John Paul Getty the third. A severed ear, the best opium in London, fountains of oil and other facts about the legendary Getty family. Jean Paul Getty - oil trader

Several real aristocratic women lived permanently in Sutton Place. Before settling with Jay Paul, they signed an agreement on the absence of any financial claims.

The mention of the name Getty first of all gives rise to one specific association: a severed ear. Like the plot of Lynch's Blue Velvet, any retelling of the story is screwed into the ear that once belonged to John Paul Getty III and only then unscrewed from it, weighted down with a bunch of other details. And Lynch is not here for a red word. In one of the main roles in Lost Highway, he played Getty's heir in the next generation - Balthazar Getty, the son of a man with a cut off ear.

Having screwed deeper into the ear, we will find ourselves at the beginning of the 20th century, at the very source of family history. In 1904, George Franklin Getty, a 49-year-old prosperous lawyer from Minneapolis, raised all his capital and acquired a license to use the subsoil of a plot of land in Oklahoma (oil had been found there three years earlier). This act cannot be called an eccentricity - after all, the founder of the clan was the most normal of the Getty, did not drink, did not smoke, and regularly attended church. Rather, he was driven by the sober calculation of a passionary capitalist. George was the classic hero of the era of primitive accumulation: it is precisely such unremarkable hard workers who make the first millions to be torn to pieces by promiscuous offspring. On his oil Klondike, a middle-aged entrepreneur got rich instantly: 1,100 acres of land gave 100,000 barrels a month, and two years later George moved the family to Los Angeles.

George and his wife Sarah had two children. The daughter died of typhoid fever back in Minneapolis, and the son, named - fashionably in French - Jean-Paul, began to demonstrate outstanding talents already in his youth. At the age of 14, classmates nicknamed him "Getty Dictionary" for his love of reading; afterwards, Jean-Paul was fluent in French, German and Italian, could hold a conversation in four more languages, including Russian, and read ancient authors in Latin and ancient Greek. After studying at Oxford with the future King Edward VIII of Great Britain, the brilliant heir went on a grand tour of Europe and Egypt, anglicized the name, becoming Jay Paul, and in the fall of 1914 borrowed $10,000 from his father to expand the family business in Oklahoma.

The history of the lucky family of capitalists began to turn into a saga with a Hollywood entourage, psychosexual motives and strange clauses in wills.

The Getty Madness Begins! The 22-year-old lucky man hit his first jackpot exactly a year later: oil was found on a plot he bought near the town of Haskell in August 1915. A year later, the commissions received made J. Paul a millionaire, and by the early 1920s he had at least tripled his capital.

John Paul Getty III (no longer ear) at the police station in Rome, 1973.

Why drinking Jay Paul Getty in this picture is unknown. Probably for frugality, 1960.

By the late 1920s, it became apparent to the old Getty that his son's personal life was turning into a suspicious charade. Within five years, Jay Paul managed to marry three times, and each time to a high school student. Jeanette Dumont was 18, they married in 1923 and divorced in 1926. With 17-year-old Allyn Ashby, J. Paul had a holiday romance: they got married in 1927 and divorced the very next year. Then Jay Paul married Adolphina Helmle, with whom he lived for four years. Wedding syncope continued into the 1930s: the serial family man was married to his fourth wife, Ann Roark, for another four years, from 1932 to 1936. And only wife number five - Teddy Lynch - spent two decades married, and divorced only in 1958, the year of the death of their 12-year-old son, who died of a brain tumor.

It seems that Getty lost interest in his legalized companions, barely leaving the threshold of the church. Of course, such matrimonial debauchery could not cause anything but righteous anger and disgust in the Getty father. As a result, the patriarch, who died in 1930, left his son only $ 500 thousand - one-twentieth of his fortune - plus a third of the shares of the family business (the rest went to the widow).

But even this “modest” legacy was enough for Jay Paul to turn around in full. During the Great Depression, a savvy businessman bought several competing companies on the cheap - Pacific Western Oil Corporation, Tidewater Oil, Skelly Oil. He stepped on the main oil vein in 1949, when he acquired from the first Saudi monarch, King Ibn Saud, the right to develop a piece of junk land on the border of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Four years later, a fountain of black gold with a volume of 160 million barrels per year was hammered there.

“The meek inherit the earth, but not the license to use its bowels,” Getty joked then. And then he learned Arabic and bought another 200 companies, covering the entire Middle East with the tentacles of his expansion. In 1957, Fortune magazine named him "America's richest man" and the owner of a fortune of $ 700 million - 1 billion ($ 4.5-6.5 billion in today's money), and the next year the 65-year-old Getty met the owner of 80% of the world's oil production .

Balthazar Getty (left) filmed in David Lynch's Lost Highway.

Billionaires have no age - look at Soros and Murdoch. The Getty didn't have it either, so as he entered retirement autumn, J. Paul decided to finally live the way he really wanted to. With befitting aristocratic scope and equally noble contempt for the philistine norms of popular morality. The tragic death of the younger offspring also played a role: Getty obviously crossed the threshold beyond which the interest of others in his person could have any meaning. In 1959, this avid Anglophile dined with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at their country estate, Sutton Place, near Guildford. The nobles complained about how much it costs them to maintain the ancient estate, which, moreover, continues to roam the headless ghost of the executed wife of Henry VIII (one of six) Anne Boleyn. The next day Getty bought Sutton Place for £65,000 (5 million today); he had spent the previous decade roaming with his entourage from the London Ritz to the George V in Paris and back again.

