Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  He was in fact a great success. As much the workaholic as ever, he proved an exceptional factory manager, driving the workforce hard, working late himself on any problem, and getting Spartan to produce an excellent single-engined trainer for the US Army Air Force. So eager was he for what he felt would be his parents’ approbation that he spent almost all his time in his factory at Tulsa, and when at the end of 1941 Sarah Getty finally expired, aged eighty-nine, his diary entry might have been a young boy’s lamentation for his youthful mother: ‘Last night, gently and sweetly, my dearest dearest Mummy passed away.’

  Around the same time, as if in compensation for the loss of his mother, his adventurous wife, Teddy, finally returned from Italy, where she had been interned by the Italians near Siena. Neither she nor her husband seems to have pined unduly for the other, but they did achieve their long-postponed bridal night together. Anxious to resume her career as a singer, Teddy was still no clinging vine, although she would have liked a modicum of a married life; but when she presented Paul with his fifth son, christened Timothy, in 1946, her husband still opted for duty back in Tulsa rather than married life with Teddy.

  Timmy proved an ailing infant. ‘Poor poor Timmy’ was how Paul wrote about him at his birth. And throughout his short life, Timmy suffered dreadfully, developing a brain tumour at the age of six, which required protracted surgery. But although he always said how moved he was by ‘sad little Timmy’, Paul seemed as incapable as ever of coping with personal unhappiness – or married life. Teddy often urged that all three of them should live together as a family, but Paul stayed in Tulsa, relying for relief on waitresses, shop-girls, call-girls – anything to save him from the dreaded tentacles of marriage.

  By the time the war had ended, something had clearly happened to him. Perhaps it was the onset of the male menopause, while some believed he’d burned out young. Maybe he no longer felt the urge to make his long dead father ‘eat his words’ by earning vast amounts of money. Whatever the cause, he remained at Tulsa in his precious bunker and, instead of returning to the oil business, organized the change-over of Spartan Aircraft from making aircraft to creating homes on trailers.

  It was an odd activity for a financial genius like Paul Getty. But the challenge of producing mobile homes seems to have intrigued him; he took endless trouble working out details of design and marketing, and was proud when production topped 2,000.

  After four years in his bunker, he clearly needed something more than trailers to excite him. Lacking it, he was soon muttering about giving up everything to become a beachcomber. He even got as far as selling out a tranche of holdings in his prized Western Pacific – the only time he ever did – and his biographer Robert Lenzner is convinced he would have continued selling had he not come up against legal obstacles to offloading further shares in the Sarah C. Getty Trust.

  This was fortunate for the Getty family. For it left him no choice but to remain in the oil business; and this in turn meant that in 1948, when he recognized the chance of several million lifetimes, he was poised to seize it.

  Like so much in the Middle East, where little is what it seems, the so-called Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is anything but Neutral. For centuries the Saudis to the south and the Kuwaitis to the north had argued over the ownership of this apparently useless 2,000-square-mile wedge of desert, lying between its neighbours and the Persian Gulf. The issue was finally settled with a typical Arab compromise.

  Ignoring the nomadic Bedouin, who were the only human beings poor enough to go there, the area was defined as a kind of no-man’s-land and called the Neutral Zone. Its two neighbours retained dual sovereignty – ‘an undivided half interest’ – over the one thing that might one day be of value, the mineral rights. But for many years there were no takers.

  Even when the world’s greatest oilfield, the massive Burghan field in Kuwait, was discovered in the 1930s, just a few miles north of its boundaries, the Zone itself continued to daunt prospective oilmen with its inhospitable terrain, its scorching climate, and the geopolitical quagmire of its mineral rights.

  With the ending of war in Europe, it was clear that the US oilfields would soon find it hard to satisfy America’s booming car economy, and interest focused once again on the Persian Gulf as the likeliest alternative. Even the Neutral Zone, with all its problems, began to be ‘tentatively’ discussed among the major oil companies.

