When J. Paul Getty died on June 6, 1976, his fortune was estimated at more than $6 billion, making it the largest estate ever to pass through probate in California.
His will had been amended 21 times over 18 years, a Guinness World Record for the number of codicils attached to a single estate document. He left nearly $700 million in stock to a museum that today holds an endowment worth $8.5 billion.
To his fifth and final wife, he left $55,000 a year. To his longest companion, a Nicaraguan woman named Rosabella Burch who lived beside him for the last 15 years of his life, he left a modest inheritance of stock, gave her just three days to vacate the mansion, and left her a cottage where the gas and phone service had already been cut off.
The popular story says she sued the estate and won $750,000. But documented records reveal a different and more telling number: $150,000, approved by a Los Angeles judge two years after the richest man on earth was buried.
Getty was born on December 15, 1892, in Minneapolis, the only surviving son of George Franklin Getty, an oilman turned lawyer who moved to Oklahoma in 1903 and plunged into the exploration trade. The elder Getty amassed a significant fortune over the next decade and formally established Getty Oil with his son in 1916.
Young Paul was, by his own admission, an indifferent student, drifting between USC and UC Berkeley before moving on to Magdalen College, Oxford. For a time, he seemed more interested in living off his father’s money than earning his own. He made his first significant return in the oil fields around Tulsa, Oklahoma, in his early twenties, though biographer Robert Lenzner’s research suggests the real figure was closer to $100,000, not the legendary first million Getty liked to claim.
The decisive turn came in 1948 when Getty won a high-risk concession in the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, paying $9.5 million upfront plus escalating royalties to secure drilling rights from King Abdulaziz. His advisers called the gamble reckless. Oil was found in 1953, and the bet nearly doubled his fortune within a few years.
Fortune magazine named him the richest living American in 1957, and Guinness declared him the wealthiest private citizen in the world in 1966, with an estimated fortune of $1.2 billion.
Getty married and divorced five times over three decades, fathering five sons from four of those marriages. By the late 1950s, he had settled into the pattern that would define the rest of his life: permanent residence in England, permanent bachelorhood, and a house full of women whose numbers and composition he controlled through the only instrument he fully trusted.
That instrument was the will.
In 1959, Getty bought Sutton Place, a Grade I listed Tudor mansion built around 1525 near Guildford in Surrey, from the Duke of Sutherland for a price said to exceed $1 million. He lived there for the last 16 or 17 years of his life, running his global oil empire by telephone from a 100-foot library. He rarely returned to the United States and even installed a payphone in the hallway for guests because he refused to let them run up charges on his line.
The guest list at Sutton Place was as selective as extreme wealth allows. One close friend described the house as extremely hospitable, where you never knew who you might meet, from famous wealthy figures to attractive young women and politicians from various countries, all mingling together.
Getty famously maintained multiple companions living under one roof at the same time, an arrangement he himself described in terms suggesting a harem. The atmosphere, by all surviving accounts, was one of manufactured competition in which every woman knew her position depended on Getty’s favor, and that favor could be withdrawn at any time.
Biographer John Pearson wrote that women were the only luxury the old miser never denied himself. Getty reportedly told his biographers that business success generates sexual drive, and sexual drive drives business, a formula that justified the arrangement in terms he found satisfying. Russell Miller’s biography claimed Getty boasted of sleeping with five different women in one day when he was in his sixties and that by age 61, he had compiled a private list of 100 mistresses.
At one of the few formal parties at Sutton Place, the guest list included a selection of his companions, who had never met one another before. Inside the walls of the mansion, women competed for Getty’s attention by every available means. They spied through keyholes and tried to turn Getty against one another, all for his favor. The anxiety about their standing was the mechanism by which he kept them all in place, and the tool he used to manage that anxiety was a 17-page will he amended, on average, more than once a year for 18 consecutive years.
Rosabella Burch was born Rosibel Burch Martinez in Nicaragua in 1932, daughter of a Nicaraguan mother and an American father named George Birch. In her youth, she reportedly aspired to acting and was sent to Los Angeles to try her luck in Hollywood with little success. She married Carlos Enrique Olvert Portocarrero in 1952 and had a son named Charles Olvert before becoming a widow.
