Painfully Rich Read online

  John Pearson

  Painfully Rich

  J. Paul Getty

  And His Heirs

  For Peter and Pamela Evans – the best of friends

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter One: Father And Son

  Chapter Two: A Solitary Childhood

  Chapter Three: The First Million Dollars

  Chapter Four: Marital Fever

  Chapter Five: Getty’s Secret

  Chapter Six: Maternal Trust

  Chapter Seven: Boom Time

  Chapter Eight: War And The Neutral Zone

  Chapter Nine: Fatherhood

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten: The Richest Living American

  Chapter Eleven: La Dolce Vita

  Chapter Twelve: New Beginnings

  Chapter Thirteen: Roman Weddings

  Chapter Fourteen: Casualties

  Chapter Fifteen: Kidnap And Ransom

  Chapter Sixteen: The Dynasty

  Chapter Seventeen: Posthumous Pleasures

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen: Drugs And Coma

  Chapter Nineteen: Recovery

  Chapter Twenty: Gordon The Peacemaker

  Chapter Twenty-One: Knighthood

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Wormsley

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Aileen

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Survivors

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Full Circle

  Postscript

  A Note on the Author

  Money is the last thing that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money – or the want of money; but money is always on the brain, so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.

  Samuel Buder – the Notebooks

  Introduction

  Jean Paul Getty was eighty-three, and had had three face-lifts, the first at sixty, but the last had failed, making him look inordinately old. He was reputedly the richest American alive, but recently all he had wanted was to hear Penelope read him G. A. Henty’s Victorian boys’ adventure stories.

  Penelope Kitson – he called her Pen – was a tall, good-looking woman, who had been his closest friend for more than twenty years and she read well in the no-nonsense voice of the upper-class Englishwoman she was. He had a large collection of the works of G. A. Henty. Possibly they made him think of a daring boyhood he had never had – and a life of physical adventure he wished that he had led.

  Getty believed in reincarnation but dreaded dying. Convinced that he had been the Roman Emperor Hadrian in an earlier life, and having been so fortunate in this, his present one, he feared that third time round he might not be so lucky.

  Getty reincarnated as a coolie, as the child of a Calcutta slum? Could God have such a twisted sense of humour? All too possible, and the prospect daunted him.

  His youngest surviving son, accompanied by his wife, had flown to London from California and had been with him at the house for several days trying to persuade him to ‘go home’ with them by chartered Boeing. ‘Home’ was Getty’s ranch-house overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Malibu – but the old man was terrified of flying and had not seen Malibu – nor his native USA – for over twenty years. What sort of home was that?

  ‘You know what, Pen? They want to take me back because they think I’m dying.’

  He stated the fact in the flat midwestern voice which seemed to count the cost of every syllable – then closed the subject as a book-keeper closes an account. J. Paul Getty, billionaire, was staying put.

  He was also refusing now to go to bed.

  ‘People die in bed,’ he said – making it clear that he had no intention of doing so if he could help it. Recently he had taken to living in his armchair with a shawl around his shoulders.

  Death is harder for the rich to face than it is for humbler mortals, the rich having so much more to lose and leave behind them – this great draughty house for instance. Built between 1521 and 1530 by Sir Richard Weston, a courtier of Henry VIII, Sutton Place had been one of Jean Paul Getty’s many bargains when he had prised it from a hard-pressed Scottish duke (Sutherland) in 1959. It was the nearest to a real home that he had ever had, and for all its discomfort and inconvenience he truly loved this red-brick Tudor pile with its twenty-seven bedrooms, its timbered hall complete with minstrels’ gallery, its home farm, and its resident ghost (of Anne Boleyn, who else?), all set in bijou Surrey countryside twenty miles by motorway from London.

  Then there was Getty’s male lion, Nero, growling in his cage outside the house. The old man loved Nero as much as he permitted himself to love almost anyone, and since he fed him personally, Nero would miss him.

  After Nero came his women.

  ‘Jean Paul Getty is priapic,’ Lord Beaverbrook once warned his granddaughter, Lady Jean Campbell.

  ‘What does that mean, Grandpapa?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ever-ready,’ he replied.

  He always had been. Ever since adolescence in Los Angeles, women had been the one luxury the old miser had never denied himself. How he had enjoyed them in his time! Young and old, fat and fashionably thin, drum-majorettes and duchesses, streetwalkers, stars and socialites. Until quite recently he had been taking vitamins in massive doses, together with the so-called sex drug, H3, to maintain his potency. But now all that was over, and it was no longer sex but the rumour of his imminent departure which brought his mistresses to Sutton Place.

  He would not be lavish with them – any more than he was lavish with himself. He was courteous with women, but rarely became emotionally involved for long.

  Had all his money brought him happiness? There is a certain consolation in the thought of the very rich deriving little pleasure from their wealth, and much of Getty’s undoubted popularity originated in that look of crucified affliction with which he had schooled himself to face the world.

