(6 of 10)
By swaps, deals, secret purchases, Getty waged a knockdown, drag-out fight for Tidewater that lasted for 19 years. When Standard Oil and Tidewater's President William F. Humphrey saw what Getty was up to, they hurriedly put together a new holding company called Mission Corp. They put into Mission 1,128,123 shares of Tidewater and 557,557 shares of Skelly Oil Co., a well-integrated oil company controlled by Standard; they then distributed the Mission Corp. shares to Standard's stockholders as a stock dividend, to keep Tidewater stock out of Getty's hands. But Getty started buying Mission stock also, got one block of 200,000 shares from the Rockefeller interests.
Bill Humphrey had other stratagems. He diluted Getty's voting strength in Tidewater by having additional shares of stock issued, exercised his option to buy Tidewater stock out of Mission Corp.'s holdings, even managed to have Getty thrown off the Tidewater board. Getty was not discouraged; by 1937 he had won control of Mission Corp.—and its Tidewater and Skelly holdings. He stubbornly kept chipping away at Humphrey and the Tidewater management, increased Mission Corp.'s holdings in Skelly to 56%, and used Skelly's dividends to buy even more Tidewater stock. Said he: "They are old men, and I can wait."
Penthouse Life. While he battled, Getty also kept busy with other affairs. He was divorced again, soon married Ann Rork, 24, a Hollywood producer's daughter who had first caught Paul's eye when she was only 14. He lived more like a millionaire than he ever has since, leased a penthouse in Manhattan so vast, jokes Getty, "that when I allowed a friend to give a dance for several hundred people at one end, I couldn't hear the music of the twelve-piece orchestra at the other end." He traveled through Europe picking up bargains for his art collection (present value: $4,000,000), which he had started in Berlin in 1931 with a $1,500 purchase of a few prints and paintings. Says Getty: "I bought art both because it was beautiful and because it was a good investment." He also found time to write a book about his father's oil business, and at 46, after a fourth divorce, take yet another wife, Louise Dudley Lynch, 20, a Greenwich, Conn, socialite.
When war broke out, Getty asked Secretary of the Navy Knox for a commission as a seagoing officer. Instead, he was asked to take over personal direction of Tulsa's Spartan Aircraft Co., then a subsidiary of Skelly Oil. Getty forthwith ensconced himself in a Tulsa bungalow with twelve-inch-thick, reinforced concrete walls as a protection against air raids. He split up the plant into competitive production teams, forced the unhappy supervisor of any lagging team to sit behind a large eight ball until he increased output. By war's end Spartan was one of the most efficient and prosperous small aircraft companies in the U.S. Getty bought it outright from Skelly when no one thought plane companies had any future, turned it into a prosperous manufacturer of mobile homes—auto trailers.
Victory at Last. In 1946 Getty took another step in his efforts to build up a big oil company: he merged George F. Getty, Inc. into Pacific Western to form Pacific Western Oil Corp.