  Inevitably word of this reached Paul Getty – but unlike most senior executives of major oil companies, he was not a tentative man. He was a realist. ‘If one is to be anyone in the world’s oil business, one must stake one’s claim in the Middle East,’ he said. And since he decided that he emphatically did want to be someone in the world oil business, he made one of his inspired decisions.

  Without having the region surveyed, or placing a foot in the Middle East himself, he decided that he and he alone would have the Saudi concession to the Neutral Zone.

  By now he was more concerned for his personal safety than ever, and had decided he would never risk travelling by air. So he had absolutely no intention of venturing to the Neutral Zone himself. Instead he was fortunate to discover the ideal agent within his own organization – Paul Walton, a young geologist who had worked in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and was currently head of exploration in the Rocky Mountain division of the Pacific Western oil company. Walton knew the Persian Gulf. He knew its people, and its problems. He was anxious to return. So Getty invited him to Paris, and briefed him on his mission.

  He did this with his customary obsession with detail, spending four full days with Walton in the Hôtel Georges V until every eventuality was covered – the exact price at which Walton should start bidding for the oil concession, the speed at which he had to move, and the height to which he was prepared to go.

  Having done this to his satisfaction, Getty waited.

  He was acting entirely on instinct, for at this stage he had not seen so much as a single survey report on the Neutral Zone. But his instinct was as sound as ever. When Walton made his first aerial reconnaissance of the Zone, it was as Paul had suspected. Spread across the desert were a number of the domelike mounds identical to similar formations covering Kuwait’s Burghan field to the north.

  As this made it almost certain that the oil deposits of the field continued through the Neutral Zone, Walton was being ultra-cautious when he reported back that the chances of a major oil-find within the Zone were fifty-fifty. (Later he said he would have given higher odds, but he had seen similar perfect sites in Saudi Arabia come up ‘dry as hell’ and didn’t wish to overpitch the prospects.)

  It was typical of Paul that even now he was so suspicious and secretive that he had forbidden Walton to send back his news by telephone, wireless or cablegram – all of which might just be liable to interception. Instead he insisted on an anonymous-looking airmail letter – which took all of nine days to reach Paris from Jiddah. And throughout this period of waiting, Paul, with his sombre face and poker-player’s self-control, continued life entirely as usual, betraying not the faintest sign of what was happening.

  But once he had the letter he was jubilant. Odds of fifty-fifty are high for the oil business, and he started bidding for the great potential oil bonanza of the Neutral Zone. He was suddenly prepared to stake his entire personal fortune, the funds in the Sarah C. Getty Trust, and anything further he could raise upon the greatest gamble of his life.

  For such a fearful man to take such a bold decision, and such a miserly one to risk so much, even before solving all the massive problems of transporting, refining and marketing the oil he hoped to find, is a measure of the unpredictability of his complex nature. It puzzled and astonished even those who knew him best.

  But stranger still was the fact that while all this was going on there was not the faintest change in the anonymous life that he was leading. Now in his late fifties, he continued to direct his multi-million-dollar empire from room 801 of the Hôtel Georges V in Paris, where he also slept with his
women, washed his socks, played teach-yourself Arabic records like background music, and every evening dutifully entered his day’s expenses in his diary – ‘taxi 5 francs, bus fare 1 franc, newspaper – 10 centimes’.

  Yet this was the man who was negotiating to pay the King of Saudi Arabia and the Sultan of Kuwait, as joint owners of the Neutral Zone, a guaranteed million dollars each a year even if no oil was ever found, an unprecedented royalty of 40 per cent on each barrel of oil produced – plus a $20 million down payment for the privilege of wildcatting in an arid desert 2,000 miles away from where he was sitting.

  Success in the Neutral Zone did not come easily. Paul soon discovered that the Aminoil syndicate, which included one of the major American oil companies, Phillips Petroleum, had got there before him, and had also purchased a concession to the Zone from the Kuwaitis. As Paul’s concession was granted by the Saudis, this meant he had to work in tandem with Aminoil employees – which inevitably led to friction, feuds and terrible misunderstandings.

