Uncommon Youth

by Charles Fox

  We went to Munich for a while and then to Berlin, I wanted to show it to him. A taxi driver recognized us and asked for our autographs. In an Italian restaurant the owner said, “Ah, you look like Paul Getty. Let me see your ears to see if one is cut.” They recognized us in all the restaurants.

  We got a video camera and Paul filmed a little bit. The film was called Berlin by the Wall. It was just of Berlin, the people, the incredible sex shops. From Berlin we went back to Rome.

  Ultimately, nine men, including two Mammoliti brothers, were arrested for Paul’s kidnapping. There was a trial in Lagonegro. Paul went as a witness; he was heavily guarded. Only two were convicted. Only $85,0000 of the $2.8 million were recovered.

  Martine had been brought back into Paul’s life by Gail.

  Martine:

  When I got pregnant, Gail invited us over to dinner, and she said, “Paul and I, we want you to have this baby. Paul wants it and he wants to marry you.” She wanted to meet my parents and they came to Rome. She welcomed them, took them around, gave a festive dinner at her place, an old palazzo. She was very nice to us.

  Paul and I had envisioned a huge wedding on the Spanish Steps in Rome with the most incredible dress. But nobody had any money and in the end, we got married in Siena, a tiny little country wedding in a field with all the journalists around us. We came outside the courthouse into the piazza. It was at night. There were thousands of people. They had come in buses. It was the biggest sensation that Paul, the Golden Hippie, now free, was marrying his girlfriend, one of the twins—“Le Gemelli Del Momento,” the twins of the moment. Paul and I got separated by the crowd.

  When we came back to Rome, it was a very difficult time. We didn’t have money and the paparazzi were following us everywhere. Marcello, Paul, and I took a place above the Spanish Steps. Jutta was in Munich. Her friend, a refugee from the political movement in Germany, a bomb-maker, came to live with us. He was in hiding, and he had come from Afghanistan to Rome.

  Marcello, Jutta, Paul, and I wanted to make a secret society, half political, half spiritual. We wanted to start an agency, like an art center, but it was all farce. Nothing was really serious. We couldn’t pay the rent. We failed. We were all having a really hard time. There was nowhere to go. We were stagnating. The chapter in Rome was finished. Paul just couldn’t be there.

  We were living in a hotel, Residence Ripa, and Tina Aumont was living there too. As I remember she turned him on to heroin. He might have asked her, he had tried it before. We used to go to Paul’s father’s palazzo. It was rented out to a black model and her husband. I think she shot him up.

  This was when I first discovered the syringe. Until then I thought, “Paul is just snorting, and he’s going to pull himself together.” When I saw the syringes, I knew it was a whole different level.

  At this point Donna Long [Paul’s aunt, his father’s half sister] came to Rome. We all got together with Gail and talked it over. The whole family thought we needed to get out of Rome. In December, we went to America, to San Francisco. We found ourselves living with Donna, Paul completely strung out on heroin, and I’m eight months pregnant. We didn’t know where to go. We wanted to go to L.A. Anne and Gordon gave us a thousand dollars and said, “Go find a house and settle down.” So we went to Union Street and bought a sitar. Paul said he wanted to make a book, to make some money, so he can do something. He said he just wanted enough to live, so we came to see you.

  EPILOGUE

  It was three months after that breakfast at the Caffe Trieste when he asked me to write his story that I drove down to Los Angeles. Martine had had their baby, a boy, christened Balthazar. Paul had put off starting work on the book until then.

  I found him and Martine living behind the Whisky A Go-Go on a residential side street that parallels Sunset Strip. I arrived at dusk. No one answered the bell, but the door was ajar, the house empty. In the sitting room, as in Rome, white predominated—the carpets, the upholstery, the drapes, the walls, the marble on the coffee table, a white azalea floating in a silver bowl.

  Canned laughter and applause came from somewhere. In the back bedroom stood a crib, from it an infant stared up, wide-eyed, silent. He must be Balthazar.

  I went to wait in the living room. When Paul and Martine returned, they weren’t surprised by the sight of me. There clearly was other business afoot. Paul stood by the window, looking out into the street. Without turning his head he said, “Later. We’ll have to do it later. I’m expecting this guy.”

