The $2 Billion Grocery Heir Who Died Broke on His Private Island: Huntington Hartford – HT
On the evening of March 21st, 1964, the new museum at the south side of Columbus Circle in Manhattan opened to invited guests with the kind of confidence that only inherited wealth makes possible. The building had cost approximately $7.5 million to construct. Edward Jerel Stone, the architect who had designed the Museum of Modern Art for the Rockefellers a generation earlier, had drawn it.
Nine stories of marbleclad concrete, a concave curve facing the circle, decorative port holes punched through the upper facade, a loia along the top floor that suggested somewhat improbably for a building wedged between Broadway and 8th Avenue, the Grand Canal at Venice. The sign on the entrance read Gallery of Modern Art, including the Huntington Hartford collection.
The collection inside the building and the building itself and the land on which the building stood all belonged to one man. Huntington Hartford was 52 years old that evening. He stood on the floor of his own museum greeting his guests. The collected works of Rembrandt and Manet and Degar and Tulus Lot and Salvador Deli arranged on the walls behind him.
For the opening, he had commissioned Deli to paint the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, a vast canvas that had been previewed at French and compassers with champagne. The gallery would charge $1 admission. It had been built to oppose in the most literal architectural sense the institution four blocks away on West 53rd Street, where the abstract expressionists held court and where the Rockefellers had been the patrons.
Hartford had spent the previous decade announcing in interviews and in published essays and now in a building of his own that abstract art was a fraud and that the public had been brainwashed into accepting it. The building on Columbus Circle was the rebuttal. The fortune behind it was older than the man holding the opening.
George Huntington Hartford the Elder had founded the Great American Tea Company at 31 VZY Street in New York City in 1859, the year before the Civil War, selling mail order tea and coffee at prices the established import houses could not match. By 1869, he had renamed it the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in honor of the railroad that had just united the continent.
By the time of his death on August 29th, 1917, the company operated across most of the country. By 1930, A and P, as the chain was universally known, ran 16,000 stores in 39 states with combined sales of approximately $2.9 billion. Time magazine put George Lulham and John Augustine Hartford, the founder’s two operating sons, on its cover on November 13th, 1950.
and described the red-fronted A&P store as the real melting pot of the community, patronized by the boss’s wife and the baker’s daughter, the priest and the policeman. It was the largest retailer in the world, twice the size of Sears, four times the size of Kroger, and it accounted for roughly 10% of all American grocery spending in the years of its dominance.
Huntington Hartford did not run any of it. He had never run any of it. He owned approximately 10% of the company, an inheritance routed to him through his father, Edward V Hartford, who had died in 1922 when Huntington was 11 years old. His grandfather’s trust had begun paying him an income at age 6. By his early adulthood, that income approached approximately $1.
5 million per year, distributed by a trust structure his uncles managed and his accountants administered. He had not earned it. He had not been required to earn it. He had been raised on the understanding that work was something other people did and that his job in so far as he had one was to spend the money in a manner appropriate to the family’s standing.
He had spent it. By the night of the gallery opening, he had been spending it for 30 years. the Joseph Conrad, the square rigged sailing ship he had bought from the Australian sailor Alan Villers in November of 1936 and used as a private yacht. The Huntington Hartford Foundation, the artist’s colony in Rustic Canyon outside Los Angeles, where more than 400 painters and composers had received free residencies between 1950 and 1965.
the Huntington Hartford Theater on Vine Street in Hollywood, which had cost $750,000 to refurbish and which he had sold in 1964 at a fraction of that. Show the magazine of the arts, the lavish monthly he had launched in October of 1961, which by the spring of 1964 was approaching its first $8 million in losses.
Art or anarchy? the manifesto against modern painting that Double Day was publishing that same year. The land at Columbus Circle, which he had purchased for nearly $1 million in 1956, the building itself. What he had not yet announced, and what was already true on the evening of March 21st, 1964, was that the Gallery of Modern Art was running an annual deficit of approximately $580,000 and was paying $320,000 a year on a mortgage of approximately $3.8 million.
The collection on the walls would begin to be sold off within 2 years. The building would be transferred to Fairley Dickinson University in July of 1969 for approximately $4.5 million, less than what Hartford had spent assembling the project. Within 5 years of the opening, the institution would no longer carry his name.
The other thing already true on that evening, although no one in the room could have stated it precisely, was that the empire on which the man’s fortune rested had begun to slide. A and P had been bleeding capital to the Hartford Trust for decades, declaring most of its profit as dividends rather than reinvesting in new stores. The chain that had operated 16,000 stores in 1930 was operating fewer than 5,000 in 1964 and would operate fewer than 1,000 by 1990.
By 2015, it would file its second bankruptcy in 5 years and shutter its last 296 stores. The grocery chain that had sustained the man would close down in the same decade in which the man had spent everything he had. Huntington Hartford stood at the height of his visibility on the night of the gallery opening.
Within 10 years, he would be on cocaine. Within 30 years, he would be in court filings asking to suspend an auction of his Manhattan townhouse. Within 44 years, he would be dead in a borrowed house on the western tip of New Providence Island, 15 mi from the resort he had built and lost, with an estate appraised at between$1 and $2 million.
The gallery opening was the peak. Everything visible that night had been built. Nothing visible that night would survive him. George Huntington Hartford was born on September 5th, 1833 on a farm in Augusta, Maine, the son of Scottish Irish settlers of modest means. He arrived in New York in his 20s and went to work for a leather merchant before partnering with a financier named George Gilman in 1859 to open a small tea shop at 31 Vy Street.
Gilman handled the financing and the promotion. Hartford handled the operations, which is to say he handled everything that mattered. After the first round of capital had been deployed, the Great American Tea Company sold mail order tea and coffee at prices the established importers could not undercut, advertised in religious weeklies on the assumption that the nation’s tea drinking households were also its church-going ones, and within a decade had grown into something larger than a tea shop. In 1869, the year the
transcontinental railroad was completed, the partners renamed the firm the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. The new name promised what the country itself had just achieved. Stores opened across the eastern seabboard with vermilion fronts and guilt fixtures and gas lights, an early effort at brand presentation in an industry that had not previously thought presentation was its concern.
