George Hartford
Full name: George Huntington Hartford
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| Bio | Huntington Hartford, who died on May 19 aged 97, was born into one of the wealthiest families in America and inherited a $90 million fortune at the age of 12, but blew it on a series of quixotic artistic and commercial ventures and expensive wives. Born in New York on April 18 1911, he was named George Huntington Hartford after his grandfather, a Maine tea merchant who had founded the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in 1859. His father, Edward, had little to do with the family business; it was Huntington's uncles, John and George, who built A&P into the world's leading retail grocery business. Huntingdon, who became the beneficiary of a $1.5 million annual income on his grandfather's death in 1917, was brought up by English governesses in a fabulous apartment on Fifth Avenue, on a plantation in South Carolina and an estate in Connecticut. His father died in 1922, leaving his shareholdings to his two children, Josephine, who went on to marry into the grandest circles, and Huntington, then under the care of his mother, Henrietta. Huntington was educated at St Paul's School, a patrician establishment in New Hampshire, where he was ostracised as "new money", and at Harvard. There he studied English Literature, played tennis and squash, and married Mary Lee Epling, a dentist's daughter who divorced him in 1939 after he had fathered a son with a chorus girl. (She would later marry Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) After graduation Hartford entered the family business, but found it difficult to concentrate on stock lists of pound cake and was fired six months later after playing truant to watch the Harvard-Yale football match. In 1940 he put up $100,000 towards the founding of a new New York newspaper, PM, for which, fancying himself a writer, he became a reporter. But he soon gained a reputation for missing deadlines – once when he took his yacht to cover a story but returned to find his berth taken by someone else. On America's entry into the war, Hartford donated his yacht to the US Coast Guard and, in return, was given the command of a small supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice. After the war Hartford moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a model agency and, surrounded by celebrities and showgirls, became a fixture at nightclubs. In 1949 he married a cigarette seller and aspiring starlet called Marjorie Steele, whom he cast in Face to Face (1952), a film which received moderate reviews. Encouraged by his new wife to make a name as a patron of the arts, Hartford set up an artists' foundation and, in 1954, converted an old cinema into a theatre where he staged his own adaptation of Jane Eyre with Jan Brooks as Jane and a hopelessly drunk Errol Flynn as Mr Rochester. The script was panned by critics and Flynn dropped out but, undaunted, Hartford took the show to New York, where it played to empty houses for six weeks. Other ventures at this time included a "handwriting institute" (he even wrote a book on graphology) and an automated parking business in Manhattan which lost $1.8 million. In 1959 Hartford sold $40 million of his shares in A&P to buy Hog Island, a two-mile strip of farmland 600 yards off Nassau, hoping to develop it into the St Tropez of the Bahamas. He renamed it Paradise Island and built the Ocean Club, a luxury resort with 35 acres of gardens modelled on those at Versailles and featuring a 12th-century French Augustinian monastery originally purchased and dismantled by William Randolph Hearst. At the other end of the island he built himself a palatial home where he played host to a cast of celebrities including Winston Churchill, Aristotle Onassis and Zsa Zsa Gabor. In 1960 Marjorie had sued him for divorce, winning a settlement which included $1 million trust funds for each of their two children. Two years later he married Diane Brown, a red-haired model who had appeared in Thunderball. She bore him a daughter, Juliet, but they both had affairs (she with the singer Bobby Darin), and they divorced in 1970. Meanwhile the Ocean Club suffered because of Hartford's failure to obtain a gambling licence. Resorts International eventually bought him out for $1 million, leaving him with losses of around $30 million. In the early 1960s he built the Huntington Hartford Museum in Manhattan as a showcase for modern art, but he had decidedly unfashionable tastes, preferring "realistic" works (mainly, oddly enough, by Salvador Dalí) to "vulgar" cubism and abstract expressionism. The gallery opened in 1964 to withering reviews both for its design ("a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops") and contents. The whole venture cost Hartford $7.4 million before he abandoned it. In 1974 Hartford married Elaine Kay, a 20-year-old beautician from Fort Lauderdale. Within 72 hours of their marriage she walked out after a row but soon returned, bringing several of her women friends with her to share Hartford's 20-room duplex apartment in Manhattan. He began to experiment with drugs, apparently under her influence. The couple were divorced in 1981 but continued to live together, and Hartford's apartment became the site of violent encounters involving transient visitors, some of whom robbed him of artworks and other possessions. In 1984, after Ms Kay and a friend were charged with tying up Hartford's teenage secretary and shaving her head, the directors of the building voted for eviction. Little more was heard of Hartford until 2001, when his daughter Juliet found him living alone and covered in bedsores in a squalid rented house in Brooklyn. She placed him in a nursing home, before taking him back to the Bahamas in 2004. Hartford's illegitimate son committed suicide in 1967. His daughter by his second wife died in 1988 after developing drug problems. He is survived by a son by his second marriage and by the daughter of his third. "At least I tried to do something artistic with my money," Hartford would say. "What did Paul Getty ever do but make more?" |
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