Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  They already had their private Boeing 727, with Ann’s initials painted on the tail, and its own bathroom with a real shower, which for some reason seemed to fascinate her husband. She had been known to redirect the plane to Paris on a sudden whim to do some shopping, but by now she had sufficient scarves from Hermès, bags from Gucci, shoes from Ferragamo, to last a lifetime.

  She and Gordon made donations to causes they believed in – still principally concerned with conservation. The Leakey Anthropological Trust was supported in its work on the origins of man – as was Jane Goodall for her work on the behaviour of chimpanzees. When Gordon gave $5 million to the Leakey Trust, he said, ‘There is a now-or-never quality to anthropological research, as human encroachment and deforestation threaten sources of fossil data-base.’

  Simultaneously Ann decided to rebuild her family home in the Sacramento Valley. Although inclined to refer to her mother as a ‘tough old bat’, Ann was a good daughter, and hoped she’d please her with this brand new home in the shape of a Tuscan villa, complete with courtyards, flower-beds and tower. But the ‘tough old bat’ stayed fairly cool about it all – and the building used up only $2 million out of all that money.

  It was around this time that a glamorous-looking Ann, when interviewed on television by Barbara Walters, tempted fate by setting out her current credo. ‘Not at all,’ she replied to a suggestion that too much money was an instant recipe for misery. ‘I think it’s possible to be very rich and happy, and I suppose, very poor and happy. But it’s easier to be very rich and happy.’

  Determined woman that she was, she now set out to prove this to her private satisfaction.

  Ann is the sort of woman who likes challenges as well as money, and, since there was little left to challenge her in San Francisco, she decided it was time to focus her attention on New York. Having made herself the undisputed social queen of Pacific Heights, she now planned to do the same from the large apartment she and Gordon had acquired on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

  It was a spectacular, expensive operation, an adventure into what is sometimes called ‘the regality of wealth’, with Ann, if not exactly Gordon, apparently set to become the nearest thing to royalty for America. She entertained lavishly, dressed superbly, and soon acquired courtiers – like Jerry Zipkin, famous for his friendship with the Reagans, and the Greek financier and socialite Alexander Papamarkou. It was Papamarkou who introduced her to a real king, or rather ex-king, Constantine of Greece, and when she decided to convert to Greek Orthodox Christianity, King Constantine stood beside her as her godfather.

  But despite this royal connection, Ann remained at heart the girl from Wheatland, California; and, to satisfy her puritan conscience, she attempted to become what is known as ‘working rich’ – by joining the boards of Sotheby’s and Revlon, and becoming a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library.

  It was not enough. For what she craved secretly was not so much work as self-improving culture – the subtle conversation of philosophers, evenings with distinguished authors, enriching contact with gigantic minds. All of which were suddenly on offer, thanks to an unlikely friendship with a portly, polyglot, cigar-loving publisher of Austrian Jewish origin, who happened to be a member of the British House of Lords.

  Since the early seventies Ann and Gordon had been flying regularly to Europe in their Boeing 727, doing the rounds of the music festivals, such as Salzburg, Spoleto and Bayreuth, which they thoroughly enjoyed. It was at Salzburg back in 1972 that they had first met Baron Weidenfeld of Chelsea, and the friendship subsequently flourished.

  Although a publisher by profession, George Weidenfeld is essentially an old style central European cultural magician. Everything about him has a touch of magic, including his barony, conferred upon him by the socialist premier Harold Wilson, and the equally magical survival of his London publishing house, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Meeting Ann now to discuss her aspirations, he suggested that the answer to her problems was to become a publisher like him.

  It was an original suggestion, but not impossible for the wife of the richest man in America, particularly as Weidenfeld knew that Barney Rosset of Grove Press, famous publisher of Henry Miller, Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade, was keen to sell the business and finally retire with 2 million dollars.

  Ann had always been an eager reader – though whether of books from Grove Press is another matter – and the idea captured her imagination.

