Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  In practical terms, her illness has had the effect of impoverishing her – by limiting her freedom and threatening to shorten her existence. But by concentrating all her interests and efforts in her struggle to survive, it has given her something in exchange – an overwhelming sense of purpose, and an urge to go on living.

  Disaster has had a similar effect on another of the Getty casualties, Aileen’s brother Paul, who after the kidnapping was practically destroyed by misery and drink. But now those closest to him think that the effects of the coma, however cruel, may well have saved his life. Until stricken, he had been locked in a never-ending cycle of disaster through drink and drugs – ‘Hanging’, as Gail puts it, ‘above the abyss’.

  Now, like Aileen, Paul insists that he is happy, and his friends confirm this. As with Aileen, the fight against his disabilities has given him a total sense of purpose. His days are underpinned with Getty money, but anything he wants requires extraordinary effort, forcing him to do something else the very rich are normally excused from doing – struggle hard for his existence.

  Will-power drives him forward, and every day demands the constant slog of physiotherapy, along with exercises to improve his speech. The work is laborious and painful, but Paul has slowly grown stronger. Fourteen years after the coma, his speech is still improving. His stamina has increased and he has even taught himself to stand upright with his nurses to assist him.

  But his real achievement is his resolution to live as if his handicaps did not exist. He regularly attends his favourite rock concerts; he loves restaurants; he keeps up to date with films and picture galleries; and by having many friends who read to him, he keeps abreast of contemporary fiction and the classics. With his team of nurses, he has devised routines for travelling. His cottage at Wormsley has become his base in England, and he stays there twice a year, including Christmas, which he usually spends with his father and the family. He is still planning to revisit Italy and Orgia, where Gail has been adapting the house to take him; but already he is telling her he’d rather stay in the centre of the village where, as he puts it, ‘I can hang out with my old Italian friends.’

  His marriage with Martine (or as she now calls herself, Gisela) ended in 1993, apparently amicably, and she returned to Germany, where she now runs a video company in Munich. They remain close friends, and speak regularly to each other on the telephone. He still falls in love as easily as ever, and has no lack of girlfriends, who adore him.

  Paul has continued to enjoy a close relationship with his son Balthazar, who lives nearby in Los Angeles. Balthazar has inherited his father’s old ambition to be an actor and finally a film director – and has had considerable success since appearing as a schoolboy actor in the film of William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies with parts in films like Young Guns 11, The Pope Must Die and Red Hot. His half-sister, Anna, is currently at the Sorbonne, but also plans to be an actress. Recently her stepfather Paul legally adopted her to make her one day eligible, like Balthazar, for her share of the Getty money.

  But for all the courage and resolve of victims like Paul and Aileen, the fact remains that these are human tragedies – ruined lives, which all the money in the world can only cushion. The rest of the family will forget them at their peril.

  *

  Another of the family casualties – but of a very different kind – was their uncle Ronald, who by the early 1990s was facing total ruin as a result of the debts incurred building the hotel in Los Angeles. He had been naive and far too trusting; now he was suffering accordingly. The company’s creditors were remorselessly pursuing him, but no one seemed capable of resolving anything – least of all the lawyers, who seemed to think that because his name was Getty he was made of money. In fact by now the unfortunate Ronald had lost his home in South Africa, and had few friends left and no resources.

  One bright spot on a fairly bleak horizon was provided by his eldest, daughter Stephanie, who would shortly marry Alexander Weibel, son of a prosperous Austrian textile manufacturer. Both Ronald and his wife would find some consolation for their troubles by staying with the hospitable Weibels in their house in Austria.

  In 1993 their son Christopher would make an even more resounding marriage – to Pia Miller, one of the richest heiresses in America, whose father, Robert Miller, had made a fortune out of duty free franchises. Neither Ronald and his wife nor their daughter was at the wedding.

  During this period, the family’s star survivor continued to be its most unlikely candidate for redemption. Paul Junior, who had all but completed his transformation from the sick, reclusive victim of the counterculture into a respected, cricket-obsessed, oddly conventional pillar of the establishment.

  What he had done was quite extraordinary. It’s rare enough to inherit a fortune as immense as his in middle age. It’s rarer still to do so when you’re a drug-addicted bibliophile with a passion for the cinema and for high romantic nineteenth-century art and literature. Like a clever film director, Paul had created himself an intricate new role through his philanthropy, and had followed this by building wonderfully romantic scenery for himself, his family and friends at Wormsley.

  When you can buy anything you end up buying dreams, and Paul’s dreams seemed oddly reminiscent of a number of recurrent nineteenth-century romantic episodes in which rich unhappy men spent large amounts of money escaping from their sense of doom into magical worlds of private fantasy.

  The most obvious parallels were with the rich reclusive writer William Beckford in the 1820s, fleeing from unhappiness and scandal by building his mock-medieval palace, Fonthill Abbey, not all that far from Wormsley, or with doomed King Ludwig of Bavaria, seeking salvation in the dreamlike castles which he built in the mountains outside Munich in the 1890s. A more interesting model may have been the hero of Jules Verne’s novel, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, the mysterious, immensely rich Captain Nemo. Like Paul Junior, Nemo was a music-lover, a recluse and a would-be oceanographer, who used his fortune to construct an enormous submarine, the Nautilus, in which he sailed away from the world and its troubles, finding tranquillity by playing the organ to himself in the vast depths of the ocean.