  At last the doorbell buzzed. Paul quickly opened to a young man in a cowboy hat, paisley shirt, bell-bottom jeans, and pointy-toed cowboy boots. They went into Paul’s bedroom, closed the door. Martine looked at me; she said nothing. Paul was buying cocaine, I assumed. It wasn’t surprising. In L.A. everyone did cocaine. It was de rigueur for the hip. The more coke put out, the better the party.

  It was after midnight when the work began. This was going to be a difficult assignment, if not impossible. He was peripatetic, rambling all over the place, running down, taking a snort and getting revved up again. As much as I wanted to steer him to what I saw was the logical starting point of the story, I didn’t interrupt. Let him go where he would, gathered what I needed. He said: “This book could be bad for me. The kidnapping brought me popularity. I love it, but at the same time I see that it’s destructive, terrifying. You wouldn’t know it here but in Italy I’m public property. I can’t walk around in Rome. It’s just so embarrassing.

  “People like Jagger, they have it okay. They’re properly insulated. I’m trying to make a film with Maria Schneider and I spoke with Alice Cooper about playing on a record. I only hope that what we’re doing now will be the answer.

  “There’s gonna be so much information in this book that nobody will ask me any more questions, nobody will ask me for an interview.

  “What they want me to do is go to school. All these years I never went to school and everybody bitched and said, ‘Why don’t you go to school?’ So finally I’ve told them, ‘All right, I’ll go. I’ll study mathematics and physics.’”

  Paul was admitted to Pepperdine University. I’m not sure how it was done. He hadn’t graduated from high school.

  He insisted I accompany him there on his first day. He drove a green MG sports car with a license plate, YARBLES—cockney rhyming slang for “marbles,” meaning testicles. He got the word from A Clockwork Orange.

  The Pepperdine University campus lies near Malibu, northwest of L.A., beside the Pacific. My memory is of a tall, impressive adobe tower rising up in the morning sun. Paul didn’t seem to know where to go or who to see. It wasn’t clear to me what we should do next. We wandered the hallways among throngs of purposeful students. As they passed, they turned to stare at him, with his boots and long green woolen cloak. He was a tall ship adrift, lost in the fog. His bravado was gone.

  We went into a lecture hall and sat among students. Every eye turned to him. After half an hour, Paul leaned over to me and whispered, “We have to get out of here.” So we did. We left, burst out of the building, foolish with relief. Paul’s first day at university would be his last.

  I wrote to his grandfather, saying it was no use to expect his grandson to go to college and behave like a normal boy. It was too late for that. I wrote, “Paul has already seen too much, done too many things. It seems to me that the only chance now to save him is to give him his money, give him the means to be creative, make something of his life, preserve it. He has inherited your speed of mind. He may be uneducated in a formal academic sense, but he is creative, determined, and his instincts are good. He may destroy himself with the money but he will certainly do so without it.”

  There was no reply.

  Paul said of money, “It is just a measure. Money doesn’t really have anything to do with it. I do everything, even without money. My name is a curse, such a curse. It’s like The Godfather; it’s a family trip, the Gettys.”

  We covered the ground slowly, gathering a fragment here, a fra
gment there, going over the same episode time and again, each time a new detail coming to light, to be put in place like a piece of jigsaw puzzle. We never began taping before ten at night and generally finished at dawn.

  He would digress and talk passionately and at length about Gabriele D’Annunzio, Anna Magnani, Aleister Crowley, Rossetti, or the last days of Mussolini. These characters seemed to form an imaginary core in him. He praised, defended, and sometimes railed against what he saw as a misunderstanding or miscarriage of justice where they were concerned. It wasn’t always clear where imagination took over from fact, but it was dangerous to underestimate his intelligence, to dismiss what he said. His wit was merciless and humor absurd. He loved Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

  He trusted no one and tested anyone who came into his circle. He would make some outlandish observation and, if the individual agreed with him, he would look at me and wink. He liked to tell the truth and watch your reaction. A sort of measuring device. Which isn’t to say that he would always tell the truth. He liked to play with who he was and who people perceived him to be.

