The Woolworth Heiress Who Married Seven Men and Died With $3,500 — The Tragic Life of Barbara Hutton D
On the morning of May 11th, 1979, a woman died in a hotel suite at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills. She was 66 years old. She weighed 80 lb. She had been in bed for most of the previous 2 years, surrounded by nurses who kept her sedated and sycophants who kept her company and half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola on the nightstand beside her.
A cousin visited occasionally and found her alert but frail. A sweet, lost quality, he said later. A sensitivity. She refused to get out of bed. Her name was Barbara Woolworth Hutton. She was the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, the man who had built the five-and-dime store empire that sold everything cheap to everyone and had become in the process one of the wealthiest men in America.
She had inherited, when her grandfather died and her mother died, and the estate was settled, a fortune that would be worth approximately $900 million in today’s terms. At the time of her death, she had $3,500 in the bank, not 3 million, not 300,000. $3,500. 10 people attended the funeral. Now, here is the question this video is going to answer.
She did not lose her fortune in a single catastrophe. There was no crash, no fraud, no moment of financial recklessness that produced an identifiable wound. The money went gradually, husband by husband, gesture by gesture, purchase by purchase through 30 years of trying to buy the one thing that money demonstrably cannot buy, and that she spent her entire adult life trying to find.
She married seven times. She owned palaces in Tangier and villas in Cuernavaca and a house in Paris and an apartment in London, and she traveled everywhere with 30 pieces of luggage and a small army of staff, and none of it produced the thing she was looking for. The question is what she was looking for, not in the shallow sense, not simply love, though she was looking for love, or security, though she wanted security, or the validation that a woman who was 5 years old when her mother died, and largely abandoned by her father afterward, was going to spend her life seeking in the faces of men who wanted something from her. The question is what it does to a person to grow up as the richest girl in America in the 1920s, to be called poor little rich girl by a press that followed her every movement, to be used systematically by men who understood that her need was as large as her fortune, and that the two together made her the most exploitable
woman of her generation. The question is what she was looking for, and why it was not there, and what the $3,500 means. Drop your city in the comments. And if these stories matter to you, the ones about the women the 20th century consumed, subscribe. Now, let us go back to New York in 1912 to the Woolworth Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, to the family that made a fortune selling things for a nickel, and to the child who inherited that fortune and never learned what to do with it. Frank Winfield Woolworth was born in 1852 in Rodman, New York, the son of a farmer. He started as a dry goods store clerk in Watertown, New York, earning $3.50 a week, which was the kind of beginning that the Gilded Age produced in the hundreds, and that only a few of those hundreds turned into anything significant. What turned Frank Woolworth’s beginning into something significant was a single insight so obvious that its power lay
entirely in the fact that nobody had acted on it. If you priced everything at 5 cents, people with almost nothing could still shop, and enough of them that the aggregate sales would be enormous. He opened his first 5-and-10-cent in Utica, New York in 1879. It failed. He opened another in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1879. It succeeded.
He opened more. By 1900, he had 200 stores. By 1911, he had over a thousand stores across the United States and Canada and Britain, generating revenues that made Woolworth and Co. one of the most profitable retail operations in the world. In 1913, he built the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, 60 stories.
At the time, the tallest building in the world, nicknamed the Cathedral of Commerce. President Woodrow Wilson lit it by pressing a button in the White House. Frank Woolworth paid for the entire construction in cash, 13 and a half million dollars counted out without a mortgage, because a man who had built his fortune from nickels and dimes understood the cost of borrowed money.
He died in 1919 with an estate of 65 million dollars, the equivalent of approximately a billion dollars today. He left it to his three daughters, Helena, Jessie, and Edna. Or rather, he left it to whatever grandchildren those daughters produced in trust, because Frank Woolworth had opinions about the judgement of his daughters, and his opinions were not favorable. He was right about Edna.
Edna Woolworth had married Franklin Laws Hutton, a stockbroker of charm and limited fidelity, against her father’s wishes. The marriage was, by the accounts of everyone who witnessed it, a performance of unhappiness sustained by social convention and the inertia of a woman who had nowhere to go that was better than where she was.
Barbara Woolworth Hutton was born on November 14th, 1912 in New York City, the only child of Edna and Franklin. She was four years old when her parents’ marriage effectively ended. She was five years old when her mother died. The manner of Edna’s death was noted and then officially obscured.
The death certificate said mastoiditis, an inner ear infection. The rumors, which were specific and persistent and have never been definitively resolved, said she took an overdose of poison in despair over her husband’s affairs. She was 33 years old. She died in a hotel room at the Savoy Plaza in New York City.
The 5-year-old girl who found her, or who was found by the hotel staff in the room where her mother lay, was Barbara Hutton. This is the wound that everything else in her life circles back to. The 5 and 10 cent store was not in the 1870s an obvious idea. Retail in 1870 worked on a system of negotiation.
Prices were not fixed. You came to the counter, you expressed interest in an item, the storekeeper assessed your apparent prosperity, and a price was named and negotiated from there. This was a system that favored experience and confidence and the commercial aggression that most people found exhausting.
