by John Pearson
It was the sort of accolade Gordon had dreamed of, and he seemed slightly overcome by the occasion. As he said, ‘There’s something very special about listening to a great orchestra like that playing your own music.’
In his role of latter-day Renaissance man he was also gaining public recognition for his economic theories from the Nobel economic laureate, Professor Franco Modigliani, who publicly praised the originality of the economic theories in his paper, ‘Fertile Money’.
Simultaneously Gordon’s wife Ann seemed to be sharing in the family success, as the money and the effort she had put into the search for man’s earliest remains in Ethiopia finally paid off. That September it was confirmed that the team with which she worked had found what they were seeking. It had been established that the fossilized remains discovered some months earlier were 4.5 million years old and belonged to an ape-like hominid. Given the name Australopithecus ramidus, the creature was confidently claimed to be the long-sought ‘missing link’, joining the families of apes with humans.
The discovery was actually a triumph for the team’s leader, Ann’s tutor at the University of California, Professor Tim White. It was also a triumph in its way for Ann and Gordon, whose financial support had helped make Professor White’s researches possible. But it also came in the middle of a bitter academic feud in which Ann and Gordon, in their role as financial benefactors, had inadvertently become involved.
Unlike his brother, Paul Junior, who has given to a wide variety of causes without strings attached, Gordon has always tended to become personally involved with the causes he donates to, treating them, as he puts it, ‘just as responsibly as my business investments’. This was very much the case when he helped to found the Institute of Human Origins at Berkeley under the controversial Dr Johanson. Since then there had been a falling out between Johanson and his former colleague, Professor White, with Ann and Gordon increasingly supporting the Professor. White’s success had given extra weight to his cause, and Gordon, true to his word, decided he would cease ‘investing’ in Dr Johanson’s institute forthwith. Since this threatened the existence of the institute, Gordon inevitably incurred widespread criticism for his action. But he believes firmly that he was in the right. More to the point, he also has the money, which invariably means that once Gordon has his mind made up, it takes something more than criticism to change it.
Ironically, just as his philanthropy was involving Gordon in controversy, so a stroke of unexpected generosity was causing embarrassment to his brother, Paul Junior, by publicly raising the long-forgotten issue of relations with his father.
After a long and disappointing campaign to raise money to buy Canova’s neoclassical sculptural group, ‘the Three Graces’, for a British gallery, it had looked as if the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu was going to acquire the three life-sized marble nymphs for the asking price of £7.4 million. They had been in Britain since a Duke of Bedford purchased them from the Italian sculptor back in 1820, and more than £1 million was still required to keep them in the country. At the last minute Paul Junior announced that he would personally donate £1 million to the fund, provided the remaining money was contributed from other sources.
Timothy Clifford, head of the National Galleries of Scotland, who directed the campaign, expressed his delight when interviewed live on television – and when asked why Getty should have backed a British gallery against his father’s museum in Malibu, he answered brightly: ‘I believe that Mr Getty never got on well with his father.’
Though broadly true, this was hardly tactful in the circumstances, and one can understand Paul Junior’s annoyance when he heard it. When you give away a million pounds you don’t expect to be reminded that you didn’t like your father, particularly when this has little bearing on the reasons for your generosity. In fact the motive behind Paul Junior’s gift lay, as usual, in his genuine love of his adoptive country.
Uproar ensued when he expressed extreme displeasure and added that he was thinking of withdrawing his offer. Faced with full responsibility for the threatened loss to Britain of Canova’s ‘Three Graces’, the unfortunate Mr Clifford did almost everything short of ritual disembowelment to express repentance.
He said he was profoundly sorry. He wrote to Paul saying he had made a terrible mistake. ‘I know nothing,’ he publicly lamented, ‘about Mr Getty’s relationship with his father.’
And that at last was that. Placated, Paul Junior confirmed his offer, and to the relief of Mr Clifford and the intense annoyance of John Walsh, director of the Malibu museum, Canova’s three young ladies were permitted to remain in Britain.
The fuss about this relatively minor matter was a measure of the unaccustomed calm which otherwise had settled on the family, and one was left to wonder – could it last? Was the cycle of disaster truly over? Having endured almost every aspect of the curse of riches, could the Gettys possibly avoid it in the future?
In any family things always can and do go wrong for individuals, but what seems certain is that the epidemic of unhappiness that had scourged the family for nearly four decades was over, since so much of it depended on the interplay of Jean Paul Getty with his children, the circumstances in which his fortune was created, and the existence of the Sarah C. Getty Trust.
Also, families, like individuals, learn from their mistakes, and the Gettys have been forced to do a lot of learning. There was a sort of innocence in the way Paul Junior and Talitha first became involved with drugs in the 1960s – and also in the way Paul Junior’s son, young Paul, made such tragic efforts to imitate his hippie father. But the younger Gettys are innocent no longer. By force of circumstance, they have become sophisticated and tough inheritors, schooled by the discipline of family disasters.
Young Paul’s son, Balthazar, for instance, has always been adamant in his refusal to become involved with alcohol or drugs, and remains dedicated to his ambition to succeed as an actor and a film director.
Talitha’s son, Tara, is similarly determined to enjoy life on his own extremely level-headed terms, steering very clear of drugs, preferring France to England, and remaining close to the person who largely brought him up, his step-grandmother, Poppet Pol. He is very good to her, has inherited his mother’s charm, and gets on well with all the family.
