Talitha Getty
Talitha Dina Pol was born on October 18, 1940, in Mojokerto, Java, in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, the daughter of Dutch artists Willem Jilts Pol and Arnoldine Adriana “Adine” Mees Pol. Art belonged to Talitha’s world from the beginning. Her mother had studied at the academies of art in Rotterdam and The Hague and worked in drawing, painting, lithography, and woodcut, while her father pursued his own career as a painter.
Talitha’s earliest childhood was overtaken by the Second World War. Following the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942, she and her mother were interned while her father was held separately as a prisoner of war. Willem survived the war, and the family was reunited after the Japanese surrender and eventually returned to the Netherlands. The years of occupation and confinement formed the background of Talitha’s childhood, although many details of her own experience remain undocumented.
The family’s return to Europe brought another loss. Adine died at The Hague on July 11, 1948, when Talitha was only seven years old. She was buried at the Dorpskerk cemetery in Wassenaar. Willem later moved with his daughter to England and, in 1952, married Elizabeth Ann “Poppet” John, daughter of the celebrated Welsh painter Augustus John and his longtime companion and model Dorelia McNeill. Through this second marriage Talitha entered another intensely artistic household, although Poppet John was her stepmother, not her biological mother as has sometimes been incorrectly reported.
As a young woman Talitha chose acting for herself. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, completing its acting diploma in 1960. Contemporary photographs from the following year already identified the twenty-year-old Talitha Pol as a Dutch actress and model. In August 1961 she was photographed at the Players’ Theatre in London, and the following month she appeared among the guests at a Christian Dior couture presentation at Longleat. Long before the Getty name became attached to hers, Talitha was beginning to make her own way through the overlapping worlds of London theatre, film, fashion, and society.
In December 1961 she was among the young actresses screen-tested at Pinewood Studios for the role of Miss Taro in Dr. No, the first James Bond film. The part ultimately went to Zena Marshall, but the test placed Talitha among the actresses being seriously considered for the new production. Her own film career began to develop soon afterward. In Village of Daughters, released in 1962, she played Gioia Spartaco, and a contemporary review in Kine Weekly included her among the actresses whose performances were favorably noted.
During the next several years she continued working in British and international film productions. Her appearances included The Long Ships, filmed partly in Yugoslavia; The System; The Comedy Man; and the Edgar Wallace mystery We Shall See, in which she played the named role of Jirina. In 1965 she appeared as Claudine in Return from the Ashes, a drama starring Ingrid Thulin, Maximilian Schell, Samantha Eggar, and Herbert Lom. Photographs taken in October of that year identified her specifically as actress Talitha Pol in connection with the film. Her screen career was never extensive, but neither was it simply an incidental pastime: she was a professionally trained actress who worked steadily enough during the first half of the 1960s to establish an identity of her own before her marriage.
It was during this period that Talitha met John Paul Getty Jr., son of American oil magnate J. Paul Getty. They met in London in 1965 at the home of Claus von Bülow and became a couple. Paul was already living in Europe and had previously been married to Abigail “Gail” Harris, with whom he had four children.
Talitha and Paul were married in Rome on December 10, 1966. Contemporary photographs show the newly married couple leaving the civil ceremony at the Campidoglio, with Talitha wearing a short white wedding dress trimmed with fur.
The marriage brought her into one of the wealthiest and most closely watched families in the world, but the years that followed also placed Talitha at the center of a remarkable international circle of artists, designers, actors, musicians, photographers, and writers.
Their only child together, Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone Getty, was born in Rome on May 30, 1968. Contemporary newspaper reports announced the unusually named infant within days of his birth and recorded his birth weight as five pounds, six ounces. Talitha was photographed with the newborn Tara in Rome only weeks later, preserving a quieter image of her life during a period more often remembered for parties and fashion.
By then Talitha’s appearance and instinctive way of dressing had begun attracting serious attention from the fashion press. Her style did not originate with a single famous photograph. Vogue was photographing her by 1968, and she had already moved easily between couture and the unconventional clothing and jewelry she encountered during her travels. Rather than dressing exclusively in expensive European fashion, she combined garments, textiles, jewelry, and accessories from different cultures in ways that became distinctly her own.
Morocco became particularly important to that visual identity. Talitha and Paul were part of the international artistic circle that gathered in Marrakech during the late 1960s, among them designer Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Bergé later remembered Talitha as an unusually free personality whose approach to dress was striking precisely because wealth did not confine her to conventional couture.
