In August 1958, a mother flew west across America with the body of her twelve-year-old son. The boy’s father was in Switzerland, at a villa on a lake. The mother was Teddy Getty, once a supper club singer. The father was J.

Paul Getty, the oilman Fortune had named America’s wealthiest man the year before. He could buy almost anything on earth. He could not make the journey his dying son needed. Teddy Getty was born Louise Dudley Lynch in Chicago in 1913 and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Everyone called her Teddy. By sixteen she was singing in a Broadway chorus, and by the early years of the Depression she was a torch singer in New York’s supper clubs, earning twenty-five dollars a week plus a free meal. But she wanted opera. In May 1935, she finished her set at The New Yorker, a fashionable club on East 51st Street, and joined her brother and her closest friend at their table.

A stranger was sitting with them, introduced simply as Paul from California. He was J. Paul Getty, forty-two years old, already a millionaire many times over from Oklahoma oil. He told her she should study opera seriously, that she would make a wonderful Carmen.

When she asked what he did for a living and her friend answered, “Paul is in oil,” she asked, “What show is that? ” The table laughed. She felt like a fool. The marriage that followed was shaped by departures from its first afternoon.

They wed in Rome in November 1939, at the Palazzo Senatorio, high on the Capitoline Hill. The bride was twenty-six, the groom forty-six, and this was his fifth wedding. After the lunch at the Ambassador Hotel, the groom rose and hurried to catch a train to Naples, where the liner Conte di Savoia was waiting to carry him home to New York. There was no honeymoon.

Teddy stayed in Rome for her singing lessons, and her husband returned to his business in California. When Italy entered the war at Germany’s side in June 1940, an American woman living alone in Rome needed a reason to remain. She signed on as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. It kept her papers in order, and it put her name on a list.

On December 7, 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor. Four days later, Italy declared war on the United States. That same month, the fascist authorities came for Teddy Getty. The suspicion was espionage.

The place of her confinement was Siena. Her country was now the enemy, her family was across the Atlantic, and her husband was on the other side of a war, mourning the death of his mother in Los Angeles. In the early summer of 1942, her release finally came. She sailed home aboard the Swedish ship Gripsholm, a neutral vessel carrying American diplomats and civilians out of the war zone.

She had been gone for nearly three years. She did not go to New York or Los Angeles. She went to Tulsa, where Paul Getty had taken over production at the Spartan Aircraft Corporation for the war effort, working from a small bungalow near the factory. On her first morning there, she woke up alone.

On the table was a note: “Darling, I’m at the factory. Have a good breakfast. Love, Paul. ” It is perhaps the most honest document of their entire marriage.

She had crossed an ocean and survived a prison to reach him, and on the first morning he was already somewhere else. After the war, they settled into a beach house in Santa Monica. Teddy preferred the sea to Oklahoma. In June 1946, she gave birth to a son, Timothy, called Timmy.

He came two months early, weighed five pounds, and was anemic. Paul Getty was fifty-three, and this was his fifth son. By Teddy’s own account, these were the happiest years of the marriage. Asked near the end of her life for her happiest memory of Paul, she chose the beach house in Santa Monica, Paul, Timmy, and herself.

She said it did not last long. Getty’s attention turned to the Neutral Zone, a stretch of desert between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In 1949, he offered the king of Saudi Arabia terms that stunned the industry: nine and a half million dollars in cash, and a million dollars a year for sixty years, whether or not a single barrel was ever found. Most of the oil business predicted it would ruin him.

It took four years for the wells to come in, and for most of those years, Paul Getty was needed somewhere other than a bluff above the Pacific. The trips grew longer, the calls grew later. Teddy, now in her late thirties, put the question to him directly. She told him she was the kind of woman who needed a husband.

His answer has survived: “You do have a husband. It’s just that I can’t always be home. ”

In January 1951, Teddy asked for an end to the marriage. That June, Paul Getty sailed from New York as he had so many times before.

Timmy was five years old. Neither of them knew that summer that he would never set foot in the United States again. Not for business, not for holidays, not for the weddings of his own sons. He would live another twenty-five years, buy a Tudor mansion in England, and fill it with guard dogs, a pair of lions, and the finest art money could find.

