Isabel Getty: ‘Some people bring a prejudice about meeting me. It’s just my family’
Cover: Getty wears a crystal-embellished velvet dress from The Vampire’s Wife, ￡995
Which London street would you pick to live on if you were, you know, a Getty? It’s a daydream question to debate. Isabel Getty has chosen somewhere that isn’t too obvious, isn’t Kensington or Knightsbridge; in fact, it’s a lot more bohemian, in farther west London, on a street that is straight out of the film Paddington.
She smiles a little wanly from the doorstep of her villa, releasing the automatic gate to let me into the front garden. She grew up in London but her voice has an occasional transatlantic burr that, she says, is mistaken for Irish. It takes a while for her to relax, but when she does, she is delightful. ‘Some people bring a prejudice beforehand about meeting me,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘Socially, professionally. Which is fine, but after a while hopefully that goes. It’s just my family.’
Indeed, and by the end of our interview I am hearing all about that curious tribe. Isabel’s own achievements, though, are impressive. Now 30, she has set up The Graduate Gallery, an online space and pop-up entity connecting artists of promise with new collectors – ‘people who are 35, made some money, and want to buy art but don’t want, like, a Picasso print’. Since graduating from NYU’s prestigious Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch, where Pharrell Williams was a guest tutor, she has spent the past 10 years as lead singer of the band Jean Marlow, named for two of her favourite icons, Jean Harlow and the playwright Christopher Marlowe. ‘My parents always just said, “Work, and work your hardest, and that will show itself ultimately.”’
Her airy open-plan living-room-kitchen-diner is enhanced by art, textiles, skylights and houseplants. ‘I’m a homebody, I like to cook and host people over for dinner; it’s a little more intimate than going out. The house is really my boyfriend’s vision, he’s a developer, he can take credit,’ she says.
Getty in a Duchesse satin dress from Nina Ricci, ￡655; white and gold diamond hoops ￡11,800, Chaumet; Hair by Alex Szabo; Make-up by Yin Lee
There is a monochrome Howard Hodgkin print over the fireplace, and opposite the television are small, intense Paula Rego-esque paintings by Alice Macdonald and lithographs by King Rhomberg, two artists she discovered at City and Guilds and represents as a gallerist. Above the kitchen sink is an Andy Warhol drawing that Warhol himself gave her mother, Pia, when she worked for him in the 1980s.
Pia is the eldest of the three Miller sisters, daughters of duty-free mogul Robert Warren Miller, New York socialites who all made dynastic matches: to Christopher Getty, Prince Pavlos of Greece and Prince Alexander von Fürstenberg. Pia Getty is now a film producer and Chinese art expert based in Hong Kong, working in the Miller family business. She encouraged Isabel to follow her rock and roll dream, while Papa was more circumspect. ‘He asked me, “Are you sure you don’t want to be a lawyer?” “Hmm, no, Dad.”’
I haven’t been able to find out much about her father, Christopher Getty, I say. ‘Oh yes, he’s very private. My dad’s more conservative though his family is more bohemian. He’s an entrepreneur based in Brazil.’
Isabel’s early years were spent in New York, and she has three younger brothers, Robert, Conrad and Maximus. (Robert is starting out as a film director, Conrad loves physics but has just gone into finance, and Maximus, still at NYU, wants to go into politics – watch this space.)
She was ‘five or six’ when a friend in the playground told her the story of her uncle John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping in Rome aged 16 in 1973. No prizes for guessing what gory element of the tale the small friend blurted out. The ear, right? John Paul Getty’s ear was brutally cut off and sent in the post to an Italian newspaper. ‘Kids are funny,’ she says wryly. ‘I asked about it when I got home. My dad hadn’t wanted to tell me until I was old enough to handle it. So he had to explain. It’s a very sad story. And one that my father lived through, of course. He was quite small when it was happening to his cousin, and it was quite traumatic, for that whole generation of the family.’ Does she think it affected the way they lived their lives? ‘Maybe a little bit. I guess it had to. They don’t really talk about it much.’
J Paul Getty was already an Oklahoma oil millionaire by 1916, and expanded into the Middle East using his spoken Arabic to his advantage. By 1957 he was worth $1.6 billion. The story goes that he was notoriously mean, leaving his personal estate not to his five children by four of his wives, but to the J Paul Getty Museum in LA. Even so, the family did receive billions in trust from Getty Oil, sold to Texaco in 1984. According to Forbes, Jean Ronald Getty, Isabel’s grandfather, who was estranged from J Paul, split his ￡750 million share between his descendants and other beneficiaries.
Isabel watched the colourful Ridley Scott dramatisation of the kidnapping, All the Money In the World, while on an aeroplane: ‘Intense.’ Particularly, one imagines, the bit where the voice-over intones, ‘To be a Getty is an extra-ordinary thing… he wasn’t just the richest man in the world, he was the richest man in the history of the world.’ ‘No offence to Ridley Scott but I kind of preferred the TV adaptation,’ she demurs. ‘It’s interesting. It was a little bit twisted in terms of accuracy, which I thought was a little unfair.
‘My parents broke up when I was eight, and the divorce was finalised when I was 13,’ she explains. It sounds like everyone managed pretty well. ‘We still used to go on holidays together and made it work, and we’ve now gone on holidays with both my parents’ new partners. I think a lot of people have that experience now.’
