J. Paul Getty, a symbol of oil, wealth and power, died early today at his country mansion near London. He was 83 years old. The cause of death was reported to be heart failure. An American by birth, Mr. Getty had lived in Britain for nearly 25 years. He had been in failing health for several months. Business associates who announced Mr. Getty's death said that the directors of the Getty Oil Company, of which Mr. Getty was still president, had already provided for the delegation of authority within the company and that normal business operations would continue. The precise extent of Mr. Getty's wealth was difficult to compute, but in 1974 business associates put his fortune at from $2 billion to $4 billion. He had a majority or controlling interest in the Getty Oil Company and nearly 200 other concerns. Mr. Getty tended to be reclusive in his last years. He spoke several times of wanting to return to Southern California, where he had lived for many years--but he never did. On his 80th birthday, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, bankers, business leaders and dressmakers turned up for a London party at which Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, was the hostess. A vocalist summed it all up by singing to the Cole Porter tune: You're the top, your are J. Paul Gettyyou're the top, and your cash ain't petty. In 1957, when Fortune magazine first suggested that Jean Paul Getty was probably the world's richest private citizen, he was asked the inevitable question: how much would he really get in cash if he were to sell his oil, realty, art and other holdings? A note of gone- are-the-better-days crept into his response. "I would hope to realize several billions," he said. "But, remember, a billion dollars isn't worth what it used to be." Mr. Getty, of course, did not sell out, and seven or eight years later, when his fortune had very much and very visibly increased, he was complaining of the hardships of wealth and the fame that accompanied it. The fame, it appeared, had generated the hardships. But these were not so great as to make them unbearable, nor to render fame less desirable than obscurity. Before 1957 Mr. Getty cultivated wealth in the relative shadows of the oil business here and abroad. He was also known by some newspaper readers for his purchase of the Pierre Hotel in New York and for his five marriages and an equal number of divorces. Once, however, the awesome vastness of his riches was made generally known he acquired celebrity. This he burnished by writing articles in mass-circulation magazines and by putting his name to two books." One was "My Life and Fortunes," published in 1953 by Duell, Sloan & Pearce. The other was "How to Be Rich," issued in 1965 by Playboy Press and consisting in part of articles Mr. Getty had composed, he said, for the "young executives and college students," who read Playboy magazine. He also permitted himself to be the subject of a biography. "The Richest American," by Ralph Hewins, which was published by Dutton in 1960. The oilman's grandson, J. Paul Getty 3d, was kidnapped in Italy in 1973, and the oilman was asked to pay a $16 million ransom. He balked on the ground that "I have 14 other grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, then I'll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren." Eventually, however, the Getty family did pay $2.8 million, but how much Mr. Getty contributed was never disclosed. Mr. Getty's principal grievances about being very rich were these: People beseeched him for money. People overcharged him or expected him to tip generously. He could never be certain that he was liked for himself. Most people, the oilman said he had discovered after 1957, were "so economically illiterate that they assume most of my fortune is in cash," whereas in fact all the folding money he had was a million dollars; and that was so parsimoniously budgeted by his accountants that he rarely carried more than $25 in his pockets. The result of this lamentable public ignorance was that he received, he said, 3,000 letters a month from strangers, all seeking money. Recounting his plight in a magazine article entitled "It's Tough to Be a Billionaire," Mr. Getty said that "I never give money to individuals" because "it's unrewarding and wrong." Returning to this theme in 1965 in a Saturday Evening Post article entitled "The World Is Mean to Millionaires" (why he had diminished his wealth status since 1958 was not explained), Mr. Getty said: "If I were convinced that by giving away my fortune I could make a real contribution toward solving the problems of world poverty, I'd give away 99.5 percent of all I have immediately. But a hard-eyed appraisal of the situation convinces me this is not the case." "However admirable the work of the best charitable foundation, it would accustom people to the passive acceptance of money," he added. This, he believed, was corrupting. As for being gouged, Mr. Getty said that at luncheon or dinner with friends waiters automatically handed him the bill. "It's not the money I object to, it's the principle of the thing that bothers me--to say nothing of the monotony of it," he wrote. "Even the simple, everyday matter of tipping can become a major problem," he continued. "If I tip well, someone is certain to accuse me of showing off. If I don't overtip, that someone will be the first to sneer "penny-pincher!"" Mr. Getty said he found himself lonely because so many people liked him for his bank balance while ignoring