Alone together : my life with J. Paul Getty /

A memoir looks back on the life of the fifth and final Mrs. Getty. I'VE often wondered what it takes to be the wife of a captain of industry. What combination of boundless optimism and self-delusion is necessary to live with someone whose real lover is his work, who cannot turn offhis competitiveness when he walks through the door, whose wealth means his opportunities and temptations with women are somewhere between "a lot" and "infinite," and whose children and wife exist as a beautiful backdrop to what he considers his real accomplishments? Well, here in "Alone Together," Teddy Getty Gaston , the fifth, final and longestlasting wife of the billionaire J. Paul Getty, gives some sort of answer. It's a blueprint for living peacefully with a brilliant and monstrously selfish man. Until Marla Maples produces her inevitable love letter to the Donald, this book (written with Digby Diehl) is the kindest, most understanding memoir of a narcissist you'll ever read. And it's still appalling. Teddy Lynch met Getty in 1935 , when she was a deb and a chanteuse at the New Yorker nightclub. She had no idea who he was, and when her friends said, "He's in oil," Lynch asked: " 'Oil'? What show is that?" Perhaps she had some reason other than money to look at a man 20 years her senior . She came from a home of privilege and secrets; her stepfather , a success and a drunk , sexually assaulted her at night , once telling her she deserved it because she was "nothing but a dirty little Jew! Like your father!" Yet she loved the man she knew as Dad. So when another father figure came along - a man almost twice her age when they met , who claimed to value her Jewish heritage (her father and grandfather were prosperous merchants in Chicago) - she perhaps thought she could get the approval she craved. And for a while there , she did. Or at least she kept the attention of the great man with her russet beauty , ebullient nature and fine singing voice. Getty was a person who looked at everything as an investment, including love. As he wrote in his own autobiography in 1976 , "I offered to finance her lessons - on a loan basis. She would repay me from her future earnings." This was no adorable joke between them; Teddy, who had bit parts in several movies and sang the uncredited opera sequence in Billy Wilder's "Lost Weekend," would eventually pay 10 percent of whatever she earned to the notoriously pennypinching Getty . They married in 1939 , and she studied opera in Italy until Mussolini joined forces with Japan and declared war on the United States . Teddy was arrested by the Fascists as a suspected spy and, for a time, imprisoned . She says she chose to stay on in Italy, instead of returning home with Getty , to study and to demonstrate her independence . She might have asked herself why, during those two years , Paul did not seem entirely desperate to get her back. But this was not a woman keen on asking questions. Instead, she practiced the First Rule of Marrying a Man on the World Stage: Find something splendid in everything he does. She writes, for example, that he was a wonderful dancer and a great lover . Was it any surprise that women flocked to him, that they - and he - couldn't resist? He was a connoisseur with a most discerning eye; we do not hear the stories about his apparent admiration for Hitler in the late 1930s or the interest he reportedly showed in treasures the Nazis had stolen from Jews . Getty provided her with glorious houses and a glorious life - on his terms (which for years meant keeping him and their young son, Timmy , as far away from each other as possible). So what if one of the richest men in the world wouldn't pay the taxes on her mother's ancestral home in New England when she fell on hard times? "Paying Mom's debts and saving her home was not Paul's business, . . . and I should have realized I was acting like a spoiled brat to think he should." It took more than a decade for Teddy to see that perhaps that admirable frugality had a dark side. After securing an enormous tract of oil-rich Saudi Arabian land , Getty lived for years in Europe. He wrote self-pitying letters claiming profound loneliness and love for Teddy and Timmy , while refusing to let them visit . In 1952 , when Timmy was 6 , the child fell ill with a brain tumor . It quickly blinded him . Getty flew mother and son to New York to see specialists, promised to visit and never did . Then came the admonishing letters - over the pony she bought for the boy's exercise (which he insisted she pay for out of her allowance "with reasonable promptitude" ) and the medical bills. "I'm glad that you realize they are enormous," he wrote later that year . "You should always, if there is time, and there was in this case, have an agreement in advance as to what the charges will be. Some doctors like to charge a rich person 20 times more than their regular fee." The child died at 12 . Getty regretted he couldn't make it to the funeral , and Teddy divorced him soon thereafter. "Alone Together" is a private memoir of a public man, and a very whitewashed one. We hear about the little Donald Duck stuffed toys they exchanged , but nothing substantive about his business, his relationships with world leaders, his other wives and children, or the famous kidnapping and mutilation of his grandson and the ransom Getty bargained down before finally paying. (From about $17 million to $2.2 million - just the amount that would be tax-deductible.) Much here reflects the fond, and I suspect unreliable, memories of a lovely and loving, now 99-year-old woman. But then, perhaps we shouldn't always read memoirs for facts; we should sometimes read them to get closer to the subject. One scene speaks volumes: In a rare visit home for Getty, Timmy brings his dad into the living room to play him his first piece on the piano. This is how Teddy remembers the moment: "Paul was visibly affected by Timmy's concentrated effort, and applauded him. Then, it was his turn to surprise Timmy, and he sat down at the piano and played a Rachmaninoffprelude for us. Timmy watched his father, intently fascinated. When Paul finished, Timmy walked over to the piano, took one of Paul's hands in his tiny little hands, and said, 'Oh - thank you, Daddy, for such an excellent concert.' " Timmy would have been 3 years old at the time. I do not believe a word of this story, except the part where the man who could not let anyone best him shows his son how a real man plays. ALONE TOGETHER My Life With J. Paul Getty By Teddy Getty Gaston with Digby Diehl Illustrated. 398 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99. The author and J. Paul Getty at a nightclub in 1937. This book provides a blueprint for living peacefully with a brilliant and monstrously selfish man. Judith Newman is the author of "You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman" and a co-author of Samantha Geimer's memoir, "The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski," which will be published later this month .

Though she was one of New York's bona fide debutantes, Teddy Lynch's life was not all cotillions and roses. Desperate to escape the sexual predations of her alcoholic stepfather, she was determined to launch a career as a cabaret singer in Manhattan. When she began singing at the renowned Stork Club, Teddy thought she might be on her way to making her dreams come true. In the audience one night was none other than burgeoning oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, and their meeting was a classic case of love at first sight. While their whirlwind courtship and marriage spanned continents and survived wars, Teddy came to realize that she had only traded one life of privilege and physical abuse at the hands of her lecherous stepfather for another one of privilege and psychological abuse at the hands of her miserly, adulterous husband. Now nearly one hundred years old, Teddy vividly reflects on the tumultuous days of her marriage to the world's first billionaire and the tragedies that defined their lives.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

Tycoon J. Paul Getty, as passionate in bed as he was about building an oil empire, jotted mashed notes to his wife while on the road, as shared in this intimate self-portrait from socialite and singer Theodora (Teddy) Gaston, the fifth and final Mrs. Getty. Sexually abused by her stepfather and rejected by her first love for being half Jewish, young Teddy found success as a nightclub chanteuse in the 1930s. While performing at the Club New Yorker, young Teddy met Paul, her future husband. As gossip columnists spread rumors of the romance, Getty, who vowed never to remarry for the fifth-time, bought her an engagement ring. In 1940 they tied the knot in Mussolini's Rome. Following the ceremony the groom zoomed back to the U.S. while the young bride continued taking voice lessons abroad. Despite prolonged separations and her observation that he "wasn't the easiest of husbands," Teddy gave birth to a son in 1946. Sadly, within five years the marriage was on the rocks and their son developed an optic tumor, which cut his life tragically short. With the help of Diehl, Gaston offers an intimate diary of the hectic love life by a woman who is about to turn 100 and wants to set the record straight. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.