beautiful women

Early years

Talitha Pol was born in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), on 18 October 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 lover and muse, 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.

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.

Marriage to John Paul Getty

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 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 Bretieul, a French aristocrat who supplied drugs to rock stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors ^[1].

John Paul Getty, who has been described as "a swinging playboy who drove fast cars, drank heavily, experimented with drugs and squired raunchy starlets" ^[2], 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 (as she had become) is probably best remembered for an iconic photograph taken on a roof-top in Marrakesh, Morocco in January 1969 by Patrick Lichfield (1939-2005) ^[3]. 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" ^[4]. 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 vitually 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 14 July 1971. She died within the same twelve month period as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, other cultural icons of the 1960s.

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" ^[5]. 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 ^[6].

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 are very elusive. The Marrakesh photograph was published in Lichfield's 1981 collection of beautiful women ^[7] 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 and in French Vogue in February 2004 ^[8]. The website of the National Portrait Gallery refers to the technical features of the photograph and its source, but alongside a blank space [1]. There are some black and white photographs of the Gettys, held by Getty images, some of which can be found with extreme difficulty on the Internet, and some group shots taken off-screen during the filming of Barbarella.

Notes

Other references

• Fiammetta Rocco, The Independent, 18 April 2003
• Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2003