On the evening of March 21st, 1964, a new museum opened at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The building had cost $7. 5 million to construct.
Edward Durell Stone, the architect behind the Museum of Modern Art for the Rockefellers, had designed it. Nine stories of marble-clad concrete rose above the circle, with decorative portholes and a loggia along the top floor. The sign read "Gallery of Modern Art including the Huntington Hartford Collection."
The building, the land, and the collection all belonged to one man. Huntington Hartford was 52 years old that evening. He stood on the floor of his own museum greeting guests, surrounded by works of Rembrandt, Manet, Degas, and Salvador Dali.
For the opening, he had commissioned Dali to paint The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The gallery charged $1 admission.
It had been built to oppose the institution four blocks away, where abstract expressionists held court and the Rockefellers were patrons. Hartford had spent a decade announcing that abstract art was a fraud. The building was his rebuttal.
The fortune behind him was older than the man. George Huntington Hartford the elder founded the Great American Tea Company in New York in 1859. By 1869, it became the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.
By 1930, A&P ran 16,000 stores in 39 states with combined sales of approximately $2. 9 billion. It was the largest retailer in the world, accounting for roughly 10% of all American grocery spending.
Huntington Hartford did not run any of it. He had never run any of it. He owned approximately 10% of the company through an inheritance routed through his father, Edward, who died in 1922 when Huntington was 11.
His grandfather's trust began paying him an income at age six. By early adulthood, that income approached $1. 5 million per year.
He had not earned it. He had been raised on the understanding that his job was to spend the money appropriately. By the night of the gallery opening, he had been spending it for 30 years.
The list of expenditures was long. A square-rigged sailing ship bought as a private yacht. An artist colony in Rustic Canyon outside Los Angeles.
A theater on Vine Street in Hollywood. Show, a lavish arts magazine launched in 1961, approaching its first $8 million in losses. The land at Columbus Circle, purchased for nearly $1 million in 1956.
And the building itself.
What was already true that evening was that the gallery was running an annual deficit of approximately $580,000 and paying $320,000 a year on a mortgage of $3. 8 million. The collection would begin to be sold off within two years.
The building would be transferred to Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1969 for less than Hartford had spent assembling the project. Within five years, the institution would no longer carry his name.
The empire on which his fortune rested had also begun to slide. A&P had been bleeding capital to the Hartford Trust for decades, declaring most of its profit as dividends rather than reinvesting. The chain that operated 16,000 stores in 1930 operated fewer than 5,000 in 1964.
By 2015, it would file its second bankruptcy and shutter its last 296 stores.
Huntington Hartford stood at the height of his visibility that night. Within ten years, he would be on cocaine. Within 44 years, he would be dead in a borrowed house on the western tip of New Providence Island, with an estate appraised at between $1 and $2 million.
George Huntington Hartford was born on September 5th, 1833, on a farm in Augusta, Maine. He arrived in New York in his 20s and partnered with financier George Gilman in 1859 to open a small tea shop at 31 Vesey Street. The Great American Tea Company sold mail-order tea and coffee at prices established importers could not undercut.
By 1878, the firm operated 70 stores with combined annual sales of $1 million.
His sons did the rest. George Ludlum Hartford and John Augustine Hartford entered the business as teenagers and worked through every position. In 1912, John persuaded his father to test a stripped-down format called the economy store.
The chain grew from approximately 350 stores in 1910 to 4,638 in 1920. By 1930, it reached its apex of 16,000 stores.
The middle son was a different sort. Edward Vassallo Hartford declared early that at least one Hartford ought to be a gentleman. He played the violin at concert level, invented the Hartford automobile shock absorber, and accumulated a personal fortune some accounts placed above $200 million.
He served as corporate secretary of A&P but was not active in management. His brothers paid the dividends his lifestyle required and did not enjoy paying them.
George Huntington Hartford II was born on April 18th, 1911, the second of Edward's two children. He was called Huntington from infancy. His mother was Henrietta Garrard Pulitzer Hartford, a beautiful South Carolina woman.
His father was distant in the years before his death. As his sister Josephine later told Vanity Fair, "I don't think Hunt ever saw him at all."
The trust from his grandfather's estate began paying Huntington at age six. Edward died on June 30th, 1922, at 51, a practicing Christian Scientist who refused to see a doctor through the illness that killed him. Henrietta moved into the role of full attention with energy.
