Growing up getty, p.11
Growing Up Getty, page 11
That weekend, an exhibition of photographs by Nick Knight opened at Albion Barn in Oxfordshire. Afterward gallerist Michael Hue-Williams hosted a lively lunch on the bucolic grounds for a fashionable group. Isabel was among them, now clad in a fringed suede jacket, jeans, and biker boots.
Born in New York City, where she spent her early childhood in her parents’ six-story townhouse on the Upper East Side, she’s a picture of transatlantic poise. “To my English friends, I’m a foreign friend. To my American friends, I’m English,” she said. At age eight, around the time her parents separated, Isabel moved with her mother to London; enrolled first at Harrodian, she later boarded in Switzerland at Le Rosey, Pia’s alma mater, where she was a member of the choir and the school band. For college it was back to the States. Isabel arrived at New York University thinking she should study law or business, but music, she decided, made her happiest. She transferred to NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. But despite her boarding-school vocalizing, the idea of performing solo frightened her. Of all people, it was Diana Ross who helped her get over her stage fright. It was May 2013, at Farmington Lodge, Marie-Chantal and Pavlos’s eighteenth-century manor house in England’s Cotswolds, where four hundred guests had gathered to celebrate her maternal grandfather’s eightieth birthday. At one point, Ross, the gala’s entertainer, pulled Isabel onstage. It’s Diana Ross passing you the mike—you better bloody sing, she remembers thinking to herself in panic. Isabel deftly belted some classic Supremes lines. “It was pretty epic,” she recalled.
After graduating from NYU in 2016, she moved back to London, celebrating with a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme party for three hundred friends at One Marylebone (she went as a fairy in a gold Oscar de la Renta gown), and temporarily reclaiming her room in her mother’s Knightsbridge mansion. Pia, who is regarded as the bohemian one among her sisters, had just launched a film production company, Pia Pressure, which aims to support emerging talent—particularly female—from underrepresented backgrounds. Toward that goal, Pia (who has directed multiple documentaries) created the Pia Pressure Award. That year, it was bestowed on two young British filmmakers—Johnny Kenton and Debs Paterson—who each received a $35,000 grant.
That fall, Isabel landed on the cover of Tatler, wearing a silk-velvet coat by Etro (“The Heiress: Glamour, Talent, Two Fortunes… Yes, Isabel Getty Has It All,” read the cover lines), and then on Dolce & Gabbana’s runway in Milan, where she walked in the designers’ Fall/Winter 2017 show.
With two friends—Ali on guitar and James on keys—she formed a band, Jean Marlow. (Its first name was a nod to actress Jean Harlow, the last to sixteenth-century English poet Christopher Marlowe.) Isabel identified herself—the group’s singer-songwriter—as Izzy Getty. “I still had terrible stage fright. It’s easier—there is more freedom—in going by another name. I liked the concept of creating this other persona when I go onstage.” Getty’s voice is soft, slightly raspy; the band has a soulful, grunge, soft-rock sound. “We’re die-hard acoustic musicians,” said Isabel. On Spotify and iTunes, they have released several EPs, with titles including “Spin” and “Run Leon,” for which she drew the album art. In 2020, following a stay in Los Angeles, where Isabel had retreated during the lockdown months, the group released “Santana Winds,” a hypnotic ballad inspired by Southern California’s fierce and sometimes evil autumn winds.
“There was so much destruction going on,” she recalled a year later, by phone from Gstaad, Switzerland. By this time, things were considerably brighter. Working remotely, she had been helping her father manage real estate investments, primarily in Germany and Portugal. She had just returned from Mykonos in Greece, where she and her South African–reared cousin Vanessa Waibel staged a high-spirited bachelorette weekend for their San Francisco relation Ivy Getty. Photos of the girls—at one point in matching pink hot pants, dancing stageside at Jackie O’, the fashionable beach club—splashed across Instagram and the Daily Mail. (Ivy’s elaborate wedding that November would draw much coverage too.)
“They are like sisters—we grew up together,” Isabel said of Vanessa and Ivy. (Living thousands of miles apart is no hindrance in this family.) “I’m very close to a lot of my cousins.… I feel very fortunate—a lot of people don’t get along with their families.”
