Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  The Rockefellers particularly impressed him with the way they managed to remain ‘a flourishing, dynamic entity’, in which different members of the family appeared to have a place. To discover the secret, he spent some time in the Rockefeller Center in New York, studying the organization which the Rockefellers created after the sale of Standard Oil to manage their investments and business interests, and to offer something of a niche for any member of the family who wanted it. The head of the family, David Rockefeller, told him from his own experience that any member of the family who was left out ‘tended to become a problem’.

  The way the Rockefellers had organized themselves helped convince Mark that there was no inevitable decline and fall facing his own family. On the contrary, it seemed as if the younger Gettys might well benefit from much the same advantages as the Rockefellers, provided that their elders were prepared to help them. He felt that what was needed was a sense of family identity and purpose, along with that magical activity which was as important to the rich as to the poor – the chance to work together.

  In 1990, while still at Hambros he organized a Getty family investment in South Africa in an attempt to involve them together for the first time in a cooperative venture. He persuaded the three separate family trusts to make what by Getty standards was a fairly modest joint investment of $5 million in the South African based Conservation Corporation, which owns the famous Londolozi game reserve in Natal, and the Phinda reserve in Zululand. This was a glamorous project, started by the visionary conservationist, David Varty, who planned to turn Londolozi into the finest game reserve in Africa.

  As there were few foreign investments in South Africa at the time, Mark made sure he had full approval of the African National Congress as well as of the South African government. With majority rule still some way off, the Getty investment was seen as a risky and idealistic gesture; and the corporation has since been cited by President Mandela himself as a model of how to integrate international tourism with the needs of animals and the local population. (Mandela has stayed at Londolozi on several occasions.)

  But Mark denies that idealism played much part in his decision to invest in Africa, and says that his real objective was to help unite his family by using their talents and resources and arousing their enthusiasm.

  When his uncle Gordon came to Londolozi together with Bill Newsom, his son Peter, and Ronald’s son, Christopher, they were soon excited and particularly impressed by Varty and the Corporation’s various locations. Later Mark’s half-brother, Talitha’s son Tara, was to work there. But for Mark himself involvement in a game reserve, however exciting, is not a big enough challenge to involve the energies and enthusiasm of the Gettys.

  ‘Frankly,’ he says, ‘I don’t see a future for us in the hotel and tourist business.’

  He was seeking something altogether more demanding, and backed by his father and his uncle Gordon, he has been evolving what he calls ‘a coherent strategy’ between the majority of the trusts to spend £30-£40 million a time buying a number of related companies with long term prospects for growth. The first of these acquisitions has been a $30 million purchase of an 80 per cent holding in Tony Stone Images, a leading international non-news photo library, with thirty thousand colour images for use by magazines and advertising agencies for average fees of £400 per sale. Mark, with his partner, Johnathan Klein, is joint chairman of TSI. While he is confident that the company will continue to expand, he explains that the primary purpose of this strategy is to ‘focus family interest and expertise in one area of investment, as happened when we still owned Getty Oil’, and not necessarily to provide employment for future members of the family. However he is quick to add that he can think of ‘few things more exciting than working in one’s own family company’, and he remains convinced that ‘a family business is potentially the most dynamic organization in existence – provided the family has enthusiastic members who will work for it, a reliable source of family capital, and a common purpose and identity’.

  By taking his long-term view, Mark is planning to harness the financial resources of the Getty trusts, and thus begin to build the sort of genuine Getty ‘dynasty’ which J. Paul Getty talked so much about but never understood.

  As he puts it, ‘Most of our troubles originated with my grandfather, who didn’t understand families or what made them tick. Come to that, he never really understood people. It’s time we did.’

  1992 was an important year for the Gettys and for Paul Junior in particular. That September he would be sixty, and when the cricket season opened he resolved to celebrate the start of play on his new ground by staging something particularly close to his heart – the perfect game of cricket.

  Country house cricket was making a comeback at the time, with Prince Philip fielding a team at Windsor, and the Duke of Norfolk doing likewise on his private ground at Arundel. But at the end of May, when Paul decided to follow suit at Wormsley, it is safe to say that not since Cecil Beaton staged the Ascot scene for My Fair Lady had a traditional English sport been staged with such precision and alarming dedication.

  The setting was idyllic. The pitch had been nursed for months by Harry Brind, the chief groundsman from one of cricket’s holy of holies, the Kennington Oval. The beechwoods were in leaf, and since W. G. Grace was captaining the great game in the sky, one of cricket’s living legends, ninety-two-year-old ‘Bob’ Wyatt, England’s oldest surviving Test captain, was there to ring the bell signalling the start of play.

  Paul’s team was captained by the most glamorous cricketer of the day, Imran Khan, captain of Pakistan; and the visitors had been organized by no less a body than the MCC itself.

  Paul was enjoying one of the most enviable privileges of the very rich, of turning an elaborate dream into reality, and since a dream demands perfection, he had taken endless trouble, even asking continual advice from his friend, the doyen of cricket commentators, the late and much lamented Brian Johnston. Everything had to be totally authentic in a world that prides itself on authenticity – from the scorers and the sight screens by the pitch, to the neatly thatched pavilion, and the right sort of sugar buns for tea. It goes without saying that the lunch was faultless – cold salmon and new potatoes, followed by summer pudding, with Pimm’s or cool draught beer or very good champagne. The outcome of the game was faultless too – the visitors winning with a boundary hit in the last over.

