Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  The result had showed when his grandson was kidnapped and the emotional ‘shutter’ had descended, just as it also showed in his refusal to lift the telephone and tell his drug-addicted son, Paul Junior, to come and see him. Most of all perhaps it showed in his unawareness of the wrong he’d done to his son Ronald.

  Since the age of its owner in no way lessens the attractions of a vast amount of money, Getty continued to attract his women. By their eighties most men are ready for a little rest and dignity about such matters, but opportunity and habit kept him at it, relying on injections from his doctor to give him an erection. By his eighties there were women still protesting their agonized desire to marry him.

  Some of his women had vanished from his life, like Mary Teissier, who had more or less succumbed to drink and disappointment and retired to the house he had bought her in the South of France. But there were always fresh admirers on the scene, even aristocratic ones like the Duke of Rutland’s sister, Lady Ursula d’Abo, who declared her love for Getty in the pages of the National Enquirer – which prompted an answering billetdoux from the emotional Nicaraguan Rosabella Burch, in an article in the Sunday Express, saying that she was considering marrying him – ‘He’s such a dear man and so amusing.’

  But another old Getty habit was that of playing off his women against each other, and watching them fighting for his ancient favours. He would sit now viewing television in the evening, lost in thought and pointedly ignoring them; then, when he’d seen enough, he would stagger to his feet and thoughtfully select that night’s companion.

  Along with concupiscence, a further habit that he couldn’t break was the favourite vice of old age – anticipatory meanness. One of the few things that could still excite him was his will. On the edge of eternity, he enjoyed cheeseparing particular bequests as a final way of getting even with women he had once been fond of – even his ex-wives, Teddy and Fini, both of whose allowances he cut, as he did with that of his one-time ‘honorary daughter’, Robina Lund, who had somehow managed to offend him. (On the other hand, there were a number of very old mistresses he now remembered.)

  But his greatest problem was the one that had been there almost all his life – the fact that part of him still had never really grown up. Even with death approaching, the financial genius was as firmly linked as ever with the emotional adolescent.

  It was the childlike side of him that seems to have appealed to the women who were genuinely concerned about him. Like his secretary, Barbara Wallace, who stayed up all night holding his hand when he was terrified of dying. Or Jeanette Constable-Maxwell, who had remained a friend since he gave her that monster coming-of-age party. Or his ‘dearest Pen’ (as he called Penelope Kitson), who had been too wise to marry him, and was one of the few who had not allowed his money to dictate her actions or affections.

  One can understand why, by the spring of 1976, when he knew he had inoperable prostate cancer and refused to see the women he could use no longer, he still wanted Penelope near him, reading those never-forgotten boys’ adventure books by G. A. Henty. There was reassurance in this authoritative woman treating him as a child and reading him children’s stories – just as there is something particularly pathetic in the thought of this richest of all Americans with his sad old face and his figure hunched in his arm-chair with his shawl around him, dreaming of going west with Drake or to India with Clive, and wondering about reincarnation and dreading dying.

  At his death in June 1976, Getty had more than fulfilled his bargain with his mother when they set up the Sarah C. Getty Trust together, forty-two years before. He had made absolutely sure that, as ultimate heirs to nearly $2 billion in the Sarah C. Getty Trust, financially at least his children and his children’s children would want for nothing.

  In the first year after his death the trust produced an income not far short of $4 million each for Paul and Gordon, and the same sum was equally divided between George’s daughters, Anne and Claire and Caroline. Since these five beneficiaries of the trust received all its income, the payments they received would rise steadily, as Getty Oil increased its cash dividends. These dividends rose from $1 a share in 1978 to $1.90 a share in 1980, and on to a record $2.60 in 1982. By the early eighties Paul and Gordon would be receiving $28 million each from the trust every year, while George’s daughters would share the same sum between them.

  But apart from money, J. Paul Getty left the members of his family remarkably little – certainly none of the things the founder of a ‘dynasty’ might have been expected to have left behind – no land, no appreciable heirlooms, not even a centre for the family. Apart from money, which by its nature is anonymous, there was little for members of his family to remember him by at all.

  Since he had only rented Sutton Place, even the house which he had loved was sold, and its pictures and furniture dispatched to the museum. At Malibu it was as if, not trusting his descendants with his memory, he was making the museum the ultimate repository of his reputation and his sole memorial.

  What he had left his family was something else – too much money, a tangle of troubles and a legacy of broken lives.

  Thus one sees how important the idea of the museum must have been for him during the months before he died. It hadn’t mattered that he never saw it – any more than it had mattered that he never visited the Neutral Zone until long after he had built up one of the most productive oilfields in the world from his hotel room in Paris.

  He was a virtuoso of remote control, of using his money and his expertise to make extraordinary things happen far away, while seeing them in his imagination. It was a most unusual talent, and for several years before he died he had been quietly using it to build his own museum of the imagination 6,000 miles away at Malibu.

  He was probably wise never to have visited it. Reality might have disappointed him – and there was always time to visit in another incarnation.

