I was very lucky, because I grew up in a little village in Italy,
in a house with no electricity and a lot of people who were from simple
and humble backgrounds, who were extraordinary human beings.
Che testa! Ciccio.
MARK WHISTLES
MARK CLAPS HORSE
This is terribile.
Terrible.
MARK LAUGHS Terrible in the sense of...
Um... You should be in awe of, that kind of terrible.
Terribile.
Mark Getty owns and trains racehorses in Italy,
and is one of over 15 grandchildren
of oil billionaire and art collector J Paul Getty.
Mark has also built a global media empire
called Getty Images.
Its newest office is in Los Angeles.
On a hilltop not far from Getty Images is the Getty Center museum.
It has a priceless collection of art...
..and it's one of the wealthiest institutions of its kind
in the world.
It's only part of the legacy of Mark's grandfather, J Paul Getty.
There are few families in history who have accumulated more wealth,
collected more art, and given more money away than the Gettys.
It's a story of three generations and their unique obsessions.
It's a story that begins with the legendary J Paul Getty.
He ran Getty Oil himself,
like Caesar would run an empire.
He may have had oil in his veins,
but he claimed to have become addicted to art.
My grandfather was very competitive.
Making more money than the Rockefellers,
he became one of America's first billionaires.
GAVEL BANGS J Paul Getty Museum...
He would go through five marriages and have five sons.
He's not a pin-up for the family guy.
One son - Mark's uncle, Gordon - would become an acclaimed composer.
Businessmen may be more famous during their times,
but nations remember their composers more than their businesspeople.
Another son - Mark's father, Paul Getty Jr -
would become one of the most generous art patrons
in British history, and be knighted by the Queen.
He discovered that giving money to worthwhile causes
does have redemptive qualities. It would do for any of us.
Of course, it's a huge danger, that silver spoon.
Many a Getty has gagged on that silver spoon.
The Gettys have had their share of nightmares.
My brother's kidnapping was an immensely traumatic event
for my family.
There's nothing that satisfies the media more
than pigeonholing a rich person as a Scrooge,
and that's what they did. They successfully did that.
When J Paul Getty died in 1976,
the billionaire typecast as a miser
would leave the most generous endowment in history
to an art museum.
Three generations of Gettys
have used art and wealth to change the art world
and British culture forever.
See, there are face elements that are
hiding in here somewhere.
The way in which my grandfather is portrayed as a dour, penny-pinching,
unsmiling, machine-like human being
is not the nature of the man that I knew.
My father was born to wealth - hard work for all his life.
I was born to wealth - hard work for all my life.
To be performed at the Bolshoi,
that's a big event for any composer.
If you grow up knowing you're going to inherit great wealth,
I think that it takes away some of your incentive.
Emasculating is not a bad word.
While based in Italy,
Mark Getty also lives part-time
at the Wormsley Estate in Buckinghamshire,
which he inherited from his father, Paul Getty Jr.
Unlike his grandfather,
Mark is a passionate collector of contemporary art.
You know, despite everything,
despite the fact that you've spent your life
with your nose to the grindstone, digging for oil...
..what you found more important in life was that painting, that statue,
that piece of music.
You suddenly felt that that's actually what interested you
about being a human being.
Why do wealthy families collect art
is really related to why does anyone collect art.
Apart from being founder of Getty Images,
Mark has also become an unofficial Getty family historian.
SOFT MUSIC PLAYS
My grandfather travelled with his parents
in the early part of the 20th century,
so he was a teenager by the time he made his first trips to Europe.
His father had enough money to be able to travel in comfort to Europe.
And so, as a young boy,
he was exposed to places of historic, cultural,
and architectural interest.
Well, I can't say that I was particularly interested in art
until I went to Europe for the first time in 1909.
I went to museums, saw some of the great buildings of Europe.
I took an interest in art at that time and I've never lost it.
During a visit to the Uffizi Museum in Florence,
the young Getty would be awestruck...
..by this painting -
Venus Of Urbino by 16th-century Renaissance master Titian.
It was this 300-year-old woman that had the uncanny presence to convince
the young Getty that art could have emotional power.
Perhaps we all have a reaction at some point, where a work of art,
a piece of music strike you
and it might change the way in which you perceive the world, and...
You know, nothing wrong with Venus Of Urbino
having been that thing for him, you know, the spark.
It's probably done it to a lot of people.
J PAUL GETTY:
The young Getty had hoped to become a diplomat,
but striking oil and quick riches trumped diplomacy.
At the age of 23, already a millionaire, he moved to Hollywood.
Not only did he have money, he had a car, and his parents were aghast.
He would attend Hollywood openings and date lots of actresses.
His friends included Marion Davies, Garbo, Chaplin and Valentino.
He would party hard, Hollywood style.
It was the J Paul Getty that time forgot, the smiling, rich,
young playboy.
You've heard of Gilbert & George
and the Chapman brothers...
This is also a joint work.
This is a Damien Hirst-Mark Getty special.
My grandfather would not have purchased.
He didn't have a liking or an understanding
for the art that was being produced during the middle of his life.
SHARP STRINGS PLAY
The Fricks, the Mellons,
the Rockefellers all bought in the late 19th century.
And the market was a completely different market.
Basically, Europe was being, um, despoiled of its great works of art
and, you know, Americans were buying them.
So the great, great works of art would still come, but fewer of them.
The stock market crash of 1929 threw the oil industry
and the international monetary system into chaos.
Getty saw the unfolding crisis as the opportunity of a lifetime.
He didn't have a great stock market crash and a great depression.
You know, he had a hard time,
but by the end of the '30s,
he had a lot of cash and that's when he started
to significantly acquire more stock in Tidewater Oil,
which was the foundation, really, of Getty Oil, um,
and to acquire more works of art.
