Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  He was a good-looking young man whom she had met in her rehabilitation clinic. Gail advised caution. ‘What’s the hurry, and why marry straight away? Take your time.’

  But Aileen, impetuous as ever, insisted she was free of drugs, and had set her heart on the marriage – which took place soon afterwards at the Monte Cedro Ranch near Gail’s home in Santa Barbara. Gail, Ariadne and Martine attended, together with patients from the rehabilitation clinic. Afterwards Aileen and her husband left on a three-week honeymoon.

  The day after they returned from their honeymoon, a friend of Aileen’s called at their apartment and was alarmed to find her lying on the bed unconscious. She was rushed by ambulance to hospital, and the doctors had her stomach pumped out, suspecting a bad overdose of drugs.

  Gail arrived as she was coming round, but the doctor said he was horrified by the sheer quantity of drugs that she had taken.

  Soon afterwards Aileen’s second marriage ended.

  In contrast with Paul Junior’s family, Gordon and Ann enjoyed reasonably untroubled relations with their children – for which they were profoundly grateful. Peter had just left college, where he had won a prize for a play he’d written. Having had it published, he was hoping to become a playwright. His brother Bill was enjoying a year at Florence University.

  Gordon remained an easy-going father, and all his sons were very much California boys – relaxed, amusing, and not really wanting to live anywhere but San Francisco. This suited Gordon.

  He always said how much he’d love the excitement of another major business deal, for in retrospect he felt he had enjoyed the drama of the sale of Getty Oil – even the broken nights, the law-suits, and the need to cope with all those possible disasters. It had been Gordon’s time of living dangerously.

  But when he did find himself involved in a deal, it rarely seemed to work, and it was clear that his coup with Getty Oil would never be repeated. On the other hand, his own creative work was flourishing. The series of songs on the theme of Falstaff which the Globe Theatre Trust had commissioned had grown into a full-scale opera, entitled Plump Jack, which received its first performance in 1989. Some critics liked it, others didn’t, and, as with all his work, the reception was almost certainly affected by the fact that he was so extremely rich.

  But Gordon’s enthusiasm was unbounded, and at times he could hardly believe he’d done it. Hearing his own music professionally performed was more exciting than the sale of Getty Oil. One day perhaps the name Getty might really be remembered more for music than for money.

  He was also excited by the economic theories he had been working on long before the sale of Getty Oil, and which, like Gordon himself, could be regarded as eccentric or highly original, depending on one’s point of view. The first, on which he worked for several years, was a brave attempt to apply his interest in biology to economics. Starting from the proposition that the market operated upon economies much as natural selection did upon a species, he worked out a complex theory to account for the way this functioned.

  The result, which he published in 1988 under the title The Hunt for R (‘R’ being the rate of return on an investment), is a highly esoteric exercise in economic theory calculated to scare off all but the most highly qualified of professional economists by the sheer complexity of its mathematics. This may account for its lack of impact so far in the rarefied world of higher economic theory.

  But Gordon was also trying to devise an answer to a more pressing economic problem – inflation. Starting from the obvious fact that inflation tends to follow an increase in the supply of money, he began wondering if some other form of ‘money’ could be found which would not automatically fuel inflation in this way.

  He reasoned that if only money could be made to have the same rate of return as that on other investments, an increase in its supply need not automatically raise inflation, for the simple reason that people would rather hold on to it than spend it. Even as he said this, Gordon realized that a sort of interestbearing ‘money’ exists already – in the form of units in mutual funds; and his proposal, which he developed at length in the article ‘Fertile Money’, published in 1992, was that funds of this sort could easily become a form of currency, and that if only governments adopted his ideas, inflation could be cured.

  In the real world, as opposed to the worlds of opera and of economic theory, the only apparent setback encountered by the thrice-blest Gordon Gettys at this time involved Ann’s New York ventures following the sale of Getty Oil. It was becoming clear that they weren’t working – and never would. The gossip had inevitably started, and back-biting and reproach, as Ann’s publishing career was clearly not going anywhere.

  She had originally thought that her son Peter might be interested, and one day even take over the enterprise. But although he, like his brothers, had literary ambitions, Peter wasn’t driven.

  It was bad that the Grove-Weidenfeld venture was showing signs of becoming a disaster. Disaster makes the rich nervous as they sense the fragile nature of their great possessions.

  The situation of the publishing house inevitably meant the end of all the exciting ideas that Ann and Weidenfeld had so enjoyed discussing, but which would have to remain ideas – her precious Wheatland Foundation, the projected glossy magazine on the arts, the sponsored performances of great operas, and the conferences for writers and intellectuals – all might-have-beens, as was the role she once envisaged for herself as a figure in the world of art and literature.

  For the sad truth was that for all the dinners she had hosted, all the advances she had funded, for all the discussions, conferences, committee meetings she had once attended, the press had not produced one genuine best seller.

  Barney Rosset, working for years on the literary equivalent of a shoestring, had published success after undeniable success. But he was like a virtuoso gardener with publishing’s equivalent of the greenest of green fingers. Barney had had the knack. Ann had only had the money.

