Barbara Hutton — the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ Who Died with Almost Nothing

Barbara Hutton inherited a Woolworth five-and-dime fortune as a child — by some estimates around $50 million at the depth of the Great Depression, when that sum was almost unimaginable — and spent the next five decades giving it away to husbands, hangers-on, jewelers, and hotels. When she died in 1979 at the age of 66, she is widely reported to have had only a few thousand dollars left.

The press named her the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ when she was still a teenager, and the cruel paradox stuck because it was true: Hutton had everything money could buy and almost nothing it could not. Her mother died when she was four (likely a suicide); her father, the stockbroker Franklyn Hutton, was distant and exploitative of her trust. She grew up fabulously rich and profoundly alone, and she spent her life trying to purchase the affection that had been missing from the start.

She married seven times, almost always disastrously and almost always expensively. Several husbands were titled Europeans who left the marriage richer than they entered it; one, the actor Cary Grant — the only husband who reportedly took none of her money and whom the papers dubbed ‘Cash and Cary’ in unfair anticipation — was the exception that proved the rule. Each divorce cost her a settlement; each marriage cost her more.

Hutton is the defining case of the heir’s ruin: a fortune large enough to last many lifetimes, dissolved in a single one through a combination of grief, generosity, exploitation, and the simple fact that a great deal of money spent steadily for fifty years on the most expensive things in the world will eventually run out.