Adorable Story #43: Barbara Hutton
The heiress and socialite always searching for something money couldn't buy
Barbara Woolworth Hutton (November 14, 1912 – May 11, 1979) was an American debutante, socialite, heiress, and philanthropist. She was dubbed the “Poor Little Rich Girl”—first when she was given a lavish and expensive debutante ball in 1930 amid the Great Depression, and later due to a notoriously troubled private life.
Born into wealth but always searching for something money couldn’t buy, Hutton’s life was a continuous mix of highs and lows.
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Early Beginnings: The Woolworth Fortune
Barbara Hutton was born on November 14, 1912, into a life of unimaginable wealth. As the granddaughter of Frank W. Woolworth, the founder of the Woolworth “five-and-dime” retail chain, she was destined for public attention.
Barbara Hutton was the only child of Edna Woolworth (1883–1917), who was a daughter of Frank W. Woolworth and Franklyn Laws Hutton (1877–1940), a wealthy co-founder of E. F. Hutton & Company, a New York investment banking and stock brokerage firm.
Edna Hutton reportedly died on May 2, 1917, age 33, from suffocation due to mastoiditis, an infection usually caused by untreated acute otitis: to this day, rumor persists that she actually committed suicide by poison, in despair over her husband’s philandering (the coroner decided that no autopsy was necessary thus increasing the suspicions surrounding the tragic event).
Four-year-old Little Barbara discovered her mother’s body and sadly the trauma would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Her inheritance, received after her mother’s passing when Barbara was just a child, made her one of the wealthiest women in the world.
Unfortunately her father was still too preoccupied with his numerous women and his alcohol addiction to take care of his daughter: shortly after Edna’s death, Franklin Hutton married Irene Bodde, the classic fairy-tale stepmother, whose manifest purpose was to exploit his stepdaughter’s wealth without having her in the way.
Little Barbara grew up in the home of her maternal grandparents, and, after their death in 1924, she was entrusted to a paternal aunt and to the care of the nanny Tiki, who would remain by her side for over forty years.
Barbara was sent to a variety of boarding schools: she attended Miss Hewitt’s Classes (now The Hewitt School in New York’s Lenox Hill neighborhood) and Miss Porter’s School for Girls in Farmington, Connecticut.
“I was trying to buy the attention of my classmates,” she recalled years later. “I used to give them pearls, rubies and dolls dressed in Lanvin... But instead of conquering them, I ended up being robbed and despised.”
Barbara became an introverted child who had limited interaction with other children of her own age. Her closest friend and only confidante was her cousin Jimmy Donahue, the son of her mother’s sister: Jimmy Donahue inherited a portion of the Woolworth estate with Barbara and also grew up to have notorious drug, alcohol and relationship problems.
By the time of her 21st birthday in 1933, her trust fund had reached the staggering amount of USD 42 million (approx. USD 1 billion in today’s value): this greatly attracted the attention of the American press, and public in general, so much so that Barbara’s entrance into any restaurant, hotel, public or private party was emphasized by the orchestras singing I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In A Five And Ten Cent Store), a famous hit composed in her honor in 1926.
Debutante ball
In accordance with New York’s high society traditions, Barbara was given a lavish débutante ball in 1930 on her 18th birthday, where guests from the Astor and Rockefeller families, amongst other elites, were entertained by stars such as Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier: the ball cost USD 80,000, a veritable fortune in the days of the Great Depression, and public criticism was so severe that after the ball her family sent her on a tour of Europe to escape the onslaught of the press.
On her return — on an ocean liner of which she occupied twenty-four cabins to house her luggage — she settled in the family mansion on the Upper East Side and began an endless series of ill-fated marriages.
A Carousel of Marriages
Barbara’s personal life was as headline-grabbing as her wealth. She was married seven times, with each husband bringing his own story to the complex narrative of her life. From her first marriage to the Georgian Prince Alexis Mdivani in 1933 to her last to Prince Pierre Raymond Doan Vinh na Champassak in 1964, Hutton’s love life was tumultuous and often unhappy. Each marriage brought its own drama and, often, ended in a very public divorce.
Alexis Mdivani
Her first marriage was with an obscure Georgian, already married to Louise Astor (whom we featured in the Adorable Story #32) and self-styled prince, Alexis Mdivani, who, with the help of his rapacious sister Roussadana, “framed” Barbara by being discovered in bed with her by his wife. To avoid scandal, Louise divorced him and Barbara married him in 1933.
But Alexis Mdivani had an almost limitless propensity for shopping and betrayal, and so the marriage ended after only two years, which was still enough for him to burn several millions of his wife’s fortune in clothes, cars, men’s jewelry and gifts to his mistresses.
Kurt Von Haugwitz Reventlow
Almost immediately avert divorcing Alexis Mdivani, Barbara married Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow, which marks a descent not only in the heraldic ladder (from a prince to a count), but also in the hell of psychological and physical violence: most probably because of the abuse from her new husband, Barbara began her life long addiction to tranquilizers and developed symptoms of anorexia nervosa, that would accompany her for the rest of her life.
