In 1958 J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world. Verified in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was from wealth; his father was a successful wildcat oilman who was one of the inspirations for the Upton Sinclair novel There Will Be Blood.
J. Paul took over the old man’s business and expanded it to heights no one could have dreamed of when the depression started.
Getty Makes a Will
Getty was on an extended stay in Italy in 1958 when he finally got around to executing a will. It was simple and came in at seventeen neatly typed pages. In it, he left his vast art collection – well, everything that ‘was marketable’ – to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Basically, the rest of the will was designed to keep his children in control of the oil company’s stock and always have a seat (and salary) on the board of the museum.
He left bequests of varying sizes to some of the people who worked for him and his women ‘friends.’ Getty had a lot of woman friends.
Fairly simple, then. Add to it the fact that he was the trustee of his mother’s trust, The Sarah C. Getty Trust. That was pushing a billion dollars in assets by the ‘60s. It was designed to provide income to Getty’s kids and grandkids. The fact that his children were scheduled to receive the principal of the trust after J. Paul’s death largely determined the disbursement of his personal estate
Simple, straightforward, and certainly – apart from the personality of Getty and the numbers involved – a non-story.
Using the Will as Emotional Extortion
J. Paul Getty was not a particularly nice human being. A fact his family certainly knew. To call him an indifferent father is to insult indifferent fathers everywhere. He didn’t inspire warmth and loyalty from his children and he knew it, so he used his money as a cudgel to ensure they attended to him – all the while remaining cold, distant, critical.
To top it off, he was a miser of legendary standing. It was a well-known and much commented upon fact, (in the early age of late-night talk shows) that Getty had pay phones installed in his homes so guests did not add to his phone bills. Pay phones in all his houses around the globe.
Put these two facts together and the result was probably inevitable. Getty used the will as a weapon. A family member snubs him at a family event? Out of the will. An employee of long-standing and good service leaves for any reason? Out. An ex-woman friend marries or inadvertently insults him? Out, but back in if she reconciles. Maybe.
Getty, it must be noted, was a brilliant businessman and had the nerves of a cat burglar. He was, after all, a man who mortgaged everything he owned after WWII to buy land in Saudi Arabia he had not only never surveyed, but had never even seen.
No More Estate Planning, Just Band-Aids
He was smart, certainly, with a steel trap, analytic mind, and an amazing memory. But there was always that incredible frugality. Instead of executing a new will every few years (and disavowing the old ones), he simply added addendums to the original – codicils, in legal terms.
Between September 1958 and his death in 1976 he executed twenty-one(!) codicils. Twenty-one changes, all of them significant, in slightly less than eighteen years. It’s not much of a reach to think that with his intellect he was sure he could keep track of it all - just as it’s not much of a reach to think he did not factor in the effects of aging on that marvelous intellect.
An Unmitigated Probate Disaster
The results, of course, were an unmitigated disaster – for his original wishes and his family. Somehow, the many uncoordinated changes resulted in Getty’s children losing their seats – and all control – on the Getty Museum board. The same thing eventually happened with the oil company.
Overall, family members were left out of the estate, employees had not been updated for a decade or more so present-day employees who helped J. Paul through his final days were ignored. Not a single beneficiary - aside from a few girlfriends from the Fifties inexplicably added back by codicil somewhere along the way and the museum - was remotely happy.
A Jumbled Mess That Took Decades to Sort Out
Of course, it ended up being sorted out through the courts. The one thing that did go right after Getty’s death was that his children finally received their funds from the Sarah C. Getty Trust. The first thing they did with their newfound wealth was hire lawyers.
Getty’s death and his twenty-one codicils was a red-letter day in the history of American Trust and Estate practice. Lawyers sued the estate, lawyers defended the estate, lawyers administered the estate through the litigation. It’s estimated that attorneys were paid tens of millions of dollars through the years of litigation. Tens of millions (estimates vary from $15 to $40 million and more) that should have gone to Getty’s family.
Codicils have their limited place in planning but it pays to draft from scratch. Ask any Getty.