It was also a system that was slow. Each transaction required its own small drama. And that relied on the customer having enough confidence in their own judgment to argue. Frank Woolworth’s innovation was not the low price. His innovation was the fixed price. The 5-cent table and the 10-cent table removed the negotiation entirely.
You saw the item, you saw the price. The price was the price. You picked it up, you paid for it, you left. The speed and simplicity of this transaction made it possible to serve far more customers in a day than the negotiated system allowed. And the customers who were served were not the confident prosperous customers who had always shopped with ease.
They were the people who had avoided shops because the negotiation made them feel inferior or ignorant or poor. Frank Woolworth’s 5 and 10 served everyone at the same price, with the same efficiency. And the everyone who had been excluded from comfortable retail came through his doors and spent their nickels and dimes in quantities that added up to something none of the negotiators had anticipated.
He was also a genius at display. The items he sold were arranged to be touched and examined. He understood that people bought what they handled, that the physical contact between a customer and an object was the most reliable precursor of a purchase, and he laid out his stores accordingly. Tables you could walk around, objects at hand height, nothing behind a counter that required a clerk’s permission to approach.
He sold soap and thread and buttons and kitchen tools and Christmas ornaments and American flags and hundreds of other small necessities and small pleasures to the working people of American cities, and he sold them so efficiently and in such volume that the nickels and dimes added up to something that would build the cathedral of commerce.
The Woolworth Building was his monument to what a nickel could do, 60 stories, neo-Gothic stone, terracotta, and gilded ornament. A lobby that the architectural critics called one of the finest interior spaces in New York City. Vaulted ceilings, mosaics, the kind of grandeur that said, “Here is a man who started with a borrowed hundred dollars and ended up changing how America shopped.
” He died in 1919 at 66, having lost his teeth to dental neglect and having refused until the end to see a dentist, which was a form of the same cost consciousness that had made him rich and that his granddaughter would invert absolutely. She would spend money on everything. He had spent money on almost nothing.
The fortune he left was built on the labor of hundreds of thousands of workers, paid almost nothing to stand behind the counters of his stores. The stores were in every city. The workers were not prosperous. The business model that worked for Woolworth’s shareholders was the business model that kept his employees at subsistence.
This was not unusual for the era, and Woolworth was not particularly cruel by the standards of his time. He was simply a man who understood, better than almost anyone in his generation, how to convert other people’s labor and other people’s nickels into his own millions. His granddaughter would convert those millions back into other people’s pockets.
The symmetry is not exact. Frank Woolworth built something. Barbara Hutton dismantled it. But both of them understood in their different ways that money was a means, rather than an end. He understood it was a means to power and monument. She understood it was a means to love. They were each mistaken about what the means would produce, but in different directions.
After Edna’s death, Franklin Hutton was effectively absent. He was physically present in the sense that he remained alive, and that Barbara saw him at intervals, and that he occasionally appeared in the newspaper photographs that documented the Hutton family’s movements. He was absent in the sense that a man who had preferred the company of other women to his wife’s company before his wife’s death did not become, upon her death, the attentive father that a traumatized 5-year-old required.
Barbara was passed between relatives. She spent time with her maternal aunt, who had married into the Post cereal family. She spent time with the Hutton family connections. She was eventually installed in a Park Avenue apartment with a governess and a staff and the loneliness of a wealthy child without parents, which is a loneliness that money makes worse rather than better, because the money brings people who are not there for you.
And the people who might be there for you do not come because the money intimidates them. She was educated privately. She was introduced to society at 18 in 1930 at a debutante ball that cost $60,000, a sum that in the depths of the Great Depression, when a quarter of American workers were unemployed and families were standing in bread lines across the country, produced a specific public fury that would follow Barbara Hutton for the rest of her life.
The newspapers called her the poor little rich girl. The phrase had been coined earlier by another writer about another wealthy child, but it attached itself to Barbara Hutton with the tenacity of labels that capture something true. She was rich, visibly and extravagantly rich. She was also by every account of the people who knew her in these years, deeply unhappy in the specific way of someone who has never learned that she is allowed to be unhappy, who has been told by the architecture of her life that unhappiness is a luxury she cannot afford because she has everything. She had everything. She had nothing that mattered to her. She turned 18 in 1930 and came into a portion of her grandfather’s fortune. She turned 21 in 1933 and came into the rest. The trust that Frank Woolworth had established for his grandchildren, the trust that had been generating returns through the 1920s market boom, the trust that had been managed by the men Frank had chosen to manage it.
That trust delivered on Barbara’s 21st birthday approximately $42 million. $42 million in 1933, the bottom of the depression. She was already married. The debutante ball of December 21st, 1930 is the event in Barbara Hutton’s life that the public records most precisely because it is the event that first made her a target.
She was 18 years old. Her father, Franklin Hutton, organized the ball at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City. The cost was $60,000. The year was 1930, 14 months after the market crash that had begun the Great Depression in a city where one in four workers was unemployed, where breadlines stretched around blocks in lower Manhattan, where men who had held middle-class jobs the previous year were sleeping in doorways and selling apples on street corners.
$60,000. The newspapers had the number within days. The $60,000 appeared in headlines across the country, in editorials in cities where the breadlines were longest, in the letters columns of papers whose readers had lost their savings in the crash. The number was indefensible. The timing was indefensible.