By the late 1950s, she had arrived in London, where the wealthy expatriate and aristocratic European community provided the perfect environment for a beautiful, well-connected woman from a prominent Nicaraguan family to find her place.
She met J. Paul Getty at his 69th birthday party at Sutton Place on December 15, 1960. Getty courted her through an old-fashioned style of wooing by telegram, one of which reportedly read: “Why do you have to go back to the United States?” She began visiting Sutton Place for long periods, sometimes up to six months at a time, gradually transforming from guest to permanent resident over several years.
In 1974, Getty bought her a country house about half an hour from the main residence. It seemed generous at the time but proved cruel within just two years.
Weeks before Getty died, the Australian Women’s Weekly published an interview with Burch, confirming her status as a publicly recognized companion long before any legal disputes over the estate began. She told interviewers the relationship was real, that the term mistress seemed cold and failed to capture the warmth between them, and that her life would be empty without him.
She was about to discover what 15 years of devotion were worth when measured against the one thing Getty trusted more than the company of any woman: a 17-page will amended 21 times to ensure no one received more than the exact amount he wanted to give them on the day he died.
Burch shared her domestic role at Sutton Place with at least two other women regularly linked to Getty’s name in the press of that era. Penelope Kitson, an interior decorator and old companion who lived in a cottage on the Sutton Place grounds, famously refused to marry Getty, a challenge he seemed to admire more than any devotion. Mary Tessier, an art expert and socialite of French and Russian descent, was credited with persuading Getty to buy Sutton Place in the first place. Lady Ursula d’Abo, an English aristocrat and former maid of honor at the 1937 coronation, maintained a long-term relationship with Getty documented in her later public statements. Robina Lund, a friend, confidante, and close associate of Getty’s lawyers, later wrote memoirs of her years with him and became one of the most quoted sources for biographers.
Getty’s method of rewarding and controlling these women relied almost entirely on the will, meaning compensation was deferred, revocable, and managed through the one instrument he obsessively amended. He made no large gifts during his lifetime and signed no binding support agreements. Instead, he built a system in which loyalty, or at least his satisfaction at the moment each codicil was drafted, determined the amount a woman would ultimately receive.
According to one retrospective compilation of the wills, Getty left money and stock to 12 women in his will, four living in California and eight in Europe.
Getty executed his original will on September 22, 1958, while in Italy, a relatively simple 17-page document that left his art collection to the J. Paul Getty Museum and structured the rest of his estate around his sons and the museum’s board. Over the following 18 years, instead of drafting new wills, he amended this single document 21 separate times, with the final codicil signed on March 11, 1976, less than three months before his death.
Legal commentary on the process is blunt. Getty used the will as a weapon, adding or removing beneficiaries based on their behavior toward him. Family members were excluded for slights, employees cut off for leaving, and girlfriends added or removed depending on their conduct after relationships ended.
The ninth codicil, executed in November 1967, removed his son Gordon Peter Getty as a trustee while keeping his three other surviving sons. The 21st and final codicil became the subject of the most significant will contest involving the entire estate. Getty’s granddaughter, Anne Catherine Getty, filed a petition to invalidate it on grounds of incapacity or undue influence, arguing Getty was too ill and too susceptible to pressure from his advisers to have signed it freely. The appeals court rejected her petition, ruling she lacked standing as an interested person under California probate law.
The codicil system created a documented culture of competition and anxiety at Sutton Place. Every woman living under Getty’s roof knew her financial future depended entirely on which version of the will would be in effect on the day he died. Every woman also knew that today’s version could be replaced by a new codicil tomorrow, adding or deleting her name, increasing her share, or eliminating it entirely.
Robina Lund summarized the dynamic in a single observation: Paul could rarely say no to a woman or yes to a man. It sounds like a compliment until you realize what it means in practice: Getty collected people the way he collected paintings, acquiring them when he admired them and placing them where he could control them.