By 1878, when Gilman retired, the firm operated 70 stores with combined annual sales of $1 million. Gilman died in 1901, and Hartford spent four years in court, establishing that the verbal arrangements between the two men had given him the operating control he had assumed for two decades. The court agreed.
The company was incorporated in 1905 with $2.1 million in assets, the voting stock under Hartford’s control. His sons did the rest. George Lam Hartford, born in 1864, and John Austinine Hartford, born in 1872, entered the business as teenagers and worked their way through every position the firm had to offer. They were practical men of the type the founder himself had been.
Formal in dress, conservative in habit, indifferent to the decorative ambitions of the social class their wealth was qualifying them to enter. In 1912, John Hartford persuaded his father and brother to test a stripped down format he called the economy store. Capitalized at $3,000, eliminating fancy fixtures and premiums and delivery in favor of low prices in a bare storefront.
The experiment was an immediate success. The chain grew from approximately 350 stores in 1910 to 4,638 stores in 1920. By 1925, it operated nearly 14,000. By 1930, it had reached its apex of 16,000 stores in 39 states with combined sales of approximately $2.9 billion, capturing roughly 10% of all American grocery spending and approximately 25% of grocery spending in its operating areas.
The middle son was a different sort of man. Edward Vasalo Hartford, born May 28th, 1870, declared early that at least one Hartford ought to be a gentleman and proceeded to live at that standard. He played the violin at concert level. He invented the Hartford automobile shock absorber, founded the Hartford Suspension Company on the basis of it, and accumulated through that enterprise and his share of the family trust, a personal fortune that some accounts placed above $200 million.
He maintained a Fifth Avenue residence in Manhattan, a plantation in South Carolina called Wando, an estate in Deal, New Jersey on the Atlantic shore and Winters in Beeritz. He served as corporate secretary of A&P but was not active in management. His brothers paid the dividends his lifestyle required and did not enjoy paying them.
According to Vanity Fair, Edward eventually broke off contact with his brothers entirely. George Huntington Hartford II was born on April 18th, 1911 in New York City, the second of Edward’s two children. His older sister, Josephine, who would later marry into the Bryce family, was the only sibling.
He was called Huntington from infancy and would never use the name George. His mother was Henrietta Gerard Pollitzer Hartford, a beautiful South Carolina woman of part Austrian Jewish ancestry, which she did not advertise. His father was distant in the years before his death, and as Josephine later told Vanity Fair, almost absent in the boy’s experience.
I don’t think Hunt ever saw him at all. The trust from his grandfather’s estate began paying Huntington at age 6 in the wake of the founders’s death on August 29th, 1917. The income was approximately $1.5 million per year, an allowance of a kind that had no obvious peer in American childhood. It flowed through Edward’s hands until 1922.
Then it flowed directly to the boy, Edward V. Hartford died on June 30th, 1922. He was 51. The cause of his death was not, as some later accounts implied, a sudden accident. Edward had been a practicing Christian scientist, and on the principle that medical intervention was a category error.
He refused to see a doctor through the illness that killed him. He left a widow, two children, an inventor’s fortune, and a son who, at 11, was now the immediate object of his mother’s full attention. Henrietta moved into that role with the energy of a woman who had been waiting for it. She was vain and beautiful, and in her daughter’s later phrase, always believed, as southerners do, that she was terribly grand.
She moved the family from the New Jersey shore to Newport, Rhode Island into the Sea Verge estate next to Doris Duke’s Ruff Point and maintained the Fifth Avenue apartment and the South Carolina plantation. She had fresh milk shipped from New York to Europe by Kunid Steamship when they traveled.
At dinner parties, she reached across the table to cut her teenage son’s meat. Josephine described it as a cocoon of mother love. Hartford himself asked in 2004 to characterize his mother used two words very doineering. In 1929, Henrietta and Huntington became the first Hartfords listed in the social register. The Grocery family had completed its transition into the kind of family the Grocery family had spent two generations financing.
The boy who carried the name forward was being raised at the social altitude his uncles had bought in the keeping of a mother who told him constantly that everyone was after him for his money and at a distance from the firm that produced it sufficient to ensure he would never have the chance to learn how it worked.
His uncles by then had organized A and P so that Huntington’s branch of the family received its dividends and its standing and nothing else. He owned a tenth of the largest retailer in the world. He had no role in running it. He was not expected to. That was the structural fact of his life before he was old enough to vote.
Everything that followed was an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to find some other place to spend the money the firm continued to generate without him. Chapter 3. Mary Lee and the Joseph Conrad. In April of 1931, Huntington Hartford was 20 years old, a sophomore at Harvard, and about to commit the first of the public acts by which the family would learn what kind of man they had financed.
He had been admitted to Harvard as a sophomore in 1930, a privilege the family name and a check could arrange in those years for boys whose academic record did not on its own command admission. He majored in English literature. He spent his time on paintings and girls and his mother’s continuing campaign to find him a suitable wife.
The campaign had a candidate. Doris Duke, the tobacco ays, lived next door to the Hartfords in Newport at Ruff Point. Henrietta wanted the match. It would have consolidated two of the largest fortunes of the period inside a single household and confirmed, if confirmation was still required, that the Hartfords had arrived at the social position.
the founder’s grocery business had been working toward since 1859. Hartford had other intentions. He had met an 18-year-old dentist’s daughter from Covington named Mary Lee Eping, and in April of 1931, the two of them eloped to Maryland, where the marriage laws were less demanding than New York’s. Henrietta, when she learned what her son had done, threw herself on the floor and wept.
Hartford, asked decades later why he had done it, gave an answer that was as honest as any he ever produced about his own behavior. I was a mama’s boy, and instinctively I wanted to have a little freedom. The marriage produced no children and lasted nominally for 8 years. Mary Lee was practical where Hartford was not. She encouraged him to attempt something resembling work, which led after his graduation from Harvard in 1934 to a brief and unfortunate stint at A&P’s headquarters in the Greybar building near Grand Central. His uncles, who had
been managing the company for 30 years, had no intention of installing their nephew in a senior role. They put him in the statistics department, tracking sales of bread and pound cake. He was absent constantly. In November of 1934, he chose to attend the Harvard Yale football game rather than report to work.
Yale won 14 to nothing. His career in the family business was over. He later asked his uncles to reinstate him. They refused. According to Vanity Fair, they cut him out of management forever. The version Hartford preferred was that he had not wanted the job in the first place. They didn’t need me and I didn’t need them. I had a lot of money.