  Yet when the sun shone he took an almost childish delight in the world around him. He was complicated, high-strung, and fragile and willing to try anything. Time after time I told him, “Oh, for God’s sake, Paul, don’t do that,” and he would look surprised and grin.

  Sometimes we changed our venue and went to stay in Malibu or Palm Springs. Sometimes he came north to Briones, the village by the sea where I had moved from San Francisco after the hills of North Beach had become too much for my legs afflicted with a slow-acting degenerative neurological disease. He was curious about it, about how it was for me. His empathy was genuine, as was his curiosity, and over these months we became fast friends.

  He liked to go surfing when he visited Briones. I would borrow a wetsuit and a board for him and watch from the beach.

  Once he flew up from L.A. with a cousin. I picked them up at the San Francisco airport in my Impala, an aging two-door hardtop. Duct tape covered holes in the front seat. The children had spilled a milkshake on the speaker cover in the dash, and the radio sounded fuzzy. His cousin, a fresh-faced, clean-shaven young man, razor-cut hair, chinos, and a sweater-vest, seemed startled. To break the ice I asked him what he’d been doing. He said he had bought a new horse. “My daughter’s just come down for the summer with her Arab mare. What did you get?”

  “A thoroughbred stallion.”

  I didn’t see it coming. I asked, “Where do you ride?”

  He shook his head “I don’t ride. We flew him in from Kentucky.” It was beginning to dawn on me. The cousin went on, “We’ll probably ship him to Ireland. That’s where we keep the horses during the European racing season. We have other stables for the French horses at Longchamp and Vincennes.” One forgot the scale of these peoples’ lives.

  Paul and his cousin slept with the children in sleeping bags on the living-room floor. In the morning we all went down to Scowley’s restaurant, where patrons must cook their own food. The coffee was already made. We took a table by the window. The cousin said he had to buy a paper and went to the village store. When he had gone, Paul at once leaned over to me and said, “We have to get out of here, he can’t handle it. He lives in the Jockey Club.”

  * * *

  There were half a dozen of us gathered at the bungalow in L.A. one night. The lights were low. The night was warm. We were sitting around, talking and listening to Pink Floyd. There was a variety of drugs; Paul preferred speedballs—heroin and cocaine.

  Around midnight the doorbell rang. Paul opened and there was the famous face of Vanessa Redgrave. With her were two minders in dark suits who looked on in silence. Redgrave was then starring in the movie Murder on the Orient Express, and was appearing onstage in Los Angeles with Richard Harris in a Shakespeare production. They came into the living room and sat with us.

  Paul was smooth, welcoming. She knelt on the carpet three feet from me and launched into an appeal on behalf of her Workers’ Revolutionary Party. I don’t recall what she said. The sight of her beautiful face, so near my own, the sound of her celebrated voice, the clear precision of her English, the sincerity of it, mesmerized me.

  She had come for Getty money. Her audience watched her, fascinated. She kept her gaze low, spoke uninterrupted for five or ten minutes, and then Paul invited her into the kitchen. When they had gone, the rest of us looked about at one another. In a minute they came back, she thanking Paul and smiling graciously at the rest of us. When the door closed once more and they were gone, our little group whirled in their wake. I took Paul into the kitchen. “What made her so happy? What did you do?”

  “I wrote her a check for ten thousand dollars.”

  “You don’t have ten thousand dollars.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  It didn’t. Paul could write wallpaper. The family would cover his checks. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the money. It’s just that they wouldn’t give it to him. That’s how he saw it, and as far as he was concerned, he had paid his dues.

  In that way Paul was a traditional character, scion of a rich man, confident that his aberrant behavior would be covered over to protect the family name. It was at this time he introduced me to Gail.

