Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  Paul’s days must have dragged interminably and at times his depressions were appalling, but he was strong and single-minded and felt that this was what fate intended. He was punishing himself for what had happened. Believing himself valueless, he could find little of value in his own surroundings. Thus, for all his wealth, his world became a tiny segment of a very private hell. He played his opera records, watched interminable TV, drank much, ate little, and when life became unbearable, he always had what seemed to be the perfect antidote.

  At times he tried to kick the habit, but this was something wealthy addicts always find a problem. On the few occasions when he couldn’t find money for drugs, the Getty name was good for credit.

  Although he was often lonely, he was not alone. Victoria helped to keep him company, and he soon built up a very private group of friends. Gradually, some of the members of the counter-culture of the sixties who had been his friends and guests in Marrakesh joined his circle. These were people he could trust, and who understood his situation. Mick Jagger and his then wife, Bianca, lived just a few doors away in Cheyne Walk and often saw him. So did the Marianne Faithful and hopelessly addicted gallery owner Robert Fraser. But as far as his future was concerned, his most important visitor was another neighbour, the knowledgeable Old Etonian with the small antique shop round the corner, who had been a friend of Talitha’s.

  During the sixties, Christopher Gibbs was a well-known figure in Chelsea. Handsome, stylish, and extremely well connected – his father was a banker and his uncle governor of Rhodesia – he was a most unusual character. Having attended university in France and studied archaeology in Jerusalem, he became something of a trend-setter for the sixties with his parties and the Arabic furniture and carpets he dealt in. His flat, a short walk along Cheyne Walk from Paul’s house, had been used as the setting for one of the theme films of the sixties, Antonioni’s Blow Up. But his most famous role was probably his friendship with the young Mick Jagger. It was Gibbs who discovered Stargrove, the Jaggers’ splendid Victorian country house in Berkshire, and helped them furnish it. Gibbs was often with them in Marrakesh, where he introduced them to his friends the Gettys.

  At the time Paul had lent him £1,200 for a small house in the Atlas mountains. Gibbs still owned it, and was grateful. Now that Paul needed company and friends that he could trust, he was anxious to repay the debt. Besides, he genuinely liked Paul and like most of his friends felt desperately sorry for him.

  During this period, one member of the family appeared entirely immune to what was going on – the ageing patriarch at Sutton Place. At seventy-eight old Paul was still as firmly in command of Getty Oil as ever, and richer than he’d ever been. With Neutral Zone production at its peak in 1971, his personal fortune climbed to $290 million, with the Sarah C. Getty Trust ahead of it at $850 million.

  Getty himself had single-handedly fought off a number of attacks upon his empire, and had saved his tanker fleet despite declining American demand, so that when the Arab– Israeli war began in 1973, Getty Oil would be well placed to profit from the worldwide oil shortage.

  Typically, when told about Talitha’s death, he showed no flicker of emotion. It seemed to be the same with the news about Paul Junior. ‘No Getty can be a drug addict,’ he said firmly, and although his son was living barely thirty miles away in London, he adamantly refused to see him. From time to time Paul would try to reach his father on the telephone, begging Penelope to use her influence. She always got the same reply: ‘When he stops taking drugs we’ll talk, but not till then.’

  Twelve days after Talitha’s death, echoing the way his father had treated him, Getty virtually struck Paul from his will – leaving him $500.

  But behind the show of strength, the lord of Sutton Place was vulnerable. He had never been as big a man as he had wanted; but he now looked rather small, with shoulders hunched, and liver spots mottling his cheeks. Suddenly, despite his money and the women round him, he seemed very much alone.

  His policy of abandoning his sons in infancy, and then recalling them to take their places in the business when they came of age, simply hadn’t worked. There was no closeness or affection, nor had there been much understanding between them. He still resented them, still angrily attacked them when he felt that they were threatening his own unique position.

