Marlene Wagman-Geller

         An American heiress would have fared far better if she had learned the lesson of the British Fab Four’s lyric, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.” What her fortune did buy was false friends, materialistic husbands, and a life bookmarked with sorrow. 

         The quintessential poor little rich girl, Barbara Hutton, was born in New York, the granddaughter of Franklin Winfield Woolworth. The son of a poor potato farmer, his five-and-dime empire (the Walmart of its era) made him one of the world’s wealthiest men. His eponymous skyscraper was the first on the New York skyline, paid for in cash, and for many years had the distinction as the tallest in the world. During its opening extravaganza, a reporter overheard the following exchange: “How did he do it?” one charwoman asked another. Her response, “With your dime and mine.” His stratospheric fortune was not able to slay his daughter Edna’s demons, and she poisoned herself in despair over her husband’s philandering. Barbara, at age five, stumbled upon her mother’s lifeless body in their suite at the Plaza. The death deprived the child of maternal love and bequeathed her one-third of a sixty-million-dollar inheritance, one billion dollars in contemporary currency. The suicide thrust the little Woolworth heiress into the headlines, and for the rest of her life, she remained a tabloid staple. She lived in a gilded cage of bodyguards, servants, nannies, and private railroad cars. Her father, who preferred gambling and womanizing, was mostly an absent figure, and she grew up plump, reticent, and lonely. Various relatives took her in, and she lived for a period with her aunt, cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. 

      Although shy, she wasted no time in pouncing on any object or person that caught her fancy. At age seventeen, emotionally needy, she seduced her tennis pro instructor and then her bodyguard. Later conquests included a one-night stand with James Dean who declined her offer of becoming her boy-toy and living in unimaginable luxury. He told her, “I’m the wrong guy for you. I can never belong to anybody, even myself.” A longer liaison was with one of the world’s richest men, Howard Hughes, of whom she remarked, “The charming thing about Howard is that he isn’t charming.” O.K.

     At age eighteen, Ms. Hutton had her debutante party, and glittering guests were the Astors, Rockefellers, and stars such as Maurice Chevalier. The price tag for the affair was $80,000, an unimaginable extravagance for 1930, the year after the Wall Street crash. Twelve million people were out of work, and thousands of women toiled for a pittance at Woolworths. The salesgirls went on strike, picketing outside the swanky Pierre Hotel where Hutton had a suite of rooms. They held placards contrasting their lives with Barbara’s. The public viewed the extravaganza as the French version of, “Let them eat cake.” The heiress responded, “Do people realize I have no more to do with running the Woolworth stores than I have the running of the British Empire?”  When Barbara publicly stated, “Living well is the best revenge,” it hurt the retail behemoth. Customers were reluctant to spend their hard-earned nickels at a business that had such an unsympathetic figure as its prow. She became the object of further ire when she renounced her American citizenship in a move calculated to lessen her taxes. Later, during World War II,  in an effort to save the life of a one-time lover and future husband, she sent money to Fascist contacts in Europe that led the F.B.I. to investigate the heiress as a Nazi sympathizer. 

      The venue for the ball was Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton, and Barbara’s doting but distant grandfather arranged for it to be an affair to remember. The glittering soiree entailed four orchestras, two hundred waiters, two thousand bottles of champagne, Prohibition notwithstanding. Never one to skimp-the Woolworth patriarch had installed a two-million-dollar pink marble stairway in his sixty-two-room home, Winfield Hall; there were one thousand seven-course midnight dinners. The press compared the occasion to the maiden voyage of the Titanic. A year later British society hosted the heiress when she visited the Court of St. James.

