Huntington Hartford

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The great Huntington Hartford was all alone now, deserted by his movie star and royal friends. His best friend was a cat. Photo by Ron Laytner copyright Edit International.

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By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2009
Edit International

Lyford Cay, Bahamas – My old friend Huntington Hartford is dead.
The legendary one time owner of all the A&P food stores in the world, philanthropist, art patron, glamorous playboy and publisher died at 97 in a luxury mansion in the Bahamas. He was once among the richest men in the world – but he squandered away all his millions.

Soon after starting a career of journalism that would last a lifetime, I visited Paradise Island, Bahamas at the age of twenty on a small jitney boat from nearby Nassau.

I listened to a steel band and was drinking a welcome fruit punch until a stranger ambled over wearing faded blue swim shorts and cheap rubber sandals. I didn’t know it yet but I was about to speak with one of the richest man in the world.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked politely. "If you find anything wrong just tell me because I'm Huntington Hartford and I own this island."

"Are you really Huntington Hartford?"

He bowed and smiled.

"That's nothing to be ashamed of," I joked.

No one had ever spoken like that to Huntington Hartford and he liked it. He gave me an impulsive hug.

We sat down at his Cafe Martinique and drank ice cold fresh-squeezed orange juice. Interested in my profession, he had me hand-write a sample sentence for him to study.

"I really like your double 8 g's," Hartford, a keen amateur graphologist said, "Very creative." He took me to his home and we dined like kings and began a friendship that lasted for years.

In stark contrast to how we first met, the last time I saw Huntington Hartford in 1996, he was a fallen man. Though I had occasionally spoken with him on the phone I hadn’t seen him face to face in nearly 20 years.

At the time I wrote: 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 cluttered bed, feet pointing toward the ceiling. They belonged to a wild Howard Hughes-like apparition: a white haired old man, prostrate on a bare mattress.

Once he was the famous lover of movie stars and super models and a friend of presidents and royalty. The Beatles sang for him privately. Sean Connery raced him in speedboats. His multi million dollar private yachts cursed oceans and docked on the Seine and The Thames.

It was perhaps the last throne and the last stop for a man with a golden name: Huntington Hartford, once the world's most eligible playboy.

The old house in East Manhattan was no slum but it was a terrible comedown. For the old man was in a rental. It was as if the Queen of England were living in a London tower block.

The place was covered by tattered manuscript pages, walked upon and spread about by black cats inside a gloomy room smelling of feline waste.

He 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 have money." He closed his eyes and petted a black cat....

Seemingly a lifetime ago as a handsome and generous 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 set out to change the world's cultural tastes in art and theater by force of his great wealth.

But the masses never cared. Culture, Hartford learned, could not be forced on anyone. Neither could his intentions. He was notorious in his groping quest for beautiful women and, even in his sixties, was often thrown out of parties.

Huntington Hartford's money came from The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company: the 14,000 thriving supermarket stores his grandfather invented in the early 1900's and which earned billions as it became the world's largest chain store and forever shaped the way the world shopped.

Everything about Huntington Hartford had been first class. 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. Europe's finest hairdressers travelled across the Atlantic to do the hair of his various wives. He crossed continents in private trains and oceans on private yachts because he wouldn’t fly.

Hartford dated Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. Close friends 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 mutual friend Aristotle Onassis, was a Hartford confident on Paradise Island.

Hartford was taught to dance by Fred Astaire, golf by Gary Player and tennis by famed Pancho Gonzalez, his private full time coaches on his island in the Bahamas.

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.

Reminiscing in the brownstone he asked me, "Did you know Cathy was actually beaten to death on a beach in Hawaii by bad people she knew?" he now asked bleakly. "She was the great sadness of my life, the one event I wish I could undo."

He tried to answer the never ending question? Where had all his 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. "I'd have been more interested if they said their idea would lose millions."

He was bitter in his old age. So much had gone wrong. "I built the finest and most modern stage theater in the world in Los Angeles in 1954.

"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. But in his art gallery and Broadway ventures he had discovered, among others, such notables as Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and actor Al Pacino.

