Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  Heavyweights in training often like to take on lighter fighters to improve their speed, and Dempsey’s verdict was that Paul was ‘well built, pugnacious by nature, and quick. I’ve never met anyone with such intense concentration and willpower – perhaps more than is good for him,’ he said.

  During that winter and the spring of 1915, Paul needed all these qualities as he drove the length of Oklahoma in his battered Ford, searching for that plot of oil-rich land to make his fortune. He had great determination, spurred on by his desire to match his father’s original achievement.

  It took practically a year before he succeeded. In August 1915, after bluffing several other would-be purchasers, he secured his first oil lease for a rock-bottom $500. His luck held. His well on the so-called ‘Nancy Taylor Lease’ was soon producing over 1,000 barrels daily, and with crude oil prices reaching $3 a barrel late that autumn, his capital began accruing. Encouraged by success, he started buying further leases which proved even more productive, and by the summer of 1916, his percentage on the profit he had made for Minnehoma Oil passed the magic figure of a million dollars.

  He was all of twenty-three – and a millionaire. Convinced that there were more important things to life than oil, he decided to retire.

  This should have been the moment he was waiting for – the precious time to realize his true ambitions. And but for the war he might have done so, sailed for Europe, and the Getty story would have had a different ending.

  But war was making Europe inaccessible. Paul always claimed that around this time he volunteered to be a flier, and while he waited for his papers to arrive (they never did) he had no alternative but to return to South Kingsley Drive. His old room with its private entrance was awaiting him, crammed with his personal possessions lovingly tended by his mother. Rather to his surprise, he found himself enjoying being home.

  As he later wrote, ‘Southern California was an ideal place for anyone seeking to enjoy himself. It had a wonderful climate, spectacular scenery, and then as later, it abounded with exceedingly attractive, largely unattached young women.’

  It was those ‘largely unattached young women’ who particularly appealed to him, and during the summertime of 1916, with a million dollars in the bank, he made the most of them.

  ‘In my experience,’ he used to say, ‘money is the only absolutely certain aphrodisiac’ – but a smart car also helped, and he bought several in succession – a Cadillac convertible, an early Chrysler, a bright red Duesenberg.

  At South Kingsley Drive, with his private key, he came and went exactly as he pleased, and sometimes even brought his women home there for the night.

  ‘Rather the “deep deep bliss” of the double bed at South Kingsley Drive, than the “hurly-burly” of the back seat of a Duesenberg,’ as Mrs Patrick Campbell might have said.

  George and Sarah must have known what was going on, and according to their own strict Christian principles, their son had now become a hopeless sinner. But had they told him so, they would have run the risk of losing him – and that was something Sarah wouldn’t contemplate. So George and Sarah kept their feelings to themselves, Paul continued down the primrose path – and peace and harmony obtained in South Kingsley Drive.

  But for Paul there was now one all-important factor in this pleasant situation – the fact that he had made himself a millionaire. Thanks to his money he had also made himself completely independent, and George was effectively deprived of any power to tell him what to do. This meant that Paul was able to enjoy his early twenties in a sort of endlessly extended spoiled childhood, indulged by his mother, tolerated by his father, and enjoying all the pleasures of a rich and thoroughly emancipated modern adolescent.

  It was a lesson in the moral power of money, which would have a significant effect on Paul and his parents for the future.Money effectively removed the moral imperative from everyday existence, and, thanks to his money, Paul could live a virtual double life – which clearly suited him.

  He no longer needed to assert himself against his puritanical Papa, nor would he ever cease to be, at least in theory, the devoted only child of ‘beloved Mama’ either. Never needing to grow up, he would protest his love for them both most touchingly until they died. But at the same time he could also be a sort of licensed puritan, and make the most of many things his parents disapproved of – fast cars and faster women, night clubs and bootlegged gin, high life, and lower company.

  As a result, the moral sense of Paul Getty seemed strangely contradictory, as he followed several lines of least resistance – eager for freedom, yet anxious for his parents’ love, essaying all manner of escapes, yet always returning like a wayward child to the house on South Kingsley Drive.

  As a Christian, George was presumably counting on the fact that his son’s unedifying life of sin could not go on for ever. This was the time for Christian patience. God in His wisdom would surely make His presence felt, just as He did to the apostle Paul on the Damascus road. Once this happened, his benighted son would see the error of his ways, become reborn in Christ, and George and Sarah could finally rejoice in one more sinner saved.

  It was an optimistic theory, and to a point it worked. Paul’s idle, hedonistic life could not continue. Something had to bring it to a close. But when it did, it was certainly not what George had bargained for – and Paul failed to react as his parents prayed he would.

  The girl’s name was Elsie Eckstrom, and she claimed in court that she had been a virgin before Paul plied her with alcohol, drove her home, and forcibly deflowered her at South Kingsley Drive.

  Paul’s lawyer counterclaimed that Elsie was no virgin but an habituée of roadhouses and nightclubs, who drank and danced and slept around and got no more than she deserved.

  The truth about Elsie is no longer particularly important – but what nobody denied in court was that sexual intercourse took place beneath the parental rafters of the Getty residence and that a baby daughter, born in 1917, was christened Paula.