1938 would be a pivotal year for Getty the art collector.
He would travel to Paris and Vienna at a time when Europe was facing
the rise of fascism and fearful of war.
Some aristocratic families
were desperate to sell their art for hard cash.
The art market in Europe was on the downturn.
Getty was on the lookout for high art at low prices.
In the Netherlands, Getty would visit museums, meet with collectors,
and acquire a taste for Dutch painters.
Getty would write in his diary...
"Admired particularly incomparable Night Watch."
"Some marvellous still lifes and some glorious Vermeers.
"Dutch painting of the 17th century is tops."
At an auction in Amsterdam,
Getty would make a bold move to acquire a work of art
by one of the most acclaimed painters of all time...
..Rembrandt.
The Rembrandt up for auction was the Portrait Of Marten Looten.
Unlike a lot of collectors,
my grandfather had a very deep knowledge
about what it was that he wanted to buy.
So he went to Holland, he went through archives,
he spoke with art historians,
he learned an enormous amount about the Rembrandt of Marten Looten.
Painted in 1632, Rembrandt was 26 years old.
It was only his second commissioned portrait.
Getty would bid anonymously.
With a winning bid of £65,000,
Getty would have his first Rembrandt.
The acquisition of the Rembrandt
secured his reputation as a serious art collector.
Getty was eager for his new Rembrandt to be exhibited
at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.
He believed art was a civilising force
and those who didn't appreciate art were cultural barbarians.
And when Getty eventually donated his Rembrandt
to a museum in Los Angeles,
he was pleased to receive a sizeable...tax deduction.
By 1939, J Paul Getty had already been through
four of his five marriages
and had four of his five sons.
Two of his sons were with the Hollywood starlet Ann Rork -
Paul Jr and Gordon.
I was composing from my earliest memories,
composing and writing verse,
and I can't remember when I wasn't doing both.
My father was very enthusiastic.
But for most of our lives, he was halfway around the world from us.
In the 1950s,
the young Gordon decided to fly halfway round the world
to get some quality time with his father.
In the Neutral Zone just south of Kuwait,
his father was busy taking the gamble of his lifetime.
In 1949, J Paul Getty risked tens of millions of dollars
for the right to drill for oil there with no guarantee of success.
There was a port camp, Mina Saud,
and then there was the oilfield camp, Wafra,
which was about 30 miles away.
There were no proper roads. There were just dirt tracks.
We lived quite comfortably. There was air conditioning.
I bought a piano in Kuwait. It was an upright, a Czechoslovakian piano,
a very good one, and did a little composing there.
There was an a cappella chorus - All Along The Valley,
a poem by Tennyson - that became published.
# And all along the valley By rock and cave and tree
# The voice of the dead was a living voice... #
The publication and recording of his Neutral Zone composition
was a career milestone for Gordon, still in his 20s.
His father's Neutral Zone gamble paid off on a spectacular scale.
Getty Oil pipelines,
refineries and supertankers couldn't be built fast enough.
J Paul Getty was on his way to becoming a billionaire.
The Fortune magazine, in '57,
it was called "The Richest American,"
and lo and behold, it was my father.
And Paul and I were equally surprised -
"The richest American? Holy mackerel!
"I didn't think he was anywhere in the running."
With a new oil empire to manage, Getty needed a palace.
The whole improbable empire of Mr Getty
is controlled from this country seat of power,
from a rambling 16th-century country house
in 700 acres of Surrey, where he moved in the summer of...
Sutton Place was a big, rambling house.
I don't think I visited the house
until I was eight or nine, in 1968 or '69.
For children, it was a treasure-trove.
My siblings, cousins and I, whenever we would be there,
part of the fun was exploring nooks and crannies.
Famously, there were secret passages.
The priests, you suppose, would be able to hide in there
at the time of the persecution of the Church, in Henry VIII's time...
Not far from the secret hideout intended to save a priest
was a dining room table that once belonged
to legendary media tycoon, William Randolph Hearst.
It was a long dining room table.
It was a long dining room.
And I had meals in there with my sister, just the two of us,
and it was generally a long wait for food to come to the table
because the kitchen was a long way away.
We didn't always like the food.
I remember various plates ending up in the loo, as opposed to, you know,
left on the table.
That was one way of making it appear as if you enjoyed the food,
but didn't have to eat it.
I don't have any experience of what he might have been like as a father.
He certainly was an absentee father.
I think also the relationship
that grandparents have with grandchildren is different.
I thought he was a good grandfather.
He treated me like an adult and I thought that was wonderful.
Not many people did.
I liked, you know, talking about politics, history, business.
We never really discussed works of art.
The pictures, the paintings, the portraits, the landscapes...
It didn't really mean anything to me.
I was much more interested in the house itself.
Here, at Sutton Place, for his private enjoyment,
such riches as Veronese's Lady In Red,
Gainsborough's Countess Of Chesterfield,
Gentileschi's Rest On The Flight.
I do remember that he would have art historians, art critics,
art dealers come by and they would join for lunch or join for dinner.
At Sutton Place, Getty lived with his favourite artworks.
Most of the paintings and sculptures he acquired
were shipped to his California ranch house,
which was the embryo of the Getty Museum
and open to the public one day a week.
Getty's baronial lifestyle, his taste for grandiose furniture,
ornate tapestries and pet wild animals, all had a role model.
It was the legendary media baron, William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst had a personal zoo and was an insatiable art collector.
He famously enjoyed entertaining guests
at a very long dining table in the castle he built to live in.
My father, he had a certain admiration
for William Randolph Hearst. He liked the guy.
They seemed to get along just fine.
Getty had met Hearst in the 1930s,
and visited his extravagant castle in Southern California.
When a BBC documentary about Hearst
appeared on television in the early 1960s...