The marriage produced her only son, Lance Reventlow, whose custody would be the subject of a fierce legal battle during the divorce in 1938, just three years later.
Eventually, custody would be shared between her and Kurt, but the young Lance will still spend his childhood and adolescence away from both parents, in prestigious boarding schools from which he will cultivate an invincible resentment for his mother: it was even said that he threw darts at the photos of her cut-out from the tabloids.
Cary Grant
After a brief flirtation with the tormented genius Howard Hughes, it was the turn of probably the most famous and fascinating of her husbands: in 1942, Barbara met the star of the moment, Cary Grant, at a charity dinner and it was mutual love at first sight.
Barbara: “Do you know you’re irresistible?”
Cary: “And you know you’re irresistibly rich?”
Barbara and Cary tied the knot in 1942 and the newspapers announced the wedding with a sarcastic headline: “Cash & Cary”.
Despite their good intentions, this marriage failed partly because of Grant’s hectic work schedule on the set, which kept him away from home most of the time, prompting Hutton to threaten: “I'm going to buy the studios and fire you!”, and partly because of her increasing addiction to narcotics.
They divorced in 1945.
Of all the “Mr. Huttons”, Grant is certainly the one who least needed Barbara’s money and fame, and he was also the only one of her husbands to bond affectionately with little Lance and the only one who kept in contact with her until the end, up to her deathbed.
Igor Truebotzkoy
After the divorce from Cary Grant, Barbara left California and moved to Paris, France, before acquiring a magnificent palace in Tangier. In Tangier, Barbara met and began dating Igor Troubetzkoy, an expatriate Russian prince of very limited means but world renown.
They married in 1948 in Zurich, Switzerland: that year, Igor became the driver of the first Ferrari race-car to ever compete in Grand Prix motor racing, when he raced in the Monaco Grand Prix, and later won the famous Targa Florio race.
The two did not go along well together and Igor Troubetzkoy filed for divorce in 1951. Subsequently, Barbara attempted a suicide which made headlines around the world.
Porfirio Rubirosa
The fifth marriage, with the famous Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, lasted just 53 days, enough to make Barbara’s son lose his temper for good since he learned of his mother’s new husband after the fact and from the newspapers: the Milwakee Sentinel reported that “for her fifth marriage, the bride dresses in black and carries a scotch and soda in her hand.”
In the scarce two months of their marriage, Porfirio Rubirosa managed to squander the record sum of about USD 60,000 a day on eccentric purchases and gifts to his real partner, the Hungarian-American socialite and actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Barbara and Porfirio divorced in 1954.
Gottfried Von Cramm
For her sixth marriage, in 1955, Barbara married the Baron Gottfried Von Cramm.
Gottfried von Cramm was a German tennis star of the 1930s, renowned for his sportsmanship and graceful play. Born on July 7, 1909, he came from an aristocratic family and was known as the “Baron” both for his noble lineage and his elegant demeanor on the court.
This union lasted four years but it was what could be called a “sexless marriage”, since the baron-tennis player-war survivor was homosexual.
When word spread among friends, Hutton proved quite adamant about it:
“Of course I knew, I just wish I didn’t find his naked men in the house.”
Raymond Doan
Her seventh (and last) marriage was also short-lived, from 1964 to 1966, but it made her a princess again (for the third time), since Raymond Doan was an adopted member of the royal family of Champasakin, a province of Laos.
After this final divorce in 1966, she stopped dating men and Barbara’s mental state —oscillating between alcohol intoxication and sleeping pill narcolepsy — became a public affair.
But fate had the coup de grace in store for her.
In 1972, her only son Lance Reventlow was seeking real-estate developers as partners to build a ski resort in Aspen, Colorado, where he had a home.
Lance was an experienced pilot, with thousands of hours, rated fully for IFR on multi-engine planes, but on July 24, 1972, Reventlow was a passenger, scouting locations for real estate in a hired single-engine Cessna 206.
The pilot was an inexperienced 27-year-old student with only 39 hours’ flying time who flew into a blind canyon during a thunderstorm and stalled the aircraft while trying to turn around. The plane plunged to the ground, killing all four aboard.
The Curtain Falls
The death of her only son marked the beginning of the end: after his death, Barbara retired to Los Angeles, where she lived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
She spent her last years in her room, lying in her bed, receiving visits only from administrators and lawyers who updated her on the almost total erosion of her assets, due to uncontrolled squandering, seven millionaire divorces, excessive nonchalance in donations and, admittedly, the outright dishonesty of countless of her managers.
The only exception was Cary Grant, who visited her regularly at the hotel bringing her beautiful bouquets of roses.
Barbara Woolworth Hutton passed away on May 11, 1979, at the age of 67 of a heart attack: she had USD 3,500 left in her account.
— Alberto @ Adorable Times
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