by Coll, Steve;
“Gordon is going to be around for a long time and obviously will run things by himself if you choose not to participate,” Hays told the bankers. “I can control Gordon. I think that if it were to be Gordon and Security Pacific as trustees, you could control him, too. He would have little choice.”
When the bank’s officers still refused to change their minds, despite Hays’ pleading, Lansing asked if at least the bank would hold the matter open. He was afraid that if the bank filed with the court formally declaring that it would not serve, great turmoil would erupt at Getty Oil Company because the executives and investors would realize that Gordon was sole heir to 40 percent of the company’s stock. The bank agreed not to file, and by the time of Lansing’s death, the issue of whether Gordon would be sole trustee was still open, at least in the minds of some Getty Oil Company executives.
And so in addition to the sorrow and sympathy that pervaded the Hays home on the afternoon of the memorial reception, there was also an air of uneasiness and uncertainty. What would Gordon Getty do, now that he was suddenly possessed of so much power and wealth, now that he was free from the ghost of his father, which had been manifested in Lansing Hays? Even before Lansing’s death, there had been whispers in the corridors of Getty Oil Company’s sleek Los Angeles headquarters. It was rumored that at the most recent quarterly board meeting, during a brief remission of Lansing’s illness, the dying lawyer had taken board chairman Sid Petersen aside and told him, “If you think I’ve been tough on you, wait until you have to deal with Gordon.” Petersen said later that rumors of such a conversation were unfounded, but still, the story spread quickly through Getty Oil’s top floors. As it was repeated that spring, the point was always the same: coming from Lansing Hays, who was so proud of his own fearsome reputation, there could be no more ominous a warning about the company’s future.
2
A Letter from Ronald
After the funeral, Gordon and Ann Getty returned home to their six-story, twenty-five-room mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay. In some ways, Lansing’s death had changed their world dramatically. There was a host of questions to be answered now, new responsibilities to be managed, and suddenly Gordon was at the center of things. He would have to make his own decisions, and for the first time, those choices would hold direct consequences for both Getty Oil Company, one of the largest corporations in America, and for the extravagantly rich Getty family, whose wealth depended on the stock Gordon now controlled. And yet, despite these important changes, Gordon and Ann Getty did not intend to alter the basic rhythms of their life. Why should they? To their wealth they had now added power, and that meant the world would have to come to them.
Specifically, the world would have to come to their house on Broadway, a place that reflected both the extravagance of their riches and the odd contrast in their personalities. For Ann, the house was a manifestation of social position and luxury, and she paid close attention to the details of its opulence. There was a butler and a footman and five other full-time servants, including a French chef. Some of the staff had worked for J. Paul Getty at his Sutton Place mansion, and had been imported to San Francisco after his death. As it had been at Sutton Place, the ambiance at 1500 Broadway was decidedly old-world. There was no electricity in the dining room, for example, only candlelight. Antique and ornate, the furniture and design blended European ostentation with the simpler styles of Asia and California. In all, it was the sort of house that might properly be the center of society for the more artistic, pretentious factions of San Francisco’s upper class, and that was precisely what Ann Getty wanted. She was becoming a charming and frequent hostess to San Francisco’s rich, and to the musicians, artists, and writers who amused them.
While Gordon gladly accommodated Ann’s taste for luxury, he did not share his wife’s enthusiasm for society. For him, the mansion on Broadway was a kind of sanctuary, a refuge where he could indulge the passion of his middle age, music. Often, while the upstairs parlors of his home hummed with the conversation of Ann’s guests, Gordon retreated to the basement and the privacy of his soundproofed study and music room. There he kept a Yamaha grand piano, a stereo system, and on shelves lining two walls, thousands of classical recordings, some of them rare and old. He had begun the collection at age fifteen, and he prized his records more than any other of his possessions. Every day he was home, Gordon spent several hours alone in the basement, composing or singing in his booming, operatic baritone or just listening to music. He seemed at times ambivalent about the materialism so visibly pursued by his wife. While Ann drove a Porsche, for example, Gordon preferred a Jeep Wagoneer, and he kept a mid-sized Chrysler and a 1979 Pacer parked on the street outside the mansion—there was no garage. Once, a television interviewer asked Ann Getty what was the principal luxury of her husband’s life. “Music,” she answered.
