GROWING UP GETTY

A contemporary biography of one of America’s most famous families.

In a captivating narrative, Reginato, writer at large for Vanity Fair and a contributor to Sotheby’s magazine, brings readers up to date on the state of the Getty family. The author begins by exploring the life of the family patriarch, J. Paul Getty (1892-1976), who made the bulk of his wealth from investments in the oil industry. Through his extensive research, which includes family letters, diary entries, and recent interviews with family members and friends, Reginato unflinchingly scrutinizes Getty’s five failed marriages and other negative aspects of the family history, including drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, sex scandals, extramarital affairs, and a kidnapping by “a group of Calabrian mafiosi,” who “snatched sixteen-year-old Paul III, Getty’s eldest grandson,” in 1973. All of these elements, notes the author, have led the Getty family to be called the “cursed dynasty,” though “it would be inaccurate to describe the whole of such a large clan as cursed.” To that end, Reginato examines the lives of the many thriving members of the family and the positive contributions they have made to the world. While many readers are familiar with “the family’s marquee ventures, including Conservation Corporation Africa, Getty Images, and PlumpJack,” the author also chronicles the family’s successes in the fields of art, music, fashion, interior design, social activism, and environmental conservation. The author also shows how, despite the extensive media attention the family has received for decades, many members prefer to remain out of the public eye. In fact, from the moment Getty was named the richest man in the U.S., he claimed that it was “a distinction I’m not particularly interested in” and later revealed that the honor effectively ended his time as “an ordinary private citizen and made me, for better or worse, a public figure, or at least a person about whom the public curiosity was whetted.”

A fresh and engaging look at a complex and elusive American family.