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PARADISE LOST .. . AND FOUND
By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2007
Edit International
On the second floor of a silent old brownstone in New York City lay a fallen legend. Through an open door could be seen two naked legs on a bare mattress, feet pointing toward the ceiling. They belonged to a wild Howard Hughes-like apparition -a white-haired old man who has not been seen since the eighties.
Once he was the famous lover of movie stars and super models and a friend of presidents and kings. The Beatles sang for him privately. Sean Connery raced him in speedboats. His splendid yachts cruised oceans and docked on the Seine and The Thames. He was one of the richest and most generous men in the world - someone Donald Trump would have borrowed from.
The old East Manhattan house he lived in was no slum but it was a terrible come down. For the old man was renting. It was as if the Queen of England were living in a London tower block.
For this was the last throne of an American monarch, last stop for a man with a golden name: Huntington Hartford, once the world's most eligible playboy.
The heir to a vast international supermarket chain fortune had squandered all his millions. Now he was alone and forgotten by the famous with nothing more to give.
His resting place was covered by tattered manuscript pages walked upon and spread about by black cats inside a gloomy room smelling of feline waste.
George Huntington Hartford looked up through thick glasses, his face close to a phone. He didn't like the look he was receiving. He didn't want pity.
"Don't worry about me," said Huntington Hartford. "I'm just taking a rest. I can walk. I'm okay. I just don't see people anymore. I have money." He hung up the phone, closed his eyes and petted a black cat.
But he didn't have money. He'd blown away more than $400 million dollars.
As a young and handsome philanthropist he developed Nassau's Paradise Island, built New York's Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art and California's Huntington Hartford Theater and the Huntington Hartford Art Colony.
Ashamed of his great unearned fortune Hartford had misguidedly set out to change the world's cultural tastes in art and theater by force of his great wealth. But the masses didn't care. Culture, Huntington Hartford learned, cannot be forced upon anyone.
Neither could his intentions. Hartford was notorious in his quest for beautiful women. Even in his sixties, the groping and aging playboy couldn't satisfy his search for young women and was often asked to leave parties.
Huntington Hartford's money came from 14,000 thriving Atlantic & Pacific Tea supermarket stores his grandfather invented in the early 1900's and which earned billions as A&P became the world's largest chain store and forever shaped the way the Western world shopped.
Everything about Huntington Hartford had been first class. He was raised by a British governess, had a 9-hole golf course built for him at ten and had private tutors for schooling and sports. He'd graduated from Harvard and toured Europe with his mother until he came of age.
His suits were made by tailors flown in from London. Italy's finest hairdressers traveled the Atlantic to do the hair of his various wives. He crossed continents in private trains and oceans on private yachts because he didn't like flying.
Hartford kept a mansion on London's Red Lyon Road and a permanent suite at the Dorchester. He had permanent suites in many of the world's finest hotels and kept more homes in Palm Beach, Paris, Monte Carlo, Geneva, Cannes and the Bahamas.
Hartford dated Lana Turner and Marilyn Munroe. Close frends included Errol Flynn, Adnan Kashogi, Presidents Nixon and Ford, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando and princes, queens and kings. Even old Winston Churchill in his last days, yachted in by Aristotle Onassis, was a Hartford confident on Paradise Island.
Hartford was taught to dance by Fred Astaire and tennis by famed Pancho Gonzalez, his private full time coach.
The playboy married four times and had two sons and two daughters among five women. The beautiful mistress who bore him one son committed suicide. Later their son, whom Hartford acknowledged and supported, but refused to give the Hartford name, shot himself.
A beautiful alcoholic and drug-addicted daughter who had attended 27 different private schools around the world died of exposure in her 30's.
"Did you know Cathy was actually beaten to death on a beach in Hawaii by bad people she knew?" he asked bleakly. "She was the great sadness of my life, the one tragedy I wish I could undo."
Women had always been trouble for Hartford. Diane Hartford, a beautiful teenager when he met her, had run off to London with singer Bobby Darin with side visits to Monte Carlo, Paris and New York.