     In 1932, the actor David Niven met the walking Fort Knox and described the twenty-year-old Barbara as “a petite, snub-nosed blond, very pretty American girl...She was a gay and sparking creature, full of life and laughter.” In 1965, Paul Bowes visited Barbara in her estate in Tangiers and said, “Her complexion was powdery, and her arms were as thin as toothpicks. She had difficulty remembering the names of all her husbands.” She was also forty-two million dollars poorer, several times divorced, and addicted to Coca-Cola and drugs. What happened to the five and dime princess in thirty-three years? What had transformed the storied life that had included masquerades in Venice, tangoes in Tangiers, and diamonds as big as the Ritz?  

      Barbara took the well-worn path of American heiresses who traded their wealth for titles and left for Europe on the prowl for a blue blood. On the continent, she fell for the Russian Prince Alexis Mdivani. Her father, no stranger to cheap and disposable objects on which his late wife’s fortune had been built, felt the prince was hungry for the Hutton bank account. He sent his daughter on a trip around the world to discourage the romance, but Mdivani followed her to Bangkok. “It’s going to be fun being a princess,” the twenty-year-old bride exclaimed before the civil ceremony in Paris. It wasn’t. Five years, after lavishing two million dollars on hubby, the heiress and the prince divorced in Reno. Barbara married other titled men: the Danish Count Kurt Haugwitz Reventlow, Lithuanian Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, and German Baron Gottfried Von Cramm, an international tennis star. In between Ms. Hutton sandwiched in a three-year wedlock to Hollywood film star Cary Grant, a union the press dubbed “Cash n’ Cary.” Unlike the others, he never asked for money as good-bye payola. She gave him his walking papers on the grounds of mental cruelty; namely, he was more interested in his career than in her. Barbara claimed Grant was the husband she loved the most. With the departure of Grant, she stated, “My money has never brought me happiness. You can’t buy love with money.” Grant’s take on the marriage, “Barbara surrounded herself with a consortium of fawning parasites-European titles, broken-down Hollywood types, a maharaja or two, a sheik, the military, several English peers, and a few tennis bums. If one more phony earl had entered the house, I’d have suffocated.”

        One of her most colorful spouses was the notorious playboy Porfirio Rubirosa; perhaps he had a surfeit of pheromones as he had previously tied the knot with Doris Duke. Their 1953 nuptial was held amidst Zsa Zsa Gabor’s proclamation that he would really have liked to jilt Hutton for her. While the new Mrs. Rubirosa took the slight with a smile, the marriage broke up in three months. The marriage cost Hutton a string of polo ponies, a Dominican Republic coffee plantation, and a plane; what she gained was public humiliation.  After the demise of her sixth marriage, she declared it was her last, “You can’t go on being a fool forever.” But in 1947, she again took vows with Prince Troubotzkoy. Ill health plagued her during their time together, and she underwent major surgery for a kidney ailment and an intestinal disorder. Like her others, the union collapsed, and she obtained a 1951 Paris divorce. Despite all her disappointments, hope sprung eternal. She said, “I’ve had happiness and I’ll have it again.”

     In between the beddings and the weddings, there was the shopping. The black belt of consumption acquired a jaw-dropping collection of jewelry made with historical connotations that added panache. Some of her gems had belonged to Marie Antoinette and Empress Eugenie of France; others hailed from the House of Faberge and Cartier. A piece de resistance was the 40-carat Pasha Diamond; after Barbara’s passing, Sotheby’s auctioned many of her possessions in multimillion-dollar bids. She treated upmarket jewelers Cartier, Asprey, Van Cleef, and Arpels like other people treated her grandfather’s five-and-dime stores. Hutton’s arch-rival was Doris Duke, and the two spent their lives in a high society claw fest. Barbara was by far the freer spending of the two-she referred to her rival as cheap-and Hutton never turned her back on an indulgence. On one occasion, spying a large rock crystal chandelier in Doris’s home, actor Errol Flynn quipped, “Doris, what are you doing with one of Barbara’s earrings?” The Gold-Dust twins, as they were known, were fascinated by psychics and faith healers; big-dame hunters pursued them from Hawaii to Hollywood to the Riviera. Barbara’s generosity also outweighed Doris’s. Nobody who met Hutton walked away the poorer; how she loved to shower others with the Woolworth fountain.

