untitled design

The rich descendant who squandered his vast fortune and died an African

“Life is short, so you do not live it well.” That, in a way, could be his motto Huntington Hartford, one of the descendants of America’s largest supermarket chain, A & P. But he himself lived for almost a century, taking care of most of it. A good time, of course, which cost him dearly in his pocket, as he wasted all the money he inherited from his family and died an Afghan. And if it were not for his daughter to take him near her, he might have died alone and helpless.

One could say that his story was fascinating and definitely instructive. Because there can be many examples of self-made people who acquired huge fortunes, however, there is also Huntington Hartford who is the typical example of the opposite case.

He was born in the feathers

THE Huntington Hartford was born into one of the richest families in America, as they were the owners of A & P, the only supermarket chain of the time. He was born in April 1911 in New York, and at the age of 7, after the death of his grandfather, he became the recipient of an annual income of 1.5 million dollars.

He and his family spent most of the year in a lovely apartment on 5th Avenue and spent the rest in a plantation in South Carolina and on a property in Connecticut. Little Huntington grew up with all the comforts and excesses, but at the age of 12 he lost his father, providing – of course – financially his two children, Huntington and his sister.

They were raised solely by their authoritarian mother, Enrietta, with the help of an army of servants at a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The “golden” heir went to Harvard for studies, when his mother wanted to marry him to a wealthy young neighbor, Doris Duke, heir to a tobacco tycoon.

But she counted without the hotelier, since her son was by nature a rebel and in no way was it logical to “unite the properties”. In fact, the young Huntington went against his authoritarian mother, when he fell in love with a trainee kindergarten teacher, then 18-year-old Mary Lee Epping, whom he married.

He was deceived by dolce vita and bad investments

From a young age, Huntington seemed to be the “black” sheep of the family and that he had other plans for his life, which had nothing to do with the family business, which his uncles had grown financially. After graduating from university, he caught up with A&P headquarters in New York.

And while he waited as heir he would take on an important post, his uncles made him watch the sales of bread and cakes. He did not like the position assigned to him, and finally they parted their bags in an inglorious way, when he did not go to work one day because he wanted to watch a football match.

Huntington decided to go his own way and try his hand at investing. He may have thought that he would have inherited the business DNA of his grandfather, who, among other things, was the largest importer of tea in America. But in this case, he fell out as his investments were misplaced, expensive and in the end as it turned out they cost him financially.

In 1940 he invested $ 100,000 in founding a PM newspaper and got a job as a reporter. But even this job did not suit him, since he was systematically late in delivering his reports. During World War II he enlisted in the Coast Guard, to which he donated his yacht and was rewarded with the position of captain on a small craft, which twice managed to run aground.

When the war ended, she opened a modeling agency in Los Angeles and began dating famous ladies such as Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe, which he had said was “oppressive, like a luxury prostitute”. Hollywood glamor fascinated him and he wanted to invest in the Mecca of cinema, buying two studios, and set up the Huntingon Hartford Art Institute. Investment means expensive.

He had since divorced his wife and fallen in love with an 18-year-old starlet, Marjorie Steele, whom he married in 1949. Although he had ambitious plans for every step of his career, they failed. And the same happened with his career in the show business.

His first Broadway production in 1955, with the play A Day by the Sea, collapsed, and three years later, he uploaded a self-written Jane Eyre adaptation starring Errol Flynn. But this show also fell. His third and final production on Broadway did not prove to be so… pharmacist. This is because the then young actor Al Pacino won the Tony Award.

Huntington was a celebrity of the time and recklessly spent the money he had inherited to satisfy the expensive tastes of himself and his friends and of course his wives. In fact, in the luxury residential complex he had built, he hosted great personalities of the time, such as Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill, Aristotle Onassis, Sean Connery and the Beatles. In fact, it is said that the famous “Island of Paradise” cost him about a third of his heritage.

The following years were followed by other failed investments, which cost him money, such as an art museum in Manhattan in 1964, with a budget of $ 8 million. A huge amount for that time.

Expensive divorces

In his personal life he was unstable and had a weakness for well-being and women. He had four marriages and paid dearly for them. His divorce from Marjorie Steele turned out to be “gold” for her, as in addition to the money she received, he was forced to pay a million dollars in trusts for each of the three children they had.

His next wife was a model Diane Brown, with whom they had a daughter. But they divorced in 1970, as neither of them was faithful to this marriage.

And he probably did not mind, since at the age of 63 he decided to get married for the fourth time. In fact, the bride – a hairdresser by profession – was only 20 years old! This proved to be his destruction. Elaine Kay is said to have been the one who introduced him to the world of drugs. And although they divorced a few years after their marriage, they continued to live together in his luxurious Manhattan apartment.

Until they parted their bags completely and the once “golden” heir moved to a house in New York. However, the dirt and disorder that prevailed forced the Health Service to intervene. The eras of glitter, glory and reckless waste are now a thing of the past. Huntington Hartford was now an old man, helpless, drug-addicted, and financially poor.

After all, in 1992 he declared bankruptcy, having managed to waste a huge inheritance, which he has not been able to enrich even once since he took it into his own hands. It just shrunk it. In the mid-1990s, his daughter, Juliet, placed him in a nursing home and in 2004, she took him to their home in the Bahamas to spend the last years of his life in peace. In the meantime he had lost his other daughter to drugs.

He died in 2008 at the age of 80, having lived an intense life. And until he closed his eyes, he insisted that he did not regret once wasting his fortune, as he always believed that their investments were creative, they just did not work out.

You may also like

Get the latest

Stay Informed: Get the Latest Updates and Insights

 

Most popular