  From the beginning Wormsley had a touch of the same surrealist escapist fantasy, but thanks largely to his family and to friends as practical as Gibbs and as devoted as Victoria, the air of doom around Paul Junior was kept at bay, and the whole strange multi-million dollar enterprise was working. Paul Junior was beginning to enjoy his life at last.

  He was no longer quite as rich as he had been when interest rates were going through the ceiling in the 1980s, and having given away something approaching £100 million, he was now needing all his income to sustain his building projects and his way of life.

  This meant that his time of spectacular philanthropy was over, and most of his current giving was limited to income from the £20 million charitable trust set up in 1985. It was carefully disbursed and economically administered.

  But Paul himself was increasingly enjoying life from his flat in London where he spent the week. Victoria would arrive there from her Chelsea home each morning, act as his devoted companion through the day, and stay as late as she was needed before returning to Chelsea and her children. She was an excellent hostess, and largely thanks to her, Paul’s steadily increasing circle of friends included film stars like Michael Caine, writers like John Mortimer and the poet Christopher Logue, and a rich connoisseur collector like Lord Rothschild. Paul was even beginning to be seen at one of London’s most exclusive dining clubs – Pratt’s (proprietor the Duke of Devonshire), where he had recently become a member.

  But it was at Wormsley that Paul relaxed and became positively benign. Here, the former recluse who once had rarely seen his own children had become an admirable father figure with Victoria’s two sons, Tariq and Zain. He loved the countryside, was particularly proud of his herd of traditional English long-horned cattle and even remembered enough of his William Morrisite ideals to promise one day to establish a colony of happy
book-binders on the estate. Often he would show friends something from his great collection of historic movies in his private cinema – or play them rare recordings (like Robert Browning reading his poetry or Oscar Wilde declaiming) from his equally great collection of historic records. At Wormsley it was hard to see how boredom could afflict him.

  Yet in spite of all his current blessings, Paul Junior, like a true romantic hero, seemed fated never to discover lasting happiness. His private trip to hell was over, but the scorch marks seemed to set him noticeably apart from those around him – his middle years were wasted, lost in the oubliette of drugs for ever, two of his children had been practically destroyed by the same affliction, and he would always be a semi-invalid, condemned to live his life at one remove from everyday reality.

  Nor did it seem that he could ever totally escape the death of Talitha, any more than devoted Victoria could take her place. For Talitha’s beauty was unchanging – as was the truth of whatever actually occurred on that July night in Rome in 1971. These were areas where his money could not enter, and it seemed that Talitha would always haunt him, unattainable and beautiful and young for ever.

  Meanwhile from his Italianate mansion on Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Gordon was offering the family his personal example of how to stay sane and happy with a fortune of a billion dollars.

  Unlike his brother, Paul, Gordon appeared curiously untouched by time or trouble. In his late fifties now, his looks had actually improved with age, but he was still essentially the same gangling would-be professor who forgot where he had parked his car, the same dedicated artist who would rather be remembered for an opera than a major fortune.

  But although on the surface he appeared to treat his money as a slightly tedious irrelevance, this was really not the case at all. Gordon possessed a deep appreciation of the stuff, and in particular of the benefits that it bestowed.

  Foremost among them was the privilege of being Gordon Getty. For one of the true advantages of very large amounts of money is the right to please oneself over almost everything – and Gordon did. He could travel as and when and where he wanted in the family Boeing 727. (When he purchased a new one, the man who did the interior decoration explained, ‘it’s the family station-wagon in terms of use’.)

  He could also work at whatever he desired. As a workaholic, work was Gordon’s greatest luxury and it was only large amounts of money which allowed him to indulge it as he did. Most days still saw him in his study, slaving at his music or his latest economic theory.

  ‘As far as work’s concerned, it’s pretty much sunrise to sunset,’ Gordon said.

  But the most important aspect of Gordon’s wealth was its effect upon his personality. For it meant that absolutely nothing ever seemed to faze him. He had always been a man who pleased himself, and his fortune seemed to free him from the jealousies and insecurities which afflict so many people from a simple lack of money.

  When a journalist was unmannerly enough to suggest that he was ‘simply an artistic Walter Mitty’, Gordon laughed and cheerfully agreed.

  ‘Of course I am. I’m Don Quixote.’

  And if other economists ignored his economic theories, he laughed again.

  ‘They’ll come round to accepting them in the end,’ was all he said. ‘They’ll have to.’

  As a businessman he had to rest content with his reputation as the man who had doubled the value of the Getty fortune, for few of his subsequent business ventures had succeeded. In March 1990 the Emhart industrial products corporation of Connecticut rejected the $2 billion takeover bid which Gordon tried to put together, and a month later Avon products were trying to sue him over another hostile takeover.