  ‘I love to read all day,’ she said. ‘But as I’m of puritan stock and grew up believing that you have to work all day, I decided to make reading my work.’

  Buying Grove Press suited her, for as well as reading for her living she could now begin to meet those strange Houyhnhnm-like characters, famous living authors. She even went on a promotion tour with one of them, Nien Cheng, author of the best-selling Life and Death in Shanghai.

  The purchase also suited George Weidenfeld, who had persuaded Ann to become a partner in Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London, and simultaneously help finance a new and independent branch of Weidenfeld & Nicolson to operate from New York, in close cooperation with the Grove Press.

  For Ann and for Weidenfeld, publishing became a game that two could play. He would fly Concorde to New York, where they would get together to discuss the publishing conundrums of the 1980s – could they encourage Joseph Heller to create a proper sequel to Catch-22, or J. D. Salinger to do likewise with Catcher in the Rye? Could Ann entice the susceptible Norman Mailer or the saturnine Philip Roth to their imprint – or should they go for less expensive, lesser-known authors? They also planned to enter films, preparing to bring Weidenfeld’s old home town, Vienna, to the screen ‘in all its intellectual and cultural splendour’, as the publicity put it. There was talk of an impressive cultural magazine. A TV series on 2,000 years of archaeology was commissioned.

  ‘Everything I do is related to everything else I do,’ said Ann, as she set up the Wheatland Foundation to further her different interests in the arts. The Foundation went to Venice to discuss the future of opera, and to Jerusalem to discuss the symphony. Writers were taken up the Nile to discuss literature, and others brought to talk about their books beside the Tagus.

  And through it all Ann paid large advances to her authors, which is the best and noblest way for anyone to offload fairly large amounts of money.

  There were also dinner parties for authors and their agents at the Getty apartment on 5th Avenue, the like of which have not been seen before or since in the world of publishing – exquisite food, exotic flowers, twenty-four sitting down to table, all this together with the aroma of George Weidenfeld’s Corona Corona and his fluent conversation in five European languages.

  Throughout these dinner parties Gordon, being Gordon, sat in the background, smiled his Gordonesque smile, said ‘Heck’, and ‘Gee’, and tried working out the latest puzzle that had started to obsess him, an odd one for a billionaire. How can modern capitalist society operate without money? Money causes such a lot of problems. Surely, he told himself, there had to be a better way.

  Gordon couldn’t meditate for long, since the fall-out from the sale of Getty Oil continued. In all, Gordon found himself facing fifteen separate lawsuits, most of them from members of the family. This genuinely disturbed him. ‘There’s nothing more rancorous and upsetting than a family lawsuit,’ he said sadly. Besides, he was longing to return to his composing.

  As a close witness to the effects of past family dissension, Gordon wanted peace. According to Bill Newsom, he was ‘astonished at the way the sale of Getty Oil had gone’, and confessed to him, ‘Bill, I just don’t want 4 billion dollars.’ Nor did he want the trouble that accompanied the position of sole trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust. Nor, for that matter, did he see much mileage in prolonging the existence of the trust out of loyalty to his father. It had done its work. It had played a major part in creating and preserving the family’s amazing fortune. Its usefulness was over.

  So acting like the philosopher billi
onaire he was, Gordon Getty bowed to the inevitable, and killed the Sarah C. Getty Trust stone dead. First he paid practically a billion dollars to the taxman – then, Solomon-like, divided up what remained of the corpse four ways. Each part was roughly 750 million dollars. One part went to his brother Paul, another to ‘the Georgettes’, the three daughters of his half-brother George, yet another to the heirs of his half-brother Ronald – and the fourth part he kept for himself and his family.

