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a few days after his divorce from Allene Ashby was
finalized. From Cuba they went on to Los
But just as with Jeanette, the reality of married life started to repel Paul once his wife was pregnant.
They called the baby Ronald, and for a few days Paul appeared excited by the prospect of a second son.
But Dr Helmle proved as tough as his son-in-law, and, advised by a top divorce lawyer, was soon demanding heavy damages for his daughter.
He calmed his mother, insisted on summoning a doctor, and then for thirty days he kept vigil by the sick man’s bed.
George F. Getty II, received $350,000.
He believes that after George’s death, Getty spent the rest of his life proving himself against his father’s judgement.
George would always mean too much to Paul to be forgotten. ‘Dearest Papa’ would always be the keeper of his conscience.
If he could reverse his father’s judgement, and somehow make him posthumously ‘eat his words’, his problems would be over. He would be freed to live exactly as he wanted, travel as he had before, enjoy his women, treat his wives and children as he pleased, and still refuse to settle down.
By any definition, he was something of a freak, a forbidding combination of relentlessly acquisitive business genius with the emotional development of a sex-starved adolescent.
As a good puritan, George F. Getty was a dedicated self-denier; so Paul set out to beat him here as well.
The result was a strangely dedicated life, with everything within it geared to one overriding purpose – the accumulation of ever larger quantities of capital.
He would have regarded the idea of conspicuous consumption as unthinkable, the notion of conspicuous waste a gross obscenity.
he felt no obligation to share any of his winnings with the multitude. He was completely self-obsessed and self-sustaining. All he required to ensure that his father ‘ate his words’ was money – and as much of it as possible. As long as he could go on making it, he could live his life exactly as he wanted. As long as he could make Papa stay silent, his money would have served its most important purpose.
Thanks to his father’s will the head of the company, with two-thirds of the capital, was eighty years of age, stone deaf, overweight, and lonely – his mother Sarah. Luckily for Paul she loved him dearly –
For the sea-lions offered Paul his finest chance to influence his mother and persuade her to transfer her power in the company to him.
Ann Rork was all of twenty-one when Paul became involved with her in the autumn of 1930, she had barely changed from the dimpled nymphet of fourteen he
But as soon as Ann discovered she was pregnant, the idyll ended and he behaved as he always did at the prospect of a family.
Paul, who hated families, still had a superstitious sense of the importance of his offspring.
Eugene Paul Getty.
Fini having custody of two-year-old Ronald,
But at least this meant that he and Ann could now legitimize their child by marrying – which they did in Paul’s favourite marital rendezvous of Cuernavaca, in December 1932.
He had bought himself a beach house facing the sea at Malibu, where he and his young family could all live happily together. Except that they didn’t.
By the time their second son, Gordon, was born in December 1933, they were barely speaking to each other.
She couldn’t bear to think that by letting Paul have his way she might be depriving future generations of their patrimony.
She would set up ‘an irrevocable spendthrift trust’ to protect the interests of his children against the possible results of his business speculation, and contribute an initial $2.5 million to it from her own resources.
This was the start of the famous Sarah C. Getty Trust, which would dominate the family finances for many years to come.
it made suitable provision for his wife Ann, and his four children, ten-year-old George II, four-year-old Ronald,
two-year-old Paul Jr. and one-year-old Gordon.
This disadvantage was placed on Ronald because his father seems to have convinced Sarah that Ronald would be receiving substantial money from the will of his maternal grandfather, Dr Helmle.
What no one, Paul included, seems to have realized at first was the remorseless way the legendary trust would grow.
Proof against taxation, bankruptcy and personal extravagance, the trust named after Jean Paul Getty’s mother would help create the greatest fortune in America.
Early in the battle he shrewdly recruited David Hecht, a smart young corporation lawyer, and with Hecht beside him steadily wheeled and dealt his way towards acquiring the crucial shares he needed.
Even in old age he was still insisting that life as an ordinary husband
would have held him back and stopped him from succeeding – since a family would have diverted his attention, squandered his precious time, and sapped his concentration.
He was still driven by two overwhelming urges – for sexual adventures,
preferably abroad, and for acquiring very large amounts of money. To combine successfully these two activities, he needed to devise a way of managing his business interests – which included the day-to-day running of George Getty Inc. and the battle for Tide Water – during his lengthy periods in Europe.
Victor Hugo once called Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who also loved living in hotels and hated families, ‘the vagabond billionaire of Europe’. Paul Getty, who was much the same, was fast becoming his successor.
He had an obsession with saving stationery,
He wasted nothing, ate economically, and recorded every cab-fare in his diary. He could fornicate, but not be profligate.
Ann Rork Getty was a tougher proposition than her predecessors. In this garrulous would-be actress, Paul had more than met his equal in the marriage stakes.
Although he was now the father of four young sons, he showed not the faintest interest in any of them;
Whatever else, anything he bought had to be a bargain –
When built in 1930, as New York’s most exclusive luxury hotel, it had cost more than $6 million. Paul bought it for $2.35 million, for the simple reason that it was such a bargain that he knew that he could never lose on the deal.
start courting Louise ‘Teddy’ Lynch – a buxom, twenty-three-year-old night-club singer.
Another Churchill connection, Bernard Baruch the financier, was her uncle,
At midday on 17 November 1939, he and Teddy met before the mayor of Rome in the historic Campidoglio, the Roman Capitol, and were made man and wife.
Anxious to resume her career as a singer, Teddy was still no clinging vine, although she would have liked a modicum of a married life; but when she presented Paul with his fifth son, christened Timothy, in 1946, her husband still opted for duty back in Tulsa rather than married life with Teddy.
precious bunker and, instead of returning to the oil business, organized the change-over of Spartan Aircraft from making aircraft to creating homes on trailers. It was an odd activity for a financial genius like Paul Getty. But