  After much unwelcome publicity with banner headlines in the Los Angeles Times during September 1917, Paul reluctantly produced $10,000 for Miss Eckstrom and the baby, and what was presumably the first offspring of the man destined to become his country’s richest citizen vanished from the scene, along with any further scandal. To this day the Getty family has heard no more of her.

  But what was intriguing was that, as in the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, there was still no outburst, no disclaimer, no evident reaction from the Getty family. Shortly afterwards, however, Paul left his life of idleness in California and returned to work for Minnehoma in the oilfields of Oklahoma.

  George Getty could console himself with the thought that his son, although a sinner, was clearly dedicated to the family business and showing extraordinary flair in the oil industry. He had energy and drive and vision, was a tougher businessman than George had ever been, and would make an admirable successor at the head of Minnehoma when George decided to retire.

  In fact Paul was already showing signs of taking over as the driving force in Minnehoma. During 1919, it was his idea to extend the company’s operations from Oklahoma to the freshly discovered coastal oilfields of California. Initially George was not enthusiastic, but Paul insisted, and Minnehoma’s Californian operation proved highly profitable, more than doubling the capital value of the company (which led to the restructuring of Minnehoma under the new name of George Getty Inc.).

  Now, too, Paul showed signs of actively enjoying life on the oilfields – learning the skills of the oil engineer, proving himself against the toughest workers on the rigs, boozing and whoring with them in the evenings, and fighting with his fists when necessary. It was a man’s life, and this one-time, would-be intellectual found himself thoroughly enjoying it. No more was heard of literature or diplomacy. ‘Nothing,’ Paul would write, ‘can adequately describe the emotion and triumph one experiences when he [sic] brings in his first producing well.’

  Despite this, Geor
ge was far from happy with his son. Paul had not repented of his trespasses – nor did he show the slightest sign of doing so. George also had his doubts about his probity, as he watched him taking risks, and underwriting deals he personally would not have sanctioned. There may have been an element of jealousy as well, the professional jealousy of the older man who fears his son displacing him, and the sexual jealousy of the ageing puritan who glimpses, in his son’s behaviour, something of the fun he might have had himself.

  For with the end of war in Europe, Paul was growing restless and had started taking longer holidays and travelling abroad – first to Mexico and then to his beloved Europe. It was not hard to imagine what Paul was doing on his travels, and George and Sarah must have felt that their son’s last chance of salvation lay in finding a good wife, settling down in California, and raising a family.

  Chapter Four

  Marital Fever

  On Emerging From adolescence, young girls possess a special kind of beauty and, though no longer children, are briefly free from the demands which come so swiftly with maturity. It was this fragile, transitory stage of femininity which seems to have excited Paul Getty in his thirties.

  Not only did he like young virgins, but, being very rich, he could afford them. They flattered his ego, kept him young, and had few of the more exacting expectations of older women. Living life exactly as he wanted, he was never very sympathetic to the emotional demands of others.

  Although an important factor in his sexuality, this taste for Lolita-style nymphets was also a cause of many subsequent dramas and disasters in the family. It led him into five failed marriages, all with women almost young enough to have been his daughters.

  The first began in 1923, when at thirty he suddenly proposed to seventeen-year-old Jeanette Dumont, a dark-eyed, half-Polish high-school beauty. Acting not unlike an anxious adolescent himself, he kept the romance secret from his parents, and it was not until he and his child-bride returned to Los Angeles from a secret wedding at Aventura, Mexico, in October that he broke the news to them that he was married.

  In fact they were delighted, and rapidly became extremely fond of their schoolgirl daughter-in-law. They helped to find the newly-weds an apartment close to South Kingsley Drive, and, when Jeanette discovered she was pregnant, did all they could to make their son feel happy at the prospect of a family.

  But a family was the last thing Paul desired. Nor did he desire Jeanette once the virgin bride turned into a pregnant and dependent wife. Far from approaching parenthood with joy, he bucked away and, like the spoiled only child he was, made angry efforts to escape.

  With his precious freedom under threat, it was now that the aggressive side of Getty’s nature soon became apparent. Gravid Jeanette was cruelly neglected as he returned to the night-life of Los Angeles with more responsive partners. When she complained, bitter rows ensued.

  According to subsequent divorce-court testimony it was now that he yelled at her – ‘I’m sick and tired of you, sick and tired of being married.’

  According to the same source, he later ‘beat and bruised her’, even threatening to kill her. Then he left her.

  But despite these ructions, it was somehow typical Paul that when the son he didn’t want was born, on 9 July 1924, he proudly named him ‘George Franklin Getty II’ – in honour of his father.

  George, meanwhile, was far from well. Early in 1923, at the age of sixty-eight, he suffered a major stroke on the Brentwood golf course in Los Angeles, which affected his speech and the right-hand portion of his body.

  With his father out of action, Paul took charge of the company. Later he would always claim that, due to bad management and the squandering of capital on unprofitable oil leases, George Getty Inc. was actually running at a loss. But by saying so, and trying to increase efficiency, he made few friends among the old guard in the company. When his father gamely struggled back to work some six weeks later, he was greeted by numerous complaints about ‘the boy’ from old employees, angry at the way they had been treated in his absence.

