The Pay Phone at Sutton Place
In the great hall of a seventy-two-room Tudor mansion in Surrey, England—a house that once belonged to Henry VIII, set on seven hundred acres of manicured grounds patrolled by Alsatian guard dogs—there was, for years, a coin-operated telephone. Guests who wished to make a long-distance call were directed to it. Dukes, duchesses, Hollywood stars, heads of state: they all fumbled for coins. The device was installed at the personal instruction of J. Paul Getty, who at the time of its installation was, by most credible estimates, the richest private citizen on the planet—a man whose daily oil revenues could have funded a small nation's annual budget, whose fortune was valued somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion in 1974 dollars, who controlled nearly two hundred companies and employed nineteen thousand people across the globe. The pay phone was not a joke, though it has become one. It was a conviction.
That conviction—that money, once accumulated, must be defended against all claimants, including guests, wives, children, grandchildren, kidnappers, governments, and death itself—is the thread that runs through six decades of the Getty story, from the Oklahoma oil fields of 1903 to the Calabrian mountains where a sixteen-year-old boy's ear was sliced off and mailed to a newspaper in 1973, and forward still, into the Nevada trust offices and California courtrooms where Getty heirs in the 2020s continue to joust with the tax code, with each other, and with the fundamental question their patriarch could never resolve: what is money for?
The answer Getty arrived at was tautological. Money was for making more money. The fortune was the monument. And the monument, he believed with near-religious fervor, must endure in perpetuity—outlasting him, outlasting his sons, outlasting the governments that would tax it and the heirs who might squander it. He succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. More than four decades after his death, the Getty fortune has not merely survived; it has metastasized, funding a museum complex that draws millions of visitors annually, a family office that quietly manages billions, and a dynasty whose members range from classical composers to multimedia artists to granddaughters who retweet Bernie Sanders while their trust administrators shuttle quarterly votes to Nevada to avoid California's thirteen-percent income tax. The pay phone is long gone. The instinct it represented is the family's most durable inheritance.
By the Numbers
The Getty Empire
$2B–$4BEstimated fortune at death (1976 dollars)
~200Companies controlled at peak
$504Federal income tax paid in one notable year
$9.5MPaid for Saudi-Kuwait Neutral Zone concession (1949)
16M+ bbl/yrNeutral Zone oil production at peak
$4BValue of the Sarah C. Getty Trust before Texaco sale
$10B+Texaco's acquisition price for Getty Oil (1984)
Shirtsleeves in Minnesota
The Getty fortune begins not with oil but with law, not with extravagance but with Methodist thrift, not in the American West but in the upper Midwest, where George Franklin Getty practiced as an attorney in Minneapolis in the last decade of the nineteenth century. George was, by all available accounts, a man of rigorous moral economy—devout, prudent, suspicious of idleness—who found lawyering dull and longed for something more dangerous. In 1903, he purchased 1,100 acres of land in Oklahoma's Bartlesville-Dewey Field, just six years after the state's first commercially successful well, the Nellie Johnstone Number One, had ushered in a petroleum frenzy that would make Oklahoma the nation's largest oil producer by the time it achieved statehood in 1907. George moved his wife Sarah and their only child, Jean Paul—born December 15, 1892, the name French in spelling but pronounced, simply, "John"—out to the oil fields.
The boy was eleven when the family arrived. He watched his father drill. He listened at the dinner table. During school breaks he accompanied George on inspection tours, absorbing the vernacular of leases, royalties, geological surveys, and the particular calculus of risk that governs wildcatting. George's instincts were uncanny: he found oil in forty-two of forty-three wells he drilled, a hit rate that bordered on the geological occult. "A lot of old-time oilmen sneered at the idea that 'some damn bookworm could tell them where to drill for oil,'" as one biographer later observed. George was both bookworm and wildcatter, and within a few years the Minnehoma Oil Company was producing roughly a hundred thousand barrels of crude a month.