Getty Villa is a must-visit point of the tourist program in Los Angeles.

Having acquired a dwelling corresponding to his status, Getty immediately began to equip it. To begin with, I walked through art auctions - from where the masterpieces of Rembrandt and Renoir migrated to the walls of Sutton Place. Then he installed the now-legendary pay phone in the hall so that the migrant workers involved in the renovation would not abuse their calls to their homeland. In June 1960, the new owner hosted a housewarming party that turned out to be the first and last party of the refurbished Sutton Place. Fireworks, fortune-tellers, medieval torches and other amusements came to the whole neighborhood to look at, and the next morning the servants had to scrape ice cream from tapestries and pick cigarette butts from carpets.

Soon, the best friend of the Saudi princes, who finally tied up with the matrimony, began to collect a personal harem.

In the best years, four real aristocrats permanently lived in Sutton Place: a Frenchwoman, art critic, great-granddaughter of Nicholas II, Marie Tessier; ex-wife of a wealthy Cornish landowner, interior designer Penelope Kitson; the sister of the Duke of Rutland, Ursula d'Abo, and the Nicaraguan widow Rosabella Burch, both she and the Getty loved to watch TV shows. “English aristocrats captivate the imagination of J. Paul,” said Lady Ursula in an interview in the early 1970s, in the midst of living together. “He gets turned on by the fact that real countesses cook dinner for him.”

All these countesses, before settling in Sutton Place, signed an agreement on the absence of any financial claims against the owner. They all counted on their modest corner in the billionaire's will. And they all got something: some - $209 monthly salary until death, some - $1167 of the same. And only the stately Penelope - the only woman of the golden autumn of the patriarch, whom he took seriously, the grand dame of Sutton Place, who was in charge of the interior design of his estates and oil tankers - was awarded a serious investment.

Gordon Getty (pictured with wife Ann) is the richest contemporary opera composer, 1973.

Jay Paul Getty in the Sutton Place dining room, 1960.

Getty's sexual appetite did not disappear even when he was over 80. The powerful old man was injected with the experimental drug H3 - one of the prototypes of Viagra - and he chose a partner for the night just before going to bed. Marafet, an elderly libertine, was inducing with the help of planned braces; he kept a "black book" of his amorous victories and in every possible way encouraged quarrels between concubines. “Getty couldn’t say no to women and yes to men,” summed up one of his biographers. At the same time, he was never handsome; he was not a freak either, but he was a copy of his father, slightly stamped with degeneration.

In the last decade and a half of Getty's life, the most unpleasant features of his personality also appeared. First of all, blatant greed. The pay phone is not yet the most grotesque example of billionaire plushism. Spending millions on his art collection (although he was said to spare money on it by not buying too expensive paintings), Getty saved on clothes by trimming frayed shirt cuffs. The stamp paper was another point of miserliness: instead of answering letters "from scratch", J. Paul wrote the answer in the margins of the letter sent and sent it back. Once he took his friends to a dog show in London and made them walk around the bush until fife-o-clock, when the price of admission was halved.

Endless fears and paranoia also entered the local folklore: Sutton Place was guarded around the perimeter by watchdogs, and a lion named Nero lived on the estate itself.

The billionaire was afraid to fly on an airplane, suffered from outbreaks and other, most incredible phobias: sometimes he was afraid to answer the phone, fearing that “something might come out” from there. This phobia was constantly used by the Getty's faithful secretaries as an explanation when the boss was not in the mood to talk on the phone with relatives.

Relatives, meanwhile, grew, grew and grew. First of all, the sons, of whom, after the death of the younger Timothy in 1958, four remained. The most promising in the eyes of his father was the eldest - named after his grandfather George Franklin Getty II. Jay Paul named him vice president of Getty Oil; nevertheless, the filial business ideas for some reason did not impress the parent much. Over time, George fell into a prolonged depression, divorced, remarried, then began to drink and eat pills. In June 1973, he drank a lot of alcohol, ate more pills, shot a little with a gun, and then tried to stab himself with a barbecue fork. The drunken heir failed to do this properly, however, in the end, he passed out by the pool of his mansion in Los Angeles and no longer regained consciousness. The next day, George Franklin Getty II died in the hospital.

Mark Getty - co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Getty Images

One of the pavilions of the Getty Center Museum in Los Angeles

Much less promising was the second son, John Paul Getty II, now known as Sir Paul Getty. After his parents divorced, John Paul went to San Francisco, studied at the university there, served in Korea, got married early, and one day called his brother Gordon (about whom below), who served as vice president in one of the companies controlled by Getty Oil, asking him to find him a job. Gordon arranged for his older brother to be a tanker. A year later, the chief Getty, impressed from across the ocean by the industriousness of his offspring, summoned him to Paris and appointed him president of the Italian branch of Getty Oil. Until that moment, J. Paul Getty and John Paul Getty had not seen each other for 12 years.

Everything would have gone well further if in the mid-1960s John Paul had not divorced his wife Gail and remarried - to the hereditary loafer Talita Paul, related to all of bohemian London, from artist Augustus John to Bond creator Ian Fleming. Talita was a free-thinking girl, circling on the carousel of swinging London and was friends with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and others like them. Keith Richards later recalled that the Gettys had the best opium in town; son, born in the summer of 1968, the swinging couple named Tara Gabriel Gramophone Galaxy. Talita is now described as nothing more than a style icon, and Patrick Lichfield's photo of the couple on a rooftop in Marrakech hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. She also acted in films - in the legendary Barbarella. In the summer of 1971, Talita Getty died of a heroin overdose in Rome, culminating in the tragic year of the departure of the counterculture titans of the 1960s - Brian Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Edie Sedgwick.