She moved the family to Newport, Rhode Island, into the Sea Verge estate next to Doris Duke's Rough Point. She had fresh milk shipped from New York to Europe by Cunard steamship when they traveled. At dinner parties, she reached across the table to cut her teenage son's meat.
In 1929, Henrietta and Huntington became the first Hartfords listed in the social register. The boy was being raised at a social altitude his uncles had bought, in the keeping of a mother who told him constantly that everyone was after him for his money. He owned a tenth of the largest retailer in the world.
He had no role in running it. He was not expected to.
In April of 1931, Hartford was 20 years old, a sophomore at Harvard. His mother had a candidate for him: Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress who lived next door in Newport. Hartford had other intentions.
He had met an 18-year-old dentist's daughter named Mary Lee Epling, and the two eloped to Maryland. Henrietta, when she learned what her son had done, threw herself on the floor and wept.
The marriage produced no children and lasted nominally for eight years. Mary Lee encouraged him to attempt work, which led to a brief stint at A&P's headquarters. His uncles had no intention of installing their nephew in a senior role.
They put him in the statistics department tracking sales of bread and pound cake. He was absent constantly. In November of 1934, he chose to attend the Harvard-Yale football game rather than report to work.
His career in the family business was over.
What he turned to instead was a sailing ship. The Joseph Conrad had been built in Copenhagen in 1882 as a Danish training vessel. In 1936, Hartford bought her from the Australian sailor Alan Villiers, added a motor engine, installed luxury accommodations, and used her as a private yacht for approximately three years.
In 1939, with the war approaching, he donated the ship to the United States Maritime Commission. She survives today as a museum exhibit at Mystic Seaport.
When the United States entered the war, Hartford accepted a commission in the Coast Guard. He ran his ship aground twice. He served without distinction and returned to civilian life in 1945 with no profession, no marriage, and a continuing dividend income of $1.
5 million per year.
In the summer of 1949, Hartford walked into Ciro's, the nightclub on the Sunset Strip, and noticed the cigarette girl. She was 18 years old, with auburn hair and an aspiring actress's manner. Her name was Marjorie Sue Steel.
She had won a scholarship to the Actors Lab in Hollywood. Hartford bought all her cigarettes.
Marjorie became engaged to Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie Chaplin. According to Hartford, Chaplin told Marjorie she should marry Hartford because he had a lot of money. They were married on September 10th, 1949, in Gardnerville, Nevada.
She was 19. He was 38.
The marriage became the most productive period of Hartford's life. Under her influence, projects began to materialize. The Huntington Hartford Foundation, an artists and writers colony in Rustic Canyon, opened in 1950.
More than 400 artists received residencies before Hartford closed it in 1965. In 1953, he bought the old Wilkes Vine Street Theatre and spent $750,000 refurbishing it. He produced two films for Marjorie.
He began acquiring a serious art collection at her urging, with an emphasis on figurative painting.
Two children arrived. Catherine, called Cathy, was born in 1950. John was born in 1953.
The divorce settlement would establish trust funds of $1 million for each of them.
The marriage did not work. Hartford was a constitutional philanderer. Marjorie tolerated this for a decade.
By 1961, she did not. She arrived home one afternoon and found her belongings in boxes and another woman's clothes hanging in her closet. The divorce went through in 1961.
What Marjorie had organized did not survive the marriage. The artists' colony continued through 1965 before Hartford closed it. The theater was sold in 1964 at a fraction of what he had spent restoring it.
The art collection she had encouraged him to build became the collection he hung at Two Columbus Circle.
The first issue of Show appeared in October of 1961. Hartford described it as a sleek magazine of the arts and culture. The contributors included Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and a roster of writers consistent with a publication that paid its rates.
Hartford treated Show as a personal extension of his cultural project rather than a property to be operated for return. That, in commercial publishing, is generally fatal. The magazine lost approximately $8 million during its first run.
In an early issue, Hartford produced his most frequently quoted self-assessment: "I've tried to use my millions creatively. The golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away."
The larger part of the cultural project was a campaign against modern art. In 1964, he opposed it in a book. Art or Anarchy rested on moral grounds.
Hartford believed the purpose of great art is ethical, that all art should be intelligible to the public, and that the modern artist had sinned against society. His main target was Pablo Picasso. He described abstract expressionism as "an ice age of art."