  But business setbacks only made him more ambitious to succeed as a composer. Much of his time was spent ‘polishing and perfecting’ his opera, Plump Jack, for he found composing harder work than making money. As he put it, ‘There is no such person as a lazy composer,’ and writing his opera was virtually a full-time occupation.

  By now Gordon was becoming a strangely amiable eccentric, and his real contribution to the Gettys was something they had always needed – concern and a touch of easy-going common sense from an older member of the family. Whenever he was in Los Angeles, Gordon would always make a point of visiting young Paul and Aileen, and Mark was always staying with his San Franciscan cousins when he visited California.

  For families to function properly, their members need to like each other – and Uncle Gordon, with his extraordinary laugh, his latest pet enthusiasm, and his slightly rumpled sense of humour, was becoming an increasingly important source of family affection and belonging.

  Hardly surprisingly, the place where this showed most clearly was with his own immediate family, and in their different ways all his sons had turned out somewhat like him. All were intelligent, original, rather private individuals. And whilst remaining very Californian and relaxed about life in general, all four of them had stayed immune to the Getty self-destructive streak which brought such havoc to other members of the family. So far they had been living undemanding lives as bright young men of independent means, able to please themselves about their future.

  The eldest, Peter, was particularly like his father, to the point of even looking like him and trying to find fame as a composer – although it’s hard to imagine Gordon composing music for the pop group which his son had founded and called ‘Virgin-Whore Complex’.

  Peter’s brother, Andrew, was trying to write scripts for Hollywood; and Bill was on his way to becoming a Greek scholar who would opt for postgraduate research on Homer at the University of California at Berkeley. Only John, the noisy one of the family, would cause his parents serious worry when he left for San Diego, got himself tattooed, and joined a heavy metal group. But even he finally enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, and ended up researching his father’s heroine, Emily Dickinson.

  As a rich boys’ hobby all four brothers jointly financed an up-market wine merchant’s shop in San Francisco – and as a measure of family solidarity they asked their father if they could name it after his opera.

  ‘Well, I won’t sue you if you do,’ said Gordon.

  So they called their shop Plump Jack – and under the management of Bill Newsom’s son, Gavin, Plump Jack would start to build up one of the most interesting and reasonably priced wine-lists along the coast. It would also help to launch the previously abstemious Gordon on to a new enthusiasm – for vintage wine. Being scholarly and rich and surprisingly thirsty, Gordon soon became a most knowledgeable connoisseur.

  But in the longer term, something more than an interest in wine and a wine shop will be needed to engage the full-time interests of the younger Gettys – which is why Paul Junior’s son Mark seems destined for an important role within the family. Having personally witnessed so much past unhappiness, and with three young children of his own, he is quietly determined to do all he can to prevent the troubles of the past recurring.

  Not that he talks about this much. Now in his mid-thirties, he has a certain wariness, and for all the quiet charm and easygoing diffidence, he is difficult to place. Studying philosophy at Oxford may have given him his air of rather cool detachment.

  In fact the coolness is deceptive, for he is very serious about the family. It shows in his behaviour whenever his brother Paul arrives in London. Mark is always on hand to help him, look after him, and search out the sort of places and events he guesses will amuse him. Mark has also made himself the family’s unofficial peacemaker and reuniter. He stays on warm terms with his father, and is devoted as ever to his Uncle Gordon, who refers to him as ‘virtually another son’.

  But if there is a key to Mark’s character it probably lies in Italy rather than among the Gettys. People often forget that he was born in Rome, and marriage to Domitilla has strengthened his ties with Italy. For some years he has owned a house near Orgia and it is in Tuscany that he spends his holidays, keeps the horses which he races in Il Palio (the historic twice-yearly
horse races around the city square of Siena), and he likes to hear his sons talking Italian and playing in the village where he used to play himself.

  He still has many friends there. Remo’s truck-driver son, Francesco, is godfather to his eldest boy, Alexander, and Mark admits the influence these country people have always had on him. Over the years they helped him reach certain conclusions which were not apparent to the Gettys.

  The first was the importance which the villagers attached to skill and work well done. ‘After all,’ says Mark, ‘whoever you are, your work is the most important thing you do. It helps define you and make you what you are.’

  His second article of faith absorbed from the villagers concerned the prime importance of the family. At the time of the kidnap, when Mark’s own family, for all its wealth, virtually fell apart, he could see examples of the way Italian families seemed to offer consolation and support to all their members. Later, in economic terms, he would also see how the Italian family still provides Italy with its basic and its most dynamic business structure. When he had married and become the first Getty of his generation to have to earn a living outside the family, what he had learned in Italy gave him food for thought.

  By the time he was twenty-five, as a salaried trustee of his father’s Cheyne Walk Trust, he was already involved in the investment policy for a fund currently standing at around $1.2 billion dollars; and by his early thirties his banking experience was giving him an increasingly important role within the family. Since then he has worked closely with his Uncle Gordon on family financial policy, and he currently runs Getty Investment Holdings. His cousin Christopher recently joined its board.

  But Mark was still worried by the thought of the family declining, and concern for its future made him study how some of America’s richest dynasties survived and prospered. What he learned confirmed much of what he’d learned already in his village in Italy.