John Paul was not a suspect in the case of his wife's death, but he decided not to return to Italy out of harm's way and settled in London. But his first wife Gail continued to live in the Eternal City along with four children - the eldest son John Paul Getty III, the youngest son Mark and daughters Eileen and Ariadne. In the ill-fated summer of 1973, when the unlucky uncle George Franklin put an end to his story by the pool in California with a fork, John Paul Getty III was sixteen. He had already left home for a year, and six months earlier he had been expelled from school. A young, long-haired slob with an innocent face of a lamb and curls of a "golden hippie" moonlighted as a model in men's magazines, hung out at Roman Polansky's villa waiting to be invited to act, and went to communist demonstrations.

The eldest son of Jay Paul - George Franklin Getty, 1967.

The famous Marrakesh photo of John Paul Getty with his wife Talita by Patrick Lichfield, 1970.

A month after the death of the uncle, at three o'clock in the morning on July 10, the young Getty was kidnapped right on the square in Rome. He was carried for a long time in the trunk of a car, and then thrown into a Calabrian cave. Masked men transported him from place to place, forced him to write letters to his relatives demanding to pay $ 17 million, took him on grueling hikes in the mountains and gave him cognac instead of water. For the first few months, no one, including Gail and the police, believed in the veracity of the kidnapping - everyone considered it a joke of a goofy dunce. It seemed that he was lying stoned on a yacht with one of his friends and would soon appear in Rome. Autumn came, but the Getty III did not appear. The powerful old man sent a rebuke from Sutton Place, saying that, they say, "he has 14 grandchildren, and if he pays the ransom, he will have 14 kidnapped grandchildren the next morning."

The "Golden Hippie" continued to sleep in the cave, washing down pneumonia with cognac and listening to the radio given to him by the masked men.

In November, a letter arrived in one of the Italian newspapers. The envelope contained a severed ear, a lock of hair, and a note demanding $3.2 million. The letter from Naples came from Naples for three weeks because of the strike. The text of the note read: “This is Paul's ear. If ten days from now his family still thinks this is a prank organized by himself, the other ear will come in the mail. And then all of it - in pieces. After Gail identified the ear of the firstborn by freckles, the stingy grandfather agreed to pay the ransom: he paid $ 2.2 million himself (the maximum amount that could be deducted from taxable profits), and borrowed the rest from John Paul - his son, the father of the kidnapped, - under 4%.

A ton of cash was taken to a snow-covered gas station on the border with Calabria. Soon Getty III himself showed up, chilled and wrapped in a blanket. When he called his grandfather in England, he referred to the fact that today he was afraid of the phone, and did not pick up the phone. Three years later, on June 6, 1976, J. Paul Getty died at his estate.

John Paul Getty with his wife Talita in Rome, 1966.

Getty III, freed from captivity, married his German girlfriend, returned to a bohemian lifestyle, hung out in New York with Warhol, acted in films and in 1981 fell victim to an explosive mixture of alcohol, Valium and methadone, which led to a stroke and paralysis . He spent the next 30 years in a wheelchair and died in 2011, having managed to sue his father for the right to receive a monthly $ 28 thousand for medical expenses.

The life of John Paul Getty II was happier than the life of his eldest son. In the mid-1980s, he spent nine months in a rehabilitation clinic in London, where Margaret Thatcher, among others, visited him. Inspired by the visit, the billionaire turned his mind and directed all his energy - and a significant part of the capital - to charity and the restoration of the run-down estate of Wormsley Park in the London suburbs. A year after being discharged from the hospital, he received the Order of the British Empire from the hands of Elizabeth, and ten years later he officially changed his name and became Sir Paul Getty, having received British citizenship the year before.

After the death of Getty II and Getty III, other family members continued to carry the banner of big money and extraordinary madness. The last living son of Jay Paul, Gordon Getty, ran the family company after his father's death and eventually sold Getty Oil to another oil giant, Texaco. Gordon Getty is a prominent classical composer: his latest opera to date, The Canterville Ghost, premiered at the Leipzig Opera in 2015. Presumably, Gordon is the richest opera composer of our time: his capital is estimated at $ 2 billion, he is one of the third hundred richest people in the United States. He is also the most consistent son of his father, and not only in business, but also in his personal life: once it was discovered that the father of four sons has a parallel family ... with three daughters!

The most successful of the descendants of Patriarch George can rightfully be considered Mark Getty, the younger brother of John Paul III, the founder of the largest photo agency Getty Images. Well, the honest successor of Talita and Getty III was Gordon's son, film director Andrew Getty, who shot his only film - the horror "Evil Within" - for 15 years and died three years ago from an overdose of methamphetamines in his luxurious mansion in the Hollywood hills.

The current total fortune of the Getty clan is estimated at $ 5.4 billion, and therefore the story of one family and its big money will continue. Balthazar Getty alone has four children, and no one can predict whether we will write about them 20 years later. J. Paul Getty biographer Robert Lenzner wrote about it this way: “Getty’s main rule was: “Give nothing to the government,” because he believed that the government was capable of throwing any money down the drain. He almost succeeded. Rule two: "Protect children and grandchildren from huge money." On this part, he did not succeed.

