Hazards of the Midas Touch the Great Getty

By R.Z. Sheppard

If the good was interred with Jean Paul Getty's bones, the authors of these two biographies have not found it. Neither have they discovered anything that could be called evil. Getty, who died in 1976 at age 83, simply emerges as a supremely selfish man and a consummate bottom-liner who subjected all his passions to cost analysis. In order of importance, his preoccupations were the oil business, sex, and bargain hunting for art. He even looked the part: a Scrooge-like figure with a lecherous gaze living in an underheated English manor house that contained a public pay phone in the hall.

Getty's genius was for making and holding on to money. He began as a wildcatter in the Oklahoma oil fields with a stake from his oilman father George F. Getty. By buying leases cheap, J. Paul was able to parlay his luck into a million dollars by the time he was 23. With dung-beetle persistence he then set out to accumulate the billion dollars that earned him FORTUNE magazine's title, Richest Man in America. That was in 1957, more than five years after Getty had abandoned the U.S. for a nomadic life in European hotels. He said he wanted to be halfway between the oil fields of California and the Middle East. Perhaps. But as his biographers make clear, the Continent was a better place than the prudish U.S. to carry on multiple sexual adventures. By 1960 he was established at Sutton Place, his estate some 23 miles from London. He never returned to America, not even when his twelve- year-old son Timothy was dying from a brain tumor in a New York hospital.

As passages from his diaries indicate, Getty was not indifferent. But he seems to have short-circuited his feelings with workaholism, a socially acceptable form of avoidance. Money did not become the sole arbiter of emotions until 1973, when his hippie grandson, Jean Paul III, was kidnaped in Italy. Publicly, the wizened billionaire refused to pay ransom, a sound decision since he had 14 other grandchildren and did not want to set a tempting precedent. But after the boy's freshly detached ear was delivered as a warning, the old man lent young Getty's father, Jean Paul Jr., $850,000 to secure his son's release. The agreement called for a reasonable interest rate of 4%.

Few things are nastier than family squabbles about money, and the Gettys' disputes were nastier than most. They began when J. Paul demanded his birthright from his father. After George F.'s death in 1930, the ambitious son set about loosening the widow's grip on her trust fund. When he succeeded, according to Biographer Lenzner, he boasted to an acquaintance, "I just fleeced my mother." His own will was engorged with codicils that treated beneficiaries like stocks on an exchange. One result was that suits and countersuits by Getty heirs cost more than $13 million in legal fees.

But loot alone could not have caused such family tangles. The problem was that the Gettys were not a family. J. Paul's five marriages produced five sons. Only two, Jean Paul Jr. and Gordon Peter, were full brothers. How much one can blame a father for the fate of his children is uncertain, though Getty's absenteeism and disparaging attitude toward his sons were not helpful. The oldest, George F. II, a president of Tidewater Oil, died an apparent suicide in 1973. Jean Ronald, born to a German mother in 1929, left the family oil business to produce a few minor films like Flare-up with Ursula Andress, and claims that "the only thing I inherited from my father was his love of animals." Jean Paul Jr., 53, one of the most flamboyant jet-setters of the 1960s, is a reclusive rare-books collector in London. Depending on which biography you read, he wore either yellow or white shoes to his father's funeral. Gordon Peter, 52, is a classical composer who involved himself in Getty Oil long enough to sell the company to Texaco. Grandson Jean Paul III came to a bad end: years of alcohol and drug abuse precipitated a stroke that left him paralyzed and virtually blind.

Hazards of the Midas touch is a theme common to both books. Lenzner's The Great Getty is more detailed and better organized and written than Russell Miller's The House of Getty, which contains such cliches as "fruit of his loins" and repeatedly uses the bush-league redundancy "consensus of opinion." Both authors have a good handle on Getty's complex business holdings and the right touch when dealing with the old man's harem, the collecton of seasoned beauties who lived at Sutton Place and fought capped tooth and lacquered nail for sole possession of their host. Their efforts were not well rewarded; each received a paltry, if not insulting, legacy from the richest man in the world. The bulk of his estate went to the Getty Museum in Malibu, an institution that tax-sheltered much of its founder's collection and finally shielded his remains. Getty was buried near the museum, a stagy imitation of the Emperor Hadrian's Villa dei Papyri, though not before his lawyers found a way around a California law that prohibits graves on private land.

What can be said of a man so wrapped up in himself? Judging from what he did with his billions, Getty had little idea of the social responsibilty that vast wealth confers. In the American lore of the superrich, his place is just below William Randolph Hearst, the builder of San Simeon and another driven megalomaniac.