Talitha Getty

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Talitha Getty (née Talitha Dina Pol) (October 18, 1940-July 14, 1971) was an actress, of Dutch parents, regarded, to some extent in retrospect, as a style icon of the late 1960s.

Contents 1 Background and early years 2 Early beauty and powerful effect on men 2.1 Pol and Rudolf Nureyev 3 Film career 4 John Paul Getty and the Swinging Sixties 5 Marrakesh 5.1 "Beautiful and damned" 6 Death 7 Note on images 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Background and early years

Talitha Pol was born in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), on October 18, 1940. Her father Willem Jilts Pol (1905-88) was a painter who subsequently married Poppet John (1912-97), daughter of the painter Augustus John (1878-1961), a pivotal figure in the world of "Bohemian" culture and fashion. She was thus the step-granddaughter of both Augustus John and his muse and second wife, Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeil (1881-1969), who was a fashion icon in the early years of the 20th century.

Pol spend her early years, during the Second World War, with her mother, born Arnoldine Adriana Mees, in a Japanese prison camp. Her father was interned in a separate camp and her parents went their own ways after the war, Pol moving to Britain with her mother, who died in 1948.

[edit] Early beauty and powerful effect on men

Pol studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Writer and journalist Jonathan Meades, who was at RADA several years later, recalled that, after first coming to London in 1964, he saw Pol with her stepmother at Seal House, Holland Park (home of Poppet John's sister, Vivien). Meades thought her "the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen ... I gaped, unable to dissemble my amazement" ^[1].

In 1988 a former Labour Member of the British Parliament Woodrow, Lord Wyatt recalled, with reference to the "success with women" of Anthony, Lord Lambton, former Conservative Government Minister, that

there was that Talitha Pol who was very pretty and had a little starlet job in Yugoslavia; and he went and stayed at the hotel and sent her huge bunches of flowers about every two hours and showered her with presents ^[2].

[edit] Pol and Rudolf Nureyev

Another to come under Pol's spell was the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who first met her at a party in 1965. According to Nureyev's biographer, Julie Kavanagh, the two were in thrall to each other, to the extent that Nureyev "had never felt so erotically stirred by a woman" and told several friends that he wished to marry Pol ^[3]. In the event, Nureyev was unable to attend a dinner party given by Claus von Bülow, at which he and Pol were to have been seated next to each other, and so Bülow invited instead John Paul Getty, son of his employer, the oil tycoon Paul Getty. Pol and Getty Jr forged a relationship that led to their marriage in 1966.

[edit] Film career

As an actress, Pol appeared in several films, including Village of Daughters (1962) (as a daughter, Gioia Spartaco); an Edgar Wallace mystery, We Shall See (1964) (as Jirina); The System (1964) (as Helga); Return from the Ashes (1965) (as Claudine, alongside Maximilian Schell, Ingrid Thulin and Samantha Eggar); and Barbarella (1968), a sexually charged science-fiction fantasy starring Jane Fonda, in which she had the minor uncredited role of a girl smoking a pipe.

[edit] John Paul Getty and the Swinging Sixties

Pol became the second wife of John Paul Getty (1932-2003) on 10 December 1966. She was married in a white mini-skirt, trimmed with mink ^[4]. The Gettys became part of "Swinging" London's fashionable scene, becoming friends with, among others, singers Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and his girl-friend Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull has recounted her apprehension, through "ingrained agoraphobia", about an invitation to spend five weeks with the Gettys in Morocco ("but for Mick this is an essential part of his life") and how, after splitting from Jagger, she took up with Talitha Getty's lover, Jean de Breteuil, a French aristocrat who allegedly supplied drugs to rock stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors ^[5].

Print designer Celia Birtwell, who married designer Ossie Clark, recalled Talitha Getty as one of a number of "beautiful people" who crossed her threshold in the late 1960s:

Jimi Hendrix [the rock guitarist] lived with Ossie and me for a while. I quite liked Jimi but at 2am it was a bit much. We’d get transient people coming by, especially girls who wanted to hook up with Jimi. I met a lot of exciting, beautiful people, such as Talitha Getty. I was quite a homebody, whereas Ossie was a party person, so when he got bored with people he would palm them off on me, and send them round to tea. ^[6]

John Paul Getty, who has been described as "a swinging playboy who drove fast cars, drank heavily, experimented with drugs and squired raunchy starlets" ^[7], eschewed the family business, Getty Oil, during this period, much to the chagrin of his father. However, in later years, he became a major philanthropist and (as a US citizen) received an honorary British knighthood in 1986. His luxury yacht, built in 1927 and renovated in 1994, was the MY Talitha G.

