Barbara Hutton died of a heart attack on May 11, 1979, in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. She was 66 years old and had spent her final months in bed, surrounded by half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola and stacks of books. Only ten people attended her funeral. At age 21, she had inherited roughly $50 million from her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth.
It took her about four decades to lose nearly all of it. The press had long called her the “poor little rich girl. ” What began as mockery became something closer to an epitaph. Over the course of her life, she married seven men: two princes, a count, a baron, an ambassador, an artist, and Cary Grant.
Six of those husbands left with significant portions of her wealth. Only Grant left her as rich as he found her. Woolworth built his fortune on the nickels and dimes of ordinary Americans. Born in 1852 on a farm near Rodman, New York, he hated farming and wanted to sell things.
In 1878, working at a dry goods store in Watertown, he convinced his boss to let him arrange slow-moving inventory on a counter where customers could browse freely. Everything was priced at five cents. The items sold faster than anyone expected. He borrowed $300 and opened his own five-cent store in Utica, New York, in February 1879.
It failed within weeks. He tried again in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this time adding items at ten cents. The store succeeded and changed the history of American retail. Fixed prices, open shelves, and bulk purchasing directly from manufacturers eliminated the middleman.
By 1900, Woolworth had 59 locations. By 1911, after merging with four rival chains, the FW Woolworth Company ran 596 stores across the country. But Woolworth wanted more than retail dominance. He wanted a monument.
He reportedly held a grudge after being denied a loan by Metropolitan Life, which had built the tallest building in the world. He told his architect, Cass Gilbert, to make his building 50 feet taller. The Woolworth Building, at 233 Broadway in Manhattan, rose 792 feet. He paid the $13.
5 million construction cost in cash. On opening night in April 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington that illuminated 80,000 light bulbs across the facade. Still, New York high society viewed Woolworth as a shopkeeper. The old-money families of Fifth Avenue refused to accept a man who made his fortune selling penny goods to the working class.
This rejection consumed him, and he pushed his three daughters toward marriages that would grant them the social standing he could never achieve. Woolworth died on April 8, 1919, from septicemia caused by an untreated dental infection. He was 66. His personal fortune was estimated at approximately $76 million, and his company operated more than a thousand stores.
One of his grandchildren, a seven-year-old girl named Barbara, would eventually inherit a third of everything. Barbara Woolworth Hutton was born on November 14, 1912, in New York City. Her mother, Edna, was the middle of Woolworth’s three daughters. Her father, Franklin Laws Hutton, was a partner in his brother Edward’s investment firm EF Hutton and Company.
The marriage was unhappy. Franklin drank heavily and kept mistresses openly. Edna reportedly began an affair of her own with a man named Bud Bouvier, whose niece would one day become Jacqueline Kennedy. On May 2, 1917, four-year-old Barbara found her mother’s body.
Edna Woolworth Hutton was dead at 33. The official cause was suffocation due to mastoiditis, an infection behind the ear. The coroner decided no autopsy was necessary, but the explanation satisfied almost no one. Persistent rumors held that Edna had taken poison after discovering another of her husband’s affairs.
Biographer C. David Heymann wrote that the family reportedly paid off city officials to prevent a formal investigation. The press reported that a maid had discovered the body. Heymann wrote that it was Barbara.
Franklin Hutton showed little interest in raising his daughter. Barbara was sent to her grandparents’ estate, Winfield Hall, a marble palace of more than 30,000 square feet in Glen Cove, Long Island. She played alone in its enormous rooms. Her grandmother, Jenny, spent her days in a white wicker rocking chair under the watch of a medical attendant, unable to hold a conversation.
Frank Woolworth was kind to Barbara. He called her “princess” and surrounded her with material comforts. When he died, Barbara lost the only adult who had shown her sustained warmth. She was six years old.
From that point on, she was shuffled between relatives, none of whom wanted the full burden of raising her. In 1924, Barbara’s grandmother Jenny died, leaving approximately $26 million to her granddaughter in a trust fund. An additional $2 million in stock went into a second trust. Both were administered by Franklin Hutton.
Whatever his failings as a father, Franklin proved a gifted investor. He liquidated volatile holdings before the stock market crash of 1929, while the rest of the Woolworth family lost heavily. By the time Barbara turned 21 in November 1933, her inheritance had grown to roughly $42 million, with around $8 million more from her mother’s estate. In today’s terms, the combined fortune would be worth well over a billion dollars.
She was one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her introduction to society came three years before the full inheritance arrived. On her 18th birthday in November 1930, she was given a debutante ball at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. The event cost $60,000 at a time when millions of Americans could not feed their families.
Four orchestras played. Two hundred waiters served a thousand seven-course midnight suppers. Two thousand bottles of champagne were uncorked. Maurice Chevalier, dressed as Santa Claus, greeted guests.
