Barbara Hutton's Seven Marriages Were Much Nastier Than You Thought

In 1924 Frank Woolworth's widow left a trust to an eleven-year-old granddaughter. By the time Barbara Hutton turned twenty-one it stood at a figure usually given as forty-two million dollars, and she gave her father five million of it as a thank-you for managing her mother's money. She had already been married for five months by then. Her father had paid the groom a dowry of one million. That was the first of seven marriages. One husband was arrested for beating her. One persuaded her to give up her American citizenship. One lasted fifty-three days. Cary Grant, whom the papers called Cash and Cary, is the only one who took no money at all. She died in a Beverly Hills hotel in 1979 with a figure widely reported at around three thousand dollars, and was buried in her grandfather's mausoleum at Woodlawn. Sources Encyclopaedic and biographical records of Barbara Woolworth Hutton, 1912–1979, including marriage and divorce dates Contemporary and later reporting on the 1930 débutante ball, the 1933 Mdivani marriage settlement and the December 1937 renunciation of United States citizenship Estate and legal commentary on the Woolworth trust, its administration by Franklyn Laws Hutton, and its final disposition Biographical accounts of Cary Grant's childhood in Bristol and his mother's institutionalisation Records of Baron Gottfried von Cramm's arrest and imprisonment in 1938 under Paragraph 175, and his own statements to the press on the marriage Motorsport records for Igor Troubetzkoy's 1948 Monaco Grand Prix and Targa Florio entries Woodlawn Cemetery interment records for the Woolworth mausoleum