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928 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 1991
As a young man, Getty was already launched on a life of wild romance and sexual adventure, with a special predilection for teenage girls. He married five times. But marriage vows were, for him, not even an inconvenience; to engage in some of his more clandestine affairs, he simply operated under a favored and not all that discreet alias, “Mr. Paul.” He liked to travel to Europe because it was less noticed that he was in “transit flagrante” with two or three women at a time. Yet the only true love of his life may have been a French woman, the wife of a Russian consul general in Asia Minor, with whom he had a passionate affair in Constantinople in 1913. He bade what he hoped was a temporary farewell to her on the dock at Istanbul, but then lost contact with her forever in the turmoil of war and revolution that followed. Even sixty years later, whereas he would discuss his five marriages almost technically, as if they were lawsuits, a mere mention of this lady, Madame Marguerite Tallasou, was enough to bring tears to his eyes.