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 Wenner-Gren and had been known as Hog Island when Hartford, alone and without legal advice, bought it for $11 million in 1959 with a contract written on the back of a paper restaurant napkin.

Those were high flying times for Huntington Hartford.

In his darkened room in New York We shared some memories. I thought back to 1960, only a few years after we first met. Richard Nixon disappeared for several days after narrowly losing the Presidential election to John F. Kennedy.

Hartford called me at the Toronto Star where I worked.

"Nixon's here at my Ocean Club," he confided. "He walks every morning on the beach crazy with grief. Get down here fast. You can have a world exclusive."

The paper dispatched me. That night I rowed the 1,500 feet in darkness to Paradise Island, hid in bushes on the ocean side and waited for dawn.

With daylight Richard Milhouse Nixon emerged from the empty hotel in bathing trunks. He and his banker friend Bebe Rebozo were Hartford's only guests.

On his knees in shallow water Mr. Nixon faced the rising sun, and bowing up and down in the water, miserably rubbed sand onto his chest and cried and cried.

I cranked off historic pictures on my Rollieflex camera until dark shadows loomed over me. Security men pulled me to my feet and dragged me over to Nixon.

The future president was enraged. He grabbed my camera, snapped it down and broke the strap holding the camera round my neck. Nixon pulled the camera open, pulled out the film cassette and slapped my face with the exposed film. Then he grabbed one end of my half-attached camera strap and smashed my Rollei over and over into the sand.

Thrown off the island, I rowed back to Nassau, broken camera at the bottom of the boat. I wanted to write about what happened but my Canadian editors told me just to come back and they'd replace the camera. They assured me Richard Nixon would never be heard from again.

"I do remember that happening to you," said Huntington Hartford from his bed. "You know after he became President Richard and his wife Pat sent me a silver inscribed lighter. But he wasn't around when I needed him."

Hartford, like everyone else in the Bahamas, was snagged in the corrupt net of members of the white ruling United Bahamian Party.

"Dick Nixon didn't help me when the Bay Street Boys destroyed me in the Bahamas," said Hartford.

In those days the UBP would not grant Hunt an essential gambling license for Paradise Island or permission to build a bridge to the mainland.

So Hartford backed a young black politician, 27-year-old Lynden Pindling with cash campaign funds. I wrote a speech for him which he took to the Queen of England. When he won, promised Pindling, he'd help Hartford develop Paradise Island and he'd make me a roving ambassador of the Bahamas.

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 some worthless stock. I was forced to leave the Bahamas.

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 Ocean Club is still there too, renting for from $310 to $650 a night. Another 25 hotels and the Atlantis Gambling Casinos dot the 650 acres of Paradise Island. Paradise Island, bought for $50 thousand in cash and worthless stock, was quickly sold for $250 million. Today it's worth billions.

The one-time reform-spouting Pindling never allowed me to return to Nassau. His name was later involved in inquiries seeking to connect him with drug dealing.

Today only the widow of the former multi millionaire prime minister lives inside his highly guarded estate. Pindling died of prostate cancer.

When I moved to Florida the A&P heir, a description he hated, introduced me to the luxuries of wealth. Hunt, the name he preferred, often flew me up from Miami first class on Pan American and had me limousine-delivered just to join him for lunch in Manhattan.

We'd sit in his office and talk and dine on sumptuous feasts catered by red Cossack-dressed waiters from New York's Russian Tea Room.

One day his secretary walked in. 'Mr. Hartford. I'm sorry to intrude, but the bank is on the phone. The loan is due!'

I understood this should be a quiet moment. I asked Hartford if he wanted privacy.

He motioned no, and then instructed: "Emily. Tell the bank not to worry. They can have another thirty days." Huntington Hartford was so rich he loaned money to banks.

Hartford, surrounded by yes men and people with their hands out, liked me because I debated and argued with him and never asked for anything.

But one day he insisted on doing something nice for me.

He wanted me to become director of Manhattan's new Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art at the, in those days, astronomical salary of $50,000 a year.

