by John Pearson
It was a strange occasion. On Paul’s side was the profound reverence with which he treated the great connoisseur, who possessed in such abundance qualities he was so aware of lacking – artistic judgement, true discrimination, taste and knowledge. And on Berenson’s side was a total unawareness of the fact that this strange American with the talkative girlfriend was rapidly becoming his country’s richest billionaire.
How much in life is timing! Twenty years earlier, Berenson would not have missed anyone as rich as Getty and he and Joe Duveen between them would have flattered him with their attention, aroused his latent enthusiasm for the pictures they could sell him, and quite probably have ended by helping him create a great collection.
Instead the moment passed. Getty promised to make photographs of some of his marble statuary; and Berenson expressed the hope that they might meet again, but they never did. Berenson was old and disillusioned – not least with himself. Getty was terrified of wasting money and/or being swindled; and not until after he was dead would he give others the pleasure and responsibility of spending just a part of his enormous fortune on works of art appropriate to his collection.
In the meantime, classical sculpture seems to have appealed to him. As a trained geologist, he felt comfortable with marble, and his recent purchase of some pieces of Roman statuary, combined with this autumn visit to Italy, brought some very strange, and, as it turned out, quite far-reaching consequences.
It was one of the Roman pieces he had bought from the collection of Lord Lansdowne, a Roman statue of Hercules, which inspired him to pay a visit to the place where it had supposedly been discovered – Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli outside Rome. Even with the scanty ruins that remain, the villa is a haunted, atmospheric site, and Paul, who was nothing if not suggestible, seems to have been overcome by an awareness of the presence of its one-time owner, the most artistically creative and enigmatic of all the Roman emperors, Hadrian.
The sense of déjà vu is fairly common. But to a very rich, self-made man, there is an additional incentive to believe in reincarnation – because of the explanation it can offer for his otherwise inexplicable success. As E. L. Doctorow has the self-made Henry Ford remark to the self-made Pierpont Morgan in his celebrated novel Ragtime – ‘I explain my genius this way – some of us have just lived more times than others.’
Paul, who appears to have felt this very strongly, may also have been influenced by the reason Henry Miller gives for the same belief – ‘Sex is one of the nine good reasons for believing in reincarnation … the other eight are unimportant.’
What is clear is that his visit to Hadrian’s Villa came at an impressionable moment when the sudden uprush of his wealth and far-flung enterprises found a sort of echo in what he had already learned of Hadrian’s activities. Just as the ageing Hadrian had stayed at the villa and continued to initiate enterprises and great events in the furthest corners of the Roman Empire, so Paul had been making great things happen in the distant reaches of the Getty Empire. Hadrian had been the richest man on earth, and Paul was fast becoming much the same himself. He also liked to think he had a stoical Roman attitude to life, and felt that he even looked not unlike a Roman emperor. Finally, for the true snob – and snobs came little snobbier than Paul Getty – what pedigree could conceivably approach direct descent from a Roman Emperor?
The more that Paul thought about it – and he seems to have thought about it quite a lot – the more did he pick up similarities, echoes, resonances, between the long-dead Emperor Hadrian and himself.
‘I would very much like to think that I was a reincarnation of Hadrian’s spirit, and I would like to emulate him as closely as I can,’ he confided to a female friend in London.
Chapter Nine
Fatherhood
For A Man who thought so much of dynasties, Paul Getty was a strangely absent father. Had he not been quite so totally immersed in the vast expansion of his fortune, one wonders if he might have found a little time for his four children who were growing up so far away from him. Probably not. It was not lack of time so much as that he clearly saw his children as a threat to the two things that meant most to him – making money and the serious pursuit of pleasure.
Nevertheless, very occasionally he did make contact with them, possibly from curiosity, like a Trappist sniffing at the pleasures of the flesh – only to recoil from the temptation. Describing these occasions in his diaries, he always presents himself as such a loving and devoted parent to his children that it is hard to realize that he almost never saw them. Young Ronald is described as ‘bright and lovable’, George is ‘very mature, with an excellent mind and personality’, and young Paul and Gordon are invariably referred to as ‘my two dear sons’.
The most intriguing of Getty’s extremely rare adventures into active fatherhood occurred on Christmas Eve, 1939, with war in Europe just declared, and provides the sole occasion in their entire childhood when the four ‘beloved’ sons actually found themselves in one room together. He had just scurried home to Los Angeles from Naples, having left his new bride, Teddy, to face the war alone in Italy. For once he must have felt the need for the consolations of a family, and he called up his ex-wife Ann to let him take young Paul and Gordon out to a toy shop, where they saw a penguin dressed as Donald Duck and he bought them Christmas presents. Fini and Ronald had come to live in Los Angeles just before the war. And so on Christmas Day ‘all four of my beloved sons’ as he insisted on describing them – fifteen-year-old George, ten-year-old Ronald, and young Paul and Gordon, seven and six respectively – were brought to the house on South Kingsley Drive to bring Christmas greetings to their eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, Sarah.
