GETTY growth
The story of America’s most unconventional dynasty
James Reginert
Illustrated. Page 314. Gallery book. $ 28.
How cheap was oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, once known as the wealthiest man in the world?
It’s so cheap that his mistress lived in New York during the Great Depression, even while receiving an invitation to Condé Nast’s penthouse party, and had dinner while waiting to be his fourth wife. I had to eat canned sardines. Because it’s so cheap, in the early 1960s Getty installed a pay phone in the cloakroom of a newly acquired mansion on the outskirts of London for the “convenience” of its guests. Most notably, because it’s so cheap, his oldest grandson, John Paul Getty III, refused to pay the ransom when he was kidnapped by a member of the Italian Crime Syndicate in 1973. Ransom Penny, I have 14 kidnapped grandchildren. “
Yes, no, not exactly, but James Reginart writes a lively and compassionate chronicle of a man and many of his descendants in “Growing Up Getty.” Adding this to Anderson Cooper and Catherine Howe’s “Vanderbilt” and Tina Brown’s “Palace Papers” may give you a new pandemic escape genre, Sionography.
The phone booth, which was demolished 18 months later, was actually the idea of Getty’s lawyer Robina Land, Lund told Reginart. 1,000 people participated. An antique sugar sieve worth $ 11,200 (with yesterday’s money) was also nicknamed by the New York Times Bash. report Then — soon, I found a nearby payphone booth everywhere. How to reward hospitality.
According to Reginart, his distant father, but “dotted grandfather,” Paul III was deeply troubled by the kidnapping of Paul III and colluded with journalists to project a public image of indifference to the perpetrators. did. Getty wrote in his diary that he was “shaking at the boy’s danger” after the kidnapper mailed the victim’s amputated ears to a Roman newspaper. By the way, a few weeks before this trial began, Getty’s son George was the first of five sons after stabbing his abdomen with a barbecue knife that combined alcohol, upper and downer. “It’s tragic! It’s shattered,” the patriarch recorded in his diary. Two years earlier, Tarisapol, a beautiful Dutch actress and fashion designer muse who married John Paul Jr., died of heroin overdose at the age of 30. (“Shocked and sad”)
A series of dramatic calamities have probably fallen upon the overextended Getty clan (Paul I’s fourth son, Gordon, recently “Goodbye, Mr. Chips“Hidden Second whole family For years), Leginart dismisses the idea that they are cursed, or particularly dysfunctional of their kind, as suggested by the Kennedy family.
HL Hunt’s complex fortune “makes Getty look like a brady bunch,” he writes.
The author, a Vanity Fair writer and contributor to Sotheby’s magazine, recorded a considerable amount of time in an American aristocratic drafting room. Some of his pages have a gentle drape in the auction catalog. But he wants to shake off the dust from Getty’s name: to show that the majority are productive citizens, not drug-added spenders. One has revolutionized the screw-top Cabernet, which received a rare score of 100 from wine celebrity Robert Parker. One is DJ. At least two design garments (one brand is named Strike Oil). They all tend to throw wedding hell. Others have quietly or flashily contributed to important philanthropic activities such as feminist art, LGBTQ rights, and whale salvation.
Gordon’s main wife, Anne, was once a California farm girl and a common dynamo, but not only did she start a decorating business (her own bathroom had Degas), but Arthur. Published Miller’s memoirs and Harold Pinter’s only novel.
A towering oil baron mining a neutral zone between her father-in-law, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — his job is his Second Family — Here you’ll be caught in an innocent Ritchie-Rich-like moment. He roared when he invited Lund to jump up and down with him in an antique chaise lounge. Kneeled late at night with a visitor to show off his oriental carpet. I’m afraid to fly to the end of his days. “Almost hippies,” says one grandson. But he’s deeply media conscious, for example, focusing on the episode “I Love Lucy” when the show called his name. And, according to his fifth wife, Teddy, who published her memoirs three years before she died at the age of 103, is great in the bag.
Recently, the relationship between surnames and oil has diminished. Many know only the monumental museum Getty built in Los Angeles (he is buried with George and his fifth son Timmy. A giant who provides photos to the Times and others. The founding of Getty Images, a stock photo service, by Pauls III’s brother, Mark, may not have been completely clicked on, even if he was familiar with the media.
At various points in “Growing Up Getty,” readers may crave a grid with color-coded pegs, like the battleships of an old board game, to keep track of all names and relationships. Certainly some Getty are square pegs. Many prefer not to be quoted (one declined the request for a Leginato interview and called the everyday events of his life “white and humble”). However, I’m moving up and down with other people on Twitter and Instagram. One seaweed posted that he loves seaweed, so he may “bite a nice-looking leaf while waiting for the next wave.”
In the Leginart story, the rich may be different, but they are not indifferent. Or, as Paul once declared, “A meek man inherits the earth, but not the rights of its minerals.”
