'I never had the feeling that I was flush in cash': How J Paul Getty became the world's richest man

The US oil billionaire's 16th-Century English mansion was home to a stunning art collection and a lion named Nero. In 1963, the BBC visited him there to discuss his "great success".

In July 1960, J Paul Getty hosted a £10,000 (£300,000 or $400,000 today) house-warming party at Sutton Place, the 16th-Century Tudor mansion in Surrey he'd bought a year earlier. More than 2,000 socialites, aristocrats and celebrities attended, and the event made headlines when a pushy press photographer was thrown into the swimming pool. 

Afraid of flying or travelling by ocean liner, the US oil tycoon was to live there until his death in 1976 at the age of 83, installing coin-operated payphones for his house guests to prevent them from running up high long-distance bills. In 1963, the BBC's Alan Whicker interviewed Getty, who was famously elusive, in the manor house that had been Henry VIII's summer residence.

The archive footage reveals the billionaire's inner sanctum inside a heavily fortified mansion, as he roams past Old Masters and eats at a 16ft-long dining table, accompanied only by his Alsatian guard dog. And it was from that rambling British country house, rather than a skyscraper in Manhattan or a potentate's palace in the Middle East, that Getty managed his vast oil business empire in his final years.

Getty entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's richest man in 1966: he'd made his first million at the age of 24, when a field he owned in Oklahoma struck oil. By the time of his death, his fortune was estimated at around $4bn ($23.5bn or £17.5bn today), and he earned more each day than the average man earned in a lifetime. One of the tycoon's maxims for success was "Rise early, work hard, and strike oil". In a series of articles for Playboy magazine that were later published as a book called How to Get Rich, Getty expounded on "the importance of having an independent view on things, not being influenced by what everybody else says".

Yet reflecting on his wealth in 1963, he was unable to determine exactly what had made him his billions. "The difference between a successful businessman and one possibly not so successful is that maybe 37 different qualities are required for a great success, and [if] a man has 35 of those qualities, he makes a more modest success. But just what those two missing qualities might be, I don't know." 

When asked by Whicker why he'd succeeded when others had failed, he replied: "I really don't know of any quality I have that many others don't have." Naming elements that he shared with others, including work ethic, intelligence and imagination, he added self-deprecatingly: "I always wish that I had a better personality, that I could entertain people better, was a better conversationalist. I always worried I might be a little on the dull side as a companion." 

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