  But during his period in charge of the family company, Paul had also been pondering the future – and envisaging George Getty Inc. growing from the relatively simple oil-producing operation that it was into an oil conglomerate, capable of refining and marketing a range of petroleum products for the rapidly expanding US market. This was clearly where the future lay – but it was not what his father or his senior directors wished to hear.

  Finally, George’s gathering resentment turned to anger when, on top of everything, people told him how Paul had been behaving to Jeanette.

  ‘That boy deserves a spanking,’ was his astonishing reaction. For George could barely shuffle round the office with a stick, let alone administer his burly son a ‘spanking’. Which did not stop his rage increasing even further when he heard that Paul, having summarily walked out on wife and baby, was about to be involved in a scandalous divorce.

  Even Sarah turned against him now, confiding to a friend that she seriously believed that Paul had been ‘taken over by the Devil’.

  Far from being cured of marriage by Jeanette and all the trouble that had followed, Paul remained firmly in the throes of what he later called ‘matrimonial fever’. Like an alcoholic on a bender, he was more enthusiastic for the married state than ever.

  The truth was that he loved marrying but hated marriage. Marrying was exciting and romantic, but marriage brought the obligations and restrictions of a family, and he had been escaping from obligations and restrictions almost all his life. But none of this prevented him from getting firmly entangled once again – before he was even legally disentangled from Jeanette.

  The beginning of 1926 found him back in Mexico in the bright red Duesenberg, hot on the trail of oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico, at intervals between studying Spanish at the university in Mexico City.

  At the university he became involved with two pretty students, Belene and Allene Ashby, daughters of a Texas rancher, and, amative as ever, he conducted love affairs with both at once. Belene was the prettier, but Allene was just seventeen, and the chance of marrying another nymphet proved too much for the nympholeptic Paul Getty.

  So, that October, he and Allene Ashby drove to Cuernavaca in the Duesenberg and married. In his enthusiasm he seems to have overlooked the fact that, since his divorce from Jeanette was still not finalized, he had not only landed in a second marriage, but had also committed bigamy.

  Mexico being Mexico, no one mentioned this or seemed to notice. And unlike her predecessor, Allene not only avoided pregnancy, but quickly changed her mind about being Mrs J. Paul Getty. Paul was developing cold feet too, and they parted swiftly, painlessly and fairly amicably.

  But Paul was too well known by now to marry incognito – even in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Somehow the news seeped back to South Kingsley Drive, and early that December George Franklin Getty called his lawyer.

  One of the qualities George Getty shared with Paul was a marked ability to hide his feelings. During this period, and despite his weakened state of health, he had managed to disguise his anger at his son’s behaviour, and amity was apparently restored within the Getty family – so much so that after the dramas when he left Jeanette, Paul must have felt that he had been forgiven.

  But with illness, George’s religious views were manifestly hardening. In 1913 he had already advanced from membership of the Third Church of Christ Scientist in Los Angeles, and joined the worldwide organization of the First Church in Boston, Massachusetts. Now illness had evidently made him take his church’s teachings more seriously than ever, for that autumn he had become ‘a class-taught student of Christian Science’, attending a concentrated two-week instruction course on the message of the founder of Christian Science, Mrs Mary Baker Eddy. Within the teachings of that formidable lady, George would have discovered the most damning condemnation of his son’s behaviour.

  ‘Infidelity to the marriage convenant is the social scourge of all races,’ wrote Mrs Baker Eddy. �
��It is “the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday”.’

  ‘The commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” ‘she added, ‘is no less imperative than the one, “Thou shalt not kill.”’

  Strong words. But for the dedicated Christian Scientist there was no evading them. And George had recently become an even more devout believer.

  He must, however, have confined these feelings to his lawyer and himself. Certainly he didn’t criticize Paul openly, and 1927 started with a seemingly united Getty family, as Paul and parents happily embarked on a joint holiday to the continent of Europe.

  Even in 1927 it was unusual for a twice-married man of rising thirty-five to take a lengthy European holiday with two aged parents, but despite his philandering, Paul remained as deeply involved with them as ever. He was still the same dutiful, attentive son who had gone on holiday with them before the war, and the unlikely trio seem to have enjoyed themselves.

  They went to Rome, then travelled on to Switzerland and Paris – even staying at the faithful Hôtel Continentale. As usual, Sarah was happy to be back in Europe, but George’s fragile health seems to have forced them into an earlier-than-planned return by transatlantic liner.

  Being in no hurry to return himself, Paul saw them off, then rented an apartment by the Eiffel Tower and remained in Paris. The loving son had done his bit. The sophisticated man of pleasure could take over.

  *

  One can imagine the relief with which he set about enjoying Europe once he was free to travel, please himself, and follow any passing love affair that caught his fancy. This had become his favourite means of exercise and relaxation, and from Paris he proceeded to Berlin, where the night-life particularly appealed to him. He had started learning German, and there was no shortage of pretty women willing to help this rich foreigner learn their language.