  As Ronald’s exclusion from the fruits of the trust continued, this brought a certain complication to the situation. Apart from the Georgettes, none of the grandchildren of J. Paul Getty would inherit until the death of the last of his three remaining sons – which by actuarial computation could be expected around twenty-seven years hence. In the meantime the money which would go to Ronald’s children was in turn divided into three separate trusts, the profits from which would go to Paul, to Gordon and to the Georgettes until the next generation was in a position to inherit.

  The dismembering of the Sarah C. Getty Trust was an important moment in the history of the Gettys, for it offered the family the possibility of peace at last, by giving each section of the ‘dynasty’ control of its own finances. The immensely profitable sale of Getty Oil had already freed the family from its dependence on the uncertain future of the oil business. Now the family possessed this vast new acreage of wealth, which with appropriate investment could last for ever, with the capital within the trust steadily increasing and the income beneficiaries living immensely well off the interest.

  At the same time, Gordon made one further contribution to the future well-being of the family. Appreciating the danger of having vast amounts of money locked away within the separate trusts for years, to gush forth only on the death of the last of the older generation, he devised a way of ensuring what by Getty standards was a relatively modest income for younger members of the family in return for their participation in the workings of the different trusts.

  He personally gave up the 5 per cent trustee fee to which he was entitled in order to provide annual fees for younger members of the family, who were to be appointed co-trustees of the family trusts at the age of twenty-five. In this way he hoped that his children and their cousins would gain experience in the financial affairs of the family, and have an early stake in its prosperity.

  Already he was looking forward to a future for his children free from the disasters that had dogged the Gettys in the past. He put his hopes for them into a poem which he wrote around this time entitled ‘My Uncle’s House’. It ended thus:

  I wish my sons no finer birth;

  I wish them this, to find

  How patience and the generous earth

  Make life, how work makes wealth and worth,

  And song the graced mind.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Knighthood

  The $750 Million Paul Junior received from the division of the Sarah C. Getty Trust made him overnight the sixth richest man in Britain. The capital was credited to his Cheyne Walk Trust, where it was expertly invested by fund managers across a whole range of investments to guarantee security and growth – which with interest rates at an all-time high in the early eighties meant that while the core capital would steadily increase for the benefit of future generations, Paul would immediately receive more than a million dollars every week in interest.

  In terms of disposable income he was even richer than most of Britain’s other hyper-rich. With his children and grandchildren’s inheritances taken care of by the capital in the trust, and with no extraneous demands upon his income, he was free to spend entirely as he wanted.

  But it would have been hard to find a neater parable on the futility of excessive wealth. What use a million dollars every week to someone who despised himself, who barely left his home except to enter a clinic, who derived no pleasure from family or food or travel, and who was suffering acute phlebitis, impending diabetes, suspected cirrhosis of the liver, impaired lung functioning, brittle bones and dreadful teeth?

  The poverty of his desires made the richness of his inheritance distinctly pointless. Yet by an unexpected twist of fate, it was the arrival of this vast inheritance that marked the beginning of Paul’s personal salvation.

  The arrival of the money coincided with a personal crisis. Paul was very ill indeed, and with Victoria still married to Mohammed Alatas – and now the mother of two sons, Tariq and Zain – it was particularly hard for him to remain at Cheyne Walk without her. With his health in ruins, he re-entered the London Clinic for what would clearly be a lengthy stay.

  It was around this time that his thoughts returned to the Catholicism to which he had been converted at sixteen by the Jesuits of St Ignatius. He had subsequently lapsed, but during this period in the clinic he was influenced by the Jesuit chaplain, Father Miles, from nearby St James’s, Spanish Place. Under his guidance Paul returned to the Church.

  Restored to the Faith, and having severed most connections with possessions and the world outside, he was living rather like a monk within the London Clinic. Here he had no responsibilities and was blessedly free from fear and worry.

  So his first reaction to his money was a Christian one. He remembered Christ’s remarks comparing rich men’s chances of heaven to a camel’s odds of getting through the eye of a needle. He was prepared to follow Christ’s advice. Having no need of so much money, he was perfectly prepared to give the greater part of it away. But this wasn’t easy. As a one-time hippie, he was uncomfortable with very large amounts of money anyhow, and had few clear plans of what to do with it – apart from wanting to see it used to good effect.

