On the 11th of May 1979, a 66-year-old woman died of a heart attack in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. She had spent her final months in bed, too frail to stand, surrounded by half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola and stacks of books no one believed she still read. When the end came, the news barely registered. Ten people attended her funeral.

One biographer later wrote that $3,500 was all that remained in her bank account, though some who knew her disputed the figure. Her name was Barbara Hutton, and at the age of 21, she had been worth approximately $50 million. That fortune, built on the nickels and dimes of ordinary Americans, had taken her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, a lifetime to accumulate. It took Barbara roughly four decades to lose it.

Along the way, she married seven men. Two were princes, one was a count, one was a baron, one was an ambassador, one was an artist, and one was Cary Grant. Six of those seven husbands walked away with significant portions of her wealth. Only Grant left her as rich as he found her.

The press called her the poor little rich girl. It was meant as mockery. But by the end, the phrase had become something closer to an epitaph. The man who made it all possible never set foot inside a classroom past the age of 16.

Frank Winfield Woolworth was born on the 13th of April 1852 on a small farm near Rodman in Jefferson County, New York. His parents, John and Fanny, were devout Methodists who worked the land and raised two boys with little money and few prospects. Frank hated the physical labor of farming. From an early age, he told anyone who would listen that he wanted to sell things.

His first real chance came in 1873 when he talked his way into an unpaid apprenticeship at Augsbury and Moore, a dry goods store in the nearby town of Watertown. He was by most accounts a terrible salesman, awkward with customers, unable to haggle, and eventually given a pay cut when business slowed down. But he noticed something the more experienced clerks had missed. Goods sat locked behind counters and stashed in drawers.

Customers had to ask permission just to look at merchandise. Woolworth believed this was backwards. He thought goods should sell themselves. In 1878, he got his opportunity.

The store had a surplus of slow-moving inventory, and Woolworth convinced his boss to let him arrange it on a counter where customers could browse and handle the products freely. Everything was priced at 5 cents. The items sold faster than anyone expected. Woolworth saw his future.

He borrowed $300 and opened his own 5-cent store in Utica, New York in February of 1879. It failed within weeks. Most men would have stopped there. Woolworth did not.

A few months later, he opened a second store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this time expanding the concept to include items at 10 cents. The Lancaster store succeeded, and it changed the history of American retail. The idea was deceptively simple: fixed prices clearly displayed, open shelves where customers could examine goods without assistance, merchandise purchased directly from manufacturers in bulk, eliminating the middleman. What Woolworth lacked in charm, he compensated with relentless efficiency.

He demanded low wholesale prices, paid cash on delivery, and maintained iron control over every aspect of his stores. By 1889, he had 12 thriving locations. By 1900, there were 59. By 1911, when he merged with four rival chains to form the F.

W. Woolworth Company, the combined operation ran 596 stores across every state in the country. But Frank Woolworth wanted more than retail dominance. He wanted a monument.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had recently completed a 700-foot tower on Madison Square, making it the tallest building in the world. Woolworth had reportedly been denied a loan by Metropolitan Life earlier in his career, and the slight had never left him. He told his architect, Cass Gilbert, to make his building 50 feet taller than the Metropolitan Tower. Gilbert delivered.

The Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic structure at 233 Broadway in lower Manhattan, rose 792 feet into the sky. Woolworth paid the entire $13. 5 million construction cost in cash. On opening night in April of 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington that illuminated 80,000 light bulbs across the facade.

The building made Woolworth famous, but high society in New York still viewed him as a shopkeeper. The old-money families of Fifth Avenue refused to accept a man who had made his fortune selling penny goods to the working class. This rejection consumed him. He pushed his three daughters toward marriages that would grant them the social standing he could never achieve on his own.

He refused to see a dentist despite severe tooth pain, a stubbornness that proved fatal. On the 8th of April 1919, Frank Winfield Woolworth died from septicemia caused by an untreated dental infection. He was 66. His personal fortune was estimated at approximately $76 million.

His company operated more than a thousand stores, and the vast wealth he left behind had no meaningful protections attached to it. One of his grandchildren, a 7-year-old girl named Barbara, would eventually inherit a third of everything. Barbara Woolworth Hutton was born on the 14th of November 1912 in New York City. Her mother, Edna, was the middle of Frank Woolworth’s three daughters.

Her father, Franklin Laws Hutton, was a partner in his brother Edward’s investment firm E. F. Hutton and Company. He was handsome, well-connected, and by most accounts devoted entirely to his own pleasures.

