Alone Together

October 14, 2013
Tycoon J. Paul Getty, as passionate in bed as he was about building an oil empire, jotted mashed notes to his wife while on the road, as shared in this intimate self-portrait from socialite and singer Theodora (Teddy) Gaston, the fifth and final Mrs. Getty. Sexually abused by her stepfather and rejected by her first love for being half Jewish, young Teddy found success as a nightclub chanteuse in the 1930s. While performing at the Club New Yorker, young Teddy met Paul, her future husband. As gossip columnists spread rumors of the romance, Getty, who vowed never to remarry for the fifth-time, bought her an engagement ring. In 1940 they tied the knot in Mussolini's Rome. Following the ceremony the groom zoomed back to the U.S. while the young bride continued taking voice lessons abroad. Despite prolonged separations and her observation that he "wasn't the easiest of husbands," Teddy gave birth to a son in 1946. Sadly, within five years the marriage was on the rocks and their son developed an optic tumor, which cut his life tragically short. With the help of Diehl, Gaston offers an intimate diary of the hectic love life by a woman who is about to turn 100 and wants to set the record straight.

August 15, 2013
A society girl-cum-torch singer's entertaining but overly sentimentalized memoir about the years she spent living with and loving America's first billionaire, J. Paul Getty. Gaston met oil tycoon Getty at a New York nightclub in 1935. From the first moment they danced, the otherwise independent young singer felt like "[she] wanted to belong to this man [she] knew nothing about." Getty, a four-time divorce and patron of the arts, wooed the much-younger Gaston with ardor and encouraged her to pursue a career in opera. He invited her to Europe, where he put her in contact with legendary vocal teachers like Blanche Marchesi and introduced her to a glamorous world of elegance, royalty and artistic refinement that went beyond anything she had known in New York. Getty married Gaston in Rome on the eve of World War II and demanded she break off her studies to return home with him. Gaston remained in Italy to finish her studies, only to become a prisoner of war. She endured hardship and privation for more than two years but also experienced passionate love with a handsome Turk. When Gaston returned to the States in 1942, it was to an increasingly stingy husband who now spent most of his time working, traveling and having affairs that he denied. The couple moved to California, where Gaston gave birth to a son, who died before reaching his teen years. The child brought the drifting partners together only briefly before Getty abandoned his family to pursue the wealth and power that became his governing obsession. Sweeping in scope, the book, which draws throughout from Gaston's and Getty's letters and diaries, offers a glimpse into a privileged world where all that glittered was far from being gold. An epic personal saga for the Harlequin Romance crowd.

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September 15, 2013
Though she was one of New York's bona fide debutantes, Teddy Lynch's life was not all cotillions and roses. Desperate to escape the sexual predations of her alcoholic stepfather, she was determined to launch a career as a cabaret singer in Manhattan. When she began singing at the renowned Stork Club, Teddy thought she might be on her way to making her dreams come true. In the audience one night was none other than burgeoning oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, and their meeting was a classic case of love at first sight. While their whirlwind courtship and marriage spanned continents and survived wars, Teddy came to realize that she had only traded one life of privilege and physical abuse at the hands of her lecherous stepfather for another one of privilege and psychological abuse at the hands of her miserly, adulterous husband. Now nearly one hundred years old, Teddy vividly reflects on the tumultuous days of her marriage to the world's first billionaire and the tragedies that defined their lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)