But first he said he'd help find me a place to live. His chauffeur/bodyguard/woman procurer, big, tall Sy Alter, a former detective, Limo'd us over to the renowned Essex House on the edge of Central Park.

A bowing tail-coated manager showed us a lovely apartment on the third floor overlooking the green. It had a picture window about 40 feet wide.

I asked, "How much?"

"Five thousand dollars."

It seemed a fortune but with a salary of $50,000 a year, I explained, I could afford $100 a week.

The manager coughed. "Sir, that's $5,000 a month.'

While I was explaining I wanted to remain a journalist and wouldn’t be taking the job, I noticed Hartford’s chauffeur trying to attract my attention. Later, as he was driving me back to my cheap hotel Sy Alter told me, “Mr. Hartford was going to pay your rent for three years in advance.”

Later, Hunt had to close down the Gallery which was losing him $10,000 every week. The building now is used by the City of New York as an information center.

Later, Hartford told me, because I never tried to get anything from him, that he was giving me his million dollar yacht, the 110 foot long three deck high Joseph Conrad. He'd just finished an Atlantic crossing in it, arguing all the way over with one of his wives and felt the boat was unlucky.

I had a week to take the boat over but I couldn't afford the $500 in marine surveys and transference papers. He gave it to a gambler he knew from Nassau. A month later a yacht broker sold it for $650,000.

While speaking with him of his past, I recalled the last time I visited Hartford at New York's most prestigious address - Number One Beekman Place. On one side lived the Bordens, on the other, the Astors and Rockefellers.

I took along my wife. The door was opened by a half-naked and drugged young woman. She took us to the living room past two giant Ming Dynasty pieces of art showing ancient dragons.

There sat Huntington Hartford, a man who prided himself on never taking a drink for decades, sllumped on a chair in the center of the room, 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.

The big room looked bare. I found out later that strangers would come by and, unchallenged by the sleeping heir, take paintings off the walls, roll up rugs and, opening windows, drop their booty to people waiting by cars outside.

Hartford tried to talk that afternoon but kept nodding off. My straight young wife was shocked and indignant. Linda shook the heir's shoulder. But his words were too slurred to understand.

We left and I hadn't seen Huntington Hartford for twenty years until finding him in the brownstone in 1986.

When I left Hartford that day I published a story on the fallen man and because of that, one of his daughters found him and took him from that place to his last abode, back in the Bahamas.

He died there in May 2008.

Huntington Hartford should finally be at peace. But I know he’ll somehow keep busy. This generous and good man will be trying to give away large chunks of Heaven.

The End
By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2008
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Editors Note: The next section is for Scandinavia.
THE SWEDISH CONNECTION

Hartford lost hundreds of millions to his five wives and foolish business schemes but was really injured when he bought Hog Island, from Swedish industrialist Axel Lennart
Wenner-Gren, one of the world’s richest men. Wenner-Gren made his first fortune with his take-over of Swedish based Electrolux which placed vacuum cleaners in millions of homes world-wide.

He went on to owning newspapers, banks and arms manufacturing businesses. He was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer and was one of the few friends of the Duke of Windsor, who became Governor of the Bahamas after giving up the British Throne.

The wealthy Swede bought Hog Island and built a mansion on it. He dug a deep canal into the center of the island to receive visitors by sea. But the British government suspected he was actually receiving Nazi submarines.

On the first day of World War Two he came under even more suspicion when his Southern Cross, the world’s largest private yacht, helped rescue 300 survivors from the torpedoed steam ship Athenia. Why, it was asked, was Wenner-Gren’s yacht very near the Athenia when a German submarine sank her?

Just after England froze his money in Bahamian banks Wenner-Gren met Huntington Hartford in 1959 and happily sold him Hog Island for eleven million dollars in cash without legal advice on a contract written on a restaurant napkin. Then Wenner-Gren and the Duke of Windsor left for Mexico.

Wenner-Gren died in 1964. One of the tallest buildings in Sweden still bears his name.

Hartford renamed Hog Island Paradise Island and started pouring in some 40 million dollars in mansions, hotels and improvements. His island is now worth many billions.

By Ron Laytner
Copyright 2009
Edit International


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