In April of 1999, three sisters walked into the Los Angeles County Superior Court, not in person but on paper, asking a judge for something that would change their names forever. Nicolette was fourteen, Kendall was ten, and Alexandra was eight. They were represented by Stephen Bergon of Latham and Watkins, one of the most prestigious law firms in the city, and their request was simple: they wanted to be Getty. The first page of the petition was remarkable for what it left out.

There was no street, no house number, no address for the girls or for their mother anywhere in the file. Instead, the petition asked the court to seal the addresses of everyone involved, and it gave the reason in a single blunt paragraph about unusual security issues. This was a family, the lawyers explained, with a history of threats against it and a violent kidnapping. To back that up, they attached a precedent and a clipping.

The precedent came from the probate of William Randolph Hearst’s estate, where the same kind of secrecy had been upheld on appeal for a family whose daughter, Patty, had been abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. The clipping was an old article from Time magazine under the headline “Minus One Ear. ” In 1973, kidnappers in Italy had seized the sixteen-year-old grandson of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, held him for more than five months, and the family had paid only after the boy’s severed right ear arrived at a newspaper.

Twenty-six years later, that ear was the argument for keeping three girls’ front doors out of a public record. The secrecy had a limit, and the girls had walked up to it on purpose. California does not change a child’s surname quietly. It takes a petition, a hearing before a judge, and a notice printed in a newspaper so that anyone with an objection has the chance to come forward.

Their lawyer described the procedure as “pretty perfunctory. ” Petitions like this one were almost always granted unless the applicant was trying to escape creditors or someone affected by the change objected. The one man whose objection would have mattered never raised it. The girls’ father had been notified of the petition and he did not contest it.

Their mother stayed out of the story almost entirely. Through Bergon, the public learned only that she was single, that she lived in the Los Angeles area, that she was a full-time mother rather than a socialite, and that privacy was a concern. About her background, he would say nothing. About the girls, he was more open.

As he framed it, they had reached an age where they could understand their situation, and the decision to take their father’s name was theirs. Then he gave the sentence he would quote again and again. “They know and love their dad,” Bergon told reporters, “and wanted to bear his name. ” In his telling, that wish had outweighed the risk of being exposed.

For four months, the file sat in the courthouse waiting for someone to read the names. Then, in the third week of August, the San Jose Mercury News had the story, and by Saturday morning, the San Francisco Chronicle had its own. The father was Gordon Peter Getty, sixty-five years old, the son of J. Paul Getty, a composer of operas, and by the count Forbes had published the year before, the 82nd richest person in the United States.

He was not even in California, because the Saturday before, he and his wife had set off on a cruise in the Mediterranean aboard a yacht belonging to their friend Ken Rainin. A lawyer for the family trust told reporters Gordon would be back in about a week. From New York, a family spokesman released a statement in his name. The statement was short.

It named the three girls, Nicolette, Kendall, and Alexandra, as his children. And it named their mother, Cynthia Beck, as the woman who loved them with him. The children’s needs would come first with a minimum of disruption. The last line was a thank you.

The Getty family had been fully supportive throughout this situation, and for that, he was very grateful. The family he was thanking had begun with a dare in a bar in North Beach thirty-five years earlier. Ann Gilbert had been born far from anything like it. She arrived on the 11th of March, 1941, in Gustine, a farm town in Merced County, where her father, William, managed a dairy.

When she was twelve, the family moved about 150 miles north to a peach and walnut farm outside Wheatland in the Sacramento Valley. She grew up driving tractors. After high school, she worked as a secretary and then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied anthropology and biology. Part of the time, she worked behind the cosmetics counter at the Joseph Magnin department store near Union Square in San Francisco.

One of the women she met there was Barbara Newsom. Barbara had a brother named Bill, and Bill had a friend from high school, a polite young man of 6 feet 5 who wanted to write music. In 1964, the four of them ended up at the same bar in North Beach. As the story goes, Gordon informed Bill that he was too short to be dating Ann, introduced himself, and challenged her to match him drink for drink.

She accepted. That Christmas day, they eloped to Las Vegas. Ann was twenty-three and Gordon was thirty-one. And the name she took that day came with a father-in-law who was already a legend for his money and his marriages.

