In early 1973, a pair of young German twins—dark-haired, pale-skinned beauties who looked like Alpine forest sprites—found themselves on the beach at Sperlonga, the resort on the Tyrrhenian, south of Rome. The women had arrived in Italy the year before in a quest for meaning, beauty, freedom, experience, and adventure in all its forms, indulging in the wild mix of self-discovery and self-escape that typified the era. The sisters—as if touched by the counterculture gods—were already becoming the bohemian “It girls” of the Eternal City. Their names were Gisela and Jutta, and they were all of 23.

In Rome, they hobnobbed with filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Roman Polanski, novelist Alberto Moravia, and artist Mario Schifano (who fell in love with Jutta). Fellini wanted to make a movie with them, but couldn’t find them. (They had no phone or fixed address—so bourgeois.) At night, they mixed with a mad array of characters on the margins, sometimes dangerously so. As Jutta would put it, “At lunchtime we had a classy lunch with Bertolucci; in the evening we sat with robbers in the street.”

And all the while they took photographs—both selfies and shots of everyone around them, the known and the unknown—and posed for countless more by the likes of Claudio Abate and Robert Freeman, who had shot the Beatles for the cover of Rubber Soul. In a way, they were Warholian creatures (in fact, the Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey was among their pals in Rome), although an ocean away from Warhol, living a life of perpetual performance. For the twins, the photographic image made existence not just a private experience but the gift of an indelible moment shared with the world.

They were Gisela and Jutta (soon to be known in their multifarious careers as Gisela Getty and Jutta Winkelmann), already becoming famous in Germany. And these kosmische Blumenkinder—“cosmic flower children”—made Italy their playground.

At Sperlonga, the sisters took a break from it all. They slept on the beach and gathered mussels for their scant meals. In this time of youthful exploration, “eating wasn’t important,” said Gisela, now 69, when I visited her in Munich recently. But there was one thing they ate on the beach that did alter them forever: LSD. Gisela told me this psychedelic experience was “the biggest moment” in their young lives. The twins tripping, staring at each other, melting into each other: “It was a moment of realization—reality really is love and the spirit. I saw Jutta and her amazing beauty and vice versa, you know?” The idea of these look-alikes staring at each other while on acid: it’s, well, trippy. “All boundaries kind of disappeared,” Gisela recalled. “I thought, Am I looking at her or am I her looking at me? Everything was just beautiful. We saw the light in everything. We felt we have to bring it into the world.”

They vowed to live their lives as “living theater”: existence itself would be art. And yet, what they couldn’t have anticipated was just how public that private world would soon become. In 1973, they would make a startling appearance on the global stage when Gisela’s boyfriend, J. Paul Getty III, the 16-year-old rebel grandson of a man considered to be the richest in the world, was kidnapped in Rome. The boy would be subjected to a five-month ordeal that famously included the severing of his right ear, which his kidnappers packaged and mailed to an Italian newspaper. Gisela and Paul would marry nine months after Paul’s release.

The kidnapping of Paul Getty has lately swung back onto the pop-culture radar, thanks to Ridley Scott’s 2017 film All the Money in the World and to Danny Boyle’s recently premiered 10-episode FX series, Trust. The two projects mine this outlandishly gruesome affair for style, suspense, and terror, helping themselves to generous “inspired by” liberties along the way. The extended Getty family—including Gisela and her two children, the actor and musician Balthazar Getty and the activist and documentary producer Anna Getty—have made a pact to not discuss these dramatizations with the media: the spotlight inevitably falls on scandal and tragedy. Yet the saga of Gisela and her twin sister, Jutta—virtually unknown in America—rekindles the strange glow of that bygone, free-spirited era. “At that time,” Gisela once said, “we felt like God’s children.”

