J.Paul Getty Biography

Just finished The Great Getty, the Life and Loves of J. Paul Getty, Richest Man in the World, by Robert Lenzner. Getty lived from 1892 to 1976, was married five times (typically to women around the age of 20 at the time of marriage), and died in England partly because he was afraid to travel by air or sea. He left an estate valued at over $2 billion, much of which went to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Some sentences that caught my eye…

p. 69: [Getty] invited suspicion with his open admiration for Hitler’s leadership, and by publicly bragging of his friendship with leading Nazis, including Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring. He was also reported to be trying to sell oil to Nazi Germany…

p. 78: After Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover personally issued approval for the custodial detention of Getty as a potential enemy.

p. 89: At fifty-five, Gerry was no longer the lean, mean playboy of a decade earlier. With slightly stooping shoulders and greying hair, now dyed reddish brown (he had used blonde dye in his early thirties), he underwent a second facelift (the first was in 1939). … The effect of the facelift, and the ones to come, was to accentuate the apparent size of his already large nose and his elephantine ears.

p. 102: [Getty said that he] “preferred Europe because he could travel with two or three women at the same time.”

p. 131: Getty wrote a magazine article in 1965 entitled “The World is Mean to Millionaires”. He noted that “Rich people once lived in a world apart; today almost the only difference between the multimillionaire and the reasonably well-to-do man earning $15,000 to $25,000 a year is that the millionaire works harder, relaxes less, is burdened with greater responsibilities and is exposed to the constant glare of publicity.”

p 140: Getty’s chief executive assistant was the glamorous, socially acceptable Claus von Bulow (subsequently convicted of murderinig his wife Sunny in Newport, Rhode Island).

p. 142: [Getty had agreed to pay double what other oil companies were paying Saudi and other Arab owners of oilfields for extraction rights, thus breaking into the market and setting off a cost-spiral.] In July 1957, … President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that voluntary import quotas on cheap foreign oil were needed to protect the domestic oil industry.

p. 160: two separate entries on wife-killing. The first is about Paul Jr., Getty’s son, accused of killing his wife Talitha, who died of a heroin overdose. The second is about Paul Jr. lending $1.5 million to Claus von Bulow to help him defend against the charges that he killed his socialite wife Sunny with insulin injections. Sometimes, apparently, divorce is not sufficient…

p 192: Getty discussed the design of his villa/museum in Malibu, California: “I refuse to pay for one of those concrete bunker-type structures that are the fad among modern architects — nor some tinted-glass-stainless-steel monstrosity.” [Getty never visited his museum since he was afraid to fly.]

p. 212: “The majority of very wealthy single men will tell you sadly that most, though not all, women can be divided into two types, those you pay to stay with you and those that you pay to stay away.”