Growing Up Getty, page 9
“We came to appreciate a number of arguments by people that this is an area that should be left as is for ecotourism,” a Mitsubishi spokesman commented.
It was a watershed victory that broke new ground in environmental activism, and was soon viewed as a case study in how to conduct a grassroots campaign—developed with multilayered sophistication—in the era of globalization.
A decade later, NRDC president John H. Adams reflected on the battle in his memoir. “Multifaceted campaigns like this are hugely expensive, and this one cost millions of dollars,” he wrote. “It could never have happened without the support of Anne Earhart, the president of the Marisla Foundation. Anne’s philanthropic strategy was to look for people with passion and give them whatever they needed to get the job done.”
When Anne received her Carnegie Medal, Serge Dedina—now the mayor of California’s southernmost city, Imperial Beach, and the director of his own nonprofit, Wildcoast—recalled her support. “Anne has this really quiet presence. Not everybody knows the work she does. But she’s out there, kind of like a coach, pushing everybody forward. She’s like that surfer on the beach that watches the gnarliest waves on the biggest day of the year, and instead of watching it from the beach, she decides to paddle out.”
She inspires others to paddle out too, he added, because they know she has their backs: “She is always there for you when you are an activist in a heavy situation.”
As she concluded her remarks that night at the New York Public Library, Anne explained how her meeting with the gray whales had set the direction of her philanthropy: Initially she focused on marine mammals because they were her passion. Soon enough she realized that these animals were “the canaries in the coal mine, as they filled up with the toxins that were dumped into the oceans, the plastics that were becoming ubiquitous in the sea, and the specter of climate change.”
Some progess has been made, she allowed—gray whales are still swimming the 10,000 miles to Laguna San Ignacio to mate. But with warming water in the Arctic endangering their feeding grounds, this is “an all-hands-on-deck moment,” she declared: “We are not separate from these sentient beings.… We need to understand we are one community and now is the time for service to that community in any and every way that we can.”
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With annual giving of around $50 million, Marisla has in recent years provided funding to more than six hundred nonprofits that work to address global environmental challenges. According to a Carnegie release, Earhart-funded philanthropy has helped preserve 4.5 million square miles “and counting” of ocean.
A board member of another conservation foundation described Marisla as “absolutely top-notch.… They really do their homework and pick the most worthy grantees to support. They go the extra mile and do things no other foundation does, like providing enhanced security to environmental defenders. In many parts of the world, these people are in real danger.
“They are caring, thoughtful people,” he added. “Anne is quite soft-spoken. She doesn’t speak often [she prefers to remain in the background, leaving most of the public work to Marisla’s executive director Herbert M. Bedolfe III]. But when she does, she speaks forcefully, and is very well-informed.”
Sara Earhart Lowell shares her mother’s interests. After graduating from Laguna Beach High School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she double-majored in environmental studies and Latin American history, she worked as a tour guide in Laguna San Ignacio. For her master’s degree in marine affairs, which she earned in 2008 from the University of Washington, her thesis examined the impact of ecotourism on the Laguna population. An Orange County resident, she has served as the Marisla Foundation’s marine program director since 2016. She oversees efforts to create protected marine areas, advance sustainable fisheries, and protect coastal lands in California, Hawaii, Baja California, Chile, and the broader Pacific.
Another thing mother and daughter have in common is an aversion to the press. “We prefer to keep a low profile,” Sara said, turning down a request for an interview. Her brother, Nicholas, expressed reticence as well. “I’m just not comfortable appearing in a book about my family [or] talking about my kinfolk,” he wrote in a polite email. Furthermore, he felt that people “would take no pleasure in reading about the pallid and humdrum events of my daily life. It mostly consists of writing, fly-fishing, and golfing.”
