In January 1969, on a rooftop in Marrakech, the photographer Patrick Lichfield raised his camera. The woman in his viewfinder was twenty-eight years old, wearing a layered caftan from a souk in the Medina, standing beside her husband, the son of the richest man in the world. The photograph took less than a minute. It appeared in American Vogue a year later with a caption of eleven words that did no justice to the revolution it contained.
Two years before that morning, Yves Saint Laurent had stood on the same rooftop, and by his own account, his vision completely changed. She would be dead within two and a half years, at the age of thirty. She was Talitha Getty, born in Java to Dutch artists, survivor of a Japanese internment camp before she was four, orphaned at eight, married into the Getty oil dynasty, and dead of an overdose in Rome before her thirty-first birthday. Talitha Dina Pol was born on October 18, 1940, in Mojokerto, East Java, a small industrial city in what was then the Dutch East Indies.
Her father, Willem Jiltz Pol, was a painter of some reputation. Her mother, Arnoldine Adriana Maas, called Adine, was frail and intellectually ambitious. The world they inhabited was a strange social formation, a small Dutch elite governing tens of millions of Indonesians across an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands. The colonial families lived in tropical bungalows with white-coated servants, painting and embroidering in gardens full of frangipani, while their husbands managed the rubber, sugar, and oil enterprises that made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest colonial powers in Europe.
Into this gilded precarious world, Talitha arrived. The sensory abundance of Java, the drenching heat, the volcanic light, the riot of spice and color, the layered textile traditions of an island where pattern and dye had been treated as serious matters for centuries, would become her first visual language. She learned to see before she could speak. She was fourteen months old when the war reached Java.
On March 8, 1942, the Dutch colonial government surrendered the Netherlands East Indies to Imperial Japan, ending three centuries of Dutch rule in a single afternoon. Dutch civilian men were separated from their families within weeks and herded into prisoner of war camps. In the months that followed, women and children were rounded up as well. On Java alone, approximately twenty-nine thousand Western civilians, the majority of them Dutch, a significant proportion of them children, were imprisoned in around eighty camps.
Conditions were catastrophic. Initially managed by Japanese civilian staff, the camps became progressively more brutal when the Imperial Japanese Army assumed direct control in 1944. Food rations were cut to near starvation levels, sewage systems broke down, and dysentery, malaria, typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis swept through overcrowded barracks. Around one in eight civilian internees died.
Talitha, separated from her father and interned alongside her mother, lived in these conditions from approximately the age of one to the age of four. She was too young to form conscious memories of the camp, but the body keeps its own records. During the internment, her mother contracted a severe pulmonary infection, almost certainly tuberculosis, and never fully recovered. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, but liberation brought a different ordeal.
Indonesia’s nationalist movement launched its independence revolution within weeks, and the Poles, like tens of thousands of other Europeans, had nowhere to go but back across the ocean. Willem and Adine separated in the chaos. Talitha and her mother relocated to Europe, first to England, then to The Hague. In 1948, when Talitha was eight, her mother died in The Hague at the age of forty, consumed by the disease she had contracted in a Javanese internment camp six years earlier.
The child who had survived a prisoner of war camp was motherless on a continent her mother had brought her to and could not deliver her through. The orphan went to live with her father, who had settled in London. Willem had remarried, and his new wife was Elizabeth Ann Pol, called Poppet, the elder daughter of Augustus John. The Augustus John connection placed Talitha, at the age of eight, in the most extraordinary artistic household in mid-century England.
Augustus John was far more than a successful British painter. He was a cultural institution, a charismatic, openly unconventional figure who cultivated a wild gypsy persona, wore flamboyant clothes, and maintained multiple households simultaneously. The sensibility that ran through Poppet and into Talitha, a preference for ethnic, handmade, romantically unconventional dress, an ease with color and fabric, an instinctive rejection of fashionable convention, was the same sensibility expressed across three generations. When Talitha Getty stood on a Marrakech rooftop in a layered caftan in 1969, she was standing in a line of women that ran directly back to Dorelia McNeill, Augustus John’s mistress and model, standing in her long skirts in his Chelsea garden sixty years before.