The family's trajectory from that point followed a pattern that would become the template for twentieth-century petroleum dynasties: accumulate in the provinces, consolidate in the cities, diversify into respectability. The Gettys moved to Los Angeles around 1906, flush with Oklahoma profits but retaining their Midwestern moral architecture. George did not resume general law practice. He had become an oil investor, and oil investors, as his son would learn, can live anywhere.
A Millionaire Before He Knew What to Do with It
J. Paul Getty completed his formal education at Oxford, earning a diploma in economics and political science in 1914—a credential that would prove less useful than the summers he'd spent in Oklahoma learning to read the landscape for subsurface formations. Returning to the United States in June of that year, he followed his father into the oil business with a $10,000 stake. Within a year, a well in Haskell, Oklahoma struck, and the young Getty was a millionaire. He was twenty-three years old.
At which point he did something almost no one in the annals of great American fortunes has done: he quit.
"I saw no reason why I should exert myself further to make more," he wrote in
My Life and Fortunes. He would focus on "enjoying myself." For the next two years, roughly 1916 to 1919, he pursued the project of enjoyment in Los Angeles with the same concentrated energy he'd later bring to petroleum concessions—acquiring Hollywood friends like Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, an ever-expanding circle of hangers-on, and the first of what would become five marriages and five divorces. His parents, devout to the point of alarm, were appalled. George and Sarah told their son that a rich man must "keep his money working to justify its existence."
The prodigal returned to the family business in 1919. But the retirement—brief, hedonistic, philosophically vacant—left a mark. For the rest of his life, Getty would oscillate between two irreconcilable impulses: the puritan conviction that wealth must be earned and re-earned through labor, and the libertine suspicion that the whole enterprise was, at some level, absurd. He never resolved the tension. He merely built an empire on top of it.
Over the next decade, he added $3 million to his estate. When George died in 1930, the will delivered a blow that would shape everything that followed.
The Christmas Present and the Spendthrift Clause
George Getty's estate was valued at approximately $15 million. Nearly all of it was bequeathed to Sarah. Paul—who had been working in the family business for over a decade, who had made himself a millionaire independently, who had returned from his retirement at his parents' insistence—received a relative pittance. The slight was deliberate. George did not trust his son with the money.
Paul complained to his mother. Sarah, caught between maternal sympathy and her late husband's judgment, agreed to sell him her controlling share of the company. She formalized the arrangement as a Christmas present, with a characteristically precise condition: the offer would expire if "not accepted by you in writing on or before noon of 30 December." It was the kind of clause that might govern a commercial real estate transaction, not a gift between mother and son. But then, the Gettys did not distinguish sharply between family and commerce.
Even as she surrendered control, Sarah hedged. She locked up a portion of the assets in what accountants call a "spendthrift trust"—a structure that gives the beneficiary limited access to principal, designed to protect inheritors from their own profligacy. The Sarah C. Getty
Trust, established in 1934, would become one of the most consequential legal instruments in American financial history, a vehicle that would shelter billions, survive internecine warfare among Getty heirs, force the sale of a major oil company, and endure, in mutated forms, into the twenty-first century.
For Paul, the insult of his father's will catalyzed something that had been latent. Claus von Bülow—the suave, sinister figure who served as a top lieutenant at Getty Oil before achieving his own infamy when he was convicted of attempting to murder his heiress wife Martha (he was later acquitted)—described the effect with aristocratic precision: "Dad was going to eat his words."
I feel no qualms or reticence about likening the Getty Oil Company to an empire—and myself to a "Caesar."
Paul channeled nearly all his energy and profits back into the company and the trust. He merged Tidewater Oil, Skelly Oil, and the Missouri Oil Company into Getty Oil. By 1967, the conglomerate held assets of more than $3 billion. But the masterstroke—the bet that transformed Getty from merely wealthy to historically rich—came in 1949, when he paid $9.5 million for a sixty-year concession in the Neutral Zone, a desolate strip of desert between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait where no oil had ever been found.