  Timmy apart – and he had loved Timmy only after he was dead – the one exception for a while had been his precious Paul. Gail still says how sad it is that Paul Jr. never realized until too late how much his father loved him. Possibly he did, but when Paul fell from grace, this simply made the old man’s heart set harder.

  ‘The only way we can preserve what we have created is through our children’, he had written recently like the old Victorian he really was at heart. Had he thought about this earlier, he might have been more careful in the way he had treated these four beings on whom so much depended.

  In many ways the unkindest cut of all had been the one he dealt his half-German second son, tall unhappy Ronald. Had Ronald possessed a little of the charm of his half-brother Paul things might have been different. But Ronald wasn’t easy. He had a stubborn streak that had made Getty say occasionally, ‘Ronnie’s the son that’s most like me’, but the truth was that the older Ronald got, the more he reminded Getty of his German grandfather, his old enemy, Dr Helmle. And it was the vendetta with Dr Helmle which was at the root of all the trouble.

  Ronald’s exclusion from the Sarah C. Getty Trust had been a cruel injustice, which made him feel discriminated against by the other members of the family. During the ups and downs of their relationship, Getty had sometimes given his son his faithful promise to rectify the situation, and include him in the Sarah C. Getty Trust. But he never had. Perhaps he was concerned that by adding to the number of beneficiaries, he would have made the trust vulnerable to his eternal enemy, the tax-man. Perhaps when it came to it he simply didn’t want to include Ronald and was still seeking his revenge on long dead Dr Helmle by victimizing his grandson.

  One effect this had was to make Ronald feel that he had no future in the family business, and in 1964, shortly after his marriage, he left Germany and his position in the Getty-owned Veedol company and returned to California. He was intent on making large amounts of money on his own account to prove his independence and show what he thought of his father. Unfortunately he chose Hollywood, and swiftly showed that, for all his alleged similarities to his father, he lacked Big Paul’s obsessional capacity to learn every detail of whatever business he embarked on.

  He had inherited nearly $2 million from Grannie Getty – who had always thought that he was badly treated – and allied himself with two Hollywood producers to produce a number of low-budget films like Flare Up starring Raquel Welch, Zeppelin and Sheilah, But although these films are still shown on TV, they failed to make his reputation or his fortune.

  ‘I’ll have the money, and they’ll have the know-how,’ said Ronald, referring to his co-producers.

  ‘And by the end they’ll still have the know-how and they’ll have your money,’ replied his father – who as usual when it came to business was remarkably perceptive.

  Gordon was completely different; and recently, despite their lawsuit and their differences in character – which were considerable – Getty had come to feel a grudging admiration for his absentminded son.

  Gordon had courage and was clever. Probably too clever, that was his trouble. He had tried his economic theories on his father who, by and large, couldn’t understand them. Nor could Getty appreciate Gordon’s music. Occasionally at Sutton Place the great voice would go booming down the corridors.

  ‘Gordon practising,’ Getty would say, almost benevolently. But he rarely failed to add that Gordon wasn’t practical. On occasions, though, Gordon could surprise him, for sometimes his wild ideas actually worked – as when he suggested that the heating system in the Pierre Hotel could double up for air-conditioning in summer, thus saving several million dollars upgrading the whole system in the h
otel. Gordon was also an admirable family man, and he had followed his father’s example by producing only sons. Old Paul was proud of them.

  To show that the lawsuit was forgiven, he bestowed on Gordon the highest accolade in the Getty firmament – the all-powerful position of trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust. But try as he might, he could never see Gordon taking a more active role in the oil business.

  In contrast, the eldest son and heir-apparent, George, Vice-president of Tidewater Oil, was deeply conscious of family tradition. Like most bad parents, Getty was inconsistent with his sons, favouring one against another, and thus creating jealousy just as he did among his women. George was the most jealous of them all. He was a great carrier of tales against his siblings, trying to curry favour with his father – first against Ronald, then against Gordon during his law-suit, even saying that Gordon was not a Getty but the child of Ann Rork’s third husband, Joe McEnerney, which was ludicrous.

