Painfully Rich

by John Pearson

  During his own ascent, there had been little he could do to halt his friend’s decline, but now he detected in the current situation a chance for Paul to help himself while helping the National Gallery solve its problems. If he could be persuaded to make the gallery the sort of grand donation it required, the result might well work wonders for his public image – and thereby for his private self-esteem and precarious morale.

  Despite his gifts to Manchester City Art Gallery and the BFI, Paul still had far more money than he knew what to do with. So when Gibbs described the plight of the National Gallery, Paul agreed in principle to a £50 million gift without demur.

  But Gibbs wanted to ensure that Paul received full credit for his generosity. With so much money – and such dubious publicity from the past – the gift could easily backfire if handled badly. To prevent this, Gibbs relied upon a number of strategically placed allies who understood the situation, and who would be able to ensure that the gift became a coup for the gallery – and something more than this for Jean Paul Getty Junior.

  The most important of these allies was the newly appointed chairman of the Gallery trustees, the financier and art collector Lord Rothschild. A perceptive human being as well as a successful banker, Jacob Rothschild was swift to appreciate the irresistible nature of the gift – and what it would entail.

  ‘It just never happens that you get an offer of £50 million even for the National Gallery,’ he says. ‘So when it does occur, you go for it with everything you’ve got, and throw in the whole boiling – support from politicians, from royalty, from anybody who can help. It’s your job to be an opportunist, and do everything you can to make it happen. I knew that Christopher was seeing this as part of Paul’s return to life, and hoping it would change the perception people had of him. That was something I was obviously prepared to go along with.’

  Another of Gibbs’s influential friends, Mrs Thatcher’s Minister for the Arts, Lord Gowrie, felt much the same once he heard what was on offer. As a member of the government he had a stake in ensuring that the donation went ahead, and he was fully aware of the political significance of so much private money for the arts. So, like Lord Rothschild, he visited Paul Getty Junior in the London Clinic to express his gratitude and finalize the details of the gift.

  He was quick to tell ‘the Boss’, as he referred to Mrs Thatcher, who was equally delighted at the news. High art was fairly low on the Thatcherite scale of values, but an unsolicited gift of £50 million to the nation brought out the gentle side of the Iron Lady, and her immediate reaction was that she should thank Paul Getty Junior in person.

  In the USA it would have been unthinkable for the head of government to associate with a well-known addict with a history such as Paul’s, but for Mrs Thatcher it would have been unthinkable not to.

  She liked rich people, and was particularly moved that one of them was showing such patriotism to his adopted country. Since he was in the London Clinic, what else could a caring premier do but don the mantle of Miss Nightingale, come to the bedside of the invalid billionaire, and thank him warmly for his generosity.

  Before this happened, Gowrie felt it prudent to inquire of Paul how he felt about meeting Margaret Thatcher. He relates that he found him ‘rather excited by the idea, but being a very shy man he was also wary and asked me to brief him over what would happen. I told Paul, “Just don’t worry. You’ll find that she’ll be very charming and very easy to talk to and as soon as she sees you, she’ll say, ‘Now my dear Mr Getty. What on earth’s the matter?’ Then before you know where you are she’ll have taken over your case medically.”’

  When Lord Gowrie brought Mrs Thatcher to the London Clinic a few days later, he was understandably relieved to see that ‘Paul had spruced himself up and was sitting on the edge of his bed like a schoolboy waiting for matron’. Once introduced, the Prime Minister treated Paul almost word for word as Gowrie had predicted.

  ‘My dear Mr Getty,’ she began. ‘Now what’s the matter? We mustn’t let things get us down now, must we? We must have you out of here as soon as possible.’

  Gowrie saw Paul looking worried, for, as he says, ‘He was obviously as happy as a clam in the London Clinic, where he was taken care of and had no intrusions on his privacy, and had everything he needed – his records, and his books and television.’

  The thought of being forced to leave this haven must have shocked him deeply. But this apart, the visit went off admirably. Everyone was very charming, and Paul himself was genuinely touched by the Prime Minister’s concern. When a signed photograph arrived from Downing Street it was given pride of place beside his bed; and during the months ahead Paul and Mrs Thatcher met several times and got on splendidly together. Meeting Paul’s half-sister Donna (neé Wilson) later in America, Margaret Thatcher told her that her brother had one of the most remarkable minds in Europe.

  Despite the Prime Minister’s concern to get him out of the London Clinic as soon as possible, Paul had nearly nine more months of clam-like bliss within its pricey portals. According to his lawyer, Vanni Treves, he was treating it ‘more like a hotel than a hospital’ – but this did not belie the fact that he had been extremely ill, and that the process of recovering from such long and deep addiction required time.

  Fortunately there was no pressure to economize on the £250 a day, plus treatment costs and incidental extras, which his room was costing. Methadone could take the place of heroin, lager in the icebox could become an acceptable substitute for rum – but there were no short cuts to help his wounded spirit to recover.

  In the meantime, since he was still determined not to spend his enormous income on himself, it was announced that he was placing much of it in a charitable trust and keeping ‘only what is necessary to maintain a relatively modest lifestyle’.

