Growing Up Getty

Autorentext
James Reginato, a writer-at-large for Vanity Fair and a contributor to Sotheby’s magazine, was formerly the features director for W magazine. He is the author of Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats, and The Carlyle. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in New York City.

Klappentext
An enthralling and comprehensive look into the contemporary state of one of the wealthiest--and least understood--family dynasties in the world, perfect for fans of HBO's Succession.

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Chapter One: Sutton Place 1 Sutton Place
It was the dawn of a new decade and a new era—a day early in 1960—as J. Paul Getty marched through the Tudor labyrinth of Sutton Place. Twenty-three miles southwest of London, it had been built 440 years earlier by a courtier of Henry VIII. Just now, it had been rebooted as the nerve center of Getty’s worldwide petroleum empire, and his seventy-two-room home. Telex machines clattered with reports of stock market gyrations on Wall Street and the flow of oil from Arabian deserts. Bustling about were members of Getty’s executive and domestic staffs, the latter headed by Francis Bullimore, his unimpeachable butler.

Getty, wearing one of his customary Kilgour, French & Stanbury dark three-piece suits, and bearing the mournful mien that made him always look, his longtime aide Claus von Bülow observed, as if he were attending his own funeral, trod through the 165-foot oak-paneled Long Gallery, draped with sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries. When Getty reached his private study, where Dutch Old Masters hung on the Honduras mahogany paneling, he shut the door.

He then unlaced his John Lobb oxfords and jumped onto a long antique settee.

“Come on,” he beckoned to the other person in the room, his solicitor, Robina Lund, a brainy twenty-three-year-old Scotswoman employed by the starchy firm of Slaughter and May. The dealer who had just delivered the settee had vouched for its sturdiness, promising it was “strong enough to jump on,” explained Getty (who stood five feet eleven and weighed 180 pounds, with a muscular build from years of weight training).

“So let’s try it!” he said to Lund.

“What if it breaks?” she wondered.

“I’ll send it back,” he said.

Recalled Lund, “So for a good five minutes we bounced up and down, and I nearly killed myself laughing as he did an Indian war-whoop each time he went in the air.”

At the sound of a knock on the door, the pair were back into their shoes in a flash. As Bullimore ushered in the next appointment, a pair of businessmen, Getty reassumed his customary countenance. “Paul gravely shook their hands,” Lund remembered.

People can be so different behind closed doors. J. Paul Getty had so many doors. That day, as he settled into Sutton Place, the richest man in the world had reason to feel giddy. This was at last a permanent home—something this sixty-seven-year-old hadn’t had since childhood. Over the previous decades, he’d been a virtual stranger to the households where his five wives and five sons lived. His had been a nomadic existence, unspooling in a succession of hotel suites, mostly in Europe, where his ear was glued to the phones on which he conducted business, and where he washed his own socks and underwear.

Resolutely low-profile, Getty ensured that his photo seldom appeared in print outside of the Oil & Gas Journal and publications of that ilk. The anonymity suited him well, allowing him to stealthily acquire stakes in companies he sought to take over, and, when he had the time, to conduct amorous meetings with an array of women.

But his cover had been blown on October 28, 1957. His first inkling came when he found the lobby of the Ritz, the hotel in London where he was then living, swarming with journalists, all clamoring to see “the richest American.” Fortune magazine had just published the results of a thorough and novel investigation that identified all citizens with fortunes exceeding $75 million. Getty was not only at the top of the seventy-six-person list—which was divided into five tiers—but far above the rest. His name alone appeared in the $700 million to $1 billion category. The $400 million to $700 million class included four members of the Mellon family as well as John D. Rockefeller Jr., Dallas oil magnate H. L. Hunt, and Miami real estate mogul Arthur Vining Davis.

Four Du Ponts, as well as Joseph Kennedy, Howard Hughes, Fort Worth oil wildcatter Sid Richardson, and steel heiress Mrs. Frederick Guest (the former Amy Phipps), made the $200 million to $400 million category; six Rockefellers (John D.’s kids), Vincent Astor, Doris Duke, and Mrs. Edsel Ford were bunched in with Texas oilmen Clint Murchison, John Mecom, and James Abercrombie at the $100 million to $200 million level; Henry Ford II, Mrs. Horace Dodge, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and John T. Dorrance Jr., son of the Campbell Soup formula inventor, were among those bringing up the rear, with $75 million to $100 million apiece.

The compilation, Fortune wrote, “only serves to emphasize the tremendous changes that American wealth has undergone in both numbers and character over the past twenty years.… No longer among today’s Very Rich are the Morgans, the Goulds, the Guggenheims.”

This rich roster was republished in newspapers worldwide. “Topping the list is Jean Paul Getty, Minnesota-born oil man and owner of the Pierre Hotel,” wrote the New York Times, in its front-page, above-the-fold story.

For the rest of his life, Getty expressed rueful feelings over this “outing.”

“I was thenceforth a curiosity only a step or two removed from the world’s tallest man or the world’s shortest midget.… I had become a sort of financial freak, overnight,” he observed.

Yet he did invite some of those journalists who thronged the Ritz lobby up to his suite. “In a two-hour interview,” wrote the New York Times’s reporter, “he traced the origins of his fortune, spoke lovingly of his extensive art collection, and imparted some thoughts on world affairs.” Nonetheless, Getty claimed to the paper that being named the richest man in the USA was “a distinction I’m not particularly interested in. I don’t think there is any glory in being known as a moneybags. I’d rather be considered an active businessman.”

In 1963, he concluded that the Fortune piece had marked “a turning point” in his life, “in the sense that it had the effect of ending my existence as an ordinary private citizen and made me, for better or worse, a public figure, or at least a person about whom the public curiosity was whetted.”

Most materially, the article prompted him to finally acquire a permanent residence. Stalkers and concerns for his security had come with fame, making hotel life problematic. Perhaps, too, he decided it was finally time to settle down. A home at last? In his own way and unique vocabulary, he envisioned it initially as “a sort of liaison base.” He weighed the merits of various capitals in Western Europe (midway between the Middle East and California, twin centers of his empire, this was the place for him). Paris was his first choice. But then, one evening in June 1959, just after he’…

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