‘I shall go on collecting until I die’

The charitable giving of Sir Paul Getty always had a deliciously quirky element to it – one thinks of the elegant replacement of the hideous old Mound Stand at Lord’s, the funding of the National Film Archive’s work in housing and restoring their immense collection of historic films, the saving of the Mappa Mundi and Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ for the nation, and so on. These apparently random choices, in fact, reflected some of the most passionate interests of the man himself – he was a cricket fanatic (he owned Wisden), a dedicated collector of old films, and, as his father before him, a connoisseur of the fine arts. These are just a few examples of his better-known benefactions.

What has never been written about is another of the ruling passions of his life, his collection of historic 78 rpm recordings of classical singers, instrumentalists and actors. This all began when he was 16 in San Francisco. ‘At that time, I had absolutely no interest in opera or in opera singers,’ Getty told me, ‘but one day, when I was entering the house of my current girlfriend, I heard the sound of an absolutely glorious voice coming from the drawing room. “What on earth is that?” I asked her. “Oh, it’s just my father playing one of his old records.”‘ This turned out to be the voice of Enrico Caruso singing Canio’s tragic lament ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Pagliacci. ‘I was hooked literally – for life.’ Probably not for the last time in his life, the sexual imperative was overwhelmed by his passion for records. His fellow collectors certainly understand and deeply sympathise with his predicament.

His mother bought him Dorothy Caruso’s life of the great tenor, which he quickly devoured. But what interested him even more was a section at the back of the book devoted to a discography, compiled by an English cleric, Canon Harold Drummond, of all the recordings Caruso was known to have made.