his other virtues. "Time is the only yardstick by which I can judge who are--and who aren't--really friends," he said, adding significantly: "I've known many people for years who have never asked me for anything." Was being so rich worth all the trouble? Mr. Getty was asked when he attained the age of 73. "Though our rewards may be small," he said of himself and his fellow Midases, "we are, if our society is to remain in its present form, essential to the nation's prosperity. We provide others with incentives which would not exist if we were to disappear." Although the oilman obviously liked to talk about his money, he insisted that it was all rather vulgar. "I don't think there is any story in being known as a moneybags," he asserted in his Oklahoma drawl. "I'd rather be considered a businessman." Indeed, business was Mr. Getty's life. One of his former wives once remarked, perhaps astringently, that business was his "first love" and that wealth was merely a byproduct. Describing how he often worked 16 and 18 hours a day to handle the complex transactions of his multifarious business dealings, Mr. Getty seemed to agree. "I can't remember a single day of vacation in the last 45 years that was not somehow interrupted by a cable, telegram or telephone call that made me tend to business for at least a few hours," he wrote in 1965. "Such work schedules and the need for devoting the majority of my time to business have taken a heavy toll of my personal life." He made a point of being the boss of all of his businesses, even at one time making his executives stand at attention in his presence. When the head of one of his companies ventured a proposal, Mr. Getty cut him off. "Who does that fellow think he is?" he said. "Why, he's nothing but a damned office boy." In a less irritated moment, he said of properties that included "Tidewater Oil, Skelly Oil and Getty Oil, "I own my own companies. How many others do? There are just a few like me left." Mr. Getty seemed to alternate between expressing pride over his undoubted entrepreneurial genius and boasting about his penny-saving habits. He liked to recount, for example, how he had once waited with a party of friends to get into a dog show at a reduced price. "I've always watched things like that," he said. He also liked to be thrifty in other ways--washing his own socks, for one thing. "I have done it and I'll probably do it again," he told one interviewer. Mr. Getty was seated at the time in the cushioned comfort of a Sheraton armchair in Sutton Place, his elegant 72-room mansion near Guildford, Surrey, 35 miles from London. This was one of several homes, the others being a place at Malibu Beach, Calif; a spot at Mina Saud on the Persian Gulf, and a 15th-century palace and nearby castle at Ladispoli, on the coast northwest of Rome. He first began to occupy his Italian estate in 1966, when the rigors of British winters drove him from London. After 1959 the oilman's principal residence was in Britain. Previously he had led a restless life, running his business for many years from hotel suites. After World War II, he virtually expatriated himself from the United States. He could usually be found in those years at the George V in Paris or the Ritz in London. He bought the 400-year-old Sutton Place in 1959 from the Duke of Sutherland for about $840,000 because it was convenient for his Middle East oil enterprise and because, he said, it was cheaper in the long run than living in a hotel. Typically, one of Mr. Getty's first renovations was the installation of oil central heating. He also substituted a highly mechanized team of four gardeners for the previous 24 who had tended the 700-acre, two-swimming-pool estate, on which there were also 30 cottages and lodges, tennis courts and a trout stream. Sutton Place was soon made into a garrison in conformity to Mr. Getty's penchant for privacy. An elaborate security system was installed, and every room, including the 14 bathrooms (one of them with gold fixtures) was wired. Windows and doors were barred, too; and 'No Trespass' signs were erected to warn visitors of the giant Alsatian dogs that had the run of the place. Mr. Getty transferred part of his art collection to Sutton Place. Valued at more than $4 million, it included works by Tintoretto, Titian, Gainsborough, Romney, Rubens, Renoir, Degas and Monet. Perhaps the most talked about feature of the mansion however, was the pay telephone booth that Mr. Getty had installed so that his guest, as he explained it, did not need to feel they were imposing on their host. Mr. Getty's seeming ambiguities perplexed his business associates and friends. He was a somber man who stood imposingly at 5 feet 11 inches and who weighed a muscular 180 pounds. A long fleshy nose dominated his pale, stern face with its pinched lips. He had blue eyes beneath heavy lids. His hair, which he touched up from time to time, was dark and carefully brushed. When he wore gold-rimmed spectacles for reading he looked rather professorial. Indeed, he possessed a keen mind and a tenacious memory--one so full of detail, it was said, that he could recite with ease the circumstance of complex financial dealings. Mr. Getty had a better-than-average knowledge of petroleum geology; knew his way about in the art world; was fluent in English, German, French and Italian and could get along commendably in Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Greek; and could read Latin and ancient Greek without too many hesitations. He constantly