by John Pearson
La Posta Vecchia was one of the Prince’s former country houses, and had been a staging-post on the ancient Via Salaria, near the old Etruscan site of Palo. Although considerably decayed, as were the Odescalchi, it was an imposing building with its portico and Roman arches, and, when he bought it, Paul had plans of living there for part of every year. The indispensable Penelope supervised the décor in the comfortable style of an English country house which pleased him.
Getty loved the house, but had always been concerned about his safety and all the publicity about his fortune made him doubly anxious. Palo was by the sea, and according to his secretary, Barbara Wallace, he began worrying about being kidnapped there by pirates.
Kidnap was becoming an obsession and, because of this, La Posta Vecchia never became the centre for the grand Italian life Getty dreamed of. He ordered bars on bedroom windows, and the most up-to-date security. He even kept a loaded shotgun in his bedroom, but even so he rarely stayed for long. In Rome he felt happiest – and safest – in the old familiar Hotel Flora on the Via Veneto.
When he had originally bought La Posta Vecchia he had consulted his Italian lawyer about adopting Italian nationality – but now it was a subject that he never mentioned. England was increasingly stealing his affections.
It was partly age. He had always felt at home in England, and had even come to tolerate the weather. More important, he felt safe there, and the British upper classes were quite different from those dried-up Romans who believed they had a right to teach a Yankee billionaire a lesson.
Even the publicity about his fortune was in his favour. The British aristocracy has always had a deep respect for money – and as he discovered in his far-off days at Oxford, it was not too hard to get to know them. More than ever, Paul enjoyed meeting almost anybody with a title.
It was on the suggestion of Commandant Paul Louis Weiller that he now recruited Claus von Bülow to his staff. This Danish lawyer, who had worked for a period in Lord Hailsham’s chambers, had a reputation as a womanizer and a social figure. Born Claus Borberg, he had adopted the surname von Bülow from his maternal grandfather, a former Danish minister of justice, after his father, Svend Borberg, was imprisoned after the Second World War for collaborating with the Nazis.
Getty appointed Claus his ‘chief executive’, but since the old man hated delegating anything to anyone, he also acted as a sort of social secretary. Here he was invaluable. Claus really did know almost everyone who mattered – which was particularly useful now, as Paul embarked upon a belated honeymoon with the British upper classes.
Before he had purchased Sutton Place from the Duke of Sutherland, he had already met that most relaxed of noblemen, the Duke of Bedford, and was genuinely delighted when invited as a weekend guest to Woburn. He was equally delighted when the Duke of Rutland invited him to Belvoir Castle (which, Claus told him, gentlemen pronounce ‘Beaver’). But his desire to establish his credentials as a fellow owner of a stately home brought trouble.
It was Claus’s idea to combine the coming of age of the daughter of a kinsman of the Duke of Norfolk, Jeanette Constable-Maxwell, with a gala party for the refurbished Sutton Place in June 1960. Paul had met Jeanette and her father, Captain Ian Constable-Maxwell, through the Duke of Rutland, and it seemed generous of this famously ungenerous American to be offering his house for the occasion.
But at some stage things got out of hand, and what began as a twenty-first birthday party rapidly became the monster party of the London season. To the last moment, Claus was busily suggesting even more distinguished guests. So was the Commandant Weiller, and by the night of 2 June the list had swollen to 1,200. It included royal dukes like the Gloucesters, humdrum dukes like the Rutlands and the Bedfords, ship-owning Greeks like Onassis and Niarchos, plus the Douglas Fairbankses, the Duchess of Roxburgh and Mr and Mrs Duncan Sandys (who came in lieu of Diana Sandys’s father, Sir Winston Churchill, whose party-going days were over).
Apart from the Rutlands and her immediate family, little Miss Constable-Maxwell knew almost no one. Nor did Getty – who had not seen fit to ask any members of his family.