  It was now that he contributed £20 million to establish the J. Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust. The trustees were Christopher Gibbs, Vanni Treves, and James Ramsden, former Conservative minister and chairman of the London Clinic – and Paul was careful to designate the sort of groups on whom the annual income should be spent.

  Two key categories were to be conservation and environment, but the rest of the money was to go to what he termed ‘unpopular causes’, generally involving ‘poverty and misery’. Most of the grants would be of the order of £5,000 and £10,000 for small community and local projects – such as work with the mentally ill, drug addicts, ethnic minorities, and the homeless. The trust should also ‘offer support for people under stress’, such as battered wives, victims of sexual abuse, and families in difficulty. Most of the suffering Paul was hoping to relieve had definite connections with his own experience. He had never known poverty – but otherwise was fairly well acquainted with most forms of human misery.

  The Trust established, he continued giving on the widest scale, often on the spur of the moment to something he had seen on television. Hearing that the virtuoso pianist John Ogdon was so short of money that he had been forced to sell his piano, he told him to choose himself a new one and send him the bill. (Ogdon did and it cost £18,000.) Touched by the plight of a group of breakaway striking miners, he sent them £50,000. £250,000 went to preserve the environment of Ely Cathedral from the threat of building, and £10,000 to conserve a medieval field in Somerset.

  (Since then he has made large donations for famine relief in Eritrea, medical supplies for Poland, the Special Air Service and the Imperial War Museum. He also paid $1 million for Claus von Bülow’s legal fees for his successful defence against charges of attempting to murder his wife Sunny – ‘because my father would have done so’.)

  By giving he was generating great goodwill. Britain is not a generous country, and gratitude was palpable around him. Meanwhile from his room within the London Clinic, he continued to adhere to that ‘fairly modest lifestyle’ he apparently enjoyed. His only personal extravagance that year was the purchase of Wormsley Park, a run-down country house with a more or less derelict estate 38 miles from London, for £3.4
million.

  Built in 1720, Wormsley had been home to the Fane family for two centuries until they found it too expensive to maintain. The house needed more or less rebuilding – or demolishing – and its greatest asset was its romantic position in an upland valley on the edge of the Chilterns, surrounded by 3,000 acres of meadowland and seriously neglected beechwood.

  Why Paul had bought the place was anybody’s guess. Had he needed a country house (which currently he didn’t), why a derelict edifice like Wormsley when he could have purchased almost any stately home in Britain? To make his attitude towards the purchase clear, a spokesman told the press that the house and the estate would be restored ‘regardless of cost – and then given to a charitable trust for deprived children’.

  Perhaps it would. But as with his gift to the National Gallery, the initiative behind the Wormsley purchase came from Christopher Gibbs, who cheerfully admits to having ‘bullied’ Paul into it. Gibbs was a man of many interests, but creating homes at great expense for deprived children was not among them.

  When Paul’s gift to the National Gallery was announced, the Establishment united to express its gratitude.

  ‘Maecenas has come among us,’ hymned Gowrie’s deputy, William Waldegrave, as he brought the news to an awed and grateful House of Commons. Simultaneously a missive of considerable distinction arrived for Paul at the London Clinic. It was from the Secretary to the Cabinet, and conveyed the news that ‘the Cabinet agreed that the standing of the Institution and the munificence of the gift combine to render this an occurrence of national significance, and express their warm appreciation of, and profound gratitude for, your magnificent generosity’.

  Meanwhile from America came congratulations couched in less tortuous vernacular. ‘Three cheers for your magnificent support,’ cabled Gordon. ‘If that means Britain can keep art works that might have gone to the J. Paul Getty Museum, that’s fine. And if you personally were to target Getty Museum acquisitions for retention funds, picking on us and not on other purchasers, I don’t see how I could find much fault with that either.’

  Since Gordon was a trustee of the museum in Malibu, it was generous of him to write like this. And against the background of the treatment he had been receiving from Paul until quite recently, his note seems positively saint-like in its attitude. But Gordon was wanting bygones to be bygones. So was Paul. A new and unaccustomed mood of reconciliation had started in the family.

  At the same time, public approval was beginning to have the effect on Paul’s morale that his friends had hoped for, encouraging him to stay off drugs and be worthy of the glowing reputation he was gaining. He had tried to break the habit many times before, but failed to sustain the resolution. This time, however, he was revealing unsuspected strength of will.

  Even so, it wasn’t easy – and his ‘cure’ was by no means completed. He had been addicted now for nearly twenty years, and the psychological dependence over such a period is often more difficult to break than the purely physical. Prolonged addiction can inhibit emotional development so that former addicts find themselves subject to relapses, to panic attacks, and are painfully at risk.

  Strong-willed though he was, Paul remained vulnerable, and his damaged psyche needed reconstructing rather like an injured body. In the process much of his former self was being quietly replaced by something very different.

  This explains why Jean Paul Getty Junior, one-time hippie, heroin addict, unemployed billionaire, was getting on so well with Mrs Thatcher, who as a person and a politician stood for much that he would once have almost certainly derided – middle-class morality, hard work, and family values.