I met up with Gisela in a tiny jewel box of an Italian bistro in Schwabing, Munich’s version of the West Village, where she’s kept one apartment or another since the early 1990s. It was hard not to notice the many eyeballs in the room straying her way: she is conspicuous, vaguely mystical, with a drizzle of white hair, eyes that retain a coal-black sparkle, Pradas on her feet. More to the point: she is known here. She is one of Die Zwillinge—the twins. Gisela and Jutta are still countercultural icons in Germany, a duo who lived large and whose exploits, from Munich to Rome to Los Angeles, have the capacity to provoke astonishment, pride, wonderment, head-shaking, eye-rolling. They’re the subjects and authors of books and photo exhibitions and documentaries, of newspaper interviews and profiles. They’ve worked as filmmakers, photographers, journalists, actresses.

When Jutta died last year, after a cancer battle (which she documented in a harrowing graphic novel), it was news—and understandably devastating for Gisela. “I never fell for anyone,” Gisela told the German newsmagazine Stern at the time. “I almost never managed to say to someone, ‘I love you.’ It always felt like a lie. That would have seemed like a betrayal of my sister.” When I asked Balthazar about his mother’s bond with her twin, he said, “That’s always been her primary relationship. But I’ve never felt any hurt or resentment around that, like a ‘What about me?’ sort of thing. I just see that as some alien shit I don’t understand.”

The twins came from an upstanding family in the provincial city of Kassel, Germany. Jutta was older by 20 minutes. Their father, Julius Schmidt, had been an SS officer in the war, as well as a Sunday painter and a columnist who wrote about his passion, hunting, in the local paper. The war had left him profoundly unmoored, ashamed at the atrocities of the Third Reich and yet devastated by the failure of Germany’s noble culture to colonize the world. Their mother, Ruth (née Winzenburg), came from what Gisela refers to as “a very old family.” Equestrian pursuits were emphasized.

The identical-twin daughters embraced the “make love, not war” spirit of 1968 (to their father’s dismay) and packed a lot into their young lives before they ever set foot in Rome. They infiltrated the ranks of Deutsches hippiedom, organizing one of Germany’s first peace demonstrations, snapping photographs everywhere they went, and taking inspiration from Kommune 1, the Berlin experiment in living that pushed back against traditional family structure and uptight stuff like bathroom doors. The group’s best-known exploit was the so-called Pudding Assassination, a thwarted plot to “bomb” Vice President Hubert Humphrey during a state visit in 1967. Theirs was the shaggy, friendly, inward-looking alternative to the bomb-throwing militancy of the anti-government Baader-Meinhof gang, which Gisela and Jutta found to be a turnoff.

The precocious twins had been in and out of relationships, the unconventional contours of which matched their anti-Establishment zeal. Barely out of their teens, Gisela married the experimental filmmaker Gerhard Büttenbender, while Jutta married another one, Adolf Winkelmann. The four set up a film-production collaborative. Gisela and Jutta’s moviemaking turned heads: while they were still in art school in Kassel, they co-directed an aggressively boring, extreme-vérité picture (Heinrich Viel) about a Volkswagen factory worker that Gisela proudly calls “unwatchable.” It won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen film festival.

The twins arrived in Rome in 1972. That year, Gisela had met and married her second husband, Rolf Zacher, a handsome young German actor. Their daughter, Anna, was born in Rome that October, and the relationship quickly went into remission. (The baby was bundled up and sent back to the safety and stability of Kassel.) The following spring, Paul Getty caught sight of Gisela and Jutta and, like Fellini, was captivated. The three became inseparable. They moved into a rough basement apartment in Trastevere, Rome’s Left Bank, that they called the Dungeon, “sleeping, the three of us, in one bed,” Gisela recalls. “There wasn’t more than holding hands.” Even so, Gisela and Paul fell in love; Jutta, the twins decided, would hold out for Bob Dylan, the man she called “our creator.”

