Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  Since the boys had virtually no contact with their father, they had no idea of the vast expansion of his fortune. According to Judge William Newsom, a friend and contemporary of both boys at San Francisco’s St Ignatius High School, ‘They knew they had a rich, even very rich father, but as he had almost no influence upon their lives one didn’t hear much about him.’ Judge Newsom describes life at Clay Street at this time as ‘financially comfortable, not prodigal, with money no great issue either way. Neither Paul nor Gordon seemed particularly concerned about money or the lack of it – nor did they seem to dwell on expectations.’

  But if their absent father left a gap in Paul and Gordon’s lives, Mrs Mack seemed more than capable of filling it. Hers was a powerful presence, and she was clearly the dominant influence on both her boys as they grew to manhood in this unconventional one-parent family in the midst of post-war San Francisco.

  Now in her mid to late thirties, a sexy, bustling woman with fine eyes and auburn hair, Mrs Mack was almost everything that Jean Paul Getty wasn’t – theatrical, easy-going and exuberant. Still very much the one-time would-be movie queen, she was a lively woman with, according to her daughter, ‘a very high I.Q.’ She was consciously artistic, with considerable taste in literature and music. She was clearly a woman of resource, who when short of money could always rustle up a little extra on her own account through property speculation in Marin County.

  With such a mother – and no father on the scene to cramp their style – the boys should have had an idyllic adolescence – and in many ways they did.

  A natural bohemian, Mrs Mack believed in freedom, and left the boys largely to their own devices. But she was also a highly social creature, and the gregariousness which had so infuriated Jean Paul Getty made her encourage both her boys to entertain their friends at home. (Being three years younger than Gordon, the boys’ half-sister, Donna Wilson, was inevitably overshadowed in this male-dominated household. A very pretty girl, she was also very shy and tended to be overlooked, playing little part in her brothers’ lives until considerably later.)

  Mrs Mack was the most hospitable of mothers, and by the boys’ mid teens, the house on Clay Street had become an open house for Paul’s school-friends. Part of the attraction was undoubtedly Mrs Mack herself – who was one of those mythic mothers who enjoy a wide rapport with all her children’s friends. Some were probably in love with her, while others recall her as a sort of rakehell aunt. Judge Newsom compares her with Graham Greene’s outrageous Aunt Augusta in his comic novel Travels with My Aunt – but the usual reaction from old habitués of ‘3788’, is that ‘Mrs Mack was Auntie Mame to the life’.

  Tolerant by disposition, Mrs Mack raised no objection to the boys and their friends drinking at home as they grew older, on the basis, as Donna put it, that ‘it was better to have them getting drunk where you knew where they were, than somewhere else where you didn’t.’

  At a time when few other middle-class parents were quite so liberated on the subject, this added greatly to the popularity of the Getty household, and of Mrs Mack herself, who was partial to a drink and would ‘sit down and have a beer with us herself as one of her sons’ friends fondly remembers. Soon the house on Clay Street was referred to as ‘the 3788 Club’ – or simply ‘Thirty-seven, Eighty-eight’.

  The members of ‘3788’ formed a fascinated following round the Gettys, with young Paul very much the leader of the pack, which was inevitably called ‘the Getty Gang’. Having inherited much of his mother’s Irish charm and sociability, he played up to his audience, making them laugh at his stories and his exploits, and dressing the part of the would-be tearaway and playboy.

  But there was more to the attractions of 3788 than Ann and alcohol, and the house became something of a cultural beacon in middle-class, post-war San Francisco. Music was of growing importance to the family – particularly to Gordon, whose collection of operatic records was already vast and steadily increasing – as was his knowledge of opera and the greatest operatic singers.

  Several of them – including such legendary figures as the soprano Licia Albanese and the lyric tenor Tagliavini – gave recitals at the house when visiting San Francisco, and the boys’ love of opera would develop in the years ahead, so that even in their periods of deepest disagreement, they would remain united as members of the esoteric cult of dedicated opera buffs.