The top seven financial transactions of the Getty family

1904

Lawyer George Franklin Getty buys an Oklahoma oil license for his Minnesota Oil Company and becomes a millionaire within two years.

1914

J. Paul Getty buys his first Nancy Tailor N1 Oil Well Site in Oklahoma. A year later, oil is found there.

1949

J. Paul Getty buys a concession from King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia for the right to extract oil on a plot of land between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The amount of the deal is $9.5 million (almost $100 million today) plus a million dollars over 60 years. This deal turned Getty into one of the richest men on earth. Also, the agreement with the Saudis allowed the Getty to make a lot of money on the energy crisis of 1973.

1973

J Paul Getty agreed to pay a ransom for his kidnapped grandson John Paul Getty III.

1976

After the death of J. Paul, one of the museums he built - Getty Villa on the Pacific coast in Los Angeles, stylized as the Villa of the Papyri in ancient Roman Herculaneum - inherited $ 661 million in the will of the deceased. The Getty Center was built with this money.

1986

Gordon Getty sold Getty Oil to Texaco for $10 billion.

2012

The Carlyle Group buys Getty Images, a company founded by Mark Getty in 1993, for $2.5 billion. Starting in 1995, with an initial capital investment of $16 million, Mark Getty has been buying up competing photo agencies and consolidating them into one big company. Now Getty Images owns the world's largest photo bank with 70 million images.

As stated in one famous television series, the rich also cry.

At the same time, the most serious troubles, as a rule, do not happen with the billionaires themselves, but with their offspring. Such a misfortune did not bypass the family clan of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty. The grandson of a billionaire, recognized as the richest man in the world, John Paul Getty III first became addicted to drugs, and then he was kidnapped by criminals. The release of the hostage has turned into an exciting crime story.

John Paul Getty III was born in 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But he spent most of his childhood in Italy - in Rome, where his father, also John Paul, represented the interests of the family oil corporation. In 1964, Paul's father divorced and married an obscure Dutch actress. Apparently, tired of the harsh everyday life of big business, after the divorce, John Paul Getty II hit all the hard. He completely abandoned all business and, together with his new wife, began to live with a colony of hippies in Morocco, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes a former businessman came to rest in England, where a luxurious house was bought for this purpose.

Young Paul was sent by his father and stepmother to study at the elite English school St. George in Rome. After finishing it with difficulty, Paul did not go to university. He stayed in Italy and led a bohemian life, as the available family capital allowed it. Among his close acquaintances were hippies, rock musicians, drug addicts, prostitutes, vagrants and other dubious personalities. Therefore, when at 3 am on July 10, 1973, Paul Getty was kidnapped in a square in Rome and taken away in an unknown direction, no one was particularly surprised.

Only the motives for the kidnapping of the billionaire's grandson remained a mystery. At first, many thought that all this was a talented staging, organized by Paul himself, in order to extract more money from his tight-fisted relatives. Then the police put forward a version that terrorists from the famous "Red Brigades" were involved in the kidnapping. However, no political statements were made by the “brigadists”, and this version had to be abandoned.

Some journalists claimed that rivals of the family clan organized the kidnapping in order to force Paul Getty's grandfather to make secret concessions in the oil business. After all, he was successfully engaged in the development of oil fields in Saudi Arabia and back in 1957 was declared the richest man on Earth.

The kidnapping of a rich man's grandson

Soon, the kidnappers sent a ransom note to Paul Getty's father and grandfather demanding $17 million. Only in this case they guaranteed the safe return of the hostage. The kidnapped father did not have that kind of money. And the head of the clan, Jean Paul Getty, who lived in England, answered the proposal of unknown bandits with a categorical refusal.

Speaking to reporters, Getty Sr. said that he has fourteen more grandchildren. If he pays the criminals the required amount, his grandchildren will be kidnapped one by one, and he will be completely ruined.

A week later, an envelope arrived by mail at the editorial office of a provincial Italian newspaper. It contained a strand of hair and a severed human ear. In the cover letter, unknown perpetrators threatened to brutally kill the kidnapped teenager if they did not receive $3.2 million within ten days. Only after that, Getty Sr. agreed to pay the ransom, but not in full, but in installments.

First, the bandits were transferred 2.2 million dollars, and then the rest of the amount. Eventually, through skillful bargaining, Getty Sr. lowered the ransom to $2.9 million. It is also curious that he lent all the money necessary to save his grandson to his own son at four percent per annum. Having received the money, the bandits released the young Paul. He was discovered in southern Italy, in an abandoned house, on December 15, 1973.

When a joyful Paul III began to call his grandfather in England to thank him for his release, he refused to pick up the phone. And then he refused to meet with his grandson at all. As the saying goes, the rich have their quirks.

mafia district scale

While the Getty family bargained with the kidnappers and sought the release of the hostage, the Italian police also did not waste time. Using operational channels, Italian detectives managed to figure out and then arrest the gang that carried out the daring kidnapping of the billionaire's grandson. Much to the dismay of the press, it was announced that the "kidnapping of the century" was organized by a small criminal group from the province of Calabria, located in southern Italy.

The police arrested nine perpetrators, including one driver, one carpenter, one municipal hospital orderly and one olive oil salesman from Calabria. The gang was headed by two mafiosi of the regional scale, some Girolamo Piromalli and Saverio Mammoliti. During the court hearings, all the circumstances of the daring kidnapping were revealed. A tip on a promising "client" to the Calabrian bandits was given by a drug addict who hung out with Paul Getty in Rome. The rest was a matter of technique.

