Uncommon Youth

by Charles Fox

  Little Paul had a period that was slightly unfortunate. He thought the younger children were interfering when he wanted to be alone with his girlfriend, so he would take her in the living room and lock the door.

  Daddy gave the children a blow-up girl—cute, lifelike. They obviously decorated her a bit and they hung a rope around her neck. They waited on the terrace for some nice old lady to walk in and then they’d drop her down from the fourth floor. At a Christmas party, Paul thought it would be a good idea to pull the same stunt, but this time with ketchup all over the doll.

  This got old fast and so he went to live with his friend Philip. The children really missed him. But he used to come over a lot and sit around.

  The world did not treat him well; he fell among thieves. They were as fascinated by him as he was by them. They quickly got him under their thumb, and the subject of kidnapping came up.

  Paul:

  That last Christmas I spent with my mother, I snuck out to see Easy Rider in English; she didn’t want to let me go. I said I was going for a walk and I went and saw the film and it flipped me out. Did you see it? I got so angry when they beat Nicholson up. When you’re young, you know, it’s just hate for straight people, it became hate. A few weeks after that I rented a motorcycle—Richard [Boyd] already had one—and we went camping. My old girlfriend Bobby was there too, but with Richard, not with me. Five of us went camping—very big motorcycles, lots of dope, Etruscan ruins. There’s a big waterfall there. It’s beautiful. I smoked so much dope. I took acid and I was so gone, you can’t believe it. Those little black ones. You know, steamboats with a toilet roll or something. Then there was that sleeping-bag situation. That was the weirdest hallucination I ever had. The sleeping bag started to go like this and it became a volcano and it became red and brown and rats and snakes and slime and witches and just the shit of the world, the scum of the world. I put my hand on the pole of the tent and the whole tent fell down.

  Have you heard Diamond Dogs? The cover is by the guy who did Rock Dreams, Guy Peelaert. There’s a beautiful poem and it goes to music. It goes something like “High on poacher’s hill, fleas the size of rats, suck on rats the size of cats, mutant eyes gaze out.” Weird thing, very beautiful. You’ll have to listen to it.

  Then we went to Positano for the first time. In Positano I did exactly what I wanted. I was completely free. No shoes. No family complex. No money, just day to day. I met Marcello then. We went back to Rome after some days. He had a studio in Trastevere and I stayed there with him.

  Trastevere is where these malavita live. Ciambellone, the big doughnut, was the main coke guy. He lived there and ran the place.

  I heard about Martine and Jutta, German twins. They were supposed to be Amazons with these enormous tits. I tracked them down, met them at a restaurant one night. They were stoned on something. Tight curls, lots of makeup, sequined pants with snakes on them, running around in silver high-heeled shoes, Roxy Music, stars in their eyes with ten or fifteen gay guys. They were taking pictures. Really, really, really having fun all the time. I was a bit down on these gays, stern; I was a little bourgeois and straight. But these twins fascinated me.

  I got to know Martine. We went to the beach one day. We played around. I was always trying to touch her. In the car she wouldn’t sit in the back with me, she would sit in the front with her sister. I was pissed off with her. In the beginning we didn’t really like each other very much.

  The twins had one of those strange little furnished apartments with just a couple of suitcases. We slept together in one bed and we didn’t make love for a month, really. I slept in my underwear. Then they came to live with us and we went to Capri, and Martine and I had our affair there.

  When we came back to Rome, living at Marcello’s, I met two guys, elegantly dressed, big Fiat 130, always paying cash. They said they worked for Air France. I hung around with them. Ciambellone got a little pissed off.