  As a household, Clay Street seemed a perfect setting for the boys to develop as intelligent and original human beings, and at first sight, Paul appeared to get the best of it, living his spoiled, highly social life, aided and abetted by his doting mother. Like her he drank a lot. (Sometimes beer with kippers for breakfast to her dry martinis.) Popular with his friends and attractive to the girls, a charmed life seemed to lie ahead of him.

  With Gordon things were rather different. Both boys were handsome but in very different ways. With his pointed face and lively manner, Paul looked rather like an adolescent satyr, but as Gordon approached his full height of six feet two, he increasingly resembled a large edition of the youthful Schubert. As Donna puts it, ‘Paul exuded sex, whereas Gordon didn’t exude anything very much,’ and Paul was inevitably his mother’s favourite. According to Bill Newsom she ‘thought him the wittiest, cleverest handsomest boy in California’.

  Paul’s reaction to his mother’s spoiling was to make the most of it and cheerfully get on with life. But when Gordon failed to receive the same attention from his mother, he tended to withdraw into himself, building a wall of self-sufficiency which soon became a key part of his character.

  By reacting against his mother’s easy-going ways, Gordon appeared as something of a puritan, and in contrast to his mother and his brother, he never was a drinker. Paul had a succession of glamorous motor cars, including a Cord and a Dodge convertible, which he drove stylishly and rather fast. Gordon chose calmer vehicles – a solid Oldsmobile and a still more solid Buick, which he drove with great deliberation.

  But while life at Clay Street seemed particularly relaxed, the absence of a father-figure probably affected both boys more than their friends appreciated. In Gordon’s case it left him no parental alternative to his mother, and when he found he couldn’t cope with Mrs Mack’s shenanigans or drunkenness or lovers, he tended to create a private, separate life away from home. Before going off to university, he actually moved into the easy-going Irish household of his old schoolfriend, Bill Newsom, making a sort of father-figure out of Newsom Senior. By then Gordon was a clever, inner-directed loner whose true home was music, poetry, and economic theory. These would see him through the troubles and distractions of the years ahead.

  Unlike the self-sufficient Gordon, who felt no need for organized religion, Paul, at sixteen, underwent a serious conversion with the Jesuits of St Ignatius. And although at first sight Paul’s life seemed more enviable than Gordon’s, he was in fact more vulnerable than his brother. If he modelled himself on anyone it was probably on handsome Edgar Peixoto, a charmingly failed lawyer, who was one of his mother’s many suitors. ‘A stylish, most intelligent man whom drink had sadly overtaken’, is how one of Paul’s friends remembers him. Bill Newsom, recalling Peixoto’s conversation and his phenomenal memory for Norman Douglas’s most ribald limericks, says, ‘Most of us thought Edgar was a hero.’ Paul certainly did – but Gordon didn’t.

  Paul’s character seems to have contained many contradictions. His wildness hid a certain melancholy, and behind the chronic need for friends lay considerable insecurity. Where Gordon loved the certainties of chess and economic theory, Paul was already drawn to the excesses of high romantic literature. He was a great reader, and was soon collecting books, having started with a first edition of The Great Gatsby. He relished the fin-de-siècle decadence of Wilde and Corvo, but his prize discovery was that overblown diabolist, Aleister Crowley. The self-styled ‘Prince of Darkness and Great Beast 666’, who flourished on a daily intake of heroin that would have floored half a dozen lesser men, Crowley came to be regarded as something of a for
erunner of the ‘psychedelic generation’ of the sixties; for Paul to have picked upon him now is a hint of how his mind was working and the way his interests would develop.

  Paul had finished high school and was about to go to the University of San Francisco when the Korean war broke out in 1950. His mother suggested using her influence with a general she knew to stop him being drafted, but he wouldn’t let her. Instead he went to Korea, made corporal, but otherwise showed little aptitude for soldiering, serving out his time in an office at the Seoul headquarters. A year later Gordon also broke off his studies in economics at Berkeley to join the Artillery, took a commission, but didn’t like the Army any more than Paul and spent his service at the base camp of Fort Ord.