Getty died at Sutton Place on June 6, 1976, at age 83, of heart failure. His fortune was initially estimated at between $2 billion and $4 billion in contemporary reports, though the official inventory value was later confirmed at $760 million. The gap reflects the fact that most of Getty’s actual wealth was locked inside the Sarah C. Getty Trust, a separate family trust created in 1934 and designed to be entirely outside his personal estate.
The women who lived with Getty were claiming shares of the smaller amount while the larger amount remained beyond their reach.
Approximately 4 million shares of Getty Oil stock, worth nearly $700 million, were allocated to the museum. The will named two executors: Getty’s son Gordon and his longtime lawyer C. Lansing Hays.
For Burch, the consequences were swift and harsh. According to Nicaraguan press accounts based on European magazine reports, the Getty family cut off her financial support almost immediately after his death. She was given three days to vacate Sutton Place. Her inheritance under the will’s terms, before any lawsuit, was estimated at about $80,000 in Getty Oil stock. She later described the amount as insignificant.
When she moved into the cottage Getty had bought her in 1974, she discovered the utilities had been cut off. The woman who had served as the announced hostess of one of England’s largest private estates was now living in a small house with no heating or working telephone, holding stock certificates worth a tiny fraction of what the museum’s endowment could generate in a single year of interest.
Sutton Place was later sold by Getty Oil to an American businessman for about $17 million, a transaction that valued the building where Burch had lived for 15 years at more than 100 times the amount she would eventually receive from the estate of the man who owned it.
In November 1976, about five months after Getty’s death, Burch filed a formal lawsuit against the estate in Los Angeles Superior Court. Her claim rested legally on the theory that Getty had promised her lifetime support and pledged to cover her children’s education expenses, a contract-based claim alleging a specific oral promise of support against the estate of a man who could no longer confirm or deny making it. Her initial request was a lump sum of $500,000 plus a monthly stipend of $1,000 for the rest of her life.
The timing placed her case at one of the most significant moments in American family law. In the same year Getty died, the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in Marvin v. Marvin on December 27, 1976, just one month after Burch filed her suit. That case arose when actress Michelle Triola Marvin sued actor Lee Marvin after their unmarried cohabitation ended, claiming an oral agreement to share property and earnings and a promise of lifetime support in exchange for giving up her career to be his companion and homemaker.
The ruling was revolutionary. The court held that adults living together voluntarily are as entitled as anyone else to contract regarding their earnings and property rights, as long as the agreement is not based on sexual services as the sole consideration. The decision went further, affirming that even in the absence of an express agreement, a partner could recover under theories of implied contract, overturning a long line of California cases that had refused to enforce any financial arrangement between unmarried cohabitants.
The ruling created the concept popularly known as palimony. Burch’s claim, based explicitly on an alleged oral promise of lifetime support in exchange for companionship, was a textbook example of the type of arrangement the new doctrine legitimized.
Claims against estates based on alleged oral promises from deceased persons face an additional evidentiary hurdle under dead man’s statutes, which restrict a plaintiff’s ability to testify about conversations with someone who can no longer respond. This may help explain why Burch’s claim, like most claims by Getty’s companions, was resolved through negotiated agreement rather than litigation to a verdict. The settlement avoided the difficulty of proving an oral promise from a dead man and the reputational cost of embarrassing, lengthy inheritance suits for an estate whose main beneficiary was a museum that could not afford to appear in open court fighting the woman who had lived with its founder.
On June 6, 1978, exactly two years after Getty’s death, Judge Jack W. Swink of the Los Angeles Superior Court approved the settlement of Burch’s claim against the estate. The terms, as reported at the time by the New York Times, were a single payment of $150,000 covering Burch and two children in her household. Her original request had included that lump sum plus a lifetime stipend. She received less than one-third of the lump sum she asked for and none of the lifetime stipend.
The $750,000 figure circulating in popular accounts of her story does not appear in any contemporary news report, appellate opinion, or major Getty biography found in this research. The most likely source of the confusion is a mix-up with other numbers in the broader Getty estate record. Mary Tessier’s monthly stipend was $750. The 1985 settlement of the Getty family trust war divided the fortune into four sub-trusts estimated at hundreds of millions each. Some accounts may have simply exaggerated the $150,000 figure for drama, or confused Burch’s individual settlement with the total value of bequests to all twelve named female beneficiaries.