John Paul Getty III - paralyzed and blind

A group of criminals arrived in Rome by car. Paul was tracked down, seized right on the street, injected with a horse dose of sleeping pills and taken to a mountain village in Calabria, where he was kept in an abandoned house. Communication with the relatives of the kidnapped and receiving a ransom were carried out through nominees. However, the court managed to prove the guilt of only two criminals. The rest had to be released for lack of evidence.

By the way, the police never found most of the money received as a ransom. Two million dollars disappeared without a trace, and, according to some skeptics, was used as a fee for lawyers and as a bribe to the court. As for Paul Getty III himself, after being released from the hands of the bandits, he was treated for a long time, underwent plastic surgery to restore the ear, which the kidnappers cut off. Then Paul got married, his son was born, but the psychological trauma associated with the kidnapping never let go of the "billionaire granddaughter." He continued to abuse alcohol and drugs, already in 1981 this led to a stroke, which made the 25-year-old guy paralyzed, deaf and almost blind with a disability. Getty III died at the age of 54.

The famous American billionaire, oil tycoon, considered in the 1960s. the richest man in the world. A philanthropist who has donated over $200 million to charitable causes. A mystic who believed all his life that the spirit of the Roman Caesar Adrian moved into him. (b. 1892 - d. 1976)

Jean Paul Getty, the world's richest man, died in a London clinic on June 6, 1976. The announcement of his will had the effect of an exploding bomb. Four sons and 14 grandchildren of Paul Getty, as well as his devoted servants, received miserable pennies. For example, one of the sons, Ronaldo, inherited from his father only a diary with critical remarks about his abilities. Getty bequeathed all his billions to the museum in Malibu - so he wanted to gain immortality. Now it is the richest museum in the history of mankind, its contents are worth about 2.5 billion dollars.

The Getty offspring, who had been at enmity with each other for a long time, after the death of the billionaire began to visit each other. There's only one place on earth that none of them like to visit, and that's the old family estate in Malibu, California, not far from Hollywood.

In the main hall of the museum there is a marble bust of the late owner, made during his lifetime. By order of the old man, the sculptor emphasized the similarity of the original with the ancient statues of Caesar Adrian, because Getty was sure all his life that the spirit of the Roman emperor lives in him. Obviously, some interesting statements of the eccentric billionaire will remain in history: “Disinterested friendship is possible only between people with the same income. If you don't have money, you think about money all the time. If you have money, you only think about money.”

Getty could go down in history as the richest man of his era - after all, he had more money than any of the Rockefellers. However, the world remembered him for a different reason. Getty believed until his death that a mysterious creature had taken over his body, which forced him to fight oil wars, kill competitors in cold blood and hunt hundreds of women. He believed that the spirit of Caesar Adrian ruined his life and turned him into the most unfortunate rich man on the planet.

Paul's parents - George Franklin Getty, an Irishman, and Sarah Catherine MacPherson, the daughter of Scottish emigrants, strictly followed the canons of the Methodist Church and believed that the Almighty rewarded with wealth for the observance of Christian commandments. Misfortune forced the pious head of the family to commit a dangerous act for a Christian: after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Gertrude, who died in 1890 from typhus, he began to seek solace in the occult sciences. George spent his evenings at séances, summoning the spirits and begging them for the birth of an heir. One day, from the lips of a medium who had entered a trance, he heard the expected news. A certain spirit, who told about himself only that during his lifetime he was endowed with imperial power in Ancient Rome, promised that in two years a son would be born in the Getty family.

The prophecy came true, on December 15, 1892, a boy was born, to whom his parents gave the name Jean Paul. The future creator of the oil empire grew up small, weak and ugly. The mother loved her son very much, but tried to restrain her feelings so as not to spoil him, and forbade him to communicate with peers in order to avoid bad influence. Subsequently, Getty recalled that in childhood he felt lonely and deprived of parental warmth. Strict upbringing and numerous prohibitions played a bad joke on Paul: in the end, his violent temper broke out.

Paul's father was rarely at home. Starting in the insurance business, he soon succumbed to the Oklahoma oil fever and tirelessly increased his capital. In 1906 Getty Sr. became a millionaire. Finally turning his attention to his grown son, he was surprised to find that he was completely out of hand. On the day he turned 14, Paul proudly announced that he had long lost his innocence. At the age of 17, he dropped out of school and plunged headlong into the nightlife. At the same time, Paul began to earn money stubbornly, even fanatically in his father's oil fields.

Parents did not know what to think, but in fact everything was very simple. Paul saw in a school textbook a statue of Caesar Trajan Adrian Augustus - and immediately the boy was seized by a strange, inexplicable feeling, the nature of which he was able to understand much later. Paul believed that the spirit of the Roman emperor returned to Earth with him, to whom he really looked like. Gradually, the young man began to feel that he was looking at the world through the eyes of the Roman dictator and hearing his formidable voice. This voice was terribly annoying, but it was impossible to resist his orders. Therefore, the young man decided to do everything in order to live himself as an emperor. To do this, it was necessary to become fabulously rich and bring the list of his mistresses to 400.

To get closer to his dream, Paul needed money. Only they could give the young man what the battle-hardened Roman emperor used to take by force. And Paul Getty began to build his own empire.

When he was 20, he borrowed $500 from his parents and became the owner of his first oil well. Two years later, having long ago paid off the debt, he was able to proudly announce to his parents: “I just made my first million dollars, and you can believe me, it won’t be the last!” Indeed, this was only the beginning of a long chain of successes. Paul had an exceptional sense of smell that allowed him to recognize rich oil fields. It should be noted that it was on his advice that George Getty made the best deal in his life: he acquired a concession in Santa Spring, which everyone refused.

