J. Paul Getty
At the time that I met J. Paul Getty he was the richest man in the world, and his earnings from oil amounted to £25,000 a minute. Yes -- a minute! As a reporter in Fleet Street I earned £25 a week from Lord Beaverbrook's coffers, not exactly, but nearly, the poorest man in journalism. I crossed swords with him at the time he had his house-warming party in Sutton Place, the splendid country mansion he had bought in England, and where, to the astonishment of his aristocratic neighbours, he installed a black wall-fitted telephone box, complete with button A and button B (to get your coins back) in case anyone tried to rob him of four old pennies, the cost of a call then. Not only was Getty mean, he liked to play at being mean.
There had been an item in a New York newspaper that Mr. Getty had been approached by a worker for the Red Cross, selling little flags on pins, and his response to a request: "Red Cross, Mr. Getty?" had been: "Let 'em work for their money like I did." The Red Cross did benefit in the end, however, for his offspring were so ashamed of that remark that they contributed generously to the Fund in later life.
J. Paul Getty inherited money from his father, and lived in St. Paul,
Minnesota, a twin city with Minneapolis, which was the home of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, who lived at White Bear lake, called Black Bear lake in the
author's short stories. This was Indian country, and the names derive
from the Indian language Minneapolis, Minnesota and Minnihaha, the famous
waterfall called laughing water in the land of blue water in the land
of many lakes. And it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said: "The rich
are different" to which Ernest Hemingway, not having mixed with the
rich the way Fitzgerald had, replied: "Yes. They have more money." A
trite and rather stupid reply, for he had not understood what Fitzgerald
meant. The explanation of what he did mean is at the end of The Great
Gatsby when Daisy "her voice full of money" escapes scot-free
while Gatsby is killed in his pool by the dead woman's grief-stricken
husband, and Daisy's millionaire husband says: "I had to tell him
he was driving. He might have killed me", and they "retreat
into their money" with "their vast carelessness" leaving
others to pick up the pieces and clean up after them.
When Italian kidnappers threatened to cut off Getty's grandson's ear and post it to him, he let them, rather than pay the ransom.
Mr. Getty's slogan could have been: "What's the use of happiness? It can't buy money."
Some instances of his meanness are recorded in Don't Tell My Mother I'm a Newspaperman, in Chapter 10:
On one occasion he had invited a party of friends for lunch at the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris -- and sent each one a separate bill later for the meal. Elsa Maxwell had refused to pay. On another occasion he had invited a party of friends to visit an Earls Court Exhibition. He looked at the price of entry: after 5 p.m. it was half price. He looked at his watch. "Let's have a walk around the block," he said, and led his friends around Earls Court until a minute past five when he paid the half price entry fee.
When Rhona Churchill of the Daily Mail went to interview him in his suite -- two tiny rooms at the Ritz, Piccadilly, for which he paid £20 a week in rent -- he offered her lunch, which she accepted with delight, as the Ritz restaurant served excellent food. Getty opened a cupboard door and pulled out a Baby Belling stove, and proceeded to cook two omelettes for himself and Miss Churchill.
On another occasion when I telephoned him in Paris he said: "Can you do me a favour, Mr. Kinsley? Ring up George, the doorman at the Ritz, and tell him to send my mail surface rate. The airmail rate is kinda expensive..."
In the mornings Getty would saunter along to Green Park for his constitutional, and on his way a Cockney barrow boy would offer him an apple. "How much today?" Getty would ask.
"Eight pence to you, Mr. Getty."
"I can read, you know. Eight pence a pound, and that doesn't weigh a pound." He would then bargain with the barrow boy and win -- walking happily into Green Park munching his apple.
A freelance photographer who heard about this ritual gave the barrow boy a handful of pennies, and stationed himself across the street with a Long Tom lens. As Getty approached, the barrow boy threw the pennies into the gutter, and Getty got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the coins, as the photogapher busily took pictures of the richest men in the world picking up pennies.
The day approached for Mr. Getty's house-warming party, and he had invited 1,200 guests. I was curious to see the list of guests because Mr. Getty appeared to have acquired a lot of friends since the start of his sojourn in England, and so I went down to Sutton place and saw him arrive in an open American car, chauffeur-driven, and he asked me to get the guest list from his secretary Miss Robina Lund, whose tiny office was near that infamous coin box on the ground floor. She gave me a book which contained the names and private telephone numbers of Mr. Getty's friends. It was as I had suspected: there were under fifty names in the book, and the large guest list had been chosen from names in the newspaper gossip columns, the most famous, but least important people in England. "Everyone in here has been invited?" I checked with Miss Lund. "Yes. Everyone in there has had an invitation," she replied. I set to, and copied the names, and, being a good reporter, took the ex-directory telephone numbers at the same time.
Back in the William Hickey office Peter Baker looked at my list and the name I pointed to: Herr Alfred Krupp.
"Good Lord," said Baker, "has he really invited Krupp?" I assured him that every name on the list had received an invitation to the party. "But he is a war criminal." said Baker.
The ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald could have been standing there, saying: "I told you the rich are different."
We decided to run the story of the guests without mentioning Krupp, to keep that on ice for 24 hours.. We sorted through more than a thousand photograph of Mr. J. Paul Getty, and there was not a single one with a smile on the face of the world's richest man. Then I went to the Ritz to interview Mr. Getty about his extraordinary guest, Herr Krupp.
He asked if we could do the interview on the house telephone
Quote, from Chapter 10: "What makes you think that the Home Office will allow a Nazi war criminal, sentenced to twelve years jail for executing slave prisoners in the Krupp factory yard, to cross these shores...?"
"Mr. Kinsley, the war is over..." said Getty
"You are wrong, Mr. Getty. The war is not over, and it will not be over until every member of my generation is dead. You think you can invite this Nazi criminal..."
"The war is over ... who gave you this list, anyway?"
"Miss Robina Lund, your secretary, Mr. Getty..."
"You can't intimidate me..."
"Oh no? Try reading the Hickey column in the press tomorrow morning..."
Getty had slammed the phone down ... and now, here he was walking into the breakfast room with his private party.
Earlier, with Harry Benson (www.harrybenson.com), the photographer who later went to New York with the Beatles and stayed there, I had asked for strawberries, to be told: "None left, sir. Those in the silver dish are Mr. Getty's."
'Oh really? That's what he thinks," I said and snaffled the dish and had almost finished them with Benson when Getty arrived asking for his strawberries. I had deprived him. Great -- until I saw the look in Getty's eye ... a look that could kill...