by Coll, Steve;
And then there was Gordon Getty. Of them all, it was Gordon’s position that would be most profoundly affected by Lansing’s death, although the Getty Oil executives and lawyers gathered at the Hays house in Riverside that day did not suspect how great the change would be. For the last six years, ever since he had joined the Getty Oil board of directors at Lansing’s insistence, Gordon had been an inscrutable and occasionally distracting presence at the company. When, after J. Paul Getty’s death in 1976, Lansing had demanded that Gordon be appointed as a director, he had said it was because there should be a Getty on the board now that J. Paul was gone. The company’s executives and some of the other directors suspected that Lansing’s real aim was to secure an easy vote, because they believed that Gordon would do whatever Lansing told him. Their assessment had proved more or less correct, although sometimes, despite Lansing’s screaming and his calling Gordon a fool in front of the other directors, the Getty scion went his own way. But Gordon’s occasional independence—he would abstain from voting on important issues or sometimes cast the only negative vote—seemed to the Getty Oil executives more a kind of adolescent rebellion against Lansing’s authority than a true, reasoned dissent.
And as anyone could see, though he was now in his mid-forties, there was still much of the adolescent in Gordon Getty. He was a tall, gangly man, six feet five inches, with a floppy, curly mop of brown hair that draped over his brow, contributing to the general impression of an oversized Muppet. Graying sideburns added years to his otherwise boyish face. His nose and fingers were gracefully long and thin. Overall, his appearance, clothes, and manner combined to create an image that Gordon himself enjoyed, and perhaps even cultivated: the absent-minded professor. Especially distinctive were his gestures and facial expressions. In serious conversation, he would adopt an exaggerated, scrutinizing pose, his eyebrows knit, his forehead furrowed like a bulldog, his mouth drawn tightly in a half-smile. His expression could change as suddenly as a flashing sign, however, and then his eyebrows would flex up and down while his long hands waved dramatically to make a point.
Gordon’s disposition contrasted vividly with Lansing’s. Gordon was a fundamentally sweet, easy man, though in his own way he was just as unpredictable as his explosive partner. In board meetings, Gordon would tilt his head back, shut his eyes, and appear to doze off, though afterward Gordon would say that he had only been thinking to himself. High-ranking company executives remarked that when you met Gordon, sometimes he acted as if you were his dearest, oldest friend, but the next time he would seem not to remember your name. He was often late to meetings, and seemed to the Getty Oil executives and directors to have no familiarity with the ordinary protocols of business. Sometimes Gordon seemed to act arrogantly, as if he thought the world turned by his clock, but mostly he seemed lost and confused. Once at a board meeting, he had gone into a side room to make a call on one of those new credit-card telephones. After a few minutes, when he had not returned, a Getty Oil executive looked in, and there was Gordon with half a dozen consumer and department-store credit cards strewn on his lap, complaining that he couldn’t figure out how the damn phone worked.
The most widely circulated stories about Gordon’s absent-mindedness concerned his erratic relationship with automobiles. Getty Oil board meetings were normally held in Los Angeles, and Gordon would fly down to attend from his home in San Francisco. He would rent a car at the airport and drive to the company’s headquarters building near downtown. But after the meeting, Gordon sometimes couldn’t remember where he parked his car, or even what make and model it was, and so a company executive would have to escort him through the underground garage, searching for a car with a rental sticker on the windshield. At one meeting, Gordon forgot about his car altogether and took a cab back to his hotel, then called frantically over to the company the next morning, worried that his rental had been stolen.
He had been an awkward boy, intimidated and degraded by his miserly, philandering father, and overshadowed by his charming, self-destructive older brother J. Paul Jr., and also by his half-brother George, the only one of J. Paul Getty’s sons to succeed in the family business. Gordon was quiet, introspective, and something of a dreamer, particularly when it came to the principal passion of his life, music. He had been an opera enthusiast from an early age and began to compose classical music in his late teens. But his father, who married five times and saw his sons only a few times a year, urged Gordon to pursue a career in business. Gordon was eager for his father’s approval, which J. Paul Getty hoarded as tightly as he did his money.