Young Paul was a freckle-faced, redheaded imp, up for anything; he was his grandfather’s favorite and a self-described “awful snot.” He’d grown up in Rome, where his father, Paul junior, had been given a post at Getty Oil Italiana in 1958. Paul III was well read, well traveled, liked a toot of cocaine, and knew his way around the city’s most refined palazzi and its most ragged fringes, befriending low-level mafiosi and hustlers. These nocturnal companions were crude, coarse, and dangerous, but at least they weren’t straitlaced bores. “Paul really wanted to get out of the expectations of being the heir,” Gisela says. “He was incredibly intelligent, but he also was shy and insecure.”

On July 9, 1973, in Piazza Navona, Paul popped the question to Gisela, seven years his elder. Paul knew her as “Martine,” a nom de révolutionshe’d picked up in Germany. She accepted. They made plans to meet later back in Piazza Navona to celebrate with friends.

Paul never arrived. He bounced around town that night (hanging out with Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, and Mick Jagger), bought a Mickey Mouse comic book, and, in the small hours of July 10, was staring at the carved face of a fountain near Piazza Farnese, when, as the world soon learned, he was pistol-whipped, chloroformed, blindfolded, and thrown into a white car by a band of malavita—small-time gangsters, not unlike the kind he enjoyed fraternizing with and buying drugs from. They drove him into the nether reaches of Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot. The kidnappers asked for $17 million in ransom (almost $100 million today), confident that the richest man in the world would cough up the insane sum to free the boy he called “a bright, red-haired little rascal.” But the 80-year-old Getty—at his baronial seat at Sutton Place, in Surrey, England—refused to pay a dime. “I have 14 grandchildren,” he told the press, “and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” As Paul’s mother, Gail, launched a frantic effort to get her son back, the carabinieri suspected it was all a prank.

Robert Freeman photographed Paul and the twins a day or so before the kidnapping. Gisela and Jutta look like a double exposure of Linda Ronstadt. Paul’s hair is neatly shorn. His left hand reaches up to his left ear. It’s the other ear, the right one, that Paul’s kidnappers would straight-razor off three months later. Gisela has been thinking about that severed, freckled ear for nearly 45 years. “This was just so terrifying, beyond words,” she says. “We were so young and so sensitive. It was just like the cruelest and most unimaginable thing possible.”

Charlie Plummer played Paul in last year’s film about the abduction, All the Money in the World, for which Christopher Plummer (no relation) earned a best-actor Oscar nomination for his stern portrayal of the implacable J. Paul Getty; he’s as unshakable as an Easter Island statue. FX’s Trust has Donald Sutherland playing the elder Getty as a Roman emperor—venal, cruel, capricious, urbane. (Getty, in fact, fancied himself the reincarnation of the emperor Hadrian.) In March, despite the family silence on these projects, Ariadne Getty, one of Paul’s sisters, lashed out against FX through her attorney Marty Singer, accusing the network of a “cruel and mean-spirited defamatory depiction of the Getty family.” The gist of the objection is that the series makes too much of the old chestnut that the family—mainly Paul—was actually in on the kidnapping job.

Gisela confirms that it was, in fact, Paul who first floated the idea of getting himself abducted, with a huge payout. Gisela says that she, Jutta, and Paul cooked up 10 crazy ideas a day—and this was but one more over-the-top notion. The intention, she insists, “wasn’t to make us rich. It was really to bring our vision into the material world.” The vision in question was about harnessing the Getty millions to establish a kind of arts-colony-ashram Utopia in Marrakech, the city where, in the late 60s, Paul’s wayward father had holed up in high gypset style with his gorgeous butterfly of a second wife, Talitha Pol; the couple liked hanging out with the Stones and being photographed for Vogue. (She would die of a heroin overdose in 1971, sending her husband into a years-long tailspin of depression and addiction.)

Gisela has said they wanted to create “Warhol’s Factory, but much more ecstatic and beautiful.” Likewise, Jutta saw the oil fortune—which Paul, due to the nature of the family trust, had as yet no access to—as “the key to our great vision: we wanted to become rich, famous, and enlightened.” The title of their 2008 dual memoir, in fact, reflects this complicated ethos, at once worldly and otherworldly; it translates as The Twins: Or Trying to Kiss Spirit and Money. For them, as for Paul, money meant freedom, a more hassle-free version of the poverty they enjoyed in Rome.