"I'm going to do a book on my life," he announced "Two of my wives, Marjorie and Diane, are going to come here and work with me on it."
His eyes lit up. "I'm very proud of Marjorie. She turned out to be a wonderful and talented artist as well as a movie and stage actress while refusing to take my help. She was a cigarette girl at Ciro's restaurant in New York when I first met her.
We had two children. Today she lives in Ireland and is one of Europe's leading artists. I still talk with her by phone and love her dearly."
Now he tried to answer the never ending question? Where had all the money gone? Why had everything he touched turned from gold to ashes?
"I turned down hundreds who approached me with investment schemes they promised would make millions, explained Hartford wistfully. “I'd have been more interested if they said their idea would lose millions.”
He was bitter in old age. So much had gone wrong. "I built the finest and most modem Stage Theater in the world in Los Angeles.
“The city gave me a plaque but they still went ahead and took my name down off the marquee when I gave it away." Hartford lost millions on the theater. He gave away millions more supporting actors, musicians, conductors, authors and playwrights.
He has also given away millions to help the world save the ancient Egyptian statues of Abu Simbel from flooding when the Nile was altered for the giant Aswan Dam.
But much of his fortune was lost on world famous Paradise Island in the Bahamas, just 1,500 feet from Nassau.
It had belonged to Swedish arms merchant and industrialist Axel Wernergren and had been known as Hog Island when Hartford, alone and without legal advice, bought it for $11 million cash in 1959 with a contract written on the back of a paper restaurant napkin.
Those were high flying times for Huntington Hartford. He had a number of multi-million dollar fully staffed mansions in the Bahamas and Florida stashed with beautiful young waiting women.
He dated them once then settled them in secret luxury, often with their mothers, and kept them supplied with fine food, clothes and jewels.
There they waited, sometimes for years, until they realized he'd never show up again. Then timeworn and bitter they'd go back to where they had come from.
He built the Cafe Martinique restaurant and an exquisite small hotel. The Ocean Club had only 52 rooms, but a staff of 400. Hartford built a golf course and had plans for chariot racing in a 5,000 seat forum and a gambling casino.
But Huntington Hartford, like almost all foreign investors in the Bahamas, was snagged in the corrupt net of members of the white ruling United Bahamian Party.
When the UBP refused to allow Hartford to build a bridge connecting Paradise Island with Nassau or grant him a gambling license, Hartford backed a young black politician, 27-year-old Lynden Pindling with cash campaign funds.
Pindling lost the first election and Hartford was forced by vengeful white politicians, mobsters and cutthroat businessmen to sell off the island he'd spent $40 million on for $50,000 in cash and a lot of worthless stock.
Pindling won the next election. The new owners of Paradise Island were quickly granted a gambling license and a high level bridge soon connected the island to Nassau over which still flood thousands of gambling tourists at two dollars a head.
Hartford's original luxurious 52-room is still there too, its rooms and suites renting from $800 to $5,000 a night. Another 25 hotels and the Atlantis Gambling Casino dot the 650 acres of Paradise Island. Those who bought the island from Hartford soon sold it for $250 million. Scores have become millionaires because of Huntington Hartford's lost dream.
In the 1960's he built Manhattan's Huntington Hartford Museum of Modern Art where he was a patron of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. His gallery provided a first glimpse of the talents of many struggling artists.
But the Gallery cost Hartford ten thousand dollars every week it was open. He finally shut it down at a cost of many millions. The building is now used by the City of New York as an information center.
Even while fighting to keep control of Paradise Island Hartford started up his prestigious Show Magazine.
Now he confessed: "I started Show to meet movie stars and beautiful girls and I did." On one bound cover of the magazine in his room was a young and beautiful Sophia Loren. "She was sensational," said Huntington Hartford. "I loved her from the moment we met."
Show magazine opened with a splash and featured beautiful girls Hartford discovered and often bedded. The magazine folded finally after three different launches and cost Huntington Hartford many millions more.
