Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty

After I saw All The Money in the World, I requested Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty from my library because I was eager to separate fact from fiction. The demand for the book is quite high, and it only became available in April. The book covers way more historical ground than the movie, which only focuses on the kidnapping of one of Getty’s grandsons, but it uses dated language to convey the lives of four generations of the Getty family.
I could almost imagine the author waggling his eyebrows at his saucy tone, which actually had the opposite of the intended effect. It didn’t feel dishy. It felt presumptuous as the author suggested what people were feeling without adequately explaining how he drew those conclusions. The book is told in chronological order, but as the cast of characters grow, the author rushes from business to personal without any sense of rhythm or drawing a real picture of daily life until he gets to the second generation, which reads more like a gossip column than a slice of life. Unfortunately, this lack of rhythm leads to repetition such as one of the sons getting left out of the family trust.
Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty is not an enjoyable read though it contains many basic facts that will give the reader a better understanding of family dynamics and individual psychological profiles. If anything, the author is a bit too understanding of the family’s foibles to write objectively about them. For example, when they have regular human problems, he excuses it as part of a curse rather than a human condition so when something specifically particular and unusual does happen, it gets lost in the litany.