Following the child's release after five months (believed to have been in return for a large ransom payment from an enraged grandfather) Gisela Zacher and Paul Getty were in love.
By the time she left Rome for California she and her husband were part of a social network of arts-world celebrities that included Dennis Hopper, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Carlo Ponti and Federico Fellini.
There are reports that it was to get them away from the excesses of the lifestyle she and her husband shared, that Gisela eventually took the children away from their home together to live in a state of "relative normality" in San Francisco.
Matters took a turn for the worse in 1981 after a medically prescribed combination of drugs – allegedly intended to reduce his dependency issues – sent Paul Getty into a coma.
When they realized that the threesome they enjoyed in Rome would not last forever and that Gisela was going to marry Paul Getty, the twins agreed that Jutta would "hold out for Bob Dylan".
[3] In 1976 she teamed up with the film-maker and former communard Rainer Langhans, the photographer Anna Werner and the Photo-model Brigitte Streubel to form a new "principally spiritually oriented self-discovery commune" in Munich.
[20] Gisela Getty "brought money and illustrious contacts" when she joined, and for a time may have distorted the dynamics of the Harem community, but that risk appears to have receded more recently.
His dismissal from Harvard in 1963, followed by frequent arrests during the next couple of decades in connection with his enthusiastic endorsement of (probably illegal) aspects of the drug culture, turned him into a media celebrity.
Critics were underwhelmed that the resulting movie was presented as a "normal" television documentary, without any disclosure that the twins were long-standing friends and admirers of the "High priest of the drug culture".
There was much about the things Leary represented that had fallen out of public favor since the 1970s, and although the film was duly screened on one of the more obscure German television channels, it has subsequently been largely overlooked.
[23] Nevertheless, as is pointed out in the biographical note on Gisela Getty's web page, "Der Tod steht ihnen gut" did win the bronze medal in the "History and Society" category at the 1995 The New Yorker Festival.
In 2008 she published "Die Zwillinge oder Vom Versuch, Geld und Geist zu küssen" (loosely, "The twins: on the attempt to embrace mammon and spirit" ) jointly with her sister, Jutta Winkelmann and the Kassel-born writer-journalist Jamal Tuschick.
[8] For Jutta and Gisela the book is a confessional autobiographical work, dealing with aspects of the twins' lives, as part of the '68 generation, in Kassel, Berlin and Rome.
Rainer Moritz shared with readers of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung his opinion that the book was "interesting principally as a historical record of deluded narcissism" ("...vor allem als historisches Dokument eines verblendeten Narzissmus interessant").
[26] Writing in Der Spiegel, Matthias Matussek had clearly had more fun with the book: "... a devilish cocktail of drug-fueled delirium, gangsterly insanity and sex in the beds of artists ...