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With the marriage breaking up, neither spouse was being faithful, and there was now another woman on the scene – Victoria Holdsworth,
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
original name of Tudor House,
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.
Queen’s House was one of the shrines of the Brotherhood, for it was here that Rossetti came to live in 1862,
So the inquiry into Talitha’s death was inconclusive and the file stayed open, but Paul could never return to Italy.
Thus, for all his wealth, his world became a tiny segment of a very private hell.
But as far as his future was concerned, his most important visitor was another neighbour, the knowledgeable Old Etonian with the small antique shop round the corner, who had been a friend of Talitha’s. During the sixties, Christopher Gibbs was a well-known figure in Chelsea. Handsome, stylish, and extremely well connected – his father was a banker and his uncle governor of Rhodesia – he was a most unusual character.
Stargrove, the Jaggers’ splendid Victorian country house in Berkshire,
At seventy-eight old Paul was still as firmly in command of Getty Oil as ever, and richer than he’d ever been. With Neutral Zone production at its peak in 1971, his personal fortune climbed to $290 million, with the Sarah C. Getty Trust ahead of it at $850 million.
although his son was living barely thirty miles away in London, he adamantly refused to see him.
Twelve days after Talitha’s death, echoing the way his father had treated him, Getty virtually struck Paul from his will – leaving him $500.
He still resented them, still angrily attacked them when he felt that they were threatening his own unique position.
Perhaps when it came to it he simply didn’t want to include Ronald and was still seeking his revenge on long dead Dr Helmle by victimizing his grandson.
To show that the lawsuit was forgiven, he bestowed on Gordon the highest accolade in the Getty firmament – the all-powerful position of trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust.
In contrast, the eldest son and heir-apparent, George, Vice-president of Tidewater Oil, was deeply conscious of family tradition.
‘I realized then that George was scared stiff, absolutely terrified of Mr Getty and of what Mr Getty thought of him.’
In 1971 George remarried – not to Lady Jean, who preferred Norman Mailer – but to Jacqueline Riordan, a San Francisco heiress who had inherited $30 million from her previous husband,
To save his name they lost his life.
‘His father killed him,’ said his widow, when journalists came to see her.
When she told him George was dead, Getty was transfixed with grief, poleaxed, stricken, unable to weep or speak, such was his anguish.
The Area Between Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Tiber has many of Rome’s great renaissance palaces, for this is where papal families like the Borgias, Farnese, and Riario once resided – and these narrow streets have seen more mayhem in their time than any other quarter of the city.
In those days living was so cheap for foreigners with dollars that she could live comfortably, but she was far from rich, and child support from Paul in London tended to be erratic. She drove an Opel station-wagon, had many local friends, most of them Italian, and lived an essentially private life around her children.
It was in early 1973 that Paul began dating Martine Zacher, a pretty German divorcée with a year-old baby daughter.
The Calabrian Mafia, the N’drangeta, was an ancient, loosely linked federation of mafioso families from this poorest part of Italy, who for centuries had been making money from protection rackets on the local peasantry.
his personal security expert, Colonel Leon Turrou.
Certainly, throughout the period of his grandson’s kidnap, he took exceptional precautions with anyone he spoke to on the telephone, and for anything related to the kidnap would generally get Penelope to speak on his behalf.
It all went back to Big Paul himself, who had always used his money as a substitute for human feeling.
She had to get news from Paul, and it was then that her lawyer, Giovanni Jacovoni, suggested she should make a direct appeal to the kidnappers on Italian television.
She told her father so when she telephoned him in San Francisco, and since Judge Harris was one of the few people Jean Paul Getty respected and would talk to on the subject, the Judge was able to convince him that something must be done.
The man he chose was a former spy who worked for Getty Oil, J. Fletcher Chace.
and Gail had met ‘the Pope’s Gorilla’, the massive Archbishop Casimir Marcinkus from Chicago,
Roberto Calvi, the head of the Banca Ambrosiana, who ended up hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Thomas Biamonte, a highly competent ex-FBI lawyer of Calabrian extraction who worked in the US Embassy in Rome, was assigned to the case, and speaking the local dialect of Calabria, had made useful contact with the kidnappers on his own account.
the old man was typically insisting that he would pay only the portion of the ransom which would be tax-deductible – the boy’s father had to foot the rest.
Since he hadn’t got the million dollars which he had to put towards the ransom, Big Paul would lend it to him, at 4 per cent interest, computed annually.
so he stuck to his demand that his son should pay the rest in regular instalments from his income from the Sarah C. Getty Trust.
At the age of eighty-two, one of the richest men in the world was experiencing a sense of failure.
His confidante and friend Penelope Kitson left him. When she told him she intended getting married once again, to businessman
At one time Gordon and Ann brought the four boys, Peter, Andrew, John and William. On another occasion George’s first wife, Gloria, brought her daughters, Anne, Claire and Caroline. And Ronald and his blonde wife, Karin, came with Christopher, Stephanie, Cecile and Christina. Gail and her children were regularly invited to Sutton Place for the weekend.
Gordon had been appointed along with Lansing Hays as a trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust,
In the past he had made himself an isolated figure in the interests of secrecy and strength – but now his isolation merely left him lonely.
even the terror of mortality that never left him.
the favourite vice of old age – anticipatory meanness. One of the few things that could still excite him was his will.
Like his secretary, Barbara Wallace, who stayed up all night holding his hand when he was terrified of dying.
Or his ‘dearest Pen’ (as he called Penelope Kitson), who had been too wise to marry him, and was one of the few who had not allowed his money to dictate her actions or affections.
he still wanted Penelope near him, reading those never-forgotten boys’ adventure books by G. A. Henty.
In the first year after his death the trust produced an income not far short of $4 million each for Paul and Gordon, and the same sum was equally divided between George’s daughters, Anne and Claire and Caroline. Since these five beneficiaries of the trust received all its income,
By the early eighties Paul and Gordon would be receiving $28 million each from the trust every year, while George’s daughters would share the same sum between them.
Apart from money, which by its nature is anonymous, there was little for members of his family to remember him by at all.