Gordon had been born in Los Angeles in December of 1933, the fourth son of J. Paul Getty, a man who married five times and whom Fortune would one day call “a crashing failure as a husband. ” His parents separated soon after he was born. He grew up mostly with his mother in Pacific Heights and saw his father once or twice a year around the holidays.

He went to Saint Ignatius, then to the University of San Francisco, then to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And in 1959, he published his first composition, a chorus for voices alone set to a poem by Tennyson. His father had wanted an oil man, and in that same year, Gordon was running Getty operations in the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait when an employee committed a minor offense and fled the country. Gordon was tried and convicted in his place.

J. Paul got his son out and concluded that he had handled the whole thing badly. On Gordon’s twenty-ninth birthday, the old man removed him as a future trustee of the family trust and gave “immaturity” as the reason. Gordon spent years trying to win the place back.

In 1965, the year after the wedding in Las Vegas, he wrote his father a letter built around two kinds of horses. “Put a plow horse and a cow pony in each other’s jobs,” he argued, “and each would look lazy and unstable. You are a cow pony, father,” he wrote, “and it seems to me I am, too. ” He even sued his father over the dividends held in the trust and lost.

By Gordon’s own later account, the old man had also told him something that did not sound like J. Paul Getty at all. “Gordon, if I’m ever remembered by the future, it will be as your father. ” Years afterward, a lawyer asked Gordon whether that had been sarcasm.

Gordon insisted it was the comment of a doting father. His father’s letters, on the whole, dwelt on his flaws. At home, the marriage filled up quickly. Four sons arrived between 1965 and 1970: Peter, Andrew, John, and William.

The friend from the bar stayed close. Bill Newsom went on to manage money for the family trust, and in 1973, when the kidnappers in Italy finally got paid, he was one of the men who helped deliver the ransom. The clipping in that Los Angeles file twenty-six years later described a crime his own best friend had helped bring to an end. The kidnapping year changed the succession, too.

In 1973, J. Paul’s eldest son, George, died. And the old man, by then eighty-one, had to choose new trustees. He chose three: a bank, one of his lawyers in New York, and the son he had once removed for immaturity.

J. Paul Getty died in 1976. The bank backed out. Six years later, the lawyer died.

And the son who had been judged unfit to hold the keys was holding all of them. The trust had been set up in 1934 by J. Paul and his mother, Sarah Catherine Getty, with a little over $3 million in shares of the family companies. And it came with one unusual lock: no trustee, except J.

Paul himself, was allowed to sell its holdings, unless a sale was needed to save the trust from substantial loss. By the spring of 1982, that lock and roughly 40 percent of Getty Oil belonged to a man that Fortune described as a “6-foot-5 personification of the absent-minded professor. ” Getty Oil’s directors thought he was harmless, and he became the great dissenter of their board, often the only vote against. Insiders liked to tell how, during one board meeting, Gordon had closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and drifted off, and later explained that he had been running through opera scores.

Under oath, he denied it. That was altogether possible around a dinner table, he said, but out of the question at a board meeting. He was not harmless. He believed Getty Oil’s shares were worth far less than its oil, and he started asking how to close that gap.

The first advisor to knock on his door, in the middle of 1982, was Sid Bass of Fort Worth, whose wife, Ann, would soon be sharing the New York society pages with Ann. Within eighteen months, the company was in play. In January of 1984, Gordon agreed to a buyout with Pennzoil and went back to his suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York to celebrate with champagne. Ann’s niece then persuaded a judge to freeze the deal.

Texaco came in with a higher bid, and Gordon, invoking the substantial loss clause, signed with Texaco instead. The final price was about $10 billion. Even then, the money could not move freely. While the litigation went on, a Los Angeles judge ordered the entire $4 billion in the trust kept in Treasury bills and cash.

The capital gains taxes alone came to about $800 million for Washington and $300 million for California. And the lawyers were already sketching a plan that would cut the old trust into six new ones, one of them for Gordon’s branch of the family. Forbes named him the richest man in America. The trust he controlled was worth about $4.