Isabel lived with her mother in London and was ‘very happy’ at the arty Harrodian School in west London. She met her Jean Marlow bandmates at 16 and experimented with a pink, silver and blue mane (‘I really fried my hair…’).
Did she do a ‘regular’ job to learn the value of money? ‘I worked in a warehouse, and as studio assistant for the artist Marc Quinn.’ What sort of warehouse – not an Amazon one? ‘No, my grandfather’s stock warehouse in California. I helped with the basic products and marketing, I had a female power boss there and I saw just how much work she put in to have a family and a career.’
The lesson seems to have stuck, because Isabel talks in detail about reselling her own clothes on Vestiaire. Her favourite shop is the high-end vintage clothing treasure chest Rellik, Kensal Town, in the shadow of Trellick Tower. Sadly she does not know what happened to the wardrobe of Talitha Getty, her fabled, tragic aunt by marriage. ‘She started a whole look that people emulate to this day… I see everyone [in her extended family] with their own unique style and they’re all quite daring and willing to overstep the boundaries and play.’
For example, Ariadne Getty’s free-spirited, multi-tattooed, gender-questioning children: the flamboyant fashion designer August, and transgender Nats, who designs hoodies and married his love, Gigi Gorgeous, formerly Gregory, in 2021. Then there’s Aileen, a climate activist who as a corrective to the family fortune supports Just Stop Oil and similar bodies.
Isabel’s schooling at Tisch was ‘hardcore, very intense, competitive. We took seven classes when most NYU kids took four.’ On graduating, she followed where the music took her for a few years. ‘I was living out of a suitcase a lot, being a hustler,’ she says. ‘I got the chance to sing in front of Daft Punk in Paris, which was intimidating as they were so formative for me.’ Another highlight was performing at Ronnie Scott’s: ‘We played a set and they wanted us to do an encore and we were just flowing and making hip-hop and riffing on stage.’ She likes to experiment with genres, from her melodic, hypnotic psychological track Lost, about ‘an unhealthy relationship’, to her sultry cover version of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box.
She spent two years teetotal in LA – ‘only because everyone is over there’ – and hanging out with Ivy Love Getty: ‘We’re really close.’ This is her fabulous younger cousin, an artist famous for her extravagant three-day nuptials in San Francisco in November 2021, the year after she lost her father, John Gilbert Getty, aged 52, following a fentanyl overdose. Earth, Wind & Fire performed at a Barbarella-themed party the night before the wedding, Nancy Pelosi officiated, and film star Anya Taylor-Joy was among 14 bridesmaids dressed by John Galliano for Maison Margiela in ‘thunderous grey’ to complement the bridal gown covered in shards of delicately broken mirror.
‘I was meant to be maid of honour,’ laments Isabel. ‘I had my fitting with John Galliano – such a character – but I couldn’t travel because of Covid restrictions. It looked so beautiful and I was there in spirit.’ The galling truth was she was studying too hard to be able to spend the required time in quarantine. ‘It would have been two weeks in the US and I couldn’t because I was working for my master’s.’
This master’s is in strategic communications. She wants to learn coding, financial structure and accounting. ‘I need to have the know-how to take care of all these artists at the gallery, to turn the website into a platform that can make sales.’ I’m impressed. No one in her family made her do this? ‘No, they said, “Are you sure?”’
Isabel is a gilded presence at parties for Cartier, Dior, Schiaparelli, Giambattista Valli, Bulgari, Hermès, Roger Vivier and Louboutin. She has modelled for Dolce & Gabbana, attends Ascot, Cartier Polo and so on. It all seems to come naturally – it’s what her mother did in the late 1980s to early 1990s New York, after all. ‘Yes, Mum lived that life. She’s quite a private person now, though. I always go thinking, “I could meet people, meet musicians…”’
At home, Isabel soothes a restless nature with repetitive, meditative drawing and painting in vibrant colours. ‘I have a touch of ADD [attention deficit disorder] so sitting still doesn’t really work for me.’ She likes a cold-bath plunge challenge (three minutes with Wim Hof breathing exercises). But her stage persona is perhaps the most potent way for her to quit her sweet daily self, put on a bucket of eyeliner and become a vamp, an androgyne, a diva.
‘Understanding one’s femininity takes a while. I got so much uncalled-for advice – “Why are you doing music, it’s a dying industry?” or, “This is the way you should do your hair.” And online people can be quite bullying and it takes a lot to handle that.’ Are they targeting you for your surname? ‘One hundred per cent.’
‘Music is what I love and what I need to do. I love to settle in with another artist on a Sunday, if I’ve been out the night before. Writing a song is like a puzzle.’ At the bottom of her garden, she has a little music ‘shack’ set up with piano, drums and speakers. ‘I do all the production myself, I like to geek out on that.’
When I admire her soft black embroidered cowboy boots, she tells me she picked them up from Miron Crosby in Colorado over Christmas, when she went skiing with her blended family, all the Gettys on the slopes. ‘My mum, my dad, my aunt Christina, her ex-partner and his kids – a very modern Christmas – and we all got a pair of these cowboy boots from the same store. My aunt just got them for us all.’
It’s like a scene from Succession – but I wish her more peace than Shiv ever had. As the fourth generation, with different types of success on her mother’s and father’s sides, she perhaps has more savoir-faire than previous generations had. I think she just might be cool-headed enough to withstand all the privilege in the world.