Talitha decided in her late teens that she would become an actress. She enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Bloomsbury, Britain’s most prestigious drama school, where the training demanded a minimum of thirty-six contact hours each week. Her film career produced a creditable run of screen appearances across the early 1960s, including Village of Daughters in 1962, The System directed by Michael Winner in 1964, and her most significant role, Return from the Ashes in 1965, a dark psychological thriller set in Paris in the aftermath of the Holocaust. One reviewer described her at the time as the exquisite Talitha Pol, then twenty-five.
Her final screen appearance was an uncredited cameo in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella in 1968. She had, by then, left acting behind almost entirely. The social world she had married into had become its own consuming performance. Before any of that, a different man had pursued her.
Rudolf Nureyev had defected from the Soviet Union in June 1961, making the dancer simultaneously the world’s greatest performing artist and one of its most romantic fugitives. He met Talitha at a party in 1965, and the chemistry, according to his biographer, was extraordinary. Nureyev told several friends he had never felt so erotically stirred by a woman and expressed his wish to marry her. A dinner party was arranged at the Chelsea home of Claus von Bülow, who at the time worked as a personal assistant to the oil magnate J.
Paul Getty. Von Bülow placed Nureyev and Talitha next to each other at table, but Nureyev was unable to attend. In his absence, von Bülow offered the empty seat to a replacement guest: John Paul Getty Jr. , the artistic, restless, fabulously wealthy son of the richest man in the world.
It was at this Chelsea dinner, at the seat Nureyev had vacated, that Talitha Pol met the man she would marry. Von Bülow would emerge two decades later as the defendant in one of the most sensational attempted murder trials of the twentieth century, accused of injecting his socialite wife with insulin to claim her fortune. John Paul Getty Jr. , born in 1932, was in almost every conceivable way his father’s opposite.
Sensitive, artistic, and temperamentally allergic to the oil business, he had abandoned his position running Getty Oil Italia in Rome, and his father had cut him off as a result. He had been married previously, with four children, including the boy who would later become infamous, John Paul Getty III. The marriage had ended in divorce. The couple married on December 10, 1966, at Rome’s Campidoglio, the magnificent civic hall atop the Capitoline Hill designed by Michelangelo.
Paul wore a dark suit and sunglasses. Talitha wore an abbreviated white dress trimmed with white mink, a fusion of old money splendor and avant-garde 1960s fashion that was entirely her own. She was twenty-six, he was thirty-four. Their circle constituted a who’s who of 1960s counterculture elite: Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were close friends, along with Michael Rainey, founder of the King’s Road boutique Hung On You, and his wife Jane Ormsby Gore.
During the honeymoon, the couple visited Marrakech and fell in love with it instantly. In 1968, they purchased a nineteenth-century Moorish palace in the Medina, the Palais Zahia, which translates literally as Palace of the Joy of Living. They renamed it the Pleasure Palace. The transformation was one of the great interior design projects of the twentieth century, and it was almost entirely Talitha’s vision.
She worked alongside the American designer Bill Willis, sourcing handwoven textiles from the souks, Ottoman ceramics, silk embroideries, carved cedar furniture, and hammered copper lanterns. Willis later said Talitha had a natural genius for space and color he had never encountered in any client before or since. The parties she hosted there became the stuff of legend. Magicians performed in torch-lit courtyards, local musicians played until dawn, and opium and hashish circulated as freely as the wine.
Keith Richards later recalled that Paul and Talitha Getty had the best and finest opium. For a period of perhaps two years, the public version of the Pleasure Palace was identical to the private one. The man who would change Talitha’s life again climbed the steps to the terrace in early 1967. Yves Saint Laurent, already at thirty the most celebrated French couturier of his generation, summarized the experience in seven words: When I knew Talitha Getty, my vision completely changed.
He saw the layering of Eastern and Western aesthetics, the ease with which ethnic craft was worn alongside Parisian couture, the absolute conviction of a woman who dressed entirely by her own aesthetic law. Morocco taught me color, he later said, and the teacher in the private seminar of the Pleasure Palace terrace had been Talitha. He later evoked the scene with the melancholy of a man who understood in retrospect what he had witnessed: Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity. By the late 1960s, both Talitha and Paul had become dependent on heroin.