The last thing I was interested in was the grocery business. The defense was less convincing in 1934 than it became in retrospect. The young man who had asked to be reinstated was not a man indifferent to the place he was being denied. What he turned to instead was a sailing ship. The Joseph Conrad had been built in Copenhagen in 1882 as the Danish training vessel Gayorg Stage, an iron hullled square rigger with capacity for 80 cadets.
She had trained Danish merchant sailors for 50 years. In 1934, the Australian sailor Alan Villers bought her from the scrapyard, renamed her for the Polish British novelist of the sea, and took her on a global circumnavigation of approximately 57,000 mi, returning to New York in October of 1936, famous and bankrupt.
He had three books to show for it and a ship he could no longer afford. On November 10th, 1936, Hartford bought her from him. He added a motor engine, installed luxury accommodations, and used her as a private yacht for approximately 3 years, sailing under sail when conditions permitted between the east coast and the Caribbean.
A mystic seapport historical marker records that the Conrad under his ownership was matched against another ship, the Seven Seas, in a square-rigged race from the United States to Bermuda and back, each winning a leg. While he sailed her, his marriage was ending. In 1938, he had a son out of wedlock with a 23-year-old chorus girl named Mary Barton.
The child was named Edward, called Buzzy, and Hartford provided financial support without legal acknowledgement. In 1939, Mary Lee left him for the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., a man whose work and posture and facility with the public Hartford was not in a position to match. The divorce was finalized that year. Hartford, by one Vanity Fair account, asked his mother to adopt Mary Lee so that he could keep her in the family as a sister. Henrietta declined.
As consolation, Hartford presented the actress Arlene Judge with a $65,000 Orchid pink diamond. The same year with the war approaching he donated the Joseph Conrad to the United States Maritime Commission for use as a merchant marine training ship. The vessel served through the war was transferred by act of Congress to Mystic Seapport in Stonington, Connecticut on July 9th, 1947 and survives there today as a museum exhibit.
She bears no connection to Hartford’s name. He had owned her for 3 years. The ship, like much of what he would later acquire, outlived its connection to him. When the United States entered the war, Hartford accepted a commission in the Coast Guard and was given command of an army supply ship, the FS179 in the Pacific Theater.
He ran her ground twice. He was not a natural officer. He served through the war without distinction and without scandal. returned to civilian life in 1945 with no profession, no marriage, no surviving institution he had founded and a continuing dividend income of approximately $1.5 million per year flowing from a company in which he was not permitted to work.
The next thing he tried like the previous things he had tried would begin in the same way. He would meet someone. The someone would suggest a project. The project would be funded out of the trust. In the summer of 1949, Huntington Hartford, then 37, walked into Cyros, the nightclub on the Sunset Strip, where Hollywood conducted the public version of its private life, and noticed the cigarette girl. She was 18 years old.
She had orburn hair and an open face and an aspiring actress’s manner. And she was working the room in the standard cigarette girl uniform of the period, selling cigarettes and cigars to film stars and producers and the men who finance both. Her name was Marjgerie Sue Steel.
She had won a scholarship to the actors lab in Hollywood. According to Vanity Fair, Hartford that night bought all her cigarettes. The pursuit was not immediate in the sense of being decisive. Marjgerie became engaged to Sydney Chaplan, son of Charlie Chaplan, who had given her a 22 karat blue white diamond ring. Charlie Chaplan saw the ring his son’s friend had given Marjgery and told his son, with the practical assessment of a man who had survived in Hollywood for 40 years, that Hartford had more money, and that the right thing to do was to step aside.
Sydney did. Hartford recounted the moment with a laugh in 2004. Chaplain told Marjgery she should marry me because I had a lot of money. They were married on September 10th, 1949 in Gardenerville, Nevada, a Carson Valley town favored at the time for its absence of a waiting period. Time magazine’s milestones column for September 26th, 1949 identified her as Marjgerie Sue Steel, 19 one-time nightclub cigarette girl.
She was in fact 19. He was 38. The age gap was conspicuous even by the standards of postwar Hollywood where the gap was conspicuous as a matter of routine. The marriage to Marjorie became in the consensus of biographers and former wives the most productive period of Hartford’s life. She was beloved in his circle, intelligent, ambitious, and capable of organizing the energy he had and lacked the discipline to direct.
Under her influence and at her encouragement, the projects he had been promising for 15 years began to materialize. The Huntington Hartford Foundation, an artists and writer’s colony at Murphy Ranch in Rustic Canyon outside Los Angeles, opened in 1950 on approximately 145 acres he had acquired for the purpose. Edward Hopper passed through.
The Pulitzer winning composer Ernst Took passed through. More than 400 artists in total received residencies before Hartford closed the colony in 1965. In 1953, Hartford bought the old Wilks Vine Street Theater from CBS radio and spent $750,000 refurbishing it, reopened in 1954 as the Huntington Hartford Theater.
It presented the first Broadway style legitimate productions Los Angeles had seen in decades. The premier production was What Every Woman Knows with Helen Hayes. He produced two films for Marjgery. Hello Out There in 1949 and Face to Face in 1952. He began acquiring a serious art collection at her urging with an emphasis on figurative painting.
He drafted a stage adaptation of Jane Heir which he called the master of Thornfield and which he would carry to Broadway in 1958. Two children arrived. Catherine, called Kathy, was born in 1950. John was born in 1953. The divorce settlement, when it eventually came, would establish trust funds of $1 million for each of them, a provision Hartford insisted on, and one of the few decisions in his life that worked entirely as intended for the people it was designed to protect.
What did not work was the marriage. Hartford was a constitutional philanderer. The pattern he had established as a Harvard sophomore did not change because he had married Marjgery Steele. It changed only in the sense that the women now arrived more often and stayed longer. Marjgerie tolerated this for a decade. By 1961, she did not.
The divorce, when she filed for it, was attributed in Vanity Fair to the women, a phrase that compressed a finite number of specific incidents into a single comprehensible cause. The final scene was domestic and exact. She arrived home one afternoon and found her belongings in boxes and another woman’s clothes hanging in her closet.
