SAN FRANCISCO — This is a story about open secrets and closed mouths, about a man with a double life and the singular city that has sheltered him.
Gordon Getty, an heir to the Getty Oil fortune and an international patron of the arts, has acknowledged that he has two families: wife Ann and four grown sons here, and three young daughters living quietly in the Los Angeles area with their mother, Cynthia Beck.
Quietly, that is, until now. The girls have filed a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court to legally change their last name from their obscure mother's to their wealthy and world-famous father's. They are also, sources say, in "intense legal negotiations" over the issue of future inheritances.
And while the Getty revelations have provided fuel for the Bay Area talk show circuit--with called-in commentary hotly debating the honor of his actions--not everyone here in America's most tolerant city was surprised at the news that Gordon Getty is helping to raise daughters some 300 miles away.
Ann Getty has known about her husband's secret life for two years. The local society elite--the upper crust, the A Team--is believed to have known for upward of a decade and kept quiet, a fact that led one local columnist to crack: "If only San Francisco's high society had been hired to guard the United States' nuclear weapons secrets, the ones that have steadily leaked out to the Chinese."
"I don't think the B Team knew, but I think an awful lot of the A Team knew. It was a well-known fact," said one source familiar with the family. "Without a doubt, Ann and Gordon are the No. 1 social people in San Francisco. . . . The Gettys are so high profile in San Francisco that people do not want to get in their bad ways and be cut off from their very interesting parties."
Very interesting indeed. When the billionaire music lover--son of oilman J. Paul Getty, one of the world's wealthiest men when he died in 1976--decided he needed more room to compose on his grand piano, he bought the house next door to his Pacific Heights mansion and had the two abodes merged. The christening: a black-tie affair for 80 with entertainment by opera diva Jessye Norman.
Pal Placido Domingo stays with the Gettys when he's in town. Don Johnson was married in April in the Gettys' pale yellow, Italian Renaissance-style home. President Clinton attended a million-dollar Democratic fund-raiser at the lavish, 1914 mansion, complete with music room and ballroom. To celebrate the premiere of Gordon's opera, "Plumpjack," the couple served Veuve Cliquot to 470 at a block party on Broadway.