He had learned Arabic to negotiate the deal personally. The initial investment exceeded $30 million before a drop of crude materialized. Old-money oilmen considered it lunacy. When the wells finally came in, they produced more than sixteen million barrels a year. Within fifty years, the Sarah C. Getty Trust had grown a thousandfold, to $4 billion.
The Solitary Billionaire
In 1957, Fortune magazine declared J. Paul Getty the richest living American. His sons learned about it from the magazine. They were shocked—not that their father was wealthy, which they knew in the abstract, but that his wealth bore so little resemblance to their experience of him. The alimony and child support he dispensed did not suggest the magnitude of the fortune. George, the eldest, referred to his father as "Mr. Getty" and estimated that he had spent fewer than six weeks with him since the age of eight or ten. "I meet him in hotel rooms or receive instructions by letter," he said in 1960. "Sometimes he says he is too busy to see me."
Getty had five sons by four of his five wives. He did not attend their weddings. He was more interested in what he called "larger expressions of legacy"—the museum, the trust, the company, the name. A 1963 BBC documentary titled The Solitary Billionaire captured him dining alone at a seventy-foot banquet table, performing exercises in a three-piece suit beside a Renoir, hoisting a barbell over his head with the grim determination of a man who had confused calisthenics with purpose. The interviewer, Alan Whicker, found him at his desk in Sutton Place, conducting his global empire with two secretaries and two telephone lines.
"I really don't know of any quality I have that many others don't have," Getty told the camera. "I'm hardworking... but I know others just as hardworking. I'm intelligent, I like to think, but I know others just as intelligent." Then, with a candor that momentarily punctured the performance: "I always wished that I had a better personality, that I could entertain people better. I always worried I might be a little on the dull side as a companion."
This was not false modesty. It was clinical self-assessment from a man who had, by his own admission, envied others his entire life—"people younger and stronger and more cheerful than I am, people who have better characters than I have." The ordinary man in the street, he noted, had advantages. "Large financial responsibilities are not any key to cheerfulness."
The women, at least, were plentiful. Getty's sexual appetite was, by all accounts, prodigious and indiscriminate. He boasted of five different partners in a single day at the age of sixty. He compiled a list of a hundred lovers he remembered fondly. He maintained a harem of live-in girlfriends at Sutton Place—four brunettes playing cards in the parlor, as one grandson discovered upon arriving unannounced. Lord Beaverbrook described him as "priapic." His friend and lawyer Robina Lund offered a more structural observation: "Paul could hardly ever say 'no' to a woman, or 'yes' to a man."
His last wife, a singer named Teddy Getty, had to beg him to pay for maternity clothes, arguing in one emphatic letter that he could deduct them from his taxes as an expense for her performing career: "SO HERE AGAIN YOU HAVE LOST NOTHING." When their son, Timmy, was treated for a brain tumor, Paul declined to visit and complained that the doctors "grossly overcharged you." He wrote, "Some doctors like to charge a rich person 20 times more than their regular fee."
Biographer Robert Lenzner's verdict was blunt: "Getty was illiterate with respect to being a father or a husband."
The Arithmetic of Parsimony
Even among the wealthy, Getty's cheapness was pathological. He signed his own checks. He washed his clothes by hand. The pay phone at Sutton Place was only the most famous instance of a broader compulsion that extended into every crevice of his financial life. When he donated artworks to his museum, he would value them at prices far exceeding what he had paid and claim a hefty deduction. He invited twelve hundred guests to a mansion-warming party and declared it a business expense. His tactics grew so aggressive that President John F. Kennedy personally leaked details of Getty's taxes to Newsweek, revealing that in a recent year Getty had paid a total of $504 in federal income tax.
