In the spring of 1979, in a rented suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a woman lay dying with sixty cents on the nightstand and less than four thousand dollars left to her name. She weighed under ninety pounds, her body ravaged by decades of starvation, drink, and pills. Nurses who cared for her in those final weeks sometimes had to lift her like a child. Yet this woman, at the height of her life, had been the richest girl on earth.
She had owned tiaras that once belonged to a murdered Russian empress. She had married seven times into three princedoms and a countship. Her debutante ball had been so extravagant it made headlines beside stories of men jumping from windows on Wall Street. Her name alone, in the 1930s, could stop a room.
Her name was Barbara Woolworth Hutton, and the world had watched her for most of the twentieth century as a kind of specimen. Newspapers called her the poor little rich girl before she had even turned eighteen, and the label stuck, following her from the ballrooms of New York to the palaces of Europe to the Casbah of Tangier. Underneath the furs and the emeralds that had once decorated the throat of Catherine the Great, there was a little girl who had never stopped grieving and a woman who spent fifty years trying to buy her way back to a feeling she lost before she was five years old. Her grandfather was Frank Winfield Woolworth, a man who built an empire out of nickels and dimes.
He opened his first five-and-dime store in Utica, New York in the 1870s, and by the time he died in 1919, the Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan rose fifty-seven stories into the sky, the tallest building in the world at the time, paid for entirely in cash. Frank Woolworth was consumed by his business. His daughters grew up in his shadow in mansions he barely had time to enjoy, learning early that love in this family often looked like objects, houses, and trust funds rather than time spent at a dinner table. The man who built an empire on giving strangers small comforts left his own daughter starving for something considerably harder to purchase.
One of those daughters was Edna Woolworth. In 1910 she married Franklin Laws Hutton, a co-founder of the E. F. Hutton brokerage firm, a charming and deeply unfaithful man who treated marriage the way he treated the stock market, as something to be managed for advantage.
Two years later, on November 14, 1912, their only child was born in New York City. They named her Barbara. In May of 1917, Edna Woolworth Hutton was found dead in her suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. She was thirty-three years old.
The official cause of death was recorded as suffocation brought on by an infection called mastoiditis, but whispers immediately began to circulate that Edna had taken her own life in despair over her husband’s endless affairs. The coroner declined to order an autopsy, and the truth was never fully settled. It lived instead as rumor, stitched permanently into the family history. And here is the detail that matters most.
The person who found Edna’s body that morning was her four-year-old daughter. Little Barbara wandered into her mother’s room expecting to see her the way children do, without fear, and instead found something no four-year-old should ever have to see. For the rest of her days, she would struggle to explain what that morning had done to her. Barbara Hutton did not just lose her mother that day.
She lost her, and then she inherited her. Edna’s death instantly transformed her small daughter into one of the wealthiest children on the planet, an heir to both the Woolworth and Hutton fortunes. Grief and money arrived in the same moment, inseparable, and they would remain inseparable for the rest of Barbara’s life. Every time she reached for comfort, she found instead more wealth.
Every time the world tried to console her, it did so with jewelry, with trust funds, with headlines about how fortunate she was. Her father’s response cut even deeper. Franklin Hutton remarried within a short time, moving on with the brisk efficiency he applied to his investments. Barbara was handed off to nurses, governesses, and a rotating cast of paid caretakers.
Her father remained a distant, largely absent figure. She was raised, in the truest sense of the word, by staff. She had more resources at her disposal than almost any child in American history, and she had, functionally, no parents. In 1927, when Barbara was fourteen, her grandmother Jenny Woolworth died and left her a further twenty-eight million dollars in trust.
By the time she turned twenty-one in 1933, her fortune had swollen to near forty million dollars, a sum so enormous for the era that it would rank among the largest personal inheritances in American history. Each new death in her family arrived like a strange recurring ritual. Wealth compounding on top of wealth, arriving from people who were no longer alive to see what it did to her. By the time she was a teenager, Barbara had learned that love was conditional, transactional, and unreliable, but that money was constant.