Parents could calmly look at the future of their heir. But neither his abilities, nor the brilliant results he achieved, combined with frugality, calmed them. They recognized that Paul is ambitious and hard-working, not throwing money away. However, the son's excessive passion for women and the so-called "dolce vita" went against their puritanical views. Therefore, fearing that their son’s excesses would not affect the state of the family business, they decided to keep him out of the business of the company for as long as possible, despite the fact that sooner or later this would have to happen, since he was their only heir. Moreover, they convinced each other that Paul did not have real professional qualities, although he proved the opposite every day. His parents stubbornly insisted that he was simply lucky and would not continue like this for a long time. And therefore, before his death, George Getty in his will appointed his wife the manager of his entire fortune, estimated at several tens of millions of dollars, placing his son under humiliating financial custody.

Paul did not have enough cash to carry out his gigantic plans. Here he could rely only on capital obtained by his own labor, that is, on ten thousand shares of the Getty Oil Company. Sarah, who entered into inheritance rights, made her son understand that he would not receive a cent from her. Paul was well aware that he could not break the firmness of his mother, especially since she, extremely dissatisfied with her dissolute lifestyle, told everyone that her son was good for nothing and that he simply could not be trusted with anything.

However, when the financial crisis of 1929 occurred, Paul was able to show what he was capable of. For a far-sighted and audacious player like him, there are plenty of opportunities for enrichment. Without hesitation and against the advice of his mother, he sold the shares of the family firm, and invested the money he received in an enterprise in which he believed that he was the only one who seemed to be able to survive the crisis: the enterprise was called the Pacific Western Oil Company.

As risky as it was, it was a masterstroke. The operation was so successful that even Sarah was shaken in the opinion she had about her son. Well, Paul's ambitions, already huge, have grown even more. In an instant, he made a decision that determined the purpose of his life: to raise the necessary funds for as long as necessary, but to gain control of the Tidewater Associated Oil Company, one of the largest firms in the United States.

He fanatically sought to succeed, fighting for black gold with the rest of the world - and won, capturing more and more new spheres of influence. At first, the oil tycoons ignored the young upstart. Getty sneaked up on his victims slowly and carefully, and competitors did not immediately notice that they were in mortal danger.

In an office on the third floor of the George V Hotel in Paris, Paul worked for days, sometimes even forgetting about food. For twenty years, he swallowed up half of his competitors, and each time the victim was several times larger than the predator. In business, Getty was distinguished by icy endurance and a fantastic memory. He built his empire with purpose and soon owned hundreds of oil rigs in America and the Middle East, a fleet of tankers and an army of subordinates.

In 1933, his mother finally handed over the management of the Getty Oil Company to Paul, placed at his full disposal almost the entire capital of the family business, although she left a certain part in common use, which could serve as a guarantee for both of them in the event, very possible, in her opinion if they find themselves in the face of collapse. And finally, Sarah, although with considerable skepticism, gave her son her maternal blessing for the implementation of grandiose conquest plans, which, as he was convinced, would certainly succeed.

Two years later, Paul had the opportunity to come close to fulfilling his cherished dream. Taking advantage of the fact that the capital under his control grew sharply (due to the decision of his mother), Getty seized control of one of the Tidewater subsidiaries. Under the very nose of John D. Rockefeller, the undisputed king of oil, he managed to eat a hole, quite a tiny one, in this huge and so tempting piece of cheese. This was followed by several years of bitter struggle, but he still achieved his goal - in 1939, Tidewater and Getty Oil merged. Since then, the fortune of Paul Getty began to grow at a frantic pace. Initially considerable, it increased so rapidly and with such constancy that in the end Paul became one of the richest people in the world.

Another 25 years passed, and the Getty defeated the almighty once "Standard Oil", owned by the Rockefeller clan. Already by the mid-1960s. Getty Oil's profits reached fantastic proportions: the oil tycoon increased his inherited fortune of $15 million to an unprecedented amount of $700 million, and the total value of his company's assets significantly exceeded $3.5 billion. According to Fortune magazine, in those years, Getty daily increased his capital by half a million dollars.

Over time, the American upstart began to be hated not only by businessmen, but also by the British nobility - for the fact that he bought up the estates of impoverished aristocrats on the cheap. Paul Getty bought his English estate Sutton Place from the bankrupt Duke of Sutherland for only 600 thousand pounds. In those years, he earned that kind of money in two days.

Once in one of the occult books, Getty read that sexual activity is one of the nine causes of reincarnation. Since then, he perceived sex as a cure for old age. It is known that he made love until his advanced years, carefully selecting partners. On the personal “front”, the most beautiful women became his trophies. Getty considered the affair with Marie Tessier, the great-niece of one of the Russian Grand Dukes, to be a great victory of his life, although he forgot her as quickly as everyone else. None of his five wives managed to stay close to Paul for more than three years. As soon as the next wife announced to him that she was pregnant, Paul immediately stopped all relations with her. Even to those who knew Getty well, this seemed strange. They did not know that Emperor Hadrian hated everyone in whom he saw his successors to the throne, and died childless. And Paul Getty tried to imitate his life in everything.

