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Getty’s one-time chief executive, the celebrated Claus von Bülow,
Indeed he was disinclined to generosity, full stop, but his celebrated stinginess was not exactly what it seemed.
Getty’s meanness was less the cause of his exaggerated wealth than a symptom of something more intriguing.
How can one bear to waste the object of one’s adoration? How could he squander that delightful substance which, with death approaching, offered him his greatest hope of immortality?
He had always been a quiet, lonely man, and during the night of 6 June 1976, still sitting in his favourite armchair, silently and quite alone, he died.
just one of Getty’s surviving sons, though suffering the severe effects of heroin and alcohol addiction, managed to attend; and the vicar never got his service fee.
It was an opportunity Jean Paul appreciated, having lived his life in the shadow of the will made by his father half a century before.
The great unanswered mystery of the Getty fortune is why it has apparently devoured so many of its beneficiaries.
Why should this massive reservoir of wealth have proved to be not just the largest, but probably the most destructive major fortune of our time?
One son had killed himself three years before he died.
Balzac, who was fascinated by great fortunes, and by the havoc that he saw them bring to the nouveaux riches families of France’s Second Empire, believed that, as he wrote, ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime’.
It also obscures the fact that without his father and his fortune, the Getty billions could never have existed.
But then, Jean Paul had reasons of his own to feel ambivalent about his father – and the part their curious relationship had played in the whole bizarre creation of his fortune.
His father, George, a powerful, godly man, was thirty-seven at the time.
The Gettys themselves originated from Northern Ireland,
It is appropriate that Sarah Getty’s name is still enshrined within the massive trust which came to dominate the fortunes of her family, for throughout the marriage sharp-eyed Sarah was the mover, egging on her dutiful, hard-working, younger partner to make money and succeed.
According to this practical belief, God rewarded those who hearkened to his word – and smiled on those whose way of life forswore the devil and his works.
This was his sister, Gertrude Lois Getty, who was born in 1880, soon after George and Sarah’s marriage, and died in the typhoid epidemic which swept Minnesota in the winter of 1890,
And on 15 December 1892, the arrival of a son was like an early Christmas present to replace their daughter.
and within their family its owner would be generally referred to by the name of Paul.
Europe and its culture were to act as magnets to her son and many of the members of his family in the years ahead.
Years later Paul told his wife that as a child he was never cuddled – nor did he have a birthday party or a Christmas tree.
He would never be entirely at ease within a family. Instead he would be always on the move, and until the onset of old age would never settle anywhere for long.
In 1903, when Paul was ten, the Lord directed George to Bartlesville, a one-horse town in what was legally still Indian Territory in Oklahoma, to settle an insurance claim.
it was little more than passing speculation that led George to invest 500 dollars in ‘Lot 50’ – a lease to the oil rights on 1,100 acres of virgin prairie outside Bartlesville.
By 1906, George Getty was a millionaire.
But it was a formative experience for any boy to watch his father suddenly grow rich so very easily and something he would not forget.
By the age of ten he had discovered those works of G. A. Henty
the Gettys decided on a plot of land on newly laid-out South Kingsley Drive, on a
corner with the still unsurfaced stretch of Wilshire Boulevard lying beyond the Los Angeles city limits. There they built themselves a house.
They were self-sufficient and reclusive people. These were habits Paul learned early, practised all his life and passed on to his children.
In his mid sixties Paul would finally succumb to buying himself a permanent home – the stately Tudor pile of Sutton Place.
From this moment it was the old world, rather than the new, that captured the imagination of Paul Getty.
Like Jay Gatsby, what he wanted was quite different – the right to call himself an Oxford man, which, with customary single-mindedness, he more or less obtained.
he was not a member of Magdalen College or at Oxford University.
Not that this ever stopped him tacitly implying that he was – and in later years he always made great play of how his time at fashionable Magdalen had subtly infiltrated him into the bosom of the British upper classes.
What was important was that here at Oxford, Paul had seen at last a world he thoroughly admired and envied.
Here, in vivid contrast with simple sunny California, and the grimy oil wells of Oklahoma, was a world of titled aristocrats, stately homes, grandiose art – and wonderfully sophisticated women. Here was a world that would haunt him for the remainder of his life.
This produced a venomous riposte from Paul, showing something of the anger and resentment which, when thwarted, he could summon up against his father.
George was sure that once Paul had his first real taste of money and success, he would have him hooked.
As a loner he had continued his hatred of team sports, but he was obsessive over strengthening his physique. He swam a lot, used weights and
This meant that Paul was able to enjoy his early twenties in a sort of endlessly extended spoiled childhood, indulged by his mother, tolerated by his father, and enjoying all the pleasures of a rich and thoroughly emancipated modern adolescent.
1923, when at thirty he suddenly proposed to seventeen-year-old Jeanette Dumont, a dark-eyed, half-Polish high-school beauty.
when the son he didn’t want was born, on 9 July 1924, he proudly named him ‘George Franklin Getty II’ – in honour of his father.
Belene and Allene Ashby, daughters of a Texas rancher, and, amative as ever, he conducted love affairs
So, that October, he and Allene Ashby drove to Cuernavaca in the Duesenberg and married.
but despite his philandering, Paul remained as deeply involved with them as ever. He was still the same dutiful, attentive
Her name was Adolphine – but everybody called her Fini.
When he spoke of marriage, she insisted he discuss it with her father – and in Fini’s father, Paul Getty met serious opposition.
and from that point on, the romance became less a love affair between Paul and Fini than a battle of wills between Paul and Dr Helmle.