Isabel acknowledged that her family has had its troubles. But she puts them in perspective. “Everyone has tragedies in their families. It’s just that ours have been more public. There has been a lot of suffering, but that’s why it’s important to stay grounded and together.”
That September, Isabel moved back to New York to study for her MBA at Columbia Business School, while simultaneously pursuing her musical career. “I’ve always followed my own path. I don’t like to be dependent on anyone,” she said. “I want to make my own way.”
* * *
Christopher is not the first Getty to reside in Rome. “This is where my grandfather would spend the winters. He felt very happy here,” he said. It was during those stays that J. Paul Getty visited the Capitoline Museums and became inspired to found his museum in Malibu. “This classical civilization, this humanist tradition, is what they aspired to,” Christopher said, referencing also his paternal great-grandparents. “They were austere Scottish peasants who hooked into this worldview.”
The city continues to cast its spell on their descendants. Aside from the obvious charm of Roman life, Christopher said he also enjoyed the disorder endemic to it. “They give you just the right amount of grit,” he said.
He was eleven when his grandfather passed away, but memories endure. “Sutton Place was the most fun place in the world,” he recalled. Every night before dinner, they would watch the lions being fed. Family meals were punctuated by amusing banter about which truants might be thrown to the beasts. There was a golf buggy he could sneak off with, to tear around the grounds. But once, as he was plowing through the prized rose garden, he looked up at the house and saw his grandfather staring down from a window. That night at dinner, not a word was said about it, surprisingly. But the next morning, when Christopher jumped into the buggy for another spin, the battery had been removed.
“That was him,” he said. “I remember him as a very calm man. He was not a shouter. He was very easy—easier than many grandfathers I’ve come across. That was my view as a child, and sometimes a child has the best view.”
The world’s richest man was “almost a bit of a hippie,” he added. “He could have been a beachcomber… he was never part of the Establishment… he was not a mainstream character.”
The tougher one was Grandmother Fini, who, he noted, remained true to her Germanic stock till the end: “She didn’t have any sense of humor!”
Christopher’s middle son, Conrad, a graduate of Harrow in England, was attending Berkeley, where he was excelling in math—a first for a Getty, Christopher claimed—as well as physics, which was a subject Conrad’s great-uncle Gordon enjoyed discussing with him during their weekly dinners at Gordon’s mansion in Pacific Heights.
While his youngest, Max (short for Maximus), is an undergraduate at NYU, the eldest son, Robert (“Bob”), is a budding filmmaker. He has directed several short movies, including a horror flick, Unbaptism, in which two priests find themselves trapped by evil when they arrive at a remote house to investigate paranormal activity, and Untitled Chat Show, a comedy about a failed talk show pilot in 1978 (which carries a credit for Pia Miller in the role of “hippie”).
“They’re all coming along nicely,” Christopher observed of his offspring. He expressed the same sentiment about the close-knit cousinage to which they belong. (Marie-Chantal and Pavlos have five children; Alexandra and Alexander, who were divorced in 2002, have three.) “They’re all good kids… they run in a pack,” he said. All of them attended the lavish ball that Marie-Chantal and Pavlos threw in 2017 for the twenty-first birthday of Princess Olympia, their eldest. Held at Farmington Lodge, it drew a stunning assortment of the royal, the rich, the young, and the beautiful. It was “the party that had everything,” the Daily Mail reported.
Even as perceptions persist that the clan is riven with strife and factions, the reality, according to Christopher, is different. “Everyone is interested in what other people are doing, and wishing them well,” he said.
Members communicate over joint investments too. Christopher was among the founding investors in some of the family’s marquee ventures, including Conservation Corporation Africa, Getty Images, and PlumpJack, which began with a small wine store in San Francisco and now produces some of the best Cabernet Sauvignon in the world. “I was the first investor,” he said, as he ordered a bottle of excellent Amarone.
* * *
A talent for viniculture runs in the family. Christopher’s middle sisters, Stephanie Getty-Waibel and Cecilia Getty-du Preez, produce some of South Africa’s most internationally lauded bottles, alongside their respective husbands, Alexander Waibel and Pierre du Preez.