He was undeterred. In
How to Be Rich, his 1965 book—which originated as a series of columns for
Playboy magazine, written at the invitation of Hugh Hefner for "young executives and college students"—he condemned the "insane hodgepodge of Federal, state, county and city levies that make life a fiscal nightmare for everyone." Elsewhere, he derided government spending on "nonproductive and very frequently counterproductive socialistic schemes."
The paradox of Getty's public writing is that it is, within its narrow register, genuinely instructive. He believed in owner-operators. He believed in thrift as a moral discipline. He believed that executives who obsessed over job security rather than productive work were a cancer on organizations. He believed that the businessman who understood his industry deeply—who could read a geological survey as fluently as a balance sheet—would outperform the credentialed dilettante every time. These are not foolish convictions. They are, in fact, the convictions of nearly every great operator in the history of American business.
But the advice always bent back toward the fortress. "Make your money first, then think about spending it" was his first principle. The corollary, never articulated but everywhere evident, was: and once you've made it, spend as little as possible, because every dollar that leaves your control is a dollar that has betrayed you.
In private moments, even Getty marveled at his own drive. "I don't know why I continue to be active in business," he wrote in his diary in 1952, four decades after he'd first tried to retire. "Force of habit, I suppose."
The Ear
On July 10, 1973, in the early hours of a Roman morning, sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III was walking to the apartment he shared with two artists when a car pulled up alongside him. The driver asked, "Excuse me, signore. Are you Paul Getty?" When the boy answered yes, he was pulled into the vehicle, muzzled with a chloroform-soaked pad, and driven south to a rural hideaway in Calabria.
The grandson—known within the family as Little Paul, nicknamed "the Golden Hippie" by the Italian press for his long curly hair and bohemian wardrobe—had been living a life of conspicuous insolvency. Despite his last name, he had no access to the Getty fortune. He bartered paintings for meals at a neighborhood restaurant. His captors, who wore masks and chained him in a series of locations including a cave, assumed the kidnapping would be resolved quickly. They were wrong by five months.
The kidnappers demanded $17 million. Old Paul—ensconced at Sutton Place, insulated by guard dogs and paranoia—suspected the kidnapping was a hoax, orchestrated by family members to extract money. He refused to pay. When reporters pressed him, he delivered what may be the most revealing sentence he ever uttered: "I have fourteen other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, I'll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren."
The logic was impeccable. It was also monstrous. Screenwriter David Scarpa, who adapted the story for Ridley Scott's film, observed that "the wealthier he became, the more dependent he became on money, like an addict. This idea of that gnawing insecurity never really going away seemed like an interesting jumping-off point for a kind of Shakespearean drama."
After three months of silence from the grandfather, the kidnappers grew desperate. On November 10, they cut off the boy's right ear and mailed it, along with a lock of his hair, to the Rome daily Il Messaggero. A postal strike delayed delivery. When the package finally arrived, the kidnappers had reduced their demand to approximately $3 million and threatened to continue removing body parts.
Old Paul consented to pay $2.2 million—the maximum amount, his advisers calculated, that was tax deductible. For the remaining $800,000, he loaned his son the money. At four percent interest.
I have fourteen other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, I'll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.
Little Paul was released on December 15, 1973—his grandfather's eighty-first birthday, an irony no one in the family appears to have commented upon. The boy was physically intact save for the missing ear but psychologically devastated. He later overdosed on drugs and alcohol, becoming a paraplegic, nearly blind, and dependent on care for the rest of his life.
The kidnapping became the defining parable of the Getty fortune—the moment at which the pay phone stopped being funny and became something closer to a clinical diagnosis. "The money is the root of the problem with the Gettys," said William Newsom, Gordon Getty's confidant and a former California judge. "It is a ludicrous, preposterous amount of money, enough to make you wonder if anybody in the world should have that much. It taints everything."