The Hutton family appeared to understand this not at all. Barbara Hutton had not chosen the ball. She had not set the budget. She was 18 years old and the ball was organized by her father and the Hutton family connections. And she attended it in the way of an 18-year-old girl who had been told to attend and who put on the dress and went and danced and smiled and performed the role of the debutante that the occasion required.
No distinction was made. To reporters and the public they addressed, the $60,000 debutante ball was Barbara Hutton’s $60,000 debutante ball. And Barbara Hutton was the Woolworth heiress. And the Woolworth fortune had been built on the five-cent table. And the five-cent table had been what allowed working people to buy the things they needed.
And here was the granddaughter of that working people’s fortune. Throwing $60,000 at a party in the middle of a depression. The label attached itself. She would spend the next 49 years trying to outrun it and failing. Because the label was attached not to a moment, but to a category. And the category, wealthy woman careless with money seeking validation in the wrong places, was renewed by each subsequent husband and each subsequent scandal and each subsequent newspaper story until the label was the story and the person inside it was invisible. She had grown up invisible. The label made her invisible in a new way, visible as a type, invisible as a person. 18 years old when this happened. Looking for someone to tell her she was more than the label. She looked for the rest of her life.
Alexis Mdivani was the first husband. He was a Georgian prince, the son of a family that had held genuinely princely rank in the Caucasus before the Russian Revolution. And the Soviet invasion of Georgia had converted their rank from something functional into something decorative, but still useful in the social world of 1930s Europe, where a title, any title, retained the power to impress American women who had been raised to believe that European nobility was the apex of social achievement. He was also, by the accounts of the people who knew him, extraordinarily good-looking and completely aware of it. The Mdivani brothers, Alexis, Serge, and David, were known in the social world of Paris and London and Monte Carlo as the marrying Mdivanis, which was a nickname that accurately described their primary vocation. They were looking for wealthy wives. They found them with the systematic efficiency of men who had understood that a title and a face and a practiced charm were assets in a
specific market, and who worked that market with professional dedication. Alexis met Barbara in 1932. He was 27. She was 20. He told her she was fat. This is the detail that the accounts of their courtship preserve most precisely, because it is the detail that most clearly reveals what the relationship was and what it would cost.
He told her she was fat, and she starved herself. He told her she was fat, and she began the relationship with her own body that would define the rest of her life. The anorexia that reduced her by the end to 80 lb, that made every photograph of her in her final decades a documentation of a woman who had been told at 20 that her body was wrong and who had spent the subsequent 46 years trying to correct it.
They married in Paris on June 22nd, 1933, 1 month after her 21st birthday and the delivery of the $42 million. The timing was precise. He spent her money for 2 years. He was seen with other women throughout. He was, by the accounts of the few friends Barbara trusted enough to confide in, dismissive of her when they were alone and charming to her when other people were watching.
Which is the combination of behaviors that defines a particular kind of cruelty that leaves no visible marks. They divorced in 1935. He received a settlement of approximately $2 million. He died in a car accident in Spain shortly after, which was noted in the newspapers with a mixture of sadness and relief that attends the deaths of people whose lives had been primarily organized around the extraction of other people’s resources.
Barbara was 22 when she married him and 23 when she divorced him. She had already been through the education in what men wanted from her that her next six marriages would confirm and deepen. She was not deterred. She believed with the tenacity of someone whose belief has never been tested by evidence because the evidence is always attributed to the wrong cause that the next one would be different.
For his The Mdivani brothers require a slightly longer examination than the accounts of her marriages usually provide because they were not simply fortune hunters, but practitioners of a specific and sophisticated form of social predation that the 1930s enabled in ways that are worth understanding.
Alexis, Serge, and David Mdivani were the sons of a Georgian general who had held real rank in the Caucasian aristocracy before the Russian Revolution. The revolution converted that rank from something with practical content, land, title, authority, into something purely social, a name with a princely prefix that could be deployed in the drawing rooms and beach clubs of the European upper class to open doors that might otherwise have been closed. They worked systematically.
Each brother identified the category of woman who was most susceptible to the combination of title and charm that they offered. Wealthy American women recently arrived in Europe, unused to the modes of European social interaction, and consequently unable to assess the difference between a genuine aristocrat and a refugee with a title and no resources.
They moved through Monaco and Paris and London and Cannes with the efficiency of people who understood their market, who knew which hotels the American heiresses favored, and which parties they attended, and which social intermediaries could make the introductions that led to the courtships that led to the marriages that led to the settlements.
Serge married the actress Pola Negri. David married the heiress Louise Van Alen, and then the tennis player Silvia de la Forest Mura. Alexis met Barbara Hutton at a party in 1932 and understood immediately what she was, the richest woman of her generation, unguarded, emotionally needy, recently arrived in the European social world without the education in its dangers that extended European experience would have provided.
He told her she was fat. This was not carelessness. It was methodology. A woman who has been told she is fat by the beautiful man she is attracted to has been handed simultaneously an insult and an invitation. The insult creates a wound. The invitation suggests that the wound can be healed. That if she addresses the deficiency the critic has identified, the critic’s regard will follow.