To relieve stress caused by constant nervous stress, Getty became addicted to drugs. They took him to the fantasy world, reconciled his two “Selves” to each other. However, he was able to stop in time and get rid of drug addiction. Later, to distract himself from business, Paul took up philanthropic activities. Imitating his idol, the businessman invested a fortune in works of art. Although the Getty could not distinguish the work of one artist from another, his first purchase was a precious landscape by van Goyen. The rural house in the picture just liked the businessman and reminded him of his childhood. The next acquisition in 1940 was the “Portrait of the merchant Martin Luten” by the great Rembrandt. Here he was attracted by the cheapness: the owner of the picture, a Dutch Jew, gave it up for only 65 thousand dollars, as he was frightened by the approach of the Nazis. In general, collecting art, Getty remained primarily a businessman, buying most often what was sold at a bargain price.

The only thing that really interested him was marble sculptures. Mr. Getty purchased ancient Roman statues from different owners. In the late 1960s he bought from Lord Lansdowne part of a Roman statue of Hercules. When the ancient fragment was delivered to the Getty, it made an inexplicable, almost mystical impression on the collector. The billionaire immediately called Lord Lansdowne back and asked where the sculpture was found. As it turned out, the statue was discovered during excavations of the ancient palace of Villa dei Papiri, buried under a layer of volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. e. It was there, according to historians, that the great Roman emperor Trajan Adrian Augustus lived for several years.

The businessman dropped all his business and went to Italy. "I was already here in a past life," he later wrote in his diary. Getty ordered to make detailed drawings of the building and decided to build an exact copy of the Villa dei Papiri in Malibu. By his order, 16 tons of golden travertine stone were brought from Tivoli, from which Trajan's villa was built. Thanks to millions of oil, time has turned back: the gardens of a luxurious ancient palace have turned green under the sun, the spray of fountains and waterfalls has sparkled.

It was a desperate attempt by a billionaire to break into immortality. Like Emperor Hadrian, who immortalized his name with the construction of a renovated Roman Pantheon, the old Getty tried to put all the energy of his dollars into one giant leap to eternal glory. Over time, the private home of the Getty in Malibu turned into a unique museum, where hundreds of precious paintings, sculptures and antiques were kept. But the owner of this luxurious estate himself never saw it with his own eyes. Paul Getty supervised the construction from London and, due to old age, could no longer endure transatlantic sea travel, and he was terribly afraid of flying in airplanes.

Towards the end of his life, the spirit of Adrian completely subjugated the old man's psyche, and he began to be haunted by fears and inexplicable manias. First, the businessman got himself a live lion named Nero, as an inner voice told Paul that only lions could protect him from danger. Love for predators was accompanied by bouts of anger towards the people around him. When the grandson of the oil tycoon, Jean Paul Getty III, was kidnapped by Calabrian mobsters, the old man refused to pay them a $2 million ransom. It was only when the boy's severed ear was mailed to him that he agreed to hand over the money. Until the end of his life, he was convinced that the kidnapping of his grandson was set up by the 16-year-old boy himself and his mother in order to make old Paul fork out. And when the billionaire’s granddaughter died of AIDS, he didn’t even have a few sympathetic words for a telegram. The fate of children and grandchildren worried the businessman much less than the future of the noble spirit that lived in his body. The old man was very afraid that after his death the spirit would turn into an unworthy shell.

He categorically did not want to die, until the last days he tried to preserve his youth with the help of plastic surgeries and entertainment with women. When the Getty learned that Caesar Adrian had died in his own bed, he ordered the bed removed from his room and spent the nights sitting in an easy chair, wrapped in a blanket. In the last years of his life, his face, disfigured by an unsuccessful plastic surgery, looked like the death mask of a Roman emperor. He sat motionless for hours in an armchair with his eyes closed. Nero the plush lion cub “dozed” on his lap.

Paul Getty died in his sleep at the age of 84. “The richest, loneliest and most selfish man in the world has passed away. Not once in his life did he donate a single dollar to any charitable organization, ”one of the news anchors described this event on the day of his death, June 6, 1976. According to doctors, death occurred from a respiratory tract infection, although the main The cause was prostate cancer. The coffin was airlifted from England to California. And immediately after his death, the shadow of this strange man, who laid down his life on the altar of serving his own mania, fell on his heirs.

The eldest son of Paul Getty, George, quickly ruined alcoholism, he committed suicide. The life of the second son, Ronald, also failed. After the announcement of the will, he became a poor resident of South Africa. The third offspring of the oil emperor - Paul Getty Jr. - went down in history as the "golden hippie from Morocco." For a long time he reveled and debauched in his African villa with a strange name - "Palace of Passion", trying to "surpass" his father in entertainment and debauchery. However, it all ended with a clinic where he was diagnosed with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and a whole bunch of chronic venereal diseases. The youngest of the descendants of the old Getty - Gordon - suffered the least from family problems. Perhaps only because even during the life of his father he communicated with him extremely rarely. However, his dreams were not destined to come true: Gordon's hopes to open his opera house with the money due to him after the death of his parent collapsed.

By the mid 1990s. heaven seems to have taken pity on the descendants of the oil emperor. Paul Getty Jr. finally recovered from drug addiction and even became interested in cricket. Gordon Getty got rich, bought himself a Boeing and a mansion in California. Ronald Getty lives with new hopes - both of his daughters married millionaires. Who knows, maybe the world will hear about a new millionaire named Getty.

Elena Vasilyeva, Yuri Pernatiev

From the book "50 famous businessmen of the XIX - early XX century."

