As his 12-year-old son lay dying of cancer, billionaire Getty moaned about the hospital bills... he was ‘too busy’to attend the funeral
He is the stingiest billionaire in history, notorious for refusing to pay a ransom to free his grandson from kidnappers and installing payphones for guests in his mansion.
Oil tycoon J Paul Getty – the subject of a new film – was the richest man in the world, worth $1.2billion in 1966, the equivalent of €7.5billion today.
When his 16-year-old grandson John Paul Getty III was abducted by the Mafia in 1973, he failed to pay the $17million ransom, believing it was a ploy by the teenager to get his cash.
In revenge, the Italian kidnappers cut off the boy’s ear and posted it to him.
The tale is told in All the Money in the World, in cinemas this week. It is the movie in which disgraced Kevin Spacey was replaced by Sound of Music legend Christopher Plummer, 88, who recorded all his scenes as Getty in nine days.
But the events surrounding the kidnapping only scratch the surface of Getty’s lifelong penny-pinching.
The oil magnate’s love of money over family extended to his terminally ill son.
Timmy’s tale is perhaps the truest reflection of Getty’s frugality.
He was the son of Getty’s fifth and final wife Teddy Getty Gaston, who died last April aged 103.
In her memoir, the American singer revealed the extent of Getty’s tight pockets. The American-born industrialist moaned about having to foot Timmy’s medical bills when he went blind from a brain tumour.
While Timmy battled for his life, Getty failed to see him for four years.
The miser missed his son’s birth and, when Timmy died at the age of 12, Getty did not attend the funeral – sending Teddy a note apologising for being busy.
Timmy idolised his father, however. In her book, Alone Together, Teddy remembers Timmy’s love for his father during his dying days in heart-breaking detail.
“He was full of love for his dad,” she writes. “He never knew he was the richest man in the world. He’d heard it but he’d say, ‘That’s what the world sees. I see him as my own darling daddy, whom I love’. How he missed Paul.”
She adds: “Sometimes I quietly beside him while he seemed to be thinking and he’d suddenly say, ‘When will he come home? I wish I had a daddy like other boys have. Do you think he really loves me? I wish I could talk to him.’
“‘Well, let’s talk to him,’ I’d say, and we’d call Paul. He’d tell everyone then for days that he’d spoken to his father. He never asked for any material things, all he wanted was to see his dad. He never begrudged the fact that Paul never came. He was too loving… and yet in his heart he needed a father.”
So Getty was as absent as he was parsimonious.
Teddy never forgave him for failing to return to his American home from England during Timmy’s illness, citing it as the reason for their divorce in 1958.
In letters sent in the years leading up to Timmy’s death, Teddy pleaded with her husband to return and comfort their son. But he never did. Teddy wrote to Getty in 1954: “I know now that you
sat aren’t coming home to us, because I know you don’t want to, and so I have come to the tragic realisation that you have no real concern for Tim or me.”
At that time, in 1958, Getty was negotiating the groundbreaking deal to secure oil rights in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which would see him become America’s first billionaire.
But not only did Getty refuse to return home – he cruelly built up false hope in his little boy’s mind.
He regularly promised to visit Timmy in New York hospitals after his operations, but again never did so.
The Getty Oil boss was even heartless enough to complain about doctors’ bills on the phone to Teddy as Timmy lay screaming in pain in the room next door.
Teddy remembers bursting into tears and hanging up the call, feeling alone and afraid as she battled the toughest years of her life.
“Timmy needed his father,” she says in her memoir. “I needed him, too.”
In the days after Timmy’s initial brain tumour diagnosis aged six in 1952, many members of the family, including Teddy’s brother Ware, nephews, nieces and Timmy, excitedly gathered to wait for Getty as the Queen Mary liner pulled into New York, told by the tycoon that he would be on board.
But a message from the captain confirmed he had never fulfilled his promise of travelling across the SHOCK Mirror report of kidnap
Atlantic. Getty had not only failed to board the ship – he had not even bothered to let his family know.
Two days later, Timmy had to undergo one of his countless operations.
Later that year Getty wrote a letter from the Ritz Hotel in Paris which would be callous from a pauper, but was positively cruel from a billionaire.
He said: “I hope Timmy can keep away from doctors, except for a $10 visit. I don’t think doctors can do much for him now, except for a check-up, and that shouldn’t be more than $25 unless the Paul at his dad’s funeral in 2003 doctors charge on the ability to pay and not on a tariff and I avoid such doctors.” He told Teddy the money she paid for a pony to comfort Timmy must come out of her own purse.
Maybe she should have spotted the writing on the wall from the beginning of their relationship.
When Teddy took opera-singing lessons after the couple met in a New York nightclub in 1935, Getty agreed to foot the bill – but only if she paid him 10% of any future singing earnings.
When he moved to Surrey, 3,500
WHO STILL ADORED UNCARING DAD
Do you think he really loves me? I wish I could talk to him SON TIMMY