“What is your luxury?” the interviewer asked her.
“All the rest of this, I guess,” Ann said, waving vaguely at the splendor of her living room.
And now, with Lansing’s death, that luxury was at the center of attention in the Getty family. For years, Gordon himself, as well as his older brother, J. Paul Getty, Jr., a registered drug addict living in England, and his only surviving half-brother, J. Ronald Getty, had focused their material ambitions on their father, who alone controlled the family fortune. Before the old man’s death, they had fought J. Paul Sr. over income from the family trust and over the right to control that trust after he passed away. When the old man died in June 1976, the field of battle shifted to his will, and disputes over that testament were settled only after four years of lawsuits and negotiations. Now, with Lansing Hays dead and Gordon ascendant to sole control of the Sarah Getty Trust, the field had shifted again. When they returned to San Francisco from Lansing’s funeral in May 1982, Gordon and Ann Getty knew that their mansion on Broadway would inevitably become the nucleus of a new round of family feuding over money.
They did not have long to wait. Only days after their return, Ronald, who lived in Los Angeles but traveled frequently around the country and in Europe, wrote Gordon asking that he consider appointing him as a cotrustee of the Sarah Getty Trust. It was a letter Gordon should have expected. Ronald was a bitter, cantankerous man whose resentment seemed only to increase with age. He had good cause to be caustic about the family; at age six, he had been the victim of an arbitrary and quite costly act of revenge by his father. Ronald was the only child born to the marriage of J. Paul Getty and his third wife Adolphine Helmle, the daughter of a German industrialist. When J. Paul and Fini, as he called her, were divorced, Fini’s father extracted a painful alimony settlement from Getty, who was by then renowned in European society for his art-buying sprees and his philandering lifestyle.
“In Dr. Helmle, I encountered a businessman who was most certainly my equal,” J. Paul admitted ruefully in his autobiography. And so to take revenge on Helmle for the divorce settlement, J. Paul arranged the Sarah Getty Trust documents to provide that Ronald would never receive more than three thousand dollars in annual income from the trust. During the 1970s, when the trust distributed tens of millions annually to Gordon, J. Paul Jr., and the late George Getty’s three daughters, Ronald received virtually nothing. To compound the spite, J. Paul provided that when the trust dissolved upon the death of the last of his four surviving sons, its corpus would be divided equally among all of his grandchildren, including Ronald’s offspring. For decades, then, Ronald had endured not only the status of poor relation in one of the world’s richest families, but he had also lived with the knowledge that his children would become immensely wealthy after his own death. Such circumstances would try any man’s patience, but in Ronald, who seemed to those who knew him a naturally acrimonious person, they produced a stubborn, alienating anger that rarely subsided.
If Ronald, like Gordon, had spent most of his adult life disaffected from his father, unlike his brother, Ronald evidenced none of the sweetness or charm that might have led to a reconcilia
tion. He, too, had tried his hand in the family business. As a vice-president for marketing at Tidewater Oil in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then in J. Paul Getty’s control, he had so infuriated his successful half-brother George that the old man was forced to intervene. Ronald was sent to Hamburg, Germany, to oversee Tidewater’s European marketing subsidiary. His tenure was disastrous. Like his father, Ronald refused to fly, and he traveled by cruise ship, maddening Getty Oil executives in Los Angeles by charging around-the-world voyages to the company. In France, he was prosecuted for improperly enticing employees of another company to join his own, was found guilty, and received two suspended prison sentences. Finally quitting the oil business, Ronald moved to Los Angeles to try his hand first as a movie producer, then as a restaurateur—and finally as a litigant against his family. When he moved with his wife and children into his mother’s Los Angeles home, Fini filed suit to have them thrown out. When he tried to use the family name to establish the Getty Financial Corporation, an enraged George Getty threatened to sue him, and finally registered the name in every state but California to prevent Ronald from expanding. In both the film and restaurant businesses, Ronald failed to earn the fortune denied him by his father, producing only a handful of poor B-movies and a chain of Don the Beachcomber eateries. He shifted his attention from business to the courtroom.
