Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  It was now that the Getty money really helped. Just as it had been the origin of so many of his problems, so now it helped relieve his ghastly situation; for without it the specialist nursing and equipment he relied on would have been impossible. But Gail insists that there was more to Paul’s treatment and recovery than money. ‘It included not being afraid and negative. It called for courage and perseverance. It was about never giving up.’

  And beyond this lay the most important fact of all – that the lost boy had found himself at last; that thanks to the disaster which had struck him, the suicidal, self-destructive urges which had practically destroyed him had been replaced by their opposite, a clinging on to life, which in turn was followed by a resolute will to live.

  Finding himself with nothing, he was being forced to fight to be a human being – which he did with increasing power as his stamina improved. Everything in life that had previously been boring, gratuitous, taken for granted, had to be struggled for now. Since the kidnap there had been few challenges in his life. Now everything became a challenge.

  Although he couldn’t see, he asked to be taken to his grandfather’s museum at Malibu on the day when it was closed to visitors, and while he was pushed around the empty galleries on a stretcher he had the paintings described to him, and the paintings became precious to him as paintings never had been when he could see them.

  Every morning he exercised with his physiotherapists in the pool beside the house – boring, repetitive exercises, but he endured them and gradually his strength improved. His speech remained a problem, as there was motor damage to the brain causing a condition known as aphonia – making it hard to pronounce consonants correctly. So the following year Gail would take him to work with the speech therapists at New York’s Rusk Institute of Speech and Hearing, which brought a slow but definite improvement.

  He became hungry for books and his friends took turns reading to him. Martine was a lifeline for him, as were the children, giving him yet further strength to carry on. Gail’s devotion was unstinted.

  One of his heroes from the past, Dr Timothy Leary, came to visit him.

  ‘His willpower is like Niagara. He is a miracle,’ he said.

  Nineteen-eighty-two saw another marriage in the family.

  When, just before Christmas, Mark married Domitilla Harding in Rome’s ancient basilica of the Santissimi Apostoli, he was the third generation of the Getty family to marry in the Holy City. But unlike the other weddings, his was a very grand affair which not only guaranteed that the Italian connections of the Getty family would continue, but also linked the family with Italian history. Along with its famous relics of St Peter and St Paul, the church of Santissimi Apostoli contains the tombs of numerous Riario and della Rovere cardinals, all of them antecedents of the bride; and part of the church itself had been built by the most famous member of her family, the warlike della Rovere Pope Julius II (patron of Michelangelo, painted by Raphael, and played in the film The Agony and the Ecstasy by the late Rex Harrison).

  Although the bridegroom had now made peace with his father, Paul Junior was unable to attend, as he could barely walk and was still unwilling to return to Italy. And on the day of the wedding, in spite of all the detailed preparations, things soon started going wrong. First the bride failed to arrive at the church. Her grandfather, John Harding, had flown all the way from Boston to give her away but, owing to a typically Roman muddle, he was driven to collect her not from her flat in Parioli where she was staying, but from the family’s summer house along the coast at Fregene. By the time John Harding found the right address, and had got his granddaughter safely to the church, the bridegroom and the congregation had endured two anxious hours wondering what had happened to the bride.

  She arrived looking beautiful and quite unflustered, but this did little to resolve an even more disturbing mystery – where was the bridegroom’s aunt, Gordon’s wife Ann Getty? Since she wasn’t there, the service had to start without her.

  When Mark and Domitilla had announced their intention of marrying in Rome, Uncle Gordon had put his foot down rather firmly. Still worried by the memory of his nephew’s Roman kidnap, he had reluctantly decided that it was still too big a risk for him or his family to attend. But Ann, by nature less anxious than her husband, thought otherwise. She was on a trip to Europe at the time, and without informing Gordon had flown to Rome to be present at her nephew’s wedding.

