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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday June 24, 2002 Volume IV Number 25 |
FOCUS - The Getty
When they all sat down for the reading of the will, just under a billion dollars was hanging in the balance. The room was full of hopeful heirs and their attorneys representing the grandchildren and the string of wives. There were five of those. The deceased passed on in 1976. It took six years and an army of accountants and attorneys to sort out assets and liabilities. He owned a complicated collection of businesses and real estate holdings. The potential heirs expected that the final settlement would result in a comfortable retirement. The attorneys, too.
In 1982, a billion dollars was a staggering amount of money. Even today, especially today, it would be, too. But we live in the post-technology-bubble world, when astonishing stories of sudden billionaires are more common. We are also aware that the stock values that made the billionaires rich can dissipate as rapidly as they materialized. But not in this case. This estate had substance. Everyone knew it.
In 1957, Fortune Magazine put J. Paul Getty on the top of their list of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Up until then, Getty had been reclusive, low profile. But with the uninvited publicity, the former wildcat oil man, taking on the giant “Seven Sister” oil firms, became an overnight legend. In the late fifties, his climb to the top became a subject of national fascination. His rocky relationship with his father, the philandering, the succession of wives, his yachts, his international business exploits, his high risk investments all became the stuff of business lore. Someone convinced him to write a book. “How To Be Rich” became an instant best seller.
To say that J. Paul Getty was an American Horatio Alger story would be missing the mark. Alger, the Unitarian minister whose books in the late eighteen hundreds told the stories of young men born in poverty and without privilege who through determination, hard work and sheer grit, established themselves in the world of commerce. Alger promoted what some have called the “boot straps theory,” which cheerily suggested that in this country, with these opportunities, anyone who chooses to take on the challenge can become wealthy and successful in the American free economy. One must “pull himself up by the boot straps,” and understand that there are no limits.
In many ways, Getty was a self-made man. But he got a rare and generous kick-start early on from his prosperous father.
George Franklin Getty was a Minneapolis attorney who moved his family first to Oklahoma and then to Los Angeles to seek his fortune in the oil business. The Gettys put their only son into private schools, and when young Jean Paul graduated from Polytechnic High School, he already understood his father’s growing business. At eighteen, his parents sent him on a European tour. There he developed sophisticated tastes. He toured the cathedrals. Took in the arts. Europe fascinated him. In 1909, before the First World War broke, Getty’s vision of the world and his place in it, widened.
He returned to California where his father expected he would pursue a college degree. He enrolled at the University of Southern California. He completed his course there, studying also at U.C. Berkeley, and during the summers worked his fathers oil fields in Oklahoma. He took his academic interests to new levels. He enrolled at Oxford University in England in 1912, and by 1914, completed degrees in economics and political science.
With the world at war, certain commodities became staples. The machines of war were thirsty for oil. Young Getty understood the strategic opportunities presented by his father’s business. He wanted indepence. His father agreed. Young Getty moved to Oklahoma, now familiar, and with loans financed by his father, ran his Minnehoma Oil Company. He began to purchase leases in the red-bed area. Using the principles he learned in the classroom in both geologic analysis and high finance and leveraging his father’s cash, he put together his first million dollars in 1916. He was an established lease-broker and a wildcatter. He was twenty four.
He and his father, business partners and chums, were about to collide.
All his life, young Getty had conformed to his father’s expectations. He won his respect. He had achieved in the classroom. In the business office. Out on the rough and tumble drilling fields. His travels abroad, both as a student and as a tourist, fulfilled many of his father’s own dreams. But this new found capacity to create wealth, staggering wealth, gave the son a potent dose of heady independence. He announced to his father that he was through with the business and that he would retire. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1917, young, vibrant, and rich. To his mother’s dismay and his father’s contempt, he launched a new career as a philandering playboy. His father openly predicted that his wayward son would self-destruct.
The dalliance lasted but two years. The young Getty quickly tired of playing socially; he decided he much preferred playing the game of business. But his father remained unforgiving. Getty senior was a distant father. Unattached from the beginning. Now, he was ashamed of his son. From that point on, the two were reluctant business partners; tolerating one another. Using one another. Whatever mutual respect they once enjoyed was gone. And when Getty senior died just after the stock market crash of 1929, he firmly believed that his son would destroy the company. And he told him so.
J. Paul Getty spent the rest of his life possessed by a terrible obsession to prove his father wrong.
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At Oxford, Getty was introduced to the fine arts and antiquities. He was fascinated by the history of culture and the artifacts archived at the University and the great museums in London. He concluded that his American upbringing in Los Angeles and in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he had been deprived of a sense of history and the great work of the masters through the centuries. Then later, in two more years of travel as wealthy tourist, he developed aristocratic tastes.