This is where Hearst thought his big thoughts.
..Getty wrote in his diary...
"I remember my visit vividly.
"I have much in common with WRH.
"I suppose that in 1935,
"I was one-third as rich as Hearst, and by 1950,
"I was twice as rich.
"I've always spent 95% or more of my money on my business,
"while Hearst was the opposite. He lived like a Roman emperor.
"San Simeon reminds me of Hadrian's Villa."
The larger-than-life character of William Randolph Hearst
became the inspiration for the Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane.
Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?!
I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr Thatcher.
I just try everything I can think of.
The film also features a rival to Kane,
with a name very similar to Getty.
..Now in complete control of the government of this state...
In Citizen Kane, which is modelled on Hearst,
who was a friend of my father's, the tough, nasty political boss
that finally defeats Citizen Kane
is named big Boss James Gettis, or Gettys... Gettys, they pronounce it.
Gettys... I don't think I will
postpone doing something about you until I'm elected.
To start with, I think I'll break your neck.
Maybe you can do it, maybe you can't, Mr Kane.
So, is that a connection? You got me.
Getty liked to keep fit by lifting weights in a business suit
in front of his Renoir.
As his vast oil empire grew from the Neutral Zone to the North Sea,
Getty looked back with regret that he didn't buy more great art
by Impressionist painters when their prices were low.
There are a great many stories, Mr Getty, of your care with money.
For example, you have installed
a pay telephone box here in Sutton Place
to prevent your guests abusing your hospitality.
Well, I think right-thinking guests would, um,
consider that was a, um...
A... A benefit. It's, uh...
I never used a pay phone.
Maybe that was a privilege of being a family member.
You know, the old story about my grandfather and his phone box
was a story which my father loved to tell,
because it was a way of...
..effectively of him criticising his father.
So this is, um, a Banksy phone box.
I saw this phone box - right away, I said, "I've got to have it."
And I'll start the bidding here at $200,000...
I bought this phone box in 2008 at an auction which was for charity.
I love this phone box.
It's a marvellous kind of joke and a metaphor and all sorts of things.
It's a little bit the death of a certain type of England.
You know, the phone box being a characteristic English symbol.
And I then purchased this.
So, in a way, I was killing the phone box story
with a phone box that was being killed itself.
Sold. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. APPLAUSE
This phone box cost,
with the auction house portion,
just over half a million dollars.
I wasn't willing to go much higher, but I am very glad that I got it.
MARK WINDS UP GRAMOPHONE
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
Well, there we have the Colosseum.
Then we have the Forum down to the left.
The Colosseum, this is the great attraction of the city.
My grandfather, he particularly loved Italy
and came here over and over and over again, and, uh,
deeply studied Roman architecture,
um, and the Renaissance and baroque in Rome, so...
Loved the place.
Getty had visited Hadrian's Villa outside Rome.
It had a profound effect upon him.
Around 1968,
Getty decided what was good enough for an emperor
was good enough for him.
He decided to build his very own Roman villa in Malibu.
I felt that there was so much modern architecture in the world that
I would copy an ancient building.
In 1968 or '69, I would see him talking with...advisers,
consultants, architects etc, models of the villa.
He wouldn't turn around and say,
you know, "Mark, what should we do with the north wing?"
To oversee the design and construction of his villa,
Getty hired British architect Stephen Garrett.
People had mentioned
that Getty was behaving rather like Hadrian
and that Hadrian had built a villa outside Rome
and Getty was going to do much the same in Malibu.
Wherever Malibu was.
It was a villa in the ancient town of Herculaneum
whose design would make its way to Malibu.
Getty's decision to build a replica of an ancient building
in the late '60s, early '70s, the height of modernism,
is something of a throwback.
But the idea of building historical reconstructions to house collections
goes back quite a while.
The new home of the Metropolitan
Museum's priceless collection of medieval art...
And the most famous example was The Cloisters in New York,
which was built by John D Rockefeller,
who, of course, was Standard Oil.
The Cloisters opened to the public in 1938.
Getty always viewed himself and Getty Oil
as the little independent scrapper
fighting the big oil companies and John D Rockefeller.
While there's nothing that I know of in writing that says Getty
was challenging the Rockefellers by building his museum,
Getty was very competitive.
I was the only woman on the site,
the only woman in the trailer.
Gillian Wilson was the Getty Museum's
first curator of decorative arts.
She helped supervise construction of the new museum.
If somebody comes up to you with a drawing and says, "Is this OK?",
if you say, "I don't know what it is," they won't come back
and they will stop asking you questions.
So you've got to be on the ball
and you've got to wear your hard hat and look as though you mean it.
SHE LAUGHS
Getty never showed up at the construction site.
By telephone, telegram, photos and mail,
he micromanaged from 6,000 miles away.
But in 1973,
as Getty's dream of a Roman villa was nearing completion in Malibu,
a nightmare would unfold in Rome.
Rome is a fabulous city...
..to grow up in.
And I was incredibly happy, despite, you know, all of the...
..difficulties that,
you know, have been thrown our way here.
The kidnapping of J Paul Getty's 16-year-old grandson,
Paul Getty III, is now the subject of a Hollywood film.
PHONE RINGS Yes?
$17 million to release him.
I don't have any money.
Get it from your father-in-law.
He has all the money in the world.
My brother's kidnapping was an immensely traumatic event
for my siblings, um,
my mother and, obviously, mostly for my brother.
I'm sure it was also difficult for my grandfather.
My son Paul...
must be very frightened right now.
I know I'm frightened for him.
The Ridley Scott movie obviously has a point of view.
You know, it's too easy to characterise someone
as being immoral.
There's nothing that satisfies the media more
than pigeonholing a rich person as a Scrooge,
and that's what they did. They successfully did that.
I do not have the money to spare.