“Nico” Earhart is a writer and adventurer. He has posted a number of his pieces on his website and blog, the Wind-Blown Golfer. Since graduating in 2008 from the University of Denver, where he majored in international/global studies, he has made Colorado (his maternal grandmother’s birthplace) his home. From there he travels to the Australian outback, the Alaskan Great North, and other far-flung locations to write about his sporting pursuits, including fly-fishing and surfing but primarily golfing. “There are no limits to where my golf bag and I will go,” the bio on his site says.
A foodie too, he apprenticed at a restaurant in Italy, then returned home to the Rocky Mountains to continue his culinary progress, which he described in his piece “Coming to Fruition.”
During his six months in Northern Italy, he had worked eighteen-hour days without compensation, mostly in a damp, chilly basement—peeling potatoes, hand-rolling gnocchi, “and dispatching and butchering every woodland creature under the canopy.” It was all worth it: the twenty-four-year-old chef upstairs was that good.
“And now, here I was back in the U.S., ready to grab the Denver culinary scene by the throat,” Nicholas continued. His foray into a Colorado kitchen, under the thumb of a sadistic chef, was short-lived, but it made for an engaging piece.
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“Claire Getty, daughter of Mrs. Gloria Getty of Hillsborough, was feted at a family dinner marking her election as senior class president at Castilleja School in Palo Alto,” the Times of San Mateo, California, reported in 1972, in one of the rare newspaper items about George II and Gloria’s middle daughter. “Claire plans to attend the University of Salzburg in the fall, where she will study music and languages and will be accompanied on a pre-college trip to Europe by her sisters.… En route, the three girls will stop in Denver to visit their maternal grandparents.… They will also plan a stop in London with their paternal grandfather, J. Paul Getty.”
Like other Gettys before her, Claire was captivated by European art; given her interests, her grandfather’s masterpiece-laden house alone provided much to study. She spent a few years in Europe during the mid-1970s, during which she gave birth to her first son, Beau. According to John Pearson’s book, Beau was born “as a result of a love affair with an Italian she met at Perugia University.”
In 1980, she was living in Washington, DC, and enrolled at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. As she pursued her degree in international economics, which she received in 1983, complicated issues surrounding Getty Oil and the management of the Sarah C. Getty Trust were demanding her attention too. She was the first of the sisters to contact their father’s younger brother to question the control he was beginning to assert. “Dear Uncle Gordon,” read a handwritten letter she composed to him. “I do not mean to be critical of you, but I think you would admit that your business management background is limited.”
Nevertheless, she, like her sisters, wanted to stay out of the papers. “If you want a story, try my uncle Gordon. He enjoys publicity. We don’t,” she said to a reporter who managed to get her on the phone around that time.
While an undergraduate, she also helped found a major new museum in Washington.
Art collector and patron Wilhelmina Cole Holladay had long harbored a dream to open a museum of works by female artists, which would be run by women. Throughout the 1970s, she organized countless meetings, trying to drum up enthusiasm as well as financial backing for her pie-in-the-sky idea. Thus far, it hadn’t crystallized. But it was about to.
“An experience with a new neighbor brought it to a head,” Holladay wrote in her 2008 memoir, A Museum of Their Own. “A young woman who had come to study at Georgetown University moved in the house next door to ours on R Street NW. Claire, who turned out to be an attractive girl; her fiancé, a former member of the Peace Corps; a darling three-year-old boy; and their Great Dane brought to our quiet street a lively household.” (Claire’s future husband, Noel Perry, a Rhode Island native, had served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.)
Holladay first met the couple after their dog left a mess on her driveway, which Holladay’s husband stepped into.