Getty must have arranged this out of filial deference rather than paternal affection, for it sounds an uncomfortable occasion – the very deaf and lame old lady, the four unknown boys who shared her blood and were so awkward in each other’s company, and the presence of this mysterious rich father with the downturned mouth who must have seemed an almost total stranger.
But again he made it sound like a happy party for a most united family when he wrote in his diary of the ‘lovely tree in mother’s sitting room’ and the ‘heaps’ of Christmas presents. ‘Mother enjoyed it like a youngster,’ he assures us. He seems to have stayed long enough to greet his offspring and kiss his ancient mother on the cheek before departing like the ghost of Christmas.
As Sarah’s health deteriorated after this, and she died two years later, this exercise in Christmas togetherness was not repeated, and it remained the only contact there would be between the young Gettys during boyhood, despite the fact that they were all living at the time in California, and that on them would ultimately rest the future of the largest fortune in America.
What made Paul Getty such a disquieting, and ultimately such a disastrous, father was the way in which he almost totally cut off from all his sons in their childhood and adolescence and then, when it suited him, re-established relationships as if nothing untoward had happened, attempting to groom them to perpetuate what he always liked to call ‘the Getty dynasty’.
It couldn’t work, for by then the damage had been done. The boys had missed their father when they needed him, none of them really knew him, and each had been damaged in a different way. Almost inevitably, all the boys were jealous and suspicious of each other, so that the ‘dynasty’, instead of helping to support its members, actually produced fearful antagonisms between them. Jealousy, bitterness and non-stop litigation would all stem from the problems Paul Getty bequeathed his sons when he gave them a phantom billionaire as a father.
The firstborn, George Getty II, should have suffered least. He was far too young to have known his father when he abandoned poor Jeanette in 1927, and she remarried fairly swiftly – a well-to-do, kindly, Los Angeles stockbroker, Bill Jones, who treated young George as a son, sending him to private school in Los Angeles and then to Princeton, where he planned to study law.
During his childhood George’s contact w
ith his father was minimal, but Jeanette took him regularly to call on Grandma Getty, who had always had a soft spot for her firstborn grandson. Not only did the child bear the precious name of her own lamented husband, but George Getty Senior had left him that $300,000 in his will. Shrewdly invested by his stepfather, this sum of money was increasing, and, together with the growing income from the Sarah C. Getty Trust, guaranteed that George would always be comfortably off, quite apart from anything he earned.
This situation should have suited George, who had inherited little of his father’s drive or business genius, and who was made for the undemanding life of an unambitious Californian attorney of independent means. But it was not to be. With his name and his position, George’s fate was sealed from the start. He was destined for the company his grandfather and namesake founded, and in 1942, when George was just eighteen and in his first year at Princeton, his father claimed him for the role he had to play in life.
George was just about to join the US Army, intending to return to Princeton when the war was over, but now, for the first time in his life, his father took an interest in him, taking him to visit the old Athens oilfield, scene of several of his own successes in his distant youth. Here he made it clear to George that his future lay irrevocably in the oil industry, and that one day he could expect to head the family business.
How could George refuse? But first he had to serve for four years in the Army, as an infantry officer to start with, then in the war-crimes prosecution team. Demobilized in 1946, he finally decided that instead of completing university he would join his father.
George made a conscientious businessman and, as his father’s heir apparent, rose with unsurprising swiftness in the management hierarchy of the Getty companies. After serving creditably as his father’s representative in the Neutral Zone of Arabia, he returned to California to become vice-president of Tide Water Oil at the age of thirty-one. Success was beckoning, and his life should now have been extremely sweet.
But as a businessman George was already suffering one fatal flaw. As a child he seems to have picked up from his mother a sense of fear and awe for the absent figure of his father which he never lost. Even as a grown man he never overcame it, and the more responsibility he gained as Paul Getty’s heir apparent, the more his fear of his father served to undermine him. In the end it helped to kill him.
But George’s problems were as nothing when compared with the handicaps his father heaped upon his unfortunate half-brother, the ‘bright and lovable’ Ronald. Being half German, Ronald was inevitably the odd one out from the family from the start.
Soon after his father had obtained his dearly bought divorce from Ronald’s mother, Fini, back in 1932, mother and son settled in Switzerland. Fini herself never remarried, and until the outbreak of the war in 1939, she and Ronald were looked after by the boy’s German grandfather, Dr Otto Helmle, who since the divorce had become one of Getty’s bitterest opponents.
During this period, Dr Helmle had other matters on his mind. As a prominent Catholic, he was secretary of the German Centre Party, precursor of the post-war Christian Democrats, and in 1933 had actually refused the post of Minister for Economics in Hitler’s first government as Chancellor. Later, as his opposition to the Nazis grew, he felt happy in the knowledge that his daughter and grandson were safely in Switzerland where he could easily visit them from Karlsruhe. So as a child Ronald grew up in Switzerland, speaking German, believing he was Swiss, and more or less oblivious of the the existence of his real father.