  As Getty’s one-time chief executive, the celebrated Claus von Bülow, put it, he always looked as if he were attending his own funeral. But clever Claus was swift to add that behind that rainy countenance his boss was secretly enjoying life, and that this contrast formed what he saw as the essential comedy of Getty’s whole existence. Von Bülow may have had a somewhat special sense of humour, but according to him, Getty always saw the funny side of things.

  Perhaps he did, and we will never know what risible delights the old nocturnal joker found in the stillness of the Surrey night with a balance sheet.

  For his fortune had achieved surreal proportions, and since most of it was carefully invested and busily creating yet more money, not even Jean Paul Getty ever knew precisely how rich he was. Suffice it to say that his fortune was almost as great as the annual budget at that time of Northern Ireland, where his forebears originated, more than any human being could exhaust in a lifetime of the most extravagant desires. He could have given every man, woman and child in the United States a tendollar bill and still been rich.

  Few things, of course, would have been less likely, for in contrast with John D. Rockefeller, who habitually dispensed a freshly minted dime to any child he met, Jean Paul was disinclined to acts of random generosity. Indeed he was disinclined to generosity, full stop, but his celebrated stinginess was not exactly what it seemed.

  ‘That’s why he’s rich,’ people used to say. But they were wrong. Avarice alone could never have accounted for a fraction of a fortune such as his, and Getty’s meanness was less the cause of his exaggerated wealth than a symptom of something more intriguing.

  The truth was that Jean Paul Getty was a man of passion, which he had channelled single-mindedly into the creation of his massive fortune much as a great composer pours his soul into a symphony. His real love was not for women, who were incidental, but for money, which was not, and he had proved himself a fai
thful and romantic partner during his lifelong love affair with wealth, jealously acquiring it, and making it increase, in massive quantities, across a period of more than sixty years.

  His avarice was an incidental aspect of this love. 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?

  Vast wealth surrounded Jean Paul Getty like a nimbus, dispensing godlike qualities not vouchsafed to poorer mortals. Through money he was able to create continual movement across the world, from the security guards with their fierce Alsatians padding in the darkness near the house, to his oil refineries working round the clock, his tankers ploughing distant oceans, his oil wells pumping wealth up from the depths of the sea and the furthest reaches of the desert.

  But there are limits to the god-like powers that wealth bestows on mortal billionaires, and nothing could relieve him of the final act required of him. 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.

  *

  Death is a great diminisher, and it was strange how insignificant America’s richest man appeared once he was dead. In accordance with his wishes his body was laid out in state in the great hall of Sutton Place like a tudor nobleman. ‘He always liked to think he was Duke John of Sutton Place,’ one of his mistresses remarked. But a dukedom was one thing even his enormous fortune could not buy, and the only mourners watching by the bier were security men making sure that, even now, the body wasn’t kidnapped.

  Later, and again in accordance with his wishes, a memorial service was held at the smart Anglican church of St Mark’s, North Audley Street, in Mayfair. As an event it was curiously in character. Another duke (Bedford this time) delivered the address to a dry-eyed, fashionable congregation; 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.

  Not that one could blame Jean Paul for that, for by then he had made the journey he had always dreaded – by air-freight in his coffin in a Boeing’s cargo hold to California – and he was currently residing in a funeral parlour at Hollywood’s Forest Lawn cemetery while the family and the Los Angeles authorities argued over where to bury him.

  But there still remained one area where the vital force of this inscrutable old man was very much alive – in his last will and testament, which had been duly published by his London lawyers. It was a fascinating document – as much for what it left out as for what it stated – and it served to emphasize the mystery of the whole baroque relationship between the dead man, his enormous fortune and the members of his very scattered family.

  A will is an opportunity to deliver those one loves a final judgement before going off to meet one’s own. 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. And like Papa, he made the most of it.

  For the past ten years, whenever his lawyer, energetic, white-haired Lansing Hays, had flown in to see him from Los Angeles, there would always be some change which Getty wanted made to the fearsome document, always somebody to add to – or angrily subtract from – the list of legatees. Getty was a man of some precision, and his will became a finely tuned expression of his wishes.

  He had never bothered overmuch with humble people, and the humble people in his life received scant crumbs from America’s richest table. Léon Turrou, his trusted security adviser, and Tom Smith, the half-Indian masseur Getty relied on to relieve his pains in his last years, both said he promised to remember them and both were bitter to discover they had been forgotten. The gardeners at Sutton Place got three months’ wages; the butler, the po-faced Bullimore, six; and even his faithful secretary, Barbara Wallace, who had mother-henned him for some twenty years, was lucky to receive $5,000.

  Remembering him, she is more generous than he was with her. ‘That’s how he was,’ she says. ‘I loved him and what counted was not the money but the memory of working with the most extraordinary character I’ve ever known.’