For almost three decades Hartford lived at New York's most prestigious address - Number
One Beekman Place. On one side lived the Bordens, on the other, the Astors and Rockefellers.
The five-story, 21-room house was filled with exquisite art objects including two giant Ming Dynasty vases at its entrance. Visitors walked among priceless turn of the century music boxes and ancient stringed instruments. Paintings of renowned artists hung on every wall.
He was known as a man who never drank or smoked. While others were consuming strong drinks or using drugs around him - Huntington Hartford always had the same thing - a glass of warm milk. But unfortunately he changed.
We recalled a visit we'd made in 1974 to One Beekman Place.
"I don't remember her name," said Hartford of the young half naked and drugged woman who had answered the door. "I don't remember much of anything at that time except I had a lot of young beautiful girls hanging around."
Hartford had waited for us on a chair in the center of the living room. And there he sat, head down on his chest in a drugged stupor. The room was filled with eight young women in their early twenties. All wore see-through silks and nothing else.
Hartford tried to talk but kept nodding off. We finally left.
Hartford lived 28 years in Beekman Place. Once he fought and won in court against neighbors seeking to have him move because of the swarms of late night callers and screaming drug parties.
Anyone could just walk into New York's most exclusive address and they did. While Hartford and his drugged and drunk friends were sleeping, thieves stood outside open windows while accomplices inside threw out priceless oriental rugs and paintings to be carried away.
The Beekman years ended in 1982 when beautiful Elaine, his last young wife and another woman, grabbed a 17-year-old girl working as Hartford's secretary, tied her up naked and shaved off every hair on her body.
Hartford was evicted and forced to settle $112,000 out of court on the shorn girl who had been seeking $65 million in damages.
Once Newsweek ran a large article on Huntington Hartford saying he'd lost $9 million in one year. Friends phoned and said they were worried about him.
"You don't have to worry about me. Nine million dollars?" He chuckled, "At that rate I'll be broke in 100 years."
Hartford is supposed to be getting $860,000 a year from one last multi-million dollar trust but it was taken over in 1979 by bankruptcy lawyers who allow him a few hundred dollars a week to live on. Meanwhile various wives are still getting thousands each month and former employees receive lifelong pensions.
His fourth wife, whom he divorced years ago, Elaine, a convicted drug user, still comes to visit Huntington Hartford and remains secluded on the third floor refusing to greet visitors. She is believed to control what money the broken heir still receives.
For a man famous for not carrying any money - something he left up to his aides - Huntington Hartford has fallen far. In the cluttered bedroom he looked desperately through his blanket for a red appointments book containing several 20 dollar bills.
He took one out slowly and carefully and called in an elderly Filipino man -- his last servant --and sent him on a shopping errand, warning him to bring back the change.
A&P, the grocery chain that spawned Huntington Hartford, has not done so well either. A German company bought enough A&P stock at $8 a share to get control of the company whose shares once sold for as high as $70.
Once at a dinner party someone asked Huntington Hartford what he'd like to do with his life.
"I'd like to grow old, spend all my money and die broke," replied the handsome heir, with a laugh. "But," someone asked, "what if you 'live' broke?"
Hartford stopped laughing. "Then I'd be in hell!"
Now the meeting with Huntington Hartford was over. The man in the tattered dressing gown had won the lottery of life just by being born but he'd blown it away, lost it all.
And his worst fear has come true. At 85 Huntington Hartford has outlasted almost all the famous people he'd known and most of his enemies.
But he's also outlasted his money. There was nothing to do but leave him in hell.
Epilogue:
Recently, Huntington Hartford in his mid nineties, confined to a wheelchair, but smiling triumphantly, was forced to conquer his fear of flying. He flew into the Bahamas with his niece and daughter Julie. They are occupying a mansion on Lyford Cay where the old playboy is living out his last years.
