and came back with a big meal, scampi or something, and Champagne. We couldn’t eat. Then Ciambellone went out and everything was a little bit quieter and I was lying on the bed completely exhausted. All this time the old man was touching me. So I got the bodyguard, he liked me, to defend me from the old man. For this I had to lie on the bed with him and he held my hand and just talked. He told me how fantastic we could live together, that nothing could happen to us anymore and they would pay for everything.

  “Then Ciambellone came back with two suitcases. He offered them. He took out incredible dresses; about ten long dresses from some fancy store. They wanted us to try them on, but we said we didn’t want these things, we wanted to go. It went on a whole night and the next day. I didn’t know how long, with the coke, I lost all relation to time. We didn’t sleep, they didn’t sleep. Always speeded, always speeded. Sometimes I thought they would kill us in a fit. They made little games with knives. Knives on the arm and along the breasts and stomach. They said, ‘Io sono cosí’—‘I’m like that.’ ‘What can I do? We were brought up to be gangsters.’

  “I said, ‘We are not like that. We don’t do it.’ I don’t know if they would be able to fuck, they were so fucked-up on the cocaine. Ciambellone had a bodyguard and he had pistols. Soon there was shooting outside. Then Ciambellone said to us, ‘Now you must stay here because when we let you out, then they will catch you, they are waiting there with guns.’ I was more scared of the police because they made so much noise outside that I thought the police would find us and the cocaine and I just thought, We are going to jail for years.

  “Then Ciambellone got a little paranoid. He said we must change places. Jutta and I went into the bathroom and we took off the gowns and put on our clothes. We went outside with Ciambellone and the bodyguard. They made this crazy drive around the Trastevere, round and round in circles to confuse us. We passed the restaurant Botticelli. There were some people in the street. They stopped and they went to talk to them. We got out of the car and they couldn’t just run after us because there were a lot of people around. We walked until they couldn’t see us and then we took our high-heeled shoes off and we ran.

  “We came to Marcello’s, beat on the door, and Marcello let us in. He was sleeping. He went back to bed. He didn’t realize what had happened to us. Paul did. He was completely white and shaking. We took our suitcase and flung everything in it and I screamed at Paul.”

  She stopped talking and eyed me, assessing the impact of her story.

  She had sung for her supper. It was all different now. The boy had found out about the reality of cocaine, the real thing. We were still watching each other as though we now shared an intimacy. From the kitchen doorway, Jutta was watching the pair of us. She had an inscrutable look. Martine announced, “We have to go now.” Thinking about what she said, I gathered up my things, packed the tape recorder back into my briefcase. Naïveté, that’s what we all had had in common. Paul had sold these two women. They had been as titillated by the company of gangsters as he had been: These women were filmmakers. Young filmmakers, caught up in the excitement of the chase, tend to forget that they, too, are part of the film.

  Paul had been fifteen when he first encountered the malavita. At fifteen we may know nothing of cruelty and so be unutterably cruel. Martine had put on a jacket. We went back downstairs and out into the street. It was very good to feel the fresh air, warm as it was, and see the sky open above us.

  How much of her hand was she showing me for the money? Had the twins filled the boy’s head with their fantasies, compounding his Getty hubris until he had drowned in it? The boy had by chance fallen in with gangsters and, with that supreme confidence of one accustomed to the privileges and protections of wealth, he had toyed with them, using these two women, these ardent and idealistic young Communists who had fallen in the shadow of the ruthless Baader-Meinhof terrorists … or had they used him? They were considerably older than he—eight years, half again his age. He had been fifteen when he left his home and took to the streets. What had driven him out? What were he and his family doing in Rome in the first place? Followed Paul’s grandfather was my guess. There was no shortage of information about Old Paul. He had published books on how he’d accumulated his colossal fortune. The death of Talitha and the goings-on in Big Paul’s pleasure palace in Morocco were documented too, but not how and why the family had come to Rome.

  The long and short of it was that these gangsters had clearly risen up and overwhelmed Paul. That’s how it seemed to me. The details weren’t all clear, but the thrust of the story was clear to me, and I had a story for the magazine, my immediate concern.

  The twins and I said good-bye and a taxi took me back to the hotel. The clerk watched me enter with a look of almost fatherly pride. With his help, we read the daily bulletins on the progress of the kidnapping:

  • Gail allegedly says “I give up.” Paul’s mother has delivered an ultimatum: “Accept our offer or keep the boy. If the kidnappers do not accept this offer, we will be forced to leave Paul to his fate.” This ultimatum comes after a long silence from the kidnappers and from her inability to raise this impossibly huge ransom: 10 billion lire [$18 million]. The grandfather has not only refused to pay but to even speak to his daughter-in-law.

  • When Gail called the old man to persuade him to change his mind, she reportedly was told: “Mr. Getty is not at the castle.”

