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All her life, Veronica Gettion was a contradiction.

With beauty and a practically perfect figure, she was unsuccessful as a model.

She wanted a happy home, but soon broke up her marriage.

She attracted cultured and interesting friends, but selected underlings for intimates.

She made ambitious plans, yet carried none of them through.

Some said Ronnie wasn't clever, but others declared that she lacked stability.

Remote ancestors, they said, had passed down to her instincts she was unable to fit into modern living.

And they pointed to the fact that even as a little girl, she was a storm center which erupted her parents' home.

Before she was 14, Ronnie began to do exactly as she pleased, despite parental threats and punishment.

It was then she first stole out of doors at night to meet neighborhood boys on street

corners in Astoria, across East River from Manhattan.

Eventually, Joseph Gettian put his foot down.

She's too young, he told his wife. Her sister

Ethel is a good girl. She stays home and reads. She wants to make something out of herself.

Ronnie does nothing. Her teachers complain that she won't study. She can't pass her grades.

Every night she goes out. That's no way to bring up a young girl.

But Mary Getty and shrugged off responsibility.

Let her go, she said.

Ronnie's all right.

Joseph was driven away from the home in the end.

I got no peace with that girl, he said long afterward. He sent Ethel to

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