Huntington Hartford, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur, arts patron and man of leisure, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He was 97.
His death was announced by his daughter, Juliet Hartford.
Mr. Hartford, a grandson of a principal founder of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, was treated like a prince as a boy, indulged by his mother and a staff of servants and eventually provided with a living of about $1.5 million a year. Not content merely to be rich, he longed to be a writer and, more than that, an arbiter of culture and a master builder — ambitions that eluded him time after time.
A famous example was the Huntington Hartford Museum, also known as the Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Mr. Hartford opened it in 1964 as a showcase for 19th- and 20th-century work that went against the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism, which he detested. The building, designed by
Edward Durell Stone, was considered a folly or worse: “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times.
The art within was generally unremarkable. And far from becoming the self-sustaining museum that Mr. Hartford had envisioned, it cost him $7.4 million before he abandoned the building to a rocky fate. It was occupied for many years by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Convention and Visitors Bureau and is now undergoing a extensive redesign as the future home of the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum).
Costlier still was Mr. Hartford’s makeover of Hog Island, in the Bahamas. After buying four-fifths of the place in 1959 and having it renamed Paradise Island, he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.
There were many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled, among them an automated parking garage in Manhattan, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and his own disastrous stage adaptation of “Jane Eyre.” He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.
Writing in Esquire magazine in 1968, after decades of spending beyond his means, Mr. Hartford said that the day had come when the chairman of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company was “suddenly too busy to see me.” But it was not quite clear whether he was bragging or complaining. “To most Americans the worst errors are financial,” he acknowledged, “and in that respect I have been Horatio Alger in reverse.”
In her book “Squandered Fortune: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford” (Putnam, 1991), Lisa Rebecca Gubernick wrote that Mr. Hartford could seldom stay focused, a tendency that irritated his associates, who might be summoned from a continent away only to be told that he had no time to see them.
Frank Lloyd Wright was said to have remarked that Mr. Hartford was “the sort of man who will come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny and run.”
Much the same might have been said of his gadabout love life. In his long heyday, Mr. Hartford frequently turned up in the company of movie stars like
Lana Turner and
Gene Tierney, generating café society headlines. When it came to his four marriages, though, he chose each time a beautiful young woman of no fame or fortune; continued having well-documented affairs regardless; and, after each split, seemed to maintain a genuine affection for the former wife.
According to the Gubernick biography, he even floated the idea that his mother adopt his first wife, the former Mary Lee Epling, so that he might keep her as a sister after their divorce in 1939. Instead, she made a successful new marriage, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
George Huntington Hartford II — he never used the George — was named for his grandfather, who helped to found the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in 1859. It grew into the world’s biggest retail business, and in 1940 the Securities and Exchange Commission ranked the Hartfords among the nation’s richest families. That had been largely the doing of young Huntington’s two hard-working uncles. His own father, Edward, considered himself a more creative, independent type and did very well with a patented shock absorber for automobiles.
Edward Hartford died in 1922, leaving his share of the A. & P. legacy to his two children: Josephine, the elder, who married the following year; and Huntington, then 12, who came under the care of his mother, Henrietta Guerard Hartford. She was by all accounts an overbearing woman, who emphasized her family’s old South Carolinian bloodlines while covering over the fact that her father, Henry Pollitzer, was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Austria.