No-one has ever been richer than you are at this moment.
The story is kind of turned into a story where he's the bad guy.
I have no question in my mind as to who the bad guys were,
and they were the kidnappers of my brother.
Ann and I, we were at Sutton Place
while my nephew was still a hostage and held for ransom.
And so I was very much in on the conversations that went on,
discussions with staff, what to do about it.
I can tell you my father was very concerned.
If you're talking to the press,
particularly in a negotiation which you know
the kidnappers would be aware of,
I don't think your first answer would be, "I'll pay anything."
Just, you know, that's not the way the world works.
Yeah, I think 20 million was what... The sum asked at the time.
He had other descendants and his sons, like me,
would be bigger targets than a... than-than-than a grandson.
They would fetch more than 20 million,
if a grandson fetched 20 million.
Italy had then a prohibition, a legal prohibition,
on paying ransoms for kidnapped individuals
because they thought that it would encourage more kidnapping.
So if you wanted to just go out and pay the ransom, you couldn't.
It was illegal. You could end up, um, you know,
very much behind bars yourself.
I think he behaved relatively normally in that situation.
I can't be there to criticise every moral decision he made.
In London was Paul Getty Jr,
the father of kidnapped teenager Paul Getty III and Mark Getty.
He had lived in Rome with his wife Gail and their four children
until their divorce in 1964.
Paul married his second wife,
the model and actress Talitha Pol, in 1966.
He was estranged from his father
after an ill-fated career running Getty Oil Italia.
In 1971, Paul left Rome for London,
after his second wife Talitha died of a drug overdose.
As the hostage drama unfolded in Rome,
Paul Jr was battling depression and addiction in London.
A spokeswoman issued a statement.
On behalf of the family,
Mr J Paul Getty Jr advises
that there have been no further developments
in the case regarding the possible kidnapping of his eldest son
and the press will be advised as soon as further facts come to light.
Paul was a very different type of human being.
You know, he was a painter, a poet, um, he was extremely creative.
I think that what happened to him
obviously changed the course of his life.
The family is prepared to negotiate, to discuss.
Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct.
The kidnapping lasted five months.
It's got to be a mother's worst nightmare, or pretty close to,
and she was...
..strong and obviously protective of her other children.
Um... You know, she's a remarkable woman.
I was in the grounds of Sutton Place with Mr Getty,
and we were walking along,
and I noticed that there was a man following us...
..carrying a large gun.
And I said... Leaping from tree to tree,
with the sun glinting off the gun.
I said, "Mr Getty, there's a man following us with a gun."
He said, "It's all right. He's supposed to be there."
Mr Getty had obviously decided that life was no longer safe.
Many victims of kidnapping, um,
never came home, you know,
so, of course, it worried all of us immensely.
PAPARAZZI ALL SHOUT OUT
After five months of captivity and the cutting off of an ear...
..J Paul Getty paid a £1.25 million ransom.
We never saw the issues the same way that the press saw them,
so we didn't see him as being, uh,
you know, reluctant to pay the ransom.
I mean, the ransom was paid and guess who paid it.
The £1.25 million is the largest ransom in modern history.
At the end of the day, you know, I don't really care.
I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over, you know,
what people think about
when they think about my grandfather, or...
I DO lose a lot of sleep, and I think I always will do,
about what the experience was like for my brother.
J Paul Getty's Roman villa...
..was five years in the making.
Getty spent $17 million having it built.
And when the villa opened to the public in January of 1974,
Getty still had not yet set foot in the building.
It was constantly our imagination that Getty might be coming out and,
indeed, there was one occasion...
..when there was a helicopter flying,
and one of the guards came into my office and said,
"Come, come, come, come, quick!
"Look! Look! It's Getty! He's up there!"
Well, of course, but it wasn't.
I think it was some journalist trying to get some shots.
The art on display revealed
not only his years of collecting, but also his persona.
Getty admitted that he enjoyed the company of women.
And he had five wives
and he had several other lady friends
and he enjoyed spending time with them.
He also enjoyed collecting images of women.
He had a gallery devoted to images of Venus and Aphrodite,
and several of them were large-scale marbles that Getty acquired,
as well as bronzes and terracottas and others.
But there's little doubt in my mind
that his favourite statue was the Herakles
or Hercules Lansdowne.
It really was a statue that was unavailable for years and years.
Against all odds, he was able to buy it in 1951.
It had been found in the late 18th century at Hadrian's Villa.
Getty once said, I think jokingly, that he was Hadrian reincarnated.
He saw Hadrian as a kind of model for a cultured, inspired,
very wealthy collector.
Getty's Roman villa was the passion project of a lifetime,
and the Lansdowne Hercules was its crown jewel.
But the Getty who remained remote from his wives
and remote from his sons,
in the end remained remote from his dream villa.
An apparent fear of flying
meant that Getty would never actually set foot
in the new ancient world he had created in California.
When J Paul Getty died in 1976,
the story of his legacy was just beginning.
Getty's death would trigger a chain of events that would rock
the international art market to its core.
Here was a will in which Getty left a significant bulk of his fortune
to this museum.
It was a total surprise to us because he often said,
"I'm not going to leave you any money.
"I'll leave you enough to keep the doors open. That's it."
The scale of the endowment staggered us, absolutely staggered us.
I rang up the museum and all you could hear was screams of laughter
and clinks of champagne glasses.
I think that when my grandfather died,
the two institutions that he was mostly responsible for,
which is the Getty Oil and the Getty Museum,
they probably all felt that they had somehow been liberated.
Following the death of J Paul Getty,
the fate of Getty Oil and the fortunes of the Getty Museum
became entwined.
Gordon Getty would play a decisive role.
Gordon was a trustee on the museum board
and a board member of Getty Oil.
The Getty family business empire was missing a successor.
