John Paul Getty III, who died on Saturday at 54, was once the favourite grandson of the world's richest man but, cursed by the trappings of fabulous wealth, never found health nor happiness.
As a tall, freckle-faced youth of 16, he was kidnapped by a gang of Italian petty criminals who blindfolded him and chained him to a stake for five months. Eventually they cut off his right ear as evidence of their willingness to kill him unless a ransom was paid.
Eight years later, and by then addicted to a cocktail of alcohol and hard drugs including heroin and cocaine, Getty was the victim of a near-fatal stroke that left him a quadriplegic, almost blind, and confined to a wheelchair. For the rest of his life, unable even to enunciate his own name, he had to be spoon-fed, dressed, bathed and cared for around the clock by his mother, Gail, and a team of carers.
With only peripheral vision, Getty had problems communicating, and could emit only a high-pitched scream. Worse, his relationship with his father, John Paul Getty II, had broken down when his parent -who in 1976 had inherited a quarter of the Getty Trust, worth at least $1.3 billion -refused to pay his son's medical bills, running at $25,000 a month.
This dysfunctional state of affairs eventually took both Gettys to court in Los Angeles, where Gail appealed for help from her billionaire exhusband. A judge ruled in the son's favour, and Getty junior moved into a house in Beverly Hills which, according to the drugs guru Dr Timothy Leary, was "just a hi-tech hospital disguised as a house".
Getty's predicament meant that he was effectively confined to this gilded medical ward, but occasionally he would break out; on a flying visit to London in the mid-1980s, for example, he spent an evening at Tramp, the nightclub in St James's. But while his confinement led to the breakdown of his marriage, the estrangement from his reclusive anglophile father -invested with an honorary knighthood in 1998 for his charitable works -ended a few years later in reconciliation.
After his death in 2003 Sir John Paul Getty II left the bulk of his fortune, estimated at pounds 200 million, to his second son, Mark, bequeathing Paul chattels worth $80,000 and an unspecified share of a family fund.
By then John Paul Getty III had moved with his mother to Gurthalougha House, a Victorian lodge with its own 100-acre estate on the shores of Lough Derg in Co Tipperary. He had even, in 1999, and along with six other members of his family, become a citizen of the Irish Republic under the controversial "investment for passports" scheme (which has since been abolished).
Latterly John Paul Getty III had lived at Wormsley, his father's mansion in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, set in 3,000 rolling acres, with a mock castle, ornamental lakes, cricket pitch and a speciallybuilt tower which houses a library containing many of the world's oldest and rarest books. John Paul Getty III was born on Nov. 4 1956, the firstborn son of the American John Paul Getty II, and struck his normally misanthropic grandfather, John Paul Getty I, as "a bright, red-haired little rascal -most cheerful and cute." Paul, as the boy was known, spent his childhood in Rome, where his father ran the Italian division of the family oil business. The temptations of la dolce vita proved irresistible, and in 1964 Getty pure divorced Paul's mother, childhood sweetheart Gail Harris, and married Talitha Pol, the beautiful step-granddaughter of the painter Augustus John.
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