The marriage had never been a happy one. Frank Woolworth had tried to prevent it, only softening his opposition when his first grandchild arrived. Franklin drank heavily and kept mistresses openly. Edna, lonely and humiliated, reportedly began an affair of her own with a man named Bud Bouvier.

He was the youngest brother of John Vernon Bouvier, whose son would one day father Jacqueline Kennedy. The household on the Upper East Side was one of wealth, silence, and mutual betrayal. Barbara spent her earliest years in the care of nurses and governesses who came and went. Her parents were rarely present in the same room, and when they were, the atmosphere was poisonous.

On the 2nd of May 1917, four-year-old Barbara found her mother’s body. Edna Woolworth Hutton was dead at 33. The official cause was suffocation due to mastoiditis, an infection of the air cells in the skull behind the ear. The coroner decided no autopsy was necessary, but the explanation satisfied almost no one.

Persistent rumors held that Edna had taken poison after discovering yet another of her husband’s affairs. According to biographer C. David Heymann, the family reportedly paid off city officials to prevent any formal investigation. The press reported that a maid had discovered the body.

Heymann wrote that it was Barbara. What a four-year-old child understood about what she had seen is impossible to know. What is clear is that the event fractured her life in two. Everything that came after—the failed marriages, the desperate generosity, the inability to trust anyone who claimed to love her—traced a line back to that morning.

Franklin Hutton did not step into the role his wife’s death had left vacant. He continued to drink, continued his affairs, and showed little interest in raising a daughter. For a time, Barbara lived with her aunt Marjorie Merriweather Post, the heiress who had married Franklin’s brother Edward. Marjorie’s daughter, a girl named Nedenia, who would later become the actress Dina Merrill, recalled Barbara staying with them after the abandonment by her father.

But the arrangement did not last. Barbara was sent to her grandparents’ estate on Long Island. Winfield Hall was a marble palace of more than 30,000 square feet in Glen Cove, built at a cost of $9 million. Barbara played alone in its enormous rooms.

She dined formally in silence in a Georgian dining room designed for banquets. Her grandmother, Jenny, suffered from what her doctors described as a pre-senile condition. She spent her days in a white wicker rocking chair under the watch of a medical attendant, unable to hold a conversation. In June of 1918, Frank Woolworth petitioned the courts to have his wife declared mentally incompetent.

He was himself declining, paranoid, melancholy, increasingly withdrawn, but he was kind to Barbara. He called her princess and surrounded her with every material comfort he could provide. She later wrote of him with rare affection, remembering that he was always a little eccentric but sweet to her. When Frank Woolworth died in April of 1919, Barbara lost the only adult who had shown her sustained warmth.

She was 6 years old. From that point on, she was shuffled between relatives, none of whom wanted the full burden of raising her. She attended Miss Huitt’s classes in Manhattan and later Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut. She was an introverted child who had almost no interaction with others her own age.

Her only real companion was her first cousin, Jimmy Donahue. He was three years younger, the son of her aunt Jesse Woolworth Donahue, and he too had inherited a share of the Woolworth fortune. The two understood each other from the start: wealthy, neglected, and left largely to raise themselves. Jimmy would grow into a flamboyant, reckless man who drank too much, spent too freely, and died at 51 from a combination of alcohol and barbiturates.

The pattern that would define Barbara’s life—isolation disguised by luxury, loneliness masked by spectacle—was already taking shape before she turned 10. In 1924, Barbara’s grandmother, Jenny Woolworth, died. She left approximately $26 million to her granddaughter, placed in a trust fund. An additional $2 million in stock from Edna’s separate inheritance went into a second trust.

Both were administered by Franklin Hutton. Whatever his failings as a father, Franklin proved himself a gifted investor. He liquidated the most volatile holdings before the stock market crash of 1929, while the rest of the Woolworth family lost heavily. By the time Barbara turned 21 in November of 1933, her inheritance had grown to roughly $42 million.

There was also around $8 million more from her mother’s estate. In today’s terms, the combined fortune would be worth well over a billion dollars. Barbara Hutton was one of the wealthiest women in the world, and she had not yet attended a dinner party as an adult. Her introduction to society came three years before the full inheritance arrived.

On her 18th birthday in November of 1930, Barbara was given a debutante ball at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. The event cost $60,000. At a time when millions of Americans could not afford to feed their families, the Hutton debut was an act of breathtaking tone-deafness. The details made it worse.

Four orchestras played through the night. Two hundred waiters served a thousand seven-course midnight suppers and a thousand breakfasts. Two thousand bottles of champagne were uncorked. Maurice Chevalier, dressed as Santa Claus, greeted guests as they arrived.