“That evening the doorbell rang, and there on the threshold stood two sweet young things, almost in tears. ‘We’re so sorry,’ Claire blurted out. ‘We just want to be good neighbors.’ ” A few weeks later, Claire was at her front door again, this time in a panic. Beau had fallen and cut his head. Wilhelmina called her grandchildren’s pediatrician, and all was soon fine. A grateful Claire asked Wilhelmina what she was involved in. Informed about the museum idea, Claire perked up. “I find that fascinating,” she said, as Holladay elaborated in an oral history she conducted with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
As it happened, a meeting was on the calendar for the next Tuesday with a group of young women, a junior committee; Holladay invited her neighbor to drop in:
“Claire attended, became excited, and declared, ‘A building is needed.’ I replied, ‘Someday, my dear.’ She said, ‘You know, Mrs. Holladay, I really want to help.’ And I said, ‘Well, tell me what committee you want to be on and we’ll do something about that.’ And she said, ‘No, I mean I really want to help.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s wonderful, my dear… we’ll talk about it.’ ”
With that, Claire had to rush out to a class, at which point one of the other girls piped up, “Is that Claire Getty? As in J. Paul?”
“It had never occurred to me,” Holladay recalled.
Soon enough, after a discussion Claire had with her financial advisor, she pledged $1 million to start a building fund; she got her sister Caroline to come across with the same amount. (Gloria became involved in fund-raising events too.) The gifts were instrumental in finally making the museum a reality. In 1983, a 70,000-square-foot former Masonic Temple was purchased for $5 million. After extensive renovations of the 1908 building, a few blocks from the White House, the National Museum of Women in the Arts opened in 1987. It is still the only major museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the achievements of women artists.
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In 1995, Claire earned a PhD in art history from Stanford University, after working on it for a decade. Along the way she and Noel had been raising Beau and the four boys they had together in the 1980s. Byron was born just three months before she began graduate school at Stanford. Twins Somerset and Sebastian arrived next, and finally Winslow, the baby of the family.
When the family settled into their home in the community of Woodside, near Stanford, they spearheaded a drive to plant three hundred little oak trees along a forlorn stretch of Cañada Road, at the entrance to the town.
The university embarked on a major project to rebuild its art museum. When it opened in 1894, the neoclassical Leland Stanford Jr. Museum was the largest privately owned museum in America. It was built by Jane and Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child, a lover of European art who died of typhoid at age fifteen.
The museum had bad luck. The 1906 earthquake wrecked much of it. During World War II it was closed altogether. Portions were rebuilt in the 1960s; then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake decimated it again. When it finally reopened in January 1999—renamed the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University—Dr. Claire Perry was its curator of American art. She curated its inaugural exhibition, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600–1915, which was based on the dissertation she wrote for her doctorate. (Oxford University Press published the accompanying 256-page catalog, the first of several books she has written.)
Pacific Arcadia illustrated how, over five centuries, the idea of the “California dream” came to be. The notion of abundance, the promised plenty of the Golden State, was at the heart of the show. To mount the show, Claire sifted through masses of images—paintings, drawings, maps, photographs, newspaper and book illustrations, printed ephemera—before ultimately selecting the works to display. Perhaps not unlike the way her grandfather prospected for oil, digging through layers and layers of sand and shale before finally striking black gold, she mined for ideas. She focused on how, beginning in the seventeenth century, with the creation of elaborate maps and depictions of fertile valleys and other natural wonders, the concept of the Golden State had been marketed and promoted by merchants, railroad owners, financiers, and real estate speculators in order to lure settlers. They presented the state as the ultimate fulfillment of the American dream and established it as a land of infinite possibilities in the mind of the American public.
Claire investigated American culture in other exhibitions and books. American ABC, which opened in 2006 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, scrutinized childhood in nineteenth-century America. In 2011, The Great American Hall of Wonders, also at the Smithsonian, examined nineteenth-century America through the lens of its technological innovations and native ingenuity. California: The Art of Water, a 2016 show at the Cantor Center, where Claire is now a guest curator, examined the state’s complicated water story through works by a diverse roster of artists, including Albert Bierstadt, David Hockney, and Ansel Adams. For the exhibition, she successfully lobbied to have the walls of the galleries painted swimming-pool turquoise.
