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Fine Days. How did Getty become a billionaire? His enemies carp that his prospects were so good from the very start that he could not miss, say: "If your dad left you all that money, you could do it, too." This does justice to neither Jean Paul Getty nor his ambitious, strong-willed father. When J. Paul was born in 1892, George F. Getty was a prosperous Minneapolis lawyer. On the day when he heard his son's first wail, he calmly turned on his heel, strode downstairs and said to the maid: "Set another place for lunch." By the time Paul was ten, he had developed into so thrifty a lad that he went without lunch for months; instead, he saved the $1.75 a week that he got to buy his school lunch, ate a bigger dinner at home. His diary of the time is a record of gleeful acquisitiveness: "Fine day. Papa gave me a quarter to put in my purse"; "Fine day. Mama gave me ten cents."
When Paul was eleven his father moved to Indian Territory (soon—1907—to be a part of the new state of Oklahoma), began to search for oil on a barren, sandy track that had cost him $500. He hit oil with his first well. A few years later he was a millionaire—and Paul was bitten by the oil bug himself.
The First Million. The Gettys moved to Los Angeles, where Paul's love of books earned him the high school nickname, "Dictionary Getty." After two years at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, and a year studying economics at Oxford, Paul took a world tour on a $250-a-month allowance from his parents. In 1914, at 21, Paul Getty arrived in Tulsa, Okla., ready for work. He began buying and selling oil leases with his father's backing (on a 30-70 split). In his first year he made $40.000, announced elatedly: "I will stay in Tulsa until I make a million dollars." By June 1916, just 19 months after he started on his own, he had made it.
Getty went back to Los Angeles and joined his father in buying and selling leases and drilling wildcat wells. He took up bodybuilding, hired professional wrestlers to tussle with him in his basement gym. By night, he squired a galaxy of bright young girls through the best West Coast nightclubs. In 1923, at 30, he married Jeannette Demont, 18, whom he had met in Los Angeles. Three years later, after the birth of his first son, George Franklin Getty II, they were divorced in Mexico. Next year Paul married Allene Ashby, 17, a Texas rancher's daughter and excellent horsewoman.
Be Thrifty. Paul's first divorce shocked his father, a Methodist turned Christian Scientist, but he had recovered enough by 1928 to sell his son a one-third interest in George F. Getty, Inc. for $1,000,000. Just three weeks later Paul took his third wife, Adolphine Helmle, 18, daughter of a German industrialist. That was too much for George Getty. When he died in 1930, he left Paul only $500,000 of his $10 million estate. Most of the rest went to Paul's mother, a tough-minded old lady of sturdy Scots-Irish stock.