For eighteen years, beginning in 1962, Gordon abandoned his composing. His attempt to find a place in his father’s oil company was disastrous, however. His first assignment, as an aide in the so-called Neutral Zone at the head of the Persian Gulf, led to a minor international incident. Gordon ignored local laws by refusing to turn over two Getty Oil employees being sought by authorities for questioning. He was placed under house arrest and soon had to leave the country. His father angrily ridiculed him for his incompetence. Gordon bounced from position to position, trailed by criticism from a wide variety of Getty Oil executives who found him immature, selfish, stubborn, and poorly qualified for business. Unable to hold a regular job in the company, Gordon began to do ad hoc consulting work at his father’s request, analyzing Getty Oil’s far-flung operations in the United States and around the world. His proposals were often dismissed as impractical by company managers. Yet he insisted that he be treated very seriously, and he came in conflict with company employees and even his own half-brother, George, J. Paul’s eldest son, who was then rising steadily through the executive ranks. Fed up, George wrote his father in England to tell him that Gordon would never become a “well-rounded and seasoned business executive” and he even began to insinuate that Gordon was not really J. Paul’s son. “Your musical compositions are very good,” J. Paul wrote Gordon, but “you are not sufficiently mature.” Even Gordon’s mother, now divorced, complained to J. Paul that her son was growing up far too slowly.
Then in 1964, Gordon eloped to Las Vegas with Ann Gilbert, a willowy, red-haired, small-town girl from Wheatland, California. For a young man universally derided for lacking judgment, it was a remarkably successful decision. Through Ann, Gordon achieved what no Getty had in nearly half a century: a stable family life. Together they had four children, and as the years passed, Ann began to display all the gumption and solidity and poise seemingly absent in her husband. She defended Gordon in family battles, encouraged him socially, supported his music, and in San Francisco built a household with both traditional roots and a presence in the community.
Raised on a working ranch in the desolate plains of north-central California, Ann grew more and more socially ambitious in San Francisco, but she was demure and possessed of sufficient elegance that few resented her climb. She had done what millions of American girls growing up in small towns in the 1950s had dreamed of: she had married a rich, faithful man, raised his children, and surrounded herself with all the clothes and jewelry and beautiful possessions befitting her station. Most important, she had managed to carry it all off without pretension. She was newly rich, but she was not nouveau riche. There were those at Getty Oil Company who believed that Ann dominated Gordon in the same way that his father did and, later, Lansing Hays. But unlike J. Paul and Lansing, Ann persuaded gently, and over time Gordon began to grow up a little, until by the late 1970s it seemed that he had changed some. He took up his music again, composing a song cycle for female voice and piano based on a book of Emily Dickinson poems. Perhaps it was not a work of genius, but it was a spare, arresting piece, and it suggested authentic talent. In no small part because of Ann’s ever-widening social connections, it was premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1981. There were those who believed that underneath the surface, Gordon was the same petulant, selfish, adolescent rich kid who had so plagued his half-brother and his father during the 1960s. But by the early 1980s, Gordon Getty was now
well into his forties, and it seemed to some that, at least partly because of Ann, he was finally coming into his own.
Ann Getty was ambitious, but she was also careful not to get ahead of her husband. She wanted respect for Gordon, both in music and in business, but there were sharp limits to her role. She knew that as time went on, the Getty Oil Company executives in Los Angeles began to see her as the power behind her husband, as a kind of puppeteer who controlled Gordon’s very movements. This was not the case, she said. She advised Gordon on a few occasions, yes, and once in a while she even negotiated for him, but she was only a facilitator, not a decision-maker. Gordon was his own man. He was a man nearly bursting with ideas, and Ann’s role was merely to help him turn those ideas into accomplishments.