He admired one modern painter without reservation. Salvador Dali was, in Hartford's published estimation, the greatest painter of contemporary times. Dali compared him to Martin Luther.
Hartford liked the comparison well enough to repeat it in 2004.
The Museum of Modern Art had attempted in early 1959 to obtain a court injunction preventing Hartford from using the name Gallery of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art lost. Hartford kept the name.
He took this as proof of his position.
The building rose nine stories of marble-clad concrete. Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times called it "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." The image stuck.
The building was thereafter known as the lollipop building.
What was inside had been assembled with the same logic as what was outside. Rembrandt, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wyeth, Courbet, Turner, and Dali appeared on the walls. The collection's centerpiece was Dali's The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
Critics did not rally to it. The art press treated it as a private folly with a public address.
The financial picture was clear by 1965. Hartford began selling collection pieces in 1966. In September of that year, he attempted to give the building outright to Fordham University.
Fordham hesitated over the mortgage and declined. In July of 1969, he transferred the building to Fairleigh Dickinson University, which renamed it the New York Cultural Center. His accountants would calculate his total loss on the gallery at approximately $7.
4 million.
The Rembrandt that had once hung inside would sell at Christie's London in 2009 for $33 million. By then, Hartford had been dead for over a year.
Hartford first saw Hog Island off the coast of Nassau in the Bahamas in 1959. The island was a sandy cay of approximately 685 acres. Hartford bought the holdings of Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish founder of Electrolux, for a price reported at between $9 million and $11 million.
He set about transforming it. He hired the Palm Beach architect John Volk to design the original Ocean Club, a 52-room hotel. He had terraced gardens laid out modeled on Versailles.
The most extravagant feature was the cloisters, dismantled stone remnants of a 14th-century French monastery that William Randolph Hearst had purchased in the 1920s and stored in a Florida warehouse. Hartford had stonemasons spend a full year reassembling it on a hill above Nassau Harbor.
He successfully lobbied the Bahamian government to rename the island. In May of 1962, it became Paradise Island. The opening gala, the Bal du Paradis, was held on February 17th, 1962.
Approximately 2,000 guests arrived on private jets. Fireworks experts were flown in from Monaco. Zsa Zsa Gabor attended.
So did Benny Goodman and Burl Ives.
The hotel did not turn a profit. The reason was structural. Hartford had not negotiated a gambling license when he purchased the island.
He had initially declared gambling beneath his vision. By 1963, his losses mounting at an estimated $59,000 a month, he had reversed course and begun publicly lobbying for a license.
The lobbying ran into Sir Stafford Lofthouse Sands, a multimillionaire Bahamian lawyer who served as the colony's Minister of Finance and Tourism. Hartford was instructed that to receive a casino license, he would have to surrender control of the island. Hartford refused.
He was strung along for years.
On January 15th, 1966, Hartford announced the sale of Paradise Island to the Mary Carter Paint Company. Some accounts place the effective payment to Hartford as low as $1 million for an investment of $25 to $30 million. Mary Carter accomplished almost immediately what Hartford had not been able to accomplish in years.
The Paradise Island Casino opened in January of 1968. Mary Carter subsequently renamed itself Resorts International.
Hartford married his third wife, Diane Brown, a model from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on October 19th, 1962. She had a daughter with him in 1964 named Senara Juliet Hartford, called Juliet. Diane left in 1970 over what she described as continuous philandering.
Her later assessment of her former husband was the kind of summary that holds up: "Hunt did many things, but all on his own. He had his own island, his own magazine, his own museum. He learned at an early age to be alone."
On his fitness as a father, she added: "He tried to be a good father, but he didn't know how. He had no role model."
What she meant became visible in 1967. Edward Barton, the son Hartford had fathered out of wedlock in 1938, was 29 years old. Buzzy, as the family called him, had grown up knowing his father's identity.
The acknowledgement had been his central wish for 30 years. Hartford had refused it for 30 years. Buzzy made one more desperate attempt to persuade his father to recognize him in 1967.
The attempt failed. Buzzy then shot himself in the head.
Cathy was the next casualty. She had been 11 when her parents separated, raised primarily at boarding schools, and fell during her late teens into substances. She drank.
She used cocaine, LSD, and heroin. She approached her father at a Manhattan club one evening and begged him to tell her he loved her. He recoiled and left with the women he had picked up.