  She was staying at the Excelsior Hotel on the Via Veneto, and Bill Newsom had arranged to meet her and bring her to the church. But once again something had gone wrong. Somehow they missed each other, so Ann took a taxi to the church alone, only to discover that while she spoke no Italian, and the driver spoke no English, she had forgotten what the church was called. For the next three hours she and her taxi-driver toured Rome, visiting every church where a wedding might be taking place.

  With the memory of young Paul’s kidnap never far away, Bill Newsom, Gail and several members of the family were alarmed that the worst might well have happened. Gordon could have been right. Ann should never have come to Rome alone.

  She and her taxi-driver never found the church, and eventually returned to the hotel where she was reunited with the family when the service was over. Only then, with the nightmare of a second potential Getty kidnap behind them, could all the guests enjoy the party.

  Next day, while Ann was flying safely back to San Francisco, Mark and Domitilla were en route for their honeymoon in Switzerland. Elizabeth Taylor had invited Gail and the family to spend Christmas with her at her chalet in Gstaad, and the newly-weds joined them. The snow was thick, the threat of kidnap was forgotten, and even with Elizabeth Taylor as their host, Christmas in Switzerland proved a more peaceful proposition than a Roman wedding.

  Chapter Twenty

  Gordon The Peacemaker

  Gordon Getty Was a late developer – and rather proud of it. ‘You know, for me it’s true,’ he used to say, beaming at the world around him. ‘Life really did begin at forty’ – for it was then that he had begun to realize his true potential, as a composer, an intellectual and a businessman.

  Unlike most other members of the family, Gordon had always seemed to keep his fortune from obsessing or distracting him by the simple expedient of ignoring it. He still loved his enormous house at the top of Pacific Heights, he was as devoted to his family as ever, and he obviously enjoyed the freedom from the daily grind that his money gave him.

  But he also insisted that he’d ‘scarcely notice the difference in my lifestyle if I didn’t have my fortune. I think I’d drive the same car I’m driving now, watch the same TV shows, the same movies. I might not have had the luxury of being a composer, but I’d probably have taught literature in a college somewhere and been just as happy.’

  Perhaps he would, for currently his greatest problem was that of being taken seriously for anything except his money. Reactions to The White Election had been mixed, but he showed a commendable unconcern about the words of critics. ‘My philosophy has always been that the next guy’s taste is just as good as mine, but I won’t defer to his.’ What was difficult was to know how much the critical reactions either way were influenced by the fact that he was a multi-millionaire.

  ‘I’d describe Gordon Getty as the best millionaire poet in the language,’ the Irish poet Seamus Heaney told Bill Newsom after reading some of his extraordinarily fluent, highly polished and romantic poetry. Much the same applied to Gordon’s music and his economic theories, which tended to be placed in a special category just because he was a Getty.

  This was not entirely fair, for Gordon, far from being a wealthy dilettante, worked immensely hard at anything he did. Unlike his brother Paul he had always been a workaholic, a tendency inherited, like his money, from his father. And like his father, when the mood possessed him, Gordon would work in massive swathes of energy, rising at 6.30, confining himself to his workroom, and labouring throughout the day without pause for food or exercise or conversation, until, as he
put it in typical Gordonese, ‘I’m bushed.’

  Apart from his record collection – by now probably the largest in private ownership in America – he remained entirely unacquisitive. It was Ann who had recently bought the three paintings of the Degas ballet dancers in the bedroom, and chosen the furniture in the spectacular drawing-room. Ann loved jewellery and grand furniture and Impressionist paintings. Gordon preferred ideas.

  At around this time a friend, calling at the house, saw a painting of a dog propped against a sofa and, remembering that Ann had recently bought a painting of a dog by Manet, asked if this was it.

  ‘Gee, I wouldn’t know,’ said Gordon. ‘Ask anyone but me.’

  Someone once described him as ‘opaque’, which was due partly to his apparent vagueness and also to his size, which gave him a sort of massive impenetrability.

  But as the next few months would show, Gordon could be made to care as deeply about money as the next multi-millionaire. And anyone who challenged Gordon would be ill-advised to place excessive store on his naivety and absent-mindedness. Opaque he might be – but in a financial battle, for all his talk about ignoring money, Gordon was someone to be taken seriously.