DOG BARKS
My brother George would have been a good successor,
would have been darned good, but he died.
In 1973, only a month before the kidnapping trauma,
Getty Oil's heir apparent, George Getty, died of a probable suicide.
My father didn't trust Ronnie.
Um... I don't think he liked Ronnie.
He LOVED Ronnie, he didn't LIKE Ronnie.
That's the difference.
The alienation between father and son in the case of Ronald Getty,
stemmed back to a bitter divorce case
between Getty and Ronald's mother.
My brother Paul had his problems and he was out of consideration.
Paul Getty Jr had already tried working for his father,
running oil operations in Italy,
but Getty Oil and Paul Getty Jr didn't mix.
Timothy, who was born to Getty's fifth wife, Theodora Gaston,
died of a brain tumour at the age of 12.
And that left Gordon.
He trusted me,
but he knew that I probably wasn't going to take
a great interest in business.
But Gordon managed the family trust,
which owned 40% of Getty Oil's stock.
And he had strong opinions about how the business should be run.
Gordon kept asking the company
to look into ways in which more money
could be produced for the shareholders.
That's his job as the trustee of a large trust.
My father told me, whether or not I was going to run the company,
that as far as my vote was concerned,
not to be bashful about voting the management in and out -
those were his words.
In a bold move to take control of Getty Oil,
Gordon would form an alliance with the Getty Museum.
Together, they would control 52% of Getty stock.
Together, we could control the company and remove the management,
even vote out the board.
But in a dramatic plot twist,
two oil companies - Pennzoil and then Texaco -
would make bids to buy out Getty Oil shareholders.
Did my father and I ever talk about
the possibility of selling Getty Oil,
or Tidewater Oil, or Skelly Oil, or whatever - any of his assets...?
He told me, frankly, they were all for sale all the time.
But he wanted a willing buyer.
He wanted someone to pursue him to sell.
Texaco is close to winning the battle
to take over Getty Oil this morning...
The offer from oil giant Texaco would ultimately be accepted.
The sale of Getty Oil for $10 billion
would be the biggest corporate takeover in history.
When the Getty Museum's stake in Getty Oil was sold,
the museum would end up with a billion-dollar cash windfall.
Overnight, a small eccentric museum in Malibu had more disposable income
than the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York City,
the Louvre in Paris, or the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
Heads of acquisitions in museums the world over
became terrified by what became known as "the Getty factor."
What do I think of the Getty factor?
Meaning... Meaning, uh...
The fear of many other museums that, with my father's huge endowment,
that Getty Museum would hog up all the artworks
and no-one else would be able to bid on anything.
What do I think of that? Well, I think that there's a grain of truth.
HE LAUGHS
All the dealers in Paris and London got busy stuffing the cupboards
in their showrooms full of things to pull out and show me
when I went visiting.
To maintain its tax-exempt status,
the Getty Museum would face the extraordinary challenge
of spending on average about $1 million a week.
Sir Timothy Clifford was director of the National Galleries Of Scotland.
It was extremely dangerous for us, in Britain,
because we were so rich
in the late 18th and early 19th century,
particularly bringing back pictures from the Grand Tour.
There was more kit for people to buy
in London, or in England, than anywhere else.
So we were liable to be raped.
We thought it was funny.
The fact that the rumour came out of England that they were
all running around thinking
we're going to buy all the great works of art and remove them.
We did buy great artworks and, of course,
to get them, we had to outbid others, otherwise you can't get 'em.
And, of course, adding more demand to a finite supply
tends to raise prices.
I think all that is true.
380,000 guineas. Any more?
GAVEL BANGS J Paul Getty Museum.
Thank you very much.
Oh, I can sleep at night with, uh...
With, uh, raising the prices of artworks.
We were a pretty mild bunch.
We were not slathering with lust for objects.
Uh...
Except now and then, maybe, like The Three Graces.
The Three Graces sculpture
by 19th-century Italian artist Antonio Canova,
was commissioned by the Duke of Bedford in 1814.
It was one of the most beloved sculptures in Britain.
Not only was Canova a world figure in his day,
he was more important, say, in the art world than, say,
Andy Warhol or somebody like that.
This was one of his supreme masterpieces.
The Three Graces by Canova is one of the most famous and popular artworks
in the British museums.
But they wanted to sell it and the Getty...Museum wanted to buy it.
While it was privately owned, it had often been on public view.
And then its owner decided to sell it to the highest bidder.
REPORTER: The prospect of even more
of the nation's treasures disappearing abroad
has dismayed many British art lovers,
and this is where many could end up -
the Getty Museum in California.
We couldn't begin to outclass them.
It was quite clearly an object which was of supreme importance,
so it would have been export stopped,
and then having stopped it at export, then try and find the money.
The Getty Museum had the winning bid with over £7 million,
but export restrictions on art
considered of great national importance
meant that Timothy Clifford and the National Gallery would be given
a limited time to raise matching funds.
I'd seen The Three Graces in Scotland
and it is absolutely beautiful.
Everyone was aware of the concern that The Three Graces would be lost.
Did I have some black fear of it going?
No. Did I wish it to stay?
Emphatically, I did.
Because I would prefer these great icons of art
to remain in the United Kingdom.
REPORTER: So far, the V&A's pledged £1.1 million...
Clifford had promises of funding from charities,
art funds and private donors,
but was still close to £2 million short.
In London, a wealthy philanthropist was determined to help keep
national treasures of Britain in Britain.
His name was Paul Getty Jr,
the brother of Gordon Getty, and Mark Getty's father.
He really loved this country and therefore it meant something to him
to keep these things here.
Out of the blue, there's a telephone call
and it was actually Christopher Gibbs.
Christopher Gibbs was one of Paul Jr's most trusted friends.
Well, he loved The Three Graces.
