BETRAYED BY HIS BLOOD T
Billionaire Getty refused to pay ransom for own grandson – until the teen’s ear arrived in the mail. A new film tells the shocking tale
HE upcoming film “All the Money in the World” has been garnering lots of buzz for the scandal around it. A month ago, the filmmakers decided to erase star Kevin Spacey — tainted by accusations of sexual misconduct — and replace him with Christopher Plummer. With the movie due to hit theaters Dec. 22, Plummer was still filming in Italy as recently as this past week.
But the scandal the movie is based on is just as shocking. In 1973, John Paul Getty III — the 16year-old grandson of oilman J. Paul Getty, then said to be the world’s richest man, worth $1.2 billion (around $9.1 billion today) — was kidnapped in Rome. His abductors demanded $17 million, which his family wouldn’t pay, leading his captors to cut off his right ear.
The ordeal, coupled with terrible neglect, ruined the boy’s life. At just 24, he ended up paralyzed as a result of a drug overdose.
As it turns out, all the money in the world could not save him.
BORN in 1892 to Minnesotan parents in the petroleum business, J. Paul Getty turned mere wealth into billions by buying oilrich land in the Middle East.
But “Old John,” as he came to be called, was a notorious tightwad. So much so that he kept a pay phone at Sutton Place, his 75-acre estate in Surrey, England, so as not to get stuck paying for guests’ calls.
He was equally parsimonious about showing love to his family. “Raising kids . . . would have gotten in the way of his mistresses,” John Pearson, author of “Painfully Rich,” on which the movie is based, told The Post.
Old John had five wives and as many sons. He particularly disdained his third boy, John Paul Getty Jr., and saw him as a dopeaddled hippie. “John Paul [Jr.] was cultured,” Pearson said. “But he was a drug addict and a layabout.”
Old John did not meet his grandson John Paul III — the oldest of four children that John Paul Jr. had with first wife Gail — until the boy was 11. Improbably, the old man was charmed.
But when they met again four years later, Old John was less impressed. It was 1971 and the 15year-old boy, known as Paul, had evolved into a bellbottom-wearing hippie. His father, John Paul Jr., had divorced Gail in 1966 and had been living a bohemian existence with his new wife, model Talitha Pol. They bounced around Rome and Morocco, hung out with the Rolling Stones and smoked opium.
By age 15, Paul had been exposed to the likes of Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger. According to the 2013 biography of Paul, “Uncommon Youth,” by Charles Fox, Gail suspected Paul “had a 24-hour really bad trip on whatever it was that [John Paul Jr.’s mistress] had given him.”
In the aftermath of a 1971 heroin binge, Pol fatally overdosed.
“But [Paul] idolized his father, thought he was a cool guy, even though he was dysfunctional and an emotional wreck,” Pearson said.
Believing that freedom would help her son, Gail allowed Paul to quit school and live in an apartment in Rome so he could pursue a career as a painter. At 16, he was mostly known for partying and nude modeling. Local media dubbed Paul “the Golden Hippie.”
Around 3 a.m., July 10, 1973,, the Golden Hippie was drunk and strolling home on the Piazza Farnese. He stopped at a newsstand to buy the coming day’s paper and a Mickey Mouse comic book.
A car pulled up and three men jumped out, brandishing pistols. They whisked Paul into the car. As he told writer Joe Eszterhas in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview, “I didn’t know if I had f- -ked somebody’s chick or whether they were the cops or whatever.”
Paul got chloroformed and smacked in the head with the butt of a gun before passing out.
The men — part of a ragtag group that included Mafia members, a carpenter and hospital orderly — drove Paul to a cave in southern Italy where he was tied to a stake. A captor said, “Listen, kid, you’re going to be here a long time. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Aday after the abduction, his mother, Gail, received a phone call asking for a ransom of $17 million.
At first, she wondered if the police were right in their assessment that he had himself “kidnapped” to bilk his family for money. In fact, Paul had bragged to friends about a plan for the perfect fake kidnapping. Even the Italian media headlined it a hoax.
Meanwhile, John Paul Jr., in London to escape Italian drug charges related to the death of Pol, was oblivious. “He lived on heroin and chocolate-chip cookies,” Pearson said. “He was out of it and useless.”
For weeks, Gail spun her wheels in trying to raise the money. Meanwhile, Old John provided a cold statement to the media: “I don’t believe in paying kidnappers. I have 14 other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, then I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.”