In the years leading up to J. Paul Getty’s death, a great deal of family gossip and speculation centered on the provisions of the old man’s will. The future of the Sarah Getty Trust was not in question; Gordon, Lansing Hays, and the Security Pacific Bank had already been appointed successor cotrustees, and all but three thousand dollars of its tens of millions in annual income was earmarked for equal division between Gordon, J. Paul Jr., and the late George Getty’s daughters—the Georgettes, as they came to be known. But J. Paul Getty, in his own name, also owned another 12 percent of Getty Oil’s stock; this block, combined with the control of the Sarah Getty Trust’s 40 percent, put the old man in charge of a majority of Getty Oil’s shares while he was alive. The question was, who would get the old man’s personal estate when he died? Since the trust controlled 40 percent of the company’s stock, whoever inherited J. Paul’s 12 percent would own a “control premium”; enough stock, that is, to take control of Getty Oil in combination with the trust. It was Ronald’s hope that his father would right his past wrongs and leave his personal estate to him. Then, not only would Ronald be restored to wealth roughly equal to his half-brothers, he would be a power to be reckoned with at Getty Oil. Again, however, Ronald was disappointed by his father. The old man left virtually his entire estate to the J. Paul Getty Museum Trust, based in Malibu, California. The trust operated an art museum which housed paintings, sculpture, and eighteenth-century French furniture collected by J. Paul in Europe. The bequest, valued at more than $400 million, instantly made the museum, a somewhat gaudy replica of a Roman villa situated on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean, one of the richest art institutions in the world. Ronald was not entirely shut out by his father’s will: he was appointed executor of J. Paul’s personal estate, a position that would earn him some $6 million in fees, and he also inherited a house in Italy which he later sold for about $1 million.
Seven million dollars might be enough for some men, but it was not enough for Ronald Getty. He sued the museum for $28 million more, claiming that he had found documents among his father’s personal belongings which suggested that J. Paul had intended to rescind the Sarah Getty Trust and then establish a new one in which Ronald would be an equal beneficiary with his half-brothers. The museum believed that Ronald’s claims were baseless, but it could not receive its own fortune until the lawsuit was out of the way, and so a settlement was reached by 1980 in which Ronald was paid close to $10 million. Still, Ronald continued to press his half-brothers for an equal share of the trust income.
So for Gordon, the letter from Ronald that arrived soon after Lansing’s funeral was yet another salvo in what had by now become a long, grinding campaign of family lawsuits. It was a campaign in which Gordon had himself participated not too long before. In the late 1960s, Gordon had sued his father in California, demanding more money from the Sarah Getty Trust. The issue was whether “share dividends,” or shares of Getty Oil stock issued to current stockholders, should be considered part of the income generated by the Sarah Getty Trust or part of the trust’s principal, or corpus. The question was important to Gordon because of the way his father ran the trust and the company. It was J. Paul’s ambition to accumulate wealth, not distribute it, and so he plowed nearly all of Getty Oil’s huge profits back into the company and into the trust. It was that philosophy which had caused the value of the trust to grow from several million dollars when it was established in 1934 to nearly a billion dollars by the 1960s. One consequence, however, was that precious little cash was distributed to J. Paul’s sons. Until age twenty-five, Gordon received nine thousand dollars annually from the trust; after that, he was supposed to receive 20 percent of its income until his father’s death, when he would get one-third. But since J. Paul was paying out share dividends, not cash dividends, there was no money to be had.
“I would be very pleased if you would follow the example of your brothers and work for a living,” J. Paul wrote to Gordon when his son threatened a lawsuit over the issue. J. Paul pleaded with Gordon not to sue. The Rockefellers do not sue the Rockefellers, nor the Kennedys the Kennedys, he told his son. It would cause him great personal embarrassment. To stave off the suit, the old man instructed George to declare a cash dividend of ten cents per Getty Oil share, enough to give Gordon a fifty-thousand-dollar annual income.