Cathy died on a beach in Hawaii in June of 1988, age 37, of a drug overdose.
John, the younger child, survived. He moved to Connecticut, became a music teacher, and lived the unobtrusive life his trust had made possible. He died of throat cancer in 2011, three years after his father.
Hartford married his fourth wife in 1974. Elaine Kay was a hairdresser from Fort Lauderdale, approximately a decade younger than Hartford. He had never previously drunk wine.
He had never smoked. Elaine introduced him to cocaine, amphetamines, and Quaaludes. The Quaaludes he liked best.
The marriage went officially through divorce in 1981. Hartford and Elaine continued to live together in his 20-room duplex at Beekman Place, where the household filled with what Vanity Fair described as derelicts and drug addicts who were stealing the artwork and the silver. In 1978, Hartford was hospitalized for an overdose.
In 1983, the building's management voted to evict him. The other tenants, who included Blanchette Rockefeller, requested that Hartford and his household leave.
The next residence was a four-story townhouse on East 30th Street. Conditions deteriorated. Someone in the household slashed Hartford's tendons, reportedly in an effort to extort drugs from him.
He fell down the stairs one night and broke his hip. No one in the house called an ambulance.
On March 24th, 1992, in US District Court in Manhattan, Huntington Hartford filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The petition was filed specifically to halt an auction of the townhouse. The filing estimated his assets at between $500,000 and $999,000 and his liabilities at between $1,000,000 and $9.
9 million.
After the bankruptcy, he moved out of Manhattan. He spent some years in an apartment in Brooklyn. Then he moved upstate to a house in the town of Warwick, New York, in the care of an attorney named Linda Blake who had obtained durable legal control over his affairs.
According to Hartford's family, she slowly sold off many of his remaining paintings and his personal papers. In January of 2004, officials removed Hartford from the Warwick house and had him hospitalized. He was 92 years old.
Juliet Hartford received clearance to transport her father out of the country in February of 2004. She chartered a private plane and flew with him from New York to Nassau. Juliet rented a house in Lyford Cay, hired three nurses, and began the daily work of feeding her father and managing his medications.
Hartford recovered enough by autumn to grant a Vanity Fair interview. It found him at 93, propped against a mountain of pillows, his cheeks sunken because he had lost his teeth. He woke at 5:00 a.
m. to watch CNN and read The New York Times. On his nightstand were Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and volumes of Tennyson, Coleridge, and Kipling.
He was editing Art or Anarchy for possible republication. He was also fighting one last public battle. The American Craft Museum had announced it would purchase the building at 2 Columbus Circle and gut Edward Durell Stone's facade.
The preservation campaign that followed was extraordinary in scale. Tom Wolfe produced a two-part New York Times op-ed defending the Stone design. Hartford himself gave the sentence that became the campaign's most quoted line: "Ed Stone was one of the great architects.
I think it's an absolute disgrace to touch the building in any way."
The demolition of the original marble facade proceeded.
His own assessments of his life had the precision of a man who had finally run out of reasons to flatter himself. On his fortune: "I spent most of it. I wasted some of it."
On whether he would have done anything differently: "Nothing. I always tried to do the right thing." On Juliet, who was sitting beside the bed: "My only and loveliest."
Huntington Hartford died at his home in Lyford Cay on May 19th, 2008. He was 97 years old. His estate at death was appraised at approximately $1 to $2 million.
Bloomberg's postmortem estimate placed the total amount he had spent over his lifetime at close to $1 billion in 2008 dollars.
The Museum of Arts and Design opened later that year in the redesigned building at 2 Columbus Circle. The building no longer carried Hartford's name. It no longer carried his collection.
It no longer carried Edward Durell Stone's facade.
The other empire ran on its own schedule. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company filed its first Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December of 2010. It emerged briefly.
It filed again on July 19th, 2015. The remaining 296 stores closed by November 25th, 2015.
The dividends that had paid Huntington Hartford $1. 5 million a year from age six had been the early sign of what eventually consumed the company that paid them. The trust took the profits.
The stores got older. The competitors built suburban supermarkets while A&P paid out cash to the heirs of the man who had bought the wrong painters.
He had said it himself in the early issue of Show. He had tried to use his millions creatively. The golden bird coming to life had wriggled out of his hand and flown away.
He had been right about the bird. He had simply never figured out which hand had let it go.