Ann Getty is in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans. It's Sunday night on San Francisco's outer Broadway—a stretch known locally as the Gold Coast, thanks to such billionaire residents as the Gettys and neighbor Larry Ellison—and while Getty fills 40 small ramekins with soufflé batter, her large kitchen is quickly filling up with guests eager to partake of the town's newest social institution, Super Supper Sunday. The informal weekly get-togethers began more than a year ago, when Jo Schuman Silver, Getty's closest friend—the Gayle to her Oprah—was scheduled for minor foot surgery. Silver has been living at the Getty manse for some three years while Getty, a decorator, refurbishes her apartment, and when Silver was housebound the night before surgery, Getty called in a few intimates for a cozy meal of leftovers in the kitchen, Sunday being the cook's night off. Everyone had such fun that the next week they all did it again, and again the following week, until Getty decided she would put on an apron and whip up a hot meal for her guests.
“Jo's recovery time has been incredibly slow,” says Getty, making an almost imperceptibly dry joke of the fact that Silver's surgery is still the official excuse for Super Supper Sunday. “I wonder how long she can milk this.” Getty acknowledges that Super Supper Sunday has become such a popular event that now she's “condemned to cook for the rest of my life.” So except when she fires up the Jetty, as the family's private 727 is known, and leaves town for Paris (where she shops for her clients) or Hawaii (the Gold Coast's answer to Palm Beach) or New Zealand (where Getty and her wine-loving husband, Gordon, are looking for a vineyard), the woman universally recognized as the queen of San Francisco society dependably cooks every Sunday for whichever 40 or 50 friends happen to claim a seat around the long pine table in the middle of her kitchen.
What's odd is that the hostess, whose more formal gatherings have included such family friends as the King of Spain and the Prince of Wales, hardly bothers with the invitations at all.
“People come from all over,” Getty says. “It's quite diverse. I actually don't know everybody.” One night, she recalls, neither she nor her husband said hello to one bewildered stranger until a secretary pointed out that he was a Russian conductor and was, unbeknownst to anyone but the staff, installed in a guest room at Gordon's long-forgotten invitation. The man's arrival had gone unnoticed by his hosts in the comings and goings of the more than 30,000-square-foot house, which has, among other amenities, a recording studio for Gordon and a private Montessori nursery school for the Getty grandchildren and other lucky neighborhood tots.
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