Rudy Vallée performed. Every guest received a small jewelry case containing unmounted diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Members of the Astor and Rockefeller families mingled on the dance floor, while outside, bread lines stretched around city blocks. The backlash was immediate and savage.

Newspapers ran the cost of the party beside photographs of soup kitchens. Columnists attacked Barbara personally, as though she had chosen the spectacle rather than merely been its centerpiece. She was 18 and had spent most of her life in boarding schools. She had planned none of it, but the public did not care about the distinction between a young woman and the machinery of wealth that surrounded her.

It was during this period that the press began calling her the poor little rich girl. The phrase was not new. Noël Coward had written a song with that title in 1925, and Mary Pickford had starred in a film by the same name in 1917, but the label stuck to Barbara with a cruelty that would follow her for the rest of her life. Songwriters joined in.

Harry Warren composed a tune called “I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store” with lyrics by Billy Rose and Mort Dixon. It became a hit in 1931, and everyone understood who it was about. The poet Ogden Nash also turned her life into light verse, treating her misfortune as public entertainment. Franklin Hutton sent his daughter to Europe to escape the onslaught.

It was meant as a temporary retreat. In a sense, Barbara never came back. She would spend most of the next five decades living abroad, moving between London, Paris, Venice, Tangier, and a dozen other cities, always at a distance from the country that had made her grandfather rich, and then turned on her for inheriting the result. What few people noticed at the time was that Barbara also wrote.

She had been composing poetry since her school years, quiet and private work that stood in sharp contrast to the public theater of her life. In 1934, she privately published a slim volume of verse called The Enchanted under the name Barbara Hutton, printed in a limited edition of 200 copies. A second collection, The Wayfarer, followed in 1957. She distributed both volumes only to family and close friends.

Decades later, at her funeral, the actor Cliff Robertson read one of her poems aloud. It was one of the few moments in Barbara Hutton’s public life where she was recognized for something she had actually chosen to create. The Mdivani family arrived in the West with nothing but a story. Their father, General Zakhari Mdivani, had served as an aide to the Russian Tsar before the revolution forced the family out of their homeland in Georgia.

The five children—three brothers and two sisters—fled to France and then to the United States after the Soviet invasion of 1921. In Georgia, they had held the rank of aznauri, a form of untitled low nobility. Somewhere in the crossing between languages and continents, that status was inflated. By the time they reached New York and Paris, they were introducing themselves as princes and princesses.

No one checked. What they lacked in lineage, they made up for in strategy. All five married into wealth or fame. The eldest brother, Serge, married the silent film star Pola Negri, then abandoned her after the crash of 1929 destroyed her fortune.

The middle brother, Alexis, married Louise Astor Van Alen, a great-granddaughter of Mrs. William Astor and one of Barbara Hutton’s own friends. The press gave the family a name that stuck. They were called the Marrying Mdivanis.

It was Alexis’s sister, Roussy, who engineered what came next. In the summer of 1932, while a group that included Alexis, Louise, Barbara, and Roussy were visiting San Sebastián in Spain, Roussy arranged for Barbara and Alexis to be found together in a compromising position. She timed the arrival of Louise and other witnesses to the guest cottage where Alexis had lured Barbara. When the group walked in, Barbara fled to Paris in humiliation.

Roussy followed. She told Barbara that unless she agreed to marry Alexis, the scandal would be made public. Barbara, 20 years old and terrified of the press that had already made her life miserable, gave in. Alexis and Barbara were married on the 22nd of June 1933 in a Russian Orthodox church in Paris.

Barbara’s father provided a dowry of $1 million. The New York Daily News marked the occasion by offering its congratulations to a woman spending American money collected from poor people on a foreigner whose name, the paper noted, had already slipped its mind. On their wedding night, Alexis looked at his new bride and told her she was too fat. Barbara was 5’4″ tall and weighed 148 pounds.

She began a crash diet the next morning, consuming nothing but black coffee for weeks at a time. She dropped 40 pounds in a matter of months. The comment and the obsessive restriction that followed would mark the beginning of a disorder that never left her. The marriage itself was a transaction disguised as a romance.

Alexis spent freely on a residence in Paris, a stable of polo ponies, tailored clothes, and jewelry for himself. He treated Barbara’s fortune as his personal account. She tolerated it because she did not know how to do otherwise. No one had ever taught her to say no, and no one around her had any interest in encouraging her to start.

They divorced in March of 1935. Barbara had been married for less than two years. The total cost of Alexis Mdivani, including the dowry and his spending, exceeded $2 million. It was a sum that would have seemed enormous to any ordinary person, but barely registered in the scale of the Woolworth inheritance.