1 billion, roughly $10 billion in today’s money. In that one year, his own income from it came to about $110 million, plus a trustee’s fee of about $20 million more. He did not do it entirely alone. Ann helped advise her husband on the sale of Getty Oil.

Her obituary, decades later, would list that advice among the accomplishments of a woman who refused to be filed as a socialite. The sale did not end the war inside the family. Several of Gordon’s nieces wanted him removed as trustee, and they asked a court to make him pay more than a billion dollars in taxes out of his own pocket. In September and October of 1984, their lawyers questioned him under oath.

The deposition ran for three weeks and filled 1,978 pages. It was never entered into the court record, but a reporter for Fortune read a copy, and the magazine compared the whole family fight to Dallas, Dynasty, and the endless inheritance case in Dickens. The lawyers kept returning to his father. They wanted to prove that J.

Paul could never have wanted Gordon in sole control. So they went through the quarrels between the two men one by one. Somewhere in those pages, Gordon gave his own explanation of how his father had seen him. “I think he envied me my serene family life,” he said.

“Knock on wood. ”

The same Fortune article sketched that marriage from the outside. Ann was forty-three by then, a tall redhead who, in the magazine’s phrase, “sometimes spent as if she meant to get through the whole fortune. ” Gordon’s tastes ran to hamburgers.

She loved moving between San Francisco and New York society, while he preferred to stay home with an opera. A scene from his newest work, a cantata about Shakespeare’s Falstaff called Plump Jack, was due to be performed by the San Francisco Symphony that spring. Then came a story from Le Cirque, the Manhattan restaurant where the powerful went to be seen. One evening Gordon arrived, tweedy and unrecognized, and a waiter led the richest man in America to a table by the kitchen.

His wife was already waiting for him at the best table in the house. The magazine told it as a joke about a rich man who did not look rich. Set next to what came after, it showed two people already arriving at the same place by different doors. Fifteen years after that deposition, the newspapers would count backward from the ages of three girls and arrive at a date.

By their reckoning, the household in Los Angeles began around 1985. 1985 was the year Ann Getty went east. She and the British publisher George Weidenfeld formed a company to buy a publishing house in New York, and she named the company after the town where she had driven tractors. It was called The Wheatland Corporation, and the house it bought was Grove Press, which had published Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, and had fought the censors in court over Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer.

It was famous, and it was nearly broke. Ann paid $2 million for it, about $6 million today, and then put in roughly $15 million more. Its founder, Barney Rosset, was pushed out, and Grove was folded into a new company, Grove Weidenfeld, with Ann Getty as its president. New York did not come easily to her.

In The New York Times that first year, she called the city “frightening” and herself “apprehensive, anxious, and not that confident. ” Four years later, with a publishing company in her name, she had found a cooler way to put it. “I’m a publisher because it’s a cover for my indulgence,” she said. She loved to read all day, but she came from Puritan farm stock and had been raised to believe you worked all day, so she had made reading her work.

She was invited onto the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, among others. New York society paired her with Ann Bass, Sid’s wife, another newcomer from Texas, and called them “the two Anns. ” The Gettys’ private Boeing 727, which friends called the Jetty, had a bath and two bedrooms. In 1987, she and Gordon set up a foundation together, mainly to support classical music around San Francisco.

Its name was the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, her name first. Gordon’s world stayed at the piano. When he decided he needed more room to compose, he bought the house next door to their yellow Italianate mansion on Broadway in Pacific Heights and had the two joined. The opening was a black-tie dinner for eighty guests with the soprano Jessye Norman providing the music.

In time, they bought the house beyond that one, too. Put the two dates side by side. In 1985, Ann Getty incorporated a company under the name of her own hometown in New York. In the same year, by the count the newspapers would print in 1999, a second household began some 300 miles south of the house on Broadway.

Across the next six years or so, three girls were born into it, and they grew up with their mother’s last name. Their lawyer would later describe a father who had been present throughout their childhood, “a real parent and child relationship,” and a mother who cared for them well with their father’s help. By the ’90s, Ann had found a third life, far from both cities. As a fellow of the Leakey Foundation, she joined fieldwork in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash, walking the ground in search of exposed fossils, part of a team that excavated remains of one of humanity’s earliest known relatives.