Rudy Vallée performed. Every guest received a small jewelry case containing unmounted diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Outside, bread lines stretched around city blocks. The backlash was immediate.
Newspapers ran the cost of the party beside photographs of soup kitchens. Columnists attacked Barbara personally, though she had planned none of it. It was during this period that the press began calling her the “poor little rich girl. ” Songwriters joined in.
Harry Warren composed “I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store,” and everyone understood who it was about. Franklin Hutton sent his daughter to Europe to escape the onslaught. She would spend most of the next five decades living abroad. What few people noticed was that Barbara also wrote poetry.
In 1934, she privately published a slim volume called “The Enchanted” in a limited edition of 200 copies. A second collection, “The Wayfarer,” followed in 1957. Decades later, at her funeral, actor Cliff Robertson read one of her poems aloud. The Mdivani family arrived in the West with nothing but a story.
Their father had served as an aide to the Russian tsar before the revolution. In Georgia, they had held the rank of ari, a form of untitled low nobility. By the time they reached New York and Paris, they were introducing themselves as princes and princesses. No one checked.
The press gave them a name that stuck: the “Marrying Mdivanis. ”
In the summer of 1932, while Barbara was visiting San Sebastián in Spain, Alexis Mdivani’s sister Russy arranged for Barbara and Alexis to be found together in a compromising position. Russy then told Barbara that unless she agreed to marry Alexis, the scandal would be made public. Barbara, 20 years old and terrified of the press, gave in.
They were married on June 22, 1933, in a Russian Orthodox church in Paris. Barbara’s father provided a dowry of $1 million. On their wedding night, Alexis told Barbara she was too fat. She was five-foot-four and weighed 148 pounds.
She began a crash diet the next morning, consuming nothing but black coffee for weeks at a time. She dropped 40 pounds in a matter of months. The comment marked the beginning of a disorder that never left her. They divorced in March 1935.
The total cost of Alexis Mdivani exceeded $2 million, but the real damage was not financial. The marriage had established a pattern. Five months after the divorce, Alexis was dead. On August 1, 1935, he lost control of his Rolls-Royce near Albons in Catalonia, Spain.
He was speeding toward a train station with Baroness Maud von Thyssen seated beside him. The car struck a tree and overturned. Alexis was killed instantly. He was 27.
Barbara had already moved on. Within days of finalizing the divorce, she had agreed to marry again. The next man was Count Curt von Haugwitz-Reventlow. He would prove far more dangerous than the first.
Barbara gave him $1. 5 million before the ceremony. Reventlow was Danish, tall, controlling, and possessed of a violent temper that revealed itself almost immediately. He dominated Barbara through intimidation, verbal cruelty, and escalating physical violence.
On at least one occasion, the abuse was severe enough to put her in the hospital. Their son, Lance, was born in London on February 24, 1936. The press called him the richest baby in the world. Barbara nearly died during the delivery.
In December 1937, Barbara signed an oath of renunciation, giving up her American citizenship. Reventlow had pushed her to do it. The official reason was to reduce her tax burden. The real motive, according to those who knew the arrangement, was to eliminate American inheritance taxes in the event of her death.
As a Danish citizen, her fortune would pass to Reventlow and her son with far fewer obstacles. The reaction was ferocious. Columnist Walter Winchell called her “society’s most outrageous child. ” The New York Times used the word “despicable.
” Within two days of her departure for Europe, three Woolworth stores in New York closed. Employees wired Barbara at sea, urging her to order the company’s management to concede a living wage to workers existing on starvation pay. She never responded. The renunciation was the moment when America turned on Barbara Hutton for good.
By this point, Barbara was using sedatives regularly and eating almost nothing. The cycle of restriction that had begun with Mdivani’s cruelty had hardened into something clinical and permanent. Doctors later called it a cry for the attention she had never received as a child. Barbara and Reventlow separated in 1938.
He demanded $5 million and full custody of Lance. The legal battle dragged through Danish and American courts for years, with the final divorce decree not arriving until 1941. Reventlow was eventually awarded temporary custody, but Barbara regained her son in 1945. In 1936, Barbara and Reventlow purchased a 12-acre plot inside Regent’s Park in London.
The site had once held a villa designed for the third Marquis of Hertford, later known as St. Dunstan’s after serving as a hospital for soldiers blinded in World War I. A fire in 1936 destroyed much of what remained. Barbara hired the architectural firm Wimperis, Simpson and Guthrie to build a new house in the neo-Georgian style.
Construction took 15 months. She named it Winfield House after her grandfather. The grounds were extraordinary. Twelve acres of private garden made it the second-largest private garden in central London, with only Buckingham Palace having more land.