  A perfect lunch, a perfect day – but the man of the match was not a cricketer, but Paul himself, who had survived the disasters that had seemed inseparable from the Getty inheritance and had put on this occasion as if to celebrate his own salvation.

  He did it very stylishly, and without saying a word, as is his nature. As he sat there, wearing his MCC tie and blazer, watching the game from his seat in his own pavilion, he was flanked by his two guests of honour. On his left sat a self-confessed ‘cricket fanatic’ – the Prime Minister, John Major. And on his right and enjoying every minute of the game was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

  For Paul it proved a splendid summer. The weather was indifferent, but cricket continued to the end of August. It was then that he told the cricket writer, E. W. Swanton, that 1992 had been ‘my happiest summer since I was a boy’. And summer wasn’t over.

  When the season ended he gave orders for the marquee to be taken down, but nobody took any notice. Used to having his orders obeyed, he complained to Victoria, but still nothing happened, and when he arrived from London for his birthday on 7 September, he was annoyed to find the marquee still in place. It was bad enough becoming sixty, without having his orders deliberately flouted.

  What Paul didn’t realize was that for almost a year Mark had been organizing a party for his birthday, and that instead of the small family affair Paul was expecting, he had secretly brought down more than sixty guests by motor coach from London.

  Victoria, who was in on the secret, kept Paul in the house all morning, and it was only when she took him for a stroll past the marquee at lunchtime tha
t he saw what was happening. Inside, and waiting to wish him happy birthday, were many of his closest friends and relations, some of whom he hadn’t seen for years. They had come from all around the world. There were friends from California and from Rome. There was a couple who had once sailed up the Thames and moored their yacht opposite his house on Cheyne Walk. There were some of his school-friends from St Ignatius. And sitting on his right at lunch there was even the woman who had once been closest to his father, the elegant Penelope Kitson.

  At the sight of so many long-lost friends Paul was moved to tears. ‘I never realized,’ he said, ‘that so many people cared.’

  But there was more than this to the occasion. It was typical of Mark, with his eagerness to bring the family together, to have turned the party into an elaborate family reunion.

  Apart from George’s daughters, who were still keeping their distance, almost all the family was there. Aileen was well enough to have flown in from Los Angeles with Gail. Young Paul had also made the journey with his nurses and his sister, Ariadne and her actor husband, Justin Williams. Ann had felt unable to leave her rocky valley in Ethiopia, where she was still searching for the fossilized remains of her oldest ancestor, but Gordon had flown over in the private Boeing, bringing their four boys, Peter, Andrew, John and William.

  The disinherited member of the family was not forgotten either; for Mark had made a special point of inviting his uncle Ronald and his family. By now Ronald was owing so much money that he had frankly no idea of what was going to happen. But the party took his mind off his troubles and after so many years of bitterness and rejection he was reunited with his brothers. So it was an emotional moment for him as well as for his brother Paul.

  ‘It was,’ he says, ‘like entering the family at last.’

  *

  What does one give a billionaire with everything? In Siena Gail had found an antique silver and ivory paperknife with a handle in the shape of a tortoise which she thought appropriate. Bill Newsom had brought a yellow taxi-driver’s hat from San Francisco. Penelope had found a Chelsea enamel box with a picture of a cricketer, and Christopher Gibbs a rare volume by the great Whig politician, Charles James Fox. It was entitled On Wind, and subtitled A Treatise on Farting.

  But it was not until lunch was cleared and the birthday speeches were over, that Paul received his most important present of the day. It had been concealed behind a curtain at the end of the marquee, and when the curtain was pulled back he saw something he could not believe still existed – his red MG from Rome that he had sold years before to his half-sister, Donna. The children had traced it, and had had it carefully rebuilt and resprayed as a present to their father from the younger generation.

  It was a present that meant more to Paul than any other, for it was also an omen for the future. There is a nostalgic feel to old motor-cars, and the MG seemed part of an existence that he had long considered lost for ever. It was associated with his youth, and with happier times in Rome before his troubles started. Now by returning it to him, it was as if the children were proving that even the past could be recovered and forgiven.

  Against considerable odds, Paul’s car had miraculously survived. Thanks to the care of those who loved him and the expenditure of a lot of money, the red MG had been wonderfully restored. And so had he.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Full Circle

  Any Talk About the Gettys has a habit of finally returning to the true begetter of their story, the unpredictable old man who simultaneously created most of the family’s enormous fortune and most of their troubles – loner, financier of genius, and miser extraordinary, J. Paul Getty. The image of him that persists is of a man of supernatural business skills, immense financial power, and a personal life of utter emptiness.

  His was a genuinely strange existence in which money took the place of almost everything. He was an alchemist of money. For much of his life, working from some room in an hotel and using nothing but a telephone, he had possessed the knack of summoning up money which he magically converted into oilfields, refineries, and tanker fleets, usually in distant continents; and such was his skill and such his cleverness that almost anything that he created seemed to summon up yet more money, which in turn enhanced the Getty fortune and the tax-immune income of the Sarah C. Getty Trust.

