The gilded ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton shimmered under the weight of a thousand orchids and roses, flown in against the season’s will, while outside, the fourth winter of the Great Depression tightened its grip on breadlines that stretched for blocks. Inside, an 18-year-old in white velvet prepared to be presented to society as the richest unmarried woman in America. The date was December 22nd, 1930, and the girl was Barbara Hutton, heir to a fortune that would soon be valued at nearly $50 million, a sum that in today’s dollars approaches a billion. The orchestra tuned, the guests arrived in evening dress, and the men outside had no work and no coats warm enough for the cold. It was a tableau of such obscene contrast that the nation’s poets would soon sharpen their pens against her, but the young woman at the center of it all had already learned a lesson far more corrosive than public mockery. She had learned, by the age of four, that a room could be full of people and still be entirely silent of affection. Barbara Hutton was born on November 14th, 1912, the only child of Franklin Laws Hutton, a founding partner of the brokerage firm EF Hutton, and Edna Woolworth Hutton, daughter of the five-and-dime titan Frank Winfield Woolworth. Her grandfather had built an empire out of buttons, thread, and penny candy, selling ordinary things in extraordinary volume to people who had never had anyone sell them anything cheaply before. By the time he died in 1919, the FW Woolworth Company operated more than a thousand stores, and he had erected a 60-story skyscraper in lower Manhattan, the tallest building in the world, paid for entirely in cash just to prove that he could. Yet despite all of it, he had never quite been accepted by the old families of New York society, new money in a world that still measured a person by how old their money was, by which church they attended, and which their grandfathers had attended before them. He resolved that his grandchildren would not have that problem, and he could not have known how that resolution would play out or what it would cost the granddaughter who carried it. Barbara’s father was a sharp, ambitious man who treated his marriage the way he treated a position in the market, something to be managed, not something to be honored, watched for weakness, exited the moment it stopped serving him. He drank heavily, often beginning in the afternoon, and he kept other women sometimes inside the very houses where his wife and daughter were also living, an arrangement the household staff understood and the family pretended not to. Her mother, Edna, was a shy, anxious woman who had married into a union that gave her wealth and gave her almost nothing else, no real partner, no real say in how her own household was run, no defense against a husband who had decided early that fidelity was a luxury he could afford to skip. The household Barbara was born into had nurses for the baby, and a name on the brokerage door for the father, and very little tenderness flowing between any of them. Visitors to the Hutton homes in these years would later recall a house that ran with the precision of a hotel, staff for every task, schedules kept to the minute, and a child taught early that a room could be full of people and still be entirely silent of affection On May 2nd, 1917, when Barbara was 4 years old, she walked into her mother’s suite at the Plaza Hotel and found her dead. Edna Hutton had been suffering for some time in chronic pain in a marriage that had collapsed around her, and the death was ruled the result of an illness, though sounding circumstances and the family’s hurried hushed handling of it would leave room for speculation for the rest of Barbara’s life about how much of it had been illness and how much had been despair. But what is certain is this. A 4-year-old girl found her mother’s body, and the adults around her responded by saying almost nothing about it ever again. There was no funeral conversation held for the child’s benefit, no explanation offered in language she could carry forward, no acknowledgment in the years that followed that the event had happened to her at all, and not simply around her. Grief in that house was not discussed. It was managed the way her father managed everything, with discretion and with silence, filed away like an embarrassing position on a balance sheet best not mentioned again Two years later, her grandfather Frank Woolworth died, and Barbara, not yet 7 years old, became on paper one of the wealthiest children in the world, heir to roughly a third of an estate that would eventually be valued at tens of millions of dollars. Her father took over the management of that fortune in trust until she came of age. By the time Barbara turned 21 in 1933, that trust would be valued at approximately $50 million, a sum that adjusted into today’s terms approaches a billion, and that in the depths of the depression sounded less like an inheritance and more like a fable told to frighten children about excess. She had governesses instead of a mother. She had a father who saw her perhaps twice a week on his terms when it suited him, arriving and departing on a schedule that had nothing to do with her own. She had by every outward measure the largest fortune a girl her age had ever possessed in American history. What she did not have in any sustained way was someone whose attention she did not have to compete for or earn or purchase by being agreeable enough not to be sent away There is a single object that recurs across nearly every account of Barbara’s childhood, and it is worth naming early because it will return. A small gold key given to her as a child by one of her governesses, meant to unlock a music box that played a lullaby her mother had supposedly hummed to her. Barbara kept that key for the rest of her life, through