  Instead, from his room in Sutton Place, he could methodically perform the tasks that he enjoyed – reading architects’ reports, checking on costings, and minutely following the progress of the building. (According to Stephen Garrett, one of the old man’s most exciting moments came when he watched a video he had sent him of pouring the concrete into the foundations.) Then, when his Roman villa was complete, it had been time to start to fill it with its treasures.

  During the months before he died, one of his few remaining pleasures was to discuss its contents with Gillian Wilson, who as well as being the museum’s official Curator of Decorative Arts was also young, intelligent and pretty. On the last occasion that she saw him he had shut his eyes and said: ‘I am entering my decorative arts gallery now. Tell me what I’m seeing.’

  She says she talked ‘as descriptively as possible’ about the gallery for nearly half an hour – at the end of which he opened his eyes, smiled at her, and said, ‘Well. Quite a spread, eh?’

  By then the initial press reaction to the museum was forgotten. Attendance figures were already proving its popularity. In the year before he died, there were over 350,000 visitors – which, as he could not resist working out, had cost him $3.50 a head. But this had been one expense that he had not begrudged – for it was good to know that people were already appreciating what he had created.

  In Rome, before the war, he had had a marble bust made of himself, and he asked that it be placed in the vestibule of the museum.

  ‘The ideal visitor to the museum,’ he once remarked, ‘should fancy himself back two thousand years, calling on Roman friends who live in the villa.’

  When they did, they would have found the marble bust of a middle-aged man looking not unlike a Roman emperor waiting in the vestibule to greet them.

  Upon his father’s death, Gordon, as co-trustee with Lansing Hays of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, became the richest – and, potentially at least, the most important – member of the family. In addition to the $3.4 million income he received in 1977 from the trust, he had an additional $1 million trustee fee, plus a $4 million fee as execut
or of his father’s will.

  But although Ann and Gordon intended to enjoy their affluence, Gordon appeared unmoved by whatever power and responsibilities accompanied it. Diffident by nature, he was no match for the lawyerly self-confidence of Hays – who, looking on himself as regent for the Getty empire after the emperor’s death, treated the board of Getty Oil with scant respect – and Gordon likewise. The board of Getty Oil periodically objected to such treatment, but Gordon didn’t. As Getty Oil was doing very nicely at the time, and returning steadily increasing dividends to its principal shareholder, the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Gordon had more important things to think about.

  An unmalicious man, Gordon spoke well of everyone – even his father – on whom he published an amiable if enigmatic obituary:

  My father was a fathomless man, commanding and disarming, a philosopher and a clown. He was inscrutable, a showman, a prince of players. He was charismatic, even mesmeric. Many of his old employees, underpaid or not, would have shed blood for him. He was stoical in grief and at last jocular to the day he died. I think he meant to tell us something about courage.

  Perhaps he had – although it’s hard to know quite what. What was clear was that Gordon had no intention of learning lessons from his father over such matters as personal economy and self-denial. Money would never turn his head, but this didn’t mean that he and Ann were incapable of enjoying it.

  Unlike his more sophisticated brother Paul, he and Ann were not rich cosmopolitans, and their social aims were essentially confined to San Francisco, where Ann was ready to replace the memory of the Sacramento Valley by becoming undisputed queen of Pacific Heights.

  So the style and quality of living at 350 Broadway rose after Jean Paul Getty’s death. They glassed in the atrium, making the house ideal for full-scale parties and receptions. Getty’s butler, the solemn Bullimore, was taken on from Sutton Place, together with a household staff of six. A splendid kitchen was installed, with amusing trompe I’œil paintings of a farmyard, and the most majestic of America’s lady interior decorators, Sister Parish, was engaged to supervise the décor in the house. It was thanks to her that the pride of the house became the dining room, where electric light was banned and the Gettys and their guests would dine exclusively by genuine candlelight from elaborate candelabra (this, despite Bullimore grumbling on about the candlewax needing to be cleared up later). With its antique blue and gold Chinese wallpaper, it was a room of considerable beauty, with the lights of Oakland glittering across the bay. Guests reported filet mignon so tender they could cut it with a fork, soufflés of virtuoso lightness, and memorable wines from France and California, although they observed that Gordon generally drank water.

  On a simpler level, as a family man, Gordon was anxious not to inflict upon his children the sort of insecurity he had grown up with. He and Ann read Dr Spock, and were relaxed and undemanding parents. ‘We’re a close-knit family but we’re not big on family meals. Everyone kind of eats when they’re hungry,’ said Gordon. This applied to him as well – as he tended at times to disappear all day to his noiseproof workroom, not surfacing until it was almost time for bed.

  No longer having any need to prove himself before his father, he was able to enjoy his freedom and do more or less exactly as he wanted. But what did Gordon want? It was none too clear, even to himself. Later he described this as a period when he was ‘simply floundering around’. With little formal teaching, he was already trying to write music but was unable to complete anything to his satisfaction. He sang Schubert – Winterreise, which he enunciated with his eyes shut – but his voice, though powerful, was faintly but fatally off key.

  According to his wife Ann, ‘Gordon’s favourite pastime is buying CDs at Tower Records. He practically supports the shop.’ But apart from records, he spent little directly on himself. His dress sense was minimal. Lacking all taste for self-adornment, he wore a 40-dollar Casio electronic wristwatch. He preferred his Dodge convertible to a Rolls or a Bentley.