Money did not leave. Money did not die in a hotel room. Money did not remarry within months and hand you off to a governess. And so she began to substitute one for the other, spending with a desperate, compulsive generosity, showering friends and lovers and even strangers with extravagant gifts, as though enough diamonds might eventually purchase what a childhood of nurses and absent parents never gave her.
America in 1930 was a country on its knees. The stock market had collapsed the previous autumn, and ruin was spreading through the country like a fever. Into this landscape of collapsing fortunes, Franklin Hutton threw his daughter a debutante ball so lavish it became a national scandal. Held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, the affair was reported to have cost upward of sixty thousand dollars, with imported flowers, an orchestra, and a young woman dressed in diamonds while, just blocks away, bread lines stretched around city corners.
Newspapers ran photographs of Barbara Hutton in her gown beside photographs of unemployed men waiting for soup. The contrast was so stark it produced the nickname that would define her for the rest of her life: the poor little rich girl. It was more accurate than anyone in 1930 could have known. Barbara Hutton was poor in every currency that mattered except money.
The debutante ball launched her into a public performance she would spend the next five decades trapped inside. In the summer of 1933, at just twenty years old, Barbara married for the first time, to Prince Alexis Mdivani, a Georgian nobleman with a reputation for pursuing wealthy women. His sister was said to have orchestrated the match with chilling calculation, reportedly threatening to destroy Barbara’s public image if she refused to go through with the wedding. The first serious romantic relationship of her adult life did not begin with courtship.
It began with a threat. It collapsed within two years, leaving Barbara divorced before she turned twenty-three, having handed over an enormous settlement. Later that same year she married Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, a Danish nobleman. This marriage produced the one relationship that mattered more than any title or fortune.
It gave her a son. His name was Lance, born in London in February 1936 in a house Barbara had built and named Winfield House after her grandfather. Barbara nearly died during the delivery. Her marriage to Reventlow deteriorated into something marked by both emotional cruelty and physical abuse, and as it fell apart, it dragged Lance directly into the wreckage.
What followed was a custody battle so vicious it played out across newspapers on two continents. Around this time, Barbara developed anorexia nervosa, a condition the world understood far less in the 1930s. A woman who could buy literally anything on earth was losing control over the single most basic thing a human body requires. All the money in the world could not make her feel safe enough to eat.
Barbara ultimately regained custody of Lance in 1945, but the pattern of his childhood had already been set, mirroring her own with eerie symmetry. Lance, too, was raised largely by nannies and shuffled between boarding schools. Just two days after Barbara’s divorce from Cary Grant was finalized in the summer of 1945, nine-year-old Lance was reportedly taken by his biological father and brought across the border into Canada before eventually being returned. A boy who had already lived through one shattering custody battle was at nine briefly pulled from his home a second time.
In 1942, Barbara married for the third time, to the actor Cary Grant. The marriage lasted only three years, and Hollywood cruelly took to calling the couple Cash and Cary. But something genuinely important happened during those years. Cary Grant took to Lance immediately, and the bond between stepfather and stepson turned out to be far more durable than the marriage that had created it.
Even after the divorce, Grant remained close to Lance for the rest of the boy’s life. The boy found more reliable love from a stepfather passing through his mother’s life than from the two people who had actually brought him into the world. Between these marriages, Barbara fell in love with Tangier, on the northern coast of Morocco, purchasing and restoring a sprawling palace filled with art, music, and a rotating circle of writers, diplomats, and wanderers. For a while, it seemed to offer her something like peace.
She also poured meaningful sums into philanthropy, funding causes quietly without the theatrical publicity that surrounded her weddings. But Tangier could not undo the pattern carved into her life. There would be four more marriages. Prince Igor Trubetskoy in 1947.
The Dominican playboy and diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa in 1953, a marriage so brief it lasted barely seventy-three days. The German tennis champion Baron Gottfried von Cramm in 1955. And finally, in 1964, at the age of fifty-one, Prince Pierre Doan, her seventh and final husband. Running through nearly all of them was the same devastating undertone: men drawn to the size of her fortune more than the substance of the woman attached to it.
Each failed marriage chipped away steadily at a fortune that once seemed too vast to ever be exhausted. By the 1950s, Lance Reventlow had grown into a striking, restless young man drawn obsessively to speed. He became fascinated with motor racing and pursued it with genuine disciplined seriousness. It was reportedly his mother’s fourth husband, Prince Igor Trubetskoy, himself a competitive racer, who first exposed twelve-year-old Lance to Grand Prix racing.