She barely had time to enjoy it. By 1939, the marriage to Reventlow had collapsed, and war was closing in on Europe. Barbara took Lance and left for California. The house stood empty.
When the fighting began, the Royal Air Force requisitioned the property as a base for a barrage balloon unit. Officers played football on the Great Lawn and named their team “Barbara’s Own. ” When Barbara returned after the war, she found buckled floorboards, peeling walls, shattered windows, and electrical wires hanging loose from the ceilings. She stood in the entrance hall and made a decision that took everyone around her by surprise.
She called her lawyer in New York and told him to give the house to the United States government. The price was $1. President Harry Truman accepted the gift in a personal letter. The house underwent extensive renovation and in 1955 became the official residence of the United States ambassador to the Court of St James’s.
It has served that function ever since. The house outlasted everything else she owned. When rumors spread in 1942 that Barbara Hutton was seeing Cary Grant, the tabloids fused their names into a single phrase: “Cash and Cary. ” For once, the joke got the story exactly wrong.
Archibald Alexander Leach was born on January 18, 1904, in Horfield, a working-class district of Bristol, England. His father pressed suits in a clothing factory. His mother, Elsie, vanished from his life when he was nine. His father told the boy she had gone away.
The truth was that Elsie had been committed to a county asylum. Archie grew up believing his mother had simply left him. He ran away at 14, joining a troop of acrobats led by a performer named Bob Pender. The troop crossed to New York in 1920.
Young Leech stayed behind when they sailed home. He drifted through vaudeville, changed his name, and by the early 1930s had landed in Hollywood. Within five years, he was one of the highest-paid actors in the industry. He negotiated his own contracts and kept meticulous accounts of every dollar.
Barbara and Cary were introduced through Dorothy di Frasso, an American countess who moved between Hollywood and European aristocracy with equal ease. They met at a dinner party in Los Angeles in the summer of 1941. Barbara was thin, exhausted, and deeply wary of men who wanted her money. Grant wanted nothing she could buy.
He earned more than $300,000 a year and had no interest in her inheritance. She found his indifference disorienting. They married on July 8, 1942, at the home of Grant’s agent near Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. For a brief stretch, they appeared content.
Grant was affectionate with Lance and reportedly the only one of Barbara’s husbands who treated the boy with genuine warmth. But the differences that attracted them became the fractures that ended them. Grant was disciplined and self-contained. He rose early, ate simply, and expected order.
Barbara kept no schedule. She slept until noon, ate almost nothing, and gave away money with a generosity that bewildered him. She once handed a hotel chambermaid a mink coat. Grant did not see this as kindness.
He saw waste. They separated in 1944. The divorce was finalized on August 30, 1945. Barbara offered Grant a settlement.
He refused. He returned the jewelry and gifts she had given him during the marriage. When the press asked him about the divorce, he said only that he wished her well. Of seven husbands, Cary Grant was the only one who left Barbara Hutton no poorer than he found her.
Between 1947 and 1966, Barbara married four more times. Each union was shorter than the last. Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, a Lithuanian-born painter, married her in Switzerland in 1947. They separated in 1951.
Porfirio Rubirosa was a Dominican former polo player and diplomat whose chief talent was the seduction of wealthy women. He had been married to the daughter of the Dominican dictator, then to the actress Danielle Darrieux, then to Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress. He and Barbara married on December 30, 1953. She reportedly gave him a coffee plantation, a stable of polo ponies, a converted bomber aircraft, and cash gifts estimated between $2 and $3 million.
The marriage lasted 53 days. One acquaintance later said Barbara did not marry him because she believed he loved her. She married him because she was tired of pretending the next one would be different. Baron Gottfried von Cramm was different, though not in the way she needed.
A former tennis champion who had reached the Wimbledon final twice in the 1930s, he had also spent time in a German prison during the war, convicted under laws that criminalized homosexuality. He and Barbara married in 1955. The union was cordial and affectionate. They separated in 1959.
He remained a friend. The final husband was Prince Doan Vinh Na Champassak, a Laotian Vietnamese artist whom Barbara married in 1964. They divorced in 1966. She was 53.
She did not marry again. Barbara arrived in Tangier in the late 1940s and recognized it immediately. The city operated under international administration with loose laws, minimal taxation, and almost no oversight. She bought a house in the Casbah, then the house next to it, then another.
Over time, she merged them into a single compound known as Sidi Hosni, a palace of reportedly 60 rooms that climbed the hillside in a maze of tiled courtyards, narrow staircases, and rooftop terraces with views across the Strait of Gibraltar. She hosted dinners for 40 guests in rooms lit entirely by candles. Truman Capote visited and later described the scene with a mixture of admiration and unease. Cecil Beaton photographed her there, posed in a tiara at the entrance to one of the courtyards.
