On 31 March 2015, an actress/model called Lanessa DeJonge rang the Los Angeles emergency services to report a death. The 32-year-old blonde had discovered the body of her ex-boyfriend Andrew Getty on the bathroom floor of his £2.8m home in the Hollywood Hills. The newspapers soon established that the couple's endless rows had drawn the LA police to the house 31 times in four years and that Getty had obtained a restraining order against DeJonge, saying 'heated arguments can cause my blood pressure to rise dangerously'. The coroner's report confirmed that the methamphetamine level in his blood was in the 'toxic range'. It said his death, at 47, was accidental, but that drugs, an ulcer and heart disease had contributed. The story dominated the airwaves. It had everything - a prematurely dead millionaire, a pneumatic and troublesome blonde, drugs, lethal rows, police reports. But most of all, it had the Getty name, and the chance to rehash the six-decades-long 'curse' that seemed to afflict a family whose combined fortune, according to Forbes, is $5bn (£3.8bn).

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You look at photographs of the resplendent new generation - the umpteen Getty great-grandchildren (and four great-great-grandchildren) - and at the picture of Andrew, their mad-eyed, speed-crazed, gun-wielding first cousin once removed, and wonder: how do they occupy the same family? But that's the Getty story - a tale of huge enterprise and massive wealth, but also of greed, rivalry, loss, fury, hatred, drugs, adultery, English stately homes and razor-wielding amputations in Italian hills. At its core, it's the story of four brothers who never stood in the same room together and a father who mostly regretted fathering them.


J Paul Getty I was 11 in 1904 when he fell in love with the oil business after being taken by his father, George, to see a well being drilled. He loved the machismo and slithery glamour of the oil business, the miracle of extracting black gold from unyielding rock and seeing it gush into the sky in million-dollar fountains. He went into the family business, took advice from 'petroleum geologists' and was a dollar millionaire at 23. Though never a looker (facially, he resembled the Forties American actor George Raft suffering from haemorrhoidal twinges), he discovered girls early and they became a lifelong obsession. By the time his father died in 1930, Paul, then 37, had married and divorced three of his five wives.

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He had a flair for courting teenage girls, marrying them, getting them pregnant and neglecting them until they left: Jeanette Dumont, 18, bore him George Franklin Getty II; a summer romance with Allene Ashby, 17, led to an impulse marriage, instantly regretted; Adolphine Helmle, 18, gave birth to Jean Ronald Getty during the Wall Street Crash; Ann Rork, 17, had Eugene Paul (later Jean Paul Getty II) and Gordon Getty; finally, Louise Dudley Lynch, an ex-convent society chanteuse also known as Teddy, bore him the last of his five children, Timothy Ware, who died in 1958, aged 12. Getty was heartbroken and didn't attend the funeral, and he and Teddy divorced soon afterwards.

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That year represented a watershed in the oilman's life. At 65, Getty was at the apex of his wealth and power, owning 80 per cent of a global oil empire. The year before, Fortune magazine had named him 'the richest man in the US', with a net worth between $700m and $1bn (£4.5-£6.5bn today). He owned a vast art collection as well as the Pierre hotel in New York. With the death of his youngest son, however, things started to go wrong. After a decade staying in hotels, he decided he needed a base in a house near a European capital. In 1959, he was invited to a dinner party with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Sutton Place, their 72-room Tudor manor house near Guildford. Over dinner, the duke told Getty how crippling he found the upkeep. The next day Getty offered to buy Sutton Place, reportedly for £65,000 (£5m today). He went on an art-spending spree, buying Rembrandts, Canalettos and Renoirs - and he installed a temporary payphone to stop builders calling their relatives around the world, a detail seized on by the press as evidence that 'the world's richest man', as he was called at the time, was a skinflint. His housewarming party on 30 June 1960 was legendary, featuring flaming torches, fireworks, a fortune teller and a real cow. Hundreds of gatecrashers attended what was described as 'the party of the century', blocking the A3 and wreaking havoc - ice cream was smeared over tapestries, cigarettes ground into carpets and valuable artworks taken as souvenirs. The Daily Express called it 'easily the most fabulous evening since the war'.

The Sixties saw the four remaining Getty sons - George, Ronald, Paul and Gordon (the late Andrew's father) - all suffer from their father's indifference, contempt and hostility. Getty laughed at Ronald's attempts to become a film producer and was enraged when Gordon, a singer, composer and bon vivant, tried to sue him for a bigger share of the family trust fund. It was just as well that Getty didn't live to see the day Gordon admitted he had a second family, having sired three more Getty children with a woman called Cynthia Beck. J Paul II seemed a level-headed executive, happily married to Gail Harris with four children, when he moved to Italy in the Fifties to run Getty Oil Italiana. But in 1964, he dumped Gail for the exotic Talitha Pol, a femme fatale with a striking pedigree: she was the step-granddaughter of Augustus John and, because of the painter's fling with Ian Fleming's mother, Evelyn, she was also a niece of the cellist Amaryllis Fleming. She and Getty married in Rome in 1966 (Talitha wore a hooded white-velvet minidress, trimmed with white mink) and decamped to a 17th-century Moorish palace in Marrakesh, where they entertained rockers and painters and were photographed in kaftans by Patrick Lichfield for Vogue.

