By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Huntington Hartford II, 97, heir to the A&P supermarket fortune whose quest to be taken seriously as a patron of the arts led him to bankroll movies, plays, galleries and publications that ultimately drained his wealth, died May 19 at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. No cause of death was reported.
Mr. Hartford once ranked among the world's richest people. He indulged hundreds of millions of dollars on interests as varied as his attention span was brief. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once called him "the sort of man who will come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny and run."
He underwrote a series of failed enterprises, most of which resulted in spectacular losses. Among them were an artist's foundation and colony in Los Angeles as well as the glossy magazine Show, a journal of art and culture.
Mr. Hartford's Ocean Club resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas suffered because of a lack of a gambling license and went bust. Resorts International eventually bought him out for $1 million, a fraction of his $30 million investment.
His Gallery of Modern Art in New York, featuring an Edward Durell Stone design, opened at 2 Columbus Circle in 1964 to risible reviews, for both its structure and offerings. He had promoted the museum as a bulwark against modernism in art, whether the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning or the literature of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.
He condemned the "vulgar" and "meaningless" extremes of modern abstract art, preferring what he called "realistic art" of an earlier period. His vocal antipathy to artists he disliked led to the resignation of all the advisers to his self-titled foundation, created to aid composers, writers and fine artists. He appointed new advisers and bought large advertisements condemning "obscurity, confusion, immorality, violence" in contemporary painting.
Meanwhile, with money never an object, he remained devoted to extracurricular pleasures, including the study of handwriting, petroleum extraction and the personal lives of showgirls. He once dated Marilyn Monroe and described her as "too pushy, like a high-class hooker."
His excesses cost him financially and personally. He had unexpectedly ascetic habits in some pockets of his life, such as a disinclination to drink alcohol. But his fourth marriage, in the 1970s, marked a turning point. According to a 2004 Vanity Fair magazine report, that last wife, a Fort Lauderdale hairdresser a decade his junior, introduced Mr. Hartford to cocaine, amphetamines and quaaludes.
He was hospitalized at least once for an overdose, and his fourth wife remained a destructive presence in his life for years. His apartment at One Beekman Place in New York became the site of violent encounters involving transient visitors. He was once left for hours writhing in pain after falling and breaking a hip.
When he made the news, it was usually for something unsavory, such as the fourth wife's assault on his secretary.
Mr. Hartford spent his final years living quietly in the Bahamas, a much-reduced figure compared with how he presented himself in his prime. In his 1964 book "Art or Anarchy?" a polemic against modernism, he described championing traditional art against the prevailing trends. "I have always hated the goose step," he wrote.
George Huntington Hartford II was born April 18, 1911, in New York. He was the namesake of his grandfather, a Maine tea merchant who in 1869 founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. The company would become a storied American business, rivaling General Motors by the 1950s as a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
Mr. Hartford began reaping the financial benefits at age 6, when his grandfather died and provided him with an annual income of $1.5 million. The family lived lavishly during the 1920s and 1930s and owned a seaside estate in Newport, R.I. His father, an inventor, strayed from the family business and patented a shock absorber for cars.
Mr. Hartford received an elite education, graduating from the private St. Paul's preparatory school in New Hampshire in 1930 and Harvard University in 1934. In college, he played on the tennis and squash teams.
Subsequent years were spent enjoying his wealth, although he made periodic forays into employment. He spent six months as an A&P clerk, monitoring pound-cake sales until he was fired after walking off the job to catch a Harvard-Yale football game.
He later became a reporter at the newspaper PM in New York, a job he acquired after investing $100,000 in the publication. He once told an interviewer -- perhaps apocryphally -- he could not turn in an assignment on time because there was no place to park his yacht.
His interest in boats was put to use during World War II, when he served in the Coast Guard and commanded a cargo vessel in the Pacific.
Mr. Hartford was operating the Hartford Model Agency in 1949 when he met Marjorie Steele, a 19-year-old cigarette girl who became his second wife. She reportedly was responsible for his interest in fine arts, resulting in the creation of an artists foundation and retreat.
Meanwhile, he deepened his involvement in movie production, including the Abbott and Costello comedy "Africa Screams" (1949) and the feature anthology "Face to Face" (1952), which starred his wife.
He also funded Broadway productions, including his own short-lived 1958 adaptation of Charlotte Bront¿'s "Jane Eyre," with Eric Portman as Rochester and Jan Brooks in the title role. Movie star Errol Flynn, who had problems with alcoholism at the time, briefly portrayed Rochester in a troubled pre-Broadway production.
Mr. Hartford's traditional tastes were evident in a costly renovation of Hollywood's Vine Street Theatre in 1953. He lured Helen Hayes to star in "What Every Woman Knows," a creaky J.M. Barrie drama she had starred in on-screen nearly 20 years earlier.
By the early 1960s, few of his projects had amounted to anything. He devised an automatic parking garage system, chaired a shale-oil company and hoped to create a European-style cafe in New York's Central Park before parks commissioner Robert Moses axed the idea.
Already precarious, his bank accounts further dwindled in the 1970s after he married a young Florida hairdresser, Elaine Kay. His descent led some family members to try to declare him mentally unfit to manage his affairs. He continued living with Kay after their 1981 divorce, and the derelicts who frequented his Beekman Place home continued to rob him of silver, artwork and other possessions.
He eventually wound up in the Bahamas, left with a fraction of his initial fortune but enough to sustain life in a seaside villa. He was a toothless recluse, far from his public image as a fixture at nightclubs with Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, assorted royalty and, of course, showgirls.
He told Vanity Fair in 2004 he had always been searching for ways "to create something beautiful. . . . I had a lot of money, and now I have enough."
His first marriage, to the former Mary Lee Epling, ended in divorce in the late 1930s after he had a son with a chorus girl. Epling later married actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The son, Edward Barton, killed himself in 1967.
Mr. Hartford had two children with his second wife: Catherine, who developed drug problems, died in 1988; and a son, John, who survives. A daughter, Juliet, also survives; she is from his third marriage, to the former Diane Brown.