Ends
By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2007
Edit International
(Also see: My Adventures with Huntington Hartford)
PARADISE LOST .. . AND FOUND
By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2007
Edit International
On the second floor of a silent old brownstone in New York City lay a fallen legend. Through an open door could be seen two naked legs on a bare mattress, feet pointing toward the ceiling. They belonged to a wild Howard Hughes-like apparition -a white-haired old man who has not been seen since the eighties.
Once he was the famous lover of movie stars and super models and a friend of presidents and kings. The Beatles sang for him privately. Sean Connery raced him in speedboats. His splendid yachts cruised oceans and docked on the Seine and The Thames. He was one of the richest and most generous men in the world - someone Donald Trump would have borrowed from.
The old East Manhattan house he lived in was no slum but it was a terrible come down. For the old man was renting. It was as if the Queen of England were living in a London tower block.
For this was the last throne of an American monarch, last stop for a man with a golden name: Huntington Hartford, once the world's most eligible playboy.
The heir to a vast international supermarket chain fortune had squandered all his millions. Now he was alone and forgotten by the famous with nothing more to give.
His resting place was covered by tattered manuscript pages walked upon and spread about by black cats inside a gloomy room smelling of feline waste.
George Huntington Hartford looked up through thick glasses, his face close to a phone. He didn't like the look he was receiving. He didn't want pity.
"Don't worry about me," said Huntington Hartford. "I'm just taking a rest. I can walk. I'm okay. I just don't see people anymore. I have money." He hung up the phone, closed his eyes and petted a black cat.
But he didn't have money. He'd blown away more than $400 million dollars.
As a young and handsome philanthropist he developed Nassau's Paradise Island, built New York's Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art and California's Huntington Hartford Theater and the Huntington Hartford Art Colony.
Ashamed of his great unearned fortune Hartford had misguidedly set out to change the world's cultural tastes in art and theater by force of his great wealth. But the masses didn't care. Culture, Huntington Hartford learned, cannot be forced upon anyone.
Neither could his intentions. Hartford was notorious in his quest for beautiful women. Even in his sixties, the groping and aging playboy couldn't satisfy his search for young women and was often asked to leave parties.
Huntington Hartford's money came from 14,000 thriving Atlantic & Pacific Tea supermarket stores his grandfather invented in the early 1900's and which earned billions as A&P became the world's largest chain store and forever shaped the way the Western world shopped.
Everything about Huntington Hartford had been first class. He was raised by a British governess, had a 9-hole golf course built for him at ten and had private tutors for schooling and sports. He'd graduated from Harvard and toured Europe with his mother until he came of age.
His suits were made by tailors flown in from London. Italy's finest hairdressers traveled the Atlantic to do the hair of his various wives. He crossed continents in private trains and oceans on private yachts because he didn't like flying.
Hartford kept a mansion on London's Red Lyon Road and a permanent suite at the Dorchester. He had permanent suites in many of the world's finest hotels and kept more homes in Palm Beach, Paris, Monte Carlo, Geneva, Cannes and the Bahamas.
Hartford dated Lana Turner and Marilyn Munroe. Close frends included Errol Flynn, Adnan Kashogi, Presidents Nixon and Ford, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando and princes, queens and kings. Even old Winston Churchill in his last days, yachted in by Aristotle Onassis, was a Hartford confident on Paradise Island.
Hartford was taught to dance by Fred Astaire and tennis by famed Pancho Gonzalez, his private full time coach.
The playboy married four times and had two sons and two daughters among five women. The beautiful mistress who bore him one son committed suicide. Later their son, whom Hartford acknowledged and supported, but refused to give the Hartford name, shot himself.
A beautiful alcoholic and drug-addicted daughter who had attended 27 different private schools around the world died of exposure in her 30's.
"Did you know Cathy was actually beaten to death on a beach in Hawaii by bad people she knew?" he asked bleakly. "She was the great sadness of my life, the one tragedy I wish I could undo."
Women had always been trouble for Hartford. Diane Hartford, a beautiful teenager when he met her, had run off to London with singer Bobby Darin with side visits to Monte Carlo, Paris and New York.