  His first large donation went to a cause he personally believed in. As a lover of the cinema, he had discovered that the whole legacy of early British movies was in danger. The only copies of countless British films in the archives of the British Film Institute were on perishable nitrate stock, and the Institute lacked the funds for the expensive process of transferring them to modern media. Paul financed this – very quietly, as he wanted no publicity – finally contributing to the tune of nearly £20 million. It is largely thanks to him that the early history of the British cinema has not been lost for ever.

  Shortly afterwards he offered £500,000 to Manchester City Art Gallery to prevent a small painting of the Crucifixion by the Sienese master Duccio being purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu. This aroused speculation in the press that he was getting even with his father’s memory – or alternatively with his brother Gordon, who was a trustee of the museum. But his own explanation for his gift was simpler. He remarked: ‘I’m fed up with everything streaming to Malibu. It’s time that someone stopped it.’

  Influenced by Father Miles, Paul now made a firm commitment to give up drugs for ever. But he had made the same decision many times before, and was painfully aware of the difficulty of sticking to it. Because of this, he intended continuing his treatment, supervised by his doctors, in the safety and obscurity of the London Clinic for as long as possible.

  He would in fact stay fifteen months – but his desire for obscurity was not to be respected.

  By the beginning of 1985 the government of Mrs Margaret Thatcher was facing problems over its policy towards the funding of the arts, a minor but potentially embarrassing area where supply-side economics, as practised by her monetarist administration, patently failed to function. In theory, as the state cut taxes and the rich grew richer, the so-called ‘trickle down effect’ would start, with grateful multi-millionaires offering up their surplus capital to fund the arts rather as wealthy donors had been doing in America for years.

  But England’s greed decade was so extremely greedy that it hadn’t worked like that. (More to the point, perhaps, contributions to the arts were still not tax-deductible as they had long been in the United States.) And the fact was that by the mid eighties many of the country’s great museums and galleries, endowed in more civilized eras, were strapped for cash in a world of monetarist plenty.

&n
bsp; Ironically, the Getty Museum at Malibu – itself the product of private benefaction and with its wealth increased, like Paul and Gordon’s, from the recent sale of its stock in Getty Oil – was making the situation worse by pushing up the prices of major works of art and being able to outbid any major gallery in the world. Without serious funding by the government – which would upset the Prime Minister and her spending limits – the National Gallery would be pauperized and left unable to bid for further acquisitions in the market-place of international art.

  There was one bright spot in the gloomy scene of artistic patronage – the gift of money to the National Gallery in London by the Sainsbury family to construct a brand new wing on a neighbouring site which would ultimately bear their name. The prime mover had been the artistically enlightened scion of the Sainsbury family, Simon Sainsbury, who coincidentally happened to be the business partner of Christopher Gibbs. While the Sainsbury gift was being finalized, one of the gallery trustees, the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, had talked to Gibbs about the gallery’s need for ‘an equivalent great endowment’ which it could invest to provide an annual income for its major purchases.

  Gibbs pondered – but he can’t have pondered very long. For it was shortly after this that some influential members of the government and the world of art became extremely interested in a previously neglected hermit billionaire currently residing in the London Clinic.

  It had been nearly twenty years since Christopher Gibbs had first met Paul, and he was one of the few who had continued seeing him regularly through the bleak years following Talitha’s death.

  During this period, Gibbs himself had prospered. With Simon Sainsbury as his partner, he had become a successful West End art dealer, with a rich clientele and a fascinating shop in Mayfair. At the same time he had transformed himself from the wunderkind of 1960s Chelsea into a serious social figure, with a house beside the Thames at Abingdon, an apartment in Albany and a wide range of influential friends.