Thursday, December 15, 2011

JEAN PAUL GETTY

I'd best type with one hand, hold my nose with t'other as I write this post about a guy who was a fully-paid up member of the 1%!

Today, 15 December, in 1892 was the day Jean Paul Getty was born into George Getty's family in the petroleum business in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He was one of the first people in the world with a fortune estimated at over one billion U.S. dollars.

After studies at Universities in California he graduated, in 1914, from Magdalen College, Oxford with degrees in economics and political science. He spent his summers between studies working on his father's oil fields in Oklahoma. Running his own oil company in Tulsa, he made his first million by 1916. However, in 1917, he announced that he was retiring to become a Los Angeles-based playboy. Although he eventually returned to business, Getty had lost his father's respect. Just before George Franklin Getty died in 1930, he believed that Jean Paul would destroy the family company, and told him so.
(See Wikipedia. Photograph from MSN)

As well as his entrepreneurial and industrialist hats Getty had another - that of the womaniser. Astrodatabank offers an unusually juicy tidbit about JPG: "he was a lifelong philanderer noted for his prowess and it was reported in a biography that he had a penis close to 9 inches long."

After taking a few years off from the money-making grind to enjoy spending his earnings on women, Getty returned to Oklahoma in 1919. During the 1920s he added about $3 million to his already sizable estate. His succession of marriages and divorces (three during the 1920s, five throughout his life) so distressed his father, however, that J. Paul inherited a mere $500,000 of the $10 million the senior Getty left at his death in 1930.

In 1953 he struck oil in the Middle East (not a hard thing to do by all accounts), then became the world's richest man.

Getty moved to England in the 1950s and became a prominent Anglophile. He lived and worked at his 16th-century Tudor estate, Sutton Place near Guildford; the traditional country house became the centre of Getty Oil and his associated companies and he used the estate to entertain his British and Arabian friends (including the British Rothschild family and numerous rulers of Middle Eastern countries).

Getty lived the rest of his life in the British Isles, dying of heart failure at the age of 83 on June 6, 1976. (Wikipedia, link above)

In spite of his obscene wealth Getty was a notoriously mean man. He installed a pay phone in his English castle for house guests to use; also famously refused to pay a $17 million ransom when his teenage grandson was kidnapped in Rome in the 1970s. Said to be very vain, also, he resorted to periodic facial cosmetic surgery. Never had a nose job though, from the look of things!



Birth data from Astrodatabank. Birthtime graded "B", so fairly reliable, from a biography - or possibly from his autobiography, As I See It.

Briefly: Venus, Moon, Uranus and South node of Moon all in sexy Scorpio no doubt reflect his womanising and reported sexual prowess. Capricorn rising is a classic representation of a character perceived as miserly or "cheap", whilst being a whizz at making money and conducting business matters.

Sun and Mercury in a usually jovial Sagittarius doesn't seem to fit this guy too well - other than giving a hint of his draw to excess - in both sexual appetite and in amassing an excessive fortune.


I like this configuration in his chart. It's what astrologers poetically term a "Mystic Rectangle", but it has nothing to do with mysticism. Always reliable Skyscript tells us that in such a configuration "the combination of tense and harmonious aspects produces the best possible potential for the constructive use of natural talents."

The configuration links 2 sets of harmonious trines, 2 sets of helful sextiles, and 2 potentially challenging oppositions.

Planets involved by trine are: Saturn & Neptune/Pluto and Mercury & Jupiter

By sextile: Mercury & Saturn and Jupiter & Neptune/Pluto

By opposition: Saturn opp. Jupiter and Mercury opp. Neptune/Pluto.

The planets are in Fire and Air signs, so a core of dynamism and mental acuity is indicated. The planets themselves represent business and discipline (Saturn);
creativity, oil, eroticism (Neptune/Pluto); communication, excess, mass production (Mercury, Jupiter).

The "interactions" of these planets, mostly benign with oppositions challenging or bringing potential for balance, are what make the Mystic Rectangle interesting. the Mystic Rectangle is a very useful configuration to have in one's natal chart, as long as one learns, from experience, how to maximise its benefits. Jean Paul Getty, whether he knew it or not - obviously did this to perfection!

4 comments:

James Higham said...

Don't know why you'd give him the blogspace, Twilight.

Twilight said...

James Higham ~~ Can't ignore 'em all, all the time!

"Know thine enemy" ;-)

Anyway, the astrology is quite interesting.

Anonymous said...

GP: I also wondered why you would care about Getty. But then, following yesterday's conversation about Scorpionic types, it's obvious. He irritates you, or you have some facility to annoy him (or at least his Venus - by e.g. highlighting his big nose...).

Nihil nisi bonum: What's left is his remarkable museum. At least he saved something valuable for the rest of us.

Twilight said...

Anonymous/Gian Paul ~~
Oh - I don't CARE about Getty himself. I care whether he fitted his natal chart. Taking a look at people such as Getty allows astrology to shine through - sometimes.

The museum? Yes. As someone once said:

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.

(Edward Wallis Hoch)

:-)