In the winter of 1910, a young woman from one of New York’s most prominent families walked into the city and vanished without a trace. Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, the daughter of a wealthy importer whose ancestors reached Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower, was last seen on the afternoon of December 12, heading home through Central Park. She never arrived. Her disappearance became one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Gilded Age, and it was only one of several tragedies that would define the lives of America’s richest daughters.
Dorothy was born into privilege on July 1, 1885, in New York City. Her father, Francis Rose Arnold, ran a successful luxury import business, and her mother descended from a prominent British Canadian family. The Arnolds lived in a large home on the Upper East Side, staffed by numerous servants, and Dorothy attended the prestigious Miss Felton’s School for girls, where she studied literature, the classics, French, and even the sciences. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1905, she returned home with ambitions of becoming a writer.
Those ambitions were thwarted. Publishers rejected her stories, and her family mocked her literary aspirations. When she asked her father for money to rent her own apartment in Greenwich Village, he refused, insisting she could write just as easily at home. On the morning of December 12, 1910, Dorothy told her mother she was going to Fifth Avenue to buy an evening dress for her sister’s upcoming party.
She dressed elegantly, wearing an expensive blue serge coat trimmed with fur and a black velvet hat with two blue roses. She bought a box of candy and some books, and around two in the afternoon, she met a family acquaintance named Gladys King outside Brentano’s bookstore. Dorothy said she was heading home and would likely walk through Central Park. That was the last time anyone who knew her ever saw her.
When she failed to appear for dinner, her family grew alarmed. They made quiet phone calls to her friends, but no one had seen her. Fearing a media scandal, the Arnolds delayed reporting her disappearance to the police. Instead, they hired private detectives, but the investigators found nothing.
It was not until late January, more than six weeks after she vanished, that the family finally went public. Her father offered a reward of one thousand dollars, and the press descended on the story. Attention soon turned to a secret relationship Dorothy had been conducting with George Griscom Jr. , the son of a wealthy Pennsylvania businessman.
Griscom was vacationing in Italy at the time of her disappearance and claimed to know nothing of her whereabouts. The police explored several theories. Her father believed she had been murdered in Central Park, but the reservoir was too low that December to conceal a body. A postcard arrived in early February inscribed simply, “I am all right,” signed “Dorothy.
” The handwriting resembled hers, but it was quickly dismissed as a cruel hoax. By the end of February, with no evidence and seventy-five days having passed, the police concluded Dorothy had likely died. Over the following decades, there were sporadic reports of sightings, but none produced anything concrete. Her father spent more than a quarter million dollars searching for her before his death in 1922.
Three theories have persisted: she was murdered and her body hidden; she died during a botched abortion, possibly from a pregnancy involving Griscom; or, disheartened by her failed literary career and deteriorating relationship, she took her own life. In a letter to Griscom, she had written of failure staring her in the face, and her family believed she may have chosen to end her own life. The truth was never established. A generation earlier, another heiress had been born into staggering wealth, but her story ended in isolation and legal chaos.
Huguette Marcelle Clark was born in Paris on June 9, 1906, the daughter of William A. Clark, a former Montana senator and copper magnate who had amassed a fortune worth roughly three hundred million dollars by the time of his death in 1925. Huguette inherited about fifty million dollars, a sum equivalent to more than five billion today. She married briefly in 1928, but the marriage ended within a year, and she retreated into a life of increasing seclusion.
After her mother died in 1963, Huguette became deeply distrustful of outsiders, preferring to speak French so those around her could not understand her. By the late 1980s, she was nearly invisible, and many assumed she was dead. In truth, she was gravely ill, refusing treatment for cancerous lesions that had disfigured her face. In 1991, she was finally hospitalized.
After surgery, she chose to remain in the hospital, paying nearly a thousand dollars a day to stay in her room, and later moving to Beth Israel Medical Center, where she occupied an eleventh-floor room overlooking Central Park. She spent the last twenty years of her life there, paying staff to maintain her Fifth Avenue apartment, her Santa Barbara estate, and a Connecticut mansion she had never lived in. Her health improved in the hospital, but her eccentricity remained. She gave away enormous sums, including more than thirty million dollars to one of her private nurses and twenty-five thousand dollars to a technician who repaired her television.
When she died on May 24, 2011, at the age of 104, her three hundred million dollar estate became the subject of fierce litigation. A will signed weeks before her death left most of her fortune to charities and her nurse, but an earlier will had favored her extended family. The family successfully argued she had been coerced, and the court enforced the earlier will, granting them more than seventy-five percent of the estate. In between these two stories lies the life of Barbara Woolworth Hutton, born in New York City on November 14, 1912.