  By the time of Mark’s wedding, trouble was already brewing between Gordon and the board of Getty Oil, after the death a few months earlier of Gordon’s solitary fellow trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, the powerful lawyer Lansing Hays.

  Since the trust owned 40 per cent of the capital of Getty Oil, Hays had been dominating the company management on the trust’s behalf ever since Jean Paul Getty had died in 1976. Hayes had made no secret of his contempt for the head of Getty Oil, the ex-accountant Sid Petersen. Now, with Hays departed, Petersen felt freer to assert himself

  But it was unwise of Petersen to have been so tactless in his dealings with Gordon Getty. For now that he was sole trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Gordon felt a need to know more about the state of Getty Oil, where all its money was invested. Petersen, however, like others in their time, regarded Gordon as something of a simpleton – and treated him accordingly.

  By that autumn, Petersen’s behaviour was seriously annoying Gordon, less on grounds of affronted dignity than because he felt that Petersen and the board of Getty Oil were insulting his intelligence. Since he effectively controlled the great family trust, Gordon felt he had a duty and a right to know why the shares of Getty Oil had reached an all-time low of under $50 a share. But as he complained to Bill Newsom, ‘Whenever I ask about it, Petersen treats me as a nonentity.’

  Unable to get the information he required from Petersen, Gordon turned to others who might help, and flew to New York to consult a firm of Wall St investment bankers. Were shares in Getty Oil, he asked them, seriously undervalued – and if so, what could be done about it?

  He was being just a touch naïve to act in such a manner. With takeover warriors like Ivan Boesky and T. Boone Pickens on the prowl, such inquiries by anyone as unmistakable as Gordon Getty would inevitably suggest that Getty Oil was ripe for their attention. So when Petersen caught wind of what was happening, battle between him and Gordon was inevitable.

  It was a curious fight, for while Gordon continued to pursue what he felt to be the interests of the Sarah C. Getty Trust with a sort of rugged innocence, his opponents went to extraordinary lengths of cunning to thwart him. Their action took the form of a secret plot to persuade some member of the Getty family to petition the court in Los Angeles that the Bank of America should be appointed as an additional trustee to the Sarah C. Getty Trust on the grounds of Gordon’s incompetence.

  The plotters were not over-clever when they did this, for apart from underestimating Gordon they also made a bad misjudgement in their first choice for a family petitioner. In October 1983, Mark Getty was so surprised to be asked to present the petition against his favourite uncle that he flew to San Francisco especially to ask him what was happening. Gordon himself was baffled – at least to start with. But Mark’s query served to warn him that something was afoot, so that when a petition did arrive, Gordon was prepared to meet it.

  By now the lawyers representing Getty Oil had persuaded Gordon’s brother Paul Junior to petition the court on behalf of his fifteen-year-old son Tara.

  The fact that Paul Junior hardly ever saw his child by Talitha made this appear a fairly cynical manoeuvre. But from the point of view of Getty Oil, it was also singularly inept. For as Gordon’s opponents might have foreseen, he possessed one weapon which they couldn’t beat. Aware of what was going on by now, the bumbling Gordon used it – and the fate of Getty Oil was sealed.

  Gordon’s strength lay in the fact that most of the money which his father had left to his museum at Malibu was in the form of a 12 per cent holding in the shares of Getty Oil. Until this point, the museum chairman, Harold Williams, had purposely remained aloof from what was happening. But now, thanks to the behaviour of the board of Getty Oil, Gordon had little difficulty persuading him that the museum’s best interests – especially their financial ones – lay in helping him defeat them.

  Together, the shareholders of the Sarah C. Getty Trust and the J. Paul Getty Museum formed a majority able to dismiss the board of Getty Oil – and duly did so.

  This was the point at which a takeover of Getty Oil became inevitable – and promptly arrived in the form of a cash bid of $110 a share from the medium-sized Pennzoil Company. This offer suited Gordon, who reached an understanding with Pennzoil’s chief executive to become chairman of the reconstituted company.