The real damage was not financial. The marriage had established a pattern. Wealthy men, or men who wished to be wealthy, would pursue her. She would comply, and when it ended, they would leave richer than they arrived.

Five months after the divorce, Alexis was dead. On the 1st of August 1935, he lost control of his Rolls-Royce on a narrow road near the town of Albons in Catalonia, Spain. He was speeding toward a train station with Baroness Maud von Thyssen, the young wife of the German industrialist, seated beside him. The car struck a tree and overturned.

Alexis was killed instantly. The baroness survived with devastating injuries. He was 27 years old. Barbara by then had already moved on.

Within days of finalizing the divorce from Mdivani, she had agreed to marry again. The next man was a Danish count named Curt von Haugwitz-Reventlow. He would prove far more dangerous than the first. Barbara married Count Curt von Haugwitz-Reventlow in 1935.

By some accounts, the wedding took place the day after her divorce from Mdivani was finalized. By others, it was within the week. Either way, the speed was staggering. She was 22 years old and already on her second husband.

She had given Reventlow $1. 5 million before the ceremony, a sum that functioned less as a gift and more as a purchase price. Reventlow was Danish, tall, controlling, and possessed of a violent temper that revealed itself almost immediately. Where Mdivani had been a charming parasite, Reventlow was something worse.

He dominated Barbara through intimidation, verbal cruelty, and escalating physical violence. On at least one occasion, the abuse was severe enough to put her in the hospital. He was arrested in London after threatening her with bodily harm. Police records also noted that he had threatened to shoot an unnamed man connected to Barbara’s circle.

Their son, Lance, was born in London on the 24th of February 1936. The press called him the richest baby in the world. Barbara nearly died during the delivery. The boy would become the single most important person in her life, though she would prove no better at raising him than her own father had been with her.

In December of 1937, Barbara walked into a federal courthouse in New York and signed an oath of renunciation, giving up her American citizenship. Reventlow had pushed her to do it. The official reason was to reduce her tax burden. The real motive, according to those who knew the arrangement, was to eliminate the American inheritance tax on two-thirds of her estate in the event of her death.

If Barbara died as an American citizen, the government would take most of the money before it reached Reventlow or his son. As a Danish citizen, it would pass to them with far fewer obstacles. The reaction was ferocious. The columnist Walter Winchell went on the radio and called her society’s most outrageous child.

The New York Times used the word despicable. Within two days of her departure for Europe, three Woolworth stores in New York closed. Thirty-six others faced the same threat. Employees wired Barbara at sea, urging her to order the company’s management to concede a living wage to thousands who were existing on starvation pay.

She never responded. Instead, she hired a public relations firm to try to repair the damage. The citizenship scandal was the moment when America turned on Barbara Hutton for good. The debutante ball had made her a figure of resentment.

The Mdivani marriage had made her a figure of ridicule. But the renunciation made her something closer to a traitor. She had inherited wealth extracted from the pockets of working people, and she had abandoned the country that made it possible. The fact that she had been pressured into it by an abusive husband was not part of the public conversation.

By this point, Barbara was using Seconal regularly and eating almost nothing. The cycle of restriction that had begun with Mdivani’s cruelty on the first night of her first marriage had hardened into something clinical and permanent. She would struggle with it for the remaining four decades of her life. Doctors later called it a cry for the attention she had never received as a child.

Whatever the cause, it hollowed her out physically in ways that would become impossible to reverse. Barbara and Reventlow separated in 1938. He demanded $5 million and full custody of Lance. The legal battle dragged through Danish and American courts for years, with the final divorce decree not arriving until 1941.

Reventlow was eventually awarded temporary custody, but Barbara regained her son in 1945. The count remarried and faded from public life. He died in 1969. Barbara never spoke of him with anything but dread.

Before Barbara Hutton built anything on the site, the land had already carried two centuries of English history. The twelve-acre plot sat inside Regent’s Park on the western edge, one of the most secluded positions in central London. In the early 1800s, the architect John Nash had drawn plans for the park that included dozens of private villas. Only eight were ever built.

The largest was Hertford Villa, designed around 1825 by Decimus Burton for the third Marquis of Hertford, a diplomat and collector who used the house primarily for entertaining on a grand and occasionally scandalous scale. The villa later became known as St. Dunstan’s after it served as a hospital for soldiers blinded in the First World War. The charity that operated it kept the name long after the patients were gone.

By the 1920s, the building had fallen into disrepair. A fire in 1936 destroyed much of what remained. Barbara and Reventlow purchased the site that same year. On the 10th of August 1936, the Crown Estate commissioners granted permission to demolish the old villa and replace it with something new.

