Gavin Newsom was seven years old when he became cognizant of his other family. Just before Christmas, when his father, William “Bill” A. Newsom III, was taking him and his sister to their favorite toy store in San Francisco, Bill told them they had to pick someone up first. “Now, whatever you guys do or say, all I’m asking is that you don’t mention Paul’s missing ear,” Bill instructed the kids before a lanky, red-haired 17-year-old climbed into the car. The world’s most famous kidnapping victim, Paul Getty III, was Bill’s godson.
It took Gavin some time to figure out the complicated Getty family tree. It descends from oil baron J. Paul Getty; with his five wives, he had five sons, including Paul Jr. (Paul III’s father) and Gordon—two brothers whom Bill counted as his closest friends since childhood.
In turn, Gavin became like a son to Gordon and his wife, Ann—in addition to their boys, Peter, Andrew, John, and Billy. All five were tall and good-looking, so they were almost indistinguishable around town and when they jetted around the world in high style (at the time, Gordon was ranked the richest man in America). Arriving via gondola for a party at a 16th-century palazzo in Venice, they were once greeted by Jack Nicholson: “Well, well, if it isn’t the Getty boys.”
Gavin failed to correct Nicholson. But in his new book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, he attempts to reconcile “the split personality of my life.” After his parents divorced, his mother, Tessa, “juggled three jobs to keep a roof over our heads because our father was so inattentive to money,” he recounts.
“I never considered…that my deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book,” the California governor elaborates. “The Getty connection would cloud and distort many things. In the eyes of the press, I was forever the ‘golden boy’ whose daddy had prospered because of his ties to the Gettys.”
As I learned when researching for my 2022 book, Growing Up Getty: The Story of America’s Most Unconventional Dynasty, the Getty and Newsom families have been closely intertwined for four generations. For almost as long, these two clans have also been intimate friends (and relations) of the Pelosi family. Much more recently, Kamala Harris entered the fold. These family dynamics have shaped American politics.