The Death of George and the Architecture of Succession
The kidnapping was not the only Getty calamity of 1973. On June 6—five weeks before Little Paul was snatched off a Roman street—George Getty, the eldest son and executive vice president of Getty Oil, died at his home in the Hollywood Hills. The circumstances were murky and have never been fully clarified.
George had been, in the Getty cosmology, "the vice president in charge of failure." His father made executive decisions without consulting or informing him. George's colleagues recalled him saying, despondently, "My father's the president in charge of success, and I'm the vice president in charge of failure." He had begun drinking heavily by the early 1970s, supplemented by sedatives and amphetamines. On the night of June 6, after what John Pearson's biography describes as "another bitter row with his wife—once again over Mr. Getty"—George locked himself in a room, swallowed a large quantity of Nembutal, attempted to stab himself with a barbecue fork, and fell into a coma.
Friends who broke down the door argued over where to take him. "No one could permit Getty's vice president to be taken, in what was thought to be a drunken stupor, to the common-casualty department of the nearby U.C.L.A. hospital," Pearson writes. They drove him instead to "a more discreet hospital," a detour that consumed an additional twenty minutes. George did not survive.
Old Paul's response to his son's death was to sanitize the story for public consumption. The private response is unrecorded. He had five sons. Two would predecease him. He did not change his approach to fatherhood. He did not alter his will. He continued to accumulate.
The Treaty of the Warring Nations
J. Paul Getty died on June 6, 1976, at Sutton Place. Heart failure. He was eighty-three. He had been living in England for nearly twenty-five years but claiming California residency for tax purposes—despite not having set foot in California in a quarter century.
The will, when it was read, surprised no one and infuriated everyone. Most of his personal estate—art, property, land—was bequeathed to a museum trust, insulating it from taxes almost entirely. It was his final act of fortress-building: a gift not to his children but to his name, structured to endure forever.
The family fought in court for years. The Sarah C. Getty Trust, now swollen with oil wealth, became the object of internecine warfare so complex that one lawyer likened the eventual settlement to "an elaborate treaty negotiation among warring nations." Four factions of the family agreed to divide the trust into portions of $750 million apiece. The tax bill was a billion dollars. The forced sale of Getty Oil to Texaco in 1984—at the time, the largest corporate acquisition in American history, valued at more than $10 billion—was a direct consequence of the family's inability to agree on anything except the need to liquidate.
Gordon Getty, the fourth son—a six-foot-five, absent-minded would-be composer who had spent his life in his father's shadow, oscillating between the piano and the boardroom—emerged as sole trustee. Fortune described the improbability: "Certainly Gordon is an improbable fiduciary... with limited and erratic business experience. His passion since boyhood has been music." The sisters—Anne, Claire, and Caroline, income beneficiaries who had been receiving $8.6 million each annually from Getty Oil and now saw their distributions leap to $35 million—were infuriated. They wanted Gordon removed. They accused him of violating trust provisions. They asked the court to make him personally liable for the billion-dollar tax bill.
Paul Jr., the second son, instantly became the sixth-richest man in Britain, with interest payments alone earning him a million dollars a week. He used part of his inheritance to purchase masterpieces for British museums specifically to prevent them from going to his father's institution in Malibu. "I was fed up with everything streaming to Malibu," he said. "It's time somebody stopped it." He was knighted in 1986 for giving away more than $200 million to British charities. He gave up his American citizenship in 1998. He built a replica of London's Oval cricket ground at his country estate. He died in 2003, at seventy, having spent the last three decades of his life in an elaborate project of renunciation—rejecting his father's country, his father's museum, and his father's idea of what money was for, while remaining, inescapably, his father's heir.
The Perpetual-Motion Machine
The old adage says "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." The Japanese version is bleaker: "The third generation ruins the house." The Germans dwell on mechanics: "Acquire it, inherit it, destroy it."
The Gettys have defied all three.
