Huntington Hartford was heir to the A&P grocery fortune and at one point one of the richest people in the world. Every bit the eccentric, he lost most of the money during his 97 years to failed marriages, quixotic arts and real estate projects and a handwriting institute.
Hartford tells David Frost about the Bahamian island he purchased:
From Hartford’s 2008 New York Times obit: “Huntington Hartford II, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur and arts patron, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau, in the Bahamas, where he had lived since 2004. He was 97.
His death was announced by his daughter, Juliet Hartford.
As a boy Huntington Hartford was treated like a prince, indulged by his mother and a staff of servants and provided with a living of $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. But his ambitions were far greater than his reach.
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 an 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 expensive amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, over-extended and unable to get a gambling license, he ultimately lost an estimated $25 million to $30 million on the project.
Then there was the automated parking garage in Manhattan, the handwriting institute, the modeling agency, and his own disastrous stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, among the many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled.”