Worse still, what had been carefully planned as the acme of the social season finally became an outright free-for-all. After much advance publicity the freelance party-going classes were alerted, and, just before midnight, gate-crashers started to arrive in droves. By the standards of the sixties, it was fairly harmless. No one was seriously hurt, the Cellini salt-cellars were not stolen as was thought at first, and although a photographer was thrown in the swimming-pool, damages were estimated at a mere £20,000.
The only lasting hurt was to Getty’s reputation, which never quite recovered. For although he gained sympathy for what had happened, there was also an impression that the whole affair had been excessive and distinctly vulgar – somewhat on a level with the previous year’s Battersea Park party thrown by American impresario Mike Todd – but not such fun.
Certainly the party did little to establish Getty as an honorary member, of the British upper classes, nor did it herald an era of feudal extravagance for the latest lord of Sutton Place. On the contrary, while it may have seemed that he had now ascended to the dizziest reaches of high living, he was in fact as firmly rooted in economy as ever.
It was the same old puritan response to self-indulgence. Deep down he must have known that neither George nor Sarah would have wasted money on a party such as this – still less upon a house as opulent as Sutton Place. Once more he was forced to justify himself before those ghostly keepers of his conscience – which meant that from the moment that he took possession, everything about his life at Sutton Place became a challenge to save money and avoid unnecessary expense. Indeed, Sutton Place called forth the highest flights from Getty, in his long career as lifelong virtuoso in the subtle art of saving money.
It was typical of him to have discovered a young female lawyer to help him with this sovereign task. Robina Lund, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Sir Thomas Lund, the President of the Law Society, had recently qualified as a solicitor when Getty met her with her parents. Contrary to rumours, she insists that – not for his want of trying – she never did become his mistress, but remained his friend, admirer, legal counsellor and ‘honorary daughter’. She was certainly a shrewd adviser, and she helped him achieve the magical fiscal situation of being legally resident in Britain while regarded by the taxman as domiciled in his native but now never visited USA.
In addition to this memorable achievement, she also helped him make another massive saving which presumably assuaged whatever guilt he felt at living in unseemly splendour. This was over the actual ownership of Sutton Place. For although he had made the original deal with Sutherland, the house was actually purchased not by him, but by a subsidiary of Getty Oil called Sutton Place Properties, of which Miss Lund was a director. Sutton Place was then designated Getty Oil’s official European headquarters.
Thus, in effect, Paul could live at Sutton Place scot-free, with his home charged to the company, and the company in turn could charge the cost against its tax as part of its operating expenses.
Nor were the minor costs of daily living overlooked. Getty was always careful to explain to anybody interested that at Sutton Place a dry Martini was actually costing him a quarter of the price he would be paying at the Ritz. He was also very much aware that his few servants and the gardeners cost approximately a third of what he would have paid in California. Ordinary guests tended to get ordinary fare, like simple cottage pie, and office costs were kept in check by re-using envelopes wherever possible, recycling elastic bands and being careful with the use of printed writing paper. In the dining room, small electric fires were used to save on central heating.
Having spent his life avoiding giving anything to anyone, he saw no reason now to change his mind, and it was only right that his deep obsession with economy finally brought its own poetic retribution. As he had learned when staying as a guest in the stately homes of his beloved British aristocracy, ther
e has always been an unstated but effective rule that just as guests are expected to put their own postage stamps on letters, so they are naturally expected to insist on paying for their personal telephone calls. But after a while he realized that this was not happening at Sutton Place, and that some of his guests were making expensive calls to Australia and the States.
It seems that this upset him deeply, partly from meanness, but also because he felt that, since he was American and rich, he was being taken for a ride, and his guests were treating him as they’d not have dreamt of behaving with, say, the Duke of Westminster.
This was the origin of Getty’s greatest social blunder – the installation of his famous pay-phone for his guests at Sutton Place. It was quite logical but that was not the point. He should have realized that as a billionaire, and an American one at that, he could simply not afford to seem as stingy as an English duke.