  But as Vice-president of Tidewater, George had truly suffered. His father had always had an instinct for the weaknesses of others, and rarely spotted them without attacking. He’d been unforgiving when Tidewater’s oil exploration bids had failed one by one – particularly those in Pakistan and the Sahara – and shut down the company’s exploration section without consulting George. Similarly he had personally sold off part of Tide Water’s unprofitable marketing network in the western USA over George’s head in a $300 million deal with Philips Petroleum’s John Houchin, at the Hotel Flora, on the last occasion he had been in Rome. George had been incensed.

  ‘My father’s the president in charge of success and I’m the vice-president in charge of failure,’ he lamented – a fairly accurate assessment of the situation.

  George’s personal life had also deteriorated since he had broken with his former wife, Gloria, in 1967. In the ensuing divorce proceedings Gloria claimed that George had been distant, cold, aloof, unfeeling – all the things the wives had said about his father.

  For a period George had thought himself in love with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter, Lady Jean Campbell. She had met him at dinner at Sutton Place and found him ‘very strange, very unrelaxed, and always referring to his father during conversation as “Mr Getty” ’. She thought this odd, and tried persuading him to call him ‘Father’, even ‘Dad’, but it was always ‘Mr Getty’.

  ‘I realized then that George was scared stiff, absolutely terrified of Mr Getty and of what Mr Getty thought of him.’

  In 1971 George remarried – not to Lady Jean, who preferred Norman Mailer – but to Jacqueline Riordan, a San Francisco heiress who had inherited $30 million from her previous husband, an Irish-American financier who had made a fortune from a dubious pension scheme in Switzerland and who had perished when a mud-slide engulfed him in his bedroom. (Jacqueline somehow managed to escape.)

  The old man had been fond of Gloria, who’d been a good wife to George and mother to his three daughters, and felt saddened by the divorce. But he couldn’t help approving of a new wife who had so much money. ‘It’s not so much a marriage as a merger,’ he began to say with satisfaction. But once the merger was effected Jacqueline soon became its senior partner, using her power unmercifully against poor George once she had reached the same conclusion as Lady Jean about his attitude towards his father.

  George in fact was secretly becoming frightened of almost everything by now – his enemies, his wife, his ex-wife, the Tide Water executives, life itself.

  To counter this he did his best to earn respect from those around him as a prominent social figure, fund-raising for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, sitting on the board of the Bank of America, even breeding horses just as the Queen of England did – in short, turning himself into the sort of character he could respect. It didn’t work. Papa was always there to rule his life, and making no attempt at all to hide the fact that he despised him.

  Not surprisingly, George was drinking by now – more or less secretly, but to excess. By the beginning of 1973 he was taking sedatives and speed and probably injecting something inadvisable. On the night of 6 June he had another bitter row with Jacqueline, once again over Mr Getty. Their rows were almost always over Mr Getty. At the end of the row he flipped, all the frustrations, hatreds, impotence and rage surfacing in one great wave of anger, and he panicked.

  He locked himself in the bedroom of their valuable house in beautiful Bel Air and started shouting. He drank. He swallowed a lot of Nembutal. He tried to stab himself with a barbecue fork, but failed to pierce his stomach. Then he fell into a coma.

  Finally friends broke down the door and got him out and called an ambulance, but there was a muddle now about the hospital. No one could permit Tidewater’s Vice-president to be taken, in what was thought to be a drunken stupor, to the common casualty department of the nearby UCLA hospital. So they took him to a more discreet hospital instead, which took twenty minutes longer.

  To save his name they lost his life. For ironically, George wasn’t drunk, but was suffering from a potent overdose of all the drugs he’d swallowed. By the time they reached the hospital, George, beloved eldest son and heir-apparent to the richest and coldest man in America, was dead.