  Nor was it all that easy to strike oil – however convinced Paul might be that it was simply waiting there to be discovered. Not until early 1953 did his Pacific Western technicians finally locate what they were seeking – an oil strike connecting with a virtual underground sea of oil. It was a discovery which, in oil terms, Fortune magazine described as ‘somewhere between colossal and history making’. But it was only now that Paul showed the true originality and business flair which would make the Getty fortune stratospheric.

  Much of the oil in the Neutral Zone was in the form of cheap so-called ‘garbage oil’, the low-grade crude coming from shallow wells which cost little to produce, but for which there was little real demand. Paul realized that provided he could get this oil to America in sufficient quantities, up-to-date oil refineries would have no difficulty processing it for the evergrowing American domestic market. The problem was to get it there, build suitably large refineries, and market it. Solving this problem was to prove the most ambitious undertaking of his life, and required coordination and financing on a massive scale.

  Unwilling to give tanker owners the power to hold him hostage in the future, he decided to construct his own tanker fleet – spending more than $200 million on the massive supertankers which would carry his cheap oil from the Neutral Zone, not only to America but also to Europe and Japan. (It was typical of Paul that, with the assistance of his well-connected friend, the French industrialist and former air ace, Commandant Paul Louis Weiller, he was able to get these tankers built in French dockyards with a 35 per cent French government subsidy – and then receive the Légion d’Honneur for services to France.)

  A further $200 million went on a new refinery at Wilmington on America’s eastern seaboard, and $60 million on upgrading the old Avon refinery in California. These were massive undertakings. The Delaware River had to be deepened and port installations built to bring the Getty supertankers up to Wilmington. The number of Tide Water service stations in America was more than doubled to provide outlets for Getty gasoline.

  The outlay was vast, but the profits were vaster. From the shallow wells the oil was costing so little to produce that salaries and overheads were minimal. World demand for gasoline and oil continued to increase, and over the next twelve years Pacific Western would build fifteen separate wells in the Neutral Zone, producing a major part of American oil imports from the Middle East and making Pacific Western the seventh largest gasoline producer in the USA.

  Since Paul personally controlled the company and he and the Sarah C. Getty Trust were its major shareholders, the profits immeasurably enriched him and his heirs. And in 1956, to ensure that his contribution to the Getty dynasty would be remembered, he changed the name of his thriving company. In place of Pacific Western, it would henceforth be known as the Getty Oil Company.

  What was so strange about this whole elaborate operation was that Paul continued to direct almost every detail of it himself. The creation of a great oilfield, of a major tanker fleet, and of port facilities and massive refineries in America were all masterminded by this one extraordinary individual, sitting quietly in Room 801 in the Hôtel Georges V in Paris. He would often work throughout the night, and not bother overmuch with food. But otherwise this whole amazing enterprise barely changed his private way of life at all.

  Provided he was always near a telephone, he could continue his travels, his affairs, his personal interests, while his most ambitious business ventures seemed to remain what they had always been – part of the everlasting game that he was playing with the world for his private satisfaction.

  When Paul met Penelope Kitson in 1953, she was just thirty-one, an elegant, very self-possessed upper-class Englishwoman, with three children and an unsatisfactory marriage. They became intimate friends, and she enjoyed his company, finding him charming, extraordinarily knowledgeable, and possessed of ‘the sharpest brain of anyone I’ve ever known’.

  He made a fuss of her and said he loved her, but from the start something told her that if she ever fell completely in love with him, she’d be at his mercy – so she never did. As an intelligent woman of the world she could see his limitations all too clearly – that he was not a man to marry or to permit to dominate her life, and that behind his womanizing lay a total inability to endure the normal bonds, responsibilities, pleasures, problems, of a family. As a realist, she would not permit herself the luxury of thinking she could ever change him. Not that she really wished to, for she knew that if she did, it would inevitably destroy the way of life he had carefully created – which in turn made possible his business ventures. So they stayed lovers, equals, friends and partners.

