Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  But business called him back to California. His father was clearly losing his grip on the company, and Paul was needed as a trouble-shooter, boosting production from various Getty properties in California. It was demanding work, and George effectively acknowledged this by offering him a third of the capital of George Getty Inc. for $1 million. It may have seemed odd for a father to be offering to sell his son part of a company he would presumably inherit, but there were doubtless tax advantages to the sale. Certainly Paul did not seem at all concerned over the arrangement, particularly as George permitted him to pay a quarter of the price in cash and the rest in notes of promise.

  With much to do, it was not until early summer that Paul escaped again to Europe. His first stop was Amsterdam for the 1928 Olympics, where he saw the Finnish runner Nurmi set a new Olympic record in the 10,000 metres. Then it was time for rather different games.

  Paul had always loved Vienna, but at first he barely recognized it as the city he remembered from before the war. Yet although the old prosperity had gone, he was reassured to find that at the Grand Hotel at least ‘the service, food, wines and furnishings were as superior [sic] as they had been before the war.’ He was just starting to enjoy them when a fresh attack of matrimonial fever hit him rather badly.

  It was another seventeen-year-old – a striking blue-eyed blonde this time – and he saw her dining with an older couple in the hotel restaurant. Afterwards he tried his luck and sent a note inviting her to dinner two nights later. Since she was young and foolish, she accepted.

  He soon discovered she was not the fast young woman he had expected, but a schoolgirl barely out of a North German convent, who was holidaying with her parents and a girl friend in Vienna. Her father, the Herr Doktor Otto Helmle, was the rich and powerful head of the Badenwerk industrial complex in Karlsruhe. Her name was Adolphine – but everybody called her Fini.

  Paul was now thirty-six, and after many years perfecting courtship patterns with young girls he found they worked as well as ever. Instead of attempting to disguise his age, he played the sophisticated, sympathetic older man, speaking German with an accent that amused her.

  Fini was intrigued. Her admirer was closer to her father’s age than hers, but he was so much more polite and cultured than the few boys she had met. Since he was so amusing and attentive she found it hard to refuse him when he suggested that they meet again. He was persistent – and soon there were other things she found it harder to refuse. They became lovers, and when she returned to Karlsruhe he followed. When he spoke of marriage, she insisted he discuss it with her father – and in Fini’s father, Paul Getty met serious opposition.

  An upright, old-style German Catholic who loved his family, and exemplified the bourgeois virtues, Dr Helmle seems to have instantly taken against Paul – and vice versa. Faced with this divorced American who had clearly bewitched his beloved Fini, the Herr Doktor indignantly refused permission for the match – and from that point on, the romance became less a love affair between Paul and Fini than a battle of wills between Paul and Dr Helmle.

  True to his nature, Paul set his heart on winning – and finally did so by persuading the infatuated Fini to ignore her father and elope with him to Cuba. In an attempt to save her daughter’s reputation, Frau Helmle travelled with her, and Paul and Fini were duly married in December 1928, a few days after his divorce from Allene Ashby was finalized. From Cuba they went on to Los Angeles, where Paul introduced his latest wife to George and Sarah.

  Hoping that Paul was settling down at last, they greeted Fini warmly, and were happy when they moved into a nearby apartment. But just as with Jeanette, the reality of married life started to repel Paul once his wife was pregnant. He was increasingly absent and she was miserable and lonely. Soon she was feeling morning-sick, then home-sick. When her parents wrote suggesting she return to Germany to have the baby, Paul did nothing to prevent her going. But nor would he go with her.

  Instead he insisted on going to New York to witness at first hand the Wall Street crash of October 1929. It impressed him deeply as the death knell of a whole financial era. Pondering the future, he left for Germany and reached Berlin in time to be with Fini when she had her baby. At first he was affectionate to her, and it seemed as if the marriage would continue. They called the baby Ronald, and for a few days Paul appeared excited by the prospect of a second son.

  But not for long. Fini wished to take the child to see her parents back in Karlsruhe. Paul refused to go with her – and there, effectively, the marriage ended.

  For Dr Helmle returned to the attack, insisting that his daughter stay in Karlsruhe and file for divorce. Paul made no objection, having found a pretty girl in a Berlin dance-hall and moved her into his apartment. But Dr Helmle proved as tough as his son-in-law, and, advised by a top divorce lawyer, was soon demanding heavy damages for his daughter.

  At this point Paul decided it might be advisable to save the marriage, and had actually begun a fresh reunion with Fini in Montreux when, on 22 April, he received news that sent him rushing back to California. George had had a second stroke and was dying.

  *

  It took Paul nine days by train and transatlantic liner to return to South Kingsley Drive. He arrived to find his father just alive, but his deaf mother so distraught that she could only communicate in writing. As a dedicated Christian Scientist George was refusing to see a doctor, and the sickbed squalor was considerable. This, at least, was something Paul was able to alleviate. He calmed his mother, insisted on summoning a doctor, and then for thirty days he kept vigil by the sick man’s bed.