Also known as Paul Getty, he is the eldest of four children of John Paul Getty and his first wife Abigail Harris, and grandson of oil magnate Jean Paul Getty. His son, Balthazar Getty, became an actor, he is known for the series Charmed, Ghost Whisperer, Brothers & Sisters.

John Paul Getty III was born November 4, 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and spent most of his childhood in Rome, Italy (Rome, Italy), as his father was the head of the Italian division of the Getty family oil business. His parents divorced in 1964, and in 1966 his father remarried Dutch model and actress Talitha Pol. Their marriage lasted five years, during which time Paul's father and stepmother lived as hippies (very wealthy hippies, it should be noted) and divided their time between England (England) and Morocco (Morocco).

In early 1971, Paul was expelled from St. George's English School in Rome. His father returned to England, and young Paul remained in Rome, where he led a bohemian life. At 3 am on July 10, 1973 Paul Getty was abducted in Piazza Farnese, Rome.The kidnappers sent a ransom note of $17 million in exchange for his safe return.After reading the note, some family members suspected that the kidnapping was staged by Paul himself and was the prank of a rebellious teenager , because he often joked earlier that the only way to get money out of his tight-fisted grandfather was to arrange his own kidnapping.

Semi blindfolded and uve

angry in a mountain refuge in Calabria (Calabria). The kidnappers sent a second ransom note, which was delayed by a strike by Italian postal workers. Paul's father, who did not have that kind of money, asked his father, Jean Paul Getty, whose fortune was already estimated at $ 2 billion, but was refused. Getty Sr. stated that if he paid off the kidnappers, his remaining 14 grandchildren would be kidnapped one by one. In November 1973, the daily newspaper received an envelope containing a strand of hair and a human ear, which included threats to permanently mutilate Paul if the extortionists did not receive $3.2 million within ten days.

Then Getty Sr. agreed to pay the ransom, but only $2.2 million, as it was the maximum amount that was not taxed. He lent the missing money to save his grandson to his son at 4% per annum. In the end, the kidnappers received approximately $2.9 million and Paul was found alive in southern Italy on December 15, 1973, shortly after the ransom was paid.

The police detained nine kidnappers: a carpenter, an orderly, a former criminal and an olive oil seller from Calabria, as well as several high-ranking members of the local mafia group, including Girolamo Piromalli (

Girolamo Piromalli) and Saverio Mammoliti (Saverio Mammoliti). Two of them were convicted and sent to prison, the rest - including mafiosi - were released for lack of evidence. Most of the money disappeared without a trace.

In 1977, Paul Getty underwent surgery to restore his ear, which he lost due to kidnappers. A number of writers have used this incident as inspiration for their books.

In 1974, Paul Getty married a German woman, Gisela Martine Zacher, who was five months pregnant. Paul knew Gisela and her twin sister Jutta before the kidnapping. Paul was 18 years old when his son Balthazar was born. In 1993, the couple divorced.

What happened ruined Paul Getty. He became an alcoholic and drug addict, and his 1981 cocktail of Valium, methadone, and liquor led to liver failure and a stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind.

In 1999, Getty, along with several other members of his family, became a citizen of Ireland (Republic of Ireland) in exchange for investments in the Irish economy in the amount of about 1 million pounds each. Subsequently, this law was repealed.

Jean Paul Getty or Paul Getty (Jean Paul Getty) - American industrialist, one of the first in the history of dollar billionaires, founder of the Getty Museum in Malibu as an exact copy of the Villa dei Papiri (it stores paintings, sculptures and antiques). The Getty empire included the largest Getty Oil Company and more than 200 concerns.

He was born on December 15, 1892 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA in the family of the Irish oil magnate George Franklin Getty and the daughter of Scottish emigrants Sarah Katherine McPherson Risher, who were already at a respectable age and, moreover, had lost their only daughter Gertrude two years before.

Jean Paul Getty - oil trader

After graduating from Oxford in 1913, Jean Paul began trading oil in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, and by 1916 he had earned his first million dollars of his own. That same year, his company moved to California.

If you don't have money, you think about money all the time. If you have money, you only think about money.

In the 1920s, Jean Paul Getty bought up several oil companies that became the foundation of his financial empire. In 1949, he bought an oil concession in Saudi Arabia, which began to generate billions in profits in the 1950s.

In 1957, Jean Paul Getty was declared the richest man in the world. He retained this title until his death. In 1968, Getty became a billionaire. He is believed to have added $500,000 daily to his net worth during the 1960s.

Here's my formula for success: Get up early, work late, and pump oil from your wells.

Personal life

By nature, Jean Paul Getty was a very eccentric and wayward person, he was actively fond of the female sex. He was married five times, and with each of the sons from these marriages he had a rather difficult relationship. Paul Getty said that "a long-term relationship with a woman is possible only if you are bankrupt".

After World War II, Getty moved to England, to Sutton Place in Surrey. His house was surrounded by a fortress wall and guarded by an entire army of security services and twenty dogs specially trained to protect people. He was distinguished by stinginess, in connection with which, he even installed a pay phone for guests in the house, saving on food.

He bequeathed his entire fortune not to 4 sons and 14 grandchildren, but to the Getty Trust, an organization that became the owner of the Paul Getty Museum, as well as the large Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Remember: a million dollars today is not at all what it used to be.

1. John Pearson. Paul Getty. Painful millions."
2. Tom Butler-Bowdon. Jean-Paul Getty. How to be rich.
3. John Paul Getty. "How to become rich".

We also offer to watch a video program about Jean Paul Getty