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In 1968, Talitha had a son, given the Geldof-ish name of Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone. Parenthood, however, didn't stop the couple's rush to destruction. They became addicted to drugs and spent increasing periods apart, in London and Rome. Talitha died of a heroin overdose in July 1971, aged 30. Paul fled to London, fearful of being charged with manslaughter, and became a shuttered recluse at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, from where he made huge philanthropic payments to British institutions, and checked himself into a rehab clinic in 1984. Surreally, Margaret Thatcher visited him there to thank him for giving £50m to the National Gallery. 'My dear Mr Getty,' she told him, 'we mustn't let things get us down, must we? We'll have you out of here as soon as possible.' Two years later, he was knighted for services to charity, became a British citizen and - coaxed from reclusion by his third wife, Victoria Holdsworth, the daughter of a Suffolk landowner and a one-time Nivea girl - bought the 12th-century Wormsley Estate in Oxfordshire. He installed a cricket ground based on the Oval and a castellated library to house his sublime collection of books, which includes a Shakespeare First Folio. Today, it's the home of Garsington Opera.


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George, the oldest, was Getty's favourite, being the only one who showed a flair for business. Getty made him vice- president at Getty Oil, but couldn't conceal his scorn at George's ideas for the company's future. He became depressed and turned to drink and, in 1967, his wife Gloria divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty. He remarried in 1971, to a wealthy widow, and moved to Bel Air, but it didn't help. In June 1973, he took a lethal dose of pills, fired a shotgun to warn his wife of his plans and stabbed himself in the chest with a barbecue knife. He died the next day at the Queen of Angels Hospital in LA.

Hardly had the family time to mourn him when news arrived from Italy that Paul Jr's son, J Paul Getty III, who was also known as Paul, had been kidnapped by gangsters. Aged 16, with a shaggy mane of red hair, he was unruly, had been expelled from seven schools in Rome and had taken to hanging out in the Piazza Navona with other hippies, taking drugs or riding a motorbike. His kidnappers took him up the Calabrian mountains and chained him to a stake in a cave. They sent ransom notes to his mother, who contacted the police - but they, and the Italian press, didn't believe the kidnap story. Everyone assumed it was Paul trying to get money out of his Croesus-rich grandpa - who issued a statement saying: 'I don't believe in paying kidnappers. I have 14 grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, then I will have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.'

To speed things up, the kidnappers cut off J Paul III's right ear and sent it to the offices of the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero. The Gettys were nudged into action. J Paul I agreed to pay no more than $2.2m (£9m) of the demanded $3m - the most that would be tax-deductible - and lent J Paul II the rest, to be repaid at four per cent interest. After five months in captivity, the boy was finally released on 15 December, his grandfather's 81st birthday. He rang Sutton Place to thank him. 'It's young Paul calling from Rome,' Getty was told. 'Do you want to speak to him?' Getty didn't look up from his papers. 'No,' he said.

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J Paul III married Martine Zacher in 1974 and they had a son, Paul Balthazar Getty. But he never recovered from the trauma of kidnap. Paranoid and haunted by nightmares, he had a stroke, brought on by a cocktail of valium, methadone and Wild Turkey, which left him blind, quadriplegic and unable to speak. His father refused to pay the monthly medical bills of £25,000 (£95,000 today) until he and his mother Gail sued. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he died at the Wormsley Estate in 2011, aged 54.

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J Paul I's last months were spent in increasing seclusion in Sutton Place, surrounded by a harem of mistresses. He had sex with them into his 80s, thanks to reputed regular injections of a mystery erectile serum. The women included Mary Teissier, granddaughter of a cousin of a Russian tsar; Penelope Kitson, ex-wife of a rich Cornish landowner; Rosabella Burch, a green-eyed Nicaraguan widow introduced to Getty by Claus von Bülow; and Lady Ursula d'Abo, a sister of the Duke of Rutland, who gave an indiscreet interview to the National Enquirer in 1973, confessing her innocent love for the octogenarian multi-billionaire. 'Paul is fascinated by English aristocratic ladies,' reported the Enquirer. 'He seems to get a kick out of having a real-life countess cook for him.'

J Paul Getty I died on 6 June 1976, sitting in his favourite armchair at Sutton Place. In his will, he left the bulk of his estate to the new J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, whose fortunes were controlled by his sons Gordon and Ronald. It was a brilliant way of avoiding inheritance tax. A series of lawsuits followed from family members contesting the will. Few people attended his memorial service. Gordon, a co-trustee of the massive family trust fund but never a board member of Getty Oil, began to unpick the family firm and, after four years of boardroom infighting, sold it to Texaco in 1984 for $10bn (£18bn). The family business that had occasioned such mayhem was now toast.