Barbara hired the architectural firm Wimperis Simpson and Guthrie. The lead designer was Leonard Rome Guthrie, a Scottish architect trained at the Glasgow School of Art, who drew up a house in the neo-Georgian style: red brick with Portland stone accents, a slate mansard roof, and a columned portico at the entrance. The front facade stretched thirteen bays across. Inside, the rooms were scaled for diplomatic entertaining, though at the time no one imagined they would ever serve that purpose.

Construction took fifteen months. The house was finished in January of 1938. Barbara named it Winfield House after her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth. The grounds were extraordinary: twelve acres of private garden in the middle of London, with lawns, sculpture courts, and tree-lined paths.

It was the second largest private garden in central London. Only Buckingham Palace had more land. She barely had time to enjoy it. By 1939, the marriage to Reventlow had collapsed, and war was closing in on Europe.

Barbara took Lance and left for California. The house stood empty. When the fighting began, the Royal Air Force requisitioned the property as a base for a barrage balloon unit. Officers used the rooms as a club.

They played football on the great lawn and named their team Barbara’s Own. The war did to Winfield House what it did to much of London. When Barbara returned after the fighting ended, she found buckled floorboards, peeling walls, shattered windows, and electrical wires hanging loose from the ceilings. The house she had built seven years earlier looked as though it had been abandoned for decades.

She stood in the entrance hall and made a decision that took everyone around her by surprise. She called her lawyer in New York and told him to give the house to the United States government. The price was $1. President Harry Truman accepted the gift in a personal letter.

The house underwent extensive renovation and in 1955 became the official residence of the United States ambassador to the Court of St James’s. It has served that function ever since. Ambassadors from both parties have hosted presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state in the rooms Barbara Hutton once walked through with a Danish count she was trying to survive. The house outlasted everything else she owned.

It is still standing, still in use, and still carrying the name of a man who sold penny goods from open shelves in a town called Lancaster. The headline writers had their fun before the wedding invitations were even sent. When rumors spread in 1942 that Barbara Hutton was seeing Cary Grant, the tabloids fused their names into a single phrase: Cash and Cary. For once, the joke got the story exactly wrong.

Archibald Alexander Leach was born on the 18th of January 1904 in Horfield, a working-class district of Bristol, England. His father pressed suits in a clothing factory. His mother, Elsie, vanished from his life when he was nine. Elias told the boy she had gone away.

The truth was that Elsie had been committed to a county asylum. Elias had signed the papers himself. Archie grew up believing his mother had simply left him. He ran away at 14, joining a troop of acrobats led by a performer named Bob Pender.

The troop crossed to New York in 1920. Young Leach stayed behind when they sailed home. He drifted through vaudeville, changed his name, and by the early 1930s had landed in Hollywood. Within five years, he was one of the highest-paid actors in the industry.

But he never lost the instincts of a boy from Horfield. He negotiated his own contracts and kept meticulous accounts of every dollar. Barbara and Cary were introduced through Dorothy di Frasso, an American countess who moved between Hollywood and European aristocracy with equal ease. They met at a dinner party in Los Angeles in the summer of 1941.

Barbara had just extracted herself from the Reventlow catastrophe. She was thin, exhausted, and deeply wary of men who wanted her money. Grant wanted nothing she could buy. He earned more than $300,000 a year.

He had no interest in her inheritance, and she found his indifference disorienting. They married on the 8th of July 1942 at the home of Grant’s agent, Frank Vincent, near Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. The press, shut out for once, compensated with speculation. Hedda Hopper called it the most interesting experiment in Hollywood.

For a brief stretch, they appeared content. They spent evenings at home. Grant was affectionate with Lance and reportedly the only one of Barbara’s husbands who treated the boy with genuine warmth. Barbara, surrounded for years by men who saw her as revenue, found herself with someone who had his own money, his own fame, and no need for hers.

The differences that attracted them became the fractures that ended them. Grant was disciplined and self-contained. He rose early, ate simply, and expected order. Barbara kept no schedule.

She slept until noon, ate almost nothing, and gave away money with a generosity that bewildered him. She once handed a hotel chambermaid a mink coat. Grant did not see this as kindness. He saw waste.

The war widened the gap. Grant threw himself into bond rallies and benefit performances. Barbara had no public role to play. She was a foreign national living in the country she had officially abandoned five years earlier.

She could fund relief efforts, but she could not join them without reminding everyone of the renunciation. They separated in 1944. The divorce was finalized on the 30th of August 1945. Barbara offered Grant a settlement.

He refused. He returned the jewelry and gifts she had given him during the marriage. When the press asked him about the divorce, he said only that he wished her well. She never said a word against him either.