Gordon said later that a lack of extreme wealth during his young adulthood had helped to build his character, but at the time he apparently could not see the value in such wisdom. He decided instead to press his case despite the ten-cent dividend, and he sued his father in California. Lansing Hays was instructed by J. Paul to supervise the litigation. To try the case, Hays hired a San Francisco trial attorney named Moses Lasky, then head of the litigation department at the large Bay Area law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. Lasky, a combative, ornery litigator and one of the few men around Getty Oil willing and able to stand up to Lansing Hays, beat up unmercifully on Gordon in court. So badly did it go for Gordon that at one point during the trial, Ann Getty called her father-in-law in England to tell him that Lasky was “killing” her husband on the stand and to urge him to instruct Lasky to ease up. J. Paul responded by telephoning Lasky and telling him, “Keep hammering Gordon. Keep hammering.” In the end, on October 30, 1970, the judge ruled that Gordon was entitled “to have and recover nothing whatever from the trust estate or from J. Paul Getty.”
Fortunately for him, Gordon was not the sort to harbor a grudge. Not only did he reconcile with his father after George’s 1973 suicide, resulting in his being named cotrustee of the Sarah Getty Trust. He also became friendly over the years with Lasky, who had split from Brobeck, Phleger to start his own small litigation firm in San Francisco, called Lasky, Haas, Cohler & Munter. Indeed, Gordon was so impressed with Lasky’s performance against him in court back in the late 1960s that he began to talk with the aging trial lawyer about representing the trust after Lansing Hays died and Gordon became sole trustee. Lasky was more than willing. The trust would be a gold mine for his small firm. Gordon was heir not only to billions of dollars but to a tortuous family history of expensive lawsuits and infighting. What better client on which to build a law firm? By the time Gordon and Ann returned from Lansing’s funeral that May, the engagement was official. Lasky and two of his younger partners, Charles “Tim” Cohler and Tom Woodhouse, would represent Gordon in all matters pertaining to his own fortune and to the Sarah Getty Trust.
That meant, first off, they had to deal somehow with Ronald Getty’s threatening letter. Earlier that month, immediately after Lansing’s death, Gordon had spoken with Ronald by telephone and had told him that he had no intention of accepting a cotrustee, whether it be Security Pa
cific Bank or a member of the family. Ronald’s letter made it clear that he did not regard Gordon’s decision as satisfactory. Gordon turned the letter over to Lasky, who drafted an unyielding reply for Gordon’s signature. Now approaching eighty, Lasky remained every inch the formidable trial lawyer who had so badgered Gordon more than a decade before. Neither he nor his client saw any reason to be soft on Ronald. On May 28, Gordon and Lasky sent the stiff answer to Gordon’s half-brother, telling him that a cotrusteeship was out of the question. Ronald was in Europe when the letter arrived, so he replied through his advisor in New York, one Horst Osterkamp.
“Ron’s letter was not intended to be a legal matter and did not wish to solicit an attorney’s reply,” Osterkamp wrote to Gordon. “Ron was very disappointed in not receiving any further response from you after your telephone conversation in early May. He wanted to reemphasize his concern about a sole trustee and his desire to be appointed as a joint trustee. He strongly feels that you should share the same concerns.… As Ron is continually on the move, I would be happy to forward a letter or supply you with a current telephone contact.”
Gordon turned Osterkamp’s letter over to Lasky and asked him what he should do about it. A few days later, Lasky wrote Gordon at his mansion on Broadway. “My advice is to ignore Osterkamp’s suggestion that you telephone Ronald. Instead, I would write Osterkamp a letter about as follows: ‘Dear however you address him, In your letter you state that Ronald’s letter was not intended to be a legal matter and that he did not wish an attorney’s reply. So far as there may be nonlegal aspects, it seems to me that my father had his reasons as to why he did not appoint Ronald as one of the successor trustees, and I would be unfaithful to his wishes and to my duties as trustee if I were now to consent to have someone appointed as trustee whom my father had not designated.’”