Considering their avocation, it’s not surprising that a friend of the women used wine vocabulary to describe them—as well as their youngest sibling, Christina: “The girls are all very bubbly and attractive. At first blush, they might seem like dizzy blondes, but they all have depth.”
Both the Getty-Waibels and the Getty-du Preezes divide their time between Europe and South Africa’s Constantia Valley, where they own adjacent wine-growing estates located on the mountainous slopes overlooking Cape Town and its breathtaking bay.
Alexander Waibel’s family history in South Africa goes back to 1950, when his maternal grandfather, Dr. Manfred Thurnher, relocated operations of BMD, the enormous textile business begun by his wife’s family, from their native Austria. The reins of the company eventually passed to Manfred’s son-in-law, Dieter Waibel, who had five children with Manfred’s daughter Rosemarie. Alexander was the firstborn.
In the 1960s, the Cape Town region became a second home for the family when they purchased their 150-acre estate in the valley, where they built country houses and enjoyed rustic life. In fact, the land had been farmed for grapes by Dutch settlers beginning in 1680. Then the acreage was left to lie fallow for centuries.
In the late 1990s, after a mountain fire devastated much of the landscape, Dieter, a lover of Bordeaux wines, hatched the idea to bring the land back to its earlier function. Alexander and Stephanie joined the venture.
It was a mammoth undertaking to clear the ravaged land and plant their vineyards on the steep slopes. Their inaugural Sauvignon Blanc was released in 2007; sales of reds began three years later. When Alexander took over the operation, he and Stephanie stuck faithfully to his late father’s vision of creating world-class Bordeaux-style wines. Under their label, Constantia Glen, four premium wines are produced: two reds (Constantia Glen Three and Constantia Glen Five) and two whites (Constantia Glen Sauvignon Blanc and Constantia Glen Two). The numerals reflect the number of Bordeaux varieties in each blend.
With their three daughters—Marietheres, Sigourney, and Vanessa—the Waibels could be a wine dynasty in the making (there is a strong tradition of matrilineal succession in this branch of the family). “They… will be the true beneficiaries of what we were doing,” said Alexander, referring to his offspring as well as future generations. “Perhaps they will nod and remark that we knew what we were doing.”
Mousy, as their eldest is called, started stomping grapes and pitching in on the farm at the age of ten. Now, on the verge of thirty, she’s Constantia Glen’s export manager. “I watched Constantia Glen grow from an idea to something bigger,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “The fact that I could be part of that process makes me so proud and happy to still be involved in the farm today.” Sigourney, meanwhile, is studying for her doctorate in neurotechnology at Imperial College London.
In 2000, another devastating fire swept through the area, and from its ashes sprang Beau Constantia, a vineyard created by Stephanie’s sister and brother-in-law.
Coming from a Sunday lunch at Stephanie and Alexander’s, Cecilia and Pierre, a South African–born investment banker, noticed a FOR SALE sign on a burnt-out goat farm—a property on even steeper slopes.
They planted vineyards over the 55 acres they acquired, on which they built a modern glass and concrete home, for themselves and their daughter, Lucca, and son, Aidan, born in the first years of the new millennium. They have literally produced a family of wines: Cecily, their Viognier, debuted in 2010 (it received a very respectable 92 points from wine authority Robert Parker). The portfolio grew to include Pierre, a Sauvignon Blanc; Lucca, a Merlot/Cabernet Franc blend; and Aidan, a spicy red blend of 35 percent Shiraz, 23 percent Malbec, 23 percent Petit Verdot, and 19 percent Merlot. In memory of Pierre’s mother, there is also Stella, a Shiraz, while Karin, a Blanc de Noir, celebrates Cecilia’s German-born Floridian mother.
* * *
After the death of her husband, Ronald, in 2010, Karin moved to Miami Beach, where her youngest, Christina, has lived since her wedding in 2002 to investor Arin Maercks, with whom she had three children before their divorce around 2013. An attentive grandmother, Karin has taken well to the South Beach lifestyle, according to one Miamian, who described her as “a live wire.” The apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. “She’s the life of the party,” said another local of Christina. “She has a big personality. But she’s down-to-earth too. She doesn’t have the airs of someone who grew up in Europe. She’s not stuffy.”