Like others in her family, Claire supports environmental causes, and in doing so she has tangled with powerful interests. In the fall of 2010, a ballot initiative that would have suspended California’s greenhouse gas law, Proposition 23, was gaining steam. Big money from oil-related interests—including $1 million from Koch Industries—was pouring in to stoke the Yes campaign for the measure. It seemed like a David vs. Goliath situation, in which the environmentalists would be crushed. Claire stepped up to help fund the No campaign with two $250,000 contributions over the next weeks. The tide turned, and the measure failed in the November voting.
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Since his days building water projects in rural Yemeni villages with the Peace Corps, Noel Perry has been a green advocate too. He established Baccharis Capital, one of the early “socially responsible” venture capital funds, which has invested in education and health-oriented consumer products, including organic foods. An amateur painter and sculptor, he founded several nonprofits, including 100 Families Oakland. Dozens of multigenerational families from across the city were brought together in workshops over ten weeks, where they were taught to paint, quilt, and sculpt. “Possibilities happen when you get around a block of clay: people learn about themselves and others—how to work together.… It’s mind-expanding,” Perry told a community newspaper, which described him as “intensely private.”
Both Claire and Anne married men who shared their aversion to publicity. “We are private people and trying to remain that way. People hate rich people,” one of the husbands once explained.
The oak trees that the Perrys helped plant on Cañada Road grew into a veritable forest. When Beau, their eldest, grew up, he planted something of a forest of his own, underwater. A mariculturist, he is the largest grower of seaweed on the Pacific Coast of North America.
“I have loved seaweed all my life. As a surfer I’ve spent an eternity bobbing up and down amidst California’s kelp forests—often getting it tangled around my legs, fins, or leash. Sometimes I’ll even chew on a nice-looking frond while waiting for the next set of waves,” he wrote on Instagram.
“Travelling the coast you can find surf spots with a variety of kelp beds—giant kelp, bull kelp, sea palm, the list goes on and on—and they feel as different to me as beech, redwood, or oak forests. When the water is clear you can see them waving in the current under the board, parting occasionally to reveal the vibrant life beneath the canopy—fish, crab, lobster, urchins, anemones, octopi.…”
Following in his mother’s footsteps, Beau earned his undergraduate degree in 1999 at Georgetown, where he majored in foreign service and international relations and affairs. At the Presidio Graduate School, he got an MBA in sustainable business. Like his aunt Anne, he traveled to Baja California. Instead of the plights of whales, it was the effects of overfishing and destructive seafood farming practices that alarmed him.
Blue Evolution, the company he founded in 2013 in Los Altos, another San Francisco Peninsula town, began propagating seaweed in onshore tanks in Baja. In 2014, he expanded and went north, heading to Alaska’s Kodiak Island, in perhaps the same pioneering spirit with which his great-grandfather arrived in Bartlesville. Perry was among the first entrepreneurs who saw the potential to cultivate seaweed in these waters.
His company contracts with local fishermen, transforming them into sea farmers in winter—the growing season for seaweed and the off-season for fishing. Blue Evolution provides them with the seed stock, which it makes by extracting spores from wild kelp; the seedlings are grown on pieces of string known as seed pipes, then given to the farmers, who wind the string along long ropes that are suspended from a floating frame in the ocean. After the “planting” is done in late November, the ribbons of kelp grow up to a foot a day. Weaving and protecting the lines is arduous. Beau has also involved members of the Indigenous population: the seaweed, once harvested, is processed at a facility in Kodiak owned by the Sun’aq Tribe.
Now the largest commercial seaweed hatchery in the US, Blue Evolution is at the forefront of sustainable marine aquaculture. Some of its seaweed is blanched and frozen and sold to restaurants and food service operations throughout the country. The company also sells a line of seaweed-infused products, including pastas and popcorns, under its own label. “Blue crops” have the potential to change the climate equation. Seaweed requires only sunlight and seawater to grow—no expenditures of energy, fresh water, fertilizer, or pesticides. And seaweeds naturally detox the ocean through photosynthesis, helping to combat marine acidification and global warming.