  • Her lawyer, Avvocato Iacovoni, declared, “All attempts at negotiations have failed. Six days from our counter-offer, we have not received any kind of signal, positive or negative. Maybe the kidnappers think that they can break us down with silence, but it is useless. We cannot find these billions.”

  • As to the people who continue to sell photographs of her son, clothed or naked, dressed in drag, models who take advantage of their casual acquaintance with the boy, and with those who promised to reveal secret details, Gail warned that “they won’t get away with impugning the good name of my son for their own publicity.”

  • In every other kidnapping, the kidnappers allow the kidnapped to give proof of the fact that they are well. Why is Paul silent? Why won’t his guards allow him to telephone his mother?

  I telephoned Martine. She said she would try to get me a meeting with Gail. Later that afternoon she called. “Gail will see you tomorrow at eleven.”

  The following morning, Gail Harris Getty called me herself. “Mr. Fox, I think it is better if we do not meet just now.” She had a smooth, reasonable tone.
“My life is too complicated and I shouldn’t talk about what’s going on. Why don’t you talk to my lawyer? I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

  The offices of Giovanni Iacovoni were in Parioli, a wealthy suburb across the Tiber, around the back of a squat office building, on the second floor. The day was getting hot. He was at his desk on the telephone. He was middle-aged, handsome, his curly hair razor-cut and dark as his silk suit. He continued talking, motioning me to sit. When he hung up and we had introduced ourselves, he said, “This morning they found a burned corpse on the beach at Naples. They think it may be the boy’s.”

  “What makes you think it’s his?”

  “We cannot say.”

  “Have you talked to the kidnappers?”

  “Every day, always the same man. Calabrese. He says to ‘call me Fifty.’ He never talks long enough that the police can find him. He has a big voice. He calls from Calabria and Naples. Always public phones.”

  It was strange to be beside the man who talked daily to the kidnappers and still knew so little. A fog hung over everything. The avvocato did talk to local reporters, Italians—more specifically, Romans—but he didn’t tell them anything of substance. I figured one reason could be that they would keep his name in the newspapers. Perhaps he had political aspirations. I was as close as I was going get to the source of this affair without actually finding the boy in his cave, or wherever he was. It felt like a stalemate.

  I took the opportunity to admire the Roman antiquities. At the end of a long day, purely by coincidence, I ran into the twins in a fashionable Roman watering hole. They looked to be as lost as I was.

  It was a week before I learned that the burned body on the beach in Naples was not that of the boy, but of a shorter man. Beyond that, there was no movement in the story. There were newspaper articles every day, but they merely stirred the pot. As much as I had become attached to this story, the magazine could not afford to keep me in Rome. The editors assigned me stories elsewhere, promising to send me back the moment there was a break.

  It was two months before there was one. I was in London on November 14 when the Italian papers reported that the kidnappers now showed a much greater assurance. They insisted on 2 billion lire [$3.6 million], threatening in a phone call to send a photograph of the boy without his ear. The Sicilian Calabrese voice on the telephone spoke with diabolical calm asking Gail Getty, “How are you?” This ostentatious lack of concern on the part of the man who telephoned her was explainable only because he was secure in his own business.

  On November 15, newspapers around the world carried the story EAR IN POST IS GETTY’S:

  An ear sent by post to a Rome newspaper almost certainly belonged to the missing grandson of oil millionaire Paul Getty, the boy’s mother has told police.

  A note with the ear and a lock of hair said they had been sent to impress on the family that 17-year-old Paul Getty III really had been kidnapped and that his captors were in earnest with their ransom demand.

  Police are still saying the kidnapping may be a hoax.

  Gail Getty is 90% certain that the ear and hair were her son’s. Experts are examining the ear to see whether the blood group is the same as Paul’s and whether it was cut off while he was alive or dead. His parents have so far offered 700,000 to buy his freedom. But the kidnappers are demanding ten times as much.

  I caught a plane to Rome that evening, and the next morning, through Avvocato Iacovoni, found the twins. They were now staying in the center of the city in an ancient bakery converted to a most contemporary apartment.

  The “hip girls” were uncertain, subdued, almost apologetic, ghostlike in comparison to how they had been.

  I asked, “Now will they let him go?” It was the question everyone was asking.

  Martine looked vague, then looked at her sister and said softly, “After so much time he must know their faces. They cannot let him go.”

  We were drawn together by a mutual concern for this boy, whatever they knew of what he had done or had not. As I was leaving the apartment, Martine, as if to provide the answer to the question no one dared ask, gave me a cassette tape of Dylan singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

  Daily thereafter I went to see Avvocato Iacovoni. He remained tight-lipped, admitting only that negotiations were ongoing for the boy’s release.

  Over the next two weeks the press kept up a steady drumroll, repeatedly asking the same question:

  WHY THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN WON’T PAY A PENNY RANSOM

  A ransom of one million pounds [$2.4 million] has been offered by his father but the mystery remains: is 17-year-old John Paul Getty, grandson of oil billionaire, a kidnap victim?