The woman who accepts this logic has handed the critic the authority to define her worth, and the critic who has that authority has power that money and title alone cannot purchase. Alexis understood this. He had, by the time he met Barbara, practiced versions of this dynamic with several other women. He knew how it worked.
He knew that the wound, once opened, was what made the subsequent courtship irresistible, that Barbara would pursue him harder once he had told her she was not enough because the pursuit was the attempt to prove to him that she was. She was 20 years old. She starved herself. She married him the following June, 1 month after her trust delivered $42 million.
He spent 2 years and approximately $2 million demonstrating that his initial assessment had been correct, that she was not enough, would never be enough, and that no amount of money or compliance would change this. Then he died in a car accident in Spain, and the specific cruelty of the Mdivani chapter ended, and Barbara was 23 and thinner and poorer and looking for the next person who would prove to her that the Mdivani assessment had been wrong.
Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow was the second husband married in 1935. He was Danish, the holder of a genuine aristocratic title, and possessed of a physical presence, tall, fair, military in bearing, that the photographs of the period confirm, and that Barbara’s accounts of her attraction to him describe in terms that suggest she was responding to something external and impressive, rather than anything she knew about who he was.
He was, in the event, aggressive in a way that Alexis had not been. The marriage was marked by a violence of temperament, by scenes and accusations, and the psychological warfare of a man who understood that his wife’s insecurity made her unusually susceptible to the particular weapons of domestic cruelty.
There was one thing Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow wanted from Barbara that the others had not specifically wanted, a child. Lance Reventlow was born on February 24th, 1936. He was the only child Barbara Hutton would ever have. He was, by every account of the people who observed the relationship, the person she loved most completely and most honestly in her entire life.
The one relationship that the damage of her history had not fully corrupted, the one person toward whom her love was not contaminated by the need to be loved back in a particular way. Lance would eventually use his inheritance to found a racing car team. He died in a plane crash in 1972 at 36. His mother never recovered.
But in 1936, he was an infant and Barbara was in a custody battle. The divorce from Count Reventlow was complicated, extended, and expensive in ways that went beyond the financial settlement. The custody of Lance became the primary battleground, a battle conducted across two continents and two countries’ legal systems.
With the resources of two substantial fortunes and two substantial legal teams, lasting from the 1938 separation to the eventual resolution in Barbara’s favor in 1940, the legal costs were enormous. The emotional costs were larger. She received custody. She received permanent anxiety about whether the custody would hold.
She received the damage of a woman who has fought the hardest possible fight for the one thing she truly cared about and who won, but who cannot fully believe she won, who remains alert to the possibility that the winning will be reversed. No. Cary Grant was the third husband, married in 1942. He was, by every available measure, the most famous of her seven husbands and the only one who did not take money from her.
He was also, she said this herself years later, the closest she ever came to being genuinely met by another person. Their marriage had a nickname, Cash and Carry. This was the press’s joke about a glamour couple with too much of both. The Woolworth heiress and the Hollywood star, the two most famous people in any room they entered together.
The nickname captured something real about the visibility of a marriage between two people who were each, individually, the objects of enormous public fascination, and whose combination produced a level of press attention that neither could fully manage. The marriage lasted 3 years. The accounts of why it ended are various.
Grant’s own accounts, given years after the divorce, suggest he found the relationship with Barbara complex, that she was more interesting and more troubled, and more difficult to reach than the public image suggested, and that his own psychological history made him an imperfect partner for someone with her particular needs.
He was, she said, the only one who treated her as a person rather than a fortune. He left the marriage with exactly what he had brought into it. Not a dollar of the Hutton fortune crossed into his account during the marriage or after. In Barbara Hutton’s life, this was so unusual as to be almost incomprehensible.
Every other husband had taken money. The one who was famous, the one who had his own money and career and identity, was the one who took nothing. She later described the divorce as a mistake. She described most of her divorces as mistakes. What she perhaps could not fully articulate was that the mistake was not individual, that the pattern of her marriages was not a series of individual errors, but a single systematic error repeated seven times.
The error of believing that the right man would fix what the wrong childhood had broken. Prince Igor Troubetzkoy was the fourth husband, married in 1947. He was Russian, another refugee prince from the Russian Revolution’s aftermath, another man whose family had held real rank in a world that no longer existed, and who had converted that obsolete rank into a social credential in the world that had replaced it.
He was a racing car driver of some distinction. He was charming. He was, as far as can be determined from the accounts that survive, less actively cruel than Alexis and less volatile than Curt, which was the ceiling of the recommendation that Barbara’s romantic history allowed.
The marriage lasted 4 years. It produced no particular drama beyond the absence of happiness, which by Barbara Hutton standards was a quiet period. He received a settlement. She moved on. Porfirio Rubirosa was the fifth husband, married in 1953. He was Dominican. He was, by the agreement of everyone who encountered him, one of the most comprehensively dangerous men of the mid-20th century.
Dangerous in the way of people who have turned the art of being attractive into a precision instrument of extraction. He had been married to Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress who was Barbara’s closest thing to a rival among enormously wealthy American women who were exploited by the same pool of international fortune hunters.