"I'm going to do a book on my life," he announced "Two of my wives, Marjorie and Diane, are going to come here and work with me on it."
His eyes lit up. "I'm very proud of Marjorie. She turned out to be a wonderful and talented artist as well as a movie and stage actress while refusing to take my help. She was a cigarette girl at Ciro's restaurant in New York when I first met her.
We had two children. Today she lives in Ireland and is one of Europe's leading artists. I still talk with her by phone and love her dearly."
Now he tried to answer the never ending question? Where had all the money gone? Why had everything he touched turned from gold to ashes?
"I turned down hundreds who approached me with investment schemes they promised would make millions, explained Hartford wistfully. “I'd have been more interested if they said their idea would lose millions.”
He was bitter in old age. So much had gone wrong. "I built the finest and most modem Stage Theater in the world in Los Angeles.
“The city gave me a plaque but they still went ahead and took my name down off the marquee when I gave it away." Hartford lost millions on the theater. He gave away millions more supporting actors, musicians, conductors, authors and playwrights.
He has also given away millions to help the world save the ancient Egyptian statues of Abu Simbel from flooding when the Nile was altered for the giant Aswan Dam.
But much of his fortune was lost on world famous Paradise Island in the Bahamas, just 1,500 feet from Nassau.
It had belonged to Swedish arms merchant and industrialist Axel Wernergren and had been known as Hog Island when Hartford, alone and without legal advice, bought it for $11 million cash in 1959 with a contract written on the back of a paper restaurant napkin.
Those were high flying times for Huntington Hartford. He had a number of multi-million dollar fully staffed mansions in the Bahamas and Florida stashed with beautiful young waiting women.
He dated them once then settled them in secret luxury, often with their mothers, and kept them supplied with fine food, clothes and jewels.
There they waited, sometimes for years, until they realized he'd never show up again. Then timeworn and bitter they'd go back to where they had come from.
He built the Cafe Martinique restaurant and an exquisite small hotel. The Ocean Club had only 52 rooms, but a staff of 400. Hartford built a golf course and had plans for chariot racing in a 5,000 seat forum and a gambling casino.
But Huntington Hartford, like almost all foreign investors in the Bahamas, was snagged in the corrupt net of members of the white ruling United Bahamian Party.
When the UBP refused to allow Hartford to build a bridge connecting Paradise Island with Nassau or grant him a gambling license, Hartford backed a young black politician, 27-year-old Lynden Pindling with cash campaign funds.
Pindling lost the first election and Hartford was forced by vengeful white politicians, mobsters and cutthroat businessmen to sell off the island he'd spent $40 million on for $50,000 in cash and a lot of worthless stock.
Pindling won the next election. The new owners of Paradise Island were quickly granted a gambling license and a high level bridge soon connected the island to Nassau over which still flood thousands of gambling tourists at two dollars a head.
Hartford's original luxurious 52-room is still there too, its rooms and suites renting from $800 to $5,000 a night. Another 25 hotels and the Atlantis Gambling Casino dot the 650 acres of Paradise Island. Those who bought the island from Hartford soon sold it for $250 million. Scores have become millionaires because of Huntington Hartford's lost dream.
In the 1960's he built Manhattan's Huntington Hartford Museum of Modern Art where he was a patron of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. His gallery provided a first glimpse of the talents of many struggling artists.
But the Gallery cost Hartford ten thousand dollars every week it was open. He finally shut it down at a cost of many millions. The building is now used by the City of New York as an information center.
Even while fighting to keep control of Paradise Island Hartford started up his prestigious Show Magazine.
Now he confessed: "I started Show to meet movie stars and beautiful girls and I did." On one bound cover of the magazine in his room was a young and beautiful Sophia Loren. "She was sensational," said Huntington Hartford. "I loved her from the moment we met."
Show magazine opened with a splash and featured beautiful girls Hartford discovered and often bedded. The magazine folded finally after three different launches and cost Huntington Hartford many millions more.
