miser (my-zer) — A person who hoards money and possessions and spends as little as possible, even to the person’s detriment. A cheapskate, penny-pincher, tightwad.
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Jean Paul Getty was born in Minneapolis in 1892, the son of George Getty, owner of a successful oil company. J. Paul studied economics and political science at UC Berkeley and Oxford, and he spent his summers working in his father’s oil fields in Oklahoma.
In 1916, at age 24, J. Paul started his own oil company in Tulsa. He made his first independent million with the first oil well he drilled.
In 1917, Getty walked away from the oil industry and embraced the hedonistic life of a Los Angeles playboy. He rejoined his father’s business in 1919, and throughout the 1920s, Getty Oil continued to grow and amass wealth with new wells and lease investments.
But J. Paul did not measure up in his father’s eyes. When George died in 1930, he left J. Paul just $500,000 of his $10 million fortune. The boy, he told friends, was ill-equipped to lead the company.
J. Paul managed to gain control of Getty Oil anyway. As if to prove his dad wrong, he began expanding the business through mergers, acquisitions, and shrewd investments.
During the Depression, while fortunes were being lost, Getty gained controlling interest in some 200 companies worldwide. He learned to speak Arabic to help solidify his investments in the Middle East. He amassed a personal fortune of $4 billion, making him one of the richest men in the world.
In the 1950s, he moved to Britain and purchased Sutton Place, a 16th century Tudor estate on the outskirts of London. It became his home and business headquarters.
Getty was famous for his business success and notorious for being married and divorced five times. He had five sons.
He also was known to be miserly in the extreme. At Sutton Place, he put dial-locks on the telephones, restricting them to authorized staff, and installed a pay phone for visitors.
If anyone questioned the sincerity of his Scrooge-like tendencies, all doubts were dispelled in 1973, when one of his grandsons was kidnapped and Getty refused to pay the ransom.
In Rome on July 10, Italian gangsters abducted J. Paul Getty III, 16, and demanded $17 million for his return. At first, the boy’s father and grandfather suspected the boy had staged his own disappearance for money, and neither wanted to pay the ransom.
But the boy’s father soon concluded that the kidnapping was real. When he asked his father for the ransom money, the elder Getty refused.
“I have 14 grandchildren,” he said in a statement to reporters. “If I pay one penny ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.”
Several months later, a Rome newspaper received a package from the kidnappers containing a human ear, a lock of hair, and a revised demand for $3 million.
A photograph soon followed showing the boy minus an ear. The kidnappers wrote that unless their new demand was met within 10 days, “the other ear will arrive.”
With that, Getty relented, but only to the extent his accountants recommended. He agreed to pay $2.2 million, the maximum that would be tax-deductible.
He loaned the remaining $800,000 to his son at four percent interest.
The ransom thus paid, the kidnappers released Getty’s grandson on December 15, 1973, which was J. Paul’s 81st birthday. The boy immediately called his grandfather to thank him for paying the ransom. Getty refused to come to the phone.
After the kidnapping, J. Paul ended all contact with his son and grandson. Thereafter, he communicated with them only through intermediaries.
In 1976, at age 83, Getty died of heart failure, estranged from much of his family, still rich and no doubt still miserly.
J. Paul Getty II fought depression and drug addiction until the 1980s, when he cleaned himself up. Subsequently, he used his substantial wealth to became a philanthropist and a collector of rare books and art.
He became a British citizen and was knighted in 1986 for his generous donations to the National Gallery in London. He died in 2003 at age 80.
J. Paul Getty III never again spoke to his father or grandfather, or tried to. Nor did he recover from the trauma of the kidnapping.
In 1981, a stroke brought on by a toxic mix of drugs and alcohol left J. Paul III partially paralyzed, nearly blind, and unable to speak. He remained wheelchair-bound until his death in 2011 at age 54.
Being rich and famous does not, of itself, make a person a reprehensible jerk. The wealthy don’t have a lock on being loathsome and dishonorable.
But so many in the affluent class qualify for that description that you have to wonder about cause and effect.
J. Paul.
J. Paul II.
J. Paul III.
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