The distinction matters because the real number tells a more accurate and damaging story about the estate’s priorities than the inflated one. The estate’s primary obligation was to the museum, and any other claim, whether from a companion, ex-wife, or blood relative, was subordinate to that obligation. Burch’s settlement was calculated to be large enough to end her claim and small enough to keep the museum bequest intact.
The museum received nearly $700 million in stock at Getty’s death, a sum that had grown to $1.2 billion by the time the estate was finally settled in 1982. Burch received a settlement representing about one ten-thousandth of the museum bequest.
Executor commissions and attorney fees alone throughout the administration of the Getty estate totaled $27 million, meaning the lawyers who managed the probate proceedings earned about 180 times what Burch received for fifteen years of companionship.
The will left the remainder of Getty’s estate, after individual bequests to family, employees, and companions, directly to the trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. Because the will and its codicils were tied up in litigation for years, the museum did not actually receive the funds until the estate was finally settled in March 1982. By that time, the bequest had grown to about $1.2 billion.
A 1983 appeals decision confirmed the staggering size of the estate, recording the inventory value at $760 million, with the total amount ultimately accounted for by the executors reaching $1.35 billion, an increase attributed in large part to gains from public stock offerings the executors handled during the multi-year probate process. The court noted this was the largest estate ever to go through probate in California.
The museum bequest expanded into the full J. Paul Getty Trust, which today includes the Getty Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute. By 1997, the endowment was estimated at about $4.5 billion. By 2023, it was reported to have reached approximately $8.5 billion, making it the wealthiest art institution in the world.
Separately from the museum bequest, and far more important to the family’s long-term wealth, the Sarah C. Getty Trust was established in 1934 by J. Paul Getty and his mother, Sarah Catherine Getty. This trust, not the personal estate, held controlling shares of Getty Oil and was the true repository of the family fortune. Its existence meant the probate estate that Burch and the other companions were claiming shares of was in fact the smaller of two pots, because the billions the public associated with Getty’s name were locked inside a structure the probate court had no authority to touch.
At Getty’s death, his son Gordon Peter Getty became sole trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust. Gordon’s management proved explosive. In 1984, he orchestrated the trust’s sale of its 40% stake in Getty Oil to Texaco for more than $10 billion, the largest corporate acquisition in history at that time. The windfall doubled the trust’s value overnight and ignited a ferocious internal family lawsuit that made the companions’ claims look, by comparison, like a dispute over pocket money.
Three of Gordon’s nieces, daughters of the late George Franklin Getty II, known to the two dozen lawyers on the case as the Georgites, sued along with a young heir named Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone Getty, claiming Gordon had breached his duties as trustee and demanding his removal. After about 18 months of litigation, the family reached a settlement in May 1985, aided by new California legislation allowing courts to divide personal trusts among beneficiaries. The final settlement split the approximately $4 billion trust into four equal sub-trusts with $1 billion allocated to state and federal taxes, ending Gordon Getty’s sole control and distributing power among the four family branches.
It is highly likely that the $750 million per trust figure, arising from a dispute among Getty’s descendants nearly a decade after his death, is one source of the confusion behind the $750,000 figure commonly attached to Rosabella Burch’s name.
The human costs within the family were severe and well documented. George Franklin Getty II, the eldest son and father of the disputing nieces, died in 1973 of what was reported as a drug overdose at age 49. John Paul Getty III, the kidnapped grandson, survived his 1973 ordeal only to suffer a drug-and-alcohol-induced stroke in 1981, leaving him severely disabled for the last three decades of his life.
Ronald, Getty’s son who was left a token $3,000 a year in the will after a bitter dispute over his divorce, sued to equalize his share of the trust, but a California appeals court refused to modify his reduced inheritance.
