Growing Up Getty, page 19
“He was very present in the here and now, he enjoyed life, he could focus on things, he was highly intuitive,” Becker remembered.
“And naughty. He was sadly druggy—on and off the hard stuff and whatever. Around him were a lot of people with the same habits. In those days, people tended to do whatever the hell they wanted, and it was funny. Until you saw the consequences.
“There were days when Paul seemed checked out, but for the most part he enjoyed life, with a tremendous sense of humor about people. He got it.”
Getty was also brave, Becker adds, recounting the story of a near-fatal sailing trip from Los Angeles to Catalina Island in 1977. Along with a few of Paul’s friends, they rented a thirty-six-foot sloop for the voyage. Halfway back to the city, they encountered heavy seas: “A real squall, with thirty-knot winds growling, huge waves, the troughs as deep as the mast,” said Becker, who was skippering. “We had to haul in and head up the face of every wave, otherwise the wave can roll you. It was eight hours like that. I was beyond exhaustion. Paul was below barfing endlessly in the cabin with his friends. Stoned, useless, spoiled brats, I kept thinking. Finally, Paul came up alone and took the mainsheet—and we got there. Paul saved the day.”
In 1981, Paul was working as a director’s assistant and an actor (he appeared in Wim Wenders’s The State of Things, which was released the following year). Trying to get himself together, he gave up drinking. To help him cope, doctors prescribed a variety of medications. After his years of drug and alcohol abuse, his liver shut down and he collapsed into a coma for six weeks. When he awoke, he was paralyzed from the neck down, and had lost much of his sight and ability to speak. Whole words were beyond him, but he could get out syllables, in a grunting fashion, which those close to him learned to decipher. Yet his brain and his emotions continued to function well. “He lives the life of the mind. He’s a good poet. He loves music,” said Bill Newsom, his godfather. “He’s a great, great fellow.”
He required round-the-clock care. At Gail’s house in Brentwood, where he lived for a time, state-of-the-art medical and therapeutic facilities were installed. When he did go out, it was an elaborate production. “He was accompanied by two or three male nurses, and he was wheeled around the galleries in a sort of hospital trolley,” a staff member at the J. Paul Getty Museum recalled of his occasional visits.
In 1986, Paul and Gisela officially separated. Around that time, Gail made some decisions for her grandchildren. “Enough of this hippie shit,” she is said to have declared. At her instigation, Balthazar transferred to a school that was Waldorf’s polar opposite—Gordonstoun, in Scotland. Famously severe and cold, it has educated generations of British aristocrats and royals, many of whom have testified to how miserable they were there. Prince Charles described it as “hell” and a “prison.”
Balthazar fared surprisingly well. “You had to learn how to survive in the woods. I enjoyed it very much,” he said.
Anna, meanwhile, continued her education in San Francisco at the Hamlin School for Girls, a prestigious academy in Pacific Heights, then at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied for three years. “She had beautiful, long brown hair—her style was earthy and bohemian. She always seemed effortlessly glamorous,” recalled a Hamlin classmate.
By the late eighties, Balthazar was back in California, enrolled at Bel Air Prep. One afternoon in 1988, a casting agent spotted the thirteen-year-old in detention (something about throwing a desk at a teacher).
English director Harry Hook was searching for the leads for his upcoming film adaptation of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s 1954 novel about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island. Hook didn’t want to use professional actors. “I wanted fresh faces. I wanted to find kids who were real,” the director said. Out of hundreds of candidates they interviewed, he felt Balthazar was the only one right for the part of Ralph, the voice of order and civilization. “With Balthazar, I felt there was an intensity and sense of morality to him, and that he was a very likable child.”
Returning to LA later in 1988 from the intense four-month, hurricane-beset shoot in Jamaica, Balthazar had money in his pocket and an agent who was lining up new roles for him, beginning with Young Guns II. By the time both films were released in 1990, he was living the high life. He was unabashed about enjoying the bling. In interviews, he explained that this Getty wasn’t born with a silver spoon. “I grew up scrappy.… The money wasn’t there,” he later reminisced on a podcast with actor Dean Delray.