Of seven husbands, Cary Grant was the only one who left Barbara Hutton no poorer than he found her. The tabloid name implied a transaction. The reality was its opposite. Between 1947 and 1966, Barbara Hutton married four more times.

Each union was shorter than the last. Prince Igor Troubetzkoy was a Lithuanian-born painter of modest talent and considerable good looks. They married in Switzerland in 1947. He was attentive at first, content to spend his days at the easel while Barbara managed the social calendar.

He grew restless, took up motor racing, and won the Targa Florio in Sicily in 1954. By then, the marriage was three years gone. They had separated in 1951. Troubetzkoy accepted a reported settlement and moved on quietly.

Porfirio Rubirosa moved on from nothing quietly. He was Dominican, darkly handsome, a former polo player and diplomat whose chief talent was the seduction of wealthy women. He had been married to the daughter of the Dominican dictator, then to the French actress Danielle Darrieux, then to Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, who gave him a reported million dollars and a string of polo ponies when it ended. Rubirosa treated his reputation as a professional credential.

He and Barbara married on the 30th of December 1953. She wore a black dress and weighed barely 90 pounds. The terms were already settled. Barbara reportedly gave him a coffee plantation, a stable of polo ponies, a converted bomber aircraft, and cash gifts estimated between $2 and $3 million.

The marriage lasted 53 days. Some accounts say 73. Either way, it was over before spring. What stunned even her most cynical observers was that Barbara appeared to have known what Rubirosa was before she said yes.

She had watched him do the same thing to Doris Duke. One acquaintance later said Barbara did not marry him because she believed he loved her. She married him because she was tired of pretending the next one would be different. Baron Gottfried von Cramm was different, though not in the way she needed.

A former tennis champion who had reached the Wimbledon final twice in the 1930s, he had also spent time in a German prison during the war, convicted under laws that criminalized homosexuality. After his release, he rebuilt his life with the same composure he had brought to center court. He and Barbara married in 1955. The union was cordial and affectionate.

Von Cramm was kind. He was also, by his own later acknowledgment, unable to give her what she wanted most. They separated in 1959. He remained a friend.

The final husband was Prince Doan Vinh Na Champassak, a Laotian-born Vietnamese artist whom Barbara married in 1964. He was younger, quiet, and largely unknown to the circles she had once commanded. They divorced in 1966. She was 53.

She did not marry again. Seven marriages in 33 years. Each time, those around her described the same unguarded hope at the beginning. Each time, it was met with something less.

Tangier sat at the northwestern tip of Africa, fourteen miles across the strait from Spain. Between 1923 and 1956, it operated under international administration. No single country controlled it. The result was a place with loose laws, minimal taxation, and almost no oversight.

Currency traders, smugglers, diplomats, and artists lived side by side in the winding streets of the medina. Paul Bowles settled there in 1947 and never left. William Burroughs arrived a few years later, writing in cheap hotels above the port. For anyone with money and a desire to be left alone, Tangier was ideal.

Barbara Hutton arrived in the late 1940s and recognized it immediately. She bought a house in the casbah, the old fortified quarter that sat on the highest ground above the harbor. Then she bought the house next to it, then another. Over time, she merged them into a single compound known as Sidi Hosni, a palace of reportedly sixty rooms that climbed the hillside in a maze of tiled courtyards, narrow staircases, and rooftop terraces with views across the strait to the Spanish coast.

She filled the rooms with silk carpets, antique screens, jade carvings, and furniture hauled up through the casbah’s medieval lanes by teams of porters. The entrance was modest from the street. Inside, the scale was staggering. She hosted dinners for forty guests in rooms lit entirely by candles.

Truman Capote visited and later described the scene with a mixture of admiration and unease. Cecil Beaton photographed her there, posed in a tiara at the entrance to one of the courtyards. The image became one of the most reproduced photographs of her life. Tangier gave Barbara something none of her marriages had managed: autonomy.

In London and Paris and New York, she had always been watched, judged, catalogued. In Tangier, she was simply the rich American in the casbah. The locals accepted her generosity without commentary. She reportedly paid for neighborhood festivals, distributed food during religious holidays, and funded a medical clinic.

Children followed her through the streets. She employed dozens of local staff and paid them well above the local standard. Whether this was kindness or the compulsive need to be needed that had defined her entire adult life, no one around her cared to examine too closely. But Tangier also accelerated what was already underway.

Barbara ate less and less. She relied increasingly on sedatives and codeine. Her weight, which had been dangerously low for years, dropped further. By the late 1950s, visitors described a woman who could barely climb the stairs of her own house.