By 1939, Dr Helmle had been banned from all political activity along with his friend and fellow party member, Konrad Adenaeur, and was actually imprisoned for a period, losing all his money in the process. (In 1944, he was lucky to escape arrest a second time – for involvement in the plot against the Führer.) At the time of his imprisonment he sent Fini and his ten-year-old grandson to the the safety of Los Angeles, where for the first time Ronald learned about his father.
‘Even then,’ he says, ‘I didn’t know him, as I hardly ever saw him. Occasionally my mother used to take me to visit my grandmother Sarah, but all I remember about her was that she seemed kind and was in a wheelchair, and was so extremely deaf that communication was impossible. My father was running the aircraft factory in Tulsa at the time so I never saw him. Occasionally a cheque would arrive from him for my birthday, once he sent me a pair of roller skates, and that was about it. I can’t say I thought about him very much, although I realized that there was something lacking in my life, particularly when I saw other kids going off to ball games with their fathers and I never did.’
It was only gradually that Ronald learned that on top of everything else he missed out on from the absence of a father, he was suffering a more serious handicap. His half-brothers, George and young Paul and Gordon, were all incuded in the Sarah C. Getty Trust, and as such were destined to become great heirs to the ever-growing fortune of the Gettys. Ronald was not.
What made the situation so unjust was that the reason for this glaring inequality was not his fault. Excluding the infant Ronald from the Sarah C. Getty Trust had been his father’s chosen way of getting even with Dr Helmle over the divorce – including the money it had cost him for the settlement, and the way the delays had prevented him marrying Ann Rork before his third son, Paul, was born. And as if to underline the arbitrary nature of the exclusion, while Ronald was excluded from the trust, any children he might have were specifically included.
To be absolutely fair to Getty, back in 1936 when the trust was established for the benefit of his children and unborn grandchildren, the capital involved was relatively small; and since he was smarting over what he saw as Helmle’s victory, he felt that rich Dr Helmle should therefore have the privilege of providing for his grandson.
What neither of them had foreseen was that Helmle would lose all his money to the Nazis, while Getty would proceed to build the greatest fortune in America.
After the war, Fini and Ronald started to return to Germany or Switzerland each summer, so that, as Ronald says, ‘Europe was always very much home to me, and Los Angeles a sort of interval in my life. I naturally thought myself more European than American.’
Not until 1951, when Ronald was twenty-two and in his final year of business studies at the University of Southern California, did his father see fit to contact him. As with George, he wanted him to take his place in his rapidly expanding business empire. And as Ronald puts it, ‘I was pleased that he asked me to work for him, but I can’t say it was a particularly emotional reunion.’
A training course followed with Getty Oil, and in 1953 Ronald joined the Getty-owned Tide Water Oil’s marketing department, where he was so successful that three years later he was running the department with a salary of $40,000 a year.
But at Tide Water he inevitably came into increasing contact with the young vice-president, his half-brother George, and a feud began, with jealousy and bitterness on either side. Despite his success, George would always feel insecure before his father, and resented having this half-brother in his company just in case he attracted more than his fair share of their father’s affection. Ronald, on the other hand, was becoming increasing aware of the massive handicap his father had inflicted on him by excluding him alone of his sons from the Sarah C. Getty Trust. It was an awareness which would grow like a cancer in the years ahead, until it all but destroyed him.
In comparison with the problems Paul Getty thrust on to George and Ronald, life seemed infinitely easier for Paul and Gordon, the two boys whom he had fathered so casually on that former child prodigy, Ann Rork. As he was increasingly away in Europe and the Middle East during the 1950s, he saw even less of them during their adolescence than he had of George and Ronald, leaving them exposed to the undivided force of their mother’s dominating personality.
When her marriage ended with that ‘noisome’ – and profitable – divorce at Reno back in 1936, Ann had rapidly embarked upon a marital career in which three further wealthy husband
s, interspersed with various lovers, took the unlamented place of Paul Getty. First on the scene was Douglas Wilson, an eminently forgettable millionaire from Memphis, Tennessee, by whom she had one daughter, Paul and Gordon’s beautiful but put-upon half-sister, Donna.
Wilson was succeeded by Garret ‘Joe’ McEnerney II, a San Francisco attorney, and it was the break-up of this marriage that left Ann – or ‘Mrs Mack’ as she was called – in possession of a comfortable, creeper-hung house at 3788 Clay Street in Presidio Heights, close to the smartest part of San Francisco.
During this period, Getty himself was giving the boys nothing but his name and child support. There is a unique entry in his diary in the middle of the war recording just one visit that he paid them. Gordon recited him a poem he had written ‘on the good qualities of negroes’ – but instead of saying what he thought of Gordon or his poem, Getty, fact-obsessed as ever, simply recorded that ‘Paul is eleven years old and weighs 86 pounds, while Gordon is ten and weighs 76 pounds.’
‘My sons – all of them – are great rewards,’ he added – so great that he saw neither Paul nor Gordon for the next twelve years. And a year later, when twelve-year-old Paul wrote Papa a letter, Getty sent it back unanswered with the spelling mistakes carefully corrected.
Paul was still bitter over this years later. ‘I never got over that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be judged as a human being, and I could never get that from him.’