Ann Getty

Ann Getty, a savvy former California farm girl who married into one of the world’s wealthiest families and transformed herself into a globe-trotting publisher, author, interior designer and philanthropist, died on Monday September 14 2020 in San Francisco. She was 79. Her husband, Gordon Getty, said in a statement that she had a heart attack during a family dinner at home and died in a hospital. Already ensconced as a San Francisco cultural benefactor, Mrs. Getty in the mid-1980s leapfrogged the continent to New York, where she was wooed to the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and New York University and sped to the epicenter of the loftiest social circles. But despite extravagances like a private Boeing 727 (nicknamed Jetty) equipped with a bath and two bedrooms, she resisted being marginalized as a socialite. In 1985, she and George Weidenfeld, the eminent British publisher, created the Wheatland Corporation (named for her hometown in California) and bought Grove Press, which was famous for its audacity but which was ailing financially. Under Barney Rosset, Grove had published avant-garde authors like Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco and successfully challenged bans on books that had been deemed obscene, among them “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” by D.H. Lawrence, and “Tropic of Cancer,” by Henry Miller. Mrs. Getty bought Grove for $2 million, invested some $15 million more and, after ousting Mr. Rosset, folded the companies together as Grove Weidenfeld. In 1993, Grove became an imprint of Atlantic Monthly Press. Ann Gilbert was born on March 11, 1941, in Gustine, Calif., in Merced County, to William Gilbert, who managed a dairy, and Anna (Bekedam) Gilbert. When she was 12, the family moved about 150 miles north to a peach and walnut farm in Wheatland, in the Central Valley. After high school, she worked as a secretary and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in anthropology and biology. She was working part time at the cosmetics counter at the Joseph Magnin department store near Union Square in San Francisco when she met Barbara Newsom, whose brother Bill was a high school chum of Gordon Getty’s. (Bill Newsom was the father of Gavin Newsom, who, with the Gettys’ financial support, would become mayor of San Francisco and governor of California.) In addition to her husband, Mrs. Getty is survived by their three sons, Peter, John and William, and six grandchildren. Another son, Andrew, died in 2015. Gordon Getty is a son of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who died in 1976 and was once the world’s richest man. In 1984, after Getty Oil was sold to Texaco for $10 billion and Gordon Getty became sole trustee of the family’s $4.1 billion trust (the equivalent of about $10.3 billion today), Forbes magazine anointed him the richest man in America. The trust was later split into six separate trusts; Forbes says Mr. Getty — who is a classical composer as well as an investor and philanthropist — is now worth about $2.1 billion.