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.
Clarence Saunders was the Memphis grocer who reinvented how the world buys food. On September 6, 1916, he opened the first Piggly Wiggly store at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, where shoppers — for the first time — passed through turnstiles, pulled their own goods from open shelves, and paid at a single checkout. The self-service layout he patented in 1917 became the template for the modern supermarket, and within a few years Piggly Wiggly franchises spread across the country; the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 1922.
Saunders was a flamboyant, self-made man who believed his own legend. When bear raiders on Wall Street began selling Piggly Wiggly stock short in late 1922 and early 1923 — wagering the company would fall after several independently owned Eastern franchises failed — Saunders took it personally. Rather than ignore the speculators, he resolved to beat them at their own game by quietly buying up nearly every available share of his own company, attempting one of the last great stock corners in American history.
He nearly pulled it off. Borrowing roughly $10 million, Saunders bought so heavily that within weeks he controlled almost all of Piggly Wiggly’s freely traded shares, squeezing the short sellers who now had to buy from him to cover their positions. The price climbed from about $39 to roughly $124 by March 20, 1923. But with the shorts trapped, the New York Stock Exchange declared that a corner existed, suspended trading in Piggly Wiggly the next day, halted it permanently on March 26, and granted the short sellers extra time to deliver their shares — breaking the squeeze Saunders had built.
The reprieve was fatal. Saunders was left holding millions in stock he could not sell at the prices he had paid, crushed by the loans he had taken to buy it. In August 1923 he resigned as president and surrendered his property — his stock, his cars, even his unfinished Memphis mansion, the “Pink Palace” — to his creditors, and personal bankruptcy followed. He spent the rest of his life chasing comeback ventures, including a second grocery chain and an automated store called the Keedoozle, but never recovered the fortune the corner had cost him.