“It was very hot,” she remembered later, “and a tent was the biggest luxury they had. ” She often stayed in the field for a month at a time. By then, friends said, the couple regularly spent months apart, and Ann divided her time between New York and London, where the publishing business was, and the dig sites in East Africa. Gordon stayed in San Francisco, writing operas.

In 1995, she founded an interior design firm under her own name. That same year, his advisers moved his trust out of California and into Nevada. The arrangement had witnesses, and they were not in Los Angeles. A good part of San Francisco’s upper circle already knew.

By the end of the ’90s, the Gettys were the first couple of San Francisco society. Plácido Domingo stayed with them when he sang in town. For the premiere of Gordon’s opera Plump Jack, they served champagne to 470 guests at a block party on Broadway. For his birthday in the late ’90s, the family threw a party themed on India, with the men in turbans and mirrored earrings, and the women in saris.

In February of 1999, a Democratic fundraiser at the house, attended by President Clinton, raised a million dollars. Gordon was also the only member of his family on the board of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, which had opened to enormous crowds in December of 1997. Gordon had a reputation as the most stable and sensible of J. Paul Getty’s surviving children.

And part of the city knew about the other house. When the story finally broke, one source told the Los Angeles Times that the “B team” probably had not known, but an awful lot of the “A team” had, and that the Gettys were so high profile, no one wanted to be cut off from their very interesting parties. The Chronicle put the circle’s knowledge at about nine years. The Times put it at upward of a decade.

A local columnist joked that if San Francisco high society had been hired to guard the country’s nuclear secrets, none of them would ever have reached the Chinese. In 1998, People magazine profiled Gordon as a man who wrote opera, gave millions to science and the arts, and loved fine Bordeaux, the San Francisco 49ers, and his wife of thirty-three years. When did that wife know? Here the accounts differ, and they differ within nine days.

On the 21st of August, the Mercury sources said the Los Angeles family had only recently come to the attention of Gordon’s family in San Francisco, and that they had learned of it when an outsider discovered the double life and exposed it to them. Those sources would not describe how anyone had reacted. The Chronicle, on the same day, reported that Ann and her four sons had known for some time. On the 30th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ann had known about her husband’s secret life for two years.

There is no honest way to choose between those versions. Every one of them came from people close to the family who would not be named, and each one served somebody. A wife who had only just found out was a wife wronged. A wife who had known for two years was a partner in an arrangement.

What all three accounts share is the only part that can be checked: Ann knew before the public did. That makes the spring of 1999 hard to ignore. In April, the mansion on Broadway hosted a wedding. The actor Don Johnson married Kelly Fleischer, a teacher at the Montessori preschool the Gettys ran inside their own house for a granddaughter, with about sixteen children enrolled.

San Francisco’s mayor, Willie Brown, conducted the ceremony. In the same month, 300 miles south, a petition from three girls with a different last name was filed in a Los Angeles courthouse. Somewhere in those months, the answer was prepared. The statement that went out in August had been drawn up well in advance by a family that feared the news would become public.

And it went out through a spokesman in New York while the couple was at sea. That is the part the headlines left out. The papers ran it as an exposure. The Chronicle called it “Getty’s secret double life.

” In London, the Guardian reported that the revelation had stunned high society. The picture underneath was the oldest one in the business: a husband caught, a city shocked, a wife reading the worst in the morning paper. The dates undercut most of that picture. The city’s upper circle had known for years.

The family had its words ready before any reporter called. And the only person who could have described what Ann felt, that August, left no public comment on it at all in any record that has surfaced. The surprise was real for the readers, and there is no evidence it was real for anyone inside the story. The convenient version had something in it for everyone.

It let society say it had been shocked. It let the press call a decade-old fact a scoop. And it handed Ann the one part no one would ever question: the victim. The record hands her a harder one, because before the country knew the girls’ names, the people closest to the marriage had already decided how the news would land.

When the yacht came back from the Mediterranean, the first voice to speak for Ann Getty did not belong to her. It belonged to her lawyer. William Coblentz had been Ann’s attorney for years. In the week the story broke, he gave reporters a philosophy instead of a denial.