The women who shared Getty’s final years watched all of this from the margins, their own claims having long since been settled for fractions of what the heirs were fighting over. By the time the trust war was settled in 1985, the Sutton Place companions had already begun to disappear entirely from public records. Burch had received her settlement seven years earlier, and the file that produced it was, by the standards of a $4 billion dispute, barely worth preserving.
A comparative record of what Getty’s companions actually received reveals a hierarchy that operated on principles the women themselves may not have fully understood while he was alive.
Penelope Kitson, the interior decorator who lived in a cottage on the Sutton Place grounds and famously refused to marry Getty, received 5,000 shares of Getty Oil stock valued at approximately $826,000, plus a lifetime monthly stipend of $1,167. Her ex-husband later told a journalist that Getty loved and valued her because she was the only woman who dared to oppose him.
Mary Tessier, the art expert credited with persuading Getty to buy Sutton Place, received 2,500 shares of Getty Oil stock plus $750 a month for life.
Rosabella Burch, the woman who lived at Sutton Place the longest and served as its announced hostess for 15 years, received about $80,000 in stock under the will and a $150,000 settlement for her subsequent lawsuit.
Louise Lynch, Getty’s fifth and final wife and the only ex-wife mentioned in the will, received $55,000 a year for life.
The disparity is striking and consistent. Getty rewarded challenge and independence more generously than proximity or devotion. Kitson, who rejected him, received more than five times what Burch, who devoted 15 years to him, received through the will and lawsuit combined. The pattern suggests Getty’s will-writing behavior operated on the same principle as his business strategy: he valued what was hard to obtain and devalued what came easily. The women who made themselves constantly available to him were, by the logic of his own system, the least valuable to him.
Burch, who gave 15 years of her life and told interviewers she wanted to marry him, discovered the system was designed to reward the opposite of what she offered.
The lesson the Sutton Place women learned collectively, though each learned it separately and too late, was that Getty’s oral promises of support were worth exactly what could be proven in a California probate court after his death. For most of them, that meant either a fraction of what they expected or nothing at all. And that precise fraction depended less on the years spent with him and more on which codicil was in effect on the day his heart stopped.
Burch’s story is the clearest expression of this framework, and the legal revolution unfolding in California courts at the exact moment of her claim would determine whether the law agreed with Getty’s calculations.
Stripped of its romantic framing, what remains is a precise and unsettling account of reality. A woman who spent nearly 15 years of her life as the announced companion of the world’s richest man was left after his death without the security she believed she had been promised and was forced to go to court, like other women in Getty’s orbit and his blood relatives, to extract a fraction of what she expected.
The documented settlement of $150,000, a small fraction of the $500,000-plus lifetime stipend she originally sought and a mere rounding error compared to the $1.35 billion the estate ultimately administered, reflects the reality of how a certain kind of old-money billionaire operated. Spectacular, almost performative generosity toward institutions. Calculated, revocable generosity toward family. And for the women who shared his life without the legal protection of marriage, a judicial struggle for relatively modest sums, settled by agreement designed to make inconvenient claims quietly disappear.
The $750,000 figure people repeat today is likely an exaggeration. But the essential truth that figure embodies needs no inflation to carry its weight. Fifteen years of a woman’s life beside a man worth billions was reduced to a six-figure legal settlement, discussed in the same courthouse that was handling a bequest to a museum.
Burch’s later life, death date, and circumstances remain undocumented in available records, a gap that is itself a final measure of how precisely the Getty machine absorbed and discarded the women who passed through his life. No obituary for her has been found in American, British, or Nicaraguan archives. The woman who appeared in the Australian Women’s Weekly while Getty was still alive, who was photographed beside him with Jack Dempsey, who served as hostess of one of England’s greatest country houses for fifteen years, faded from the documentary record after 1978 as completely as if the estate settlement had been designed to erase her trace.
The museum Getty endowed is today worth $8.5 billion. The Getty Center in Brentwood, completed in 1997 at a cost of nearly $1 billion, stands on a hill visible from most of western Los Angeles as a monument to the man’s generosity toward an institution and his stinginess toward the women who shared his life. The woman who spent 15 years at his side received a six-figure settlement and a cottage with no gas supply.