Um... And he loved there being three of them,
and he was keen on Graces in general,
and he thought that the sculpture should always stay in England.
He very excitedly said, "What do you want?
"How much do we need? It's yours."
Which was fantastic.
Um...
But I had been warned not to say anything
about relationship between father Getty and son Getty
and any hostility towards the Getty Museum.
The billionaire John Paul Getty Jr has pledged £1 million
to help keep Antonio Canova's
Three Graces in Britain...
Paul Getty Jr was about to write a cheque for £1 million.
It would save The Three Graces for Britain.
REPORTER: The Three Graces
should have been on their way to California...
But Timothy Clifford didn't heed the warning
to keep Paul's father out of it.
In the first place,
his relations with his father were not particularly brilliant.
That was enough for them and I was caught, you know.
Completely hooked.
Um, and then it was a world story.
Paul's very, very angry about that.
To say that Paul did it to spite his father's museum,
I mean, that was an absolutely disgraceful thing to do.
The offer unravelled.
REPORTER: ..Mr Getty said he was astonished
to hear he bears a grudge against the Getty:
Behind here, I've got all my scrapbooks,
or a lot of my scrapbooks...
With the fate of the sculpture in limbo,
even a national tabloid produced a Page Three appeal for The Graces.
REPORTER: This morning, Mr Clifford was backtracking rapidly,
saying he regretted his remarks and knew nothing about Mr Getty's
relationship with his father.
I would like to repeat my sincere apology
to Mr Getty for any distress that I've caused him.
But not all the Getty Museum curators rated The Three Graces.
I kept out of it cos I thought it was really ugly.
My goodness, they were big, fat bottoms and everything.
You know, I mean, they were huge and fat, you know, with ugly faces.
Ultimately, Paul Getty Jr
accepted Timothy Clifford's apology
and gave his donation.
The Three Graces remained in Britain.
I was immensely grateful to Paul for his generosity to those causes,
and so were millions of other people.
My brother Paul came to the rescue.
Paid up the dough and became a hero in England.
And I sent my brother a letter of congratulations
on that, uh, magnificent gift.
Paul Getty Jr's journey
to becoming one of the most generous art patrons in British history
was a tortuous one.
Paul is a completely different person from his father.
I remember Paul telling me
that he was in the office of Getty Oil when he was quite young
and his father said, "Oh, this is so-and-so who manages this
"and this is so-and-so who manages this,
"and this is our legal man...
"Oh, and this is your brother Ronald. Do you know each other?"
And he'd never met him.
Christopher Gibbs was a fashion trendsetter in the '60s
when he first met Paul.
He would become one of Paul's closest friends
for the next three decades.
He was a child of his time.
We were interested in all kinds of forms of ecstatic experience.
I mean, the whole world, um, of getting high, um,
is full of monsters and dragons and horrible people,
as well as ecstatic, lit up, wonderful, lyrical folk.
After moving to London,
Paul would spend years in rehab, getting treatment for addiction
and related health problems.
Texaco is close to...
In 1984, after the sale of Getty Oil,
Paul Getty Jr would receive hundreds of millions of dollars.
..Or $10 billion...
I thought, "What's the best thing that England offers to people
"who've got a bit of dosh?"
And I thought, um, "A country estate with a nice house..."
"..and all that goes with it."
Christopher Gibbs would convince Paul
to buy the 18th-century Wormsley Estate
in Buckinghamshire...
It's 2,500 acres in the heart of the Chiltern Hills.
They would spend over six years and millions of pounds restoring it.
And the most important ingredient, from his point of view,
was to have a library.
You bought Wormsley, this lovely estate -
is it Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire?
Oxfordshire? Actually, the line runs right through the estate, yes.
And we must mention your books.
You've got the most marvellous library down at Wormsley.
In contrast to J Paul Getty's Roman villa,
Paul would build a medieval castle
to provide a secure and fireproof home
for what would become
one of the most extraordinary private collections of books
in the world.
Have you collected these yourself, or were they handed down?
I have indeed.
They're the books that I've loved and collected over...
Over the last, uh, 35-40 years, yeah. Mm.
This is the library.
The books here go back 2,000 years
and they go back to the beginning of print,
the beginning of binding, to binding today.
Well, for my father, the library represented, really,
the completion of his life's dream.
He began collecting books when he was very young, a teenager.
He was much more interested in the history of the book,
the quality of it,
what role it had in the history of either literature,
or bookmaking itself.
So, here we have
the first collected works of Shakespeare, together, in 1623.
Shakespeare would never have been known to us
if it hadn't been for this book.
The players' company got together and spent a lot of time, you know,
sort of racking their brains, their notes, their histories
and put together what we see here.
The ceiling represents the night sky over Genoa in the north of Italy
on September 7, 1932,
which was the day my father was born.
I was born on a boat in the Mediterranean.
On a boat?! Yeah, I was born on a boat in the Mediterranean.
But I was brought up, um,
originally in Los Angeles and then in, um... In San Francisco.
So, this painting is my father in his sitting room library,
in London, at Cheyne Walk.
And you've been an American all your life and still are, I imagine.
I still am, indeed, yes. I still am.
I didn't live with my father when I was young
and I only, kind of, developed a relationship with him
from a young teenager onwards,
so formative years were spent separately in Rome with my mother.
Even though I didn't grow up with him,
we certainly spent a lot of life together.
Mark would discover that book collecting
was not his father's only obsession.
He had a cinema built with a full 35mm projection suite.
His father collected hundreds of prints of Hollywood films,
especially those by his favourite director, John Ford.
GUNFIRE
TV: The collection itself was in very poor condition...
And then, one night in 1984, while watching TV,
Paul became aware that Britain's film heritage
was seriously under threat.
It was a chance encounter
that would change the course of British film history.
