In the early 1950s, Barbara Hutton was still one of the most famous women in the world, but her life had become a pattern of destructive marriages and staggering financial loss. When she married Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat and playboy, in 1953, the union lasted only 53 days. The cost was estimated at between three and five million dollars, though the true price of the marriage went far beyond money. Rubirosa was a man whose name generated headlines long before he met Hutton.
A competitive racing driver and an official diplomat for the regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, he had previously been married to Trujillo’s daughter, Flor de Oro. That marriage gave him diplomatic cover and access to international social circles, which he used with considerable skill throughout his life. Barbara had married him just months after her divorce from her third husband, and the pattern was already deeply established. Her first marriage, to the Russian aristocrat Alexis Mdivani, had set the tone.
Mdivani spent her money freely, treating her fortune as if it belonged to someone else, which in practical terms it did. Their divorce was followed by a custody dispute over their son that spanned multiple countries and legal systems, an exhausting international battle that marked the most difficult period of her life to that point. Her second husband was Cary Grant. The marriage surprised many because it seemed genuinely different.
Grant was kind and genuinely fond of her, and he made real efforts to be present for her son, Lance, from her first marriage. For a time, the relationship had real warmth. But the couple came from incompatible worlds, and despite remaining on friendly terms for years after their divorce, they could not make the marriage work. Barbara’s subsequent marriage to Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, a Russian-born French aristocrat and racing driver, was quieter and produced fewer dramatic public incidents.
It lasted four years and ended in 1959 with the most painless divorce of her life, with no custody battle, no public acrimony, and no reported financial warfare. Then came Rubirosa. The marriage was brief, but it was not subtle. Barbara, who had been ill before the wedding, spent parts of those 53 days confined to bed, while her new husband was photographed at parties across the city.
He did not trouble himself to be discreet. Barbara had been born into extraordinary wealth. She was the meeting point of two separate fortunes, but her childhood was marked by loss. Her mother died when Barbara was four years old, officially of a cerebral hemorrhage, though those close to the family have long suggested it was a choice rather than a sudden illness.
Her father, Franklin Hutton, showed little interest in raising her, and she was largely handed off to relatives and governesses, moving between wealthy households without ever feeling quite at home. The press had followed her story for decades, famously criticizing her debut ball in the 1930s, which cost an estimated $60,000 while millions of Americans stood in food lines. The scrutiny followed her through each marriage, and after seven husbands, she spent her final years in a world that had largely stopped paying attention. What is often lost in the narrative of Barbara Hutton as a woman who simply spent everything she had is that she was seriously unwell.
Years of restricted eating, prescription medication, and the emotional cost of five failed marriages had accumulated in her body as well as her mind. People who knew her described her as genuinely funny, warm, and self-aware, with a sharp sense of humor that surprised those who knew her only from the headlines. She spoke multiple languages fluently and wrote poetry privately throughout her life, without any ambition for publication. She had described Lance, her son, as the person she had loved most simply and most completely.
When she received news of his death, by accounts of people present that day, she received it in silence and did not leave her room for an extended period afterward. Her final marriage, her seventh, came in her later years and brought her the closest she came to peace in her adult life. But the earlier marriages had taken their toll. She had once sold pieces of her inheritance piece by piece, sometimes to cover debts, sometimes because someone in her circle had identified them as available.
By the time of her death, the fortune she had inherited was largely gone. The pattern of her life, the marriages, the money, and the public fascination, had followed her across three continents. But underneath it all remained the same unresolved question that had been present since a four-year-old girl was told her mother had simply gone away.