On a crisp November evening in 1930, as the Great Depression tightened its grip on the nation, New York City’s elite gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworth retail fortune. The guests, drawn from families like the Astors, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and Rockefellers, were greeted by the French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, dressed whimsically as Santa Claus. Inside, the grand ballroom had been transformed into a winter wonderland, its extravagant floral arrangements alone reportedly costing $50,000, a sum worth nearly a million dollars today. Four orchestras played while 200 waiters served 2,000 bottles of champagne.
As midnight passed, the celebration continued with a seventy-course supper, and by the early hours, 1,000 breakfasts were laid out for those who had danced through the night. The most talked-about detail, however, was the party favor given to each guest: a small jewelry case filled with unmounted diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. The evening, which reportedly cost $60,000, announced Barbara Hutton’s arrival into high society. As one attendee observed, this was the moment she became “Barbara Hutton, debutante, glamour queen, playgirl of the Western World.
” What no one could foresee was that this glittering introduction foreshadowed a life of heartache, addiction, and the relentless pursuit of happiness amid a world of immense wealth. Barbara’s fortune had been secured long before that night. Born on November 14, 1912, in New York City, she was the only child of Edna Woolworth and Franklin Laws Hutton, a founder of the investment firm E. F.
Hutton & Co. Her mother’s death in 1917, when Barbara was just five, left a wound that would never heal. Officially attributed to complications from mastoiditis, rumors persisted that Edna had taken her own life following her husband’s infidelities. Barbara was the one who discovered her mother’s body, an image that haunted her for decades.
Franklin’s subsequent marriage to Irene Bod only deepened her isolation, and Barbara was shuffled among relatives, spending long stretches at her grandparents’ sixty-room Long Island mansion. There, material abundance could not compensate for emotional warmth. Her grandmother, Jenny Woolworth, was consumed by dementia, and her grandfather Frank, who affectionately called her “princess,” was too frail to offer the stable affection she craved. After his death in 1919, her father moved her frequently, each relocation eroding her sense of security.
Those who knew her described her as a wistful, imaginative, lonely child. Her inner world found some comfort in her cousin Jimmy Donahue, who also knew the cold embrace of wealth combined with familial neglect. Their bond, forged in shared experience, became a rare constant in her early life. Her education at prestigious schools could not heal the emotional damage, and as she matured, her quest for love became a defining feature of her life.
Barbara’s search for affection led her into seven marriages, each beginning with hope and ending in disappointment. Her first husband was Prince Alexis Mdivani, a self-proclaimed Georgian prince from a family of social climbers known for marrying into wealth. His sister arranged their meeting, exploiting Barbara’s vulnerability and her immense fortune. The affair began while Alexis was still married to his first wife, and after a quick divorce, he married the twenty-year-old Woolworth heiress in a grand Paris ceremony in 1933.
The reality was far from a fairy tale. Mdivani quickly spent her inheritance on a luxurious home, polo ponies, and jewelry, and the marriage dissolved in March 1935, less than two years after the vows. A settlement reportedly cost Barbara $2 million. Within months, she married Count Kurt Heinrich von Haugwitz-Reventlow.
This union brought her only child, Lance, born in 1936, but the marriage also crumbled, ending by 1941 and costing her an additional $1. 5 million. The following year, she married Hollywood icon Cary Grant. The couple was dubbed “Cash and Cary,” a nickname that played on her wealth and his fame, though Grant was independently wealthy himself.
Initially marked by glamorous public appearances, the relationship deteriorated as Barbara felt overshadowed by Grant’s growing career. She later remarked that he was primarily interested in advancing his stardom, a factor she believed contributed to their separation. The marriage ended amicably, with neither seeking financial compensation. Her fourth marriage, to Prince Igor Troubetzkoy in 1947, lasted until 1951.
A fifth, to Dominican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa in 1953, dissolved after just fifty-three days. In 1955, she married the German tennis star Baron Gottfried von Cramm, a union that drew scrutiny given his known sexual orientation and his imprisonment for homosexual activity, which was illegal at the time. That marriage ended in 1959. Her final attempt, a marriage to Prince Pierre Raymond Doan Vinh Na Champassak of Laos in 1964, concluded in 1966.
Barbara’s wealth, once one of the largest fortunes in America, was steadily consumed by extravagant spending and financial mismanagement. Her collection of homes across the globe, from a Japanese-inspired estate in Mexico to a regal residence in Tangier, was a testament to her taste but also a drain on her resources. Her lack of financial acumen and her reliance on others to manage her estate left her vulnerable to exploitation. Several of her husbands were accused of siphoning her money, and her impulsive purchases of jewelry and art continued to strain her finances.
By the 1960s and 1970s, her life had taken a darker turn. She battled addiction to barbiturates, using them to manage anxiety, and her mixing of these drugs with alcohol led to several near-fatal overdoses and eventually a coma. Her physical health deteriorated severely. She became nearly blind, suffered a debilitating hip injury that left her bedridden, and her mental health declined into erratic behavior, mood swings, and paranoia.
Increasingly reclusive, she spent most of her days confined to her bed, dependent on her staff. The death of her only son, Lance, in a 1972 plane crash plunged her into profound despair. She retreated further from the world, moving into an upscale hotel in Beverly Hills to live out her remaining years in seclusion. Anorexia compounded her physical decline, and her failing eyesight disconnected her from everything around her.
Even as her financial ruin paralleled her physical deterioration, she continued giving money away, often to strangers, further straining what remained of her resources. By the time of her death, on May 11, 1979, at the age of sixty-six, it was reported that she had only $3,500 to her name, a figure hotly contested by those close to her but symbolic of her dramatic fall from financial grace. She died of a heart attack in her hotel suite. The public, who had followed her rise and fall for decades, reacted with shock and sympathy.
Her funeral was as subdued as her final years had been lonely. Held at the Woolworth family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, the service was attended only by a close circle of family and friends, a quiet gathering far removed from the lavish celebrations she had once hosted. It was a fitting tribute to a woman whose life was a complex interplay of immense wealth, public fascination, and a loneliness that no fortune could ever fill.