About this ebook
“The Great Getty is thorough and serious. Mr. Lenzner, who is the chief New York correspondent for The Boston Globe, adequately translates the purely business history of the Getty empire... [a] useful reminder that being rich is not enough.” — The New York Times
“Lenzner gives us a warts-and-all biography of Getty (with an emphasis on the warts). In so doing, he goes far beyond Getty’s two self-serving autobiographies... which displayed Getty’s facility for substituting his intentions for his actions. The real Getty does not appear as the sort of fellow one might like one’s children to emulate. Reared by a father he despised and by a mother who smothered him with affection, he developed a poor respect for women, (leading him to bed hundreds of women from all social classes), a bottom-line mentality, and a frugality far beyond the bounds of thrift and prudence... Upon his death, his four remaining sons and his 14 grandchildren were at each other’s throats for his fortune.” — Kirkus
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About the author
Born in 1935 in New York City, Robert Lenzner earned his BA (cum laude) from Harvard University in 1957 and his MBA from Columbia University in 1960. He attended Oxford University from 1957 to 1958 where he studied political science at St. Antony’s College. Lenzner was the assistant to the partner in charge of trading and arbitrage at Goldman Sachs & Co. from 1962 to 1968 and worked at the Urban Coalition from 1968-69. From 1969 to 1970 he was Manager of the Arbitrage Department at Oppenheimer & Co. From 1970-71 he wrote for Barron’s Financial Weekly and was assistant to the Managing Editor of Barron’s.
Lenzner was New York correspondent for the Boston Globe from 1971 to 1982 and its New York Bureau Chief from 1983 to 1990. He was a columnist for the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News from 1990 to 1992 and was a correspondent for The Economist from 1973 to 1992.
Lenzner joined Forbes as a Senior Editor in 1992 and also served as National Editor. His areas of expertise included Wall Street, investment banking, finance, the oil industry, corporate takeovers, insider trading and litigation. He has appeared on “Forbes on Fox,” “Forbes on Radio,” the BBC, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC. He is the author of The Great Getty, a biography of J. Paul Getty, which spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His articles have also appeared in Barron’s, Vanity Fair, the (London) Financial Times, the New York Observer and the Rocky Mountain News.
In 2014 Lenzner was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center On Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he wrote about the media’s failure to foresee the 2008 financial crisis and how it can avoid similar mistakes in the future, and examined the vulnerability of giant banks to the growing threat of cyberattacks.