worried about the state of his health. He ate health foods, chewing each mouthful 33 times; munched maple sugar candy between meals, worked at Bernarr Macfadden body-building exercises and walked two miles a day wearing a pedometer to calculate his mileage. He liked to pretend to poverty by wearing rumpled suits and sweaters out at the elbow. He also liked to practice the prerogatives of wealth by attending splendid social gatherings and by escorting comely women many years his junior to parties. He was a friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and of many correspondingly notable and fashionable people here and abroad. He thought of himself as a man who yearned for privacy. Yet certainly after Fortune emblazoned his wealth, he courted publicity. His appearances in the British press were quite frequent, both as contributor ("How to Make a Million Dollars") and as a subject, in which capacity he was photographed contemplating masterpieces in the Hanover Gallery; being fitted for a hat at Lock's; getting a haircut in St. James's; driving a Lotus racing car at 85 miles an hour around the Goodwood Circuit; posing with Ringo Starr, the Beatle, at a birthday luncheon at Trader Vic's in the London Hilton; masticating at a Foyes literary luncheon and grappling with the twist at a party in his Sutton Place for children from a Church of England home. Mr. Getty was an art collector of note who wrote about his hobby in a book, "The Joys of Collecting" (1965), and who explained some of his expertise in another book, "Europe in the Eighteenth Century" (1949). His collection, of more than 600 items, was housed partly in Sutton Place and partly in a gallery of his ranch home at Malibu. Mr. Getty started his collection in the nineteen- thirties. He purchased the house and 60-acre ranch near Los Angeles in 1943, and later he added the gallery wing. At that time he placed the estate under a trust fund as the J. Paul Getty Museum, which was opened to the public in 1954. Some art objects were given to the Los Angeles County Museum. These included the legendary Ardabil Persian Carpet that had been made on the royal looms of Tabriz in 1535 and Rembrandt's "Martin Looter." Other Malibu items included the Persian "Coronation Carpet," 18th-century Beauvais tapestries, 18th-century French and English furniture, rock crystal, chandeliers and fine examples of Greek and Roman sculptures. There was also a somewhat less fine bust of the donor. All this, and additional acquisitions were housed after 1973 in a Roman villa-style museum on Mr. Getty's Malibu property. The building, fashioned after one found in the ruins of a town near Pompeii, was often criticized by art professionals but it delighted the public, which clamored for tickets of admission. Mr. Getty credited his global oil empire (and the riches it gushed for him) to his father's foresight and his own luck and ingenuity. "In building a large fortune," he once said, "it pays to be born at the right time. I was born at a very favorable time. If I had been born earlier or later, I would have missed the great business opportunities that existed in World War I and later. "I suppose it takes a long time and it takes extraordinary circumstances to be born at the right time and have cash money available at the right time. I was fortunate due to my father's foresight and my good luck. In the Depression I did what the experts said one should not do. I was a very big buyer of oil company stocks." Born in Minneapolis Dec. 15, 1892, Jean Paul Getty was the son of George Franklin Getty, a lawyer who went into the oil business in Oklahoma in 1903 and two years later moved to California. There Paul was reared. He attended Harvard Military Academy and Polytechnic High School, both in Los Angles, graduating in 1909. In the next two years he studied at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley. Then he went to Oxford for two years where, in 1914, he took his diploma in politics and economics. At 21 he arrived in Tulsa Okla., ready for work and determined to make a million in two years. This was the site of his millionaire father's Minnehoma Oil Company. "I started in September, 1914, to buy [oil] leases in the so-called red-beds area of Oklahoma," Paul Getty said afterward. "The surface was red dirt and it was considered impossible there was any oil there. My father and I did not agree and we got many leases for very little money which later turned out to be rich leases." By buying and selling oil leases with his father's backing young Getty made his million by June, 1916, and retired to Los Angeles, where he lived a gaudy, girl-filled life for two years. In 1919 he returned to business with his father in buying and selling leases and drilling wildcat wells. More money rolled in. In 1923, when he was 30, Mr. Getty married Jeannette Dumont, 18. She was the mother of his first child, George Franklin Getty 2d, and the first of his five wives. The others, also all younger than himself, were Allene Ashby, a Texas rancher's daughter, whom he married in 1925; Adolphine Helmle, a German girl, whom he married in 1928 and who was the mother of his second son, Jean Ronald; Ann Rork, a film starlet, whom he married in 1932 and who was the mother of two sons, Eugene Paul and Gordon Peter; and Louise Dudley Lynch, a debutante and cabaret singer, whom he married in 1939 and who was the mother of a son, Timothy, who died at the age of 12. His parents were divorced in 1958. Most of Mr. Getty's former