Background

Jean Paul Getty was born on December 15, 1892, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the United States, to Sarah Catherine McPherson Risher and George Getty in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, formerly a lawyer, entered the oil industry in 1903. In 1905, the family pulled up stakes in the oil business, relocating to Los Angeles, California.

The Gettys lost their ten-year-old daughter to typhoid fever in 1890. Sarah had her second child, Getty, at the age of forty. Sarah never gave her son any physical affection. Getty's unemotional style characterized his approach to business and was the reason family members were kept at a distance his entire life.

Education

In 1906 Getty's 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. In 1912 Getty enrolled in Oxford University in England, from which he received a degree in economics and political science in 1914.

Attending both Berkeley and Oxford University, a young J Paul Getty showed a strong intellect. He spoke seven foreign languages: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Russian, and Arabic. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, he could also read Latin and Ancient Greek. While at Oxford he befriended Prince Edward, who soon became king of England. Getty achieved a highly prized degree in economics and political science and spent years traveling the world. He learned much in this period, shaping his mindset forever.

Career

In 1914 Getty arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, determined to strike it rich as a wildcat oil producer. In September 1914, George Getty, who had become a multi-millionaire by this point, loaned his son some money to buy up oil leases at rock-bottom prices in Oklahoma's 'red-bed' area. Super-driven, Jean Paul was intent on making his very own fortune and went on to sell the leases at a massively marked-up premium.

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. With his new fortune, he briefly retired for the next two years to a life of leisure in Los Angeles, before returning to the oil business in 1919.

During 1920 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.

During the 1920s, having accumulated a substantial fortune, he set about gaining control of several large independent oil companies and began building an immense financial empire, a task that was to occupy the remainder of his life. His most lucrative venture was a 60-year oil concession that he obtained in Saudi Arabia in 1949, the profits from which vaulted him into the billionaire class during the mid-1950s.

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 1930 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 1930 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 1950 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.

Achievements

• Getty founded and controlled the Getty Oil Company and over 200 affiliated companies. In his business career, Getty always continued to invest and reinvest. At his death, he was worth more than $2 billion (approximately $8. 42 billion in 2016).
  
  He established the J. Paul Getty Trust, which operates the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute.

Works

More photos

• book

  • My life and fortunes

    (The autobiography of one of the world's wealthiest men - ...)

    1963
  • The Joys of Collecting

    (In 1965, shortly after founding his namesake museum in Ma...)

    1965
  • How to Be Rich

    (There are plenty of books on making money by men who have...)

    1965
  • As I See It: The Autobiography of J. Paul Getty

    (In his candid and witty autobiography, famed tycoon J. Pa...)

    1976
  • The Golden Age 1968
  • How to be a Successful Executive 1971

Religion

Getty was raised as a Methodist.

Views

Upon his death, Getty bequeathed $1.2 billion to his charitable trust. The J. Paul Getty Trust, which oversees the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, set about expanding the museum and its contributions to the art world. In 1997, it unveiled the Getty Center complex overlooking Los Angeles. His personal art collection was world-class and the gift was the largest ever given in support of the arts at the time.

Quotations: "A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure."

"I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success."

"I don't think there is any story in being known as moneybags. I'd rather be considered a businessman."

"In building a large fortune, it pays to be born at the right time."

Personality

Getty saw himself as a modern oilman, 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 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.

Besides oil, Getty's major interest was art. He began serious collecting in the 1930-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.

Despite being one of the most wealthy people to ever exist, J. Paul Getty was famously reluctant to spend any money on anything. It is said he did his own laundry by hand, just to avoid paying for it to be done, while he was a multi-billionaire. He would always try to aggressively negotiate a discount for everything he purchased, hating to pay full price.

Constantly preoccupied with his constitution, J. Paul was known to only eat healthy foods and chew each mouthful 33 times. The oil baron, walked at least two miles a day using an early pedometer and even lifted weights on a regular basis.

Interests

• 18th-century furniture and paintings

• Artists

  Rubens, Titian, Gainsborough, Renoir, Tintoretto, Degas, Monet

• Sport & Clubs

  boxing

• Athletes

  Jack Dempsey

Connections

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.

Getty long had a complicated and volatile relationship with his children and grandchildren. As they competed to become his successor, and with him not being the most present father, some of his children grew to hate him. In his will, two of his sons were left "The sum of 500 Dollars and nothing more." He literally gave them just 500 dollars despite being one of the world’s most wealthy men. What makes this even crazier is that many of the women he had affairs with were included in the will. Some of them received massive amounts of valuable shares in his oil company and monthly payments for as long as they lived.

Despite his deeply religious upbringing, his immense appetite for women always horrified his parents. But it wasn’t just a thing of his youth. Even when he was married, in all of his multiple marriages, his need for more women was never blunted. It got to the point where his lawyer once famously said that he "could hardly ever say no to a woman, or yes to a man." He had lots of mistresses. Some of his lovers were well-respected women of society, including members of the Russian royal family. Even well into his 80s, he was determined to carry on his affairs, taking drugs to do so.