  The more she got to know Paul, the more she saw him as a man with extraordinary powers of concentration and strength of will, and realized that his attitude to women (herself included) was part of something crucial to his nature. It didn’t particularly trouble her that he was sexually obsessive, and that ‘he simply couldn’t keep his hands off any woman who came near him’. She claims that as she had never had a jealous nature sexual jealousy wasn’t really an issue between them.

  But she sensed that he was a very strange character indeed – dominating, clever, independent, but lacking one crucial ingredient to his nature. ‘I suppose that one would have to say that part of him had simply never grown up.’ Part of him remained the selfish, spoiled only child who had been indulged by George and Sarah. (Hence much of his trouble with his children and his family.) ‘But he was utterly determined over anything he wanted, and would never delegate to anyone, because no one was really up to him.’

  As far as Penelope was concerned, it suited her to keep her independence, especially as she sensed that at the moment Paul was more in love with her than she was with him, and that once this changed she would lose him. After her divorce she bought a house in Kensington, which he often visited when he came to London, and since she was an accomplished interior decorator, he employed her to decorate the state rooms of the oil tankers he was building.

  He excused himself for not proposing marriage by saying that a fortune-teller in New Orleans once said that if he married for a sixth time he would die. (This was probably untrue. He often quoted fortune-tellers to confirm or excuse any line of conduct.)

  But he also told her, ‘Pen, you’ll always be my Number One.’ This time he was not lying, and until he died she remained virtually the only person close to him who was not intimidated by his character, his reputation or his money – which was why he trusted her.,

  One area where the oddities of Paul Getty’s character were particularly evident was in his role as an art collector. With his increased wealth he was starting to take collecting seriously. He had recently bought the so-called ‘ranch-house’ at Malibu – a stone-built summer residence in a prime location overlooking the Pacific Ocean – and used it as a setting for the valuable French eighteenth-century furniture he’d bought at bargain prices just before the war.

  Since then he had picked up further bargains – par
ticularly the Rembrandt portrait of the merchant Marten Looten, which he bought from a frightened Dutch businessman on the eve of war for $65,000, and the superb Ardabil carpet, which he had previously acquired at the bargain price of $68,000 from the sharpest of international dealers, Lord Duveen, when his lordship was on his deathbed. On an off-day at Sotheby’s he had also picked up for $200 a painting known as the The Madonna of Loreto, which he convinced himself was at least partially painted by Raphael.

  In artistic matters, his overwhelming motive continued to be to find a bargain – which stopped him from ever becoming a genuine collector. Even Penelope admits that ‘Paul was really too mean ever to allow himself to buy a great painting.’

  More to the point, his lack of emotional response made him somewhat like a very clever child who knows a lot but lacks a mature aesthetic response to anything. This was particularly apparent in the small book he put together on his favourite subject – eighteenth-century France. With some of its information evidently lifted straight from encyclopedias, much of it might have been written by a fact-obsessed twelve-year-old – but as a guide to Paul Getty’s mind, it is most revealing.

  Almost everything within this book relates to money. Various important pieces in his own collection are described – but always in terms of market prices, estimated value, and exactly how much he had spent on them.

  This can be fascinating. Who but Paul Getty would have worked out the contemporary cost of making a boulle table and concluded that a French nobleman would have paid slightly more for it in real terms in 1760 than the cost of ‘a top quality saloon car’ in the 1950s?

  Similarly he could become absorbed in the minutiae of connoisseurship – over the precise pigment used in one or other of his paintings, for example.

  What he appeared unable to do was trust his emotional response to any work of art, in case his feelings ran away with him, so that what he really needed was somebody whose taste he trusted to advise him as he built up his collection. In September 1953 he did meet such a person. During a trip to Italy with another of his current mistresses, the effusive English art journalist Ethel le Vane, he accidentally met, in a corridor of the Excelsior Hotel in Florence, one of the greatest connoisseurs of Italian painting, Bernard Berenson, who, without realizing who Paul was, invited him to tea at the holy of artistic holies, his villa I Tatti on the hill at Settignano, close to France.