Duke had given Rubirosa sports cars and a plantation in the Dominican Republic, and a converted B-25 bomber, and a house in Paris, and $25,000 a year for life. Barbara, not to be outdone, and this was the real tragedy of the Rubirosa chapter, that there was competitive element in pursuing a man that her rival had already used, gave Rubirosa $3.
5 million in Arizona another B-25 bomber when they divorced. The marriage lasted 53 days. 53 days for $3.5 million plus a B-25 bomber. Horror and delight. The Barbara Hutton story reliably produced both. The horror was genuine. The exploitation was visible and systematic and the woman being exploited was visibly damaged by it.
The delight was also genuine because the story had the quality of a cautionary tale so extreme that it crossed into entertainment and the public had learned over the 20 years since the debutante ball to consume her disasters with the pleasure that other people’s catastrophes provide. Baron Gottfried von Cramm was the sixth husband married in 1955.
He was German, a former world-class tennis player who had been one of the best in the world in the 1930s. A man whose athletic career had been real and distinguished and who had also in the 1930s been imprisoned by the Nazi regime on charges that were widely understood to be politically motivated rather than substantive.
He was by the accounts of the people who knew him a decent man. One of the few decent men who moved through Barbara Hutton’s life. Whose primary limitation was that he was not in love with her and could not pretend to be convincingly enough to sustain the marriage. They divorced in 1959. He kept his dignity. She kept looking.
Prince Pierre Don was the seventh husband married in 1964 in Tangier where Barbara had established one of her primary residences. The Sidi Hosni Palace, a labyrinthine Moroccan property that she had decorated over years into an expression of her aesthetic that was simultaneously stunning and excessive, the visual equivalent of a woman who had never learned the word enough.
Prince Don was Laotian, a minor prince of the former royal family of the Kingdom of Champassak, a man she had met in the social world of Tangier that she had come to prefer to the social worlds of New York or London or Paris because Tangier in the 1960s was the destination of people who found the world’s other options too demanding. They married.
They divorced 2 years later. He received a settlement. She was 54 years old. She had been married seven times. She had given away in direct transfers to husbands approximately $12 million in settlements and gifts. She had spent the rest on the palaces and the 30 pieces of luggage and the parties and the jewels and the clothes and the properties and the travel and the staff and the cost of maintaining a life at the level that each successive husband had demanded or that Barbara’s own terror of ordinariness had imposed. The $900 million was almost gone. The palace at Sidi Hosni in Tangier is the place where Barbara Hutton is most completely visible as a person rather than a headline. She first visited Tangier in the 1940s. By the early 1950s, she had begun to acquire and restore the Sidi Hosni complex, a series of interconnected Moroccan houses in the Medina of Tangier that she
gradually unified into a single palace through careful acquisition and meticulous restoration. The restoration required years and millions of dollars and the involvement of Moroccan craftsmen whose techniques were the techniques of centuries rather than of contemporary construction. She knew what she was doing.
This is the point that the press coverage of her spending never adequately addressed, that many of the things she spent money on were the result of genuine knowledge and considered judgment rather than impulsive extravagance. The Chinese porcelain collection she had assembled since the 1930s was not the collection of a woman who liked pretty things.
It was the collection of a woman who had spent years studying a subject, who could evaluate pieces on their historical and artistic merits, who had read the relevant scholarship and consulted the relevant experts, and made purchases based on educated assessment rather than mere price.
The Sidi Hosni restoration was similar. She spent years learning about Moroccan architectural traditions. She worked with craftsmen who could execute the zellige tile work and the carved cedar wood and the tadelakt plaster that the restoration required. She insisted on accuracy rather than approximation. On the actual techniques rather than the contemporary shortcuts that would have been faster and cheaper.
The result was a building that the architectural historians who documented it considered one of the finest examples of a foreigner’s respectful engagement with Moroccan domestic architecture. She was also in Tangier hosting one of the most interesting salons of the mid-20th century. The guest lists at Sidi Hosni in the 1950s and 1960s read like a directory of international literary and artistic life.
Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Ian Fleming, Tennessee Williams, the Maharaja of Baroda, David Herbert. She knew all of them. She entertained them with a sophistication and generosity that the people who attended her parties consistently described as remarkable. A hostess who had read the books, who engaged with the ideas, who was genuinely interested in the people she was talking to rather than simply performing interest.
This was the Barbara Hutton that the press narrative made invisible, not the woman who paid 53 days worth of attention to Porfirio Rubirosa’s extraction methods, but the woman who could discuss Chinese porcelain with a museum curator and Moroccan architectural history with an archaeologist and the state of the contemporary novel with Truman Capote, and who did all of these things in French or Spanish or Arabic or German, depending on who she was talking to.
Six languages. She spoke six languages and spent $90 million on husbands who did not speak her language at all. Lance Reventlow grew up inside his mother’s turbulent life with a resilience that the accounts of his childhood consistently describe and that his adult achievements confirm. He was born during the marriage to the count, which was the worst of Barbara’s marriages in terms of physical environment and psychological safety.
The custody battle that followed the divorce was the background of his first four years. He was raised once the custody was settled in Barbara’s favor in the peripatetic world of a woman who moved between Tangier and Cuernavaca and Paris and London and New York with no fixed domestic rhythm. A world of hotels and rented villas and staff who changed and countries that changed and schools that changed while the one constant was his mother who was herself not always constant.