  One night I went out with the Air France guys and they said, “Get us a couple of girls,” which I did. We went back to their apartment. They had all these gun magazines, telescopic sights and stuff. I had great fun watching these two old men and these two girls. They wanted coke. We said, “We have coke.” We chopped up Vitamin C and gave it to them—that’s how we took them—and laughed all night long. These guys said, “Why don’t you go to Cannes with us?” I was supposed to spend a week in Cannes in the best hotel and I only had jeans. No suitcase. No brush. Nothing. I asked for money to go shopping. One had no cash on him. I borrowed five thousand lire from the other one for a cab. They said, “Get some proper clothes. See you in a couple of days.” We had an appointment to meet at the airport. I hitchhiked there but they never showed. At that point, Marcello’s place was crazy. A wild scene, people never slept. Coke, coke, coke. I was selling diamonds. We had machine guns. We were starting to get into big drug deals. Really started to organize a gang. We wanted to eventually have some sort of political thing. In some ways it was even romantic. Then the Air France guys walked in. I always thought of Ciambellone as a big guy, but when these guys came in, he bowed down.

  This was just before Martine and Jutta left. Did she tell you about being locked in that room?

  Ciambellone tricked me. He woke me at four in the morning and said, “The guy’s here with the money for the coke.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. He told me to come to his place. All these guys have little apartments—one-room paranoia places, big locks on the doors. I said, “Where is the guy?” They said, “He’s coming.” There were maybe fifteen of them and they had been there for a while, so you can imagine the tension.

  I was naive. I really thought the film guy was coming. Martine and Jutta wanted to produce a film and I had talked to Ciambellone about this. He said, “Why don’t you call them, I’ll produce the film.” We called them up and he said he was going to give them the money and they had to come immediately. As soon as they came, one of these guys locked the doors. They started showing porno films. I stayed for a while. They wouldn’t let us go and I got really a little bit nervous. I told Ciambellone I needed some money for jeans. He gave me the money and I went away. I didn’t say anything to Martine. I just went away. I was going to come back but I didn’t. I was so fucked-up.

  A few days before I was kidnapped I had a fight with my mother. I came home stoned one day and told her, “I am addicted to coke.” She began to cry. I said, “I have no problems.” I just hated women—because I was with the wrong women, awful whores. I loved only myself. My theory was that if you just love yourself and no one else, then you can’t have any problems.

  These Air France guys proposed to me, “Why don’t we kidnap you?” I was really ready to do it. Just out of economic necessity, political reasons, and wanting to buy weapons and things. I don’t want to mention this in the book because it could get me in trouble. I was really mad. When you get into coke you’ll do anything to have it. I was even asking for advances. I’d say, “Give me some money now and then later we’ll work it out.”

  After a day I said to Marcello that something was happening and we had to go there. We took his Citroën and went there but they opened the shutters and shot at us. After about three days Martine and Jutta arrived at the door. They had escaped. They were really furious. They thought I had organized the whole thing.

  After that it got heavy. It got dangerous. The malavita got very jealous of the twins. They talked bad about me. They said that I didn’t give a shit about Martine. They had gotten me really under their thumb because I owed them money.

  After the twins came back to Marcello’s, Jutta left. She didn’t speak to me for a long time. Martine stayed a few days longer and I realized how much I liked her, but these gangsters kept coming. She hid in another room. It really destroyed her. She found an apartment and moved out.

  I got really jealous when she left. I followed her. I watched her. She and Jutta got an apartment on Via della Scala. I wanted to rent a room from them. They didn’t want to rent it
to me, so I found an apartment in the same building.

  Martine and Jutta were on the first floor and on the ground floor there was Moonie, a painter, very gay, a great guy. Everyone was gay. They had a shop downstairs and Hiram Keller was there all the time. I was seeing a lot of them. You could scream out the windows at the twins, very nice.

  After this I completely changed sides. I hung around with fags for a few weeks. I was going to live with Daniel, a gay boy, upstairs. Let’s not mention this or tell Martine, but I had an experience with him one night. I went really gay hanging out with Hiram and all these gay people in Trastevere. Morrissey and Warhol. I believe I am gay, but not sexually anymore, it doesn’t attract me. But psychologically, I’m pretty feminine.