According to her own later account, what she said next was straightforward. Hunt never understood why I was so upset. The divorce went through in 1961. Marjgerie subsequently married the British actor Dudley Sutton. Then in 1967, the Irish American author Constantine Fitzgibbon with whom she had a daughter.
She died in Dublin on January 19th, 2018. Her daughter from the Fitzgibbon marriage according to her IMDb biography predescased her of a drug overdose at 28. The Hartford pattern of children dying ahead of their parents from substances was not, it turned out, confined to the Hartford line. What Marjgerie had organized during the marriage did not survive the marriage.
The artist’s colony continued through 1965 before Hartford closed it. The theater was sold in 1964 to James Doolittle who outbid Carrie Grant for it at a fraction of what Hartford had spent restoring it. The film projects ended. The art collection she had encouraged him to build became eventually the collection he hung at two Columbus Circle where its dispersal would be the eventual proof of how much of the assembling had been her doing rather than his.
The Broadway adaptation of Jane Heir he had drafted during the marriage the master of Thornfield opened at the Bolasco Theater on May 8th, 1958 with Eric Portman in the lead after Errol Flynn withdrew during the Cincinnati tryyout. Hartford subsidized the production through 6 weeks of near empty houses. The reviews were withering.
He had cast it, financed it, and adapted it himself. He had wanted to be the writer Marjgery had thought he might become. The script confirmed that he was the patron of writers, which is a different thing. Kathy, Hartford’s elder daughter with Marjgerie, was 11 when her mother left. John was eight. Both children would receive their 1 million trust funds.
Both would be raised at boarding schools. The provision that had been so carefully drafted in 1961 ensured the financial component of their inheritance. The other components, the things the contracts could not specify, were already moving toward the conclusions they would reach a generation later. The first issue of show the magazine of the arts appeared in October of 1961.
A thick handsome monthly with a cover designed by Henry Wolf, the Austrian-born art director who had previously run the visual program at Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. Wolf had left Harpers, his Wikipedia entry records, to start a new progressive arts magazine show for&p Huntington Hartford. Hartford described what he was attempting as a sleek magazine of the arts and culture, a successor in spirit to the original Vanity Fair of the 1920s and 1930s.
The magazine in which Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker and Robert Benshley had appeared. The first issue focused on the performing arts. It was by the standards of the genre a good magazine. The contributors who passed through show during its first run included Tom Wolf, Truman Capot, and a roster of writers and photographers consistent with a publication that paid its rates and held its standards.
Hartford was not in his role as proprietor indifferent to the editorial work. He read the magazine, weighed in on assignments, and treated show as a personal extension of his cultural project rather than as a property to be operated for return. that in commercial publishing is generally fatal. Show lost approximately $8 million during its first run which ended in 1964.
Hartford revived it briefly in the early 1970s. It folded for the final time in 1973. Total losses across the iterations were estimated at 8 to$10 million. In an early issue, Hartford produced his most frequently quoted self assessment. the kind of sentence that recurs in obituaries because the subject has done the obituary writer’s work for them.
I have tried to use my millions creatively. The golden bird coming to life has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away. The magazine was the smaller part of the cultural project. The larger part was a campaign against what Hartford understood to be the corruption of modern art. He had opposed abstract expressionism for years in conversation.
In 1964, he opposed it in a book, Art or Anarchy: How the Extremists and Exploiters have reduced the fine arts to chaos and commercialism, was published by Double Day at Garden City. The Harvard Crimson, which reviewed it on December 17th, 1964, treated the volume with the beused contempt that Cambridge generally extends to enthusiastic amateurs.
The reviewer described its author as a nice, slightly baffled man who never tries to understand or to analyze. Instead, as he says, I am angry. The argument of the book rested on moral grounds. Hartford believed that the purpose of great art is ethical, that all art should be intelligible to the public, and that the modern artist, by abandoning recognizable subject matter, had sinned against society.
His main target was Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s work, he wrote, had had the effect of wiping out almost all the gains that have painfully and step by step been made in painting during the last 500 years. He described Picasso as a potentially great painter who never developed but chose instead to create by means of mental gymnastics such as those glorified in IQ tests.
He lumped together the beatnic, the existentialist, the juvenile delinquent, the ziest of abstract art, the weirdest aberrations of the mentally unbalanced, the do nothing philosophy of Zen Buddhism as products of the same disorder. He described abstract expressionism as an ice age of art. The most peculiar passage in the book was its presentation of what Hartford described as notes taken at secret communist party meetings.
The notes, he claimed, gave the American Communist line on abstract painting. Inspirational art must be discredited. Insane, ugly, revoling art must be substituted. Tie junk together and set it up as sculpture. Hartford urged readers to file the notes somewhere under the category ancient history. Then declared that against the spirit of these notes, against the propaganda that still tries to brainwash us with the theory that liberty and anarchy are one, we must fight to the last drops of blood.
The book made him conspicuous in the precise circles that had already concluded he was not to be taken seriously. He admired one modern painter without reservation. Salvador Deli was in Hartford’s published estimation the greatest painter of contemporary times. The two were photographed together at New York nightclubs through the 1960s.
Delhi, according to Hartford, returned the compliment in the form of a comparison Hartford liked enough to repeat in 2004. You wouldn’t believe it, but he compared me to Martin Luther. And I think there was a little bit of truth in that because I believed in what I was doing. The literary modernists fared no better in his judgment than the painters.
William Falner, Tennessee Williams, and TS Elliott all fell under his censure as glorifiers of decadence. Hartford did not hold his views as positions in a debate. He held them as facts about the world that any honest observer would confirm, and he was prepared to spend large sums of money to communicate them.
By the autumn of 1964, the book was in stores, the magazine was on news stands, the Gallery of Modern Art was open at Columbus Circle, and the campaign that had begun as a private aesthetic preference had become a public institution. The Museum of Modern Art had attempted in early 1959 to obtain a court injunction preventing Hartford from using the name Gallery of Modern Art.
The Museum of Modern Art had lost. Hartford kept the name. The skirmish conducted through the legal vocabulary of trademark protection had told him what he wanted to know about the people he was opposing. They had tried to silence him through the courts. He had outspent them. He took this as a proof of his position and proceeded to act accordingly.
