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Note: N655 Getty, Jean Paul, 1892-1976, American business executive, one of the richest men in the world during his life, b. Minneapolis, Minn. He inherited his father's oil business, George F. Getty, Inc., becoming its president and general manager in 1930. When it was reorganized (1956) as the Getty Oil Company, he became the firm's director and principal owner. From the early 1950s until his death, Getty resided in Great Britain. From his 16th-century Tudor estate, known as Sutton Place, Getty controlled a vast business empire made up of almost 200 concerns. His personal worth was estimated to be approximately $3 billion.
The Reader's Companion to American History
GETTY, JEAN PAUL
(1892-1976), 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.
Robert Lenzner, The Great Getty (1985); Russell Miller, The House of Getty (1985).
Susan Keselenko Coll
Jean Paul Getty (December 15, 1892 - June 6, 1976) was an American industrialist and founder of the Getty Oil Company.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota into a family already in the petroleum business, he was one of the first people in the world with a fortune of over $1 billion U.S. dollars. He was an avid collector of art and antiquities, and his collection forms the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.
He enrolled at the University of Southern California, then at Berkeley before graduating in 1914 from Magdalen College, Oxford with degrees in economics and political science. He worked during the summers on his father's oil fields in Oklahoma. Running his own oil company in Tulsa, he made his first million by 1916. However, in 1917, he announced that he was retiring to become a Los Angeles-based playboy. Although he eventually returned to business, Getty had lost his father's respect. Just before George Franklin Getty died in 1929, he believed that Jean Paul would destroy the family company, and told him so.
He moved to England in the 1950s, where he lived and worked at his 16th-century Tudor estate, Sutton Place near Guildford, until his death.
Born: December 15, 1892 Minneapolis, Minnesota Died: June 6, 1976 London, England American businessman
J. Paul Getty was a billionaire independent oil producer who founded and controlled the Getty Oil Company and over two hundred other related companies. Childhood
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 in the oil business. 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 graduation Getty attended the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley where he studied political science and economics. During the summers he worked on his father's oil rigs as a "roustabout," or unskilled laborer. In 1912 Getty enrolled in Oxford University in England, from which he received a degree in economics and political science in 1914. Afterwards he traveled around Europe before returning to the United States. Striking oil
In 1914 Getty arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, determined to strike it rich as an 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. In 1916 Getty's own first successful well came in, and by the fall of that year he had made his first million dollars as an oil producer.
For the next two years Getty "retired" to the life of a wealthy bachelor 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 (renting out oil rigs), 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.
Paul Getty became the president of the George Getty Oil Company after his father's death in 1930. During the 1930s 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. He also began real estate dealings, including the purchase of the Hotel Pierre in New York City. The Getty Oil Company
After World War II (1939–45), Getty took a 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 area between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He made major deals with King Saud (c. 1880–1953), which shocked the large oil companies. After three years and a $30 million investment, however, Getty found the huge oil deposits that helped make him a billionaire. In 1957 Fortune magazine published a list of the richest men in America. Getty's name headed the list, and the publicity turned Getty into an object of public fascination and legend.
After 1959 Getty stopped living out of hotel rooms and established his home and offices at Sutton Place, a sixteenth-century, seven-hundred-acre manor outside London, England. The huge estate, with its gardens, pools, trout stream, and priceless furnishings, was also a near fortress with elaborate security arrangements. Giant Alsatian dogs had the run of the estate, and there were also two caged lions, Nero and Teresa.
Getty was a celebrity, and public interest, fueled by envy and admiration, focused on Getty's tragedies as well as his billions. The public seemed to like to read into Getty's life the lesson that money does not buy happiness. Getty was married five times and each J. Paul Getty. Reproduced by permission of AP/Wide World Photos. J. Paul Getty. Reproduced by permission of AP/Wide World Photos . marriage ended in divorce. He had five sons, two of whom died before 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 (exchanged for money), part of his ear had been cut off.
Jean Paul Getty died at Sutton Place on June 6, 1976. He is buried on his Malibu, California, estate.
"The parents never fully recovered and were unprepared for J. Paul's arrival. There was no parental affection. There were no birthday parties, no Christmas trees. George and Sarah refused to let him play with other children lest he contract a contagious disease. It was a lonely and chilly childhood." ~ Titans of Fortune
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