The image became one of the most reproduced photographs of her life. Tangier gave Barbara something none of her marriages had managed: autonomy. She reportedly paid for neighborhood festivals, distributed food during religious holidays, and funded a medical clinic. But Tangier also accelerated what was already underway.
Barbara ate less and less. She relied increasingly on sedatives and codeine. By the late 1950s, visitors described a woman who could barely climb the stairs of her own house. In her final years at Sidi Hosni, servants reportedly carried her through the Casbah in a sedan chair.
One of Barbara’s most famous possessions was the Vladimir tiara, which had belonged to Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia. When the revolution came in 1917, a loyalist smuggled the piece out of the Vladimir Palace in St Petersburg, hidden in a diplomatic bag. It passed through several hands before reaching Cartier in Paris, where Barbara eventually acquired it. The tiara was set with 15 interlocking diamond circles, each suspending a pearl drop.
Cecil Beaton photographed Barbara wearing it at Sidi Hosni. In that image, she looks regal, gaunt, and entirely alone. Over three decades, Barbara assembled one of the most significant private jewelry collections of the 20th century. She acquired a strand of pearls with a claimed connection to Marie Antoinette, though the attribution has been questioned by historians.
She owned Mughal emeralds, Burmese rubies, and a jade collection that specialists considered among the finest in private hands. She wore major pieces to small dinners or while sitting alone in hotel suites. She gave away jewelry impulsively, pressing rings and bracelets on friends, staff, and near strangers. She sought out pieces that had belonged to women of extraordinary status: Romanov grand duchesses, Bourbon queens, Mughal empresses.
Much of the collection was dispersed before she died. After her death in 1979, what remained was auctioned by Sotheby’s. The Vladimir tiara was not among them. It had already passed to another owner years earlier.
Lance Reventlow grew up in the custody of lawyers. By the time Barbara won him back in 1945, he was nine years old and had lived in more countries than most adults visit in a lifetime. In his mid-20s, he founded Reventlow Automobiles Incorporated and set out to build an American sports car capable of competing against the European constructors who dominated road racing. The result was the Scarab, a front-engined car powered by a Chevrolet V8.
It won several domestic races in 1958. Lance entered the car in international competition the following year, but the sport had moved to rear-engine designs. He shut the operation down before turning 30. He married the actress Jill St John in 1959.
They divorced in 1963. A year later, he married Cheryl Holdridge, a former Mouseketeer. On July 24, 1972, Lance Reventlow boarded a small plane in Aspen, Colorado. The aircraft crashed into the mountains shortly after takeoff.
He was 36 years old. The cause was later attributed to severe weather conditions and possible mechanical failure. Cheryl Holdridge survived him. She died of a brain tumor in 1983 at the age of 39.
Barbara was in Tangier when the news reached her. According to those present, she did not speak for several days. She did not attend the funeral. Some accounts say she was too ill to travel.
Others say she could not face it. Her health, already fragile, deteriorated sharply in the months that followed. Lance Reventlow left behind no children. The Scarab cars he built survive in private collections.
Frank Woolworth left three daughters. None of the marriages produced a family equipped to manage what they had been given. Frank had spent a lifetime building systems of extraordinary efficiency inside his stores. He applied none of that discipline to the fortune those stores created.
Jimmy Donahue, Jesse’s son and Barbara’s closest childhood companion, burned through his share with a flamboyance that made even Barbara’s spending look measured. He died in 1966 at the age of 51. The company followed the family. By the 1970s, the five-and-dime model was obsolete.
Discount chains had taken the customers Woolworth once owned. In 1997, the company shut its remaining 400 American and Canadian locations. The corporation survived by pivoting to its athletic footwear subsidiary and eventually rebranded as Foot Locker. The Woolworth Building still stands at 233 Broadway.
It is a condominium now. The name above the door belongs to a company that no longer exists in any form its founder would recognize. In her final years, Barbara Hutton lived in hotels. She moved between the Pierre in New York, the Ritz in London, and eventually the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, where she settled into a suite and rarely left.
She had attempted in the early 1970s to regain her American citizenship, the one she had signed away under pressure 35 years earlier. The application was reportedly approved, though the exact timeline remains unclear. Her world contracted steadily. Her weight reportedly dropped below 80 pounds.
She relied on a rotating staff of nurses. She died on May 11, 1979. She was 66, the same age her grandfather had been when he died 60 years earlier. The funeral was held at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where she was buried near Frank Woolworth in the family mausoleum.
Fewer than a dozen people attended. Cliff Robertson read one of her poems aloud. Advisers estimated that Barbara had given away or spent in excess of $500 million over the course of her adult life, adjusted for inflation. She gave to husbands, to strangers, to causes, and to anyone who asked with enough conviction.
What she could not give away was the label the press had fixed to her at 18. It followed her into the mausoleum.