  Ann seemed to bear out the truth of Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum about the rich being different – but in a way he’d not intended. The very rich like Ann are different because money deprives them of a role – except the role of being very rich, which stops them being taken seriously for anything else. They can be flattered and indulged but things they undertake have a way of ending badly.

  Having lost an estimated $15 million on Grove-Weidenfeld, the Gettys tried to sell it – but finding no adequate offers, left it in a state of suspended animation. And the whole affair had left behind a sour taste among many of the people Ann had wanted to impress.

  Harry Evans, former editor of the London Sunday Times, had worked as an adviser to the company before becoming President of Random House. He felt bitter at the way the whole affair was handled.

  ‘I didn’t like the rich picking up a publishing house like a plaything, and then dropping it when they got bored. It’s part of the vast carelessness of the rich. It’s something maybe money does to people. They just get a little casual.’

  Casual or not, Ann returned gratefully to San Francisco, where she licked her wounds, and started at the University of California as an ordinary student majoring in chemistry. Weidenfeld once described her as ‘a perpetual student’ – as in his way was Gordon. (Out of interest he once spent a few weeks studying the university physics textbook by Halliday and Resnick, sat the first year undergraduate physics exam at Berkeley, and passed.)

  But Ann was also fascinated by pre-history, ever since Gordon backed Richard Leakey’s researches into the origins of man in Kenya. So as well as studying chemistry, she also soon became involved in field research in Ethiopia under the direction of the anthropological archaeologist, Professor Tim White. White was a colleague of Dr Donald Johanson, who in 1974 in a rocky site 100 miles north-east of Addis Ababa, found fame by discovering the fossilized remains of ‘Lucy’, a 3.2-million-year-old female hominid, which he claimed to be the oldest of man’s non-ape ancestors ever discovered. Gordon had subsequen
tly helped Johanson to create the prestigious Institute of Human Origins at Berkeley, with a $15 million grant. And Ann was currently hooked on Ethiopia, and the prospect of discovering even older fossilized remains.

  Soon her life was becoming one of bizarre contrasts – between the great house on Pacific Heights and her personal Boeing which was being refitted at extraordinary cost – and the bleak valley in the Ethiopian hinterland, scratching through acres of rock and shale for fossilized hominid remains. Life in Ethiopia was tough, amenities non-existent, the climate dreadful, but Ann preferred it to New York.

  Throughout this period, all three daughters of Gordon’s brother George were sticking firmly by their original decision to avoid the limelight. Given who they were, and how rich they had become, this was a considerable achievement. They refused to be interviewed or photographed in public. They avoided gossip and avoided scandal. ‘If you want a story, try my uncle Gordon. He enjoys publicity. We don’t,’ said the second daughter, Claire, to one of the few reporters to reach her on the telephone. Even when Claire unexpectedly gave birth to a son in 1979 – christened Beau Maurizio Getty-Mazzota – as the result of a love affair with an Italian she had met on a university course for foreigners at Perugia University, no further details reached the media.

  The three girls also kept their distance from the other branches of the family. Indeed it was as if they could never quite forgive them for what they saw as the betrayal of their grandfather’s achievement by agreeing to the sale of Getty Oil. They would keep in touch with members of their grandfather’s entourage like Penelope Kitson or Barbara Wallace, but when George’s daughters were invited to Mark and Domitilla’s wedding the invitations went unanswered.

  Ronald’s life continued to be ruled by his exclusion from the ever-expanding Getty fortune, and it is only now that one can see the full extent of the damage this had caused him. By disinheriting him his father had made a sort of exile of him – from the family and from life itself – and he was spending an increasing amount of time with his wife Karin and his four children in their house in South Africa. Ronald and the family enjoyed Cape Town. He loved the climate, while the countryside around the Cape was beautiful and free from all associations with a past that haunted him. In South Africa Ronald wasn’t constantly reminded of what he’d lost in California.

  The children went to school there, but even with his children Ronald’s exclusion from the fortune was having its effect. There was always a subtle difference between himself and them. All the children were destined to be included in the wider Getty family from which it seemed that he would for ever be excluded.

  Despite his efforts to ignore this, he could already detect a different attitude developing among them – particularly with Christopher the eldest. He was a sturdy boy, shorter and less refining than his father, and already he had that touch of confidence the certainty of money brings. At the age of twenty-five Christopher would become a paid trustee for the money which would one day come to him and his sisters – and which, by rights, should have already come to Ronald on his father’s death.

  But Ronald hadn’t given up, and had decided that if he couldn’t inherit what he felt was morally his due, he would try to earn it. He was thinking big, just as his father always had, and as part of his plan to make that elusive fortune he invested in a company building a luxury hotel, the Raddison Manhatten Beach, close to Los Angeles Airport. The general partner managing the company was a friend and Ronald joined him as a non-executive partner.