*
One of the interesting might-have-beens in the Getty saga is what would have happened had that lunch party at the Hôtel Georges V not occurred, and if Paul had gone as planned to the Neutral Zone, with Gordon being made manager of Golfo Oil, later Getty Oil Italiana, instead.
Gordon, with his passion for music, would have loved Milan and its opera house. Being unmarried and susceptible, he would probably have married an Italian. And then, when Paul and Gail returned to California – as they undoubtedly would have done after the heat and horrible discomfort of the Neutral Zone – it would have been Gordon and not Paul who might well have started the Italian branch of the Getty family – with a very different outcome for the future.
Instead, by 1962, having left his father over the trouble in the Neutral Zone, Gordon was safely back in San Francisco and was standing in a bar called La Rocca’s Corner when he met tall, auburn-haired Ann Gilbert, daughter of a walnut farmer from Wheatland in the Sacramento Valley. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three. They fell in love. In 1964 they married. And over the next six years they produced four sons, Peter, Andrew, John and William. Thus, while his brother Paul was busily creating Roman Gettys, Gordon’s boys grew up as true Americans.
Even in his days at Clay Street, Gordon had always been in search of the simple pleasures of a settled home. In total contrast to his father, he was naturally uxorious, and his marriage proved that rarity among the Gettys – a stable and happy relationship.
One of the reasons was probably that Gordon and Ann were largely complementary to each other. Ann had a strong puritan element, having been brought up according to the precepts of fundamentalist Baptist Christianity, but she was also worldly, very practical and thoroughly determined to enjoy the good life after enduring the opposite, for so long on a walnut farm in the Sacramento Valley.
In many ways Gordon remained harder to fathom than his wife. Perhaps as a defence against his father, he continued to appear a sort of lost professor trying to remember where he was. ‘I am not entirely of this century,’ he admitted on one occasion, and Penelope’s verdict on him was more or less typical of how most of his father’s friends at Sutton Place regarded him. ‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘is potty but in a highly intelligent way.’
Gordon’s pottiness was deceptive. He was to prove extremely down-to-earth where his family was concerned – and was determined that his sons should never suffer what he himself had endured in his own childhood. He was also the most indulgent and generous of husbands, to the point that Ann was often said to wear the trousers.
But beneath his undoubted kindness and the protective camouflage of the mad professor, Gordon could be extremely sharp and surprisingly persistent where his interests and those of his immediate family were concerned – as his father now discovered. For as well as producing further male heirs to the enormous fortune in the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Gordon’s marriage had a more immediate – and for his father, less agreeable – result. As a married man with a young wife who herself saw little point in needless self-denial, Gordon soon discovered he was short of money – which struck him, as it struck his wife, as utterly absurd.
He had a father known to be his nation’s richest citizen, dollars were gushing ceaselessly into the trust specifically established by his grandmother for her grandchildren’s benefit, and yet he and his wife were currently subsisting in a small motel and wondering where their next few thousand dollars were to come from.
It is often claimed that Ann was the cause of what ensued, but Gordon’s friend Judge Newsom firmly insists that it was he, not Ann, who encouraged Gordon to commence the lawsuit to compel his father to disgorge at least a little of the money locked away in Grandma Getty’s trust to benefit the grandchildren. The outcome was predictable – uproar from stately Sutton Place.
For although the amiable Gordon tried to describe his lawsuit as a ‘friendly’ legal action simply intended to clarify an obscure financial situation, it was the equivalent of placing ground glass in the old man’s coffee, or barbed wire in his double bed. Worse – for by questioning the legality of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Gordon was not just threatening the future of the Getty fortune. He was getting at his father at the crucial point where he would always be acutely vulnerable.
For years the Sarah C. Getty Trust had been at the centre of the weird emotional-financial game his father had been playing as he built his fortune. By existing to receive the accumulated conscience money he had been paying to his parents’ memory, the trust had also become a wonderfully tax-efficient method of protecting and enlarging the fortune itself.
