by Charles Fox
Paul saw what was going on and was always needling him about the Getty business. “I’m a Getty”—Paul was full of being Getty, and that used to wear pretty thin.
Big Paul and I were divorced in the spring of 1966. Afterwards, he ordered a whiskey sour, or whatever it was, raised his glass to me, and said, “From now on, I can drink what I like.”
Lang and I were married that summer, August 13, 1966, in Rome City Hall, a beautiful Michelangelo building. We didn’t go on a honeymoon. We had to go to the Canary Islands, where Lang was doing a film. His films weren’t A-films. He knew that perfectly well. But he was successful in the sense that he started from five thousand dollars and ended up doing terribly well. Not as well as the big stars, obviously, but terribly well.
[Paul] blamed me for leaving his father. He didn’t want to be put into this other scene. He wanted his father and not a stepfather. It was too bad, because in many ways Lang was really very fond of Paul. He knew what was going on and realized how badly Paul, more than the other three, was hurt by what his father was doing. But instead of being clever and keeping his mouth shut, Lang used to hammer about how unfair their father was being to them and how you just don’t do that kind of thing. With Paul’s instinctive love of his father, his father’s easy way of life looked pretty good to him. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. Paul always wanted to be with his father. Lang could have been the pope, Kennedy, anyone, and there would have been something wrong with him. Lang knew this and he took it out on Paul.
A lot of people say Lang was too tough on Paul. I guess, looking back, he was. He believes in a certain amount of discipline. It was fine for the others because they adored him and respected him and if he said don’t do something, they wouldn’t do it. He never shooed them away. Where he went, they went. But his relationship with Paul was a disaster.
Lang used to punish Paul in the wrong way. Some people shouldn’t be punished. I don’t mean physically, but intellectually. There were times when he should not have been punished and times when he absolutely should have. Sometimes he really was a devil. He’d take things and go off and lose them. We used to repeat over and over and over again, “Please don’t do this!” Paul would do things to irritate me—heavy, psychological things. I’m terribly sensitive. I can’t stand a lot of noise. I don’t like people arguing, going off in a pout. He did all that kind of thing. He was always causing trouble. He wore on me hard. I continued on and on because I couldn’t understand him; he was such a nice boy underneath it all.
If you’re trying to live in a house with four children, you have to keep a certain kind of dignity about yourself. Lang believed in that kind of thing. Everyone had to do their little chores, we all helped clean the pool. Lang would ask, “Please help,” or “Please help your mother.” Sometimes Lang gave him manly things to do that just weren’t Paul. Paul was lazy, slovenly.
Lang was a physical fellow, not an intellectual, and Paul had the notion that one had to be an intellectual. Although in those days Paul loved nothing more than to get up and go hiking, boating, swimming. These days he relates to what he is now; he puts [the] Paul [he is] now back then.
Paul resented Lang, thought he wasn’t good enough for me. His father felt that way, that’s where he got the idea. Or maybe he got it, in his own peculiar way, from my family. But what is that sort of thing? Garbage. Paul was very protective of me, he always has been. He has very mixed-up feelings about me. He used to say, “I want to meet someone I can talk to the way I can sit and talk to you about poetry or painting, and still have some fun. Why can’t I meet—why are all the girls so dumb? Why aren’t they like you?” He’s very caught up in the whole mother thing, Oedipus thing.
4.
Talitha Pol, an icon of the Swinging Sixties, the woman with whom Paul had fallen “a little bit in love,” would only live for six years beyond this point. Her tragic death would have a stupendous effect on all their lives, particularly Paul’s.
Talitha’s good friend Lord Christopher Thynne, second son of the sixth Marquess of Bath, remembered her:
We met at a small dinner party. She was very, very pretty, almost beautiful, but slightly heavy in a sort of Dutch way. Her shape was amazing. Very good figure. Rather overmuscular. But just the energy made you forget. She was so energetic, always dancing wildly, incredibly lively and very funny. I was twenty-seven. She was nineteen or twenty. She had some smart friends, but not many. She was rather new to the scene. I thought, Why haven’t I seen her before? She gradually appeared in London society and was taken up by quite a lot of people.
