'As long as I have money I will give it away'

WHEN he was 12, "Pabby" wrote a letter to his father, a distant figure who had left his son to be brought up by the child's grandmother. The letter was returned, with no message, and with the spelling mistakes corrected. Pabby - whose real name was John Paul Getty II - told his biographer that from that moment on, it was impossible to write his father another letter.

He may have been born into fabulous wealth, but John Paul Junior's life was to be blighted by tragedy, much of it bound up in family disputes and rivalries. After a drug-fuelled and hedonistic youth, he became a recluse, until he reinvented himself as Britain's most generous philanthropist, chiefly supporting the arts, but also giving money away to cricket clubs, churches and the families of striking miners. In one of his rare interviews, he said: "As long as I have money, I will give it away." By the time of his death yesterday at the age of 70, after he was admitted to hospital with a chest infection, he was estimated to have given away around £140m.

Born Eugene Paul Getty in 1932, his father was the Oklahoma oil tycoon John Paul Getty Senior, a famously miserly man who took little interest in his children. But despite the family's wealth, he was an unremarkable boy, awkward, shy and bespectacled, until one day in 1957, when he was 25, when his problems really began.

It was in October of that year that Fortune magazine named John Paul Snr as the richest man in America, and therefore the richest man in the world. John Paul Jnr's life was never to be the same again. He tried drugs and locking himself away from the world, but he was never able to recapture the privacy and anonymity he craved.

John Paul Jnr had studied at San Francisco State University, but left before graduating and served in the US Army in Korea, before returning to the US where in 1956 he married his college sweetheart Gail Harrison, a water polo champion. The first of their four children was born later the same year.

But as Getty embraced the hedonistic lifestyle of the 1960s, his marriage began to break up, and in 1965 he met Talitha Pol, granddaughter of the painter Augustus John. They began a relationship, and married in Rome the following year, Pol in a mink-trimmed mini-skirt.

But their life together was one of self-indulgence which was to end in tragedy. They soon became addicted to heroin, flitting between palaces in Italy and Morocco. At one point, Getty was drinking a bottle of rum and taking a gram of heroin a day. His drug addiction saw his father cut him out of his will, leaving him just $500, but the $100,000 a year from his grandmother was enough to sustain his lifestyle.

His relationship with Talitha started to break down, and she moved to London with their son, Tara, but in 1971 she returned to Rome to attempt a reconciliation. On the night of July 10, Getty and Talitha locked themselves in their apartment, and when Getty awoke the next morning, his estranged wife was dead, killed by a massive heroin overdose. Her death was put down as an accident, but Getty was never to return to Italy.

Two years later, his life was to be rocked once more, when his eldest son, John Paul III, was kidnapped in Italy. For five months, the 17-year-old was chained to a stake, while his family argued over whether to pay the ransom. Getty was unable to find the $2.5m the kidnappers demanded, and Getty Snr refused to help, until John Paul III's decomposing ear was sent to a newspaper in Rome. Finally, Getty Snr agreed to lend his son the money. It was the last meeting Getty ever had with his father.

Nor was this the end of the ordeal for John Paul III. Although released by the kidnappers, in 1981 he took a massive cocktail of prescription drugs, triggering a stroke which left him paralysed and almost blind.

Reeling from these tragedies, Getty Jnr retreated behind the doors of his Chelsea mansion, where he was to remain a virtual prisoner for 13 years. Depressed and suffering from a succession of illnesses, including circulation problems, cirrhosis of the liver and damaged lungs, his behaviour became increasingly bizarre. At one point he refused to pay his son's medical bills - running at $25,000 a month - perhaps in some destructive repeat of his own treatment at his father's hands.

Getty's father died in 1976, but it was not until his grandmother's death in 1984, the same year Texaco bought the family firm, Getty Oil, that he became a billionaire, with an estimated £1.4bn fortune. The 1980s also saw his gradual reconnection with the world.

Getty himself put his survival down to his third wife, former Nivea model Victoria Holdsworth, 17 years his junior and his companion for 20 years. Victoria nursed him through his depression, and the couple married in Barbados in 1995.

And it was as he resurfaced from his depression that the philanthropy took hold. His first major donation was £50m to the National Gallery, helping it fill the Sainsbury Wing, swiftly followed by £20m for the National Film Institute.

His love for cricket - born out of a friendship with neighbour Mick Jagger - saw him give £2m to build the new Mound Stand at Lords. He also gave £5m to the Conservative Party and £100,000 to a Christmas appeal for striking miners.

His generosity saw him awarded an honorary knighthood in 1986, and 11 years later he was granted British citizenship, personally turning up at the American Embassy in London to return his US passport, allowing him to be knighted by the Queen, and entitling him to be known as Sir Paul, the new name by which he became known.

When he received his knighthood, he said: "It means a great deal to me. I am proud to be a subject of Her Majesty. When I heard the national anthem played, I felt very proud to be British - it's my national anthem now. I love Britain's way of life. I love its people. I love its history and I love its future."

His love affair with Britain was one of the enduring features of the last 20 years of his life. It may have been a sentimental and outdated view - he once said "It is probably true that the Britain I love is not the Britain which exists today" - but one of his chief pleasures was his own cricket ground at his 3,000-acre estate, Wormsley Park in the Chilterns.

The last years of his life were dogged by ill health. After complications following an operation to remove his gall bladder, Getty was frequently confined to a wheelchair. But, despite his illness, and a life riven by tragedy, he was said to have found a sort of peace in his later years. His fortune may have seemed like a curse, but in the end it brought a kind of happiness.