Huntington Hartford

Huntington Hartford was born in New York City, the son of Henrietta Guerard (Pollitzer) and Edward V. Hartford (1870–1922). He was named George Huntington Hartford II for his grandfather, George Huntington Hartford. His father and uncles, John Augustine Hartford and George Ludlum Hartford, privately owned the A&P Supermarket, which at one point had 16,000 stores in the U.S. and was the largest retail empire in the world. In the 1950s A&P was the world's largest grocer and, next to General Motors, it sold more goods than any other company in the world. Time magazine reported that A&P had sales of $2.7 billion in 1950. His maternal grandfather was from an Austrian Jewish family, and his maternal grandmother, who was Protestant, had deep roots in South Carolina. Hartford's father was a successful inventor and manufacturer who perfected the automotive shock absorber. Along with his brothers, Edward was also an heir to the A&P fortune and served as A&P's corporate secretary as well as one of three trustees that controlled A&P's stock. After Hartford's birth, the family moved to Deal, New Jersey, a wealthy community on the Atlantic shore. After Huntington's father died when he was 11, his mother moved the family to a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, known as "Seaverge" next to Rough Point, the mansion owned by tobacco heiress Doris Duke. The family also lived on a plantation in South Carolina called "Wando" as well as an apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. After his father died in 1922, Hartford's mother sent him to St. Paul's School. He later majored in English literature at Harvard University. from Alan Villiers which he converted to a private yacht, and donated to the U.S. Maritime Commission as a sail training ship in 1939. ==Career==

In 1940, Hartford invested $100,000 (equivalent to approximately $ in ) to help start a newspaper, PM, with Marshall Field III and worked as a reporter for the publication. An avid sailor, he donated his yacht to the Coast Guard at the start of World War II. During the war he was commissioned in the Coast Guard and commanded the Army supply ship FS-179, commissioned in May 1944, in the Pacific Theater. Hartford twice accidentally ran the ship aground. After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and attempted to purchase Republic Pictures and RKO Studios from Howard Hughes. Huntington also started a modeling agency and an artists' colony, and opened a theater. Hartford owned Huntington Hartford Productions which produced several films including the Abbott and Costello film, Africa Screams, in 1949. In 1950, Hartford produced Hello Out There, the last film of James Whale, the acclaimed director of the 1931 version of Frankenstein. He produced several films starring Marjorie Steele and encouraged her to become an artist. Later, Hartford produced the play on Broadway. In 1959, Mike Wallace introduced him on a television interview as being worth half a billion dollars. In 1959, Hartford bought Hog Island in the Bahamas, renaming it Paradise Island. He developed it over the next three years hoping to turn it into another Monte Carlo. One feature of his Ocean Club was a cloister built from the disassembled stones of a monastery that William Randolph Hearst had stored in a Florida warehouse. Hartford was responsible for getting the gambling license for Paradise Island by hiring Sir Stafford Sands, a Bahamian lawyer. In 1969, Hartford produced the Broadway show Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, which opened at the Belasco Theater starring the then-unknown actor Al Pacino. Pacino won a Tony for his performance. Patronage of the arts Hartford was a patron of the arts, building an artists colony above Los Angeles and later a gallery in New York City, and his opinions on the arts were equally strong. He criticized Abstract Expressionists, believing they had ushered in a great "ice age of art," freezing out the grand traditions of music, painting and sculpture; he described Pablo Picasso as a "mountebank". Beyond expressionism, he derided the "beatnik, the Existentialist, the juvenile delinquent, the zaniest of abstract art, the weirdest aberrations of the mentally unbalanced, the do-nothing philosophy of Zen Buddhism" as a result of wanton "abuse of liberty and freedom." Hartford's taste for Los Angeles began to wane, however, after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rejected an exhibition he proposed. He decided to build his own museum in New York City, the 1964 Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle, declaring that building a museum in Los Angeles was like putting up "a theater in Oklahoma" due to a lack of audience. Art collection Hartford owned an extensive art collection. In an interview by Edward R. Murrow on his show Person to Person he gave a tour of the collection at his Beekman Place apartment including Rembrandt's "Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo", which sold at Christie's auction house in London on December 8, 2009, for $33 million, a world record for a Rembrandt. To house his extensive collection of 19th- and 20th-century art, Hartford built the Gallery of Modern Art Including the Huntington Hartford Collection at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan which opened in 1964. Pointedly, it did not include Abstract Expressionism which Hartford panned in his book, Art or Anarchy. Hartford was a patron of the architect Edward Durell Stone who designed the modernist marble-clad structure often derided as the "lollipop building". Stone had previously designed the Museum of Modern Art for the Rockefeller family. Hartford commissioned Salvador Dalí to paint The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus for the museum's opening. The museum also included Hartford's paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Hartford closed the museum after five years. Later the building housed the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and was recently rebuilt with a new facade to house the Museum of Arts and Design. ==Personal life==

Hartford was married four times, all ending in divorce, and had five children. His mother intended Huntington to marry Doris Duke, but in April 1931, Huntington married Mary Lee Epling, the 18-year-old daughter of a dentist from Covington, Virginia. They divorced in 1939. Hartford supported the boy financially but refused to legally acknowledge him as his son. In 1967, Edward Barton died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Huntington's second wife was Marjorie Steele, an aspiring actress whom Hartford married in 1949. The couple had two children, Catherine (born 1950) and John Hartford (born 1953 or 1954). The couple divorced in 1960. John Hartford later became a musician and music teacher. He died of throat cancer on April 15, 2011. In 1962, Hartford married Diane Brown at Melody Farm in Mahwah, New Jersey. They had a daughter, Cynara Juliet, before divorcing in 1970. Five years later, he married Elaine Kay. They divorced in 1981. ==Later years and death==

In February 2004, he and his daughter moved to Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Hartford died at his home in Lyford Cay on May 19, 2008, at the age of 97. The cause of his death was not publicly released. His remains are interred at Lakeview Memorial Gardens & Mausoleums in Nassau. ==In popular culture==

• Hartford was portrayed by John McMartin in the 2004 film Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon. • Hartford's Ocean Club, situated on Paradise Island, was featured in two James Bond films: Thunderball, in 1965, and Casino Royale in 2006. His then-wife, Diane Brown, has a cameo in Thunderball as the woman James Bond (Sean Connery) briefly dances with at the "Kiss Kiss" Club in Nassau, and in Casino Royale as a card player at the Ocean Club. ==References==