Given her outgoing character, Miami is an appropriate place for her. “Her impact here is being ‘the Miami Getty.’ San Francisco is full of Gettys, but she’s our only one. Though ninety-nine percent of Miami doesn’t know what a Getty is,” said a resident.
Along with her fiancé, Juan Pablo Cappello, a Chilean-born lawyer and tech entrepreneur who is the father of three girls, Christina is a cofounder and investor in NUE Life Health, a business start-up that will use psychedelic drugs such as ketamine to treat mental illness. “With one in five women in the United States relying on an antidepressant to get through the day, and with our losing twenty-two veterans a day to suicide, we felt compelled to launch a different kind of mental wellness company,” Christina said.
A supporter of worthy institutions such as the Bass Museum of Art and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Christina is a regular at charity events. She also sends out, biennially, one of South Florida’s most coveted invitations—to her “Bad Santa” party, which she usually throws at her house on Sunset Island (where neighbors have included Enrique Iglesias and Lenny Kravitz). In 2018, it outgrew the premises; Christina and Juan Pablo transferred the party to Soho Beach House Miami. Traditionally, the party has been a good-natured exercise in flouting the boundaries of taste, with strippers, dancers, Playboy Bunnies, and bawdy Christmas tree ornaments—“pornaments,” as one guest called them.
“It’s something we all look forward to,” said one prominent Miamian. “It’s all in good fun. She just wants her friends to enjoy themselves. She could care less if anybody thinks it’s in bad taste. She doesn’t care about impressing people.”
That outlook, according to someone who knows a variety of Gettys, is a hallmark of the family: “They don’t give a fuck about what other people think of them. They’re not snobs and they don’t think in terms of something being ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ In a weird way, they are liberated from that paradigm.”
III. THE PAULS
5 Paul Jr.
Born at sea in 1932, J. Paul Getty Jr. was brought up first in Los Angeles. Around 1945, as he entered his teenage years, he moved to San Francisco. His mother, the madcap Ann, and her fourth husband, attorney Joseph Stanton McInerney, settled Paul and his brother Gordon—fifteen months Paul’s junior—into a rambling house on Clay Street. But perhaps settled is a word that never applied to the young Gettys. Within a few years, McInerney was gone, and sometimes their gregarious, artistically inclined mother was absent as well, leaving the boys—the only full siblings born to J. Paul Getty—to their own devices. “They were raised by a mother who wasn’t always available,” recalled Bill Newsom III, their St. Ignatius High School classmate and lifelong best friend.
Paul Jr. was considered the best-looking and most charming of all the Getty brothers. Tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, he liked music and literature, which he studied at the University of San Francisco before his army service in Seoul during the Korean War. Abigail Harris, whom he married in January 1956 in a modest ceremony at Our Lady of the Wayside Church on the San Francisco Peninsula, was the outgoing one. Pretty and athletic, Gail was the adored only child of a federal judge. The pair had known each other since childhood, when she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart; they were sweethearts during her years at Dominican College in Marin County. From the start of their marriage, she tried to curb her husband’s drinking. “Paul had been grounded by Gail in the cause of temperance,” Bill Newsom remembered about the young couple, who set up housekeeping in Marin County, where they had their first child, J. Paul Getty III, in November 1956.
Everything changed when the young Californians landed in Rome in 1958, just as Federico Fellini began preproduction for La Dolce Vita, which would immortalize the decadent, ravishing world of the ancient capital in its postwar years when it was released in 1960.
They had been summoned to Italy by the patriarch, in order for Paul Jr. to begin working at Getty Oil Italiana. But by 1964 the younger Getty had lost interest in business. He began to embrace the counterculture movement—complete with long hair, beard, and a hippie wardrobe that exasperated his father. And the couple had drifted apart. Gail had fallen in love with Lang Jeffries, a handsome American actor who had come to Rome to shoot a television show. (Gail and Lang were married in Rome in 1966, and divorced five years later.)