He became, despite all of this, a man of genuine accomplishment. At 17, he drove in his first car race. At 20, he established the Reventlow Automobiles Inc. and began building the Scarab, an American racing car designed to compete in the Formula One World Championship. The Scarabs were among the most ambitious American racing projects of the late 1950s and while they did not ultimately achieve the Formula One success that Lance had intended, they were regarded by the racing world as technically sophisticated and innovative. He was, by the accounts of the people who raced with him and worked with him, a serious and capable man who had converted his inherited wealth into something that required skill and knowledge, who was not simply buying his way into the sport, but earning his place in it through the competence that the sport demanded. He was also, by the same accounts, warm and funny and easy to like, which were qualities he had from his mother but that his mother’s
life had not allowed her to express as easily as his did. He married Jill St. John, the actress, in 1960. They divorced in 1963. He had a son, Sasha, with another woman. He was building towards something, toward the next chapter of a life that had survived the chaos of its beginning and was organizing itself into something that looked like stability.
On July 24th, 1972, the plane he was traveling in crashed near Aspen, Colorado. The cause was pilot error in conditions of poor visibility. Lance was 36 years old. Barbara was in London when she received the news. The accounts of people present describe a woman who received the information and sat still for a long time and then said quietly that she did not want to talk about it.
She did not cry in front of anyone. She went to her room. She never fully emerged from that room again. The withdrawal that had been partial became complete. The bed at the Beverly Wilshire became the world. The nurses came. The Coca-Cola accumulated on the nightstand. The sycophants arrived and were accommodated and took what they could take.
She was 60 years old when Lance died. She lived nine more years. She spent those nine years in the condition of a woman who has lost the last thing she actually cared about and who is waiting, without any particular impatience, for the end. Lance Reventlow died on July 24th, 1972, when a small plane he was traveling in crashed near Aspen, Colorado.
He was 36 years old. He had been Barbara’s reason, not in the simple sense of a mother’s love for a child, though that love was real and was, by every account, the most uncomplicated emotion in Barbara’s otherwise complicated emotional life. He was her reason in the sense that she could justify her own existence in terms of his.
That the confused and often harmful pattern of her adult relationships had a counterpoint in the one relationship that had not been confused or harmful, the one where she had simply loved and been loved back. He died at 36, the same age that her mother had died at 33. Death came to the people she loved when they were young at ages that suggested the world was systematically taking from her the things she most needed.
After Lance died, Barbara retreated entirely. The Beverly Wilshire suite, the bed, the nurses, the Coca-Cola, the gradual withdrawal from the world that had consumed her for 60 years and left her with nothing. Cliff Robertson, the actor, visited her in those final years with his wife, Barbara’s cousin Dina Merrill.
He found her surrounded by half-empty glasses of Coke and books. “Alert,” he said, “but frail. A sweet, lost quality. A sensitivity, strong and determined mind.” She was surrounded by sycophants, by people on her payroll, a virtual cocoon. She refused to get out of bed. Rice is a buddy The specific arithmetic of how her fortune disappeared is worth examining because the examination produces a more complicated picture than the story of seven husbands and their settlements suggests.
The husbands took approximately $12 million in direct settlements and gifts, during significant but not by itself a catastrophic fraction of 900 million. The larger drain was the lifestyle, which was not the lifestyle of a woman spending money on pleasure, but the lifestyle of a woman spending money on the proof that she existed.
The palaces were not purchased for comfort. The jewels were not acquired for beauty. The parties were not thrown for fun. Everything was acquired and maintained in the service of a performance whose audience was always, ultimately, Barbara herself. The proof that she was worth loving, demonstrated by the scale of what she had assembled around her.
The Cartier jewels, the Lalique glass, the Chinese porcelain collection she had assembled over decades with the knowledge of a genuine connoisseur. She knew art, genuinely knew it, had educated herself in the objects that surrounded her with a seriousness that the press never credited her with and that the sycophants around her had no incentive to acknowledge.
The Sidi Hosni Palace in Tangier, restored and decorated with a thoroughness that architectural historians found significant. The Japanese-style house in Cuernavaca, Sumiya, designed with an authenticity that required importing craftsmen from Japan, not simply spending. Building. Building the evidence that she was a person of substance, a person with taste, a person worth knowing for reasons beyond the Woolworth and the number in her bank account.
The building cost more than the fortune. The tax problems compounded the spending. The Second World War and the post-war period brought substantial American taxation of overseas assets, and Barbara had structured her fortune in ways that created ongoing legal and financial complexity. The lawyers and accountants who managed these complications charged for their management, and the complications had a way of multiplying despite the management.
By the 1960s, the fortune was substantially depleted. By the 1970s, it was functionally gone. The properties had been sold or could not be maintained. The staff had been reduced or had left. The jewels had been sold one by one to fund the continuing life. The Beverly Wilshire suite, the nurses, the Coca-Cola on the nightstand.
She was reduced at the end to what she had always been, a woman alone in a hotel room. Doris Duke was her counterpart in the drama of the mid-20th century American heiress. Duke had inherited the American Tobacco Company fortune, $250 million in 1925 when she was 12 years old. She had grown up similarly, rich, motherless in a different way.