Even so, the sisters, particularly Jutta, were not happy about Paul’s dangerous and quixotic scheme. Gisela suspects Paul blabbed about it to his miscreant friends in Rome’s demimonde, and then backpedaled on the idea. His kidnappers, she believes, may have been spurred by Mafia-style umbrage at having been trifled with, along with the promise of an easy payday.

Gisela knows something about the malavita and their willingness to play at abduction. Shortly before Paul’s disappearance, the twins were themselves taken captive by a posse of gangsters. Paul had brought the sisters to a thug Gisela calls “Catellone” (she’s still hesitant to use his real name), who lured them in by promising to help finance a movie they wanted to make about transvestites. Instead, Catellone placed Gisela and Jutta under a surreal and ugly house arrest that lasted three days. The twins’ armed captors honked endless rails of coke and stripped down to their Y-fronts to gaze at porn projected on the walls. “We have read de Sade,” the twins wrote in their memoir. “But we have never seen a porn movie.” Paul tried to rescue them but was run off.

In Trust, one of the twins grabs a machine gun and goes bananas. Artistic license, Gisela says. But in real life the captive sisters, envisioning their corpses floating in the Tiber, did finally manage to bolt at an opportune moment, leaning on each other for courage. The power of two, Gisela believes, is what allowed them to survive.

As the weeks of Paul’s disappearance stretched on, the twins were hounded by paparazzi, interrogated by the authorities, suspected as possible accomplices. The interminable wait for Paul’s release finally ended on December 15, 1973, his grandfather’s 81st birthday. The ransom had been bargained down to $3.2 million, $2.2 million of which J. Paul Getty, finally caving, paid, having calculated that amount to be the tax-deductible limit. Young Paul’s father, Paul junior, in a drug funk and largely estranged from reality, chipped in the $1 million difference—a sum the oil tycoon loaned to him at 4 percent interest.

Gisela and Jutta caught wind of the news and hightailed it to a telegraph office, wiring Paul a simple message: YOU WON. (Nine men would be arrested for the crime; two were convicted.) When Paul rang his grandfather at Sutton Place to thank him for paying the ransom, the elder Getty was afraid to come to the telephone, thinking it might be rigged to blow up or otherwise do him harm. They conducted their brief conversation through an aide.

Nine months later, Paul, aged 17, and Gisela, 24, were married near Siena, where Paul’s mother had a house. Gisela says Paul would never speak to her in detail about his months in captivity.

For the past 17 years, Gisela has lived most of the time in a cottage in the Austrian Alps, near Innsbruck, shuttling into Munich to be with Jutta (she was extremely involved in her sister’s care) and to commune with “the Harem.”

The ironically named group, which Jutta helped to found in 1976, has generally consisted of four women and a man: Rainer Langhans, a rock-star-like veteran of Kommune 1, who was once the partner of Uschi Obermaier, the Über-hippie pinup, actress, and icon of the 1968 protest era. The Harem’s informal motto, as Langhans once said, is “How to live best, how to live properly.” What that yields in practice is a mercilessly self-questioning yet emotionally supportive family, in which the members ritualistically share their darkest insecurities, fears, and hatreds—even of one another. Indeed, Gisela and Jutta were often at each other’s throats, riled by competition and jealousy and what Gisela calls their “schizophrenia that has become flesh.” In the Harem, Gisela says, to “go into heaven you have to cross through hell.” It is no New Age bubble bath, in other words, but it does have a pranksterish side: the group would occasionally pose together naked in order to shock the Establishment. To this day, the Harem, Gisela says, demands rigor and a certain ascetic outlook. “I’m a monk,” she says, “but I’m not dressing like a monk.”