In her final years at Sidi Hosni, servants reportedly carried her through the casbah in a sedan chair when she wanted to move through the city. She left Tangier for the last time in the mid-1970s. The palace was sold after her death. New owners stripped much of what she had installed.

The bones of the compound remain in the casbah, recognizable to anyone who knows what to look for. But the silk and the jade and the candlelit dinners are gone. The tiara had belonged to Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia, born Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, one of the most formidable women in the Romanov court. When the revolution came in 1917, a loyalist smuggled the piece out of the Vladimir Palace in St Petersburg, hidden in a diplomatic bag.

It passed through several hands before reaching Cartier in Paris, where Barbara Hutton eventually acquired it. The tiara was set with fifteen interlocking diamond circles, each suspending a pearl drop. Cecil Beaton photographed Barbara wearing it at Sidi Hosni. In that image, she looks regal, gaunt, and entirely alone.

The Vladimir tiara was not an isolated purchase. Over three decades, Barbara assembled one of the most significant private jewelry collections of the 20th century. She bought from Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, and private dealers who tracked down pieces with royal provenance. She acquired a strand of pearls with a claimed connection to Marie Antoinette, though the attribution has been questioned by historians.

She owned Mughal emeralds, Burmese rubies, and a jade collection that specialists considered among the finest in private hands. What drove the collecting was not vanity in any simple sense. Barbara showed little interest in being seen at the right events wearing the right stones. She wore major pieces to small dinners or while sitting alone in hotel suites.

She gave away jewelry impulsively, pressing rings and bracelets on friends, staff, and near strangers. One acquaintance recalled receiving an emerald brooch as a thank-you for bringing flowers. The gesture was characteristic. Barbara treated her collection the way she treated her money: as something to distribute rather than hold.

The imperial provenance mattered to her in ways she rarely explained. She sought out pieces that had belonged to women of extraordinary status: Romanov grand duchesses, Bourbon queens, Mughal empresses. A woman who had been mocked since childhood for inheriting a shopkeeper’s fortune surrounded herself with objects that carried centuries of dynastic authority. Whether she recognized the irony is unclear.

What is clear is that the objects outlasted everything else. The marriages ended. The houses were sold or given away. The money dwindled.

But the stones survived, indifferent to the life that had passed through them. Much of the collection was dispersed before Barbara died. She sold pieces when she needed cash. She gave others away during manic episodes of generosity that her advisers could not prevent.

After her death in 1979, what remained was auctioned. Sotheby’s handled the sale. Pieces that Barbara had worn at candlelit dinners in the casbah were catalogued, numbered, and scattered across the collections of strangers. The Vladimir tiara was not among them.

It had already passed to another owner years earlier. Lance Reventlow grew up in the custody of lawyers. His earliest years were divided between his mother and his father by court order, shuttled across borders according to schedules set by men he had never met. By the time Barbara won him back in 1945, he was nine years old and had lived in more countries than most adults visit in a lifetime.

He was quiet, self-contained, and drawn to machines. Where his mother moved through the world surrounded by people she could not trust, Lance preferred engines. In his mid-twenties, he founded Reventlow Automobiles Incorporated and set out to build an American sports car capable of competing against the European constructors who dominated road racing. The result was the Scarab, a front-engined car powered by a Chevrolet V8.

It won several domestic races in 1958 and earned respect from drivers and engineers who had dismissed the project as a rich man’s hobby. Lance entered the car in international competition the following year, but the Scarab was already outdated. The sport had moved to rear-engine designs. He shut the operation down before turning 30.

He married the actress Jill St John in 1959. They divorced in 1963. A year later, he married Cheryl Holdridge, a former Mouseketeer who had appeared on television throughout the late 1950s. Friends described the second marriage as steady and grounded in ways that Lance’s childhood had never been.

On the 24th of July 1972, Lance Reventlow boarded a small plane in Aspen, Colorado. The aircraft crashed into the mountains shortly after takeoff. He was 36 years old. The cause was later attributed to severe weather conditions and possible mechanical failure.

Cheryl Holdridge survived him. She never fully recovered from the loss and died of a brain tumor in 1983 at the age of 39. Barbara was in Tangier when the news reached her. According to those present, she did not speak for several days.

The son she had fought for in court, lost custody of, regained, and then struggled to raise with any consistency was gone. She had outlived the only person whose existence had given hers a visible center of gravity. She did not attend the funeral. Some accounts say she was too ill to travel.

Others say she could not face it. Her health, already fragile, deteriorated sharply in the months that followed. The weight loss accelerated. The dependence on sedatives deepened.