  That was how it went, and the essential point about it all was that for J. Paul Getty, most of what occurred in life – with the possible exception of sex – took place in his truly extraordinary mind. He rarely saw the far-off marvels which he and his money had created; he didn’t care to. Nor did he ever spend the money which he had piled away in such abundance in the Sarah C. Getty Trust; he didn’t dare to. It was entirely typical of him to have built that strange museum out at Malibu which he would never see. And it was much the same with the scattered offspring he had casually produced but could not be bothered with for years on end.

  So it was not surprising that there were problems when he decided that his adult sons were to join the family business, and start what he liked to call ‘the Getty Dynasty’. To build a dynasty, one must first create a family, and J. Paul Getty, who had spent his adult life escaping from his wives and children, had really no idea of what a family entailed. Nor was it surprising that all his offspring in their different ways were scarred by contact with their father – that George should have destroyed himself, that Paul Junior almost did the same, that Ronald was tortured by his disinheritance, and that even Gordon had been forced to build himself his private intellectual world to take the place of what was missing in his childhood.

  Mutual affection, understanding, generosity – the basics of any happy family – were not in J. Paul Getty’s emotional vocabulary. Instead it was as if something of the old man’s lack of feeling had been inserted in its place. This together with the vast amounts of money he was making, in theory to benefit his family, served to magnify the problem, helping to create jealousy, suspicion, and mistrust among the children, together with that fatal weakness which appears to have been somewhere at the root of the old man’s curious psychology – fear.

  With his fear for his possessions, fear for his person, and ultimately fear for his existence, Jean Paul Getty was that most unseemly spectacle, a fearful billionaire; and since fear is contagious, by the time of young Paul’s kidnap he had turned the Gettys into a fearful family as well. Much of Paul Junior’s reclusiveness had to do with fear, as had George’s death and the family’s behaviour during the kidnap and its aftermath. Gail was important to the family because she alone was not fearful.

  But now that members of the family were emerging from the old man’s shadow, fear was fading. Aileen had overcome it in her private Calvary, as had her brother Paul with his determination to go on living: so had her father when he came off drugs and faced the world again. Now with fear departing, the Gettys could start to pick up their existence as a relatively normal family.

  Back in 1960 when the old man threw his monster party at Sutton Place for the daughter of a friend of a duke he barely knew, he felt no inclination to invite a single member of his family. But now, when Mark arranged the Wormsley party for his father, he had been anxious to invite all the Gettys he could muster. And the Gettys were increasingly behaving as a close and supportive family.

  On 18 December 1992 the London Times, quoting an Associated Press report from San Juan, Puerto Rico, reported that a son of the late oil billionaire, J. Paul Getty, had filed for bankruptcy, claiming no assets and debts of $43.2 million. ‘The claim by J. Ronald and Karin Getty was filed last month in San Juan.’

  Although locally self-governed, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico is in union with the United States and shares its legal system and its currency. Ronald and his wife had settled there after leaving South Africa, and on 18 December 1992, both appeared before the judge in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico to request an extension to file schedules and statements of their affairs. This was understandable, as Ronald owed money on
behalf of his company to a formidable list of creditors. They included Merrill Lynch Private Capital Inc., Société Générale, First National Bank of Colorado Springs, Crédit Suisse, and the Security Pacific National Bank.

  Ronald was personally liable for these debts, but ever since his company collapsed, he had been having nightmares with the principal creditors, some of whom had been prolonging the bankruptcy proceedings in an attempt to recover assets that he simply didn’t have. He was sixty-two, a bad time of life to deal with this sort of crisis – and in the past he would have had to face the music on his own. But after his reunion with the family, things had changed. Gordon and Paul were on his side, and began to help in every way they could, advising him, paying for lawyers, and finally setting up a fund to pay a proportion of his debts and get a settlement. As a result, Ronald was able to discharge his bankruptcy.

  By doing this, they helped their unhappy brother to recover peace of mind and a measure of self-respect, and since then they have arranged for him to have an income (of an undisclosed figure) as a paid consultant to his family trust. They are also helping him and Karin buy a house in Germany.

  By doing so, the family has tacitly accepted that Ronald was unjustly treated all those years ago by his exclusion from the Sarah C. Getty Trust. They couldn’t change that, any more than they could really make amends for Jean Paul Getty’s behaviour. But they could at least ensure that after a lifetime ruined by trying to prove himself against his father, Ronald could end his days where he began and where he had always felt at home – among his mother’s people in his native Germany.

  In contrast with Ronald, Gordon remained the lucky member of the family, riding high on personal success, particularly with his music. Early in 1994, after attending concerts of his work at Newark, New Jersey and Austin, Texas, he had the unique triumph for a composer of flying in his own aircraft to Moscow to be present at a concert dedicated to his music, with the Russian National Orchestra performing Plump Jack and his ‘Three Victorian Scenes’, and ‘Three Waltzes for Orchestra’.