She was born in Java in 1940 and interned in a camp by the Japanese, separated from her mother. They were kept in separate camps. She’d talk to her mother every day through the wire.
Immediately after the war, her mother took her back to Holland and died of tuberculosis contracted in the camp. Talitha adored her mother, although it was a dream because they never really had much of a chance, always separated by a piece of wire.
I think she thought she would make it as an actress, but she never did. She was a show-off and so everyone used to say, “You ought to be an actress.” She made one or two little films, small parts, but she wasn’t very good. I wouldn’t have thought she had social aspirations. She wanted to be rich. But I think everybody wants that, really.
She used to come and stay with me and talk with my father. I could see my father really fancying her. I don’t mean he ever made a pass at her, but I see the way he looks at people. He loved her coming down, because he always felt around her he was being attractive and funny. She used to talk to you as if you were the only person in the room. She just made you feel good.
She went out with people like Alastair Londonderry, Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, and Lord Lambton. He’s one of the most charming men out, rather common knowledge, one of the gossip figures for that set. She got rather involved with them, which probably cheapened her in a way. But in no way was she cheap herself. You could say she was ahead of her time, a very liberated woman, a woman of the sixties. I suppose at the time people might have said—I can only think of pompous words—she was “loose.” Whereas now they wouldn’t at all. I’m not saying in any way that she was a tart, and I don’t mean to knock the tarts by saying that.
Meeting [Big] Paul was fatal for her, and I don’t mean that as an obvious remark, but it was totally wrong. She was the leading light at a party, but she wasn’t really strong. I think she had that exuberance and when you get involved with that kind of huge set, I think it was just too much for her. It just had to be exuberance, exuberance, exuberance all the way ’round.
I suppose one thinks of her as being very witty, but I’m not certain if she was laughing at other people or whether she actually said anything funny herself. I just remember that you were always laughing when you were with her.
She was absolutely ripe meat for all those Tarzan people who wanted a pretty, amusing girl around to bolster their ego. I thought Paul was another when it started. Except he married her, and from what I’m told he did love her—probably not so much at the end.
He always rather wanted to have sex scenes. I felt it was always there, but I don’t know if it was him or her. I always imagined it was him, really.
When they were first living in London sometimes he’d ring me up and I would go out and have dinner with them. There would probably be two other people. But it was basically Talitha who talked. I don’t think Paul was ever very amusing. We’d go to a Chinese restaurant and the bill was always split. I was amazed; if you are asked out to dinner, you don’t split the bill. He’s not all that rich, but certainly he’s a hell of a lot richer than I am. One time I paid the whole bill. I said, “No, it’s only four pounds for four,” or something, I thought I would make a mark. But it didn’t work. I think he was always frightened of being taken.
One summer, I remember going ’round to their house with a friend. My friend looked out of the window and said, “God, what a pretty ga
rden.” Paul said, “Oh yes, the garden is the only reason we can live in London. It’s lovely in the summer and we can sit out there.” Talitha said, “Yes, otherwise the house isn’t particularly good because it’s rather dark. We can always go out in the garden when it’s sunny.” Paul went on and said, “Oh yes, it’s lovely.” My friend said, “Could I go out there?” And Paul said, “Oh yes, please, please go out.” And my friend said, “What’s the way out?” And Paul said, “You go … Well, Talitha, how do you get out into the garden?”
Talitha introduced Big Paul to a new circle of friends. They went to Bangkok, Thailand, on their honeymoon and there began smoking opium. When Gail realized that the couple was in trouble with the drug, she introduced them to her Tuscan neighbor Victoria Brooke, whom Gail thought of as an herbalist. Gail told them that Victoria would be a help in their struggle to untangle themselves from opium.
