Ann Getty

Ann Getty (née Gilbert, March 11, 1941 – September 14, 2020) was an American philanthropist, publisher, paleoanthropologist and socialite. As a fellow of the Leakey Foundation, she worked on archeological digs in Turkey and Ethiopia and was part of a team that excavated Ardipithecus fossils. She provided funding for the National Museum of Ethiopia and redesigned the museum's garden. Getty served as president of Grove Press, a publishing house that she and Lord Weidenfeld purchased in 1985, and founded the interior design firm Ann Getty and Associates in 1995.

In 1964 she married billionaire Gordon Getty, the fourth son of oil baron J. Paul Getty, then the richest man in the world and had 4 children. As his wife she was a prominent society hostess in both New York City and San Francisco high society and a philanthropist for political, artistic, and scientific causes. She served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, New York University, and Wexner Center for the Arts, and was a patron of the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Getty ran fundraising events for Democratic political candidates including Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, and hosted cultural salons in her Pacific Heights mansion.

Early life Getty was born Ann Gilbert on March 11, 1941, in Gustine, California. Her parents, William Gilbert and Anna Bekedam Gilbert, managed a dairy farm.

Career and philanthropy Getty did fieldwork as a paleoanthropologist in the 1990s, participating in archeological digs with the Leakey Foundation, for which she served as a fellow, and Tim D. White in Great Rift Valley, Ethiopia, and in Turkey. In 1985, she and Sir George Weidenfeld created the Wheatland Corporation and purchased the publishing house Grove Press for $2 million. She was a political fundraiser for the Democratic Party, hosting fundraising events for Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris. In the early 1990s, they contributed $5 million toward the renovation and improvement of Berkeley's Valley Life Sciences Building, and in 2006, Berkeley announced that the couple had contributed $25 million to support teaching and research in the biomedical sciences. They also donated $8 million to the University of California in 2008.

In 1995, she founded Ann Getty & Associates, an interior design firm, and launched the Ann Getty House Collection in 2003.

Getty founded Playgroup, an accredited private Montessori preschool housed in her Pacific Heights home that was attended by her granddaughter, Ivy Getty. Her husband carried on an affair with Cynthia Beck, with whom he has three children. Getty's son, Andrew Rork Getty, died in 2015; followed by the death of her son, John Gilbert Getty, in November 2020.

Getty and her husband were known as international jet setters, and often traveled on their private Boeing 727, The Jetty, to attend music and art festivals around the world. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in California, the Getty family hosted a small, private memorial service. U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed both issued public statements regarding Getty's death.