Art in the ashes / Terror on Terra
Today: Diana Moskovitz, investigations editor, writer, and co-owner of Defector; writer and editor Maria Bustillos; and Joe MacLeod, Creative Director at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.
Issue No. 390
The Getty Villa Remains
Diana Moskovitz
HYDRANYM No. 14
The Editors
PODCAST! ALIEN: EARTH, Episode 3: Metamorphosis
Joe MacLeod and Maria Bustillos
The Getty Villa Remains
by Diana Moskovitz
On a perfect L.A. day recently—warm but not hot, barely a cloud in the cobalt blue sky, cool breeze rolling in off the Pacific Ocean, the kind of day that makes you understand why Whitey Bulger hid out in Santa Monica—I made my way across town with a friend to the Palisades to see the Getty Villa, the luxurious museum built in the early 1970s by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, then the richest man in the world, to house his burgeoning collection of antiquities. The museum’s design was based on the Villa dei Papiri, a Roman villa in Herculaneum buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It’s situated on one of the loveliest hillsides in Los Angeles, with a fine view of the water.
I’d be lying if I didn’t disclose that I chuckled a little at learning why the Villa had been built; some of us rent storage lockers, Getty built a storage villa.
Getty was a second-generation oilman whose fortune came largely through a gamble he made on Saudi Arabian oil in the late 1940’s. At the time of his death in 1976 his estate was estimated at more than $2 billion. Yet his cruelty and stinginess were legendary. The stories are endless: he had a pay phone put in his house for the use of guests, made his young wife Teddy repay him for singing lessons, and, most famously, he initially refused to pay the ransom for his kidnapped grandson, J. Paul Getty III, who’d been pinched in Italy by Calabrian bandits. The kidnapers responded by cutting off their captive’s ear and a lock of his hair and sending them to a Roman newspaper. (Getty eventually agreed to shell out $2.2 million—the maximum tax-deductible amount—loaned his son the rest of the $3 million ransom at 4 percent interest, and at last his grandson, minus one ear, was returned.)
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