What he had not yet absorbed, although by the spring of 1964 the figures were available to anyone who asked, was the rate at which the project he was conducting was consuming the fortune that had been generating his $1.5 million a year. The magazine was bleeding. The gallery was bleeding. The book had been a publicity event rather than a commercial one.
The figurative art counter cannon he was building had no buyers among the museum boards he was trying to challenge. The argument was not winning. The money was running. Edward Durrell Stone had designed the original Museum of Modern Art building on West 53rd Street for the Rockefellers in the 1930s and was by the late 1950s one of the most established American architects of his generation.
His US embassy in New Delhi completed in 1959 had marked his transition into a more decorative idiom. His Kennedy Center plans were under development, and he was prepared when Huntington Hartford approached him about the Columbus Circle site to design a building that would express the patrons quarrel with everything the institution four blocks away on West 53rd Street had come to represent.
The site was small and irregular. It occupied the south end of Columbus Circle on a lot bounded by 58th Street, Broadway, and 8th Avenue, a sliver of Manhattan that no developer of office towers had been able to make work. Hartford paid nearly $1 million for the land in 1956. Stone produced a final design around 1959 and 1960.
The building rose nine stories of marbleclad concrete faced with a concave curve toward Columbus Circle, punctured by decorative circular port holes set into the upper facade, ringed at the top by an open lodger and supported at the street by a colonade of slender columns whose silhouettes resembled to one critic a row of confections on sticks.
The critic was Adah Louise Huxable of the New York Times. Reviewing the building when it opened on March 21st, 1964, she produced the phrase that defined the structure for the next four decades. She called it a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops. The image stuck. The building was thereafter known in New York architectural conversation as the lollipop building, and the lollipops, regardless of one’s view of the architecture above them, were the part of the structure on which all parties could agree. What was inside had been
assembled with the same logic as what was outside. Hartford had collected figurative paintings against the prevailing taste of the postwar art market. Rembrandt, Manet, Dear, Tulus, Lotre, Wyth, Corb, Turner, and Salvador Delhi appeared on the walls. The collection’s centerpiece was Dy’s The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, a vast canvas Hartford had commissioned for the opening and previewed at French and Kungchil with champagne.
The gallery operated on four exhibition floors. Admission was $1. The reviews of what was on the walls were no kinder than the reviews of the building. The collection was uneven, the curation eccentric, the catalog of figurative holdouts, a museum-cale argument with the people who had won the argument before the museum opened.
Critics did not rally to it. The art press treated it as a private folly with a public address. Visitors averaged approximately 500 on weekdays and 1,000 on weekends, a number sufficient for a strong civic museum and ruinous for one, carrying a $3.8 8 million mortgage. The financial picture was clear by 1965 and incontestable by 1966.
The gallery was running an annual deficit of approximately $580,000. It was paying $320,000 a year on its mortgage. Hartford began selling collection pieces in 1966, raising approximately $200,000 in the first round. In September of that year, he attempted to give the building outright to Forom University.
Forom hesitated over the mortgage and declined. He hosted a major daily retrospective from December 18th, 1965 through February 28th, 1966. Salvador Dali 1910 to 1965. The show drawing a crowd that the rest of the program could not sustain. In July of 1969, he transferred the building to Fairley Dickinson University, which renamed it the New York Cultural Center.
The transaction figure, widely cited at approximately $4.5 million, reflected the assumption of the mortgage rather than a gain on the project. Hartford’s accountants would calculate his total loss on the gallery at approximately $7.4 million. Fairley Dickinson operated the cultural center until 1975. Gulf and Western Industries acquired the building thereafter and eventually deeded it to the city of New York which used it for the Department of Cultural Affairs until 1998.
The collection that had hung inside the building dispersed gradually. The Rembrandt that Hartford had once shown to Edward R. Marorrow in his Beakman Place apartment on the persontoperson program would sell at Christy’s London on December 8th, 2009 for $33 million, setting a world record for Rembrandt at the time.
By then, Hartford had been dead for over a year. The painting had outlived its owner, the institution that had displayed it, and the argument the institution had been built to make. The argument was the question on which the project failed. Hartford had built the gallery to demonstrate that figurative painting was the legitimate tradition and that abstract expressionism was a fraud.
The gallery had instead demonstrated that taste in the cultural institutions of the postwar period was not a matter that could be decided by the spending of private money. The Rockefellers had won that argument by funding the institution that had set the terms. Hartford had attempted to win it by funding a separate institution making the opposite case.
The institutions of the postwar art world were not symmetrical. The fortune required to build the case had been substantial. The fortune required to alter the case was larger than what one A and P air possessed. The building survived him. It also survived the argument it had been built to advance. By the time Stone’s facade was being demolished in 2005, the lollipops had become beloved precisely because they were old, and the patron whose name had been on the door had become, in the architectural preservation literature, a sympathetic
figure. He had bought the wrong painters. He had backed the wrong critic. He had built the wrong building. The decades had nevertheless converted the wrong building into something New Yorkers were prepared to fight over. The argument had inverted itself. The patron by then was in the Bahamas. Hartford first saw Hog Island off the coast of Nassau in the Bahamas on a trip in 1959.
The island was a sandy kay of approximately 685 acres, lightly developed, named for the pigs the British had penned there in the colonial period. Approximately 4-fifths of it belonged to Axel Venugren, the Swedish founder of Electrolux, who had built an estate called Shangria on the island in the 1930s.
Venugren had been placed on the US proclaimed list of certain blocked nationals in 1942 on suspicion of Nazi sympathies. Blacklisted on the basis of his friendship with Herman Guring and his close relationship with the Duke of Windsor, who had been stationed as governor of the Bahamas during the war. The blacklisting was lifted after the war.
The taint in the gossip of the international set was not. Hartford bought Wenren’s holdings on the island in 1959. The price has been variously reported at between $9 million and $11 million. He set immediately about transforming what he had purchased. He hired the Palm Beach architect John Vul to design the original Ocean Club, a 52- room hotel arranged around a garden courtyard.
He had terrace gardens laid out modeled on Versailles with neocclassical statues and fountains imported for the purpose. The most extravagant single feature was the cloysters, the dismantled stone remnants of a 14th century French Augustinian monastery from Montreau, France, which William Randph Hurst had purchased in the 1920s, dismantled and stored in a Florida warehouse.
