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

Summary

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.

Timeline

The Fortune

The fortune came from Frank Winfield Woolworth, the retail pioneer who built the F. W. Woolworth Company five-and-dime empire into a chain of more than a thousand stores. When he died in 1919, his estate passed largely to his descendants, and a substantial share — on the order of $25–50 million depending on the accounting and the year — flowed to his granddaughter Barbara, the daughter of his daughter Edna.

Barbara's childhood was as bleak as the inheritance was vast. Her mother Edna died in 1917, when Barbara was four or five, in circumstances widely believed to be suicide; the official story was chronic illness. Her father, Franklyn Laws Hutton, a co-founder of the E. F. Hutton brokerage, was largely absent and is reported to have mishandled and skimmed from her holdings. Raised by relatives and servants and shuttled between estates, Barbara entered adulthood with one of the largest personal fortunes in America and almost no experience of being loved for anything other than it.

The Cracks

The first cracks were visible from the moment she came of age. Her 1933 debutante ball, thrown at the Ritz in the depths of the Depression with reported costs running to the tens of thousands while breadlines formed outside, made her a national symbol of tone-deaf wealth and earned her the 'Poor Little Rich Girl' label that would follow her to the grave. The public never forgave the spectacle, and Hutton never escaped the image.

The marriages began the same year and set the pattern. Her first husband, Alexis Mdivani, was a self-styled Georgian 'prince'; her second, the Danish Count Court Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, reportedly extracted a fortune and left her, by some accounts, having renounced her U.S. citizenship to her later tax disadvantage. Title by title, settlement by settlement, the principal that should have been left untouched was steadily chipped away — and the lifestyle it funded (palaces in Tangier, ropes of historic jewels, a permanent entourage) chipped faster.

The Collapse

There was never a single dramatic collapse — that is the point of Hutton's story. The fortune did not vanish in a crash or a swindle; it drained away continuously over five decades through the most ordinary mechanism imaginable: spending more than even a vast fortune could sustain, on people and things that gave no return. Seven marriages and six divorces each carried a financial cost. Hangers-on and staff multiplied. She bought and gave away jewels that had belonged to royalty, including pieces once owned by Marie Antoinette.

By her final years Hutton was living in a hotel, in poor health, dependent on others, and — according to the widely repeated accounts — down to roughly $3,000 to her name. The woman who had been one of the richest in the world died, in 1979, effectively broke, the principal of a Depression-era fortune of tens of millions reduced to a rounding error.

What Went Wrong

After

Barbara Hutton died in Los Angeles in May 1979. The figure most often cited for what remained — about $3,500 — may be apocryphal in its precision, but the essential fact is not disputed: a fortune that had been among the largest in the United States had been substantially exhausted within her lifetime.

Her name became shorthand for a specific kind of tragedy — the idea that great wealth, far from guaranteeing happiness, can isolate and destroy. The 'Poor Little Rich Girl' tag, coined to mock a debutante, ended up reading as an epitaph. Her son, Lance Reventlow, died in a plane crash in 1972, seven years before her, deepening the sense of a life in which the money insulated her from nothing that mattered.

Hutton sits at the center of The Wheel of Fortune's catalogue of ruin because her case is the purest: no fraud, no crash, no single villain — just the slow, total conversion of a fortune into nothing, by a person the money had never managed to make secure. She is the cautionary twin of every self-made rise on our sister site, Up From Nothing.

Lessons

References

• Barbara Hutton Wikipedia
• F. W. Woolworth Company Wikipedia
• Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton Encyclopaedia Britannica