Jean Paul Getty

Jean Paul Getty was born on December 15, 1892, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, George Franklin Getty, was a lawyer, but in 1904 he moved his wife, Sarah Risher Getty, and his son to the Oklahoma territory to begin a successful career as an independent oilman. Two years later the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where young Getty attended private school before graduating from Polytechnic High School in 1909. After a European tour he attended the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley; he spent his summers working on his father's oil rigs as a "roustabout." In 1912 Getty enrolled in Oxford University in England, from which he received a degree in economics and political science in 1914.

In 1914 Getty arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, determined to strike it rich as a wildcat oil producer. Although he operated independently of his father's Minnehoma Oil Company, his father's loans and financial backing enabled him to begin buying and selling oil leases in the red-bed area of Oklahoma. Getty saw himself as a modern oil man, relying on geological data and not simply on the instinct of the experienced veterans, but he also thrived on the excitement, gamble, risks, and high stakes of the oil business. Getty's own first successful well came in in 1916, and by the fall of that year he had made his first million dollars as a wildcatter and lease broker.

For the next two years Getty "retired" to the life of a wealthy playboy in Los Angeles, but he returned to the oil business in 1919. During the 1920s he and his father continued to be enormously successful both in drilling their own wells and in buying and selling oil leases, and Getty became more active in California than in Oklahoma. He amassed a personal fortune of over three million dollars and acquired a third interest in what was to become the Getty Oil Company.

After his father's death in 1930 Paul Getty became the president of the George Getty Oil Company (successor to Minnehoma Oil), but his mother inherited the controlling interest, as his father had been upset with his son's profligate personal life. During the 1930s Getty followed several paths to both short-term and long-term success. His wells continued to produce, and profits poured in. He also bought a controlling interest in the Pacific Western Oil Corporation, one of the ten largest oil companies in California. After a series of agreements with his mother he obtained the controlling interest in the George Getty Oil Company, and he began real estate dealings, including the purchase of the Hotel Pierre in New York City.

The Getty Oil Company

Getty's ambition was to build up an independent, self-contained oil business involving refining, transporting, and selling oil as well as exploration and drilling. To that end he began in the 1930s to gain control of the Tidewater Oil Company. Getty pursued that goal in a series of complicated maneuvers, which involved tilting with the giant Standard Oil of New Jersey, until in the 1950s he had control of Tidewater, Skelly Oil, and the Mission Corporation. In 1967 these companies merged into the Getty Oil Company, the foundation of Getty's fortune. Getty had a majority or controlling interest in Getty Oil and its nearly 200 affiliated and subsidiary firms, and he remained its president until his death in 1976.

At the outbreak of World War II, Getty, a yachtsman, volunteered for service in the Navy, but his offer was rejected. At the request of Naval officers, however, he took over personal management of Spartan Aircraft, a Skelly and Getty subsidiary. The corporation manufactured trainers and airplane parts, and it later converted to the profitable production of mobile homes.

After the war Getty took a lucrative gamble on oil rights in the Middle East. In 1949 he secured the oil rights in Saudi Arabia's half of the Neutral Zone, a barren tract between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He made major concessions to King Saud, which shocked the large oil companies, but after three years and a $30 million investment, Getty found the huge oil deposits which helped make him a billionaire.

In his business career, Getty continued to invest and reinvest; his fortune consisted not of cash, but stocks, corporate assets, and real estate. A loner, he saw himself as a solitary knight in fierce battle with the giant "Seven Sisters" oil firms, and that competitive urge fueled his desire to build a larger and larger fortune.

A "Public" Personal Life

In 1957 Fortune magazine published a list of the richest men in America. Getty's name headed the list, and the resultant publicity turned the reclusive Getty into an object of public fascination and legend. Getty complained about the fame, the requests for money, and the assumption that he would pick up every restaurant check, but he also furthered his own legends: he wrote articles on such topics as "How To Be Rich" and pretended to poverty by wearing rumpled suits and threadbare sweaters. The public was fascinated by Getty's wealth and extravagance and also by his reputed stinginess. After 1959 he stopped living out of hotel rooms and established his home and offices at Sutton Place, a 16th-century, 700-acre manor outside London. The huge estate, with its gardens, pools, trout stream, and priceless furnishings, was also a near garrison, with elaborate security arrangements. Giant Alsatian dogs had the run of the estate, and there were also two caged lions, Nero and Teresa. Numerous stories circulated about Getty's penny-pitching; the most famous incident was the installation of a pay telephone on the Sutton Place grounds. Getty offered various explanations, but the public preferred to see the phone booth as a symbol of his stinginess.