In 1968 the Gettys had a son, Tara Gabriel Gramophone Galaxy, who became a noted ecological conservationist in Africa.

[edit] Marrakesh

Talitha Getty is probably best remembered for an iconic photograph [1] taken on a roof-top in Marrakesh, Morocco in January 1969 by Patrick Lichfield (1939-2005) ^[8]. With her hooded husband in the background, this image (now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London) portrayed her in a slightly anxious, crouching pose, wearing a multi-coloured kaftan, white harem pants and white and cream boots. It seemed stylishly to typify the hippie fashion of the time and became a model over the years for what, more recently, has been referred to variously as "hippie chic", "boho-chic" and even "Talitha Getty chic" ^[9]. Although, in her lifetime, Talitha Getty, who was only thirty when she died, was not much known to a wider public, fashion gurus of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have often written of her and Marrakesh (a major destination for hippies in the late 1960s ^[10], as illustrated by the song, Marrakesh Express (1969) by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) as vitually synonymous. The very mention of her name has been taken to suggest a particular "look" and style.

[edit] "Beautiful and damned"

The couturier Yves Saint Laurent was part of the same "in crowd" as Talitha Getty and she was an early muse of his. In a widely quoted paean of 1984 to the "youthfulness" of the 1960s, he invoked the title of a 1922 novel by F Scott Fitzgerald ^[11] to describe the Gettys as

lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakesh, beautiful and damned and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future.

Another friend and leading fashion designer, Diane von Fürstenberg, recalled Talitha Getty dancing under the stars ^[12]. One of von Fürstenberg's granddaughters, born in 1999, was named Talitha ^[13].

[edit] Death

Talitha Getty died of a heroin overdose in Rome, Italy on July 14, 1971. She died within the same twelve month period as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, other cultural icons of the 1960s, and four months before Edie Sedgwick.

His wife's death marked the end of John Paul Getty's period of hedonism and its circumstances initially drove him to ground in England. He remained reclusive for several years, being described by the critic Kenneth Tynan as the "Hermit Millionaire" ^[14]. His rehabilitation was assisted by a growing passion for cricket, which was nurtured by, among others, Mick Jagger and a former England captain and future MCC President, Gubby Allen, whom he met in the London Clinic during a long period of illness ^[15].

[edit] Note on images

For someone who has acquired iconic status in the world of fashion and as an examplar of the 1960s, images of Talitha Getty have been rather elusive. The Marrakesh photograph was published in Lichfield's 1981 collection of beautiful women ^[16] and has re-appeared from time to time in newspapers and magazines: for example, with the Daily Telegraph's obituary of John Paul Getty on 18 April 2003, in French Vogue in February 2004 ^[17] and in a Times feature on November 2, 2006 marking the ninetieth anniversary of Vogue. In the latter, the newspaper's fashion editor, Lisa Armstrong, referred to the image as "typif[ying] the luxe bohemian look". The website of the National Portrait Gallery refers to the technical features of the photograph and its source, but alongside a blank space. A version of Armstrong's article appeared in the December 2006 edition of Vogue itself, illustrated by a slightly hazy photograph of Getty in a different bohemian outfit on London's Albert Bridge.

There are some black and white photographs of the Gettys, held by Getty images, some of which can be found on the Internet, and some group shots taken off-screen during the filming of Barbarella. A naked shot of her in Barbarella, partly covered by a long flowing headdress, appeared in Sunday Times on September 16, 2007, alongside revelations about her relationship with Rudolf Nureyev. The latter piece was headed, "Talitha, the 'hippie de luxe' Nureyev wanted to marry". A photograph of Getty with her infant son, taken in June 1968, was reproduced in the Times Magazine on November 11, 2006.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Talitha Getty. This site reproduces the Marrakesh photograph, as well as a number of black and white images. It is accompanied by text from Wikipedia.