  Police skepticism, four months after the kidnapping, is still strong, despite repeated ransom requests and the grisly delivery this week of an ear and a lock of hair said to belong to the boy.

  Meanwhile his grandfather, oil billionaire Paul Getty, 80, continues refuse to part with a penny.…

  “GIVE ME MY SON” PLEA BY MOTHER

  Yesterday, Gail Getty broadcast a dramatic “return him alive” appeal to the kidnappers.

  She sobbed repeatedly during the broadcast, which came shortly after a Rome newspaper had published five pictures said to be of the missing boy.

  One picture shows a large patch of cotton wool and plaster peeled back to show what appears to be the wound of a severed ear.…

  IT RAINS LETTERS AND TELEPHONE CALLS, “OPEN A FUND”

  Some have written or telephoned us appealing us to help Paul’s mother collect the ransom. Others have actually sent money.

  Rosalba C … is 16, and telephoned, crying, “Paul is the same age as I am and he may die cut up into small pieces. Do something. Open a fund.…”

  A mother telephoned, “My son and his friends want to send Paul their savings.” A lawyer from Bologna wrote, “Can’t anybody open a fund to raise the ransom demanded by the kidnappers? If we each pay 1000 lire [approx. $2], the amount would be gathered very quickly. I am ready to pledge 10,000 lire [approx. $20].” A Roman doctor called us, “A foreign lady has been seriously offended in Italy and it is right that the Italians give a contribution, even if it is only symbolic.…

  Finally, around mid-December, when the water in the Bernini fountains in the heart of Piazza Navona was frozen, the souvenir stalls had been decorated for Christmas, and two men in Santa Claus suits shared a cigarette leaning against the church at the northern end, this came:

  NEW GETTY PLEA

  Mrs. Gail Harris said: “I beg of you … I implore you. I am still waiting.

  “I want to remind you that on November 30 our family agreed upon all of your conditions for the return of my son and the 1 million dollars raised by his father has been withdrawn in favor of the sum you ask.

  “I am waiting … I am always waiting for you.”

  Around the world we were all waiting. As abruptly as it had begun, it ended. On the afternoon of December 15 I went as usual to see Martine and Jutta in their apartment. There was an air of uncertainty about them. They smiled wanly.

  “We can’t say much,” Martine said. “They have Paul. He is in a clinic. I’m going to see him. I cannot talk about it, but we won.”

  I asked her who was “we.” She only smiled.

  “I’m going to go home to San Francisco.” As I stood in the doorway, half turned, suppressing the urge to ask her to take me along, I said, “I hope he’s okay. If he ever wants to tell his story, get in touch with me.”

  It was a Hail Mary. I didn’t honestly expect to ever see any of these people again.

  Leonardo da Vinci Airport was choked with Christmas travelers. I got the last seat of the day back to California and the apartment on Telegraph Hill.

  Here I set about the writing of the story. In the course of researching background I wrote to my friend D. O. Cozzi, an American writer living in Italy, and asked him to look into the history of kidnapping in his adopted country. I expected to hear of medieval goings-on from the time
they made the Spanish Steps in Rome a sanctuary for criminals or the days of Romeo and Juliet, but he wrote:

  Kidnapping

  “Sequestro di persona a scopo di lucro”

  At the war’s end, there were cases of sheepherders on the island of Sardegna collecting ransom on sheep dogs that had been “lost” and then after a few days “found” thanks to negotiations concerning unfenced land use in the almost empty, sparsely inhabited northern part of Sardegna called “La Barbargia.” News of these dognapping episodes didn’t get into major newspapers. They were considered unimportant local problems and were not reported to the police or in the newspapers.

  In the early sixties the Aga Khan Karim invested in several square miles of then scrub bush, rocks and shoreline in northeastern Sardegna calling it “La costa Smeralda.” Khan and his consortium of investors began building luxury summer residences for Europe’s moneyed few. They fenced their properties and this was not received well by the indigenous people. Barbed wire and sheep did not mix well.

  Then kidnappings began to occur: short duration, penny-ante ransom, no injuries, low-profile crimes. A small payment by that of the family involved, and things were kept very quiet. The police were often only informed after the fact. The victims were generally not Italian citizens. The actors were locals or at the most Sardi. No one from the “outside” was allowed into the game.

  In summer when the Sardi sheepherders transported their sheep to the higher elevations of the Appennines on the mainland, where summer rains keep the edible greenery constantly growing, a criminal element invariably accompanied the flock and this made the shepherds unpopular with the natives, for crime went up when they appeared and down when they left.

  In the ’70s the number of kidnappings increased in northern Italy. After two or three weeks the victims—random adults, or minors—turned up unharmed, found in some remote area of the Appennines. Then one night a victim was released in the wilds of the Calabria, and everyone was shocked to realize that there was another team on the field.