Between 1983 and 2020, according to analysis by researchers tracking dynastic wealth, the fortunes of America's most prominent clans did not shrink—they exploded. The Koch fortune grew twenty-five-fold. The Mars family's expanded by a factor of thirty-six. The Waltons of Walmart grew theirs forty-four-fold. The Getty fortune, though more fragmented and less precisely tracked, has followed a similar trajectory, sustained by the legal architecture of trusts, the lobbying power of the wealth-defense industry, and a tax code that has been systematically hollowed out since the late 1970s.
Brooke Harrington, a Dartmouth sociologist whose book Capital Without Borders examines the mechanics of tax avoidance, described families like the Gettys as beneficiaries of a "perpetual-motion machine of wealth creation." Often, she said, "the advisers' job is protecting the fortune from the family. Without clever wealth management and attorneys, the Getty fortune would've gone up in smoke."
The tools are baroque. Dynasty trusts, made possible after South Dakota abolished the ancient "rule against perpetuities" in 1983, can shield assets from inheritance taxes for centuries. Nevada set its limit at 365 years. Alaska at a thousand. South Dakota imposed no limit at all—a return to feudal England. GRATs (grantor-retained annuity trusts) allow heirs to receive vast sums tax-free by exploiting the technical fiction that the trust is an annuity. Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate, sometimes maintained at least ten GRATs simultaneously; in one three-year period, he used them to escape $2.8 billion in taxes.
The ethics of avoidance are themselves a form of inheritance. "Families just grow up in it," said Edward McCaffery, a tax professor at USC's Gould School of Law. "The patriarch never paid much in taxes. And you're just in a world in which, four times a year, you're going to Nevada or wherever."
The Bastard Princesses and the Pleiades Trust
Gordon Getty, now in his nineties, has lived for half a century in a grand yellow Italianate mansion in Pacific Heights, with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. He and his wife Ann expanded their living space by buying the house next door (to accommodate his piano) and then the house next door to that. They hosted opera stars and fund-raisers for politicians including Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, whose father William had been Gordon's friend since high school and had managed the family trust for years.
In 1999, it became public that Gordon had a second family. During an extramarital affair in Los Angeles, he had fathered three daughters. When their mother asked a court to recognize them as legal descendants, Gordon was vacationing with Ann on a friend's yacht in the Mediterranean. He released a statement: he acknowledged paternity and proclaimed, "I love them very much."
He created a trust for the girls—Kendalle, Alexandra (known as Sarah), and Nicolette—named Pleiades, after the sisters in Greek myth who had dalliances with Olympian gods and were immortalized as stars in the night sky. The trust was arranged to grow until Gordon's death, at which point the sisters would gain control of assets estimated to approach a billion dollars.
Kendalle, a multimedia artist, identified herself on Instagram as a "bastard princess." Sarah split her time between Los Angeles, New York, and Japan, and described herself as "artist, webtoon creator, boxer, runner, and vegan." These were not the heirs Old Paul had imagined when he vowed to create a "Getty dynasty." They were, in some ways, the opposite: progressive, politically engaged, openly ambivalent about the petroleum fortune that funded their lives. They retweeted Bernie Sanders. They supported environmental conservation and criminal justice reform. They wanted to pull their money out of oil.
In 2013, they hired Marlena Sonn.
The Wealth Manager's Dilemma
Sonn was born in Queens to South Korean immigrants determined to see her "fulfill the American Dream—go to Ivy League schools and become a doctor or a lawyer." At Barnard, she was drawn to punk, goth, and progressive politics. After graduation, she moved to San Francisco, campaigned for a higher minimum wage, and planned a career in activism. Then, in 2005, while working at a nonprofit, she developed an unexpected fascination with her retirement account. She started listening to analyst calls, buying stocks on E-Trade, watching exultantly as picks spiked. "That was where the real levers of power were," she said. "My parents were so relieved."