Yet after J. Paul Getty’s death in 1976, there had been one impediment to Gordon’s maturation that even Ann could do nothing about: C. Lansing Hays. Lansing was such a forceful personality, and his ties to the company and the family were so deep, that as long as Lansing was alive Gordon would always be a kind of second-class citizen, despite his cotrusteeship and board of directors membership. There were those in the company who believed that Gordon preferred relationships with powerful, dominant people. His father had been that way, certainly, and Gordon liked affectionately to compare his father to a formidable lion with a deep growl and a ferocious appearance. Lansing was the same way; his roar was his most distinctive characteristic, and he acted sometimes as if he were Gordon’s stepfather. Despite the abuse he endured, Gordon felt a deep respect for Lansing Hays. He felt, as nearly everyone did, that Lansing could be surly, boisterous, and disagreeable, but he also believed that Lansing was less rude to him than he was to others. As cotrustees of 40 percent of Getty Oil’s stock, Gordon and Lansing were allies. They had mutual interests to protect, and they shared a skepticism of Getty Oil’s management, led by chairman Sid Petersen. Shortly before Lansing’s death, Lansing and his wife Nancy had come to dinner at Gordon’s San Francisco mansion. Before the meal was served, Lansing and Gordon were sitting alone in the opulent living room. Lansing turned to Gordon and, for the first time, confessed indirectly that he might not live forever.
“You know,” he said, “You’re going to have to go it alone sometime as sole trustee. And you might, eventually, have to get rid of Sid Petersen.”
It was the first time Gordon had heard Lansing say such a thing. “What is that all about?” he asked.
“Well, Sid’s an accountant. He doesn’t think in broad terms.”
Gordon wasn’t sure what Lansing meant by that remark, and he did not try to draw the lawyer out. He was uncomfortable with Lansing’s implication that he was dying. “Oh, Lansing,” Gordon said, “you’ll outlive us all. Let’s not sound funereal.”
Even if they had known that Gordon and Lansing had had such a conversation only weeks ago, it would have been hard for Sid Petersen and the other Getty Oil executives gathered in Riverside, Connecticut, on that spring afternoon in May 1982 to imagine what Gordon would do now that Lansing Hays was gone. After all this time, Gordon remained a mystery to them, despite the fact that he was near their age. Gordon’s wealth, family history, and erratic demeanor all contributed to his inscrutability. By and large, the Getty Oil executives felt they could control Gordon. They had seen Lansing do it, and there was no reason to believe they couldn’t do it themselves. But as to Gordon’s plans, they were totally in the dark.
At the reception after the memorial service, Gordon offered a hint of his feelings and intentions, though none of the Getty Oil executives and lawyers in the crowd overheard his remark. Gordon was off in a corner of the house, speaking to Spencer Hays about the eulogy he had delivered earlier at church.
“You left one word off your list of adjectives,” Gordon said sympathetically to Lansing’s son.
“What was that?”
“Lansing was a trustee.” Gordon spoke with emphasis, his eyebrows knitted, his bony hand gesturing urgently.
The idea was an important one to Gordon Getty. At this moment, for the first time, Gordon was the sole trustee of the bulk of the Getty family fortune. The value of the Sarah Getty Trust was something over $1.5 billion. Until now, Gordon had relied on Lansing to perform the essential duty of a trustee: to preserve the value of the trust’s stock, prudently to make that value rise, and to protect the trust from any threats to its holdings. Now, suddenly, Gordon was alone in charge. It was, by anyone’s standards, an awesome responsibility, but for Gordon it was especially so, since his experience in finance and the oil business was limited. Gordon might be a flake, as the Getty Oil Company executives always put it, but he was a man who took his responsibilities seriously, even if he had not quite shed his immature outlook on matters of business.
It was not entirely clear that afternoon at the Hays home whether Gordon was indeed sole trustee of the Sarah Getty Trust, but Gordon certainly believed that he was, and that was perhaps all that really mattered. The history of the trust was long, litigious, and warped by family intrigue. The trust had been created in 1934 in the midst of fierce warring between J. Paul Getty and his eighty-year-old, deaf, partially crippled mother, Sarah. It was then four years since the death of George Getty, J. Paul’s father and the founder of Getty Oil Company, and Sarah was suspicious and skeptical of the way her son J. Paul was running the family business. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and instead of drilling for oil, J. Paul was feverishly buying stocks in oil companies, many of which were in shaky financial condition. J. Paul kept pressing his mother for more money, but Sarah, who still had her wits about her, feared that if she turned the entire family fortune over to J. Paul, he would blow the bundle on penny stocks. In fact, J. Paul was pursuing a sound business strategy that would lead him to such wealth as Sarah could never contemplate, but since his strategy involved buying stocks, and since the collapse of stocks in 1929 had caused so much hardship, Sarah was intractably skeptical. In a hasty compromise over Christmas 1933, she created the trust as a mechanism to pass control of the family wealth to future generations.