Without professional purpose or structure, Paul sank deeper into addiction and infidelity, conducting an ongoing affair with a woman he would eventually marry in 1994. In July 1968, amid the escalating excess, Talitha gave birth to a son, given a name unprecedented in the history of the Getty dynasty: Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone Getty. Among Talitha’s entanglements during these years, none was more darkly significant than her affair with Count Jean de Breteuil, a scion of one of France’s most distinguished aristocratic families who, by his mid-teens, had found his purpose as a full-time career supplying heroin and hashish to the rock and roll establishment of two continents. His principal clients included Keith Richards and Jim Morrison, whose girlfriend Pamela Courson had been introduced to heroin by de Breteuil himself.
On July 3, 1971, Courson called de Breteuil to say that Morrison was not breathing. According to one account, de Breteuil had supplied the heroin that killed Morrison. Thirteen days later, Talitha Getty was dead in Rome. By 1969, the marriage was functionally finished.
Talitha wished to pursue treatment for her heroin and alcohol addiction and return to England. Paul showed no commitment to sobriety, and they agreed to a separation. By early 1970, Talitha had achieved sobriety. She was living actively in London, raising her young son, and beginning to reconstitute herself as an independent presence.
In the spring of 1971, she formally asked Paul for a divorce. Paul refused, telling her he still loved her and she should give their marriage one more chance. Her lawyers advised that divorce proceedings would move more smoothly under Italian law if Talitha could demonstrate a sincere attempt at reconciliation. The provision of Italian family law would, with terrible irony, deliver her directly into the circumstances of her death.
On July 9, 1971, two years into her sobriety, Talitha flew from London to Rome. She arrived at Paul’s apartment on the Piazza d’Aracoeli, a small square at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, where Michelangelo’s civic hall had hosted their wedding five years before. They spent the night together. What happened in the hours that followed has never been definitively established.
On the evening of July 11, 1971, Talitha Getty was found dead in the Getty apartment. She was thirty years old. The official death certificate listed cardiac arrest, with high levels of alcohol and barbiturates found in her blood. An autopsy conducted eight months later found traces of heroin in her system, evidence that was medically ambiguous because heroin metabolites can persist in body tissues for many months.
The Italian press speculated that Paul’s continued heroin use had caused Talitha to relapse during her two days in the apartment, and the Italian Wikipedia article on de Breteuil implicates him directly in providing the lethal dose. None of these theories was ever formally proven or officially accepted. In January 1973, Italian authorities announced a formal inquest. In February, Paul Getty Jr.
departed Italy for Britain and never set foot in the country again. The inquest reached no definitive conclusions. Paul Jr. became a near total recluse for much of the following decade, taking solace in heroin and rum.
During this period, his son Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the ’Ndrangheta crime organization in Rome in July 1973. The elder Getty Sr. famously refused to pay the ransom for months, and the kidnappers cut off the teenager’s right ear and mailed it, with a lock of his hair, to a Roman newspaper. Paul III descended into addiction, suffered a devastating stroke in 1981 that left him a quadriplegic and virtually blind, and died in 2011.
By the early 1980s, something genuine had begun to happen to Paul Getty Jr. He had converted to Christianity and began to redirect his vast inherited wealth toward the country he had adopted, donating fifty million pounds to the National Gallery, fifty million to the British Film Institute, with smaller gifts for St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Imperial War Museum. In 1986, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to charity and the arts.
In 1993, he named his new luxury yacht Talitha G, the name of the woman he had loved and lost. He married Victoria Holdsworth in 1994, the same woman with whom he had been conducting an affair during his marriage to Talitha. He died on April 17, 2003, at the age of seventy. Their son Tara grew into a man of purpose, becoming deeply involved in conservation work in Southern Africa and founding the Tara Getty Foundation.
The Lichfield photograph now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Every season, the fashion houses return to the rooftop in Marrakech. Saint Laurent’s borrowing of Fitzgerald’s phrase, Beautiful and Damned, was the most precise epitaph she would ever receive. She had been born in a Japanese internment camp, orphaned at eight, photographed by Lichfield at twenty-eight, and dead in Rome at thirty.
Some people are simply too vivid to disappear.