THE CURIOUS KIDNAPPING OF PAUL GETTY

GISELA Getty pauses and chuckles at the sheer chutzpah of the proposition: one of the richest men ever to bestride the planet defrauded of millions of dollars by his favourite grandson and heir. In 1973 the world was transfixed by the kidnapping of Paul Getty, then just 16. As if his mysterious abduction in Rome wasn’t dramatic enough, his miserly grandfather, J Paul Getty, then pointblank refused to pay the ransom. It was only after the kidnappers cut off the teen’s ear that the oil baron grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the kidnappers. And so, five months after his abduction, Paul walked free – minus one ear.

Even though the official conclusion was that the kidnapping was the work of the Italian mafia, for years there’s been another intriguing theory. What if Paul staged his own kidnapping? Exponents of this weird conspiracy theory speculate that Paul planned to use the ransom money to set up a revolutionary counter- culture paradise in Morocco and, for good measure, lure his stingy grandfather, the arch capitalist, out of his lair in Surrey, England, to see how his money was being ethically spent.

If all this sounds like the plot of a film, you’ll understand why British directors Ridley Scott and Danny Boyle were drawn to the extraordinary story, making their own rival screen versions.

Both have tried and, according to Gisela, failed to unravel one of the greatest mysteries to grip the world. For years she’s upheld the Getty family’s strict code of silence but after all the debate sparked by Scott’s acclaimed 2017 drama, All the Money in the World – which, famously, dropped the disgraced Kevin Spacey after shooting was wrapped – and now Boyle’s TV series Trust, which is currently on DStv (channel 115), she feels compelled to speak out.

Gisela (69) knows that doing so will be met with disapproval within the family. “I know it’s, to put it lightly, going to meet with discontent,” she says. But it’s not just the screen versions of the kidnapping that forced Gisela to break cover and tell her story. There was also the death of her glamorous twin sister, Jutta, from cancer last year which forced her to confront her past, as well as her future.

“Boyle and Scott have told their versions, but there’s no female voice,” says Gisela, a filmmaker herself whose memoir is due out next year. “I wanted my own interpretation to be heard.”

IN the 1960s she and her sister seduced an extraordinary roll call of high-profile men with their beauty, intelligence, confidence and conviction. The twins were feted by filmmakers Roman Polanski and Federico Fellini and would entrance Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, among many other famous names.

But it was Paul who captured Gisela’s heart. Just months after the kidnapping they married in a wedding that made headlines globally all over again. Their son Balthazar (now 43), an actor and the leading light of the secretive clan, was born a short while later.

The marriage, however, went into a tailspin long before Paul overdosed at