Hartford had stonemasons spend a full year reassembling the monastery on a hill above Nassau Harbor, looking down over the cascading gardens. He hired Gary Player as the resort’s golf professional and Panchcho Gonzalez as its tennis professional. He hired offseason staff from the Hotel Dapedan Rock on the French Riviera.
He successfully lobbyed the Bahamian government to rename the island. In May of 1962, it became Paradise Island. The name appeared on Bahamian $3 notes by 1966. The opening gala, the Balu Paradi, was held on February 17th, 1962. Approximately 2,000 guests arrived on private jets. Fireworks experts were flown in from Monaco.
Hotel rooms were filled with white roses. Zaza Gabbor attended. So did Benny Goodman and Burl Ives. Hurst, by then elderly, attended. The Daily News of New York summarized the spectacle in a sentence that defined the press treatment of the project. What’s he going to do for an encore? Versailles. The Beatles filmed beach scenes for help on Paradise Island in 1964.
Richard Nixon visited in 1962. Sha Connory was photographed there. The Ocean Club appeared in Thunderball in 1965 with Hartford’s third wife, Diane Brown, in a cameo dancing with James Bond. The hotel did not turn a profit. The reason was structural, and Hartford had created it himself. He had not negotiated a gambling license when he purchased the island.
The Ocean Club was an elegant resort competing for clientele with Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, and without a casino, it could not match either. Hartford had initially declared gambling beneath his vision. By 1963, his losses mounting at an estimated $59,000 a month, he had reversed course and begun publicly lobbying for a license.
The lobbying ran into Sir Stafford Loft House Sands, a multi-millionaire Bahamian lawyer who served as the colony’s minister of finance and tourism and who in his private practice served as legal council to nearly every major commercial interest in Nassau. Sans was the dominant figure among the white oligarchy known as the Bay Street Boys who controlled commerce on the islands from offices on Bay Street in Nassau.
According to the contemporary account preserved at the JBZ Corner archive, Hartford was instructed that to receive a casino license, he would have to surrender control of the island. Hartford refused. He was strung along for years. He even offered in one of the negotiations to direct 50% of the casino’s profits to the Bahamian public. The license did not arrive.
Behind Sands stood the financial figures who controlled casino operations elsewhere in the islands, including through the Bahamas Amusements operation in Freeport, the organized crime financia Maya Lansky, who collected a flat 15% of gross gambling profits. On January 15th, 1966, Hartford announced the sale of Paradise Island and its facilities to the Mary Carter Paint Company, a Delaware Corporation headquartered in Tampa.
The reported terms were $3 million in cash, the buyer’s assumption of approximately $9 million in mortgage debt, and a 25% retained interest for Hartford in future operations. Some accounts placed the effective payment to Hartford as low as $1 million for an investment of $25 to $30 million. The find a grave account compiled from contemporary obituaries gives Hartford’s total loss on the island at approximately $40 million.
Mary Carter Paint accomplished almost immediately what Hartford had not been able to accomplish in years. Through Sir Stafford Sans’s representations, the company purchased the certificate of exemption of the Bohemian Club, a small Nassau gaming parlor controlled by Lansky’s associates for $750,000. The certificate became the basis of Mary Carter’s casino license.
The Paradise Island Casino opened in January of 1968. The 1968 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Bahamian gambling licensing later established that Sans had received approximately 1.8 million in payments from the casino operators distributed both before and after the licenses were granted.
Asked about the payments by the commission, Sans offered a sentence that served as the period’s definitive contribution to the genre of public denial. Of course, these consultancies were not softeners or bribes. Mary Carter Paint subsequently dropped the paint business, renamed itself Resorts International, and relocated to the Bahamas.
In 1978, it opened the first legal casino in Atlantic City. Paradise Island sold in the 1980s for $79 million, then for $400 million by the entity MV Griffin Assembled, then for $125 million to the South African developer Soul Kurtzner. Today, the island houses the Atlantis Resort, a complex with hundreds of millions in annual revenue.
The original 52 room Ocean Club still operates as the Ocean Club, a four seasons resort. The Hartford wing of the original hotel still bears his name. Hartford attended the casino opening in January of 1968. Earl Wilson reported him at the party with Lady Aster, Lady Cissoon, and Carol Channing. The license he had failed to obtain had opened the door he had been pushing against for 7 years.
He was no longer the man holding the door. Hartford married his third wife on October 19th, 1962 at Melody Farm in Mahar, New Jersey. Diane Brown was a model from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, approximately three decades his junior. described by those who knew her as the most serious-minded of his wives. She had a daughter with him in 1964 named Sinara Juliet Hartford and called Juliet from infancy.
Juliet would later become the only one of Hartford’s children to remain his caretaker rather than his casualty. A difference that did not become visible until 40 years after she was born. Diane left in 1970 over what she described as continuous philandering. the same explanation Marjgerie Steel had given a decade earlier.
The marriages had not been failing for different reasons. They had been failing for the same reason at different times. Her own conduct in those years included a publicized association with the singer Bobby Darren, an event the press handled with the discretion appropriate to a man of Hartford’s social position and his wife’s apparent reasons.
The divorce became final in 1970. In 1986, she would attempt to have herself declared Hartford’s legal conservator, arguing that the people surrounding him by then were pandering to his every vice and depravity and robbing him blind. The court declined. It found him sane. Dian’s later assessment of her former husband, given to Vanity Fair in 2004, was the kind of summary that holds up because it tries for accuracy rather than judgment.
Hunt did many things but all on his own. He had his own island, his own magazine, his own museum. He learned at an early age to be alone. On his fitness as a father, she added the observation that explained more about the children than the marriages. He tried to be a good father, but he didn’t know how. He had no role model.
What she meant became visible in 1967. Edward Barton, the son Hartford had fathered out of wedlock with the chorus girl Mary Barton in 1938, was 29 years old. Buzzy, as the family called him, had grown up knowing his father’s identity and supported by his father’s checks, but never legally acknowledged as a son.
The acknowledgement had been Buzz’s central wish for 30 years. Hartford had refused it for 30 years. According to Vanity Fair, Buzzy made one more desperate attempt to persuade his father to recognize him in 1967. The attempt failed. Buzzy then shot himself in the head. The aftermath was characteristic. According to Vanity Fair, Hartford was privately griefstricken and did nothing publicly.