The kidnappers kept Paul drunk on cheap cognac in the cave. They gave him a radio and a pet bird. Each day he was unchained for an hour of walking and smoking. He tracked days by making small scratches on a rock. After 50 days passed with no action, the kidnappers became agitated.
Early one October morning, around three months into his ordeal, Paul received a haircut from his kidnappers. The next morning, he was fed a meal of five steaks and pressed to eat as much as he could. Afterward, the teen was blindfolded and a handkerchief was placed in his mouth. He bit hard as the men secured his arms, legs and head.
Then, they sliced off his right ear with the single sweep of a razor-sharp blade.
“I was vomiting,” Paul told Eszterhas, recalling how the wound became badly infected and the penicillin he was given poisoned him. “I didn’t even move for about 10 days. I pissed myself all the time.”
His ear was wrapped in a bag, with strands of his hair and a note that said unless the ransom was paid within 10 days, “we shall send you the other ear.” It was sent to Il Messaggero newspaper in Rome. But a national postal strike meant the gruesome parcel took three weeks to reach its destination.
Upon its arrival, Gail and lawyer Giovanni Jacovoni raced to the paper’s office. She took one look at the ear, recognized the freckles, and said it belonged to her son.
After Polaroids of Paul, showing his emaciated body and missing ear, were left for Il Messaggero reporters to retrieve from the side of a highway, the family negotiated the ransom down to $2.9 million.
Grudgingly, Old John put up $2.2 million — the maximum that could be tax deducted — and loaned the remaining $700,000 to his son, providing the sum be paid back at 4 percent interest. Pearson suspects the debt was never repaid.
ON Dec. 12, five months after Paul was nabbed, money changed hands at a rendezvous in the Italian countryside. Three days later, he was released. He began walking and was soon picked up by the police and his mother.
At the main police station in Rome, a mob of reporters awaited the teen’s arrival. Paul described the homecoming as “absolute insanity.” A week or so later, back in Rome, he
was as famous as a Rolling
I don’t believe in paying kidnappers. I have 14 other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, then I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” — J. Paul Getty, on the ransom demanded for his grandson John Paul Getty III (above)
Stone, complete with screaming girls and fan mail. “All the letters,” Paul told Eszterhas, “basically said, ‘Give me your c--k.’ ”
He called his grandfather to thank him for putting up the money. But Old John would not take the call. Through an intermediary, his final words to Paul were, “Good luck.”
Soon after Paul’s release, he met with Eszterhas in Berlin and Rome. Reportedly, Paul demanded $500 for the interview and $2,000 for a photo session. “I heard that he was doing cocaine, lots of cocaine,” Eszterhas said. “He carried himself like a rock star, but he needed money. I had to put cash down on the table when we started the interview and more when we finished it.”
Eventually, nine men associated with the ’Ndrangheta organizedcrime group were arrested for the kidnapping, with two later convicted. Only $85,000 of the $2.9 million was recovered.
A year later, in 1974, at age 18, Paul married photographer Martine Zacher, 24. His grandfather disinherited him, not liking that Zacher was older — and five months pregnant. The couple’sp son, Balthazar, now 42, went on to become a successful ac
tor in such films as 1990’s “Lord of the Flies” and the ABC series “Brothers & Sisters.” (They also had a daughter, Anna.)
Fatherhood did little to mellow Paul. His family lived in a house behind the Whisky a Go Go on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Author Fox wrote of him being jumpy and doing speedballs (a mix of heroin and cocaine). By this point, Paul had no money himself, but family members covered all the checks he could bounce.
In 1981, after a night of methadone, valium and alcohol, Paul, 25, suffered a stroke that left him a quadriplegic. Still, Eszterhas re- called hearing about him being rolled into a Carlos’n Charlie’s nightclub in his wheelchair.
Paul and Gail sued John Paul Jr. for $28,000 per month to cover Paul’s care. After a long period of poor health, Paul died in 2011 at 54. By then, his father and grandfather had both passed on.
Although the Getty name endures on gas stations across the US — as well as through Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Villa, both among the world’s finest art museums — the family oil business was sold for $10.1 billion to Texaco in 1984. In 2015, Forbes magazine estimated the Getty fortune to be a diminishing $5.4 billion. That made them the 56th wealthiest family in America — rich but a far cry from Old John’s former top-of-the-heap status.
Pearson thinks Old John would not have been pleased with Hollywood making money off his name.
“The old man would have had the script rewritten for his own ends; he would have tried to shift blame from himself,” he said. “I also think Getty would want to get whatever money he could out of it. That was his
nature.”