In the Chronicle, his position was that nothing in this world stays secret, that the family had known something would come out sooner or later, and that you face the facts and tell the truth. The next week, he offered the Los Angeles Times a phrase for the marriage itself. “The couple had an understanding between them,” Coblentz said, “and she was handling this with courage and dignity. ”

Friends of the family used a longer version.

They described an unspoken arrangement between husband and wife. Another source told the Times that Ann and Gordon had been living very different lives, different enough to have separate families. A third gave the city’s verdict: people had known and had very gallantly and elegantly kept it out of the press. In that version, there was no scorn for Gordon and no “poor, poor, pitiful Ann.

” Gordon, for his part, had always called his wife the same thing: his best friend. Go back to the deposition room in 1984, where a man under oath described a serene family life and touched wood. Fifteen years later, the family he had called serene included three daughters in another city. And the word his wife’s lawyer chose for the marriage was “understanding.

” The first word came from a husband explaining his father. The second from a lawyer speaking for a wife. Neither came from Ann. Sources said she had no plans to divorce.

And no divorce filing by either of them ever surfaced. What the papers did record was money. The Los Angeles family, according to sources, was in intense legal negotiations over future inheritance. The girls’ lawyer drew his own line around the mother: she was aware of the petition, but it was the daughters’ cause, not hers.

The hearing on the petition had been set for late August. It was pushed back to the 18th of November. In the end, the court granted it. And Nicolette, Kendall, and Alexandra Beck became Nicolette, Kendall, and Alexandra Getty.

The exact date of the order remains unknown. It never made the papers. Ann Getty, meanwhile, went on doing what she had been doing, only now in full view and on her own terms. Her design firm, Ann Getty and Associates, took on houses for clients in San Francisco and beyond.

In 2003, she launched a furniture line built on copies of antique pieces she had bought for her own rooms, starting with a set of six Louis XV chairs. In 2006, she announced a gift of $25 million to Berkeley, the university she had attended while working a cosmetics counter. In 2012, she published a book on her interiors. She also refused the label that came with the house.

That same year, Harper’s Bazaar heard her call it “rather amusing to be described as a socialite. ” It was no longer her focus, and she went out about once a month, barely, to keep up her so-called status. In the interviews of her later years that are on record, about books, fossils, and furniture, Los Angeles never comes up. The girls had their father’s name now.

What came with the name stayed out of sight for more than two decades, until a quarrel between two of them and a former advisor produced a court file of its own. The advisor was a wealth manager in New York who started working for two of the sisters in 2013. In 2022, after she had been fired, the relationship ended in lawsuits running in both directions. She accused the family and its advisors of retaliating against her.

Kendall accused her of pressuring her into promising a large payout. The administrator of the family’s trusts denied the advisor’s allegations. Everything on both sides was an allegation made by people in a fight with each other. But in describing the work, the filings and the reporting around them laid out something the family had never discussed in public: how Gordon Getty had provided for his daughters in Los Angeles.

He had done it with a trust. Look at the name on it: Pleiades, after a group of sisters in Greek myth who, as the New Yorker put it, had dalliances with the gods of Olympus and were turned into stars in the night sky. When exactly the trust was created is unclear. The magazine’s reporting in 2023 also described how the trust worked.

It was arranged to grow for as long as Gordon lived. At his death, the sisters would take control. When it opens, by the magazine’s estimate, each of them can expect at least $300 million. The trust’s paperwork lived far from either family.

On paper, it was administered from a small office complex, a block from the airport in Reno, Nevada, a state that had marketed itself as the Delaware of the West, and the office shared a parking lot with a private investigator and a hobby shop that sold electric trains. Gordon himself is its principal beneficiary for as long as he lives. Each quarter, the same filing says, the sisters met with their father about how it was run. The name they had grown up with was Beck.

The name they asked a judge for was Getty. The name on the money set aside for them was a myth about sisters and gods. No explanation of that choice appears anywhere in the public record. One of the sisters, Kendall, a multimedia artist, found her own phrase for the position.

