Sad end for ‘poor little rich girl’

Press, 14 May 1979, Page 9

Sad end for ‘poor little rich girl’

K’ZPA-Reuter Los Angeles

Barbara Hutton, the “poor little rich girl” with beauty md a fortune built on the Woolworth store empire, spent most of her life trying to escape loneliness, seeking bve in seven marriages. She never seemed to find • real home or true love, ind became an ailing recluse who spent much of her time in hospitals. Miss Hutton, aged 66, died If a heart attack on Friday night in her penthouse suite it the Beverley Wiltshire Hotel. A woman in her suite tailed paramedics, who arrived within three minutes, but could not revive her. She was dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

The Beverley Hills Fire partment and the Westwood Village Mortuary, where her body was taken, listed her as “Barbara Doan,” from the name of her last husband, the Laotian prince and abstract artist, Raymond Doan Vinh, from whom she was separated in 1966, two years after they were married. A mortuary spokesman said an attorney had called to say the body would be flown to New York today, but no details were immediately available on plans for services.

The former jet-setter was nearly blind and was suffering from a bad hip on which she had delayed treatment after a fall. She was bom in New

York on November 14, 1912, daughter of Franklyn Laws Hutton and the former Edna Woolworth, whose father founded the Woolworth chain. Her mother died when Miss Hutton was five. “I hadn’t a very happy childhood,” she recalled. “Though I had millions of dollars, I had no mother and no home.” Her father shuttled her from relative to relative and school to school.

During her marriages, she continued on the move —

iTangiers, Rio. London, Paris, and Rome, for sun or shopping.

me public was fascinated by the woman who seemed able to do anything, yet appeared frail and vulnerable through it all. A series of intestinal operations in Europe was reported to have left her weighing 40 kilograms in 1949.

She broke her hip when she tripped on a carpet in Rome in 1971. A delay in treatment brought complications. In 1969, she underwent cataract surgery that was reported to have left her nearly blind. Her last trip to the hospital ended just eight days before she died, when the Cedars-Sinai Hospital released her after treatment for pneumonia. A spokeswoman for the hospital then denied reports circulating that Miss Hutton was living on a diet of Coca-Cola.

Her frequent travels to exotic places began when her father sent her on a round-the-world trip to discourage a romance.

But Alexis Mdivani, who claimed the title of “prince” of the old State of Georgia, now part of Russia, pursued her to Bangkok. She married Mdivani when she was 20 years old. A few months later, she came into her SUS2OM inheritance. Mdivani died in a

1935 car accident, shortly after their divorce. One day after that divorce she married a wealthy Danish nobleman, Count Kurt Haugwitz-Reventlow. That was her longest marriage, ending in divorce six years later after the birth of a son; Lance, who dabbled in car racing and was killed in July, 1972, in a plane crash in the Rocky Mountains. His estate went to his wife Cheryl. In 1942, Miss Hutton married the British-born actor, Cary Grant, a marriage that lasted three years. She later said he was the husband she loved the most, but that his career had got in the way.

“He was so sweet, so gentle,” she said. During divorce proceedings in 1945, she complained he “did not like my friends. When he came down, and my friends were there, he obviously didn’t look amused.” Her fourth husband was a Lithuanian prince, Igor Troubetskoy, whom she married in 1947. That marriage lasted until 1951. In 1953, she married an international playboy, Porfiro Rubirosa, the Dominican Republic’s Minister to France.

That marriage lasted 73 days, the shortest of her seven.

In 1955, she married a German tennis ace, Baron Gottfried von Cramm. They were divorced in 1960.