The public also seemed to like to read into Getty's life the lesson that money does not buy happiness. Getty was married five times: to Jeannette Dumont (1923), Allene Ashby (1925), Adolphine Helmle (1928), Ann Rork (1932), and Louisa Lynch (1939); each marriage ended in divorce. He had five sons, two of whom predeceased him, and his relationship with each of them was difficult. His grandson, J. Paul Getty III, was kidnapped in Italy in 1973. Although he was returned for a ransom, part of his ear had been cut off. Getty was a celebrity, and public interest, fueled by envy and admiration, focused on Getty's tragedies as well as his billions.

Besides oil, Getty's major interest was art. He began serious collecting in the 1930s - European paintings, furniture, Greek and Roman sculptures, 18th-century tapestries, silver, and fine Persian carpets, including the 16th-century Ardabil carpet from Tabriz. He housed his collection at Sutton Place and at his ranch house at Malibu, California, one wing of which he opened as the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1954. In 1969 construction began on a new Getty Museum, also on his Malibu property. The huge building is a replica of an ancient Roman villa found near the ruins of Pompeii, and the extensive Getty collection was moved thereafter his death.

Jean Paul Getty died at Sutton Place on June 6, 1976; he is buried on his Malibu estate.

oil executive and art collector. Born in Minneapolis to a lawyer who turned a lease bought on a gamble into a successful oil company, J. Paul Getty, through his autocratic rule and skillful manipulation of the stock market, brought the Getty Oil Company to the status of an "eighth sister" among the giants in the business. But eight years after his death, the company became the subject of a fierce takeover battle and was eventually absorbed by Texaco.

The young J. Paul worked in the oil fields during school vacations as a general laborer, acquiring the hands-on experience he later found useful in his management of the company. After his father's death in 1930, he and his eighty-year-old mother battled for control of the family wealth. Sarah was skeptical of her son's practice of buying the stock of companies in shaky financial condition during the depression. To control his spending, and to preserve some of the wealth for future generations, his mother created the Sarah Getty Trust, which later became the subject of litigation among its beneficiaries. J. Paul's stock market speculation, however, proved to be a sound business strategy. It laid the foundation of what eventually became the billion-dollar Getty Oil empire, which included holdings in oil and natural gas, as well as gold and uranium mines, a copper deposit, vineyards, orchards, grazing lands, timberlands, refineries, and chemical plants.

As shrewd a businessman as Getty proved to be, he was unsuccessful in his personal life. Though he tried to emulate the Rockefellers and Kennedys, his own family was too fragmented and embattled to invite comparison. He had five sons by four wives and never invited his parents to any of his weddings. Similarly, he failed to attend his sons' weddings and even missed the funeral of his youngest son, Timothy. All of his surviving sons did a stint in the family business, but none lived up to his expectations. He changed his will twenty-one times, using it as a weapon to punish filial "disloyalty."

Getty spent the final twenty-five years of his life at his Sutton Place estate twenty miles from London, surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and patrolled by plainclothes guards and twenty-five German shepherd attack dogs. Yet he maintained firm control of his company, though fear of flying kept him from visiting the Los Angeles headquarters. Declared the richest man in the world by Fortune magazine in 1957, he was nevertheless tight with money: he installed a pay phone in his home, saved bits of string and was delighted when he had enough to tie up a parcel, and throughout his life washed his own underwear. Perhaps the most notorious example of his penny-pinching was his refusal to pay ransom for his grandson, J. Paul III, until finally the kidnappers cut off the boy's right ear.

Always an avid art collector, Getty left virtually his entire estate to the J. Paul Getty Museum Trust. Designed as a replica of a Roman villa, the Malibu museum houses paintings, sculpture, and eighteenth-century French furniture. Though the endowment has grown to $3 billion since Getty's bequest, making the collection one of the world's richest cultural institutions (its budget is roughly twenty-five times the New York Metropolitan Museum's), it has failed to monopolize the art market in the way many feared. Critics charge that the museum has not been aggressive in broadening its mediocre collection to include modern art, or pieces from periods other than what its founder collected, although its acquisition of van Gogh's Irises in 1990 was an important exception. The museum has also come under intense public scrutiny with questions about the authenticity of some of its recent purchases.