When J Paul Getty II died in 2003, he left most of his £200m to his second son, Mark. It was a shrewd move. Mark, to speak in Star Wars terms, seems to represent A New Hope for the family, putting the tragic past behind him. Anglophile and modest in nature - his family home is in Battersea, he travels by Tube and seldom wears a suit - he persuaded the far-flung, warring factions of the family to put money into a new venture: Getty Images. Starting in 1995 with an investment of $16m (£20m), his company harnessed several picture libraries around the world into one online mega-resource. The Carlyle Group acquired Getty Images in 2012 for £2.5bn. It's now the biggest picture agency in the world. At the time of going to press, it is being sued by a photographer for alleged 'gross misuse' of numerous photographs donated to the Library of Congress. Getty Images promises to defend itself 'vigorously'.

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In Mark's personal relationships, however, things have been less satisfactory. In 1982, he married Domitilla Harding, the half-Italian designer behind the Miss Italy fashion label, and raised three children at the Wormsley Estate. But after 28 years of marriage and long periods of estrangement - not to mention Domitilla's intense friendship with Lord Lambton's granddaughter, Rosie 'Ro-Ro' Bowdrey - the couple split up in 2010. She now lives as an artist in Tuscany. Mark has homes in London and Italy as well as Wormsley, and was chairman of the National Gallery's board of trustees until recently. His sons have inherited his grounded work ethic: Joseph, who's married to the jewellery designer Sabine Getty, née Ghanem, works in London for a leading asset-management firm; Alexander is a San Francisco-based photographer; and Julius works in a London art gallery.

Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone was brought up by his maternal grandparents in St Tropez, but has also developed a sensible gene. He dropped his last two names and went to the agricultural college in Cirencester. He's now happily settled in South Africa with his wife Jessica Kelly, whom he met while she was crewing in the galley of his yacht, Talitha G, named after his mother. They provided three more Getty great-grandchildren - Orlando Willem Pol, Caspar and Talitha.

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John Paul III's son Balthazar - known as 'Balty' - is the family's most high-profile member. He was raised by his mother Martine in San Francisco and went to Gordonstoun. Now 41, he has starred in the JJ Abrams action TV series Alias as CIA operative Thomas Grace and as Tommy Walker in the ABC series Brothers & Sisters, acting alongside Sally Field and Calista Flockhart. Ironically, the latter concerned the misfortunes of a wealthy American family after the death of its patriarch. His debut film role at 14 was the lead part of Ralph in the 1990 remake of Lord of the Flies, directed by Harry Hook, and he also appeared in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and David Lynch's Lost Highway. In 2000, he married Rosetta Millington and produced three daughters - Grace, Violet and June Catherine - and a son, Cassius. In 2008, however, shortly after Rosetta had given birth to June, Balthazar had a well-publicised affair with the actress Sienna Miller on a yacht in Italy, but later returned to his wife. 'It was a very challenging time for everyone involved,' he told Harper's Bazaar. 'But I loved and missed my family too much not to make it work. Rosetta is understanding and spiritual enough to let us try.'

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The last lot of great-grandchildren belong to Christopher, the eldest son of Jean Ronald Getty, the ultimately not-very-successful movie producer. Born in 1965, Christopher worked at Getty Investment Holdings in New York and married Pia Miller, daughter of Robert Miller, the fabulously rich inventor of duty-free shopping. Their 1992 wedding was a lavish affair in Bali, sealed with a $200m (£260m) dowry from the bride's father. But it didn't last. They divorced in 2005 and Pia now lives in South Kensington with their four children, Isabel, Robert, Conrad and Maximus.

The Gettys' story began like the first scene of There Will Be Blood and turned into The Oresteia and the curse on the House of Atreus. And there will always be Cassandras around, prophesying woe and destruction to future generations of the family, saying the demise of Andrew Getty continues the sorry tradition. But elsewhere the signs are good. In a 1996 interview Mark Getty declared: 'The last thing I wanted in life was to be measured by what I had inherited, as opposed to what I had done,' and his attitude seems to have become a rallying cry for the new generation. The young Gettys - Mark's, Tara's, Balthazar's and Christopher's children - seem more cautious, more sensible, more industrious and more likely to succeed than their wayward and warring parents and grandparents. Can it be that, after the three-act tragedy of its past, the family is heading into a fourth act of luxe, calme et volupté, where the inheritance of great wealth isn't necessarily accompanied by disaster? 'Families,' says Mark Getty, 'are extremely dynamic organisations. If you can tap some of that energy and channel it, they are more productive than almost any other social organisation.'

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