People who saw her in the mid-1970s described a woman who appeared decades older than her age. Lance Reventlow left no children. The Scarab cars he built survive in private collections, maintained by enthusiasts who know them as engineering curiosities from a brief window in American motorsport. His mother’s grief, unlike the cars, left no physical trace.

It simply consumed what remained. Frank Woolworth left three daughters. Helena, the eldest, married Charles Edward Francis McCann, a businessman with no particular ambition beyond maintaining what he had. Edna, the middle child, married Franklin Hutton, and was dead at 33.

Jesse, the youngest, married James Paul Donahue, a man of inherited means and limited purpose. Each daughter received a share of the estate. None of the marriages produced a family equipped to manage what they had been given. The money moved outward with each generation and found no resistance.

There were no binding trusts designed to preserve the principal. No conditions that required heirs to demonstrate competence before gaining access. Frank Woolworth had spent a lifetime building systems of extraordinary efficiency inside his stores. He applied none of that discipline to the fortune those stores created.

The wealth passed to his daughters without structure, and from them to grandchildren, who had never been taught what it meant or what it cost. Jimmy Donahue, Jesse’s son and Barbara’s closest childhood companion, burned through his share with a flamboyance that made even Barbara’s spending look measured. He drank heavily, threw extravagant parties, and carried on a public affair with the Duchess of Windsor that scandalized what remained of their social circle. He died in 1966 at the age of 51.

His death received little attention. By then, the Woolworth name had lost the weight it once carried. The company followed the family. F.

W. Woolworth had dominated American retail for half a century, but by the 1970s, the five-and-dime model was obsolete. Discount chains with larger footprints and lower costs had taken the customers Woolworth once owned. The stores that had funded a skyscraper and a dynasty were closing one by one.

In 1997, the company shut its remaining 400 American and Canadian locations. The brand that had been synonymous with affordable goods for three generations disappeared from the American streetscape. The corporation survived by pivoting to its athletic footwear subsidiary and eventually rebranded as Foot Locker. The Woolworth Building still stands at 233 Broadway.

It is a condominium now. Apartments on the upper floors sell for tens of millions of dollars. The neo-Gothic lobby with its marble walls and mosaic ceilings is maintained as a landmark. Tourists photograph it.

Architecture students study it. But the name above the door belongs to a company that no longer exists in any form its founder would recognize. Barbara was not the only Woolworth heir to end in ruin. She was simply the most visible.

The fortune that Frank Winfield Woolworth spent forty years assembling was largely gone within two generations. No single cause explains it. Bad marriages, absent fathers, unchecked spending, and a complete lack of structural protection all played their part. But if there was a central failure, it was this: Woolworth built an empire on discipline and left it to people who had never been required to exercise any.

In her final years, Barbara Hutton lived in hotels, not because she had no other option, but because hotels were the only places that still functioned the way she needed them to. Someone answered when she called. Meals appeared without negotiation. The staff asked nothing of her beyond payment.

She moved between the Pierre in New York, the Ritz in London, and eventually the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, where she settled into a suite and rarely left. She had attempted in the early 1970s to regain her American citizenship, the one she had signed away under pressure thirty-five years earlier. The application was reportedly approved, though the exact timeline remains unclear. It was a quiet reversal of the decision that had cost her more public goodwill than any of her marriages.

Her world contracted steadily. The dinner parties stopped. The visitors thinned. Dina Merrill, the actress who had been her cousin by marriage since childhood, was among the few who continued to visit.

Most of the people who had surrounded Barbara during the decades of spending were gone. Some had died. Others had simply stopped coming once the money slowed. Her weight, which had been dangerously low for years, reportedly dropped below 80 pounds.

She relied on a rotating staff of nurses and a small number of personal attendants who managed her medications, her meals, and the logistics of a life that had narrowed to a single set of rooms. She still read. She still occasionally spoke by telephone with old acquaintances. But the woman who had once hosted forty guests by candlelight in the casbah now spent most of her hours in bed.

She died on the 11th of May 1979. She was 66, the same age her grandfather had been when he died sixty years earlier. The funeral was held at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where she was buried near Frank Woolworth in the family mausoleum. Fewer than a dozen people attended.

Cliff Robertson, the actor, read one of her poems aloud. It was the same gesture noted years earlier in accounts of her private literary life. At the graveside, it carried a different weight. The estate that remained was negligible by any measure connected to the name Woolworth.

Advisers estimated that Barbara had given away or spent in excess of $500 million over the course of her adult life, adjusted for inflation. The giving had never been strategic. She gave to husbands, to strangers, to causes, and to anyone who asked with enough conviction. What she could not give away was the label the press had fixed to her at 18.

It followed her into the mausoleum.