The Unexpected Warmth of the Getty Clan Makes for a Perfect Summer Read

It’s not surprising that the Tri-state region book launch for “Growing Up Getty: The Story of America’s Most Unconventional Dynasty” took place last month at Tent, the sumptuous home furnishings shop that opened in Amenia, N.Y., in late 2020.

Author James Reginato has been friends with the store’s owner, interior designer Darren Henault, for at least 20 years, and they share a luxe sensibility informed by appreciation for what are generally considered the finer things in life.

It’s also a nice coincidence that Aimee Bell, editorial director at Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books, which published “Growing Up Getty,” is a long-time resident of nearby Lakeville, Conn. Married to writer David Kamp, she was previously deputy editor at Vanity Fair, where Reginato is a writer-at-large.

Born in Chicago but a New Yorker since graduating from Columbia, Reginato has famously interviewed everyone from the Aga Khan to the Prince of Wales, with whom he spent a week gallivanting by private plane on a royal 70th-birthday tour. His previous book, “Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats” (Rizzoli Books), offered “an intimate and lively look at some of Great Britain’s most historic and majestic houses” as well as the fabled families who dwell in them.

His interest in the kind of lifestyle that only great fortunes can buy stems to the 1990s, when he was features director at W magazine. “John Fairchild [the publisher] was fascinated by high society, so it became part of my beat,” he said at Tent, where copies of his new book sold out. “I specialized in getting hard-to-get people to open up.”

Over decades, he interviewed a number of Getty family members, but writing the book was more of a challenge than anticipated, he says. It took three years, including a full year of meticulous research, to untangle various plots and subplots involving the wives (five), girlfriends (numerous), children (five sons), grandchildren (19) and great-grandchildren (47) of J. Paul Getty, who died in 1976.

Luckily, Reginato had access to the Getty Center’s archives, which include Getty’s daily diaries, many from Sutton Place, the grand English manor where he spent the last 16 years of his life with a famously upper-crust butler and two pet lions.

Getty’s fortune began in 1903 with his father’s lease of a small but oil-rich Oklahoma lot; it pinnacled a few years after his own prescient 1949 lease of the former Neutral Zone in Saudi Arabia. By 1957, Forbes cited him as the richest American, and in 1966 the Guinness Book of World Records named him the richest man on earth.  The key to his success, he explained, was easy: “Rise early, work hard — and strike oil.”

He was a serious collector of rare, historic furniture and art and today his public legacy is less about oil (the company he founded was dissolved in 2012) and more about the stunning Los Angeles museum that bears his name. It also includes a well-endowed third and fourth generation of Gettys who are artists, designers and musicians as well as business owners and quiet environmentalists.

Most surprising to Reginato, the image of J. Paul Getty as cruel and unfeeling (those of a certain age remember his much-publicized refusal to pay his 16-year-old grandson’s kidnappers, even after the boy’s ear was sent to the police), is patently false.

This was a man who married five times yet remained friendly with his exes. A man who remembered old lovers’ birthdays with red roses and gifts of money. A man whose journals kept a record of daily oil prices while fondly noting his grandchildren’s christenings and visits.

“J. Paul Getty is so often portrayed as this cold, monstrous character, but people who knew him really liked him,” Reginato says. His book is a “rapturous biography for casual readers,” says the Library Journal. And that makes it perfect summer reading.