Pictures have been made to move,
starting thousands of years ago with shadow plays and so on, and...
I was doing a television programme about preserving film
and Paul happened to be watching, and the next day, um,
his lawyer rang and said,
could I come and see him
because he'd like to help the task of preserving film.
YELLS: Forward ho!
Paul Getty Jr came to the rescue of British film heritage.
This would eventually become this...
The BFI received a first donation of £20 million
to enable the preservation of every British film ever made.
When I first came to the BFI,
everybody talked about Getty
cos, of course, he'd made everything happen for us.
And it wasn't a one-way relationship.
So every couple of weeks,
I would be sending him VHSs of films that he really wanted to see.
He was really obsessed with this actress, Edna May Oliver.
People will know her horsey face, if they see it.
She played very caustic-tongued spinsters
who liked to give people a hard time.
It's all right, really.
Where d'you think you were?
In an unexpected conversation with another stranger.
And he was obsessed. He watched all of those.
His mother was Ann Rork and she had been an actress
in the days of silent cinema.
One of the things we did was to track down one or two
of the four films that she made.
And he was obviously very delighted with that.
He created the bedrock for us to be able to look after the nation's film
heritage. He really, really did.
I knew him, Horatio.
A fellow of infinite jest.
Of most excellent fancy.
Across two decades,
Paul Getty donated over £15 million to the BFI.
The film and television heritage of Britain
received a new lease of life.
Another obsession of Paul Getty Jr...was cricket.
When you say you discovered cricket,
how did you discover cricket? How does someone...?
Well, Mick Jagger used to come by my house...
In the 1970s,
Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were Paul's neighbours
on Cheyne Walk
and they were also friends of Christopher Gibbs.
Paul would be, sort of, glued to the box.
Mick Jagger used to say,
"Please, do we really have to watch this rubbish?
"Why can't we look at the cricket?" You know...
And, "The cricket? What is the cricket?"
He would want to watch the cricket when it was on. Mm.
And I would have to watch it too,
and, of course, I would ask the questions.
I'd heard about this game and I'd seen cricket bats,
and I'd always thought,
"How can you fail to hit the ball with a bat as big as that?"
THEY CHUCKLE
COMMENTATOR: Tony Greig.
Paul would soon become obsessed with cricket,
past and present,
and he would have the means to create HIS vision
of the ideal cricket ground at Wormsley.
It was a cornfield, um, originally, and, uh...
You've achieved something, to have your own cricket ground.
I-I took on more than I realised
when I decided to have cricket there.
PAUL JR CHUCKLES
I thought you only had to, sort of, shave the...
Shave the field off and play cricket on it.
In 1992,
Paul Jr was joined at the inaugural cricket game by celebrities,
cricket greats, Her Majesty the Queen Mother,
and the then Prime Minister.
I remember being there the very first day that Wormsley was open.
I remember Brian Johnston, the famous cricket commentator,
driving the sheep away from the outfield of the pitch,
about an hour to an hour and a half before the game started.
It was an absolutely perfect indication
of what a cricket romantic would have wished to see.
Having a wonderful cricket pitch and a wonderful, um, library...
An exquisite form of rehab, you might call it.
He discovered that giving money
to worthwhile causes
does have redemptive qualities.
It would do for any of us.
These bits of furniture, which were made for this room,
he managed to persuade those two museums
to lend them back to the room...
In 1985,
Lord Jacob Rothschild successfully raised funds
to restore the long-neglected Spencer House in London.
He was also chairman of the board of trustees at the National Gallery.
He heard that Paul Getty Jr
was thinking of making a sizeable donation.
He met up with Paul to convince him of its worth.
The pitch really was that,
A - it's an incredibly worthwhile institution.
B - he loved pictures.
And C - um...
You get more of an impact if you...
..give a very substantial donation to one institution
rather than spreading your favours amongst 200.
Paul needed no more convincing.
The National Gallery received one of the most generous donations
in its history - £50 million.
The ripple effects are still being felt.
It was reminiscent of his father's generosity to a different museum.
Paul would eventually get his very own museum entrance.
And a bronze bust, which now greets millions of visitors.
In 1986, he received an honorary knighthood from the Queen.
What is it like being an American with a knighthood?
I don't feel like an American, to tell you the truth.
In 1998, he received the full title, after adopting British citizenship.
A lot of wealth was made,
certainly in the first 50 years of the 20th century,
by exploiting the material assets of the Earth.
So, mining, oil, diamonds, etc.
Cos if you look at what's happened
with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc, etc,
the economy has shifted,
where we extract a lot of value from what's inside people's heads.
Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century.
In the 1930s, when the oil industry faced crisis,
J Paul Getty seized an historic opportunity to grow.
In the 1990s,
when dozens of photo archives
struggled to adapt to the digital age,
Mark Getty seized HIS historic opportunity
and established Getty Images,
which now has dozens of offices from LA to London.
There are lots of family patterns.
My grandfather rarely visited his business personally.
Both his business and Getty Images,
though they're completely different in all sorts of ways, are...
..spread around the globe,
so it isn't an easy thing to get everywhere a lot,
um, or at least, that's my excuse.
But, uh... I'm very excited about our archival facility.
That's where all of our archival photography is stored.
100 million-odd pictures
since the beginning of photography in the 1840s.
And I haven't been to it yet, so I'm very excited about seeing it.
DOOR BUZZER BLARES
Getty Images today owns and licenses a significant chunk
of the world's photographic memory of the 19th and 20th century.
Welcome to our new world. Thank you. Um...
Hi. How are you? Jim's been here 108 years. Yeah...
We still call Justine the new girl.
She's been here over ten years. Hello. Hi. How are you?
Nice to meet you. And you, too.
Sorry, and Melanie.
Some of our oldest photographs date back to 1839.
