Alone Together: My Life with J. Paul Getty

It was 1935. Flame-haired Teddy Lynch finished singing "Alone Together" at the swanky nightclub the New Yorker and left the stage to find a charming stranger at her friends' table. It was Jean Paul Getty, enigmatic oil tycoon and America's first billionaire.

In her passionate, unflinchingly honest memoir of two outsize lives entwined, Theodora "Teddy" Getty Gaston — now one hundred years old — reveals the glamorous yet painful story of her marriage to Getty. As formidable as he was, Teddy was equally strong-minded and flamboyant, and their clutches and clashes threw off sparks. She knew the vulnerable side of Getty — he underwent painful plastic surgery and suffered terrible phobias — that few, if any, saw.

A vivid love story, Alone Together is also a fascinating glimpse into the twentieth century from the vantage point of one of its most remarkable couples. This is how the other half lived — dinner dances, satin gowns, beach houses, hotel suites, first-class cabins on the Queen Mary. Teddy's extra-ordinary life story moves from the glittering nightclubs of 1930s New York City to Mussolini's Italy, where she was imprisoned by the fascist regime, to California in the golden postwar years, where Paul and Teddy socialized with movie stars and the elite.

But life with one of the world's richest men wasn't all glitz and glamour. Though terrifically charismatic in person, Getty grew more miserly as his wealth increased. Worse, he often left Teddy and their son, Timothy, behind for years at a time while he built planes for the war effort in the 1940s or brokered oil deals — he was the first American to lease mineral rights in Saudi Arabia, which made him, at his death, the richest man in the world. Even when Timothy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Getty complained about medical bills and failed to return to the United States to support his wife and son. When Timothy died at age twelve, the marriage was already falling apart.

Teddy's unrelenting spirit, her valiant friendship, and her winning lack of vanity transform what could have been a sob story into a nuanced portrait of a brilliant but stubbornly difficult man and the family he loved but left behind, as well as an enchanting view into a bygone era. This was a life lived from the heart.

Theodora "Teddy" Getty Gaston, born in Chicago in 1913, began singing at the age of sixteen in the chorus of J. J. Shubert's Arms and the Maid and, in the twenties, performed as a torch singer in New York's most prestigious supper clubs. She studied opera in Europe and worked for the New York Herald Tribune during World War II. After a long romance, she married J. Paul Getty, with whom she had one child. During their eighteen-year marriage, Teddy acted in Forgotten Women and Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, and she started a water company, a candy company, and a children's charity in her son's name. In 1990, she wrote her first book, The Mark of the Eagle.

Digby Diehl is one of the most trusted and successful literary collaborators in America. He has written, cowritten, rewritten, researched, and edited more than three dozen books. He was the founding editor of the original Los Angeles Times Book Review and previously served as a book columnist for AARP The Magazine and as a literary correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America. Diehl is currently the book editor of The Rotarian and writes articles and reviews for publications such as Esquire, the New York Times, People, and TV Guide. He lives in Pasadena with his wife, Kay Beyer Diehl.