His pragmatic father considered these pursuits a monumental waste. His mother believed otherwise, that her son’s expanded horizons enriched his life, and gave him a social context from which to build the Getty Empire with a conscience.
Getty never really reconciled those two ever-present, contradictory voices. His father’s harsh utilitarianism. His mother’s social grace. He tried in vain to find someone who would bring him the same balance that his mother brought to his father. He married Jeannette Dumont (1923), then Allene Ashby (1925), then Adolphine Helmle (1928), then Ann Rork (1932), and finally Louisa Lynch (1939). All five marriages ended in divorce.
Meanwhile, his empire expanded. In the thirties he acquired Tidewater and Skelly Oil. His interests went beyond selling oil. He purchased truck lines. Refineries. Storage tanks. He never lost his interest in exploration. After the second World War, Getty invested heavily in a Saudi Arabian venture. It paid off. The consolidated Getty Oil Company made him a billionaire.
His avocation became the arts. He collected paintings and sculptures and monographs and furnishings and fine glassworks and potteries from all over the world. He began work on his Malibu, California estate, a replica of an Italian Villa he found just outside Pompeii. His favorite home, however, he called Sutton Place, a large English country estate outside of London. From there, he ran the operation of his vast global conglomerate.
He became the subject of international curiosity. When, in the early seventies, kidnappers snatched his grandson in Rome for a ransom, Getty refused. The kidnappers sent him a gruesome package – his grandson’s severed ear. Only then did he show some meager compassion for his family.
When J. Paul Getty died in 1976, there were few mourners. By then, he became a living example of the doctrine that money alone (in this case, lots of it) does not guarantee happiness. But there were plenty of heirs, hoping against hope for a significant piece of the fortune Getty left behind.
To most everyone’s surprise, including the curators of the small foundation he established in Malibu, he left most everything to a Trust – thereby barring the U.S. Government from snatching over half the estate through taxation – a Trust dedicated to the preservation of antiquities in perpetuity. The Getty Trust.
In 1982, nearly a billion dollars.
As the will was read, you could hear the groans, all the way to Wall Street. Most of the heirs and their attorneys left empty handed.
* * * * * * *
We wandered the grounds of the expanded Getty Museum in Santa Monica this week. The construction of the opulent grounds, a gleaming white combination of Italian marble and steel and glass overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Century City and the downtown skyline. The gardens are a massive living sculpture.
The Getty Trust must spend the earnings of its investments every year to maintain its tax exempt status. The holdings of the trust are so massive, that the directors have had difficulty achieving that goal. In fact, many believe that the Trust is responsible for the world-wide inflation of the value of art. Finally, the trustees decided to construct the Museum facility, at a staggering billion dollars. Their problem – every Getty investment has appreciated considerably, multiplying the challenge every year.
The tram transports you to another world. The plazas, and the rooms housing the wide variety of art, the vistas and the fountains and the California skies, create a cultural experience that seems to be quite the antithesis of Tinseltown.
We wandered through the Rome exhibit; Kevin and his girl friend Sonya studied in the ancient city a couple years ago. They filled in the detail for us as we wandered from painting to painting. Sculpture to sculpture.
J. Paul Getty’s mother was quite right. Art humanizes. Cultivates the spirit. Draws people together. Inspires the soul.
In a twist of irony, the scrawny old man named Getty, out of the cruel tragedy of personal isolation, gave the world and indescribable gift.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
I hope your weekend included at least a few moment’s of art appreciation… of some sort.
I’m hardly an art historian. Some of the stuff looks like junk, no matter how its presented. But look closely, read the description. Get some sense of the historical context. Pay attention to the subtleties, the obscure details. Take it in.
Fra Bartolommeo painted a large oil canvas in 1509. He titled his work, The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Saint John the Baptist. It is a tender Joseph and Mary with their chubby little baby. They are on the road, leaving town. The great escape. They stop by the way for a moment’s rest. A toddler approaches the eager baby Jesus with a greeting. Until I stood before the five hundred year old painting, it never occurred to me that Jesus and John knew each other as children. It makes sense. Their mothers were close friends. But a careful look and you’ll notice that John hands Jesus the gift of two twigs, the kind of thing boys do. Look closely - the sticks are tied together in the shape of a cross.
Getty never found that balance - the balance between commitment to work and commitment to family. The balance between business success and healthy relationships.
Think about it. How is that balance working for you?
This morning, make sure you cover both ends of the spectrum.
Ask Getty.
One without the other is a lonely place.
Posted in Valley Center, Calfornia
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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