She started at a small firm in lower Manhattan as a receptionist, studying at night for her financial planner certification. She found a niche serving "progressive, ultra-high-net-worth millennials, women, inheritors, and family offices," navigating a shifting vocabulary of noblesse oblige that had migrated from "socially responsible investing" to "E.S.G." to "impact investing." What she offered was capitalism with progressive characteristics: tax-efficient strategies to move clients out of fossil fuels and into Amazon Basin reforestation, structuring trades to minimize the cost in taxes.
Sonn and Kendalle Getty met for dinner at a restaurant in Williamsburg in 2013. They bonded instantly. "An instantaneous meeting of the minds," Sonn recalled. Kendalle had about five million dollars administered by Goldman Sachs. She moved a million to Sonn, then the rest, then introduced Sonn to Sarah. Within a year, the sisters asked Sonn to help run the Pleiades Trust itself. As her duties expanded, she helped manage art projects, pay bills, navigate family dynamics. The three texted with "LOL," "Okee Dokee," and "Love you."
For nearly eight years, Sonn served the Getty sisters as adviser, confidante, and surrogate mother—Sarah described the relationship as "very much like mother-daughter, because my mother wasn't very present in my life." But the deeper Sonn penetrated into the family's financial architecture, the more uncomfortable she became.
Four times a year, to maintain the legal fiction that the Pleiades Trust was not administered from California, Kendalle and Sarah boarded jets to some location beyond the state border to cast their official votes on investment decisions. "It would be a different place every quarter," Sonn said. "New York, Seattle. Once a year, it would be in Nevada, usually in Las Vegas, because none of the family members wanted to go to Reno." The trust's official address was a small office complex a block from the Reno-Tahoe airport called Airport Gardens, which shared a parking lot with a private investigator and a hobby shop selling electric trains. In all the years Sonn worked with Kendalle and Sarah, neither sister had, as far as she knew, set foot in Airport Gardens.
The stakes were not trivial. By Sonn's estimate, the quarterly ritual had helped defer approximately $116 million in California taxes on the Pleiades Trust alone. Across at least two other family funds, the combined deferral reached an estimated $300 million. But Sonn had seen trust business conducted in California—she had visited Gordon's Pacific Heights mansion to help interview prospective financial advisers, with all candidates flying into San Francisco. She had watched emails, texts, and phone conversations flow constantly within the state's borders. She began telling Kendalle the truth: "I don't think we're being in integrity re: the spirit of the law."
Kendalle's reply: "Zoinks."
The financial-services industry lives between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. That's what tax efficiency is.
By 2021, both sisters had fired Sonn. The rupture produced dueling lawsuits—Kendalle accusing Sonn of "unjust enrichment," Sonn accusing the Gettys and their advisers of retaliating against her for opposing a "dubious tax avoidance scheme." The litigation exposed, in court filings studded with family emails and texts, the rarest of indiscretions from the wealth-management world. Wealth managers like to say, "A submerged whale does not get harpooned." Sonn was allowing one of America's richest families to surface.
Travertine and the Public Contract
The Getty Center sits on a sun-drenched hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains, its walls and walkways made of pale travertine mined from an ancient quarry east of Rome—the same stone used in the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum, a material, as the museum notes, "historically associated with public architecture." The phrase is a masterpiece of institutional misdirection. Public architecture belongs to the public. The Getty Center exists because Old Paul Getty fought his entire life to ensure that his money did not.
On a nearby stretch of coastline, with panoramic views of the Pacific, the Getty Villa occupies a re-created Roman country house. Joan Didion once described it as "a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least."
The J. Paul Getty Trust, which administers both institutions, was at one point the richest art institution in the world, with assets exceeding $9 billion. Its collections include a 1628 Rembrandt self-portrait on copper, rediscovered at an obscure English auction house in 2007 where it had been attributed to a "follower of Rembrandt," and Canaletto's dazzling Grand Canal in Venice, once owned by the New York philanthropist Jayne Wrightsman. Admission is free. Attendance is measured in millions. The museum is, by any measure, Old Paul's most successful investment—not because it generates returns, but because it generates the one thing his fortune could never reliably produce while he was alive: public goodwill.
