At the age of 10, the model and oil heiress Ivy Getty formed a pop group called the Sparklets. Each member was named after a different scent of Secret Sparkle, the tween-age deodorant. They’d sing at her grandmother’s parties on a portable karaoke machine. Then life happened, and Getty let the microphone gather dust.
But across the years, Getty would write thousands of lyrics in her Notes app, and record little hums of melodies for potential songs. “I don’t really have a diary. I just wrote songs,” she says. Her father, John Gilbert Getty—grandson of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty—was an amateur rock musician. Her grandfather Gordon Getty, the philanthropist and sometime classical composer, was once the richest man in America.
Then, one day last year, a friend who worked in the music industry was staying with Getty in New York and lost Getty’s keys. She asked if she could make it up to her in some way. “And I was like, ‘Could you help me get a studio session to do a pop song?’”
The result was a recording slot with the musician Madison Love—best known for writing songs for Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, Pink, and Demi Lovato—and the creation of “One Hit Wonder,” a summery, synth-filled pop track which was released at the end of July. She was so nervous on the release day that she didn’t leave her apartment, she says. “But I guess the important thing is I’m super-happy with it. I was so worried I was going to be embarrassed or hated on for it.” (So far she has accrued just under 3,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.)
The release follows a turbulent few years for Getty. In 2020, her father died from complications of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 52. Getty described him after his death as the “coolest man to ever land on this planet.”
“Could you help me get a studio session to do a pop song?”
The following year she married photographer Tobias Engel at an opulent three-day celebration in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, culminating at the Getty-family mansion made legendary by Ivy’s philanthropist grandmother, Ann.
Day one saw Earth, Wind & Fire play, and Mark Ronson hired to D.J. a Barbarella-inspired party. Day two saw a picnic lunch at the Log Cabin at the Presidio national park, high above the city, accompanied by vitamin-infused IV drips available for those feeling unaccountably under the weather.
The wedding itself began with a hotel pajama party, before moving to San Francisco City Hall—decked out in velvet drapes and thousands of pink orchids—for a ceremony in which the bride and bridesmaids wore dresses designed by John Galliano, Nancy Pelosi officiated, Anya Taylor-Joy was the maid of honor, and the rings were delivered by Getty’s rescue Chihuahua mix, Blue. The unfortunate epilogue was a separation from Engel, earlier this year.
The single, then, marks something of a new chapter in Getty’s life. The lyrics to the song seem to follow a swannish high-society figure, cutting across Manhattan in white lace. (“And she never lights her own cigarettes.”) I ask Getty whether she had ever considered releasing the song under a pseudonym, so it didn’t carry the freighted associations of her family dynasty.
Actually, she says, it was important to use her real name. The song is, she says, “a very spruced-up version of what people probably already think Ivy Getty is.” But it’s also a representation of the Ivy Getty she was growing up—the Sparklet version, the grandmother’s karaoke version—who perhaps got lost along the way.
“I think that Ivy—I mean, myself—I don’t ever show my creative projects,” she says. “And so it’s helpful to at least have something out there so people can see there’s more to me than meets the eye. That sounds awful. I hate that phrase. But it’s true.”
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London
