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>>> It's a certainty that Republicons
ISN'T IT FUNNY WHAT MONEY CAN DO?
By JANE O'REILLY
March 30, 1986
THE GREAT GETTY The Life and Loves of J. Paul Getty -Richest Man in the
World. By Robert Lenzner. Illustrated. 283 pp. New York: Crown Publishers.
$18.95. THE HOUSE OF GETTY By Russell Miller. Illustrated. 362 pp. New York:
Henry Holt & Company. $17.95. HERE are some interesting facts about J. Paul
Getty (1892-1976): He was, for a while, the richest man in the world; he
refused to pay a penny of ransom for his grandson and namesake, J. Paul
Getty 3d, until the boy's severed ear was shipped through the mail by his
kidnappers; as a monument to himself, he built a museum in the farther
reaches of Malibu, Calif. He never saw it, but he left it so heavily
endowed - $2 billion - that it must spend about $2 million a week to avoid
taxes; throughout his life, every night, he hand-washed his own underpants.
These facts are perhaps less interesting than they are odd. As curiosities,
they are more diverting than the kind of tabloid headlines at supermarket
checkouts that announce, ''500-Pound Hamster Saves Tot From Burning
Penthouse,'' but they fall well short of historical standards of
eccentricity and wretched excess. One thinks, for example, of the
17th-century Spanish dukes whose estates were bankrupted by their obsessive
acquisition of dwarfs (a prime collectible of the era).
These two books, ''The Great Getty'' and ''The House of Getty,'' suggest
that while their subject may have aspired to the ducal style (Getty believed
himself to be the Emperor Hadrian's reincarnation), he achieved only a kind
of deluxe version of the Collier brothers, his psyche blocked by tunnels of
money instead of canyons of old newspapers. Getty had the soul of a
shopkeeper straining to express itself as an entrepreneur, and the only
really interesting thing about him was that he was so rich - richer than
anyone else. That fact generated clouds of mystery and puffs of mythology,
but alas, Getty himself seems to have been dull, dull, dull, and, as an
occasional change of pace, mean.
Robert Lenzner succeeds at making Getty the epiphenomenon into Getty the
noteworthy. ''The Great Getty'' is thorough and serious. Mr. Lenzner, who is
the chief New York correspondent for The Boston Globe, adequately translates
the purely business history of the Getty empire. In ''The House of Getty,''
Russell Miller, a British writer and the author of ''Bunny: The Real Story
of Playboy'' and other books, seems to rely too heavily on the kind of
information found in celebrity clip files, and he makes some startling
omissions and mistakes. For example, he does not even refer to the cloud
over Getty's character that Mr. Lenzner follows through the files of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation; the F.B.I. tracked Getty's warm regard for
Hitler but eventually cleared him of actually being an enemy spy.
''When I think of Paul, I think of money,'' said Getty's friend, the Duke of
Bedford. The money began piling up in 1903, when Getty's father, George, a
businessman who had grown up in desperate poverty, traveled from Minnesota
to Oklahoma to settle an insurance claim and while he was there got caught
up in the oil boom and bought a claim for $500. The wells came in, and
George, who was a hard-edged skinflint, knew how to parlay one good claim
into an oil company. The family, a dour little group of father, deaf mother
and Paul - the only surviving child - eventually moved to Los Angeles. Young
Paul took a dilettante's approach to life until his father persuaded him to
try the oil business.
In 1914, he arrived in Tulsa, the only man wearing a wristwatch, and within
a year he claimed to have made $1 million trading leases. Getty was a kind
of idiot savant of the oil business. He loved every well, knew what it cost
to drill, what it produced. All his life he bought low, sold high and used
every advantage of luck and timing. By 1957, Getty had built an enormous
conglomerate. That year Fortune declared him the richest man in America with
$700 million to $1 billion -richer than the Rockefellers, the du Ponts, the
Mellons.
In the 1970's Getty got unimaginably richer, Mr. Lenzner writes, because of
''the explosion of pride, greed and outright blackmail on the part of the
Arab oil-producing nations.'' As Arab oil prices rose, so rose Getty Oil
prices. The billions rolled in virtually entirely to Getty and the family
trust his mother had set up. He himself owned and managed the entire
gigantic money machine. When he died in 1976 at the age of 83, the Getty Oil
Company lasted just eight years before being taken over by Texaco, but his
children and grandchildren were left to divide an income of $1 million a
day.
This was all done in a singularly joyless way. Mr. Lenzner describes a
friend of Getty's who ''always puzzled how this yokel became the world's
richest man. In the end, he decided that an 'extraordinary shrewdness lay
underneath the coldness, cruelty and naivety.'
