J. Paul Getty: The Oil Billionaire Who Haggled Over a Ransom

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J. Paul Getty was the wealthiest private citizen on the planet, and he installed a coin-operated payphone in the hallway of his 72-room English mansion so guests could not run up his bill. This episode tries to reconcile the two men. It starts in Minneapolis in 1892 with strict Methodist parents, follows him to Berkeley and Oxford, and lands on the wound that shaped him: when his father died in 1930 leaving 10 million dollars, the scandal-prone Paul received only 500,000.

He answered by building something larger. During the Great Depression he bought up Pacific Western, Tidewater, and Skelly Oil for pennies on the dollar, then paid Ibn Saud 9.5 million dollars in cash for rights to the Saudi Arabian Neutral Zone and drilled dry holes for four years before striking oil in 1953. The same cold arithmetic governed his five marriages, his dying son, and the 1973 kidnapping of his grandson in Rome, where even a severed ear did not stop him from negotiating.

• Given 10,000 dollars by his father in 1914, Getty bought the Nancy Taylor No. 1 well in Oklahoma, struck oil in 1915, and made his first million soon after.
• Having studied Arabic, he negotiated directly with Ibn Saud. The Neutral Zone field produced 16 million barrels a year and made him the wealthiest living American by 1957.
• He scolded his fifth wife, Teddy Lynch, for spending too much on treatment for their son's brain tumor, and did not attend the boy's funeral when he died at 12.
• When kidnappers cut their demand from 17 million dollars to 3 million, Getty paid 2.2 million, the most he could deduct from his taxes, and lent his son the other 800,000 at 4 percent interest.
• He died in 1976 and left more than 661 million dollars to the J. Paul Getty Trust, which now runs the Getty Museum and Getty Villa in Los Angeles.