  Paul was changing. He was now fifty-two, and, in place of the Pre-Raphaelite hippie of the early days in Cheyne Walk, an increasingly conservative middle-aged Englishman was emerging.

  That autumn came his biggest test of all – reunion with his son, Paul. This was young Paul’s first flight to Europe since his coma. He flew from Los Angeles with his two male nurses, and once in London the first thing he wanted was to see his long-lost father; or rather, since young Paul was all but blind, to hear his father’s voice, be with him again, forget the past, and start a new life with his blessing.

  It would have been hard for any father to have coped with such a situation. Inevitably there were tears, especially from Paul Junior, whose sense of horror and regret when faced with what had happened to his broken son can be imagined. It was a harrowing ordeal for him, particularly as he could no longer dull his sense of guilt with drugs or alcohol. But there was also joy, and the chance of making restitution in the future. He was learning his first lessons in coping with his guilt unaided, and with every day that passed, the future seemed more hopeful.

  By the second week of March 1986, Paul was sufficiently recovered to take Mrs Thatcher’s advice and leave the London Clinic. He had stayed hidden away for so long that, despite the fame his generosity had brought him, he was regarded as something of a mystery by the general public, and bizarre rumours of his physical condition prompted Vanni Treves to assure reporters that ‘his health is now actually very good’.

  Like most lawyers’ assurances, this was true to a point. Paul was off heroin and booze, his circulation had improved, as had the condition of his liver, and his general health was certainly better than eighteen months earlier. But his physique remained impaired. He tired easily, and was liable to fall and break bones if he wasn’t careful. To Lord Gowrie he appeared ‘as if he had received a bad wound some time in his past, and had never quite got over it’.

  Wise for once, Paul decided against returning to Cheyne Walk to live, the excuse being that the house had been so seriously neglected that it needed renovating. But the truth was that Cheyne Walk contained the dead weight of his past – regret for his children, guilt for Talitha, drugs, drink, the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – and to leave now was to make a break with all that it had represented.

  His new abode could not have been more different – a flat in a modern block created for the very rich just behind the Ritz. There were no ghosts here. It was quiet and discreet and somewhat clinical, its principal features being the views from its plate-glass windows of trees ad infinitum in Green Park, and the occasional elusive presence of Rupert Murdoch as a neighbour. Paul had actually purchased the flat some months earlier for his mother, but as she was now dying of cancer and her doctors were in America, she had little use for it.

  The final accolade for Paul arrived in early June in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, when, not entirely unexpectedly, he was appointed Knight of the British Empire, ‘for services to the arts’.

  For a man suffering low personal esteem there is nothing like a knighthood, and it was touching to observe his obvious delight at what was happening. This was the final seal of acceptance by the British establishment, proof that as far as Britain was concerned the past was over and the slate wiped clean. However, as a foreigner he could not style himself ‘Sir Paul’ – which would have rather suited him – because foreigners are given only honorary knighthoods. To enjoy the curious pleasures of a title, he would have had to change his nationality, something he had already contemplated doing, having come to the conclusion years ago that ‘Britain is Utopia’.

  But he reluctantly explained that ‘my advisers have asked me not to, because of the enormous tax consequences. [It would have involved him in double taxation, by the USA and Britain.] If I became a British citizen it would prevent me putting my money where it is needed.’

  One sees his point. His knighthood had already cost him £50 million. To pay yet more money to the British Treasury for the right to use it would have been excessive. So he remained plain Mr Getty, KBE – joining a distinguished group of his fellow Americans, including Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and Douglas Fairbanks Junior.

  Receiving the KBE insignia from the Queen at the official investiture at Buckingham Palace was Paul’s first appearance at a public event since his fraught arrival with Bianca J
agger at his father’s memorial service ten years earlier. In its way this was even more of an ordeal, given the forbidding nature of the Palace and the fact that he was still far from well and had grown even shyer and more reclusive with the years.

  But he had to go, not only because the Queen had summoned him but because his mother and his half-sister Donna had flown in from America to be present at the great occasion.

  In place of the bustling Aunt Mame figure, Ann was now skin and bone, and so ill that her daughter Donna had had to accompany her. Ann had borne witness to the troubles that had hit the Gettys, and to the pain and disappointment Paul had caused her. But now, for the first time in many years, she could be proud of him, and could die having seen the Queen of England honouring her ‘dearest Pabby’.

  *

  By now Paul was following several paths towards salvation. His Catholicism was one, his philanthropy another – and the third, and most pleasurable, was cricket.

  Ever since Mick Jagger had introduced him to the game, he had continued watching it on television; given his addictive nature, he was soon a dedicated fan. Cricket can have extreme effects on grown men. Harold Pinter once seriously insisted that ‘Cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth, certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’

  Paul would have agreed, and, scholar that he was, he began studying the history of the game from the days in the 1790s when the members of the Marylebone Cricket Club adjourned to the room at Lord’s Tavern to codify the ‘laws’ of the game. In love with England, he loved the Englishness of cricket, and the way it had been patronized by the aristocracy when they played it with any labourer from the estate who could hit a ball for six. He learned all he could about cricket’s famous players, past and present, rather as he had once learned everything he could about the greatest opera singers.