At fifteen, he moved in with a twenty-year-old girlfriend, then dated Drew Barrymore; he went clubbing all night with friends including the Beastie Boys. Yet even with continued success—in such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997)—family sorrows took their toll. His father’s misfortune wasn’t just a private family matter; it was yet another manifestation of “the Getty curse,” as the press repeated time and again. “That’s a lot to cope with when you’re growing up and I didn’t handle it well,” Balthazar said. “I got angry.”
He became a third-generation heroin addict.
“For me the drugs were never about getting high, they were about adventure… the search for higher consciousness,” he said.
“Without Mom’s guidance, I’d be dead. In fact, I did die, several times. I was just lucky,” he later told the London Times (“Member of a Troubled Dynasty” read the headline). “Normally these things don’t have a happy ending, but my family are together and they made me want to be a better person.”
Gisela and Paul divorced in 1993 and she moved to Europe. Living between a cottage in the Austrian Alps and an apartment in Munich, she has pursued fine art photography, writing, and documentary filmmaking. But she returned regularly to California to visit her children and Paul, with whom she remained close.
After finishing at the Sorbonne, Anna relocated to Los Angeles, where she pursued an acting career. She landed parts in a few independent films as well as in some of the 1990s’ buzziest TV series, including ER and Malibu, CA.
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On the eve of the new millennium, Balthazar met Rosetta Millington, with whom he found mutual understanding. The second of three children born to two hippie-artists, she grew up in an itinerant commune her family belonged to in Southern California. While it was a loving environment, “there weren’t any boundaries,” she recalled.
At fourteen, she began an international modeling career, which included campaigns for Azzedine Alaïa and shoots with Bruce Weber. Then she launched herself as a fashion designer and entrepreneur, with a children’s wear line that had grown into a success by the time she met Balthazar.
“It was love at first sight, but it was also perfect in that all of our friends were the same and he was raised in a similar way,” she said.
Their circle included the Arquette siblings. One of his closest friends is David; she has been best friends with Patricia since early childhood. At age eight, the girls had predicted their respective career paths, in fashion design and acting. “We were ambitious even then,” said Rosetta, an elegant brunette with a precise manner.
She and Balthazar married at Los Angeles City Hall in 2000. Cassius (named after Muhammad Ali, a hero of Balthazar’s) was born to the couple that year. Grace, Violet, and June came in 2001, 2003, and 2007, respectively.
They moved into a sprawling six-bedroom 1920s Spanish-style house with a lush garden, above Sunset Boulevard not far from the Chateau Marmont. On her visits from Germany, Gisela continued to drop into the old stamping ground, photos of which she sometimes posted on her Instagram page. (“And always the Chateau M,” she captioned one picture.)
After her own wandering childhood, Rosetta prioritized providing a sense of stability for her children—a lively brood. Family dinners are served every night at six thirty. Fridays, the family observes Shabbat; Balthazar has studied the Kabbalah since 2009. The previous year had been tumultuous; a brief affair he had with the actress Sienna Miller was widely reported.
The Gettys’ residence became a new nexus of hipster Hollywood. “Anyone who is anyone has been at the house,” said Balthazar. (Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino are among the many who have attended the couple’s parties and gatherings.)
Cassius once expressed to his mother a wish for his family to be “regular.”
“I don’t quite know what regular means,” she said.
Meanwhile, husband and wife were succeeding in their creative endeavors. In 2006, Balthazar joined the cast of Brothers and Sisters, the hit series that ran for five tear-inducing seasons, in which he played Tommy Walker, scion of a wealthy California family.
After the birth of June, her youngest, Rosetta turned their guesthouse into an atelier and began producing a small collection of gowns and cocktail dresses under the label Riser Goodwyn. It was meant to be a line for just friends, but when you have friends like Demi Moore and Kirsten Dunst, word travels, and orders came in.