On Instagram, she described herself as a “bastard princess. ” Her sister, Nicolette, speaking to the New Yorker, said she expected to pay about $30 million in taxes on her share, and that she believed the tax burden on wealthy families like her own should be higher. Their father, asked once about the name itself, gave an answer that reached print. In 2016, a documentary about his music opened in New York, and People magazine asked him about the Getty name and the curse so many writers had pinned to it.

His answer was that the name was neither a curse nor a blessing. It was an influence. The same article described him as a composer living in San Francisco with his wife, and as the father of seven children. He was no longer counting only four.

One of the seven had died the year before. In March of 2015, Andrew, the second of Ann’s four sons, was found dead at his home in the Hollywood Hills. In March of 2016, a magazine profiled Ann at home on Broadway. It counted her marriage at fifty-one years.

And when the conversation turned to her favorite things, she chose to talk about a painting. The painting was a pastel by Mary Cassatt, made around 1878, of a young woman in a theater box. Its first owner had been Paul Gauguin, who kept it until he died. In a house that held a lamp commissioned by Napoleon for his mother, and chinoiserie panels made for a king of Poland, this was the piece she singled out.

“I love the setting for the pastel,” Ann told Haute Living, “and the gentle depiction of the subject. ” Then she described the young woman in the box. “She looks as if she is caught up in the performance, but you can’t really read her exact expression. You don’t know what she is thinking.

” In the same interview, she called herself something no society column ever had: “actually quite shy, and most at ease in the company of scientists. ”

Go back to the courthouse in Los Angeles in the spring of 1999. Three sisters ask a judge for their father’s surname. Their father does not object.

And in San Francisco, a statement that will answer for everyone is already being prepared, approved, a family source said, “by the husband and by the wife. ”

Ann stayed married to Gordon. But the record never shows a wife deciding, in one terrible week in August, whether to forgive. By the time the file was found, the marriage had long since been divided into two cities, two calendars, and two households held together by a fortune, a foundation, and a shared name.

Staying did not mean surviving the news. It meant keeping her name at the front of an arrangement that had absorbed the news years before it was printed. Four and a half years after that interview, on the 14th of September, 2020, Ann Getty had a heart attack during a family dinner at home in San Francisco, and died in the hospital at seventy-nine. Because of the pandemic, the family held only a small private memorial.

Nancy Pelosi and the city’s mayor released statements of tribute. The obituaries listed her survivors as her husband, her three sons, and her grandchildren. Her family said she had given her life to anthropology, publishing, interior design, and early childhood development. Sixty-seven days after Ann’s death, her son John Gilbert Getty died.

A spokesman for his father announced it with a heavy heart. The next year, their granddaughter Ivy, who had gone to the preschool inside the house on Broadway, was married at San Francisco City Hall with Nancy Pelosi officiating. Two years after Ann’s death, the contents of the house on Broadway went to Christie’s in New York. Across ten sales in October of 2022, more than 1,500 lots of paintings, furniture, porcelain, jewelry, and textiles were offered, and every one of them sold for a total above $150 million.

The proceeds went to a new foundation, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation for the Arts. The collection went under the hammer with the same two names, in the same order as the foundation of 1987. A few hours before the first evening sale, Christie’s announced that one of its stars, A View of the Grand Canal by Canaletto, had been sold privately to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The museum’s director said that many people who had visited the Getty home over the years had lusted after it.

Christie’s would later rank the collection among the three greatest of its kind the house had ever sold, alongside those of Yves Saint Laurent and of Peggy and David Rockefeller. The Cassatt led that first evening sale on the 20th of October. Christie’s had estimated it at three to five million dollars. It sold for about seven and a half million, a record for the artist, to the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan.

Much of what sold had filled the rooms that Gordon had joined together for his piano, and the rooms Ann had furnished in the style she later sold to her clients. The girls had needed a judge to give them the name Getty. Ann had carried it since a Christmas Day in Las Vegas. And when she started her first company, she named it after a farm town.

On the paper that outlived her, her first name came before his. Gordon Getty is ninety-two now, the father of seven, and his music is still being performed. The woman in the Cassatt went to Japan.

Her face still gives nothing away.