  Ann, meanwhile, had started buying French Impressionists but lacked the temperament and inclinations of a serious collector. Regular contributions were made to the San Francisco Opera House and the San Francisco Philharmonic but, in general, philanthropy was done ‘rather mechanically’ as Ann put it, in accordance with an annual list compiled by Gordon’s secretary.

  As a couple, they were generous but not overgenerous, not wishing to be landed with a reputation for prodigality, and appeared somewhat less concerned about human beings than animals, prehistory, and conservation – particularly ‘conservation of the world’s resources before it is too late’, as Gordon put it when setting up the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize in memory of his father, but not making it very clear what connection there had ever been between his father and conserving anything except large amounts of money.

  Gordon voted Republican and Ann Democrat, ‘thus cancelling each other out’, as Gordon put it; and they were equally impartial in lending the house to any cause they happened to approve of.

  At this stage in the marriage it appeared to be Ann who made the running. It was Ann who bought herself a Porsche, Ann who dressed in Paris. And while Ann became the most glamorous and talked about woman in San Francisco, Gordon continued to exude the faintly baffled air of a music professor who has suddenly found himself a multi-millionaire – a multimillionaire who sometimes happened to forget where he’d parked his car, but who, when he did find it, always insisted on driving his friends home after dinner.

  During this period he seemed perfectly prepared to ‘flounder’ on for ever, devoted to his children, inflicting Schubert on his long-suffering friends, and ignoring what was happening in the far-off world of Getty Oil and the Sarah C. Getty Trust. At times it seemed as if he was positively inviting people not to take him seriously. Few did.

  One will never know for certain why the old man didn’t use the opportunity of his will to right the wrong that he had done to his eldest son Ronald. It seems inconceivable that the ancient grudge against his grandfather, Dr Helmle, still rankled. Given the somewhat bumpy history of their relationship, he may simply have felt disinclined to do Ronald any favours. But most probably he was wary of changing anything in the Sarah C. Getty Trust which could have given a point of entry to his abiding enemy – the tax-man.

  Instead he offered Ronald certain consolation prizes, which made things worse rather than better. He left him the major share with Paul and Gordon in La Posta Vecchia – which none of them wanted. Still less, in the circumstances, did he want his father’s diaries, which for some extraordinary reason he bequeathed to him. (The diaries were valued at a nominal value of one dollar for probate purposes.) Apart from a legacy of $320,000, the only substantial benefit Ronald derived on his father’s death was his fee of $4 million as his executor, a role he shared with his brother Gordon.

  After so many promises he was bitter and humiliated, so he went to law – against the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Sarah C. Getty Trust. Fearing that his case would delay settlement of the will and threaten the tax-free status of the great bequest, the museum settled with Ronald for $10 million. But he got nowhere in his case against the trust, although he says that Paul and Gordon had been willing to include him in the trust until their lawyers dissuaded them.

  So the injustice that was done to Ronald festered on, leaving him feeling doubly betrayed by his father – first at the age of six when the trust was founded, and now in this will that had continued the injustice and had set him firmly against his brothers.

  Ronald, of course, was still a multi-millionaire and, sensibly invested, his money would have brought him in enough to live in comfort for the remainder of his life. But Ronald wanted more than comfort. He wanted to prove himself against his father and his brothers and before his children. So he invested his money in his business ventures, risking everything to make another Getty fortune on his own account.

  Apart from Ann and Gordon, the most fortunate members of the family were George’s chi
ldren, Anne, Claire and Caroline. Ever since George’s death, their mother, Gloria, had carefully protected them from further scandal and from press intrusion; and continuing the pattern established by their father, they kept more or less apart from other members of the family. Each received a third of the income which their father would have had from the Sarah C. Getty Trust, which in the twelve months following their grandfather’s death approached $2 million each.

  But although this meant that they were great heiresses, they remained wary of the world outside their sheltered circle. It was as if all three of them had learned important lessons from their father’s downfall, and were determined to avoid the temptations and disasters of the very rich. They revered the memory of their grandfather. Their mother retained a strong influence on all of them, and for all their money they continued leading undramatic, very private lives.

  It was as if the fault line in the Getty family continued through Paul Junior and his children; and by the time his father died, it was clear that Paul’s attempt to repair it by bringing Gail and the children back to Cheyne Walk had failed.

  Throughout the marriage of Paul’s former mistress, Victoria Holdsworth, to Oliver Musker, her mother, Mary Holdsworth, had kept in contact with events at Cheyne Walk. Being concerned for Paul she used to bring him supper in a basket every Wednesday evening, which also gave her an opportunity to keep in touch with what was happening.

  It is hard to be precise about the sequence of events that followed during the spring before Paul Getty’s death. Strains had been appearing between Paul Junior and Gail and the children, as Paul was clearly finding it hard to cure himself of his addiction and continue his treatment at the clinic. Simultaneously there had been strains in Victoria’s marriage, which ended in divorce some two years later – and when she decided to move back to Cheyne Walk, Gail moved out at once to a house across the river.