  It was a promising project, but by the early eighties there were problems. The Californian building boom had produced several other hotels in this once exclusive area, and when the recession followed, some went backrupt. To prevent his happening with the Manhatten Beach, Ronald joined his three other partners to guarantee the debts – but in spite of this the company finally collapsed as well.

  Neither Ronald nor the other partners could meet their guarantees, but because his name was Getty, Ronald was the one creditors pursued for their money. When he discovered the astronomical sums for which he was liable, Ronald Getty’s private nightmare started.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Survivors

  If There Was a curse upon the Gettys, it seemed to be lifting with the new decade in 1990. At last the old man’s influence, which had brought such trouble in the past, was waning, and it was clear that Gordon – least practical but most effective of his sons – had put an end for good to the conflict and litigation in the family when he divided up the Sarah C. Getty Trust. The sale of Getty Oil had more than doubled the combined resources of the Gettys. And by putting aside his money for the young trustees, Gordon had also ensured that they too would have enough to keep them happy – and to become involved themselves in the work of their respective family trusts while they waited to inherit, probably fairly late in middle age.

  At the same time, the great fortune which Jean Paul Getty spent his life creating showed no sign of disappearing like so many famous fortunes in the past. On the contrary the way the separate trusts were structured guaranteed that, with interest steadily accruing, and barring unforeseen accidents and revolutions, the capital would safely go on accumulating. As the younger members of the family start producing children of their own, the number of Getty heirs will also go on growing, but it is hard to see a situation in which the family will ever cease to be extremely wealthy.

  Thus by 1990, financially at least, the future was already looking rosy for the younger generation Gettys, but what of those still suffering from past disasters?

  It was Aileen, possibly the most self-indulgent of the Getty casualties, who produced the bravest answer to her situation when it seemed most hopeless.

  Early in 1990 came the first of the symptoms – in her case painful blisters in the mouth – signalling the onset of full-blown Aids, and the doctors gave their verdict. With luck she might have six months more to live.

  From Aileen this produced a reaction few expected. She was still terrified of dying and knew that she could not evade her fate, but Aileen the rebel started objecting to the way that she was being treated. It was bad enough having people pitying her; what was worse was their refusal to address the subject of her illness, and she realized she was being treated as a source of shame.

  This angered her, and out of her anger grew something that began to change her life. She says that Aids gave her something positive to live for.

  For a period she was very ill; her nervous system was affected, making it difficult to walk. Physically and emotionally she had always tended to be fragile. She fell a lot, and hurt herself, so that for days on end she had to stay in bed.

  But one thing Aileen didn’t lack was courage, and she refused to hide behind some bland denial of her situation. ‘What I wanted was to bring dignity to myself and to the disease.’

  With this in mind, she openly admitted to the press that she was suffering from Aids. Her family supported her, and with the Getty name – and Elizabeth Taylor never far behind her – she gained maximum publicity for her fight ‘to give a human face to the Aids plague for a world that didn’t want to see it’.

  What particularly incensed her was the plight of other women sufferers in the United States, where women and children had recently become the fastest-growing segment of the population testing HIV positive.

  So she made no secret of the true cause of her own infection – not a blood transfusion as she originally stated, but through ‘unprotected sex, out of fear of rejection’ with someone she later discovered to have been HIV positive. The point Aileen was making was that however Aids was contracted was irrelevant, and that all its victims should be treated like sufferers from any other major illness – with care and dignity. Thanks largely to her name – and to her natural sense of drama – Aileen became a powerful voice speaking out for female Aids victims everywhere.

  Soon she was on television pleading their cause. She worked with Aids sufferers in Los Angeles. She visited and campaigned for
them, and planned a special hospice for afflicted women. With her name and looks she was becoming something she had never been before – a national celebrity.

  This brought the challenge of putting her personal life in order. She did her best to come off drugs, and having reestablished good relations with Christopher, who had now remarried and was living near her in Los Angeles, she was granted custody of her children four days a week.

  Caleb was eight and Andrew seven, old enough to know what was happening, and she was open with them, answering their questions as truthfully as possible. She told them about her illness, and taught them how to cope with an emergency. Soon Caleb and Andrew were giving their mother the will to go on living – which by a miracle she has continued doing ever since.

  Her life today is full – with her children and her work. Thanks to the Getty money she receives the best possible treatment – in her case so-called ‘aggressive therapy’, with the most powerful drugs available – the anti-Aids drug AZT and three separate anti-viral drugs taken simultaneously.

  Along with this she has regained her self-respect through a cause she totally believes in. This, together with her will-power and determination, has clearly played its part in her survival.

  She has periods of relapse, but on good days is unusually pretty and serene. She counsels other women sufferers, works for them, and does all she can to publicize their plight and help them. She says she now has little fear of dying, and that for the first time in years she’s happy.

  Aileen’s situation provides her with an answer, however desperate, to what she had long seen as a problem associated with large amounts of money – its tendency to isolate the very rich from normal life and ordinary people. In her case, as an Aids victim, she had discovered a sense of genuine companionship with other sufferers.