Gisela and Jutta’s questlike approach to life—what Balthazar calls “this constant pursuit”—rubbed off on the kids. Jutta’s son, the filmmaker and novelist Severin Winzenburg (who has called the Harem “a youth clique in old age”), has collaborated on video projects with his cousin Balthazar, who landed his first big film role, in Lord of the Flies, at age 14. Their closeness and avant-garde sensibility are a testament to the solidity of the family that Gisela and Jutta—far from conventional mothers—created. (Jutta’s daughter is the actress Karline Lisk.) Gisela’s daughter, Anna, whom Paul adopted, is a documentary producer, green-living advocate, yoga teacher, organic chef, and the founder of Pregnancy Awareness Month. If she embodies the yin of the ‘68 spirit, espousing social commitment and inner truth, it is Balthazar who embodies the yang: creativity, individuality, rebellion. “Having that curiosity about spirituality and never being shamed about anything I was ever curious about,” Anna says, “that was from my mom.” Balthazar adds, “I continually learn from her about how to be a better person and a better parent.” Each of them has four kids, who, he says, adore their “kickass grandmother.”

Gisela and Paul arrived in L.A. in late 1974, not long after Paul had appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. There, they were reality-star curiosities before the reality-star age. Barbra Streisand invited them to her house for her annual holiday party; Keith Richards and Ron Wood would turn up at the Chateau Marmont, where the couple were living, and spirit Paul away on undisclosed adventures. One day, Gisela ran into Leonard Cohen in the hotel’s lobby. The poet-songwriter sized her up and said, “Who are you?” They became lifelong pals, with Gisela creating indelible photographs of him over the decades.

Balthazar was born in January of 1975, and Gisela and Paul moved to Laurel Canyon, amid redwood decks and eucalyptus trees. Jutta flew over from Germany with the two-year-old Anna, their travel paid for by Elmer Valentine, co-founder of the fabled Sunset Strip nightspot the Whisky a Go Go. It was a time of family idyll. Paul and Gisela would rent horses and trot away into the Santa Monica Mountains with the kids squeezed onto the saddles. Anna Getty recalls, “My parents brought us everywhere. We were sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap at Dan Tana’s at midnight or partying at Timothy Leary’s house and waking up under coats.” (The twins made a documentary about Leary in the 1990s.) The actress Sally Kirkland baptized the kids in the backyard garden. Balthazar remembers Paul tucking him inside his leather jacket and taking him zooming up and down Laurel Canyon on a Harley. From time to time, a teenage Sean Penn babysat.

Yet the twins and Paul continued on their unique paths. For Paul, forever coping with trauma, this meant a slide into heroin addiction. Though Gisela would never give up on her husband (as was also the case when her son had his own struggles decades later), she couldn’t really relate. The spirit-seeking twins hated heroin. “We belong to the psychedelic order,” Gisela once said. “Our souls wanted to fly.”

At some point in the 70s haze, the sisters befriended actor Dennis Hopper, another of their counterculture heroes and, like the twins, a compulsive photographer. He asked them along to a blowout at the Malibu pad of ex-Byrds guitarist Roger McGuinn, who, around that time, was touring with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. The twins dropped acid for the occasion. Soon Jutta was lying on the grass and gazing up at the sky when the face of Bob Dylan—the man earmarked as her future husband—came into view. He said he’d like to draw her, and her sister too. Jutta was mesmerized.

After a while—as Jutta would describe the scene in the twins’ memoir—he asked, “Are you all right?” She managed to get out a Dylan pun: “Big grass bed” (as in “lay across my”). The singer laughed, but his eyes showed little in the way of mirth. When Dylan made a rather probing comment about her German background, Jutta meekly responded that she was “Hitler’s daughter,” gripped deep inside by the guilt of her father’s participation in the war and mindful of the singer’s Jewish heritage. The notion of a bad trip seems to have been invented for a situation precisely like this one. Dylan took her hand. “I feel as if an iron ring that enclosed me came loose,” Jutta recounted. “Everything that was buried inside of me, like a secret monster, escaped into the warm night.” At the end of the encounter (which would not have been out of place in the Harem), Dylan gave Jutta his home phone number. When she called the next day, a woman answered. Jutta hung up. That’s the closest they ever came to getting married.