The trust document itself, executed early in 1934, was deeply convoluted and contained a variety of strange and restrictive provisions, most of which reflected Sarah’s concerns about her only son’s lack of prudence. In essence, cash income from the trust’s holdings—dividends, interest, and so on—would be divided in fixed portions between J. Paul and his sons: George, Ronald, J. Paul Jr., and Gordon. (A fifth son, Timothy died young. There were no daughters.) Control of the trust’s stock would pass solely to J. Paul, but he was prohibited from investing the trust’s assets in companies other than those already in the Getty Oil group. After 1934, a number of disputes and several family lawsuits arose over the issue of precisely what J. Paul could and could not do as sole trustee. After his mother’s death, however, J. Paul did what he pleased, and he fought off all his challengers.
The question of who would succeed to control of the trust when J. Paul died had been an issue of some contention between father and sons, but as a practical matter it was clear that George Getty II, J. Paul’s son and only child by his first marriage, was the favorite. By the late 1960s, George had risen to the top rank of Getty Oil Company. His official title was executive vice-president, since J. Paul wanted to be called president even though he never left England. But in the United States, where the company was based and where most of its business was conducted, George was clearly in charge. He was a moody man, but he was a competent executive and was well liked by the company’s employees. It was assumed by all that when the old man died, George would run both the Sarah Getty Trust and the company. Gordon and his brothers would receive income from the trust, but George would be in control, just as his father had been throughout his life.
Instead, in 1973, George preceded his father to the grave, dying in Los Angeles from an overdose of barbiturates. The coroner ruled it suicide. The death shook J. Paul and led him to reconcile with Gordon; for all his insensitivity to his family, the old m
an decided in the end that his bloodline was important to him. He drew up a new document to govern control of the trust after his death. There were to be three equal cotrustees: Gordon, Lansing Hays, and the Security Pacific National Bank, an enormous financial institution headquartered in Los Angeles and long one of Getty Oil’s bankers. But by the time of the old man’s death in 1976, Security Pacific had still not agreed to accept the position of cotrustee. This was not a pressing issue at the time. As long as Lansing was around, Lansing was in charge, and if a representative of the bank joined him as a third cotrustee, it would just be one more person in the irascible lawyer’s sphere of influence.
In fact, as the time passed and Security Pacific still refused to become cotrustee, some executives at Getty Oil suspected that Lansing was stonewalling the bank, unwilling to share his power and his trustee fees. There always remained some doubt about Lansing’s intentions toward the bank, but it later became clear that Security Pacific had decided on its own not to serve as cotrustee. The bank was afraid that if it accepted the position, it might somehow get caught in all the family battles among the Gettys. There was a dispute in England about whether J. Paul’s residency at Sutton Place made his estate subject to stiff British inheritance taxes, and it was legally possible that if Security Pacific became a cotrustee, its own assets might be tied up by British courts. Then, too, there were so many strange provisions in the trust document itself, and such a long history of disputes about its meaning, the cautious bankers at Security Pacific felt it would be imprudent to get involved, despite the millions the bank would earn in fees.
Toward the end of his life, Lansing Hays became concerned about what could happen to the trust and Getty Oil Company if he were to die and the bank refused to accept a cotrusteeship with Gordon. Then Gordon, whom Lansing so frequently ridiculed, would alone control 40 percent of the company’s stock and a $1.5 billion fortune. On February 9, 1981, just over a year before his death, Lansing met with three top executives of Security Pacific in downtown Los Angeles in an attempt to persuade them to accept the cotrustee position.