  I was testing Martine. I’d tell her I had fucked six women that night. I was fucked-up.

  Martine and Jutta were really getting it together. They were doing pictures, they had a contract with Playboy. We even had a little money to buy food and drugs. They got me to do some pictures too.

  Things got really great with Martine. We were getting money. I avoided Marcello and that whole scene. We even ran away from Danielle Devret and all those people. Martine and I would stay home all day, then go out in the evening and eat at Piazza Navona. She’d buy me clothes. Nobody had ever done that for me. Everyone had always taken advantage, so I really dug it.

  It was a really nice period. We were really happy together, Martine, Jutta, and I. Pretty much in love.

  8.

  After Paul told the twins that he was going to have himself kidnapped, things began to go well for them. He avoided the gangsters and changed his mind about a kidnapping, but he had set them on his trail and the idea was loose in the air and they were coming for him.

  Paul:

  I was seeing nice people. Warhol was in Rome and Jagger was in Rome and there was the Andy Warhol scene. Going out to eat one night, we just looked out the window in the bar next door and said, “Oh, they’re shooting a movie.” We went over and ended up getting a little part in Polanski’s film.

  Marcello invited me to Gaeta, to Remington [Olmstead]’s place. He said, “Bring down a girl,” so I thought I’d bring Danielle. I don’t know why I was attracted to her, but I really was. She has connections with all those gangsters, with all the malavita. I was very suspicious of her. I still am.

  I had been talking to Paul Morrissey, who did Trash. In the morning I went out to his house, where Warhol was staying, doing Frankenstein. They were cutting it. I went out there with Bob Freeman. There, I met this guy who I had seen with his sister in Trastevere. He went away without speaking to me. I saw his sister that night on the set with Danielle. She said, “Oh, we had this great idea. My brother saw you at Paul Morrissey’s.” At that time the French were testing their H-bombs in the Pacific. She said, “Why don’t we kidnap you and get a boat and sit in the middle of where they are going to throw the bomb. Oh, don’t you think it’s a good idea.”

  There was no way I could stop it. It wasn’t a joke anymore. People came up to me and made kidnapping proposals. They said, “Oh, why don’t we do something together?”

  One night I was in a Mercedes with Carlo Shimonova and a car followed us. Very fast—we had to race around town at three in the morning. We even took the license plate of this car, but it was lost. Probably the whole thing would have been solved, but the license plate number was lost.

  The next day we did those famous Cocaine pictures. We went over to Claudio Abate’s apartment. It was only for fun, you know. I had them but Claudio came and took them from our apartment. I don’t have a single print anymore.

  When Martine and I came back to the apartment one evening, men were waiting by cars in the street under the trees. I stood in the window of the apartment looking down at them. I asked Martine, “What the fuck do they want?” She said, “They’ve been there for some days.” I threw a chair out the window at them. I was really paranoid.

  Of the morning of the last day before Paul disappeared, Martine said:

  The last morning I was at the house, Paul had been out and he called me around noon time and he took me out to Piazza Navona and told me, “When you get your divorce, I want to marry you.” He was excited, I was excited too, he was very sweet. And then he said, “I’ll see you later.”

  What Paul did in the final hours of that afternoon, where he went and whom he saw, are not talked about by either by him or Martine. Paul only picks up his account that evening. It seems clear from Paul’s proposal to Martine that he knew something was about to happen and that Danielle, in some fashion, had set him up, but after his row with her in Piazza Navona at three in the morning, we have only Paul’s word for what happened next and, in light of Rick Boyd’s assertion that Paul had “taken a boat,” we have to wonder. Boyd had a reputation as a bad actor, but if Paul is making up the story of his abduction, his details are very convincing. Still, you wonder.

