Dimensions
165 x 236 x 36mm
In this unflinching, page-turning memoir Teddy Getty Gaston, now nearly 100 years old, tells the glamorous, often painful, story of her life with the enigmatic oil tycoon John Paul Getty. He swept her off her feet, mentored her, married her, fathered her child, and then abandoned her for the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
Their story began in May of 1935, when Getty walked into the nightclub where Teddy, a noted beauty and blue-blood debutant had a gig singing torch songs. She lived at the Algonquin hotel and sang at the rooftop bar of the Waldorf Astoria. She and Getty began a passionate affair spending their nights on the town at El Morocco ("Elmers") and hobnobbing with the great and the good of 1930s New York-Gypsy Rose Lee, Walter Winchell, Dorothy Lamour. It had always been Teddy's dream to sing opera, and Getty encouraged her to train with the best voice teachers in Europe. It was thus that she found herself in Italy at the end of the 1930s. She and Getty were married in Italy, in 1940. He left her there, at her insistence, though her half-Jewish ancestry made her especially vulnerable in Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, to continue her training. She was imprisoned by the fascists and then held in Siena with foreign journalists for more than a year. It would be two years before she saw Getty again.
Returning to the United States, Teddy reunited with Getty and moved to Malibu, next door to Marion Davies. They had a son called Timothy, but Getty had business in Saudi Arabia and would leave his wife and child behind for years at a time. When Timothy was diagnosed with cancer, Getty failed to return to the United States. For the rest of Timothy's short life, Getty quibbled over hospital bills and was unavailable to either his wife or his son. When their angelic son died at twelve, the marriage was already moribund.
Gaston brings her lively wit and tremendous compassion to bear on this nuanced portrait of a difficult man. The richest man in the world at the time, he was unusually stingy. Though he was terrifically charismatic in person, he was neglectful from a distance, and could never put his family ahead of his work. Nevertheless, Teddy remained steadfastly his friend until he died in 1976. This is a remarkable look at the twentieth century from the vantage point of one of the century's most intriguing couples.
