Who is J. Paul Getty?
Andrew Norman (nja@le.ac.uk): John Paul Getty was an oil millionaire and famous cheapskate (wasn’t he the one who installed a payphone in his mansion so that his guests wouldn’t cost him too much?), and JPG II is his son, who now lives in England and gives a large amount of money to charitable causes. Rumour has it that they didn’t get along very well, though JPG II nearly pulled out of buying a statue for a museum recently when the director suggested that this was the case. The statue in question was Canova’s “the Three Graces”, which the JPG museum in California was attempting to buy – JPG II was contributing to a fund to keep it in Britain.