The target of fortune hunters and press attention and the curiosity that enormous inherited wealth in a young woman provoked in the public of that era. They were rivals in the way that two people occupying the same category inevitably become rivals. The category of enormously wealthy American women attended by press, pursued by the same pool of international fortune hunters, competing for the same social territory of European aristocratic acceptance.
The rivalry was never warm. The Rubirosa episode brought it to its most visible point. Rubirosa had been Duke’s husband before he was Barbara’s. Duke’s divorce settlement, the sports cars, the polo ponies, the Dominican plantation, the bomber, the Paris house, the $25,000 a year, was the template against which Barbara’s own settlement would be measured.
When Rubirosa divorced Barbara after 53 days, the settlement Barbara provided, $3.5 million, another bomber, was in every accounting more than Duke had given. More money, same bomber. The bomber is the detail that the contemporaries noted with a specific mixture of disbelief and recognition.
Two of the wealthiest women in the world competing for the affection of a man who had made a career of being competed for, measuring their regard for him in converted military aircraft. Duke and Hutton had other parallels. Both were knowledgeable art collectors. Both built extraordinary homes that architectural historians took seriously.
Both were consistently exploited by people who understood that their need was as large as their fortune. Both died with diminished estates relative to their inheritances, though Duke retained far more. She died in 1993 with an estate valued at well over a billion dollars, having managed her inheritance with far more discipline than Barbara had managed hers.
Barbara was the more public story. Duke was the more private one. Both were the products of a system that gave women enormous wealth while providing them no tools for its protection or its use. No education in finance, no understanding of the mechanisms of exploitation, no community of peers who could offer the kind of knowledge that would have helped them navigate what they had inherited.
They were rich in money and poor in everything else. Both found their way to the same answer, men who wanted the money. Duke found fewer of them because she was harder. Barbara found more of them because she was softer. The hardness and the softness were not character flaws. They were the different adaptations two women made to the same impossible situation.
The seven men Barbara Hutton married are worth accounting for individually, not in the manner of tabloid chronicle, but in the manner of a ledger that records what each transaction cost and what it produced. Alexis Mdivani, 1933 to 1935, cost approximately two million dollars in settlement, plus the two years of sustained psychological damage that began with being told she was fat at 20, and that continued through the systematic cruelty of a man for whom her suffering was a tool.
Produced the permanent wound to her relationship with her own body. Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow, 1935 to 1938, cost the custody battle that lasted years and cost millions in legal fees, plus the ongoing anxiety of a mother who had fought the hardest possible fight for her son, and who never fully trusted that the fight was over.
Produced Lance Reventlow, which was the only valuable thing any of her marriages produced, and the love for Lance, which was the cleanest love of her adult life. Cary Grant, 1942 to 1945, cost nothing financially, and cost something emotionally that the accounts do not fully capture. The loss when the marriage ended of the one man who had treated her as a person, rather than a resource, the return to the world of men who wanted something.
Produced the clearest evidence she would ever have that what she was looking for actually existed, combined with the painful proof that having found it, she could not keep it. Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, 1947 to 1951, cost a settlement, amount not fully documented in accessible sources.
Produced nothing that the record preserves. Porfirio Rubirosa, 1953 53 days, cost $3.5 million and a bomber. Produced the most publicly visible example of exploitation in a life that contained many examples, and the confirmation that the dynamic established by Mel Ferrer could be reproduced by any sufficiently motivated operator.
Baron Gottfried von Cramm, 1955 to 1959, cost a settlement. Produced the longest period of relative stability in her adult life, and the one marriage that contemporaries describe as companionable, rather than predatory, even in the absence of love. Prince Pierre D’Orléans, 1964 to 1966, cost a settlement.
Produced nothing that the record preserves, and the melancholy of a final marriage that confirmed the pattern she had been unable to break. Total cost of the husbands, in direct financial terms, approximately $12 million. The fortune had started at 42 million, grown to something approaching 60 million through the trust’s investments, and been added to by various inheritances, and supplemented by Franklin Hutton’s estate.
The total available fortune was by the most conservative reasonable estimate, something in the range of $200 million in mid-century dollars. The equivalent of the 900 million figure cited by financial historians for what she had available during her lifetime. The husbands took 12 million, the lifestyle took the rest.
The question of what the lifestyle consisted of, what $900 million minus $12 million of husbands looks like when spent on a life rather than on divorce settlements, is the question that the arithmetic of her fortune makes hardest to answer, and most important to try. It looked like this. 72 rooms at the Ritz in Paris, occupied for months at a time.
30 pieces of luggage on every journey, a staff of 40 at City Hassney. A staff of 30 at Soumia, private railway cars, chartered yachts, a jewelry collection that included the Pasha of Egypt’s diamond, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s pearl, a jade collection that museum curators described as among the finest in private hands.
Parties in Tangier for which orchids were flown in from Europe. Parties in London for which musicians were flown in from America. The restoration of City Hassney over 20 years at a cost that the contractors never fully disclosed, and that Barbara never tracked because tracking costs was not something she had been taught to do.
