The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa (Text Only) by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780007496624
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

COLD FISH

A s his brother Cesar had despairingly noted, Rubi had failed to hold on to Doris and her hundreds of millions. But there was one woman out in the great big world with a fortune nearly as large and a marital history even more checkered: Barbara Hutton, or, more properly, at the time Rubi bumped into her at Deauville in the summer of 1953, Princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Troubetzkoy—something like that.

As that ungainly string of names indicated, Barbara was a serial bride, with four husbands already in her wake by the time she cut into her fortieth birthday cake. And although it was hard to say afterward whether she had used her men or vice versa, there was no doubt that she could afford to be profligate with them: When her grandmother died in 1924, Barbara, then eleven and a half, had inherited a cool $28 million.*

The money came from two streams. As her name indicated, she was a Hutton. Her father, Franklyn, was the younger brother of Edward Francis Hutton, the Wall Street tycoon who founded the famed brokerage firm that bore his name, E. F. Hutton. But Franklyn Hutton was the black sheep of his family, a boozer and skirt chaser who was kept on at his brother’s business out of nepotistic kindness. The real money came from Barbara’s mother’s family, and a fortune with even more resonant fame than the Duke billions.

Edna Hutton was born in 1883 Edna Woolworth, the middle of three children, all daughters, of Frank Winfield Woolworth: that Woolworth. Four years before Edna’s birth, F. W. had opened his first five-and-ten-cent store in Utica, New York, and promptly saw it close within two months for lack of custom. In a demonstration of true American stick-to-it-ive-ness, he went ahead and opened another store later that year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This time he had a hit. By the time Edna was taking her first steps, there were 25 Woolworth stores in five states; by 1917, Woolworth’s company was grossing $100 million a year (nearly $1.5 billion in 2005 terms) from 1,000 stores—a massive fortune built literally on the nickels and dimes of consumers all over North America and Western Europe.

Old F. W., a humble son of Rodman, New York, only partly shared MegaBuck Duke’s vaunting ambition to remake the world and himself in it. True, when he moved his family and his corporate headquarters to Manhattan, he settled in increasingly grand houses; He owned a sizable chunk of property at the Fifth Avenue and East Eightieth Street portion of Millionaires’ Row, where he lived in a four-story, thirty-six-room palace near smaller homes he had built for his daughters and servants. But he maintained only one other residence—sixty rooms in Glen Cove, New York—and, unlike Duke, didn’t invent whole new fields of business. Rather, he merely built the world’s tallest building and named it for himself: 792 feet of gabled neo-Gothic rectangles rising above lower Manhattan an oversized copper finial, a sandstone cathedral pointing

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