seven marriages, through three continents, through the sale of nearly every other object she owned. People who knew her in her final years in Los Angeles, decades later, said she still kept it near her bed. It was in the end one of the only things her staggering wealth was never able to either improve upon or replace By 1930, Barbara Hutton was 18, and high society tradition demanded a debut, a formal presentation to the world as a marriageable young woman, the ritual by which families of a certain class announced that a daughter was now officially available to be courted. Her father, not normally a man inclined toward extravagance on his daughter’s behalf, spared no expense this time. The supper dance at the Ritz-Carlton on December 22nd cost in the neighborhood of $60,000, roughly four times what an unusually lavish debutante ball cost that same season, and nearly a million in today’s money. A sum that included some $50,000 on flowers and decoration alone, blooms flown in out of season and arranged through a ballroom built to hold a thousand guests. Among those guests were Rockefellers and Astors, the very families whose acceptance Frank Woolworth had spent a lifetime chasing and never fully secured. Entertained that night by the popular singers Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier, Barbara wore a gown of white velvet and diamond earrings, and the photographs taken of her that evening would run in newspapers across the country within days. It was by every measure her father cared about a triumph, the Woolworth name finally inside the rooms it had always been kept out of The country was not impressed. The same newspapers that ran photographs of Barbara in white velvet ran them beside photographs of breadlines stretching down city blocks, of men sleeping in shanty towns built from packing crates, of a nation four years into an economic collapse that had made fortunes like the Woolworth fortune look less like an achievement and like an obscenity. The poet Ogden Nash mocked her in print in verse sharp enough that it followed her for years. The backlash was severe enough that her family sent her abroad to Europe, ostensibly for a grand tour, in practice to get her out of the path of the press until the outrage cooled. A girl removed from her own country because her own country could no longer stand to look at her. It was during this period that a phrase attached itself to her that would follow her for the rest of her life and outlive her by decades. The Poor Little Rich Girl, a title borrowed from an old stage play about a wealthy, neglected child, repurposed now for a living 18-year-old who had done nothing yet to earn it beyond being born into money at at the wrong moment in her country’s history. The country had decided before she had done a single notable thing in her own right exactly what kind of story she was going to be, a cautionary one. She would spend the next half century whether she meant to or not proving them correct It was on that European tour, away from her father’s brokerage office and the chaperone of New York society, that Barbara first tasted something that felt to a girl who had never had it like being chosen rather than managed. Among the men drawn into her orbit on the continent was a Georgian prince named Alexis Mdivani, the eldest son of a family of Russian-Georgian aristocrats who had fled the Soviet takeover of their homeland in 1921 with their titles intact and very little else to support them. The Mdivani siblings had become famous across European society for a single well-understood skill, marrying wealth methodically, one sibling after another until the the family that had arrived in Paris with nothing had rebuilt itself entirely out of other people’s fortunes. Alexis was strikingly handsome, charming in the practiced way of a man who has made charm his profession, fluent in five languages, and entirely without income of his own. Where Barbara was uncertain, watchful, starved for attention, after 18 years of governesses and absent parents, Alexis was fluent in attention, generous with it, lavish with it, in the specific way of a man circling something he intends to take. He took her dancing in Paris nightclubs that stayed open until dawn. He sent flowers with notes attached that read like they had been written for her alone, though those close to the Mdivani family would later note that very similar notes had been sent in earlier seasons to other wealthy young women who were no longer in the picture They were married on June 22nd, 1933 in a Russian Orthodox ceremony in Paris, a wedding so heavily covered by international press that crowds gathered outside the church simply to watch the cars arrive. Barbara wore a long-sleeved white gown and a veil that trailed behind her down the aisle. And for a few months, by all accounts, she was happier than she had been at any point since she was 4 years old and still had a mother. It would not last. Even before the wedding, those close to the family understood the shape of what was happening. A girl who had never been loved for free was marrying a man who had made an art of appearing to love people for money. The cost of that connection would not become clear immediately. It rarely does. It would become clear in the settlement. The marriage to Alexis Mdivani lasted barely two years before it dissolved in 1935, but not before Barbara had paid him roughly $2 million in cash and gifts to make the divorce final, a price friends later said privately that Barbara herself described as cheap at twice the amount simply to be free of him. Alexis Mdivani would die in a car accident in Spain just two years later, the first of what would become across her life a recurring and almost uncanny pattern, men who passed through Barbara Hutton’s life meeting sudden violent ends. It was the first lesson too of a pattern that