At 23-years-old, the German twins Gisela and Jutta Schmidt were already becoming famous as “cosmic flower children” of the early 1970s hippie era. They’d made Italy their personal playground and partied with iconic filmmakers, artists and novelists. The pair would eat elegant lunches with director Bernardo Bertolucci, then hang out with street hooligans in the evening. They spent their time taking photographs, both of themselves and everyone around them, and sat with Claudio Abate and Robert Freeman, who had shot the Beatles for the cover of the album Rubber Soul.
Gisela, now 69, told Vanity Fair that the girls—who later became Gisela Getty and Jutta Winkelman—dropped acid on the beach in Sperlonga, and it was then that they vowed to live their lives as “living theater,” and make “existence itself art.” But in 1973, they made appeared on the global stage not as artists, but when Gisela’s boyfriend, J. Paul Getty III, the 16-year-old grandson of one of the richest men in the world, was kidnapped in Rome. He was held for five months, and had his right ear severed and mailed to an Italian newspaper. Nine months after his release, Gisela and Paul married.
Getty’s kidnapping has come back into the spotlight due two high-profile projects: Ridley Scott’s 2017 film All the Money in the World and Danny Boyle’s FX series. And while the extended Getty family has been mum about the dramatizations, Vanity Fair looks into the lesser-known story of Gisela and Jutta’s idiosyncratic lives and how they intersected with so many other famous people’s. “At that time,” Gisela once said, “we felt like God’s children.”
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