She had been taught nothing about money except that it existed and was hers. Nobody had taught her that it would end. The newspapers had a story about Barbara Hutton that they told from the beginning and never revised. The poor little rich girl, the woman who had everything and valued nothing, the cautionary tale about the corrupting power of inherited wealth. This story was not false.
It was incomplete. The part it missed was the intelligence. Barbara Hutton spoke six languages fluently. She wrote poetry, real poetry, not greeting card verse, but considered observations about loneliness and beauty, and the distance between what people present to the world and what they actually are. She was a genuine collector who understood the objects she collected with the knowledge of a person who had spent years learning what made them significant.
She was, by the accounts of the people who knew her, without financial interest in the relationship, an interesting and perceptive woman whose observations about the people around her were frequently more accurate than those of the supposedly worldly men who surrounded her. The part the story missed was the childhood.
The death of a mother at five in circumstances that were never cleanly resolved, the abandonment by a father who preferred other company, the displacement through relatives who were kind but not parents, the debutante ball at 18 that made her the target of a depression-era public fury that she had done nothing to deserve and that taught her at 18 that the world was paying attention to her in a way that was not kind.
The part the story missed was the men. Not simply that they were bad, which several of them were, but the mechanism of the exploitation, the way in which a woman who had learned at five that the people she loved would leave her was perpetually vulnerable to men who understood that her need to be needed was larger than her judgment about who needed her.
Each husband arrived with the credential that the previous one had lacked, a real title, a real career, real gentleness, and each one with one exception confirmed the pattern. The one exception was Cary Grant, the one who treated her as a person rather than a fortune left, and she spent the rest of her life looking for him again in men who were not him.
Still, the $3,500 that Barbara Hutton died with has been calculated by financial historians as representing approximately the cost of two nights at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where she died, which is either an irony or a symbol, depending on how you read the story. She had started with $900 She had spent it the way the gilded age and its aftermath expected the daughters of Woolworth to spend it, not through philanthropy, which no one had taught her, not through investment, which her father had not taught her and her husbands had not tried to teach her, but through the form of spending the world of international society demanded and that the people around her encouraged, because the spending was what supported them. No one taught her to say no. Her grandfather Frank Woolworth had said no to everything that did not produce a return. He had priced everything at a nickel or a dime and had understood that the accumulation of nickels and dimes was what produced the fortune that
eventually built the cathedral of commerce. He had passed the fortune to his daughters in trust because he did not trust them with it directly. He had not passed the understanding that had made the fortune. The understanding died with him. His granddaughter inherited the fortune without the understanding.
She spent the fortune in the pursuit of the understanding, in the pursuit of the knowledge that she was worth loving, that she deserved to exist, that the five-year-old girl in the hotel room where her mother lay was not responsible for what had happened. The fortune could not prove any of this. The seven husbands could not prove any of this.
Nothing she could buy or rent or acquire could prove any of this. And so, she spent it all trying. And when it was gone, she lay in a bed in a hotel in Beverly Hills with $3,500 and half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola and a sweet lost quality and a sensitivity. And she died. The Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan still stands.
Frank Woolworth paid 13 and a half million dollars in cash for its construction in 1913, and it was the tallest building in the world. And it is still one of the most beautiful buildings in New York City. A gothic tower that catches the light of the Hudson differently at different times of day, and that has been a landmark for over 100 years.
It was converted to residential condominiums in 2014. The penthouse sold for $34 million. The building that was built with Woolworth nickels and dimes now contains luxury apartments at prices that would have made the man who opened his first store for $3.50 a week unrecognizable to himself. The last Woolworth five and dime stores closed in 1997.
The company that Frank Woolworth had built from a failed store in Utica and a successful one in Lancaster had transformed itself into other retail formats over the decades and had eventually exited the format entirely. Barbara Hutton is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx in the Woolworth family plot.
She was buried with 10 mourners. The grave is modest. She spent $900 million in a life that lasted 66 years, and she left $3,500 and 10 people came to the funeral, and the press wrote one more story about her, and then mostly forgot her. The forgetting is the last thing that happened to her.
She deserved better than the forgetting, not because the forgetting was unearned. She had participated in her own destruction as damaged people often do with the logic of someone for whom destruction feels more familiar than anything else. Not because her spending was admirable, which it was not, or because her choices were wise, which they were not.
She deserved better than the forgetting because the story the press told about her, silly woman who threw away a fortune, was a story that explained nothing about why she did what she did and exonerated everyone who did it to her. The men who married her for money are not particularly remembered.
The society that taught her that a title was the apex of achievement is not particularly examined. The father who left and the mother who died and the childhood that produced a woman who could not believe she was worth loving without the evidence of a purchased aristocratic title. These things are mentioned in the accounts and then set aside.
She is left with the $3,500 and the poor little rich girl label and the 10 mourners. She was a woman who never learned she was enough. The people who should have taught her were gone before she could learn it. That is the story. That is what the $3,500 means. The Woolworth building is still there. She is not.
The building outlasted the fortune. The fortune outlasted the girl. The girl outlasted the love. In the end, all she had was a hotel bed and half-empty glasses of Coke and a sweet lost quality that the people who visited her noticed and that the world mostly did not. She was the Woolworth heiress who married seven men and died with $3,500.
That was not who she was. It was only what happened to her.
