Born into a dysfunctional family [citation needed], Barbara Hutton's father was a notorious philanderer [citation needed]. Her mother committed suicide when Barbara was six years old. After her mother's death, she was shuffled between various relatives, and raised by a governess. She became an introverted child who had limited interaction with other children her own age. Her closest friend and only confidante was her homosexual cousin Jimmy Donahue, the son of her mother's sister.
In accordance with New York's high society traditions, Barbara Hutton was given a lavish débutante ball on her 18th birthday, where guests from the Astor and Rockefeller families, amongst other elites, were entertained by stars such as Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier. Three years later, on her 21st birthday, Barbara Hutton inherited close to $50 million from her mother's estate. Her inheritance made her one of the wealthiest women in the world.
Portrayed in the press as the "lucky" young woman who had it all, the public had no idea of the psychological problems she lived with that led to a life of victimization and abuse [citation needed]. Barbara Hutton married seven times:
1933 - Alexis Mdivani, a soi-disant Georgian prince, divorced 1935
1935 - Count Curt Heinrich Eberhard Erdmann Georg von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, divorced 1938
1942 - Cary Grant, divorced 1945
1947 - Igor Troubetzkoy, divorced 1951
1953 - Porfirio Rubirosa, divorced 1954
1955 - Baron Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt von Cramm, divorced 1959
1964 - Prince Pierre Raymond Doan, divorced 1966 (she bought him the title Vinh na Champassak of Laos)
Her first two husbands had their own dysfunctional backgrounds [citation needed] and could not deal with her neediness [citation needed]. They used her great wealth to their advantage, especially the extremely abusive [citation needed] Curt Haugwitz-Reventlow with whom she had her only child, a son named Lance.
Reventlow dominated her through verbal and physical abuse that escalated to a savage beating that left her hospitalized and him in jail [citation needed]. He also persuaded her to give up her American citizenship to take his native Danish citizenship for tax purposes, which she did in December 1937 in a New York federal court.
Hutton's divorce from Reventlow gave her custody of their son, and like her father had done to her, she left the raising of Lance to a governess and private boarding schools. The physical and sexual abuse led to drug abuse and Hutton developed anorexia [citation needed], which would plague her for the rest of her life.
With World War II raging in Europe, Hutton gifted her London mansion Winfield House to the United States government and moved to California. Back home, Hutton became active during the war, giving money to assist the Free French Forces and donating her yacht to the U.S. government. Using her high profile image to sell War bonds, she received positive publicity after being derided by the press as a result of her marriage scandals. In Hollywood, she met and married Cary Grant, one of the biggest movie stars of the day. Grant did not need her money nor to benefit from her name, and genuinely cared for her. Nevertheless, this marriage failed as well.
Hutton left California and moved to Paris, France before acquiring a mansion in trendy Tangier. Hutton then began dating Igor Troubetzkoy, another expatriate Russian prince of very limited means but world renown. In the spring of 1948 in Zurich, Switzerland, she married him. That year, he was the driver of the first Ferrari to ever compete in Grand Prix motor racing when he raced in the Monaco Grand Prix and later won the Targa Florio. For the second time she had married a man who actually loved her. He ultimately could not deal with her problems and filed for divorce. Hutton's attempted suicide [citation needed] made headlines around the world. Mocked by the press as the "Poor Little Rich Girl," her life nevertheless made great copy and the media exploited her for consumption by a fascinated public.
Her next husband was an old friend, German tennis star Baron Gottfried von Cramm. Hutton sought safety and friendship with the homosexual von Cramm. This marriage also ended in divorce. He died in an automobile crash near Cairo, Egypt in 1976.
Her next marriage lasted only 53 days. Porfirio Rubirosa, one of the most notorious of international playboys, only married the vulnerable woman for her wealth and reputation [citation needed] while continuing his affair with the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor [citation needed]. Hutton then met James Douglas, a handsome young American who, though homosexual [citation needed], cared for her. (She also had an intense, though platonic, relationship with another young American, Philip Van Rensselaer.) However, her lavish spending continued, and although she was already the owner of several mansions around the world, in 1959 she built a luxurious Japanese-style palace on a 30 acre (120,000 m²) estate in Cuernavaca, Mexico. For a time she seemed happy, but when her neglected 23-year-old son Lance visited and unleashed his anguish over his upbringing, Hutton was unable to cope and reverted back to her addictions [citation needed]. (Her son later married the actresses Jill St. John and Cheryl Holdridge, a former Mouseketeer who is now known as Cheryl Reventlow Post.)
Extremely volatile when drinking [citation needed], Hutton had to be restrained on an aircraft flight after which she began suffering from drunken blackouts [citation needed]. She frequently appeared drunk in public and her rash spending continued unabated. Over the years, she had acquired a large collection of valuable jewelry, including elaborate historical pieces that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette and Empress Eugénie of France. In her drunken stupors, Hutton began sleeping with numerous younger men, total strangers to whom she gave money, diamond bracelets, and other pieces of expensive jewelry [citation needed].
In Tangier, she met her seventh husband, Raymond Doan. (Other sources [citation needed] indicate that the title she bought for him came through his late-in-life adoption by the head of the Champassak family, deposed Indochinese royalty.) His sole motive was to get at her wealth [citation needed], which by then had shrunk considerably from years of reckless spending. This marriage, too, was short-lived.
The 1972 death of her son in an aircraft crash sent Hutton into a state of despair. Her fortune had shrunken to the point where she began liquidating assets in order to raise funds to live on. Nonetheless, she continued to spend money on strangers willing to pay a little attention to her. She spent her final years living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she died from a heart attack in May of 1979, and was interred in the Woolworth family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. At her death, it is said that $3,000 was all that remained of her fortune.
Over the years, numerous books have been written about Barbara Hutton, the best known of which are:
Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton by C. David Heymann
Million Dollar Baby: An Intimate Portrait of Barbara Hutton by Philip Van Rensselaer
In 1987, a television motion picture titled Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story starred Farrah Fawcett in the role of Barbara Hutton.
Title: Jill st. john married barbara hutton's son
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