In 1969 photographer Patrick Lichfield made the series of photographs that would become inseparable from Talitha’s name. On a rooftop in Marrakech, Talitha and Paul were photographed in flowing, richly textured clothing against the city beyond them. Published by Vogue in January 1970, the images came to embody the bohemian glamour associated with the period. Talitha, seated with an ease that made the elaborate clothes appear entirely natural, became one of the enduring visual symbols of late-1960s style.
Yet the Marrakech photographs were not the creation of Talitha Getty as a fashion figure; they were the culmination of an identity already visible for years. Vogue Paris devoted a feature to her in its April 1970 issue under the title “Forte et fragile. Mrs. Paul Getty junior,” photographed by Jeanloup Sieff. Vogue continued photographing her into 1971.
In an April 1971 series by Maurice Hogenboom, Talitha appeared on a Roman rooftop wearing a Lebanese dress with an umbrella from Bali and a belt from Iran; in Marrakech she was photographed in a Berber wedding dress and Moroccan copper crown; and in a Dutch fishing village she wore a traditional embroidered white cap. Taken together, the photographs reveal something more interesting than a woman following fashion: Talitha assembled influences from the many places through which she moved and made them recognizably her own.
The glittering surface of the Gettys’ life concealed increasingly serious difficulties. Both Talitha and Paul became involved with drugs, and their marriage deteriorated as the decade ended. They eventually spent increasing amounts of time apart, with Talitha and Tara living in London while Paul remained principally in Rome. By 1971 divorce was being discussed.
In July of that year Talitha returned alone to Rome, where Paul was living, to discuss their marriage and the possibility of reconciliation. Contemporary reports published immediately afterward stated that she had arrived shortly before the weekend and that the couple had been discussing whether their marriage could continue.
On Sunday, July 11, 1971, Talitha became critically ill in Rome and was taken to a clinic, where efforts to revive her were unsuccessful. She was thirty years old. Initial reports attributed her death to an apparent overdose of sleeping tablets or tranquilizers, while her physician cautioned that heart failure had not yet been excluded and an autopsy was being conducted. In the months that followed, an Italian narcotics investigation reopened questions surrounding her death, and later forensic reporting linked it to heroin. Contemporary accounts therefore changed as the investigation developed, and the precise circumstances became the subject of considerable speculation. What is certain is that Talitha died in Rome on July 11, 1971, after a life that had lasted only thirty years.
Her father immediately traveled from London to Rome. Talitha’s burial service was held in Wassenaar in the Netherlands on July 20, attended by Paul, Willem, and other family and friends. She was laid to rest at the Dorpskerk cemetery in Plot 572, the same grave in which her mother, Adine, had been buried twenty-three years earlier.
There is a poignant coincidence in their dates that requires no embellishment: Arnoldine Adriana Mees Pol died on July 11, 1948. Her daughter Talitha died on July 11, 1971, exactly twenty-three years later. Their names now appear together on the same stone in Wassenaar.
Talitha’s early death inevitably became part of the mythology surrounding the final years of the 1960s, and over time the circumstances of her death sometimes threatened to overshadow the woman who had lived before it. Her life was considerably larger than its ending. She had survived wartime internment as a child and the early loss of her mother, trained seriously for the stage, worked as an actress under her own name, became a wife and mother, traveled widely, and developed a visual language that fashion photographers and designers recognized during her lifetime.
The Patrick Lichfield photographs in Marrakech remain the images most often associated with her, but they capture only one moment in a much longer story. Before the rooftop there was Talitha Pol: the Dutch girl born in Java, the daughter of two artists, the RADA student, the young actress at the Players’ Theatre, the woman testing for a Bond film and working on British film sets. After it there was still Talitha: a mother, a woman navigating a troubled marriage, and a continuing subject for Vogue whose distinctive style remained alive and evolving only months before her death.
More than half a century later, the clothes, photographs, and famous Getty name continue to attract attention. What endures beneath them is Talitha herself—a woman whose brief life crossed continents, war, art, theatre, cinema, motherhood, fashion, and one of the most turbulent cultural periods of the twentieth century. In Wassenaar, far from the rooftops of Marrakech and the public world in which she became famous, she rests beside the mother she lost when she was seven years old.
Wonderful!! I’ve always been interested in her because of those fantastic photos. I didn’t know about her early life and the loss of her mother. That’s trauma enough, but marriage to a Getty was probably the worst choice she made.