Is The Atlantic magazine trying to send its readers a not so secret message? Although it's profile of California Governor Gavin Newsom by Helen Lewis on Tuesday, "The Front-Runner," was generally positive it was also chock full of Gettys as in the oil fortune family of patriarch J. Paul Getty.
In fact the name "Getty" was so important in Newsom's personal, business, and political background that it appeared a total of 22 times in the article (including the Getty Images attributions of five of the photos used). Although a Republican presidential hopeful so attached to a family whose fortune was based on oil would be savaged for the connection, with Newsom it seems to be okay because of the magic (D) by his name.
The Getty name first comes up when Lewis apparently irritates Newsom by mentioning it in a discussion about his memoir due to be published in February:
Authors write a memoir when there’s something about themselves that they want other people to understand. So what don’t outsiders get about Gavin Newsom?
“The memoir opens up with that question,” Newsom tells me—the question of whether “I’ve become a caricature of myself and contributed to it, as it relates to this perception of privilege and wealth that has dogged me—and at times infuriated, not just frustrated, me.” I run the caricature as I understand it past him: His father was a friend of the Gettys, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest and most well-connected families, and Newsom started his first business with Getty money. “Yeah, you got it, sums it up,” he says. So how is it wrong? “Well, you gotta read the book,” he deadpans.
Ouch! Newsom sure seems touchy when the Getty family name is mentioned. Although the Getty family was essential to the rise in business and politics of Newsom, he expects people to believe he somehow came up the hard way in an alternate version of his life which hardly adheres to reality.
Newsom’s version is that he grew up between two worlds. His parents divorced when he was still a young child. His late father, Bill, was close to the oil heirs Gordon Getty and John Paul Getty Jr.—so close, in fact, that Bill became an administrator of the Getty family trust and helped deliver the ransom for the kidnapped John Paul Getty III. With the Gettys, Gavin went on safari and watched polar bears in Canada. But at home with his mother, Tessa, life was Wonder bread and mac and cheese.
So eating mac and cheese at home with mom somehow shelters Newsom from being accused of a privileged upbringing among the Gettys?
Right out of college, "young Gavin" founded what became a vineyard empire using a "relatively modest investment from a few members of the Getty family."
After college, the young Gavin and his childhood friend Billy Getty founded a wine store called PlumpJack, which has since grown into a restaurant-and-vineyard empire. (The word is a nickname for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and the title of an opera by Gordon Getty.) “I grew a business with a relatively modest investment from a few members of the Getty family,” Newsom says now. “There were 13 investors.” Then he adds: “I’m not naive as well; I don’t run away from a recognition of the advantages and the privileges that I did enjoy.”
Throughout the rest of the profile, the oil family Getty name keeps popping up over and over again:
For Newsom, the fallout from the gay weddings was nothing compared with the implosion of his first marriage. Newsom had married Guilfoyle, an assistant district attorney turned television host, in 2001. Her “something borrowed” was one of Ann Getty’s tiaras, and the reception for their 600 guests was held at the Getty mansion.
...Guilfoyle took a somewhat unorthodox approach to life as a political consort. Filling in for Newsom at a gay awards dinner, she told the crowd: “I know that many of you wanted to see my husband, and some of you had questions out there. Is he hot? Yeah. Is he hung? Yeah.” The couple infamously posed together, sprawled on a rug, for the September 2004 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, in a story headlined “The New Kennedys.” The rug, and surrounding house, belonged to Ann Getty, and the magazine’s fashion editor at the time was Jacqui Getty, who was then Ann’s daughter-in-law. Asked about Newsom’s ambitions, Guilfoyle replied: “Do I think he could be president of the United States? Absolutely. I’d gladly vote for him.”
...By the late 2010s, Newsom had a personal reason for supporting the #MeToo movement; his second wife is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, an outspoken feminist and a sexual-assault survivor. She was involved with two films about gender roles in America: Miss Representation, about girls, in 2011, and The Mask You Live In, which tackled men’s issues, in 2015. She testified that she’d been raped by Harvey Weinstein in 2005. (The jury could not reach a verdict in her case.) In keeping with her feminist principles, Siebel Newsom is not California’s first lady, but its “first partner.”
Their relationship started with a blind date at a fundraising gala at the Yerba Buena Center in 2006, and within 18 months, Newsom had proposed with a Tiffany diamond ring. They married that summer in a field in Montana, and Stanlee Gatti did the decor. The bride rode to the aisle sidesaddle on a black stallion; the groom wore a tan suit; the theme was “Out of Africa.” The ceremony was conducted by Carol Simone, a “modern day mystic” whose website describes her as a medium, an astrologer, and a tarot practitioner. Bill Newsom arrived in Gordon Getty’s plane.
...He argues that his record of pro-LGBTQ bills gives him the ability to look for compromises; he also has a trans godson, 33-year-old Nats Getty. “I have someone I love dearly who went through a transition,” he says.
It will be interesting to see what the reaction of Democrats will be to Newsom's extremely tight connections to the Getty family if, as expected, he runs for president in 2028.
Strangely, although Newsom's response to the disastrous Pacific Palisades fire last year has been widely criticized, it got only a brief mention in passing when Lewis brought up his podcast: "(Newsom paused Politickin’ during the Palisades Fire crisis, but plans to revive it later this year.)"