But he never came back. In the early 1950s, Timmy began to have trouble with his eyes. He had a tumor growing in his brain. By the time he was six, he had lost his sight.

Paul told Teddy which doctors to see and paid for everything. He promised to come back for the first operation. The operation came, and he did not. Then there was another.

Timmy recovered in a New York hospital, his mother at his bedside, his father on the telephone from the other side of the Atlantic. Teddy’s own words, spoken at the age of ninety-nine, are the plainest record of those years: “I went through two operations in two years and Paul did not come back. ” Even as the operations went on, she wrote, her husband complained about the medical bills. In 1954, the house Paul Getty had bought so that his wife could ride her horses by the ocean opened its doors as the J.

Paul Getty Museum. Visitors could walk its rooms and look at his antiquities, his French furniture, his paintings. He filled it from Europe, crate by crate, sending his treasures home when he would not come home himself. By 1958, there was better news: after some six years of operations, Timmy’s cancer was gone.

He was twelve years old and had survived. What the surgeries had left behind were deep scars across the boy’s face. The doctors suggested a routine cosmetic operation in New York that August. Timmy did not survive it.

The cancer that had threatened him for years was gone; what killed him was the attempt to remove its scars. Teddy’s memory of that summer is brief: “The end of his life was horrifying. ” And then, in eight quiet words, she gave the whole of it: “His death was sudden and Paul was not there. ”

Paul Getty was in Switzerland, staying at the villa of his friend Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza on the shore of Lake Lugano.

He did not come to the funeral. On that point every source agrees. In the same year, the divorce Teddy had requested in 1951 finally became final. The marriage and the child ended together.

In Timmy’s memory, she established a charitable foundation for the care of children and animals. Why did a man who could bargain with kings never once come back to his dying son? The beginning of the answer lies in 1942, on a flight between St. Louis and Tulsa.

According to his biographer, the flight was so harrowing that it left Paul Getty with a morbid fear of flying. From that year until he died, he never again boarded an airplane, not once, in thirty-four years. A man can sail from Europe to New York in a week, and he had done it many times before. In all those years, he did not do it once.

The fear explains why he did not fly. It does not explain why he did not sail. Paul Getty kept a diary for the last sixteen years of his life, writing about oil prices, dinner parties, his dogs, his lions, his visitors. His biographer was given access to those pages.

Among the stock valuations and nightclub visits, there is something no one expected to find. Every year, Getty marked the anniversaries of his family: the birthdays of his long-dead parents, the death of his mother, the death of his favorite dog, and Timmy. On one of those days, the entry is almost nothing at all. Reginato records it: “Walk and think of Timmy.

Timmy. ” That is all. Six words and his son’s name written twice. No explanation, no excuse, no apology.

Just an old man out walking, thinking of a boy he had not seen for the last seven years of that boy’s life. Paul Getty died at Sutton Place in June 1976, at the age of eighty-three. He left the greater part of his vast fortune, not to his family, but to the museum that had begun in the house by the Pacific. A new building had risen on that land, a grand recreation of an ancient Roman villa, opened to the public in 1974.

Getty had paid for every stone of it and never saw it. He was buried on the land he had bought all those years before so that a young wife could ride her horses by the sea. His grave lies at the edge of the grounds, overlooking the Pacific. Beside him lies his eldest son George, and beside them both lies Timothy.

Timmy’s body was moved there in the 1970s. The marker is a simple low slab of marble at the end of a treelined walk, one of the most peaceful spots on the whole estate. He came home for his son at last. It took him eighteen years and his own death to do it.

Teddy outlived him by more than forty years. When she was nearly one hundred, she wrote a book called Alone Together, the title taken from the song that brought them together on the night they met. She died on April 8, 2017, at the age of 103. A week before she died, she listened to the whole of Madame Butterfly, from the first note to the last.

The story of a woman who waits by the sea for a man who has sailed away. He does return in the end, but he returns too late. Teddy had spent a lifetime knowing that story from the inside. Her last words were meant for her daughter: “Be strong, Gigi.

Never quit. ” Up the coast, the ranch he bought her still looks out over the sea.