Father:

George Franklin Getty

The Getty family was not especially wealthy at the time of Jean Paul Getty’s birth, but they were better off than most. His father was a successful lawyer in Minnesota. But this was not enough to satisfy old George Getty. In 1903 he traveled to Oklahoma, a state still in the grip of an oil boom. There he bought the rights to extract oil from a patch of land stretching over a thousand acres. This gamble paid off, and before long they were extracting more than a million barrels of oil per year.

As a young boy at the time, Jean Paul Getty learned a lot about life from witnessing this success story. When his father finally passed away, he inherited one-third of the oil empire George Getty founded. But by that time he had an empire of his own.

Mother:

Sarah Catherine McPherson Risher Getty

Sarah was married to George Getty and bore him two children. Their daughter, Gertrude Lois Getty, was born in 1880 and died in 1890 during a typhoid fever epidemic. Gertrude's parents never fully recovered from her loss.

They were very much overprotective of their only son, Jean Paul Getty, who arrived two years later and wasn't offered any parental affection, birthday parties, or Christmas trees. He wasn't even allowed to play with other children, because he may catch a contagious disease.

Grandson:

John Paul Getty III

When the 16-year-old John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in 1973 and held for an approximately $17 million ransom, his billionaire grandfather refused to pay a dime. During the time of the ordeal, the Getty patriarch told the press, "I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I'll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren."

As the situation grew direr (John Paul Getty III got his ear cut off by his captors), his grandfather agreed to pay the tax-deductible amount of $2.2 million and loaned an additional $1 million to the boy's father for a total of $3.2 million for John Paul Getty III's release. The entire saga lasted five months.

Sister:

Gertrude Lois Getty

Gertrude died from Typhoid fever two years before Getty's birth.

ex-wife:

Jeannette Dumont

The couple got married in 1923. Union ended in divorce.

Son:

George F. Getty II

The oldest of four sons of one of Jean Paul Getty served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Getty Oil Company since 1967.

ex-wife:

Allene Ashby

On a trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico, Paul married 17-year-old Allene. At the time of his marriage to Allene, Paul was still married to his first wife, Jeanette Dermot, from whom he was divorced in 1927.

Paul's marriage to Allene lasted less than two years; his frequent business trips caused them to drift apart. Their marriage was kept a secret for nine years, long after it ended.

ex-wife:

Adolphine Helmle

Getty and Allene divorced in 1928 and the tycoon married his third wife, Adolphine Helmle, that same year. Their son Jean was born in 1929.

Son:

Jean Ronald Getty

ex-wife:

Ann Rork

J. Paul and Adolphine divorced in 1932, and the oil baron married silent movie actress Ann Rork that same year. They had two children: John Paul Jr., the father of kidnap victim John Paul Getty III; and Gordon Peter. But the union wasn't meant to be, and the couple split in 1936.

Son:

John Paul Getty Jr.

Sir J. Paul Getty, Jr., after years of bohemian dissipation, devoted his later life to doing good works with his inherited fortune. In 1959 Getty’s father, J. Paul Getty, Sr., put him in charge of the Getty Oil operations in Rome, but he soon found himself drawn into the counterculture.

After his father’s death in 1976, Getty began gradually to pull himself together, and in the 1980s he embarked upon a career as a philanthropist. He donated millions to the National Gallery and the British Film Institute and stepped in several times to prevent art treasures from being sold to American institutions.

Son:

Gordon Getty

After Jean Paul's death, Gordon Getty led the sale of his family's Getty Oil to Texaco for $10.1 billion in 1984. Once the sole trustee of the family trust, Getty orchestrated the breakup into six separate trusts in 1985.

Since 2008, Getty has given more than $200 million to his philanthropic foundation, which supports performing arts, music, and museum projects.

ex-wife:

Teddy Getty Gaston

Gaston was the fifth wife of J. Paul Getty. She was married to the billionaire from 1939 to 1958, marking the longest of his five marriages.

In Getty, Gaston found a father figure who accepted her but dating the infamously frugal billionaire presented its own unique challenges. In his autobiography, Getty reflected on the payment plan he imposed on his young wife for her opera singing lessons. "I offered to finance her lessons - on a loan basis. She would repay me from her future earnings," he wrote in 1976.

When they married in 1939, Getty had his wife sign a prenuptial agreement, which was rare at the time. Between her studies in Italy and her husband’s obsessive work schedule, the couple rarely saw each other. Gaston did her best to endure her husband’s absence and womanizing, but Getty’s dark side became exceedingly apparent when their son Timmy was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of 6 in 1952.

Son:

Timothy Ware Getty

In her memoir, Teddy revealed the extent of Getty’s tight pockets. Getty moaned about having to foot Timmy’s medical bills when he went blind from a brain tumor.

While Timmy battled for his life, Getty failed to see him for four years. When Timmy died at the age of 12, Getty did not attend the funeral - sending Teddy a note apologizing for being busy.

Friend:

Edward VIII

References

• Getty: The Richest Man in the World
  1985
• The Richest American J. Paul Getty
  1960
• The Great Getty: The Life and Loves of J. Paul Getty - Richest Man in the World
  1985