  George died on 31 May 1930, with Paul and Sarah at his bedside. Both were overcome with grief. It was, wrote Paul, ‘the heaviest blow, the greatest loss, I had suffered in my life’. But worse was to come. The next day, when the will was read, Paul discovered that his father had bequeathed his fortune not to him, but to his mother, Sarah.

  Control of the all-important Getty oil interests passed to the executors. Paul’s son, the three-year-old George F. Getty II, received $350,000. And although Paul was ‘remembered’ with a derisory $250,000, his father had effectively disinherited him.

  Chapter Five

  Getty’s Secret

  As Was To be expected from a man who spent a lifetime developing the inscrutable expression of a Chinese poker-player, Paul gave the outside world no sign of the extent of his disaster. Because of this, there has always been a mystery over what he really felt about the way his father treated him.

  Outwardly he seemed completely unaffected, behaving almost as if the will had not been written. Since he’d been so close to both his parents, how could anything have altered? Dearest Papa had loved him, and Paul had loved him in return. That was all that mattered and could never change.

  Two days after George’s death he devotedly inscribed a note for the press praising his father’s virtues. ‘His loving kindness and great heart, combined with a charming simplicity of manner made George F. Getty the idol of all who knew him. His mental ability was outstanding to the last. I, his son and successor, can only strive to carry on to the best of my ability, the life work of an abler man.’

  There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he wrote this. Forty years later he would still be piously insisting that ‘the love, respect, and admiration I had for my father were boundless. His death was a blow that only passing years have numbed.’

  But the ‘blow’ was more serious than simple grief for somebody he loved. For if nothing else, the will had inflicted a serious financial injury on him – and was a grave setback to his personal ambitions.

  It also came as a complete surprise. Until that moment when the will was read, Paul had been regarding himself as his father’s inevitable successor – and with reason. For years he had been helping to enrich the family company. He had initiated some of its most profitable ventures, and even before he bought his third of its capital for a million dollars, he had been permitting money that was really due to him to be ploughed back into
George Getty Inc. He must have counted on the fact that this would all descend to him.

  Thus George F. Getty had inflicted a considerable punishment on his son; and however calm he may have seemed in public, it was not in Paul’s nature to accept punishment from anyone.

  In fact he was deeply angered at the way he had been treated. Many years later, Getty’s then accountant, who was on close terms with him at the time, told his biographer, Ralph Hewins, that When his father died, Paul was swindled and hurt, and has since built up a protective armour.’ Claus von Bülow, who became Getty’s ‘chief executive’, says much the same. He believes that after George’s death, Getty spent the rest of his life proving himself against his father’s judgement. ‘Dad was going to eat his words. And when that is your attitude,’ he added, ‘it becomes an obsession.’

  But why, if Getty had this deep obsession, did he always say how deeply he had loved his father?

  During the days following George’s death, Paul clearly had to face the fact that he would never publicly admit – that his father had done more than simply disinherit him.

  Through all those years of Paul’s affairs and broken marriages, father and son had carefully avoided any real confrontation over that most sensitive of subjects – Paul’s blatant ‘immorality’. But suddenly pretence was over. In his will George had done what he had never dared do face to face – deliver judgement on his son in the strongest terms at his disposal. Mrs Baker Eddy had declared adultery and the breaking of marriage bonds akin to murder. Now, by disinheriting his only son and heir, George was rejecting him as firmly as he might have done a murderer.

  For Paul this rejection went against the very basis of the wonderfully seductive way of life he’d been perfecting since his early twenties. Thanks to his own precocious fortune, Paul had managed to remain like a pampered child, immune to criticism and paternal pressure. In his role of spoiled only son he knew that however he behaved he could always count upon affection and forgiveness from his parents. But no longer. By disinheriting him, George had made it clear that Paul was not forgiven – which left him with a serious dilemma.

  His obvious reaction should have been indifference. George was dead, Paul was relatively young and still extremely rich, and he could live his life exactly as he wanted. Why agonize about the judgement of a father now departed?

  From someone who appeared so cold and ruthless, this is certainly what one might have expected – but it didn’t happen. George would always mean too much to Paul to be forgotten. ‘Dearest Papa’ would always be the keeper of his conscience.

  This left Paul a second possibility: doing what his father had clearly wanted him to do – repent, reform, and settle for a godly, moral life like George and Sarah’s. But this was equally impossible. Paul was getting on for forty, which was far too old to give up all those harmless pleasures which for twenty years had made his life worth living.

  But there remained a third solution. If he could reverse his father’s judgement, and somehow make him posthumously ‘eat his words’, his problems would be over. He would be freed to live exactly as he wanted, travel as he had before, enjoy his women, treat his wives and children as he pleased, and still refuse to settle down.

  The only way to do this was to make a fortune large enough to answer George’s evident belief that Paul’s immorality disqualified him from managing the affairs of George Getty Inc. For a puritan like George F. Getty, godliness was closely linked to credit-worthiness, just as making money was a sign of virtue. So Paul could still redeem himself by producing a financial triumph – which was the origin of that continuing obsession which von Bulow would notice thirty years later. From now on this obsession was to drive him forward until he ended up creating the largest fortune in America.