Buzzy was buried by a friend in an outofthe-way cemetery in California. When the Vanity Fair writer placed a note in front of Hartford in 2004 reading simply, “Buzzy!” tears welled up. He gave the answer that captured what he was capable of saying about his oldest son’s death, which is to say almost nothing. Buzzy committed suicide. It was a tragedy.
That was the entire statement. Kathy was the next casualty. She had been 11 when her parents separated, raised primarily at boarding schools and fell during her late teens into the substances available to a young woman of her social position in the 1960s and 1970s. She drank. She used cocaine, LSD, and heroin.
She entered rehabilitation and emerged from it and entered it again. She had been beautiful in adolescence and ballooned by her 30s to over 200 lb. The ark was documented in Vanity Fair with a single scene that did the work an entire chapter would have done in another telling. Kathy approached her father at a Manhattan club one evening where he sat with a group of young women he had picked up.
“Daddy, tell me you love me,” she said. Hartford recoiled. “Oh, Kathy, will you stop? Just stop.” She did not stop. Please, Daddy, tell me you love me just once, he tried to push her away. I’m serious. Just tell me you love me, she said, beginning to cry. He left with the women. A waitress later remembered Kathy clinging to the limousine’s door, sobbing as the car pulled away from the club.
Kathy died on a beach in Hawaii in June of 1988, age 37, of a drug overdose. Hartford by then was deep in his own addictions and did not travel to Hawaii. When the Vanity Fair writer showed him a photograph of his daughter 16 years later, what he produced was the sentence in which the entire pattern of the family’s affections was compressed into the smallest possible number of words.
Kathy Kathy got overweight and she died. John, the younger child by Marjgery, survived. He moved to Connecticut, became a music teacher and a working musician, and lived the unobtrusive life his trust had made possible. He died of throat cancer on April 15th, 2011, age 57, 3 years after his father. By the early 1970s, the family Hartford had built was no longer functioning as a family. The first wife was gone.
The second wife was in Dublin. The third wife had taken her daughter and left. Buzzy was buried in California. Kathy was on her way to Hawaii by route of every clinic in three time zones. John was tuning a guitar in Connecticut. The sister, Josephine, kept her distance. The mother, Henrietta, who had taken full charge of the boy in 1922, had died years earlier.
The man who remained was 60 years old. With what he believed to be approximately $30 million still available to him and a 24-year gap between the present and the day, his cash would no longer cover his expenses. Hartford married his fourth wife in 1974. Elaine Kay was a hairdresser from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, approximately a decade younger than Hartford, which is to say roughly the same age as his daughter Kathy.
The marriage produced what Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times obituary identified as the decisive turning point in Hartford’s late life. He had never previously drunk wine. He had never smoked. He was, in those particular respects, the abstius son Henrietta had raised. Elaine introduced him to cocaine, amphetamines, and qualudes. The quaudes he liked best.
Asked about them by Vanity Fair in 2004, with his daughter Juliet sitting next to him and his hand in hers, he gave a sentence that captured the durability of certain affections. Quaudes, I love them, but I can’t get them anymore. The marriage went officially through divorce in 1981. The divorce was a legal action rather than a separation.
Hartford and Elaine continued to live together in his 20 room duplex at Beman Place in Manhattan, where the household over the next several years filled with what Vanity Fair described as dereliks and drug addicts who were stealing the artwork and the silver. In 1978, Hartford was hospitalized for an overdose.
The visiting list that had once included Edward R. Marorrow and Salvador Deli had narrowed to people who waited until the host was unconscious before they emptied the rooms. In 1983, the building’s management voted to evict him. The triggering event was an incident in which Elaine and a friend were charged with assaulting Hartford’s living teenage secretary.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Elaine eventually pleaded guilty to torturing the secretary. The assault, as reported, included beating the young woman and shaving her head. The other tenants of one Beakman place, who included Blanchett Rockefeller, requested that Hartford and his household leave. He left.
The next residence was a four-story townhouse on East 30th Street in Manhattan. Conditions there deteriorated more rapidly than they had at Beman Place. According to Vanity Fair, someone in the household slashed Hartford’s tendons. reportedly in an effort to extort drugs from him. He fell down the stairs one night and broke his hip.
No one in the house called an ambulance. He was found by a housekeeper the next morning on the floor where he had spent the night moaning in pain. The independent obituary noted that the city health department eventually sent warnings about the conditions inside the house. On March 24th, 1992, in US District Court in Manhattan, Huntington Hartford filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The petition was filed specifically to halt a Tuesday auction of the East 30th Street Townhouse, which had been foreclosed by Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company on the basis of $595,341 in late mortgage payments. The filing estimated his assets at between $500,000 and $999,000 and his liabilities at between $1 million and $9.9 million.
The same man who had paid nearly $1 million for the Columbus Circle land in 1956 was in 1992 asking the court to suspend an auction by stating in his own filing the sentence the moment seemed to require. I have found it impossible to catch up on all of my monthly expenses and need a breather in order to put my financial affairs back in order.
The Los Angeles Times, summarizing Lisa Rebecca Gubernick’s 1991 biography, Squandered Fortune in the same article, identified Hartford as an elderly alleged drug addict who wasted millions of dollars and is now living in squalor in Manhattan. The biography itself, which the Chicago Tribune reviewed in August of 1992, summarized the trajectory in a single sentence.
He had inherited approximately $100 million and spent the next several decades squandering it. The trust funds his accountant still administered were paying him an income he reportedly continued to draw at over $500,000 a year. He had spent it as fast as it arrived. After the bankruptcy, he moved out of Manhattan.
He spent some years in an apartment in Brooklyn. Then he moved upstate to a house in the town of Warrick, New York, in the care of an attorney named Linda Blake, who had obtained durable legal control over his affairs. Blake’s account of her role was that she was protecting an elderly client. According to Hartford’s family, what she was doing was selling off his remaining property.
Vanity Fair described the period in clinical terms. Isolated, unable to walk, he had watched as, according to his family, she slowly sold off many of his remaining paintings and his personal papers. According to the family’s account preserved in the same article, Blake sold approximately 60 boxes of Hartford’s personal papers to Boston University for $150,000.