  When we sat down to work, the first question I asked her was whether she thought the affair had been a hoax. Her handsome face, the set of her jaw, the twinkle in the eye seemed undermined for an instant, then she said calmly, “I knew Paul hadn’t done anything really wrong. He wanted to take care of me. Times weren’t easy, but he wouldn’t really hurt me, especially in that period. He just wouldn’t. He told me too much, he came to me too often. We’d sit, the two of us, and talk and talk. He’d tell me his problems. He thinks his father isn’t good enough for me. In his peculiar way, he has finally worked out that no one is. Perhaps it was an Oedipus thing.

  “He wanted freedom. He was a hangover from the sixties, which had been about freedom. Adults were free and young people were free. The period of the early Beatles influenced a young boy, who was then given freedom because I felt he was really capable and I still feel it. Perhaps I didn’t do all of the right things. But I was sure if I sent him off to some fine fat school to be controlled, he wouldn’t have one but twenty-two nervous tics. He needed to be with older people. He’s a very unusual boy. There are special things in Paul.

  “I may be proved wrong, but I think he’s going to be extraordinarily successful—and I don’t mean in terms of money—in whatever he happens to do. He’s unusually bright, an exceptional man. Certainly before he was kidnapped, he’d seen a lot of life. Was he able to cope with all that? Maybe he did funny things, saw too much at a young age, but he’s got past it. He should. He was set up anyway. It seems obvious to me.

  “People said I was involved.… I know the children’s father said some very unpleasant things during the bad period and after it, but I somehow have to excuse him, because he’s not really with us. When I saw him in London, he had great fantasies: ‘It must have been so and so. It must have been this one. You could have been involved. You could have done it.’ I told him, ‘I don’t need money. If anybody needs money, you do. I don’t have a habit to support. If I do need money, I only need a tiny bit.’

  “When Paul was fifteen, he went to stay with his father, a disastrous visit. He saw too much in that house and he was given too much. Victoria did or didn’t give him ‘something’; I imagine she did. When I see Victoria, I’m fairly civil to her, pleasant enough, I suppose, really, because I think I have to be. But when I do stop and think about what she did, I just want to kill her. I know it’s great for a young boy to be initiated by an older woman and all that, but not your father’s mistress, come on. I’m sure she would deny it, but I know it’s true. He had a twenty-four-hour really bad trip on whatever it was that she gave him. I wonder how he’s as fine as he is today.”

  I found backers for the project, film people. They provided me with seed money and with it I spent much of the
following summer flying about the world talking to friends of the family, mistresses, servants, and policemen, gathering fragments of the whole. Finally there was Chace, the “controller.” He would only see me if I had consent from Old Paul. I did and then flew to Charleston to find Chace living alone in an expensive little bungalow in a pine wood on Wadmalaw Island beside a slough in which floated a forty-foot yacht.

  He was still adamant that Little Paul and Gail, as he put it, “cooked up the whole thing and then lost control.”

  I spent two weeks with him. Not that the interviewing took that long, but he made me call him from my hotel every morning, at which point he would tell me whether it was convenient for us to meet that day or not. Returning at summer’s end to the house in Briones, I set about writing Paul’s story. My backers, the movie people, constantly chivvied me for pages, but I could not bring the story or myself to life.

  Once more I drove down to L.A. to see Paul. There was the usual scene going on, people drifting in and out, Paul avoiding them.

  In the afternoon Paul and I went to get breakfast at a coffee shop on Sunset. We sat on stools at the counter. I told him, “I’m not going to write this story. It isn’t going to do you any good. I’m sorry.”

  He swiveled on his stool and looked at me. He didn’t seem surprised. “I’ve made an awful mess of my life.”

  “Don’t say that. There’s plenty of time to put things right.” There wasn’t, and somehow we both knew it.

  Thereafter I saw Paul only now and then. On one occasion he drove up to Briones and we walked together beneath eucalyptus trees beside the lagoon, I leaning on a stick and only fourteen years his senior.

  As we walked, he looked me up and down and asked, “What’s it like?” It was as if he needed to know.

  On June 6, 1976, almost exactly a year since I’d stopped work on Paul’s book, Old Paul died. He was eighty-three.

  Paul told me that his grandfather was found sitting in his armchair in his study, dressed in a dark suit. No one knew the extent of his wealth. His principal interests were said to be business, sex, and the collection of antique art, in that order.