Barbara Hutton was still a teenager when she became one of the wealthiest women in the world, the heiress to a retail fortune that had grown out of her grandfather’s revolutionary idea of selling everything for five or ten cents. Her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, had built a commercial empire on those humble five-and-dime stores, and when he died in 1919, his fortune passed down through the family. Barbara, the only child of his deceased daughter, inherited a share worth nearly thirty million dollars, a sum that would exceed half a billion in today’s money. By the time she gained full control of it in the early 1930s, careful investment had grown it to over fifty million dollars, more than a billion dollars in modern terms.
She was born in New York City on November 14, 1912; her father was Franklyn Laws Hutton, co-founder of the investment firm E. F. Hutton and Company. But the wealth that defined her life came from her mother, Edna Woolworth, who died suddenly in May 1917 at just thirty-three.
The coroner ruled her death a result of suffocation from mastoiditis, but no autopsy was performed, and many suspected she had taken her own life. Barbara, only five years old, was the one who found her mother’s body. Her father proved to be a neglectful presence, a heavy drinker and serial philanderer who left his daughter to be raised by governesses and sent off to private schools in New York and Farmington, Connecticut. Her grandmother’s death in 1924 completed the transfer of the Woolworth inheritance into Barbara’s hands, though she would not control it for nearly another decade.
By the time she did, she had already acquired a reputation in American high society, and it was not a good one. The autumn of 1929 had shattered the great economic boom of the 1920s. The stock market collapsed, the country slid into the Great Depression, and millions of Americans lost their savings and their jobs. In that climate, it was seen as socially toxic when Barbara’s family threw an ostentatious debutante ball for her eighteenth birthday in November 1930.
The event featured a performance by Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular entertainers of the day, and cost more than sixty thousand dollars, over a million dollars in modern terms. The press attacked her savagely, especially since financiers like the Huttons were widely blamed for the nation’s economic ruin. They labeled her the “poor little rich girl,” a nickname that would follow her for the rest of her life, a cruel combination of her vast fortune and her visibly troubled family background. Her personal life became the defining tragedy of her adult years, marked by seven marriages.
Her first, at age twenty, was to Alexis Mdivani, a man from a Georgian family that had fled the Caucasus in the early 1920s claiming persecution by Soviet authorities. The Mdivanis were social climbers, and when Alexis met Barbara, he was already married to Louise Van Allen of the wealthy Astor family. He divorced quickly to marry the much richer Hutton in June 1933. He then began spending her money freely, on top of the one-million-dollar dowry paid to the Mdivani family as part of the union.
By the time Barbara divorced him in the summer of 1935, she had lost a considerable part of her fortune. Her second marriage, to a minor Danish nobleman named Kurt von Reventlow, was even worse. They married just weeks after her split from Mdivani, but the relationship soon deteriorated into physical and emotional abuse. Barbara began drinking heavily and taking drugs, habits she would never shake, and she developed anorexia during the three years of the marriage.
The couple had a son, Lance, born in 1937, who would be Barbara’s only child. Speculation held that her anorexia was a deliberate attempt to prevent another pregnancy, and it did leave her unable to conceive again. Yet she clearly felt affection for her son, successfully contesting custody when she divorced von Reventlow in 1938. She sent Lance to be raised by governesses and at boarding schools, but this simply reflected the standards of her own upbringing and the expectations of American high society at the time.
The next years brought a somewhat happier period. When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, she became an active fundraiser for the Allied cause, supporting Britain and France during a time when the United States was sympathetic but unwilling to enter the war. After France fell in the summer of 1940, she funded and campaigned for the Free French. She moved to California, where she sold war bonds once America entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
It was there that her relationship with actor Cary Grant deepened. Grant was then one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, known for films like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. Barbara had met him years earlier through the millionaire philanthropist Howard Hughes. They married in July 1942, and the media mockingly dubbed them “Cash and Cary.
” It was one of her happier marriages, though it lasted only until 1945. Grant never sought to take her money, and both maintained that they remained close friends long after the divorce. After the war, Barbara moved to Europe, where in 1947 she married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, a French aristocrat and athlete of Russian descent. He used her money to pursue a career as a racing driver during the first golden age of professional motorsport.
That marriage ended in 1951. She did not cope well. The collapse of her fourth marriage, combined with her escalating drug and alcohol abuse and her anorexia, led her to attempt suicide. The news leaked to the media, and once again she was written about on both sides of the Atlantic as the poor little rich girl, more than twenty years after the label was first attached to her.
In December 1953 she stumbled into her fifth and briefest marriage, to Porfirio Rubirosa, a diplomat and playboy from the Dominican Republic. Rubirosa had previously been married to Doris Duke, another of the world’s wealthiest women, born within days of Barbara in 1912. The two heiresses had developed a curious rivalry over the years. Duke had married Rubirosa in 1947, but the marriage collapsed quickly, and Rubirosa walked away with an enormous financial settlement.
Now Barbara married her rival’s ex-husband. The marriage lasted fifty-three days before Rubirosa divorced her and walked away with another substantial settlement. Bizarrely, he acquired a converted B-25 bomber plane in his divorce settlement from both women. Barbara married twice more.
Her sixth husband was Baron Gottfried von Cramm, a German professional tennis player who had won the French Open twice in the 1930s. They married in 1955 and divorced in 1959. Her seventh and final marriage, to Prince Raymond Doan Vinh, a Laotian aristocrat, lasted just over a year in the mid-1960s. By then her life had taken on a tragic shape.
Decades of alcohol, drug dependency, and anorexia had crippled her health. Her lavish spending and endless divorce settlements had consumed a huge share of her fortune, much of it also lost through her own generosity. Friends and acquaintances knew she would listen to requests for financial support, and her frequent intoxication left her vulnerable to exploitation. In 1972, her only child, Lance, was killed in an air crash in his mid-thirties.
After that, Barbara became increasingly reclusive. She sold some of her homes in an attempt to stabilize her finances and moved into the penthouse of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. She spent her last years there, nearly blind, addicted to painkillers and alcohol. On May 11, 1979, she died of a heart attack at sixty-six.
At the time, it was widely believed she had only about three thousand five hundred dollars left in her name, though the full extent of her assets, if any remained, was unclear. A half-century after becoming one of the richest women in the world, America’s prominent poor little rich girl died alone in a hotel suite, the inheritance that had once exceeded a billion dollars reduced to almost nothing.