By the time Elaine Kay died, approximately 2 years before the Vanity Fair interview, Hartford was living in a small bedroom of the house Blake used as her office. The discovery came through chance. Hartford’s son, John, alerted his halfsister, Juliet, that a local upstate New York newspaper had reported that Linda Blake had been arrested and convicted of forgery in connection with the estate of another elderly client.
Juliet contacted the district attorney’s office. Social services investigated. In January of 2004, officials removed Hartford from the Warick House and had him hospitalized. He was 92 years old. Doctors told Juliet that he was suffering from congenital heart disease and might have only 2 weeks to live. Vanity Fair recorded the public’s relationship to the man at that point in the only sentence that fairly summarized it.
If people thought of Huntington Hartford at all, most presumed that he was dead. Hartford himself, asked about Blake by Susanna Andrews in 2004, gave the assessment that condensed his entire experience of his attorney into eight words. Awful. She stole everything she could get her hands on. He had survived to make the statement.
The remaining question was how long that survival would extend and where it would end up taking place. Juliet Hartford received clearance to transport her father out of the country in February of 2004. She chartered a private plane and flew with him from New York to Nassau, his first plane journey in many years. Hartford, according to Vanity Fair, made an observation during the flight that suggested the man Henri eta had raised in the 1920s was still in there somewhere.
I feel like Charles Lindberg flying around with Miss James Bond. Life at Kay sits on the western tip of New Providence Island, the same island as Nassau, a private gated enclave of grand estates approximately 15 mi by road from the bridge to Paradise Island. Shan Connory kept a home there. Juliet rented a house in Lifeford Kay, hired three nurses, and began the daily work of feeding her father, managing his medications, and reading to him from the books he requested.
Hartford recovered enough by autumn to grant the Vanity Fair writer Susanna Andrews her interview. The article appeared in December of 2004 under the title, Hostage to Fortune. It found him at 93, propped against a mountain of pillows, wearing a navy blue tennis shirt, his shoulders as thin as a young boy’s, his face deeply lined, his cheeks sunken, because he had lost his teeth, and would not wear the dentures Juliet had obtained for him.
He was temporarily deaf from an ear infection, which is why Andrews wrote her questions on a notepad. He woke at 5:00 a.m. to watch CNN and read the New York Times. On his nightstand were Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and volumes of Tennyson, Cage, and Kipling. He had approximately $11 million remaining in one untouched trust fund, and was planning, when his strength returned, to buy a $6 million seaside villa in Life at K and fill it with house guests.
He was editing art or anarchy for possible republication. The other thing he was doing from his bed was fighting one last public battle. The American Craft Museum, soon to be renamed the Museum of Arts and Design, had announced in June of 2002 that it would purchase the building at two Columbus Circle and gut Edward Durell Stones facade in a redesign by the architect Brad Clville.
The preservation campaign that followed was extraordinary in scale. The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the building among its 11 most endangered historic places for 2004. The World Monuments Fund placed it on its 100 most endangered sites list for 2006. The Preservation League of New York State, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Historic Districts Council, and the Municipal Art Society all joined the campaign.
Landmark West installed a webcam aimed at the building, the so-called shame cam, to document the demolition of the facade in real time. Tom Wolf, the writer Hartford had once published in show, produced a two-part New York Times op-ed defending the stone design. Juliet Hartford backed the Deesh Museum’s competing bid to preserve the exterior.
Hartford himself from Life at Kay gave Andrews the sentence that became the campaign’s most quoted line. Ed Stone was one of the great architects. I think it’s an absolute disgrace to touch the building in any way. Seven lawsuits and multiple appeals followed. The demolition of the original marble facade proceeded. his own assessments of his life, given that autumn had the precision of a man who had finally run out of reasons to flatter himself.
On his fortune, I spent most of it. I wasted some of it. On the question of whether he would have done anything differently, nothing. I always tried to do the right thing. On his personal history, well, you know, I never drank. I never smoked, but I [ __ ] a lot. on Juliet who was sitting beside the bed. My only and loveliest on Paradise Island, a name he could no longer use without pausing.
I was like Bugsy Seagull. Before me, there was nothing here. Huntington Hartford died at his home in Lifford Kay on May 19th, 2008. He was 97 years old. His daughter Juliet announced the death. The cause was not publicly released. His remains were interred at Lake View Memorial Gardens and Moseliums in Nassau.
He was survived by Juliet and by his son John who would die of throat cancer 3 years later. His estate at death was appraised at approximately 1 to2 million. Bloomberg’s postmortem estimate placed the total amount he had spent over his lifetime at close to $1 billion in $28. The Museum of Arts and Design opened later that year in the redesigned building at 2 Columbus Circle.
The building no longer carried Hartford’s name. It no longer carried his collection. It no longer carried Edward Durell Stone’s facade. The patron, by the time the institution he had founded was reopened under another name in another design, had been dead for several months and had been forgotten for several years.
The other empire ran on its own schedule. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the chain his grandfather had built and his uncles had grown to 16,000 stores at its 1930 peak, filed its first Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December of 2010. It emerged briefly. It filed again on July 19th, 2015. The remaining 296 stores closed by November 25th, 2015.
The dividends that had paid Huntington Hartford $1.5 million a year from age six had been the early sign of what eventually consumed the company that paid them. The trust took the profits. The stores got older. The competitors built suburban supermarkets while A and P paid out cash to the heirs of the man who had bought the wrong painters.
The grocery family that had financed everything Hartford built and lost was by the end in the same condition as the man it had financed. The fortune that had begun in 1859 at 31 Vasy Street had made one Hartford a gentleman, two Hartford’s industrialists, and one Hartford the most expensive case study the cultural institutions of postwar New York had agreed to host.
On the evening of March 21st, 1964, the Gallery of Modern Art, including the Huntington Hartford collection, opened to invited guests at two Columbus Circle. The collector was at his height. The building had cost $7.5 million. The lights worked. The wine was cold. Within 44 years, the collector would be dead in a borrowed house.
The collection would be dispersed. The building would have been redesigned by another architect to house another institution. The company that had paid for everything would be in its second bankruptcy, and the only thing on the original site that still bore the name Hartford would be a wing of a hotel on an island 15 mi away that he had also lost.
He had said it himself in the early issue of show. He had tried to use his millions creatively. The golden bird coming to life had wriggled out of his hand and flown away. He had been right about the bird. He had simply never figured out which hand had let it go.