Word: ritz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cornered by an aggressive newsman in the lobby of London's Ritz Hotel, Oilman Jean Paul Getty (TIME cover, Feb. 24, 1958) was persuaded to offer some reasons why the life of a billionaire is not roses all the way. "Quite a bother," to Getty, 66, and an altar-scarred veteran of five marriages, is a continual stream of letters from ladies proposing to be his sixth missus. Among his other complaints: "People keep writing me for money. They don't realize I don't have any spare cash...
...dinner check, including "35? for ice cream." He has homes in California and Italy, but rarely uses them, prefers instead to run his vast Middle Eastern oil interests (TIME cover, Feb. 24, 1958) from the cheapest two-room suites in Paris' George V and London's Ritz Hotel. He has no personal servant, and it takes a nimble bellhop to beat the billionaire out of carrying his own bags...
...have worked out that our combined hotel bills will be more than is required to run a stately home. If your name is Getty, you can't expect to be allowed to live in a hotel for less than $100 a day." Retaining his composure, the Ritz manager said that customary manners leave Getty's Ritz bills "up to the imagination." But, he added, "I can tell you he doesn't pay anything like that." Getty's own expenses come closer...
...safaris, photographing the big game and potting birds for dinner. (His barstool story is that his white hunter imitates a lovelorn female rhino, and when a nearsighted male rumbles toward the sound, Ruark hangs his hat on the beast's horn and the hunter slaps a Ritz Hotel sticker on its behind.) Ruark will spend the next few months "doing all of Africa" for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, because "I have a hunch that 99 million natives are going to make noise in the Union around Christmas, and I want to be there." In his hushpuppy accent (a defense...
...earnest desire to assist the parties more directly concerned to maintain peace in a vital area of the world." At the Lisbon airport, cops threw a protective ring around Batista's 15-man party, sped it off to a gold-and-blue suite at the just-opened Ritz Hotel. "I am out of politics," Batista told the few newsmen admitted to his rooms. "Cubans deserve their own decisions. They chose not to have me as President." He planned to sail in a few days for Madeira, a haunt for retired Britons. 400 miles west of the Moroccan coast, which...