By April 1975, Paul and Gisela were already in arrears on the Laurel Canyon house. “All the money had gone into drugs,” Gisela says. In June, Paul got busted for stealing a pickup truck in Malibu, a goofball move. There were late nights at the Roxy. One photo in Gisela’s collection shows her there with Dylan, Sally Kirkland, Robert De Niro, and actress-singer Ronee Blakley; in another, she’s with the inspired combination of Leonard Cohen and Devo. There were jaunts to London where, Gisela recalls, she first exposed Jagger to the Sex Pistols. Meanwhile, she says, Paul was having affairs all over the place, the most notable being with Patti Smith, who, in 1976, described their connection: “We’re both walleyed.” (She wrote a beautiful poem for Paul called “Indian Rubies.”) The two became part of the scene at Max’s Kansas City, in New York.

For her part, Gisela was having an affair of her own—with Dennis Hopper. She drove out to Taos, New Mexico, to visit him at his adobe fiefdom of drugs, tequila, guns, paranoia, and general mayhem. Hopper, Gisela says, was an angel one minute, the “Antichrist” the next. On one occasion, he called for his machine gun, vowing to shoot everyone in the house, including Gisela, to pieces. Having survived an armed abduction and the kidnapping of her husband, Gisela’s response was basically: I got this. She fetched the machine gun. “I gave it to him,” Gisela says. “And he started to cry.” Situation defused. She remained close to Hopper throughout his life and took some stunning portraits of him.

As the 1970s wound down, Gisela appeared in an episode of the TV sitcom Barney Miller (talk about surreal), while Paul, who’d begun dating a woman from a Tuscan winemaking family, was getting deeper into drugs. “I’m watching my own destruction,” Gisela says Paul told her, “and I can’t stop it.” She decided it would be best to escape to San Francisco and set up a normal (relatively speaking) household with the kids. She would eventually write plays, getting involved in the Magic Theater there, where Sam Shepard cut his teeth. Gisela and Paul had been cast in Wim Wenders’s The Shape of Things, but they were clearly fracturing. In the spring of 1981, Paul took a prescribed medicinal cocktail—intended to get his drinking and drugging under control—and fell into a coma. The “accident,” as the family calls it, left Paul in a permanent state of paralysis—wheelchair-bound and nearly blind, but with his brain function intact.

Despite the fact that Paul and Gisela separated in 1986 and divorced in 1993, family members attest that the two maintained a bond until Paul died, at age 54, in 2011, with Gisela at his side—as she would be with Jutta, at the end of her life. In his own strange way, Gisela says, Paul had managed to escape the cast-iron bubble of being a Getty. “It’s like you have to destroy your body,” Gisela says, “to be really able to step out.”

In the sparse Munich apartment of a onetime partner—a mathematician—Gisela talks for nearly eight hours, day turning to night. She discusses the past, the present, and the future. She mentions the film she and her nephew Severin are working on, about her sister’s illness and death; her fascination with Varanasi, the Indian city of the dead; her appreciation of the Internet as a “consciousness machine.” There remains an energizing aura of adventure about her.

The British filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, who has just released an acclaimed documentary about the Studio 54-era icon Grace Jones, has been Gisela’s friend for 20 years. She says, “When Gisela is deciding to do something crazy she’ll say, ‘Ja, I’m going to ride the tiger!’ ” Fiennes admires Gisela’s willingness to keep riding that tiger—as she approaches 70. Even today, when faced with a challenge, Fiennes says, she often finds herself wondering, “What would Gisela say or do?”

I keep wondering what Jutta would say or do. The sister’s absence is palpable—a presence in itself. Gisela insists her twin never feels far away, much like the spirit of ‘68, or Paul. “I do feel her now, all the time,” she says, with a single candle flickering on the coffee table before her. “I feel something very good is always coming from her. She’s encouraging me, making me braver. Even if it’s just my imagination.”