Growing up Getty: Biography details billionaire’s extravagant life

BIOGRAPHY

GROWING UP GETTY 

by James Reginato (Gallery £22.92, 336pp)

When he was 22, in 1914, J. Paul Getty’s father gave him $10,000 (the equivalent of £250,000 today) to invest in the oil business.

Getty, who had dreamed of becoming a writer or a diplomat, took out leases on some untested oil wells and, within a year, had made his first million.

By the time he was in his 60s, he was America’s richest man, with a billion-dollar fortune. Although he was highly intelligent and fluent in several languages, Getty’s private life was chaotic, with five failed marriages, all of them to much younger women.

In 1923, when he was 30, he married Jeanette, described by author James Reginato as ‘a 19-year-old beauty of Polish extraction’. They had a son, George, but the marriage ended within a year.

Two years later he married Allene, who was 17 and ‘the tall, slender daughter of a Texas rancher’. That marriage barely lasted six months.

Next came Fini, ‘a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed beauty’, also 17. They divorced shortly after the birth of their son Ronny.

Wife number four was Ann, with whom he had two sons, Paul and Gordon. Getty had first met Ann eight years earlier at a restaurant in Hollywood ‘when she was a spirited 14-year-old’. Reginato writes: ‘Some electricity between them was evident, but her parents forbade them to see each other.’ You don’t say!

Getty and Ann divorced after four years but, undaunted by his terrible track record, in 1937 he married again to Louise, known as Teddy, ‘a raven-haired chanteuse’. Their son, Timmy, died of a brain tumour when he was 12 and the couple divorced in 1951.

The reason for all these failed marriages, Getty said, was that ‘no wife wants to feels that she is being neglected for an oil rig’. All the wives managed to stay on good terms with him after divorce. After his last, Getty left the U.S. for what was intended to be a brief stay in London. He never left.

Having resisted the craze for stocks and shares in the 1920s, Getty had emerged unscathed from the Wall Street Crash and cannily kept investing in oil fields worldwide.

In 1959, he bought Sutton Place, a sprawling Tudor manor house in Surrey where he entertained guests such as the Queen Mother and members of the Guinness and Rothschild families.

Although he now swore off marriage, Getty had a string of girlfriends and also used the services of dominatrix Norma Levy, whose other clients included the Shah of Iran, Aristotle Onassis and the then Duke of Devonshire.

Levy reported that the septuagenarian Getty was particularly creepy, asking her to dress in white and lie in an open coffin playing dead, as he gazed down at her.

Getty’s children suffered due to his coldness. His oldest son George, who worked for his father’s firm, was a heavy drinker and often stabbed his hands with a letter opener when stressed. He died of an overdose in 1973.

Weeks later, Getty’s eldest grandson, 16-year-old Paul, was kidnapped in Rome. Little Paul, as the family called him, was held for five months by the Calabrian Mafia who sliced off his right ear and sent it to a newspaper, saying the rest of him would arrive ‘in little bits’.

Getty at first refused to pay anything, justifying it by saying that if he did, his 13 other grandchildren would be at risk.

Eventually, he paid $2.2 million of the $14 million ransom, haggled down to $3.2million, and lent his son Paul the rest of the money, to be repaid at 4 per cent interest. When Young Paul called to thank him after his release, Getty declined the call.

Eight years after his kidnap, still suffering from drug and alcohol addictions, he suffered a stroke which left him quadriplegic and unable to speak. He died aged 53.

His grandfather J. Paul Getty died in 1976, leaving most of his money to the Californian museum he had founded. His heirs didn’t do too badly, though. They benefited from a $2 billion trust fund.

Unable to agree how it should be run, family members sued each other. The lawsuits took ten years to be resolved and cemented the image of a dysfunctional family blighted by ‘the Getty curse’.

Reginato, a journalist for Vanity Fair magazine, devotes most of this book to the younger generation of Gettys.

But they are not as interesting as the monstrous paterfamilias and, sensibly, wouldn’t speak to him, so much of the information on them is culled from rare magazine interviews.

They are still stonkingly rich; the family’s net worth may be as much as $20 billion. Some of the younger Gettys devote themselves to good causes, like environmental protection and AIDS research. And like many rich people, they are keen on horseracing, opera, producing wine, racing yachts and having their own fashion lines.

The most successful in carving out his own niche has been Oxford-educated Mark Getty, one of J. Paul Getty’s grandsons.

He bought up photo agencies, and his company, Getty Images, has earned him another fortune.

The most interesting chapter is on Getty’s third son, Paul, father of the kidnapped Young Paul, who in the 1960s lived in a palace in Marrakech and was at the centre of a glamorous, druggy crowd.

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said Paul and his beautiful wife Talitha had ‘the best and finest opium’.

After her death from a heroin overdose in 1970, Paul withdrew from the world. Overcome with grief and still battling addictions, he spent most of his time in a private London clinic, from where he made charitable donations.

Some were small (sending his Bentley to pick up a dog after its owner went to prison), some large (£50 million to the National Gallery).

Hearing of his state of mind, Mrs Thatcher went to visit and told him briskly: ‘My dear Mr Getty, we mustn’t let things get us down, must we? We’ll have you out of here as soon as possible.’

Paul Getty did recover. He made a happy marriage and was knighted, becoming a British citizen six years before his death in 2003.

Perhaps the secret to his contentment was that he was as generous as his father had been stingy, contributing over £100 million to good causes in Britain.

Reginato, a diehard Getty fan, dismisses talk of a family curse. ‘A number of them indeed appear to be well-adjusted and happy,’ he protests. Yet for all their wealth, who would want to be a Getty?