All the Money in the World

by John Pearson

his twelve-year-old son Timmy was undergoing further surgery in a New York hospital,

Teddy finally reached him on the telephone in the early hours of Monday, 18 August. Beside herself with grief, she sobbed out the news to him. Timmy, their own beloved son, had not survived the operation.

Faced with death, he was always vulnerable, and totally alone.

Thus began Getty’s long and uncomfortable relationship with thirty-six-year-old Mary Teissier. She was elegant, and a little mad,

the Villa San Michele, on the slopes of Fiesole, close to Florence.

Getty was rising sixty-six, and his wealth was steadily accruing at an effortless half a million dollars daily,

Penelope Kitson, introduced him to George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland.

Sutton Place, the

Tudor mansion he had purchased forty years before from the self-made press lord Viscount Harmsworth.

But by the spring of 1960, Paul Getty would proudly take possession of something he had never really had before – a home.

historic Palazzo Lovatelli in Piazza Campitelli, one of the smallest and most enchanting squares in the oldest quarter of the city.

In July 1959 she had a daughter and they called her Aileen after Gail’s mother.

the decadence and glitter of Roman society which centred round the Via Veneto.

demanding Mme Teissier. Early in 1959 she left her husband and the Villa San Michele and became his full responsibility.

In Rome she pulled every string she knew to get him into that most improbable bastion of Roman snobbery – the exclusive Circolo della Caccia, the Rome hunting club.

Prince Ladislao Odescalchi.

La Posta Vecchia was one of the Prince’s former country houses, and had been a staging-post on the ancient Via Salaria, near the old Etruscan site of Palo.

In Rome he felt happiest – and safest – in the old familiar Hotel Flora on the Via Veneto.

he now recruited Claus von Bülow to his staff. This Danish lawyer,

Robina Lund, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Sir Thomas Lund, the President of the Law Society, had recently qualified as a solicitor when Getty met her with her parents.

Sutton Place was then designated Getty Oil’s official European headquarters.

This was the origin of Getty’s greatest social blunder – the installation of his famous pay-phone for his guests at Sutton Place.

Instead, by 1962, having left his father over the trouble in the Neutral Zone, Gordon was safely back in San Francisco and was standing in a bar called La Rocca’s Corner when he met tall, auburn-haired Ann Gilbert, daughter of a walnut farmer from Wheatland in the Sacramento Valley.

In 1964 they married. And over the next six years they produced

four sons, Peter, Andrew, John ...

Gordon to commence the lawsuit to compel his father to disgorge at least a little of the money locked away in Grandma Getty’s trust to benefit the grandchildren. The outcome was predictable – uproar from stately Sutton Place.

the trust had also become a wonderfully tax-efficient method of protecting and enlarging the fortune itself.

It has been claimed that for many years Getty never paid more than $500 a year in tax. Over the years building up the corpus of the Sarah C. Getty Trust had become his absolute obsession.

Since a cash dividend was income, it would have been subject to taxation. Instead he always paid a stock dividend, which increased the beneficiary’s holding in the Trust, but was not considered income and so remained untaxable.

The result was a bitter, complicated legal battle which dragged on, with intermissions and explosions, for the next seven years – at the end of which, by a judgement of the California Supreme Court, Gordon lost.

the formidable trial lawyer Moses Lasky.

Then, as a sign of ultimate acceptance, Gordon was appointed a trustee of the museum and, ultimate accolade, in 1972 was reinstated as a trustee of the very body he had tried so hard to break – the vast, the ever-growing and the still unassailable Sarah Getty Trust.

Inevitably Gail fell in love with someone else. And just as inevitably – being the character she was – she decided that she had to go.

Lang Jeffries was almost entirely Paul’s antithesis

in Paul’s case the search for happiness would lead him to the love which would all but ruin his life.

She was that perilous rarity, an enchantress, and only in retrospect does one see the danger enchantresses can bring to others – and ultimately to themselves. For those who fall beneath their spell expect too much, indulge them to excess, then blame them when the spell is broken.

it was decreed that any of the children would be disinherited from the benefits of the trust if they married before the age of twenty-two.

the great rotunda of the Roman Pantheon, which was rebuilt in its present form by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 120.

Some years before, on a trip to Naples, he had visited the site of the fabled villa of the Roman multi-millionaire Calpurnius Piso, which had been buried in volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted and destroyed

Pompeii and Herculaneum.

the Villa dei Papiri.

ll Re Pastore – The Shepherd King.

one of the happiest of Mozart’s operas,

Paul and Talitha married in the very place where Gail had wed Lang Jeffries a few months earlier, and Jean Paul Getty had married Teddy Lynch in 1939 – the city hall, the Campidoglio, crowning the Roman Capitol, the central point of ancient Rome itself.

Of course the old man had known all about the wedding, but he had disapproved of everything to do with it. For by now he had fallen out of love with handsome Paul Junior – which, combined with escalating troubles with the Naples refinery, placed a further strain upon his love affair with Italy.

Paul discovered he had always been one of nature’s hippies. The Eastern-born Talitha encouraged him, and flower power, self-fulfilment and the drug-hazed

lure of the magnetic East had entered both their lives with a vengeance.

‘Any idiot can be a businessman,’ said Paul Junior – which was rather like the Prince of Wales informing Her Majesty that any fool could be a monarch.

Le Palais Da Zahir (mixed French and Arabic for ‘the Pleasure Palace’)

which was part of the charm of old-world Marrakesh before they built the ring-road and the modern airport.