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Between her film jobs, Anna was supporting herself as a caterer. She became an assistant to Akasha Richmond, organic chef to the stars (Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand among them). The work reconnected Anna to her childhood cuisine. As a teenager, she had fallen off the organic wagon, rebelling against yeast flakes and the like.
Anna’s August 2003 wedding in Tuscany, to screenwriter Gregory Pruss, brought together much of the Getty family, and spanned East and West. Some three hundred guests gathered for the hilltop ceremony. Balthazar walked Anna—resplendent in an antique diamond choker lent to her by her aunt Ariadne—down the aisle. She stopped to give a kiss to her wheelchair-bound father, Paul III, before she and Pruss were pronounced husband and wife by Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, yoga guru to the stars (including Madonna and Courtney Love). She chanted “Sat Nam” (“I am truth”) three times.
In Los Angeles, where the couple raised their children, India and Dante, born in 2004 and 2009, Anna forged a career as an advocate of holistic healthy living. Certified as an instructor in kundalini and prenatal yoga, she produced a DVD collection: Anna Getty’s Pre and Post Natal Yoga Workout. But organic food became her primary focus. In 2010, Chronicle Books published Anna Getty’s Easy Green Organic: Cook Well—Eat Well—Live Well.
In addition to recipes, it contained recollections of her mother’s cooking as well as memories of the monks at Green Gulch tending their fruits and vegetables. “That’s where my food education began,” she wrote.
A healthy diet is the key to life, she stressed: “Reconnect to food and its power to nourish your mind, body, and spirit. Empower yourself through your kitchen and the food you prepare.”
In the early 2010s, she crossed paths again with Scott Oster. They had met twenty-five years before at a West Hollywood nightclub, when he was beginning his career as a pro skateboarder and was about to be married. Now they were both recently divorced. They began dating, as he pursued his new career as an interior designer and she delved further into organic cooking. In 2014, they had a son, Roman. Later that year on a trip to Paris, when they were cycling by the Eiffel Tower, Scott proposed. Attendants at their 2015 ocean-side wedding in Big Sur included India, eleven, the maid of honor, and Dante, six, the ringbearer. This time, Anna walked herself down the aisle. The following year the family, including newborn Bodhi, settled in the idyllic valley town of Ojai, where Anna’s aunt Aileen lived at the time. (When the New York Times Styles section published a somewhat snarky piece on the scene there in 2015, it described the two Getty women as “offbeat heiresses.”)
Anna explained in another article, in Greener Living Today. “We’ve always worked,” she said, speaking at least for herself and her brother. “People have passed on in my family and things have changed a bit, but not drastically. Even though my aunts and uncles live a very wonderful lifestyle, most of them drive Priuses and they’re putting in solar panels at their properties.
“One thing that I constantly have to remind people of is that when you are an heir, you get money when people die,” she added.
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In 2011, J. Paul Getty III died at the age of fifty-four. He had been living with his mother in Ireland, at Gurthalougha House on a 100-acre lakefront estate in County Tipperary, but he passed away at Wormsley, with Gail and Gisela by his side.
Balthazar issued a statement: “[He] taught us how to live our lives and overcome obstacles and extreme adversity and we shall miss him dearly.”
Even with Paul’s physical limitations, he and Balthazar had found ways to open up to each other emotionally. “He would tell me he loved me. We had regular father-son moments,” Balthazar recalled. “He would worry and he would cry.… To the day he died I would hop in bed next to him and tell stories or watch a film.”
Thanks to his own earnings, as well as the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Balthazar’s “scrappy” days were long gone. A weekend beach house in Malibu, a whopping gold Rolex, private jets, and a fleet of fancy cars became part of the lifestyle. His ground transport included a Lamborghini and a Porsche Turbo (“My first ‘fuck you’ car. I haven’t normally done that. And that’s part of being okay with ‘it,’ ” he said in 2016—“it” meaning, presumably, being a Getty).
Music became his focus now. He made beats for a rock band, Ringside, and he formed a rap duo, the Wow, with South African rapper K.O. Using Pro Tools, a digital audio workstation (a birthday gift from Rosetta and their friend Joaquin Phoenix), he turned the guesthouse into his music studio, where he produced an album, Solardrive. Under his rap name, Balt Getty, he began DJing around the country—sometimes spinning several nights a week.