    To salve her marital wounds, Barbara travelled to exotic locales and acquired a number of luxurious homes. She spent the equivalent of twenty million pounds on building Winfield House in London’s Regent Park (now the U.S. ambassador’s residence). Another exquisite property was a 16^th century, fifteen-room palace, Sidi Hosi, in Tangier, Morocco. Hutton filled her real estate trophy with Middle Eastern art and antiques, including a million-dollar jewel-encrusted tapestry. Craving company, her home was the venue of legendary parties; her guests were European aristocrats. Ever restless, Hutton changed abodes even more rapidly than husbands. The only constant in Barbara’s life was her only child, Lance, born in London, the son of the Danish count. After his birth, the Countess developed serious health problems, and the boy became the rope in a tug-of-war custody battle. Heavily guarded during his childhood because of the threat of kidnapping, he inherited a fortune when he turned twenty-one. He married Cheryl Holdridge, a former Walt Disney Mouseketeer in 1964, after his divorce from actress Jill St. John.

     Barbara’s later years were a dizzying, downward descent. Lonely and in ill health, she took to self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, and as with her shopping, she did so on a grand scale. She had experimented in her teens with the barbiturate-based tranquilizer Seconal, her cohort in experimentation her cousin Jimmy Donahue. His claim to infamy was although he was a practicing homosexual, he had an affair with the Duchess of Windsor that led an acquaintance’s quip, “She married a king, but screwed a queen.”

     Despite her half dozen failed attempts at wedded bliss, loneliness led to husband number seven. She stated of the marital conundrum, “All the unhappiness in my life has been caused by men. I think I’m pretty timid about marriage but I’m also too timid to live alone, and life doesn’t make sense without men.” Her final rendezvous at the altar was in 1964; it was also her most exotic. She became the Princess Doan Vinh Na Champassak in a civil ceremony at her walled estate near Cuernavaca, Mexico. The Laotian Prince, a painter and a chemist, was three years his wife’s junior. Miss Hutton, her son at her side, wore a green and gold sari-type gown, a gold ring on each big toe, and gold anklets. The soles of her feet were painted red. When they separated late in 1966, there was talk of a four-million-dollar parting gift. Old habits die hard. The Prince said, “She gave me more than $4 million. She gave me love.” A more visceral loss was Lance, a daredevil racecar driver, who died in 1972 at age 36 in the crash of a small plane in Colorado.

     Of all her palatial residences, Barbara’s Sunset Boulevard was the penthouse of The Beverley Wilshire Hotel. Her former beauty-that Doris had envied- was no more. Miss Hutton, who had been termed “fat as butter” during her teens, had spent a lifetime in strenuous dieting, and in lieu of a healthy diet subsisted on cases of Coca-Cola mixed with alcohol, usually vodka, intravenous megavitamin shots laced with amphetamines, supplemented with a cocktail of drugs including codeine, Valium, and morphine. A cataract surgery had left her with impaired vision, and a fall in Rome had left her with a damaged hip. Retainers carried her everywhere. The quintessential poor little rich girl, bedridden and alone, died of a heart attack in the penthouse of The Beverley Wiltshire Hotel. In her once too-great-to-be-real bank account, there remained $3,500. In a further disconnect from her glittering former life, the mortuary referred to her as Barbara Doan.

      Barbara’s final resting place was the Woolworth family vault in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery that houses the McMansions of the dead. The Pharaoh of the five-and-dime constructed a marble Egyptian themed mausoleum whose pillared entrance is guarded by stone sphinxes.

       Although Woolworth’s tomb is a nod to ancient Egypt, metaphorically he was a modern King Midas. As a boy, his greatest desire had been for wealth and when he achieved his dream, as with his mythological counterpart, it brought desolation in its wake. Barbara Hutton paid a high price as King Midas’s granddaughter.