Once upon a time–which is to say, a generation or two before Sean Penn and Britney Spears–the popular gossip culture in America was preoccupied not with dysfunctional entertainers but with misbehaving millionaires. And not the men who made the millions, but their errant sons and grandsons, such as Tommy Manville (1894-1967), heir to the Johns-Manville asbestos fortune, who was married 13 times (“She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook”) or England’s Lord Moynihan (1936-1991), who owned a brothel in Manila, played the bongos professionally, and married a succession of models and one “snake charmer and former fire-eater’s assistant” named Shirin Quereshi.
Well, the granddaddy of them all, Huntington Hartford II, died last week at his home in Lyford Cay, Bahamas, age 97.
To readers of a certain age, the name of Huntington Hartford II must be synonymous with wasted resources, failed enterprise, and sad debauchery. An heir to the A&P grocery fortune, Hartford acquired an annual income of $1.5 million on his grandfather’s death in 1917–that’s when a million-and-a-half was the real thing–and by age 12 possessed something like $90 million, which must be close to a billion in today’s money. Hartford had the benefit of an elite education–St. Paul’s, Harvard (’34)–and seems not to have suffered losses in the Depression. In the late 1930s he was fired from an apprenticeship at the A&P when he skipped work to attend the Harvard-Yale football game, and in 1940 he invested $100,000 in the new left-wing newspaper PM, where he was briefly a reporter. It is said that he once traveled to an assignment on his yacht but missed the deadline when he returned to find its berth taken.
It would be nice to say that the experience of World War II–where he served in the Coast Guard and commanded a cargo vessel in the Pacific–awakened the feckless youth, but it didn’t happen. In his earlier years Hartford was a full-time ladies’ man–he ran a modeling agency, married showgirls, produced movies no one paid to see–but in his later years, influenced by the ex-cigarette girl who was his second wife, branched out to cultural entrepreneur. He developed an interest in the study of handwriting, founding a “handwriting institute” and writing a book on graphology, financed an artistic/literary/musical foundation and retreat in Los Angeles, and published an oversized and glossy, but inevitably short-lived, entertainment magazine called Show.
In 1964 he unveiled his most ambitious project: an eponymous Gallery of Modern Art, on Columbus Circle in New York, designed by Edward Durrell Stone and containing the “realistic art” he preferred to what he called the “obscurity, confusion, immorality [and] violence” of cubism, abstract expressionism, and modernism in literature. He expanded on these themes in Art or Anarchy? (1964), a volume which brings to mind Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous remark about Hartford that he was “the sort of man who [would] come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny, and run.”
The gallery, which consumed a fair portion of his assets, was a failure, and the building–called “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops” by one critic, and which Tom Wolfe, in a rare lapse of taste, seems to admire–still sits on Columbus Circle, awaiting renovation.
Along the way, Hartford switched to moneymaking ventures, and with equal success. He drilled for shale oil, which he didn’t find, devised an automated parking garage system, which didn’t work, and sought to build an artists’ café in Central Park, which the city nixed.
In the late 1950s Hartford had purchased a two-mile strip of farmland off Nassau called Hog Island, christened it Paradise Island, and built a gigantic luxury resort called the Ocean Club, with casino, formal gardens, and a 12th-century French monastery building originally purchased and dismantled by William Randolph Hearst. At the other end of the island he constructed a palatial home for himself.
True to form, however, Hartford had failed to obtain a gambling license, and was forced to sell the enterprise to Resorts International for $1 million–a $30 million loss. By then even Hartford must have recognized his leaden touch, and retreated into the welcoming world of drugs, derelict visitors, Howard Hughes-style reclusiveness, increasingly younger girlfriends, and diminishing assets. In 1984 his fourth ex-wife and a friend were charged with tying up Hartford’s teenaged secretary in his Manhattan home and shaving her head. In 2001 his daughter found him living in a squalid rental house in Brooklyn, and put him in a nursing home before shipping him off to the Bahamas.
“I had a lot of money,” he told –Vanity Fair four years ago, “and now I have enough.”
The lessons of Huntington Hartford II’s life seem obvious enough: Wealth can’t buy happiness, quit while you’re ahead, don’t throw good money after bad, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much. Somehow, though, they miss the point. If Hartford had been a little more self-aware, and somewhat less ambitious, he might have been content to live quietly in comfort, paying someone to manage his money, collecting art and manuscripts, subsidizing scholarship, marrying twice, serving on the boards of foundations and museums. But that would have made him indistinguishable from innumerable civic patrons–no doubt, several of his St. Paul’s classmates–and would not have yielded the long, entertaining obituaries in America’s leading newspapers.
What Huntington Hartford II achieved, in the end, was what he probably sought all along: celebrity, at least for a time. Not the kind of celebrity he must have had in mind, but fame and notoriety–and in our world, where Bono is a statesman and Barack Obama is a rock star, who could ask for anything more?
Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