A turning point for Rosetta came in 2015. Patricia Arquette appeared at the Academy Awards wearing an elegant black and white column dress Rosetta had designed for her. Nominated as Best Supporting Actress for her role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Patricia took home the statue, and Rosetta garnered considerable buzz.
With June now in kindergarten, Rosetta took her work as a fashion designer to the next level and launched her eponymous line out of the pool house. Reflecting her minimalist sensibility, she created understated but beautifully cut pieces, made of superlative-quality silk, cashmere, and other materials. Devotees of the Rosetta Getty label soon included the likes of Margot Robbie, Tracee Ellis Ross, Dakota Johnson, Claire Foy, and Rihanna, while Vogue and WWD gave glowing coverage.
Each season she produces a limited number of wardrobe fundamentals—an assortment as rigorously curated as a museum collection. When she begins a collection, she usually chooses an artist or an architect to study and draw inspiration from (Louise Bourgeois and Louis Kahn are favorites), or she picks a young contemporary artist to collaborate with (such as Kayode Ojo or Anna-Sophie Berger).
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Looming ahead in 2016 was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Balthazar’s great-grandfather. By now, many of the millions who visited the J. Paul Getty Museum’s sites in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades had no idea who J. Paul Getty was. Among the general public, the Getty name had come to be better associated with drugs, decadence, and tragedy. At the same time, to the youngest Gettys, their patriarch had become a fairly remote historical figure.
As the anniversary approached, both the museum and the Getty family delved into their history. At the Getty Center, curators prepared a permanent, interactive installation, J. Paul Getty: Life and Legacy, to tell the story of their patron’s life as a businessman and an art collector; at the Getty family meetings in Italy, Balthazar and his uncle Mark put together lessons for the youngsters. Starting with their Scots-Irish roots and the pioneering days in Bartlesville, the tutorials explored the work ethic and unconventional thinking that enabled Getty to become the richest man of his time, and to create one of the world’s greatest cultural assets. In addition to the museum, which has never charged an admission fee to any visitor, the J. Paul Getty Trust operates the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute, preeminent centers of scholarship and preservation.
As the museum put the finishing touches on its installation, the curators asked Balthazar to come and test the beta version of the interactive touch screens. In September 2016, just before it opened to the public, director Timothy Potts welcomed twenty-three Gettys to a private preview. Five generations, they ranged from age 8 (Veronica, Billy and Vanessa’s youngest child) to 103 (Teddy, J. Paul Getty’s last wife).
Aileen thanked Potts and his staff for “unearthing and shedding a more natural light on my grandfather” and for “making it possible to strip away some of the myth that was setting like stone.”
As Balthazar said in an interview with The Iris, the blog of the J. Paul Getty Trust, it was an opportunity to reconnect with a legacy he had once shunned, and for his family as a whole to bolster its pride: “I think you rebel against these sorts of things because you want to create your identity and nobody wants to be seen as the great-grandson, or grandson, or son of anybody. You want to be your own man and create your own legacy… but the older I get the more pride I’m able to have in my family’s history. As a family we feel incredibly proud. It’s not about showing off. It’s not about gloating. It’s really just having pride in what Nonno was able to do. I do feel an incredible connection.”
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“Stand back—it’s about to get wack!”
“Single droppin’ in a couple hours. Wack—Balt Getty—wack.”
Behind a turntable set up in the parking lot of a strip mall on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, on an evening in June 2019, Paul Balthazar Getty was whipping up the crowd. At his invitation, a couple hundred hipsters and local characters—including Tommy the Clown, the freestyle-dancing LA legend—had gathered for a block party. Getty had multiple reasons to celebrate: Monk Punk, his luxe streetwear line, was debuting; his retail store (housed in a former RadioShack outlet) was opening; and his latest hip-hop track—which was entitled “Wack,” if you hadn’t guessed—was about to drop.
