Barbara Hutton

Barbara Woolworth Hutton was born in New York City on 14 November 1912, granddaughter of Frank Winfield Woolworth, founder of the five-and-dime chain that made the family one of the richest in America. Her mother died when Barbara was four, reportedly by suicide, and she was raised largely by relatives and servants. In 1930, amid the Depression, her father staged a lavish debutante ball for her that drew public outrage and earned her the tabloid label "poor little rich girl," a phrase that followed her for the rest of her life. She inherited roughly $50 million on her twenty-first birthday in 1933. Her adult life became a sequence of marriages, each covered by the press as a spectacle: Prince Alexis Mdivani (1933–1935), Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow (1935–1941, father of her only child, Lance Reventlow), Cary Grant (1942–1945), Prince Igor Troubetzkoy (1947–1951), the actor Porfirio Rubirosa (1953–1954), Baron Gottfried von Cramm (1955–1960), and Prince Doan Vinh na Champassak (1964–1966). She was married seven times in total. Hutton wrote poetry, collected art and jewelry — including pieces once owned by Marie Antoinette and the Romanovs — and gave away enormous sums, funding war relief efforts and donating property such as her Tangier house, the Sidi Hosni, and holdings in Mexico. Ill health, alcoholism and the erosion of her fortune through mismanagement and generosity marked her final decades. She died in Beverly Hills on 11 May 1979 at sixty-six. Reports at the time put her remaining estate at approximately $3,500, a stark end for a woman who had once been worth tens of millions.