Talitha: The Ghost of Fashion

"I knew the youthfulness of the sixties: Talitha and Paul Getty 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." - Yves Saint Laurent

"One memorable New Year's Eve [author John Hopkins] went with friends to Marrakesh to meet the Beatles: 'Don't know what they lace the majoun with down here. Last night Paul and Talitha Getty threw a New Year's Eve party at their palace in the medina. Ira, Joe and I went to meet the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were there, flat on their backs. They couldn't get off the floor let alone talk. I've never seen so many people out of control.'" - Tangier Diaries

Season after season, as soon as even a baby's breath of bohemia or the oft-dreaded words, "rich hippie," leave the mouths of stylists and editors, the name Talitha Getty inevitably enters the conversation. The second wife of John Paul Getty II, she died of an overdose in 1971 and although her now-legendary style is a mainstay in the fashion lexicon, it's difficult to find  anything in her own words, or even an objective account of her life, in the public sphere.

She's the kind of person made famous by photographs and gossip columns in life, and in death, by enduring style and the conceptual fantasy of carefree pleasure in exotic places her name invokes. NARS has named a lipgloss after her, a "deep rose" called "Talitha." She appears in the same publications over and over, sometimes years apart, sometimes more frequently (see: W, Dec 01; W, April 05; Village Voice, May 03,  Village Voice, Sep 05)... usually to describe a particular kind of dress or the slightly louche sort of background sketch that lets you know, It was the Sixties! Things were ever so slightly magical/fabulous/berserk, e.g. the casual mention of her Marrakesh scene in a profile of YSL that appeared in The New Yorker.

And then, of course, lest you think that a hard-partying life of endless street drugs in a city with a low cost of living is rather pedestrian as things go, there is her yacht and namesake, the Talitha G ("Running costs: Pounds 252,000 a week to charter. Value Pounds 128 million.")

Romanticized nearly beyond compare, Getty's role as an eternal muse in the world of fashion seems as ephemeral as the caftans and glamorous mien that shadowed her decadent lifestyle. A recent issue of Tatler profiled her son, Tara Galaxy Gramophone Getty (b. 1968), who lives, with his family in Africa, the relatively normal life of an heir to an unimaginable fortune.

The snapshots of young Tara and his mother were the first I'd ever seen of her that didn't appear make her appear to be the shallow shorthand for the end of a lawless era, or one of the few whose seemingly ubiquitous status in the public eye only makes them more mysterious.

(Scanned from Tatler, February 2006):

Comments

[Jayme]

Check out this site full of Talitha Getty photos!

[Micki Williams]

I million thanx for your Talitha article & lovely, rare fotos. I am manager of a group, "Cultish Celebs & Icons," a private archival site w/ Icons from from Marilyn to Courtney Love, a large Stones section, including Anita Pallenberg & Marianne Faithful, among many others. If you are interested in checking us out, please contact me at Mygothicka@aol.com. Hope to see you there.

[CindyC]

I too was always interested in hearing more about Talitha, she is mentioned quite a bit in connection with the Rolling Stones, but haven't had much luck. I did find out that she has an uncredited cameo in Barbarella. She is the girl smoking the water pipe that has a man floating in it. I'm sorry, but I can't remember where I read that, but seeing these photos makes me realize that it is her.

Thanks for posting these.

[Jayme]

Click the URL for my Talitha Getty site, full of fantastic photographs.
http://talithagetty.tripod.com