would repeat seven times across her life. Marriage for Barbara Hutton very often functioned less as a partnership and more as a toll. She would pay to be loved and then pay again to stop being Her second marriage, to a Danish nobleman named Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow, began in 1935. And to understand why it happened at all, it helps to understand the particular hunger that had been left unaddressed by the Mdivani marriage. Barbara had married Alexis, hoping to be chosen. She had instead been collected briefly and then cashed out. Reventlow arrived presenting himself as something different, older, more serious, less obviously a fortune hunter than the openly charming Mdivani had been, a man who spoke of duty and tradition rather than nightclubs and flowers. It was in retrospect simply a different mask over the same hunger, and it proved to be the darkest chapter of her private life. Reventlow was domineering in a way that went beyond the merely controlling. He restricted who she could see and what she could wear. He criticized her in front of staff and in front of guests methodically until friends who visited the household began finding excuses not to return. Household staff and friends later described a pattern of verbal cruelty that escalated over the course of the marriage into physical violence severe enough that on at least one occasion Barbara required hospitalization, and Reventlow himself was briefly jailed for the assault. He pressured her during the marriage into renouncing her American citizenship in favor of Danish citizenship ostensibly for tax purposes, a decision finalized in a New York federal court in December of 1937, and one that would haunt her reputation at home for years, branding her in the American press as a woman who had turned her back on her own country for money she did not even need to protect, a betrayal the public found easier to be angry about than the violence no one in the press was yet reporting It was during this marriage, under this pressure, that Barbara began both the substance dependence and the disordered relationship with food that would recur across the rest of her life, patterns that medical accounts from the period and after consistently link to the trauma of those years. Though the precise clinical picture, as with much about Barbara’s interior life, was never something she spoke about plainly in public. She learned in this marriage to make herself smaller. It was a lesson that once learned at 23 proved very difficult to unlearn at any age after. There was one bright outcome of the Reventlow marriage. A son, Lance, born on the 2nd of January, 1936, the only child Barbara would ever have, delivered after a pregnancy and birth difficult enough that doctors would later point to it, alongside the developing anorexia, as a factor in why she never had another. The marriage’s collapse in 1938 produced a vicious headline-grabbing custody battle fought out in open court and in the newspaper simultaneously, each side accusing the other of unfitness. The child himself reduced for months to a subject of legal argument rather than a boy who simply wanted to know which parent he would be living with. Barbara ultimately won. But the win revealed something uncomfortable about the family pattern she had inherited and was now, despite everything she had suffered at the hands of her own parents, repeating almost exactly. Having fought so hard to keep her son, Barbara largely handed his upbringing over to governesses and boarding schools, just as her own father had once handed her over to nurses. She loved Lance. Every account agrees on that, and it was the one love in her adult life that nothing ever managed to fully poison. But love in the only home Barbara had ever known had always come wrapped in distance, administered through staff and structured through schedules, and she did not know, perhaps could not have known, how to give a different kind. The cruelty Barbara endured from Reventlow was real and well documented. But the household she built afterward, for the son she had fought so hard to keep, was not so different in shape from the one that had once been built around her. The power in this story did not only flow from husband to wife. It flowed quietly and almost invisibly from one generation’s wounds into the next one’s habits It is worth pausing here to note that the small gold key, the one given to her as a child, tied to her mother’s music box, traveled with her through all of it. Staff who packed and unpacked her belongings across these years, country to country, marriage to marriage, recalled that it was never left behind, never sold, never folded into the inventories her lawyers would later draw up for insurance and for auction. Everything else in her life had a market value someone was prepared to assess. The key did not By the early 1940s, with a second failed marriage behind her and a war beginning to reshape the world, Barbara Hutton relocated to California, drawn, like so much of wealthy America in those years, toward Hollywood, toward a coastline far enough from New York and Europe both that she might for a while simply be left alone. It was there that she met the man who would become by nearly every account the one genuine partnership of her adult life. And the contrast between this man and the men who came before him could not have been more complete. Cary Grant by 1942 was one of the most famous and most financially secure actors in the world, a man who had built his own fortune through his own labor methodically and with discipline after a childhood in Bristol, England, far harder than the one Barbara had escaped. A mother committed to an institution when he was a boy, and a father who told him for years that she had simply died, a lie Grant would not learn the truth of until he was an adult. Where her previous