Ronald’s son, Christopher, is resolved to achieve the sort of business success his father didn’t, and with his banking expertise, and connections with the family trusts, he shows every sign of doing so.
Paul Junior’s youngest daughter, Ariadne, is similarly committed to her husband and her two young children. She misses Italy, but the experience of the kidnapping still makes her grateful for America and the privacy and safety of her own small family.
Ann and Gordon’s children are all highly motivated, self-aware, essentially private people, who are very sure of what they’re doing.
As for Mark, time alone will tell if his plans for a Getty business dynasty will work, but whatever happens he has his own life very much worked out, and seems certain to find riches as a merchant banker long before inheriting his full portion of the Getty money.
Remembering the Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’, Mark says that he feels that the Gettys have been ‘interesting’ for long enough. ‘I hope that from now on we can all become a little boring.’
But there is nothing boring in the situation of the younger Gettys. Thanks to Sarah Getty the money from her Trust looks like enriching the lives of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren as she originally intended. Their interests have been taken care of; the capital is safe within the separate trusts, and after the turmoil of the past, the younger members of the family are fortune’s favourites. Having drawn their winning ticket in the lottery of life, they can look forward to the best of everything, and never feel the care and anguish that afflicts the vast majority of suffering mankind from lack of money.
But for them, unlike their elders, there can be no excuses if things do go wrong, and so they should not ignore th
e lessons offered by the sufferings and errors of their predecessors – or ever overlook their own immense good fortune.
Postscript
With The Fates apparently smiling on the Gettys, they had a final blessing to bestow upon the one who in his way had suffered most – Paul Junior.
Jon Bannenberg, the Australian naval architect who designed the Queen Elizabeth II, had been rebuilding his sixty-year-old yacht, the Jezebel, and early in 1994 the work was finished. The gleaming boat now rode at anchor on the River Dart, awaiting her new owner’s pleasure.
With his yacht, as with his ‘paradise’ at Wormsley, Paul had been indulging his expensive passion for perfection. With a crew of nineteen looking after a maximum of twelve passengers in conditions of total luxury, the 90-metre yacht now ranked among the most glamorous vessels in her class – and was about to play a special role in the final stage of Paul’s recovery.
Until now, Talitha’s name had invariably been remembered with a touch of sorrow, but this changed mysteriously when Paul elected to rename his yacht Talitha Getty. Sailors are superstitious about changing names of vessels, but it was as if Talitha’s spirit had been reborn in one of the loveliest ships afloat – and could offer Paul something he had not experienced for years – the freedom of the seas.
Born off the coast of Italy himself, he had always loved travelling by sea, but the damage caused to his feet and legs by acute phlebitis had made this impractical. With a spectacular ocean-going yacht at his command, and the chance to have his private doctor always in attendance, it was impractical no longer.
At the beginning of April he and Victoria flew Concorde to New York and on to the Caribbean where Talitha Getty was waiting to receive them both like minor royalty. For Paul, after twenty land-locked years this was the ultimate in freedom – and in Barbados he was even able to enjoy the amazing spectacle of Britain’s Test cricketers beating a West Indian XI in Barbados for the first time for fifty-nine years.
Thanks to Talitha Getty, Paul was also able to revisit his beloved Mediterranean late that summer with Victoria and a few close friends for company. Then immediately after Christmas, which was spent with the family at Wormsley, the two of them flew once more to Barbados where the yacht was waiting. On 30 December, in Bridgetown harbour, on the deck of the Talitha Getty, Paul completed the love affair that had started so many troubled years before in Rome. Before a local minister, he married Victoria.
Before leaving for Barbados, they had told no one of their intentions, but there was a sort of rightness in the outcome of their journey. Her love for him had managed to survive rejection, drugs, ill-health and untold difficulties – and his for her had been dogged by troubles with his father, regret over Talitha, and a good proportion of the ills the flesh is heir to. But somehow, and in spite of all their problems, they had grown closer with the years. She was devoted to him and he depended on her utterly.
‘Victoria is my inspiration,’ he frequently remarked, which in its way was true, for she, more than anyone, had been constant through his troubles and had saved him from the depths of absolute disaster. When she was very young she had dreamed of marrying him. Now that she was young no longer, her dream had finally become reality.
Uncertainty was ended, the past was over if not entirely forgotten, and like the family itself, Paul and Victoria had earned their chance to enjoy their fortune and their days together.
A Note on the Author
John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King's College School and later at Cambridge, where he read history.
In the early years of his career, Pearson worked on various newspapers including The Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times – on which he was an assistant to Ian Fleming. He went on to write the first biography of Ian Fleming in 1966. He would also become the third official James Bond author of the adult Bond series with his first-person biography of the fictional agent, James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007. During the span of his career, he has written multiple novels and many more works of non-fiction.
Pearson now divides his time between London and West Sussex.
Discover books by John Pearson published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnPearson
Arena: The Story of the Colosseum
Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink
Biggles: The Authorized Biography
Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals
Edward the Rake
Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell
Gone to Timbuctoo
Painfully Rich: J. Paul Getty and His Heirs
The Bellamy Saga
The Cult of Violence: The Untold Story of the Kray Twins
The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins
The Kindness of Dr. Avicenna
The Life of Ian Fleming
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
The Ultimate Family: The Making of the Royal House of Windsor
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © John Pearson 1995
Cover image © Mark Kauffman / Getty Images
First published by Macmillan
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ISBN: 9781448208050
eISBN: 9781448207817
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