We have a collection of daguerreotypes,
which is one of the earliest forms of photography.
We have Getty Images photographers who are still shooting today,
so it goes right up to this very moment.
We'll have photographers out there
shooting what's going on in the world,
and it all feeding through back to the website.
Wow! Unlike the old archive, where now it's just one big warehouse,
what we've done is, basically, all the paper-based stuff is upstairs.
Too close! My nose is going to look that big! No, no, you look great.
I never wanted to be cast as grandson of J Paul Getty.
THEY LAUGH
My life was going to be mine.
I had always wanted to run my own business,
build a business.
I think that might have been influenced by, um...
..my grandfather having built HIS business.
I thought that, yeah, that was an extraordinary achievement.
With a colleague of mine, Jonathan Klein -
who became my partner and cofounder of Getty Images -
we made approximately 150 acquisitions in the last 23 years
since we created the business.
I think ourselves and Corbis, um,
were seen as, sort of, like the Antichrists in our industry,
buying up lots of these agencies,
making huge people...
A number of people redundant, and throwing stuff away.
Which was, like, complete rubbish,
but that was the perception out there.
A lot of these businesses were going under because they hadn't made that
switch from analogue to digital,
and that takes an enormous amount of investment.
We were basically saving these archives from extinction.
We were seen as new and full of money and brash and ignorant.
Amongst the countless boxes, folders and files at Getty Images,
Mark would encounter all the raw ingredients
for the ultimate Getty family scrapbook.
OK. So, THIS one...
..is...my grandfather.
Now, he was a famous sportsman and athlete.
Oh, right. OK. All right. MARK LAUGHS
Ah, Sutton Place.
Obviously, it was a difficult neighbourhood.
BOTH LAUGH And...it was rough!
HE WINDS UP GRAMOPHONE
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
Saving great artworks has become a family tradition for the Gettys.
When Mark Getty's father, Sir Paul Getty,
gave a £50 million donation to the National Gallery,
it may have seemed like a tough act to follow.
But in 2008,
Mark Getty took on a challenge
that would carry on that family tradition.
When I became chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery
in early 2008...
..soon after that event,
we were told as a board that the Dukes of Sutherland
were thinking of selling these two great paintings by Titian.
Titian is one of the greatest Renaissance artists
and the National Gallery has some of his finest works.
It would be a coup to finally own the legendary Diana And Actaeon
and Diana And Callisto.
This wasn't the first time a Titian had cast a spell on a Getty.
Well, these two paintings, they have been sitting side by side
for over 500 years.
They're both scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
On the open market,
the estimated value for both paintings was over £300 million.
The Duke agreed to sell both Titians to the National Gallery
for a mere £100 million.
However, he wanted the first 50 million paid within three months.
We launched the campaign to acquire the two Titians
on September 15, 2008.
It wasn't the most...
..propitious time to launch a fundraising campaign
to acquire anything.
Financial markets around the world are in shock.
Lehman Brothers - America's fourth-largest investment bank -
goes bankrupt.
We didn't know that in the morning when we made our announcement.
If you have the task ahead of you,
as chairman of an institution like this -
raising £100 million in two years in the teeth of a financial crisis -
the first letter you write is a draft letter of resignation
because you don't think you're going to be able to do it.
The campaign had echoes of The Three Graces.
You do everything in these circumstances.
It's all hands to the pumps.
If Mark and fellow trustees couldn't raise the money,
there was a chance that the Getty Museum would step in
and try to take the two Titians to America.
All of the trustees individually gave.
It's the first time that ever happened at the National Gallery.
With public and private funds raised
and Gallery trustees - including Mark - also donating money,
these two great paintings were saved for the nation.
And there they still are.
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
It's not the obsession with oil and art of his grandfather,
or the obsession of books and cricket of his father.
It's his own Mark Getty obsession...
..to have a winning horse in the centuries-old horse race of Siena...
..The Palio.
I grew up between Rome and Siena.
A lot of my childhood was spent here
and you can't avoid the excitement around the Palio,
which is, of course, the great Sienese festival and horse race.
It's in my blood, really.
This is Polonski.
Ciccio!
I'm in debt to this horse. Yeah...
Mark has been running horses and hoping to win the Palio
since the early 1980s.
The fact that you may have the fastest horse
doesn't mean you're going to win.
Animal rights activists and people outside Siena
are often shocked by the rules of the Palio,
but for locals, they're a matter of challenge and tradition.
Jockeys are allowed to pay each other off,
they're allowed to whip the other jockeys.
All sorts of things are permitted.
So the most successful teams are the ones who are smarter at it.
And that's a good life lesson.
Era piu alto di lui. Eh, ma anche piu giovane.
Va be', ma...
In 2015,
the decades-long quest of Mark for a Palio victory was long overdue.
Riding Mark's horse Polonski in green and orange
was jockey Giovanni Atzeni.
We had a good starting position, put it that way.
MARK LAUGHS, ITALIAN COMMENTARY
Polonski and Atzeni achieved the inside position.
ITALIAN COMMENTARY CONTINUES
Mark's horse Polonski won the Palio in record-breaking time.
One minute and 12 seconds flat.
It felt great. Of course it felt great.
MARK CHUCKLES I lost all of my Anglo-Saxon reserve,
um, and was ecstatic.
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
Philanthropy, that's my father's achievement.
You know, my legacy is my music.
It's an auction.
There's no question. Looking at him here, he wants it.
Steely determination. Absolutely. He wants that picture badly.
That's a ferocious look there. Really.
BOTH LAUGH
The hilltop Getty Center museum in LA
has grown out of the historic endowment of J Paul Getty.
It rivals Disneyland as one of LA's top tourist attractions.
Its expanding collection of masterpieces
has made it one of the most visited museums in the world.