  Paul:

  Later on I was going to meet Martine. I went to a bar alone and I got a table. Kevin O’Neil, Sue Johnson, and [Roman] Polanski came and sat. Then we all went to another bar and there was Warhol and Jagger and Bianca and Polaroids here and Polaroids there. It got kind of late and I went to the Domiziano and sat down. Warhol, Jagger, and Kevin went off to one section and Kevin left Sue Johnson with me. That’s how I ended up with Sue Johnson. Everybody thought I was balling her or something. I wish I’d never seen her. Kevin came running down with Paul Morrissey and said, “Stay here a minute.” We stayed for maybe half an hour. He never came back. We went to look for him and never found him. I said, “Why don’t we go to the Treetops?” So we went. Later, I wanted to go to Positano. I walked down the hill through the streets to Piazza Navona.

  They were starting to close the cafés. I found Danielle Devret with some people. I asked her to take me in her car to Positano and she said no, so I asked her to drive me home. She wouldn’t. Why didn’t she take me home? She said that I had given her the clap. I freaked out at this woman and I was very drunk and I just said, “Fuck off,” right in the middle of the piazza. We shouted at each other. She screamed at me, “You are nothing but a name!”

  I had these boots and the heel was broken and I was just wearing my clothes for the disco, tight jeans and T-shirt with glitter. I walked to the Campo dei Fiori. There I bought a newspaper and some cigarettes and I walked on into the street by the French embassy. My head reeled with the argument I had had in Piazza Navona. I didn’t want Danielle Devret, only a ride to Positano for the weekend, or home. My head was full of Danielle’s scream, You are nothing but a name!

  At the end of the street there is a fountain, the stone face of a boy, white marble. Water spurted out of his open mouth. It ran over his lip and down his chin, making a dark stain. It was like the boy was leering at me, his mouth half open. I was drunk, hot. My head was swimming and it was difficult to walk on the stones and sometimes I leaned out and touched the wall. All the time I was looking at this stone face of this boy under the light on the wall at the end of the street, he was staring back at me and he smiled. I swear he smiled.

  As he did I realized a car was stopping alongside me. These men were coming out of it. They grabbed me and wrestled me to the floor behind the front seats. I can distinctly remember laying like that, bending my feet. There were three guys, two in the front, one in the back. I could feel his heels resting on me. I was just so fucking drunk. The car took off. They drove for an hour in silence. Then the guy in front, the passenger, leaned over the seat and looked down at me. He asked, “Who are you?” I said, “Paul Getty,” and instantly realized my mistake.

  “Do you have papers?” I said no. That was it. Shortly after we went through the toll gate onto the autostrada. If I was smart, I would have screamed at the toll gate or something. I would probably have made it, because they couldn’t have escaped from the motor squad, but they could have shot me too or thrown me out going at one hundred miles an hour.

  I slept and we drove south for hours.
I woke feeling like shit, so thirsty. I said, “Water, water.” They would only give me whiskey. I must have drunk a bottle and a half on the trip.

  I didn’t realize at all what was going on. I remember the drive and voices talking to each other. I thought it was the cops. I would have never dreamed it was real.

  When I woke again, the car had stopped. It was getting light. Outside I heard them talking. They blindfolded me. I was carried out. Feet and hands. They made a mistake by carrying me like this because I could see under the blindfold. I saw an Arab-looking guy. Half-beard, like the one Gregg Allman has, and just a brown face. I only saw this part. And a cigar. This was Piccolo, the guy with the bandy legs. They lay me onto the grass. They didn’t say anything. Then I said I was hungry and they said, “Okay, now the food comes.” The guy who told me this had a thick Arab accent. I thought, “Oh, it must be the Arab guerrillas or something.”

  I was sure it was political, that they wanted the money, and I thought that’s great, I thought that it was Arabs. Then I thought that it was Communists. Or maybe it was Fascists. Or maybe it was Peter Sellers, I didn’t know who it was. Then I realized they had nothing, and they were not happy with just a little bit. They wanted it all. They had nothing to do but kidnap people.

  Then Piccolo said, “We’re not going to talk to you anymore.” They devised a system for yes and no answers, the clapping. One clap for yes and two for no.