husbands had been drawn to her money, Grant, by every account, including his own, given decades later in interviews where he bristled visibly at the suggestion, otherwise wanted almost nothing to do with it. He insisted on an unusually strict prenuptial agreement of his own design, one that left him entitled to nothing whatsoever in the event of divorce, a document his own lawyers reportedly found excessive, and that he refused to soften. I may not have married for very sound reasons, he said once years afterward, but money was never one of them The press, never able to resist a tidy phrase, nicknamed the union cash and carry. It was meant as mockery. It was also unintentionally the most honest description anyone in the papers ever gave of one of her marriages. For the first time, the cash was entirely on one side of the ledger, and Grant had made it clear from the outset he wanted none of it. They married on July 8th, 1942 in a quiet private ceremony at her Lake Tahoe estate, far removed from the spectacle of her debut 12 years earlier, and from the heavily photographed church wedding to Mdivani before it. No orchestra, no thousand guests, no flowers flown in out of season. Grant became, by several accounts, a genuine and attentive presence in young Lance’s life during this period, taking the boy fishing, teaching him small things a father is supposed to teach a son, offering a steadiness the boy had rarely had access to from either of his biological parents. For roughly three years, Barbara Hutton lived something that resembled an ordinary, if extraordinarily wealthy, domestic life. It did not survive. The marriage ended in divorce in 1945, for reasons neither party ever discussed in detail publicly, friends pointed variously to the disruption of Grant’s filming schedule, to Barbara’s drinking, to a simple incompatibility neither of them could name aloud. And the two remained, by every later account, genuinely fond of each other for the rest of their lives, exchanging letters for decades. Grant reportedly among the very few people from her early life who continued checking in on her once the glamour had worn entirely away. The marriage most often remembered as a punchline, cash and carry, was in fact the one marriage in which money changed hands the least, and the affection by all evidence ran the deepest. The public had the joke exactly backwards What followed across the next two decades was a pattern that would define the rest of Barbara Hutton’s life, in the eyes of the world, even as it obscured what was actually happening underneath it. In 1947, she married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, a Russian émigré aristocrat who shared her growing fascination with motor racing, a pastime that had begun in part as a way of connecting with the sport her son would later make his own life’s work. That marriage ended in 1951. In 1953, she married Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat and famous womanizer whose previous marriage to the tobacco heiress Doris Duke had already made him a kind of legend among wealthy women drawn to dangerous men. Duke had showered him during their own marriage with sports cars and polo ponies and a plantation in his native country. Barbara, determined not to be outdone by her own rival, matched the extravagance and then some. Rubirosa’s marriage to Barbara lasted barely a year and cost her, by the time it concluded, several million dollars and a converted military bomber aircrafted over as part of the settlement, an almost exact mirror of what Doris Duke had given him on the way out the door before her. Two of the era’s richest women unknowingly running the same losing math against the same man. In 1955, she married the German tennis champion Baron Gottfried von Cramm, a marriage that lasted on paper until 1959, though by most accounts the two lived largely separate lives for much of it, von Cramm spending long stretches away from her on the international tennis circuit that had made him famous before he had ever met her. Each marriage followed roughly the same arc, a beginning that the press treated as a fairy tale, a middle that grew quietly cold, and an end that came with a settlement attached to it, a number large enough to make headlines on its own. The public watched the headlines. Almost no one watched what was happening to the woman generating them This is the place in Barbara Hutton’s story where the lens has to widen for a moment, because what was happening to her individually was also happening in smaller and larger ways to an entire generation of so-called poor little rich girls coming of age in the shadow of the depression. Women like Doris Duke, like Brenda Frazier, heiresses whose fortunes had been amassed by ruthless self-made grandfathers and handed down to fathers who often saw their daughters less as people to raise than as assets to manage until marriage transferred the management to someone else. The press loved these women for the same reason it punished them. They were proof, dangled in front of an impoverished public, that money did not buy what it promised. Barbara Hutton did not invent this story. She simply lived the most extreme version of it in public for nearly 50 years. While the men who orbited her treated her fortune as a resource to be extracted rather than a life to be shared, by the time her fifth and sixth marriages had ended, the toll the years had taken was no longer something she could keep entirely behind closed doors. However hard she tried, the anorexia that had taken root during the Reventlow marriage recurred throughout this period, severe enough at various points to require medical intervention, and severe enough doctors later believed to have permanently affected her ability to have more children after Lance. The substance use that had also begun in those early years deepened. … Read more