‘Whatever they say about J. Paul Getty,’ says Judge Newsom, ‘he was pretty good at one thing – accruing and preserving capital.’ And the way he did it was to use the Sarah C. Getty Trust to hold his accumulated capital and thus avoid taxation. It has been claimed that for many years Getty never paid more than $500 a year in tax. Over the years building up the corpus of the Sarah C. Getty Trust had become his absolute obsession.
Since he controlled the Trust, he was able to ensure that it never paid a cash dividend to the beneficiaries, i.e. himself and his children. Since a cash dividend was income, it would have been subject to taxation. Instead he always paid a stock dividend, which increased the beneficiary’s holding in the Trust, but was not considered income and so remained untaxable.
For a miserly man like Getty this was a perfect method to create a private golden mountain. His surplus wealth would make it grow. The taxman couldn’t touch it. And nobody threatened it – until Gordon went to law to ask for some of the money in the trust which Grandma Getty had clearly intended him to have.
One can see how deeply threatened Getty must have been. For the real danger to his whole magnificent creation was not the payment of a relatively small cash dividend from the trust to Gordon to keep him happy. It was more complicated – and more dangerous – than that. As one of the income beneficiaries of the trust, Gordon was entitled to 6.666 per cent recurring of his father’s income from the trust – and he was claiming retrospectively that, in order to pay him this, his father should have paid himself dividends in cash, not stock, since the Trust was founded back in 1936.
If Gordon could establish this in court, the Sarah C. Getty Trust would fall apart, as the tax-free basis of its dividends unravelled.
Gordon and his legal adviser, Bill Newsom, were as aware of this as Getty himself, and were counting on the threat to make the old man see a little sense and find a way of disbursing some badly needed income to the income beneficiaries. But Paul Getty was not a man to submit to threats – and particularly not over something as important as his mother’s trust, from someone as unimportant as his youngest son.
The result was a bitter, complicated legal battle which dragged on, with intermissions and explosions, for the next seven years – at the end of which, by a judgement of the California Supreme Court, Gordon lost.
This was largely because his father had engaged the most powerful legal hotshot of the day, the formidable trial lawyer Moses Lasky. Also, if Bill Newsom is correct, at the last moment the jud
ge himself recoiled from the enormity of submitting the great Sarah C. Getty Trust to the potentially lethal machinations of the tax-man.
After his father’s death, when he himself became one of the greatest beneficiaries of the trust, Gordon would have reason to be grateful for this judgement. In the meantime, during the seven years the case had lasted, it had produced much tension in the family, and a number of surprises which were going to affect its future.
In the first place, during the legal process Gordon had been able to persuade his father to pay out certain sums of money from the trust to him and to his brothers, Paul Junior and George. Despite this, George had dutifully sided with his father – to the point of writing outraged letters to Gordon on the lines of ‘How could you do this to our own dear father.’ Little love was already lost between the two half-brothers – and this trouble over the Sarah Getty Trust widened the rift which continued to the following generation.
But the strange thing was that, such is the perversity of human nature, and in spite of George’s loyalty, it was Gordon, not George, who ended up in favour with his father.
Ann played a part in this. ‘See here, Mr Getty [as she always called him], let’s have an end to this’, she is supposed to have said to her father-in-law when things were getting particularly hard for Gordon. And the billionaire, who never said no to a woman, is said to have agreed to give a grudging semblance of forgiveness to her husband.
More to the point, perhaps, the way in which Gordon had maintained his case impressed him. Of all his sons it was the vague and otherworldly Gordon who had shown the courage and determination to oppose him. It was an important omen for the future – and Getty almost certainly respected him for it.
He still insisted that he couldn’t understand Gordon’s economic theories, still less his music, but they started seeing more of one another. He got on well with Ann and liked the children. Then, as a sign of ultimate acceptance, Gordon was appointed a trustee of the museum and, ultimate accolade, in 1972 was reinstated as a trustee of the very body he had tried so hard to break – the vast, the ever-growing and the still unassailable Sarah Getty Trust.