Lance raced competitively across Europe and the United States. He became friends in the mid-1950s with the young actor James Dean, and in a detail that reads like a novel too dark to be believed, Lance was reportedly one of the very last people to speak with James Dean just minutes before the car crash that killed him in September 1955. By the late 1950s, Lance had founded his own race car company in Venice, California, designing a vehicle called the Scarab, named for the Egyptian amulet. The Scarab went on to beat some of the most storied names in European motorsport, including Ferrari and Maserati, on American racetracks, even winning the International Manufacturers Championship in its class.
Lance was not simply a wealthy heir spending his inheritance. He was building something of his own, engineered with his own hands, rather than inherited from someone else’s grave. By his thirties, Lance had settled into a quieter chapter, building a home in Aspen, Colorado, and immersing himself in skiing, hiking, and flying. On the twenty-fourth of July, 1972, everything Barbara Hutton had left came apart for the final time.
Lance was thirty-six years old, a passenger in a small Cessna 206 flying with three companions, returning to the Aspen airport as a summer thunderstorm gathered over the Rockies. The pilot was inexperienced. As the storm intensified, the small plane crashed into a heavily wooded remote area roughly eight miles from the nearest road. All four people on board were killed instantly.
Barbara Hutton was in New York when the news reached her. Something in her simply never recovered. Friends described a woman who seemed to age almost visibly within days. She had spent sixty years absorbing loss after loss, but the one relationship she had protected more fiercely than any other was gone.
There would be no eighth marriage, no next grand gesture. The one investment she had made that was never about a title or a settlement had been lost, and there was no fortune left large enough to buy her a version of the world where that hadn’t happened. Barbara wanted Lance’s body brought back to New York to be buried in the Woolworth family plot. But those closest to Lance knew that was not what he would have wanted.
They moved quickly, arranging for Lance to be cremated before Barbara could complete the legal process to intervene, and his ashes were scattered over the Colorado mountains he had loved. What came after was something slower and far harder to watch. Barbara, once one of the most photographed women alive, withdrew from public life entirely. She spent much of her final years in Los Angeles, largely confined to a bed in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Her cousin, the actress Dina Merrill, and Dina’s husband, the actor Cliff Robertson, were among the few people who continued visiting. Robertson later described a woman who was alert, whose mind remained sharp, but whose body had become almost unrecognizably frail, surrounded by half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola and books, cared for by a rotating staff of employees rather than family. Exploited by financial advisers and hangers-on, drained by decades of spending, Barbara Hutton found herself hovering on the edge of literal bankruptcy. On May 11, 1979, she died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California.
She was sixty-six years old. At the time of her death, by some accounts, she had roughly three thousand five hundred dollars remaining in her bank account. Her body was returned east to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, laid to rest in the Woolworth family mausoleum alongside the mother she had found dead in a hotel room sixty-two years earlier. Only around ten mourners attended her funeral.
A woman who had once thrown parties so lavish they made front-page news during the Great Depression, whose seven weddings had each been covered breathlessly by newspapers on multiple continents, and at the very end, when it was time for the world to say goodbye, only about ten people bothered to show up. Barbara Hutton spent her entire adult life doing the only thing her upbringing had taught her to do when she felt that ache of loneliness rising back up inside her. She spent. She gave.
She married again. She reached again and again for the only currency she had ever been shown, believing that if she could just find the right amount, the right gesture, the right person to give it to, it might finally translate into something that felt like being loved. It never quite did. Because the thing she was searching for had never been available for purchase in the first place.
Somewhere in a hotel suite in New York in 1917, a four-year-old girl walked into her mother’s room expecting comfort and found devastation instead. For the next sixty-two years, in ballrooms and palaces, in the arms of princes and movie stars, across three continents and seven marriages, Barbara Hutton never really stopped looking for her way back to the version of safety that little girl lost that morning. She had, by any material measure imaginable, absolutely everything.
And she spent her entire life quietly, desperately, tragically poor in the one thing that was never for sale.
