Talitha Getty (née Talitha Dina Pol) (October 18, 1940 - July 14, 1971) was an actress, of Dutch parents,
who, largely posthumously, became a style icon of the late 1960s.
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 Bohemian 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 with her mother
to Britain.
Early beauty
Pol studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art 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."
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.
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 and Anita Pallenberg, in which she had the minor uncredited
role of a girl smoking a pipe.
John Paul Getty and the Swinging Sixties
On 10 December 1966 Pol became the second wife of John Paul Getty (1932-2003), son of the oil tycoon Paul Getty (1892-1976).
She and her husband were part of "Swinging" London's fashionable scene, becoming friends with, among others, singers Mick
Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and his girlfriend 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 Bretieul, a French aristocrat
who allegedly supplied drugs to rock stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors.
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.
John Paul Getty, who has been described as "a swinging playboy who drove fast cars, drank heavily, experimented with drugs
and squired raunchy starlets", 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.
Marrakesh
Talitha Getty is probably best remembered for an iconic photograph taken on a roof-top in Marrakesh,
Morocco in January 1969 by Patrick Lichfield. 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". 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, as illustrated by the song, Marrakesh Express (1969) by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) as virtually
synonymous. The very mention of her name has been taken to suggest a particular "look" and style.
"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 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.
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, like
Getty herself an icon retrospectively.
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."
His rehabilitation was assisted by a growing passion for cricket, which was nurtured by, among others, Mick Jagger and a future
MCC President, Gubby Allen, whom he met in the London Clinic during a long period of illness.
