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as "Pompeii-on-the-Pacific," a monument to "aggressive bad taste, cultural pretension and self-aggrandizement" that cemented the city's reputation "as Kitsch city and the Plastic Paradise."
    The public, however, embraced the Getty Villa. A few Sundays after the opening, the queue of cars waiting to get in was so long that it clogged the Pacific Coast Highway for two miles. By March, the new museum recorded its 100,000th visitor, a hundred times the annual attendance of the old galleries.
    That the crowds came to see the building more than the art was no secret. Getty's penny-pinching over the years had left him with a collection of largely mediocre art—and deeply resentful staff members. They were chagrined that despite the opulent new building, Getty was still unwilling to dip into his wealth to acquire any artwork of lasting significance. He had idly sat by while his crosstown rival, industrialist Norton Simon, had scooped up several masterpieces. And it was only at the last minute that Getty's staff, desperate to fill out the new museum's first-floor antiquities galleries, had convinced the billionaire to go ahead with the bulk purchase of four hundred small antiquities—at a 30 percent discount—from a New York antiquities dealer named Jerome "Jerry" Eisenberg. Now, even with the museum open, the staff had to beg and plead to purchase art books for the museum's library.
    Hope arrived in early 1976, when an announcement was made at a staff meeting that Getty's health was failing. Over the next few months, there was no word from Sutton Place. Expense requests and the telephone there went unanswered. Getty had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and retreated from the world. The only people allowed to see him were his nurses and a steady stream of alternative medicine gurus and quacks—Chinese acupuncturists, a masseuse, an American Indian with "healing hands" flown in from Florida.
    By July, Getty was dead. Three days later, Burton Fredericksen, now the museum's chief curator, drove to the downtown Los Angeles County courthouse for the opening of Getty's will. He hated Getty's parsimony more than most at the museum, having witnessed countless lost opportunities over the past twenty-five years. It would not surprise any of the staff if that stinginess were somehow embodied in Getty's last will and testament. But Fredericksen had a hunch it wouldn't be. Getty supported no charities to speak of and was estranged from his surviving sons, who were already provided for through a family trust. Where else would Getty's personal wealth go?
    Fredericksen was led to a nondescript, wood-paneled courtroom, where he felt his excitement grow as he read through the will. Getty had left insultingly small sums to his children, a former wife, and members of the Sutton Place harem. Many of the other people in his life were ignored altogether. But the payoff came in the ninth codicil: "I give, devise and bequeath all of the rest, residue and remainder of my estate ... to the Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum, to be added to the Endowment Fund of said Museum."
    In all, Getty had left the museum nearly $700 million in Getty Oil stock. With that flick of a pen, Getty had transformed his neglected provincial museum into the richest art institution in the world.
    Racing back to the office, Fredericksen led thirty museum employees in a champagne toast to the old man. Viewed through the lens of the museum's sudden newfound wealth, its art collection looked all the more second-rate. People took turns making speeches, hailing the Getty Museum's bright future and the untold acquisitions that would now be possible—so many, no doubt, that soon another new building would be needed to house them.

    I N A MEETING a short time later, Fredericksen and his curatorial staff resolved to make the bronze athlete their first major purchase of the new era. Gone were any concerns about the bronze's price or legal status. The museum's board voted