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no takers.
Paul Walton, a young geologist who had worked in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and was currently head of exploration in the Rocky Mountain division of the Pacific Western oil company. Walton knew the Persian Gulf. He knew its people, and its problems. He was anxious to return. So Getty invited him to Paris, and briefed him on his mission.
(It was typical of Paul that, with the assistance of his well-connected friend, the French industrialist and former air ace, Commandant Paul Louis Weiller, he was able to get these tankers built in French dockyards
he changed the name of his thriving company. In place of Pacific Western, it would henceforth be known as the Getty Oil Company.
When Paul met Penelope Kitson in 1953, she was just thirty-one, an elegant, very self-possessed upper-class Englishwoman, with three children and an unsatisfactory marriage.
But he also told her, ‘Pen, you’ll always be my Number One.’ This time he was not lying, and until he died she remained virtually the only person close to him who was not intimidated by his character, his reputation or his money
of the Excelsior Hotel in Florence, one of the greatest connoisseurs of Italian painting, Bernard Berenson, who, without realizing who Paul was, invited him to tea at the holy of artistic holies, his villa I Tatti on the hill at Settignano, close to France.
he treated the great connoisseur,
Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli outside Rome.
the most artistically creative and enigmatic of all the Roman emperors, Hadrian.
Just as the ageing Hadrian had stayed at the villa and continued to initiate enterprises
and great events in the furthest corners of the Roman Empire, so Paul had been making great things happen in the distant reaches of the Getty Empire.
It was not lack of time so much as that he clearly saw his children as a threat to the two things that meant most to him – making money and the serious pursuit of pleasure.
Young Ronald is described as ‘bright and lovable’, George is ‘very mature, with an excellent mind and personality’, and young Paul and Gordon are invariably referred to as ‘my two dear sons’.
Fini and Ronald had come to live in Los Angeles just before the war.
my beloved sons’ as he insisted on describing them – fifteen-year-old George, ten-year-old Ronald, and young Paul and Gordon, seven and six respectively – were brought to the house on South Kingsley Drive to bring Christmas greetings to their eighty-seven-year-old grandmother,
it remained the only contact there would be between the young Gettys during boyhood, despite the fact that they were all living at the time in California, and that on them would ultimately rest the future of the largest fortune in America.
Jealousy, bitterness and non-stop litigation would all stem from the problems Paul Getty bequeathed his sons when he gave them a phantom billionaire as a father.
George Getty Senior had left him that $300,000 in his will.
in 1942, when George was just eighteen and in his first year at Princeton, his father claimed him for the role he had to play in life.
while Ronald was excluded from the trust, any children he might have were specifically included.
Not until 1951, when Ronald was twenty-two and in his final year of business studies at the University of Southern California, did his father see fit to contact him.
Ronald, on the other hand, was becoming increasing aware of the massive handicap his father had inflicted on him by excluding him alone of his sons from the Sarah C. Getty Trust. It was an awareness which would grow like a cancer in the years ahead, until it all but destroyed him.
Paul and Gordon, the two boys whom he had fathered so casually on that former child prodigy, Ann Rork.
If he modelled himself on anyone it was probably on handsome Edgar Peixoto, a charmingly failed lawyer, who was one of his mother’s many suitors.
that overblown diabolist, Aleister Crowley.
When he returned from Korea, Paul was already in love with pretty Gail Harris, the only child of Federal Judge George Harris.
When Paul and
Gail decided to get married, the only person not in favour was Mrs Mack.
Up to this point in their lives neither brother had paid the faintest attention to the oil business, to their half-brothers George and Ronald,
or to their unknown father,
Fortune magazine, after several months’ research among America’s super-rich, including Rockefellers, Morgans, Hunts, and Fords, publicly proclaimed Jean Paul Getty, an ‘expatriate businessman living in Paris’, the ‘richest living American’.
‘After managing to avoid the limelight all my life,’ he wrote, ‘to my acute discomfort I became a curiosity, a sort of financial freak overnight.’
But according to his secretary, Barbara Wallace, ‘It was now that things started going wrong.’
Ann Rork Getty had been right when she accused her former husband of having had ‘no interest in his sons until they were old enough to take their places in his precious dynasty’.
his first-born son, Jean Paul Getty III, born in November 1956, he
But there was still virtually no contact with their distant father until the spring of 1958, when out of the blue he telephoned Paul to summon him to Paris.
Which explains how Paul and Gail and the baby all arrived for lunch with the head of the family on an early summer day at the Hôtel Georges V in Paris.
The group around the table started to get on rather well together.
and Paul Junior began to captivate his father, as none of his other sons had ever done before.
But the truth of the matter was that ‘Big Paul’, as the family sometimes called him, had grown attached to what he called ‘my little family’, and had no intention of losing them if he could help it.
Who better to install as general manager than his son Paul?
It was during this honeymoon period between the father and the reunited son that Paul made a gesture which touched the old man more deeply than one might have thought.
Eugene Paul was now no more. Jean Paul Getty Junior took over.
George was now in his mid thirties, father of three lively daughters,
and something of a pillar of polite Los Angeles society.
Ronald’s lot was equally uncomfortable.
Ronald married pretty Karin Seibl in Lübeck, Germany, in 1964,
Even the sunny Gordon had his troubles when he took Paul’s place in the manager’s office in the Getty installation in the Neutral Zone.
Gordon was rapidly recalled and sent to manage what was now the Spartan Trailer Company in Tulsa. When he tired of this, he quietly returned to Berkeley to finish his degree in English.