  But completion of the Pennzoil deal was delayed by a lawsuit from one of ‘the Georgettes’ (as someone had christened George’s daughters), his second child, Claire, who was sentimentally opposed to this impious attempt to break up Grandpa Getty’s precious company and petitioned the courts accordingly.

  ‘Why, Uncle Gordon, does a trust already worth $1.8 billion need to be increased in value?’ she had asked him.

  ‘A very interesting philosophical question, Claire,’ said Uncle Gordon, scratching his curly head and searching for an answer. ‘It is my fiduciary duty,’ he said at last, ‘to maximize the wealth and income of the Trust.’

  Maximize he did, and largely thanks to Claire. For while her lawyers were arguing the legality of the Pennzoil deal, the oil giant Texaco slipped in a higher deal of $125 a share for Getty Oil. And in January 1984, when Gordon accepted the Texaco offer on behalf of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, the value of the trust was doubled overnight, from $1.8 billion to nearly $4 billion.

  Even this was not the end of it. To forestall yet another legal intervention from yet another quarter of the family – this time from Ronald’s children, claiming that the price was still not high enough – Texaco actually increased their price to $128 a share, and that was that.

  If the word awesome can be properly applied to a financial deal, then the sale of Getty Oil was awesome. By paying a total of $10 billion for the whole of Getty Oil, Texaco had just made what was then the largest corporate acquisition in American history.

  Some of the results were less than beneficial. With Getty Oil now swallowed up by Texaco, the family company lost its identity – and 20,000 Getty Oil employees their jobs. For Texaco too the monster deal proved ultimately disastrous – with Pennzoil successfully suing them for $10 billion over the affair, and making the company bankrupt in the process.

  Within the family few seemed happy at the outcome and the legal battles rumbled on. Ronald used the sale as the occasion for one more attempt to right the injustice which had dogged his life – and petitioned the court to ‘equalize’ his share of the Sarah C. Getty Trust with those of his three siblings. (Two years later, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Julius M. Title would finally express his sympathy for Ronald’s situation, but reluctantly rule that ‘in law there was no proof that his father ever promised to correct the inequity’.)

  ‘The Georgettes’ also went to law – in an attempt to punish Uncle Gordon for what he’d done to Getty Oil, by trying to make him pay all taxes
due on the sale. And the earlier attempt in Tara’s name to have a co-trustee appointed to the Trust continued. But despite the anger and upheavals which still echoed from this earthquake of a sale, one thing was undeniable. While the Sarah C. Getty Trust had been under the solitary control of an absent-minded, would-be poet, composer and economic theorist, its capital had more than doubled and now stood at something over $4 billion.

  Whether by extraordinary cleverness or the luck that protects the innocent, Gordon in this one traumatic deal had made almost as many billion dollars for the Sarah C. Getty Trust as his father had within his lifetime. This time, Forbes magazine was proclaiming a Getty the richest human being in America.

  *

  This wasn’t strictly true, as Gordon didn’t own the Trust money he controlled, and he was limited to an annual income as its principal trustee of a mere $200 million. But this did not prevent him and Ann attempting to enjoy a little of their new-found increment.

  Left to himself, Gordon would almost certainly have stayed exactly where he was and carried on composing his opera based on the character of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which the Globe Theatre Trust in London had recently commissioned. Apart from finding fame as a composer, there was little new in life that Gordon truly craved, and San Francisco suited him to perfection. ‘I can go down into the street and get into my own car and. don’t have to call the chauffeur as I have to in New York,’ he said. Besides, his friends were there, along with his precious workroom with his two computers, his Macintosh loudspeakers and his Yamaha piano.

  But Ann felt differently. Under California law, she is theoretically entitled to half of Gordon’s income, and within the family it was Ann who had the role of mover and spender. Even so, she had a problem over what to do with such a massive sum of money. For like Gordon she appeared to have more than enough of almost everything.