For almost three decades Hartford lived at New York's most prestigious address - Number
One Beekman Place. On one side lived the Bordens, on the other, the Astors and Rockefellers.
The five-story, 21-room house was filled with exquisite art objects including two giant Ming Dynasty vases at its entrance. Visitors walked among priceless turn of the century music boxes and ancient stringed instruments. Paintings of renowned artists hung on every wall.
He was known as a man who never drank or smoked. While others were consuming strong drinks or using drugs around him - Huntington Hartford always had the same thing - a glass of warm milk. But unfortunately he changed.
We recalled a visit we'd made in 1974 to One Beekman Place.
"I don't remember her name," said Hartford of the young half naked and drugged woman who had answered the door. "I don't remember much of anything at that time except I had a lot of young beautiful girls hanging around."
Hartford had waited for us on a chair in the center of the living room. And there he sat, head down on his chest in a drugged stupor. The room was filled with eight young women in their early twenties. All wore see-through silks and nothing else.
Hartford tried to talk but kept nodding off. We finally left.
Hartford lived 28 years in Beekman Place. Once he fought and won in court against neighbors seeking to have him move because of the swarms of late night callers and screaming drug parties.
Anyone could just walk into New York's most exclusive address and they did. While Hartford and his drugged and drunk friends were sleeping, thieves stood outside open windows while accomplices inside threw out priceless oriental rugs and paintings to be carried away.
The Beekman years ended in 1982 when beautiful Elaine, his last young wife and another woman, grabbed a 17-year-old girl working as Hartford's secretary, tied her up naked and shaved off every hair on her body.
Hartford was evicted and forced to settle $112,000 out of court on the shorn girl who had been seeking $65 million in damages.
Once Newsweek ran a large article on Huntington Hartford saying he'd lost $9 million in one year. Friends phoned and said they were worried about him.
"You don't have to worry about me. Nine million dollars?" He chuckled, "At that rate I'll be broke in 100 years."
Hartford is supposed to be getting $860,000 a year from one last multi-million dollar trust but it was taken over in 1979 by bankruptcy lawyers who allow him a few hundred dollars a week to live on. Meanwhile various wives are still getting thousands each month and former employees receive lifelong pensions.
His fourth wife, whom he divorced years ago, Elaine, a convicted drug user, still comes to visit Huntington Hartford and remains secluded on the third floor refusing to greet visitors. She is believed to control what money the broken heir still receives.
For a man famous for not carrying any money - something he left up to his aides - Huntington Hartford has fallen far. In the cluttered bedroom he looked desperately through his blanket for a red appointments book containing several 20 dollar bills.
He took one out slowly and carefully and called in an elderly Filipino man -- his last servant --and sent him on a shopping errand, warning him to bring back the change.
A&P, the grocery chain that spawned Huntington Hartford, has not done so well either. A German company bought enough A&P stock at $8 a share to get control of the company whose shares once sold for as high as $70.
Once at a dinner party someone asked Huntington Hartford what he'd like to do with his life.
"I'd like to grow old, spend all my money and die broke," replied the handsome heir, with a laugh. "But," someone asked, "what if you 'live' broke?"
Hartford stopped laughing. "Then I'd be in hell!"
Now the meeting with Huntington Hartford was over. The man in the tattered dressing gown had won the lottery of life just by being born but he'd blown it away, lost it all.
And his worst fear has come true. At 85 Huntington Hartford has outlasted almost all the famous people he'd known and most of his enemies.
But he's also outlasted his money. There was nothing to do but leave him in hell.
Epilogue:
Recently, Huntington Hartford in his mid nineties, confined to a wheelchair, but smiling triumphantly, was forced to conquer his fear of flying. He flew into the Bahamas with his niece and daughter Julie. They are occupying a mansion on Lyford Cay where the old playboy is living out his last years.
Ends
By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2007
Edit International
(Also see: My Adventures with Huntington Hartford)