The irony would not have been lost on him. He was a man who understood that legacy outlasts liquidity, that a name on a building persists longer than a name on a stock certificate. He bequeathed his art and property to the museum trust precisely because he understood the tax code: by routing his personal estate through a charitable vehicle, he insulated it from taxes almost entirely. The monument to his name was also a monument to the loophole.
The Fortress Endures
In one of her conversations with a reporter from The New Yorker, Marlena Sonn was asked why more people from her world didn't speak out about the tax avoidance they facilitated daily. "There's an unspoken omertà," she said. People "become engaged in the wrongdoing themselves. So they're able to enforce a certain kind of culture of silence around bad behavior."
Sarah Getty, the youngest of the Pleiades sisters, insisted that the family had acted lawfully. "I'm not against paying taxes at all," she said, "because I think they're very important, especially if they go in the right things. I would want the right government to be in control, though." Nicolette, the middle sister, acknowledged considering a move out of California to avoid tens of millions in taxes but said she abandoned the idea. She expects to pay about $30 million on her share of the trust. "I'm one who thinks the tax burden needs to be higher on the wealthy such as myself and my family," she said.
Kendalle, who declined to comment, continued to retweet Bernie Sanders: "Billionaires get richer & pay less in taxes while millions are unemployed, kids go hungry, veterans sleep on the street."
Sonn's career in finance was over. She had spent eight years as what one wealth manager called "a slave to these prima-donna girls, without the expectation that there's something at the end of the rainbow." She had reached the heights of wealth management, optimized her position, and sued in pursuit of millions. Viewed from a certain angle, she admitted, it was a capitalist fairy tale.
"My parents came here imagining that they could build a better life, and I am a product of that," she said. "And I think that some of what we're experiencing is that window has been closing for the last ten or twenty years."
The system, she concluded, "will always do whatever it can to preserve itself."
Five tax lawyers, interviewed independently about the Getty family's approach, said the final assessment would likely rest on subtle facts—how much trust business was actually conducted in California, whether beneficiaries moved away with genuine intention or transparent plans to return. Auditors have been known to examine not just claimed residency but gym-card swipe locations, social media geotags, and where a person keeps their most treasured belongings—a test known in the industry, with unintentional poetry, as the "Teddy-bear test."
Darien Shanske, a law professor at UC Davis, characterized the Gettys' approach as "aggressive, obnoxious tax planning." But he suspected the family's real strategy was simpler than it appeared: take their chances with the Franchise Tax Board, California's version of the IRS, which has finite capacity for complex cases against well-resourced litigants. "They're probably guessing that, in the unlikely event that the F.T.B. challenges them, it may well lose, thanks to their preparatory work—or that, faced with this work and the legal uncertainties, it'll just decide to settle."
Old Paul Getty would have understood the calculation perfectly. It was, in the end, the same calculation he had made with the kidnapping ransom, the same one he had made with the pay phone, the same one his mother had made with the Christmas offer that expired at noon on December 30. Every relationship—with governments, with family, with guests who wished to telephone—was, at bottom, a negotiation. And in every negotiation, the party with more money and more patience wins.
When the Pleiades Trust opens, each of the three sisters can expect to receive at least $300 million, minus whatever taxes their advisers do not succeed in avoiding. The fortune their great-grandfather began assembling in Oklahoma in 1903 will have passed through four generations, survived five divorces, a kidnapping, a billion-dollar tax bill, the forced sale of a major corporation, a public paternity scandal, and a wealth manager's lawsuit—and emerged, in real terms, larger than ever.
In a small office complex by the Reno-Tahoe airport, beside a hobby shop selling electric trains, a corporate filing gathers dust. Nobody visits. The money works in silence.