He understood that Getty succeeded because he 'never lost his cynicism about
people's behaviour and that he saw excitement or emotion as a weakness.' ''
In the Getty family the sins of the fathers passed all too quickly on to the
next generations. George distrusted his son, resented his aptitude, and,
finally, secretly changed his will to leave the company in control of Paul's
elderly, conservative, stubborn mother.
Paul, in turn, had five sons by four of his five wives. Insatiable and
ungiving, he nevertheless cherished a maudlin vision of a Getty dynasty,
even as he made sure none existed by remaining remote, controlling and
disdainful. He gave his sons too much responsibility (or too little) and
publicly relished their failures.
His eldest son, George, died a suicide from pills and alcohol, after
inflicting small stab wounds on himself and insisting he was still ''strong,
powerful, masculine and able to bear pain.''
The youngest, Timmy, died at the age of 12 after many operations. His father
never left England to visit him in the hospital. Getty never invited his
parents to any of his weddings, and he never attended those of his children.
A wedding is a family ritual, and Getty had no concept of family. Suspicious
and unimaginative, he did not know his offspring and so was capable of
believing that his family was plotting to get money from him when his
grandson was kidnapped in 1973.
Getty was sexually insatiable as well, permanently prowling, sporting face
lifts and hair dyes and demanding certificates of freedom from disease and
releases from any expectations of financial gain. Money has a certain
allure, however, and he ended his life with a collection of desperately
hopeful women, all living together in his Tudor mansion in England, none of
them aware that his favorite pastime was rewriting his will, changing his
insultingly small bequests: $209 a month to one, $1,167 to another.
As a bon vivant, Getty was a glum face in the jet set. His idea of a great
time and a boon companion is perhaps best conveyed by his unusual
description of his friend Richard Nixon: ''a cheerful, convivial person who
enjoyed trading jokes, playing the piano and chatting with friends.'' AS an
art collector, Getty was too timid to be vulgar, too suspicious and
uncertain to be a patron of anything new and too cheap to acquire a great
collection. Sir Francis Watson, one of his advisers on the decorative arts,
said, ''The act of being mean gave him great pleasure. . . . Getty's
collecting was a para-artistic activity. He acted up to the image of very
rich men who are collectors of money, and works of art come second.''
Getty liked to tell his friends he wanted ''to be the acceptable face of
capitalism.'' Whatever he imagined that face to be, it certainly was not
civic-minded. When the Rockefellers urged him to use his money to make a
significant contribution he was silent, and then lectured them on not having
thrown out the leftists from the University of Chicago. ''Getty's cardinal
rule,'' Mr. Lenzner writes, ''was to give nothing to the government because
they wasted it. He very nearly succeeded in this goal'' (there were years in
which he paid no taxes at all). ''Secondly, he wanted to prevent his
children and grandchildren from obtaining vast wealth. . . . On this score
he failed.'' Perhaps luckily for the nation and the world, Getty was too
small-minded and unimaginative to have realized the power he had because of
his money. He had no sense of responsibility and no particular vision,
either for good or evil. He was merely greedy, the paradigm of the old
saying, ''He knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.'' J.
Paul Getty was the ultimate Yuppie. These biographies appear as useful
reminders that being rich is not enough.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE1DE153FF933A05750C0A96094826...
JJ Cale:
Money talks; it'll tell you a story
Money talks; says strange things
Money talks very loudly
You'd be surprised the friends you can buy with small change
They say it's the root of all evil
They say gold is the king
Money talks; you'd better believe it
All that gold don't mean a thing
Rich people, hear those pockets jingle
Spare change, hear the down-and-outers cry
Money talks, tip-toe up behind you
Brigham Young:
Old King Solomon, the wise man, says, the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither riches to men of wisdom. The truth of
this saying comes within our daily observation. Those whom we consider
swift are not always the ones that gain the mastery in the race, but those
who are considered not so fleet, or not fleet at all, often gain the prize.
It is, I may say, the unseen hand of Providence, that over-ruling power
that controls the destinies of men and nations, that so ordains these
things. The weak, trembling, and feeble, are the ones frequently who
gain the battle; and the ignorant, foolish, and unwise will blunder into
wealth. This is all before us, it is the common lot of man, in short
I may say, it is the philosophical providence of a philosophical world.
~~Journal of Discourses, Vol.1, Pg.267, August 14, 1853
The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.
~~J. Paul Getty
Dire Straits:
I've got the blues right down, mean and low
I'm as low as the heels of my alligator shoes
You should know how it feels to have these millionaire blues
Millionaire blues
