The Benefactor

At his death in 1976, J. Paul Getty left 4 million shares of Getty Oil stock--valued at $700 million--to his museum in Malibu. The bequest had grown to $1.2 billion by 1982, when Getty’s estate was settled in court, and the endowment it funded is now worth an unfathomable $4.5 billion.

Then there are the stories.

A miserly recluse with a disastrous family life who parted with enough of his wealth to establish a splotchy art collection with great patches of brilliance, Getty ran his original museum on a threadbare shoestring. He went on a spending spree to build his second museum--sinking $18 million into the re-creation of a Roman villa and establishing a $40-million endowment for operating expenses--but he had to be tricked into providing a cafe and other standard visitor services.

When you put them together--the fabulous fortune and the human foibles--you have the makings of a mythical character. Indeed, Getty is remembered as an eccentric billionaire art collector who married and divorced five times. He had five sons--including one who died as a boy, one who is thought to have committed suicide and one who has donated large sums of money to help British institutions buy artworks the Getty Museum had been trying to purchase and export--and a kidnapped grandson whose abductors cut off his right ear when they didn’t receive a $3.2-million ransom. The mutilation had the desired effect, however belatedly.

With all that baggage, Getty has evolved as a compelling persona, almost as complicated as the components of the J. Paul Getty Trust that have finally come to roost at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Jean Paul Getty was born in 1892 in Minneapolis, the only child of attorney and insurance executive George Franklin Getty and his wife, Sarah McPherson. He was a privileged child with a Midas touch. But he wasn’t a particularly promising candidate for the success he achieved.

When the boy was 9, his father traveled to the Oklahoma Territory on behalf of a client and plunged into the oil business. George Getty, a hard-working Christian Scientist, amassed considerable wealth during the next decade and encouraged his son to join him in business. But the young man, who was an indifferent student at USC and UC Berkeley before transferring to Oxford University, was having too much fun being a playboy--on Dad’s bank account.

In 1914, when World War I erupted, young Getty agreed to work in his father’s oil fields, but only for a year. When the time was almost up, Paul, as he was called, paid $500 for a half-interest in a lease of 160 acres near Stone Bluff, Okla. The land produced oil, lots of it, and the young entrepreneur was on his way.

He eventually got control of his father’s company, Getty Oil, and shaped it into his own empire. In the meantime, he began to buy art, with no thought of becoming a major collector. His first significant purchase was a 17th century Dutch landscape by Jan van Goyen, acquired in 1930 for $1,100.

Getty continued to buy paintings for relatively small sums but soon developed a deeper interest in French furniture and became a champion of decorative arts. He emerged as a player in the art market at an auction in 1938, when he bought an extraordinary group of furniture from the collection of Mortimer Schiff and a Savonnerie carpet that had belonged to Louis XIV.

His third area of collecting, which evolved into a passion, was antiquities. Inspired by a visit to the Vatican Museum in 1939, he was struck by the lifelike qualities of Roman portrait sculpture. Before long, he was buying Greek and Roman art and singing the praises of “the ancients.”

Getty bought what he liked and is often disparaged for failing to acquire paintings that measure up to his decorative arts and antiquities, but he was no dilettante. He visited museums and archeological sites all over the world, chronicling his trips in detail.

While traveling widely, Getty established a home in Southern California. He built a house on the beach in Santa Monica in 1934; 12 years later he purchased a 64-acre ranch on Pacific Coast Highway. Getty used the ranch house as a weekend residence before he left America for Europe in 1951. Although he never returned, he added a wing to the house, which opened as a museum in 1954.

Getty was not well known until 1957, when Fortune identified him as America’s richest man--although he was then living in Paris. His museum was obscure in its early years as well, operating with a tiny staff and a paltry budget. But, to everyone’s amazement, the situation changed dramatically after he announced plans in 1968 to build a new museum. After considering possibilities for simply expanding the ranch house--and stating that the one thing he did not want was a Modernist building--he decided to re-create the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy, which was buried in 79 when Vesuvius erupted.

The museum opened in 1974 as a popular success and a critical disaster. The public flocked to its doors and created major traffic jams while critics derided it as Pompeii on the Pacific. Getty--who had moved to the English estate Sutton Place and never saw the museum, apparently because he had developed a fear of flying--was stung by the barbs. But, predictably, the museum has become a beloved cultural landmark.