  It is here that one discerns the uniqueness of Paul Getty both as a businessman and as a human being. By any definition, he was something of a freak, a forbidding combination of relentlessly acquisitive business genius with the emotional development of a sex-starved adolescent.

  Henceforth the businessman would operate in overdrive, always attempting to increase that stock of money which would provide the adolescent with his alibi before his parents. As a businessman he possessed formidable resources – originality, strength of will and an obsessive mastery of detail.

  Now all these qualities were ruthlessly applied to the task before him – and it was now that he also really started to enforce such strict control over his own expenditure. He had never been lavish with himself – still less with others – but now every petty meanness held a deeper meaning – to add, however insignificantly, to the all-important pile of wealth and quietly inform the ghostly keeper of his conscience that he was not the immoral profligate his father had rejected.

  Similarly, any personal acquisition was decided henceforth strictly on a profit basis. As a good puritan, George F. Getty was a dedicated self-denier; so Paul set out to beat him here as well. He would permit himself no self-indulgence in the purchase of a place to live, a work of art, even a piece of furniture, unless he could convince himself that it would appreciate in value.

  The result was a strangely dedicated life, with everything within it geared to one overriding purpose – the accumulation of ever larger quantities of capital. For then and only then could the adolescent in him be permitted to continue as he had before Papa’s demise – pursuing his teenage girls, refusing to shoulder any real responsibility as husband or as father, always on the move, and always able to believe that he could count on his parents’ love behind him.

  As a recipe for happy living, Paul Getty’s system left a lot to be desired, but as far as business was concerned, his quaint psychology became a real source of strength, soon setting him apart from the happy ranks of other massively successful multi-millionaires. For past a certain point, the makers of all large fortunes face the problem of maintaining motivation. Why continue? Why bother with acquiring yet more money when one has all the Impressionist paintings, private jets, and Park Lane mansions one can live with?

  There inevitably comes a point where even the most driven wealth-acquirer needs some external motive to continue – like buying political power, creating an art collection, building a great ancestral home or even, if all else fails, using the money for philanthropy.

  That mordant critic of the social scene, the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his classic Theory of the Leisure Class, invented a phrase to describe the way the great nineteenth-century American nouveaux riches like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers once employed their surplus wealth in competitive display. He called it ‘conspicuous consumption’: the building of the great Rhode Island mansions which they barely used, the throwing of the massive parties which none but the hideously rich could equal. Driven by such sumptuary competition, they sometimes reached the point which Veblen identified as ‘conspicuous waste’ – the spending of very large amounts of money simply to defeat their rivals in a war of pointless ostentation.

  Such problems never troubled Paul Getty. Far from requiring any outside interests, he had a perfect built-in system of obsessive motivation. Far from ever getting bored with money, the more of it he had, the more profound would be his sense of satisfaction. He would have regarded the idea of conspicuous consumption as unthinkable, the notion of conspicuous waste a gross obscenity.

  He personally required none of the outward trappings of success. On the contrary, he wanted privacy and quiet to enjoy the solitary game that he was playing. Just as he had no need for others to envy or applaud him, so he felt no obligation to share any of his winnings with the multitude. He was completely self-obsessed and self-sustaining. All he required to ensure that his father ‘ate his words’ was money – and as much of it as possible. As long as he could go on making it, he could live his life exactly as he wanted. As long as he could make Papa stay silent, his money would have served its most important purpose.

  Chapter Six

  Maternal Trust

  When The Directors of Georg
e Getty Inc. made Paul their president, they did so in the evident belief that as a minority shareholder owning only a third of the capital he would have no power to make serious decisions. Thanks to his father’s will the head of the company, with two-thirds of the capital, was eighty years of age, stone deaf, overweight, and lonely – his mother Sarah.

  Luckily for Paul she loved him dearly – and he did his best to ensure that her love continued. She still called him ‘dearest child’, just as he referred to her as ‘beloved Mama’. Twice and sometimes thrice a week he used to call at the house on South Kingsley Drive to take her out. By now she could barely walk. A lift had been installed to get her to her bedroom, and she required a servant on each arm to reach his Cadillac. Sometimes he drove her through the foothills of the Santa Monica hills, but what she really liked was to feed the sea-lions that still basked along the beach at Malibu.

  It must have been a strange sight – sea-lions barking from the water’s edge, overweight widow dressed in black, and neatly suited middle-aged son throwing herrings to the beasts at her direction.

  But what must have been still stranger was their conversation. For the sea-lions offered Paul his finest chance to influence his mother and persuade her to transfer her power in the company to him.

  There would have been a strong temptation for a tired old lady to agree. She, after all, had had little experience of business. She was very lame and old, and Paul could be remarkably persuasive when it came to getting what he wanted.

  But Sarah had always been obstinate, and despite Paul’s arguments, something held her back. In the first place she believed that George’s wishes ought to be respected. Since he had seen fit to place her in this position of responsibility, she had a duty to accept it. Second, she knew her son. She loved him dearly. He was all she had, but she also knew how rash and harebrained he could be, and during such dangerous economic times as the early thirties, wildness could lead a company like George Getty Inc. to disaster.