Instead, Victoria, a young, very beautiful English woman, became entangled with the pair of them, something Lord Thynne advised strongly against, saying, “Victoria Brooke is trouble. She’s awfully nice and terribly amusing, but she is trouble. God, I like to see her, she’s funny and amusing, but never get involved.” In due course, Victoria would become “the other woman” in this affair.
Born in England in 1940, she became another of those celebrated beauties in the time of Swinging London. She was the only daughter of a pair of British wartime spies turned “gentleman farmers.” She made her debut in London in 1959 and eloped with Lionel Brooke, a nephew of the last White Rajah of Sarawack. When Brooke went “in the loony bin,” as Victoria put it, she left him and met Lord Alastair Londonderry on a plane from Paris. Lord Londonderry invited her to stay at his house in Tuscany. That is where she met Big Paul and Talitha.
Victoria:
Paul and Talitha, the great happy, shining couple, were on their way to the Far East.
Talitha was fantastic, a bird of paradise, the most alive, courageous person. She was incredibly tough, physically tough. She’d drink two bottles of vodka the night before, go to bed at three in the morning, and if we had decided to walk up a mountain the next morning, she’d be there. She was like an electric charge; nobody who met her could possibly forget her.
As Paul described it, “At the end of 1966, my father came into a large lump sum of money. A hell of a lot, a frightening amount. He stopped working. He was thirty-five. He lived off the interest.”
The late Martin McInnis, longtime family lawyer, recalled how this had come about:
Gordon, the younger brother, sent out to Kuwait in his older brother’s place, was thought to be the rebel, eccentric. He’s brilliant. In pure intellect he has few equals. He has a frightening IQ, something like 160. When he arrived in Kuwait, the first thing he did was have a grand piano shipped to him. He was in charge of the Getty refinery. There were certain financial arrangements with the local royalty. The emir apparently lived in a mansion which the Getty Company had built for him. And if I remember correctly, the financial gimmick was that the emir paid a token rent for this big establishment, perhaps one hundred dollars a month. But he was behind in his rent. Knowing his father’s parsimonious ways, Gordon thought he saw a way to impress his father and sent the emir the equivalent of a three-day notice. The emir’s answer was to send a little platoon of soldiers to the office and put Gordon in jail. He was then required to leave the country.
His father then sent him to New York to manage the Hotel Pierre. It was an elegant hotel, but losing money. Gordon’s democratic device for cutting down the number of employees was simple: he lined up the entire staff around the walls of the basement. He walked down and tapped every third one on the shoulder and said, “Thank you very much. You are excused.” His father considered this an unsound business practice and sent him to Japan to represent the Getty Oil Company, but something happened there, I haven’t got it in mind.
After that he came back to San Francisco and, dissatisfied with the amount of money his father was allowing him, he commenced an inquiry into income. I believe his yearly income was ten thousand dollars. The Sarah C. Getty Trust was established in 1931 or 1932. It allowed J. Paul Getty to get the control and usage of a great part of his mother’s money, and, through it, control the vast businesses which he knew were going to develop without him seeming to contravene antitrust laws.
Gordon was entitled to receive interest from the Sarah C. Getty Trust. The principal was to be divided among the grandchildren upon the death of the last remainderman. We therefore sued his father for failure to disgorge profits.
I thought J. Paul Getty enjoyed the suit very much and that he wanted badly to win the case just to show Gordon that he was an upstart. Losing the case did not have any terrible consequences for him at all. We had the better case, and he thought he was going to lose. Also we were assigned to Judge Pierry, a judge we thought would be favorable. His opinion in a comparable case the year before had been sustained in a court of appeal. So the lawyers for Getty were very upset when we got Judge Pierry. I thought I argued the case well, but Pierry found against us. I met him in the street a month or so later. He said, “Gee, I’m awfully sorry about ruling against you. I was literally on the fence as to how to rule on both the law and fact. But the more I got to thinking about it, I thought of poor Gordon, who gets all of this money, and I thought that the father had really been pretty good to him.” I said, “Judge, the father had nothing to do with this. As you know, this was a device he created to form the springboard for his own power in business.” The judge said, “I know, I know, but he has done a wonderful job. He took a trust with $3,500,000, and now you say, based on good figures, that it’s worth almost two billion. So, I thought Gordon was not going to suffer, and everybody is going to do all right.” So he decided against us with the kindliest of feelings, but they were illogical. However, the trial had the effect of loosening J. Paul’s grip on the purse strings and thereafter he began to release increasing amounts of money to his sons every year.