wives had a good word for him and he for them. He also expressed regrets for all his divorces "because I don't like anything to be unsuccessful." Sharpening his oil talents to the point of genius in the nineteen-twenties, Mr. Getty accumulated about $3 million, including a one-third interest in a company that was to evolve into the Getty Oil Company. Mr. Getty's father was pleased by his son's business acumen but shocked by his marriages, and when he died in 1930 he left his son only $500,000 of an estate of $10 million. Most of the estate, which had sprung from a $5,000 oil investment in 1903, went to Paul Getty's mother. In the Depression he picked up the Pacific Western Oil Corporation, a holding company with large oil reserves and a heavy cash balance. He also dickered with his mother to win a controlling interest in the Getty concern. Then, in a drawn-out series of maneuvers in which he displayed an extraordinary patience and shrewdness, he obtained control, by 1953, of the Mission Corporation and its holdings in Tidewater Oil (then called Tide Water Associated Oil Company) and Skelly Oil Company. These companies with their reserves, refineries and retail businesses eventually became part of a pyramid of corporations, at whose apex stood the Getty Oil Company, which was more than 80 percent owned by Mr. Getty. They constituted the chief ingredients of his fortune in the United States. In a complicated rearrangement in 1967, Mr. Getty merged the Tidewater Oil Company and the Mission Development Company into the Getty Oil company. The surviving company then had assets of more than $3 billion, a figure since multiplied after oil price increases in 1973. Shortly afterward, he estimated that his profits were 10 percent of assets. Mr. Getty was asked then what satisfaction he derived from making so much money. "It is just to prove that you can keep step with the regiment," he replied, alluding to Exxon, Gulf and Texaco, the other giant oil corporations, he seemed to regard as his rivals. In the years Mr. Getty was wheeling in oil stocks and battling Standard Oil for control of Tidewater and Skelly, he lived mostly in an enormous penthouse at 1 Sutton Place, New York, that he had leased from Mrs. Frederick Guest. He conducted a vigorous social life there and also found time to write his first book, "History of the Oil Business of George Franklin Getty and J. Paul Getty, 1903-39." He also got into the hotel business in that period by purchasing the Pierre at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street for $2,350,000 in 1938. Twenty years later he sold most of the suites to residents while retaining, through a subsidiary company, the service rooms--the bars, restaurants and reception rooms. To the rear of the Pierre, at 600 Madison Avenue, is the 22-story Getty Building, which he built in the late fifties and which he owned through Getty Oil. He also owned, again through corporate devices, a skyscraper in Los Angeles, an office building in Tulsa and the Pierre Marques Hotel at Revolcadero Beach near Acapulco, Mexico. The day the United States entered World War II, in 1941, Mr. Getty dispatched a telegram to an old friend, Under Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal. The message, quoted in Mr. Getty's autobiography read: "I am 49 but in good health, have owned three yachts and am experienced in their care and maintenance. If Navy can use me in any capacity, please advise. Regards." The Navy rejected him for sea duty, but Secretary Frank Knox suggested he do something about the Spartan Aircraft Company, a Skelly and hence Getty subsidiary in Tulsa. He did, and in the war Spartan manufactured trainers and plane parts under Mr. Getty's personal direction. Afterward, the company converted profitably to production of mobile homes. In the postwar years Mr. Getty executed the most daring coup of his business career when, in 1949, he obtained a 60-year concession in Saudi Arabia's half of the Neutral Zone, a barren tract lying between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in which no oil had been discovered. He paid King Saud $9.5 million in cash for the concession and agreed to pay $1 million a year for its duration whether or not oil was struck. After an investment of $30 million, the gamble paid off when the Getty interests hit oil in enormous quantities in 1953. Production from that field, which was in excess of 16 million barrels a year, helped to elevate Mr. Getty into the billionaire class. In addition to his holdings in oil (including a tanker fleet with a ship named for him), real estate, trailer homes and hotels, Mr. Getty had interests in the Minnehoma Insurance Company and the Spartan Cafeteria Company, all in Oklahoma. Mr. Getty's ability (and agility) in amassing his fortune awed most of his business contemporaries. "He is comparable to Henry Ford, Commodor Vanderbilt or Andrew Mellon," one Wall Street broker said. His sons were awed, too. One of them, George, who died in 1973, once put it this way: "Mr. Getty is the smartest businessman I know. Coming to see him is like visiting Mount Olympus." Mr. Getty was inclined to agree that he occupied some sort of special status, although he was modest in his expression. "I'm a bad boss," he said self-analytically. "A good boss develops successors. There is nobody to step into my shoes." Mr. Getty is survived by three sons, J. Ronald Getty, J. Paul Getty Jr., and Gordon Peter Getty, 16 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.