  When he returned from Korea, Paul was already in love with pretty Gail Harris, the only child of Federal Judge George Harris. Unlike the Gettys, who were very much newcomers to the city, the Harrises were third-generation San Franciscans, and the Judge, a Truman appointee, was a leading figure in the community. But for all Paul’s wildness, the Judge and his wife, Aileen, became very fond of him, and he in turn was sufficiently in love with Gail to give up drinking. When Paul and Gail decided to get married, the only person not in favour was Mrs Mack.

  Hating to lose her favourite son, she argued forcibly that at twenty-three he was far too young and wild and immature for marriage. But despite her warnings and objections the Harrises supported the young lovers, who finally married, quietly, in Woodside’s Our Lady of the Wayside Chapel in January 1956.

  The bridegroom’s father, who was then in England, would, true to form, have ignored the marriage, but prompted by Penelope Kitson he sent a telegram of congratulation signed, ‘Your loving Father’ – though not a present.

  Gordon by now seemed firmly married to poetry, economic theory and music – above all music. He possessed a baritone voice to match his size, and dreamed of studying at the conservatory and one day finding worldwide fame and fortune as an opera singer.

  Up to this point in their lives neither brother had paid the faintest attention to the oil business, to their half-brothers George and Ronald, or to their unknown father, who was drawing wealth in such unimaginable quantities from beneath the sand in one of the hottest, driest, most uncomfortable spots on earth.

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  The Richest Living American

  In October 1957 Paul Getty finally emerged from the capitalist closet in which he had been living in relative obscurity for so long. Fortune magazine, after several months’ research among America’s super-rich, including Rockefellers, Morgans, Hunts, and Fords, publicly proclaimed Jean Paul Getty, an ‘expatriate businessman living in Paris’, the ‘richest living American’.

  Photographs taken of him at the time give the impression of a nocturnal creature suddenly flushed out of hiding and exposed to the cruel light of day. The secret game he had been quietly engaged in since his father died was no longer secret, his wealth no longer private, and a number of important things began to change for Getty – and for those around him.

  The great fortune and the business interests he had been creating could no longer remain the discreet affair which he had been conducting for so long by long-distance telephone from hotel bedrooms, with the records carried in his head or stowed away in shoe boxes. Henceforth it became increasingly like other major fortunes, and although he did his best to keep his style of life unchanged, it was now that he inevitably became a public figure, subject to all the pressures on the very rich – publicity, begging letters, speculation, envy, fawning ballyhoo; and from now on his features started becoming known as well.

  He pretended to regret the loss of his previous ‘gratifying’ anonymity, remembering how in the past reporters covering events at which he was present had generally overlooked him. ‘For all I know,’ he said, ‘they took me for a waiter.’ But no longer. ‘After managing to avoid the limelight all my life,’ he wrote, ‘to my acute discomfort I became a curiosity, a sort of financial freak overnight.’

  In fact he was vain enough to start relishing the notoriety. But according to his secretary, Barbara Wallace, ‘It was now that things started going wrong.’

  Ann Rork Getty had been right when she accused her former husband of having had ‘no interest in his sons until they were old enough to take their places in his precious dynasty’. Indeed his lack of interest in his offspring was positively superhuman. How could anyone, one asks, remain so impervious to his own flesh and blood as to ignore them totally for years on end, never writing to them, never inquiring if they were intelligent, halfwitted, handsome, keen on women, keen on animals, musical or criminally insane. But Getty never had inquired. He genuinely was not interested, and until they were old enough to be of use had never bothered with them.

  For his son Paul Junior it must have been tempting to respond with a similar lack of interest. But as he needed to support not only Gail, but his first-born son, Jean Paul Getty III, born in November 1956, he decided at around this time to try the family business for a job – and contacted his half-brother George, now vice-president of the Getty-owned Tidewater Oil, with headquarters in Los Angeles. (The company had recently changed its name from Tide Water.)

  Apart from a shared father, the two half-brothers had nothing else in common. They didn’t know each other and would never come to like each other. But George did offer Paul a job – pumping gasoline in a Tidewater service station in the smart white trousers, neat white hat, and shiny black bow-tie of a Tidewater pump attendant.