With his newfound wealth, Big Paul bought the three remarkable properties: the landmark London house primarily for Talitha—26 Cheyne Walk, also known as Queen’s House or the Rossetti house—the palazzo on the Piazza Venezia in Rome, and a rundown palace in the Mamounia Quarter of Marrakesh, quickly nicknamed “The Pleasure Palace.”
In February of 1945, Sir Winston Churchill had invited Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to meet him at the Mamounia Hotel, which stands in the same quarter, to discuss the reconstruction of postwar Europe. He told them, “This is the most beautiful place on Earth.”
When Big Paul bought the palace, it needed considerable restoration. He hired an American, Bill Willis, to do the work and asked him to find a housekeeper. Willis approached a young Englishwoman he knew in Tangier, Nicolette Meers.
Nicolette:
I went out to Morocco in 1961 to visit friends. Bill Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and the beatniks were on the road in Tangier. I knew a boy who was staying with Bill. They were all out there that summer. Tangier was utterly rundown, and the Moroccans used to get drunk and say, “Go back to your own country”—they were very possessive about the place.
I stayed in the Spanish Quarter in a tiny hotel, the Hotel l’Amour. There was only a cold bath, but it was the summer so it didn’t matter. It had all sorts of odd residents left over from the war. They had been in the French Army, the German, the English, and God knows what else. They’d all drink in the same bars together. A lot of old whores, old con men. It was amusing to go down there at night and sit in the cafés in the little square in the Medina. There was the Parade Bar, run by Lily Whitman and Jay Hazelwood, an American boy who looked just like a very tall Pekinese. Lots of American women whose husbands had long since divorced them, downing drinks and having Moroccan lovers and raining things on Jay about their emotional entanglements. Jay dropped dead on Christmas Day the second year I was there.
People flooded into Tangier in the wake of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac’s On the Road.
They were all shooting speed and smoking then. There were deaths every other day. They took old Arab houses, six or eight together in a house absolutely out of their heads, raving around the streets and getting all geared-up in Arab clothes.
It was outrageous; everybody was swapping girlfriends and wives. The Arabs are very narrow-minded. You couldn’t expect them to understand this sort of behavior. The police used to make roundups. They’d go all around the houses and arrest everyone and drag them off to jail for a day or two and escort these people over the border. They really didn’t know how to handle it, the beatnik attitude. Then everyone slipped into the psychedelic age and flower power, and things got even weirder because a lot of flower-power people had money. Suddenly, the beatnik with the long hair and the beard was transfigured into something more eccentric, but they paid their way. There were the hippie boys going on their trips around the world, getting their monthly checks. People were very well off in those days. Everyone had so much money. The English had money, the Spanish did, the Moroccans had money, and everyone was spending it like mad. Extraordinary. Where was it all coming from?
I met a Moroccan boy, Amin. We didn’t speak each other’s language but we didn’t need to. In fact, the more we learned the less well we got along. Then my mother came out on a visit with my sister and said, “What are you doing living with this boy? It’s lunacy.” Actually, I adored him. She said, “Well, either marry him or … don’t let it drag on, because it will get harder and harder.” Then it all happened at once. Bill Willis, the builder, told me, “We must have someone to keep the Getty house in Marrakesh together.” I used to see Bill at the Parade Bar all the time and I knew what he was working on. Bill told me, “I suggested to Paul and Talitha that you were the ideal person. So why don’t you go down and meet them? They’re coming for Easter.”