  ‘His father killed him,’ said his widow, when journalists came to see her.

  In London it was early evening when the news of George’s death reached Barbara Wallace, who telephoned Penelope. Penelope knew that Getty was having dinner with the Duchess of Argyll at her house in Mayfair. But one of her daughters said, ‘You must go to him and break the news to him. He’ll need you.’

  So she did.

  When she told him George was dead, Getty was transfixed with grief, poleaxed, stricken, unable to weep or speak, such was his anguish. For this was one of those extremely rare occasions when the structure of his life – his fortune, his ambition, his constant activities, his women and his powers of concentration – were all useless, blown away, leaving the lonely child who had grieved for his dog Jip, for his dear Papa and darling Mama, and for Timmy, ‘bravest and best of all my sons’. Now George had joined them in the line-up of this old man’s misery.

  On the way back to Sutton Place he wouldn’t speak to anyone, and next morning still refused to talk of George. But he had a portrait photograph of him hung in the hall of Sutton Place, with purple round it, purple being the imperial colour of the emperors of Rome and also of mourning.

  Shortly afterwards he agreed to speak to journalists, one of whom repeated the widow’s original remark.

  ‘She says his father killed him. Have you any comment, Mr Getty?’

  ‘None,’ he answered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kidnap And Ransom

  The Area Between Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Tiber has many of Rome’s great renaissance palaces, for this is where papal families like the Borgias, Farnese, and Riario once resided – and these narrow streets have seen more mayhem in their time than any other quarter of the city. At night they still seem faintly sinister, but by the small hours there is rarely any sign of life, apart from the Roman cats and the occasional night-watchman on his rounds. So no one could have missed the young Paul Getty as he walked down the Via della Mascherone towards the mask-like fountain of a girl spouting water from her mouth, after which the little street is named.

  He was a red-haired beanpole of a boy, and after a night out he often wandered home like this to the apartment he was sharing with two young painters in Trastevere on the far side of the river. Today it would seem a stupid thing to do, but Rome was a safer city then, and when an elderly white Fiat drew up beside him with a squeal of brakes, he was not particularly alarmed.

  ‘Excuse me, signore. Are you Paul Getty?’ called out the driver.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am.’

  With which two men jumped out, grabbed him, and despite his struggles forced him into the back of the car, which swiftly drove away. As the clocks of Rome were striking 3 a.m. on the morning of 10 July 1973, the next disaster to afflict the Getty family had
started.

  Since the death of Talitha, and Paul’s flight to London, Gail’s chief preoccupation had been to hold her family together, and although her marriage to Lang Jeffries had ended two years earlier, she felt she was succeeding. She was thirty-seven that April.

  She and the children all loved Italy. They went to the house at Orgia for weekends and holidays, and in Rome were now living in a modern apartment in the middle-class area of Parioli. In those days living was so cheap for foreigners with dollars that she could live comfortably, but she was far from rich, and child support from Paul in London tended to be erratic. She drove an Opel station-wagon, had many local friends, most of them Italian, and lived an essentially private life around her children.

  Wishing them to enjoy a European education, she sent them not to the American School in Rome, but to solid old St George’s on the Via Salaria, which still claimed in its prospectus ‘to provide a sound, all-round British style education for English-speaking children between the ages of eight and eighteen’.

  But like much in Rome in the early seventies, St George’s was affected by the new-wave culture which was hitting Italy. The three younger children made the most of their time there, but Paul, the eldest, rebelled. He was more seriously affected by the divorce and by Talitha’s death than the others, and proved harder to control without a father.

  By 1973, when he was just sixteen, he had effectively given up on regular education. When Lang was around he had never got on well with him, resenting his presence in his father’s place. Now, being highly independent, he had set his heart on painting and educating himself by reading what he wanted. He was serious enough about this for Gail to agree to let him share the Trastevere studio with two older friends of the family, Marcello Crisi and Philip Woollam.