  Soon Gordon, who had nothing very much to do, would join him, and after a while both brothers were seconded for training at Tidewater headquarters. But there was still virtually no contact with their distant father until the spring of 1958, when out of the blue he telephoned Paul to summon him to Paris. He was to have a chance to prove himself at last – in the Getty Oil installation in the Neutral Zone of Arabia.

  Paul answered that as he had a wife and baby son, he would naturally want to take them with him.

  ‘Fine,’ said his father. ‘Bring them to Paris first so I can meet them.’

  Which explains how Paul and Gail and the baby all arrived for lunch with the head of the family on an early summer day at the Hôtel Georges V in Paris. It also explains how something happened which would have far-reaching consequences for the Getty family. The group around the table started to get on rather well together.

  Gail, who had never met her father-in-law before, had been expecting ‘an extremely grumpy man’. Instead he greeted his son with, ‘Paul, no one told me that your wife was pretty,’ and proceeded to charm her as only he could charm a pretty woman. The old misanthrope was equally delighted with his grandson – ‘a bright, red-haired little rascal’ with ‘a remarkable ability for making his grandpa obey his commands’, as he wrote with untypical enthusiasm in that evening’s diary.

  Even now this exercise in family bonding might have ended there and then, but for events in Paris at the time. A violent demonstration had begun against de Gaulle’s Algerian policy – and the barricades were going up uncomfortably close to the Hôtel Georges V.

  Getty was not a man for violent revolution – and in some alarm decided to decamp to Brussels with his new-found family. And there for the next few weeks they stayed, living in unaccustomed luxury at the Grand Hotel, and going every morning to the newly opened Brussels Exhibition. Here they would breakfast, first, at the Canadian Pavilion off waffles with maple syrup, followed by a trip to the Soviet Pavilion for what Gail still remembers as ‘the most delicious caviare I’ve ever tasted’. Getty, as a man of habit, started to enjoy himself.

  A pleasurable holiday with younger members of his family was something Paul Getty had not experienced before. In Gail he had the perfect daughter-in-law, who found his stories fascinating, and would listen to him, more or less entranced, for hours on end.

  The ‘red-haired little rascal’, seventeen-month-old Jean Paul Getty III, continued as a source of permanent
delight; and Paul Junior began to captivate his father, as none of his other sons had ever done before. By the time the holiday in Brussels ended, Getty had come to an important decision, not just for Paul and Gail, but for all the Getty family.

  Although everything had been arranged for the arrival of Paul and his family in the Neutral Zone, Getty had changed his mind. As he said, life in a trailer in the heat of the Arabian desert was not the thing for a newly married couple with a baby. Gordon was still unmarried, and could easily take his brother’s place – which was what occurred a few weeks later, when he was summarily dispatched to the Getty Oil installation in Arabia.

  But the truth of the matter was that ‘Big Paul’, as the family sometimes called him, had grown attached to what he called ‘my little family’, and had no intention of losing them if he could help it.

  Since Paul had rapidly become his favourite son, it was time for him to have the fatted calf. And as it happened, there was the ideal post within the Getty empire waiting for him. The more the old man thought of it, the more he liked it.

  As part of the expansion of its refinery capacity in Europe, Getty Oil had recently acquired the small Italian Golfo oil Company, with a refinery at Gaeta outside Naples. It had an office in Milan but Getty planned to expand it, change its name to Getty Oil Italiana, and move its headquarters down to Rome. Who better to install as general manager than his son Paul?

  In fact Paul, with his love of travelling and books and leisure, was an unsuitable young man to place in charge of anything, particularly as he’d had no experience of management. But none of this counted with his father. Paul was his son and any son of his should find running a modest operation such as Golfo Oil a picnic.

  It was in his new-found grand-paternal mode that the old tycoon continued to show his ‘little family’ such untypical affection. From Paris he actually drove them to Milan himself – in easy stages and extremely slowly – in his ancient Cadillac; and once in Milan, he insisted on installing them in an apartment in the centre of the city – close to the Golfo office in Piazza Eleonora Duse. The fateful connection of the next generation of the Getty family with Italy had started.