Her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, had invented the five-and-dime store and built the Woolworth Building, once the tallest in the world. Her mother, Edna, died suddenly in 1917 under circumstances that many suspected were suicide. Barbara, only five years old, was the one who found her mother’s body. Her father, a serial womanizer and heavy drinker, largely left her to a governess and a series of boarding schools.
When her grandparents died, she inherited a third of the Woolworth fortune, roughly thirty million dollars, which her father invested well. By the early 1930s, it had grown to more than fifty million, over a billion in today’s money. But her wealth came with a public burden. In November 1930, her family threw her an eighteenth birthday party costing over sixty thousand dollars, complete with a performance by singer Rudy Vallee, while the country was sinking into the Great Depression.
The press branded her the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a title that followed her for the rest of her life. Barbara married seven times. Her first husband, Alexei Mdivani, was a Georgian social climber who left his previous wife and quickly spent vast sums of Barbara’s money before she divorced him in 1935. Her second husband, Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow, was physically and emotionally abusive.
During their three-year marriage, she developed anorexia nervosa and began drinking heavily, habits she never fully overcame. She gave birth to their son Lance in 1937. During World War II, she became active in fundraising and war bond sales, and in 1942 she married the actor Cary Grant. The press mocked them as “Cash and Cary,” but the marriage was one of her happiest, although it ended in 1945.
Her fourth husband, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, used her money to pursue a career in European motor racing. After their divorce in 1951, she attempted suicide. Her fifth marriage, to the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, lasted only fifty-three days but ended with a substantial settlement. Her sixth husband, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, a German tennis champion, and her seventh, Prince Raymond Doan Vinh na Champassak of Laos, rounded out a life marked by serial divorce, addiction, and declining fortune.
By the mid-1960s, much of her wealth had been lost to spending, settlements, theft, and simple mismanagement. In 1972, her only son Lance was killed in a plane crash. After that, Barbara withdrew from the world, moving into a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, addicted to painkillers and alcohol and nearly blind. She died of a heart attack on May 11, 1979, at the age of sixty-six.
It was widely reported that only thirty-five hundred dollars remained in her name, a tragic end for a woman who had once been one of the richest in the world. Perhaps the most dramatic of all these lives began in New York City on December 11, 1950, with the birth of Christina Onassis. Her father, Aristotle Onassis, had risen from modest origins in Smyrna to become the world’s largest shipping magnate, and her mother, Tina Livanos, was the daughter of one of his fiercest rivals. Christina grew up in luxury across three continents, largely cared for by servants while her parents pursued their business empires.
Her parents divorced in 1960 after her father’s long affair with opera singer Maria Callas, and in 1968 he married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated president. Christina and her older brother Alexander resented their stepmother, whom Christina privately dismissed as her father’s unfortunate obsession. The family’s fortunes turned in January 1973, when Alexander, an experienced pilot, was killed in a plane crash in Athens. He was twenty-four years old.
His father became paranoid, blaming first the young pilot and then the CIA, offering rewards to anyone who could confirm his delusions. Christina became the heir to the family empire. Two years later, her mother died of a drug overdose, widely believed to be suicide, and shortly after that, her father, weakened by myasthenia gravis and broken by grief, died in Paris on March 15, 1975. Within twenty-six months, Christina had lost her brother, her mother, and her father.
She was left with an estate worth roughly six hundred million dollars and control of the Onassis business empire. She sold large portions of the company, donated other parts to charity, and retained the core shipping and airline interests, although much of the daily management was left to her board and executives. Her personal life was chaotic. She married four times, each ending in divorce, and gave birth to a single daughter, Athena, in 1985.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she struggled with weight, dieting, and a growing dependence on prescription drugs. On November 19, 1988, she was found dead in a bathtub in Argentina. She was thirty-seven years old. The official cause of death was a heart attack, complicated by drug use.
Her daughter inherited the estate, and legal battles over the fortune continued for years. Athena eventually came into her inheritance on her eighteenth birthday in 2003. From the vanished heiress of 1910 to the reclusive invalid of the twenty-first century, these women shared a common burden. Born into immense wealth, they inherited not only fortunes but also the public’s fascination, their families’ failures, and, too often, tragedy.
Some died in obscurity, some died young, and at least one vanished without explanation. Their stories remain a reminder that money, however vast, offers no protection from the sorrows of ordinary life.