3 Review(s)

Manhattan, 1935. It was love at first sight the night J. Paul Getty walked into the exclusive club The New Yorker and saw Teddy onstage, a beautiful blue-blooded debutante, singing torch songs. In Alone Together, Teddy-now nearly 100 - tells the large-than-life true story of their three-decade long love affair and its aftermath, a sweeping saga of passion, adventure, danger, betrayal and tragedy. Moving from the glittering nightclubs of 1930s New York to Mussolini's Italy and California in the golden post-war years, Alone Together brings to life the dazzling time when the Algonquin and "Elmers" (EL Morocco) where the epicenters of New York's most fashionable and famous circles. Gaston recalls stories of hobnobbing with such legendary figures as Gypsy Rose Lee, Walter Winchell, and Dorothy Lamour.She recreates the drama of living in a fascist regime in the dark years of war in Mussolin's Italy where she was studying to become an opera singer - including her yearlong imprisonment with foreign journalists She shares the joy of new motherhood and the heartbreaking pain of loss-both the death of her twelve-year-old son, Timothy, and her husband's eventual abandonment - while living in sunny 1950s Malibu next to Marion Davies. With lively wit and tremendous compassion, Gaston offers a nuanced portrait of a difficult man - a skinflint who was richer than anyone in his time; a terrifically charismatic but neglectful companion; a driven businessman who refused to put his family first. Yet despite these vicissitudes, Teddy remained Getty's steadfast friend until his death in 1976. Fascinating and extraordinary, Alone Together is a remarkable look at the twentieth century through the lives of one of the century's most intriguing couples.