  Others were less charitable, for he also used his will to make clear what he thought about the women in his life. His legal adviser, chaste Miss Lund, received $200 a month – possibly to put on record what he thought of chastity. But then, the unchaste Nicaraguan Mrs Rosabella Burch fared little better, so he may have had some other reason.

  The only female friend who did do well was Mrs Kitson, who received some $850,000 worth of Getty Oil stock. When the value of shares in Getty Oil doubled in the early eighties, she would finally be the only person to become a dollar millionaire from reading G. A. Henty.

  Again, the frugality of these personal bequests was totally in character and was probably intended to emphasize the big surprise within this deeply pondered document. For in one untypically grand gesture, Jean Paul Getty had decided to dispose of the mass of his personal fortune in its entirety, unconditionally and without the faintest reservations.

  He’d always been a man for sly surprises, and, apart from Lansing Hays, had given nobody the slightest hint of how he would be opening the sluice-gates on this vast amount of money to benefit one unsuspecting legatee – the modest J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, which he had been quietly creating in the grounds of his ranch-house but had never dared to visit.

  In museum terms the Getty legacy was vast. At his death his personal assets were computed at nearly a billion dollars (around 2 billion today allowing for subsequent inflation). With this money, the strange museum he had had meticulously created in the form of an ancient Roman villa on the shores of the Pacific Ocean became overnight the most richly endowed institution of its kind in modern history.

  According to the old man’s personal assistant, Norris Bramlett, ‘This was his hope of immortality. He wanted the Getty name to be remembered as long as civilization lasted.’

  It was also, as he knew quite well, a highly tax-efficient way of disposing of a large amount of capital. In California, the museum counted as a charity, and provided its directors spent 4 per cent of the value of the capital on acquisitions every year, the US Internal Revenue Service would not assess taxes on it. Getty had always been viscerally opposed to paying taxes – and unlike simpler citizens who feel the same, he rarely had.

  Beyond these facts, the will gave not the faintest explanation as to why his money had been left like this, and why no conditions were imposed upon the way the museum trustees spent it. When Getty’s rival oilman, Armand Hammer, created his own much smaller museum in Los Angeles, he tied up everything in minutest detail. The steel baron Henry Clay Frick had almost made it legally impossible to change an aspidistra in the atrium of the Frick Collection in New York – let alone a picture. But should the trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum in their wisdom suddenly decide to sell the whole collection, using the assets to create a bicycle museum, a bicycle museum is what the J. Paul Getty Museum will irrevocably become.

  But just as the will shed little light upon the old man’s reasons for bequeathing everything in this way, so it also left obscure a more intriguing mystery: the financial fate of the members of his family, or, as he liked to call them, the ‘Getty dynasty’ – the children and the grandchildren of three of his five failed marriages. Since the will made so little mention of them, what of their future? Had he simply forgotten them, or had they been collectively disinherited?

  When archaeologists unearthed the tombs of some of the richest pharaohs, they sometimes found, concealed behind the burial chamber, a further chamber crammed with still more splendid objects where the spirit of the dead resided. Something similar had happened with the money left by Jean Paul Getty, for it was typical of the old man’s covert nature that behind his personal fortune, which he bequeathed to his museum, he had been slowly building up a second, even greater, fortune which resided in a trust not covered by his will.

&
nbsp; This massive trust had always been completely separate from Getty’s personal fortune, and had grown with a lifetime’s winnings from the secret game he had been playing with the world for over forty years. This was where he stacked away the vast amounts of money which, according to the complex rules by which this game was played, some of his descendants would inherit – and some, emphatically, would not.

  Although this trust had suited Jean Paul Getty’s purposes as a sort of monster tax-proof money-box, it was originally created as a so-called ‘spendthrift trust’ to placate his formidable mother, Sarah, who had known him well enough to distrust his motives. It was through her insistence that the trust was established in the mid 1930s to protect the financial interests of her grandchildren from what she saw as Getty’s ‘spendthrift’ tendencies, and appropriately it bore her name – the Sarah C. Getty Trust.

  It was strange to have the century’s richest miser publicly proclaimed a ‘spendthrift’. What was stranger still was the way he seemed obsessively compelled to go on adding to the trust, creating this prodigious pile of untaxed capital. When finally split between its beneficiaries in 1986, the trust was valued in excess of 4 billion dollars – since when the resultant capital has more than doubled in value yet again.

  One might have thought, as Sarah presumably did, that this spendthrift trust would guarantee to her descendants all the benefits and pleasures wealth can bring to those who journey down the rocky road of life: freedom from anxiety and care, the best of everything, faithful friends, and – dare one whisper it? – happiness.

  Reader, think again!

  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? And why, when millions die for want of money, and countless millions slave, scheme, murder, labour, subjugate themselves for such pathetic glimpses of the stuff, should something as pleasurable as money bring such misery and havoc as it has to Getty’s heirs?