by Jeremy Scott
Barbara too intended to continue her career as an international hostess and the idea of a castle had great appeal to her, but the reality of Castle Hardenberg did not come up to her expectations. Set on a lonely island off the coast of Denmark, the building was a grim fortress of blackened stone, lacking not only in towers and turrets but bathrooms and mod cons. There was no heating, part of the roof had fallen in, only one wing of the place was habitable, and that was haunted. The surroundings too left a great deal to be desired. The fort presided over flat fields extending to the horizon in a wide panorama animated only by rather a lot of cows whose job it was to provide the inadequate income on which the family Reventlow subsisted. The truth which Barbara faced with gathering hysteria was that she had married a farmer.
After being shown over the estate and meeting the cows, there wasn’t anything to do. Neither she nor Jimmy Donahue were country girls, rural pursuits held no appeal. There was a chill grey sea but no beach identifiable by parasols, matelas and willing plagistes. And there were no charming hostelries accessible for lunch. She’d had a Rolls-Royce shipped over, but there was nowhere to visit beyond a single village and the island’s narrow lanes were obstructed by columns of defecating cattle. Cousin Jimmy did his best to liven things by feeding lurid items of misinformation to the press. He’d been lodged not at the castle but in a guest cottage, where he burnt its antique furniture in the grate to keep warm. ‘Man! Was he a nuisance!’ said Reventlow, who detested him.
Before she cut short the honeymoon and moved the whole caravan to Paris there occurred one redeeming scene. Heinrich gave a dinner party for Barbara in the castle. Hereditary silver decorated the table and traditional Danish dishes replaced the Spartan fare which had been the rule. At the end of the meal Heinrich made a speech and presented Barbara with a bracelet of family-heirloom emeralds. She was deeply moved by the gift. She said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever really been given a present I didn’t have to pay for myself.’
In Paris, where the group next took up residence in the suite she maintained at the Ritz, Barbara appeared depressed by the relentlessly negative press she was receiving. ‘They simply won’t let me alone, and I’m so tired of being followed around,’ she complained to her husband.
Reventlow went to the Paris Herald Tribune, one of whose reporters had been assigned to her full-time and was publishing daily stories on her shopping trips and social round. Meeting with the editor Hawkins, Reventlow asked him to lay off. Barbara’s next big party at the Pré Catelan went unreported, nor did her name feature in the paper’s society column. Then, a few mornings later while reading the paper, Reventlow came upon a major story about Barbara and her extravagant life. Irritated, he called Hawkins to say, ‘I thought you promised to forget us.’
‘Don’t blame me,’ Hawkins told him.
‘Who then?’ he asked.
‘Ask your wife. She phoned here yesterday. She told us all the things she has been doing for the past few weeks and said, “What’s the matter with your reporters? Am I supposed to be dead?”’
Reventlow did not again attempt to interfere with Barbara’s appetite for publicity. Her appetite for food was now also causing friction between the couple. She refused to consume anything except RyKrisps and coffee and Reventlow, who had a hearty appetite, found it impossible to enjoy his meals when his every mouthful was watched by her hungry eyes. She was down to less than a hundred pounds and against his will he was losing weight himself.
By now Barbara had found her husband to be a different man from the one she’d married. The aristocratic manner she’d found so attractive was less appealing in daily close-up. Haughty and intolerant, he showed a violent temper and had firm views on a wife’s place, which he believed should be in the home – or rather in the castle after she’d used a slice of her fortune to restore it. He was also aggravated by the fact that she was no longer sexually responsive to him. One night he raped her.
Some while later Barbara discovered she was pregnant. She announced to the press and to friends that she was delighted and wanted a son; she told Reventlow it didn’t fit with her plans. It certainly didn’t fit with her body image. For an obstetrician Barbara chose the best in Paris, the society physician Dr De Gennes, Le petit frère des riches, as he was known. But she was defiantly resistant to his advice about diet. At a loss how to handle so intractable a patient, he recommended a change of air. She took her group – which still included Jimmy Donahue – to Rome.
It was not the best of times to visit the eternal city. Mussolini’s Blackshirt thugs strutted the streets in gangs, stealing, torching cars, and giving a hard time to anyone who looked at them sideways. At the end of September the Fascists staged a demonstration to celebrate Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in the piazza outside the Grand Hotel where Barbara and her entourage were staying. She was hosting a party that evening and the noise of the mob chanting political slogans and waving banners drowned conversation in the third-floor suite. Jimmy Donahue, well lit on brandy, decided to address the crowd in his own fashion.
Stepping onto the balcony he bellowed, ‘Long live Ethiopia!’ A sea of faces tilted up to him; momentarily the mob was silenced in outrage. Then fury seized them and they began to howl for blood. In response Jimmy picked up a potted rose bush and dropped it on them. Unbuttoning his fly, he urinated on the rabble below. They stormed the hotel and it required the police to save him from lynching. Next morning two hard-faced men came to the hotel and, deaf to his apology, bundled him to the railway station and put him on a train to Paris.
Newspaper headlines, which form the spoor charting Barbara’s earthly transit, supply the end to her Italian vacation: COUNT AND COUNTESS REVENTLOW PROVOKE BLACKSHIRT FASCIST ATTACK. ASKED TO LEAVE… COUNT AND COUNTESS COMB ENGLAND FOR SUITABLE RESIDENCE.
Five months later Barbara gave birth to her only child. Her son, THE WORLD’S RICHEST BABY, as The Times named him, was delivered by caesarean section in a private house in London, where a large room had been equipped as a hospital. The infant, Lance, was a 7½-pound boy with blond hair and wide blue eyes like his mother’s. He was looked after by a nanny, nursemaid and team of six bodyguards, and his appearance into the world was soon followed by the arrival of his first kidnap threat. Barbara and her husband Count Reventlow had decided to make England their home. Her association with America was not happy, and she was well connected here. She knew the King and Wallis Simpson, and on the international circuit she’d become friendly with men and women who made up the country’s elite. That is to say she was on invite and be-invited terms with them. The political situation in Europe was ominous – particularly in Germany where Hitler had become Chancellor, and a National Socialist government was in power – whereas England looked a stable and safe place to bring up a child.
Dunstan Lodge, which she renamed Winfield House after her grandfather’s mansion on Long Island, was a Regency house standing in fourteen acres of grounds in Regent’s Park; it and Buckingham Palace were the largest private estates in London. ‘Of course I’ll have to make a few changes,’ Barbara said.
Naturally she would. To redecorate the new home you’ve acquired not just forms a popular genre of present-day television but represents a primal instinct. Almost our only knowledge of pre-history derives from the automatic reflex of Man and Woman on first occupying their cave: to scratch a few signature paintings on its wall. Barbara understandably had no taste for DIY or small measures, but had the house knocked down and rebuilt as a Georgian mansion of red brick with a slate roof and thirty-five rooms. Baby Lance had his own suite on the top floor and a designer nursery walled in pink calfskin. Restoration of the mansion cost $4.5 million with a further $2 million for decoration and furniture (in today’s money a total of somewhat over $100 million).
But for Barbara the year had opened with a disappointment. Elsa Maxwell had published her list of the ten most fascinating women in the world – and she was not on it. Pregnancy had kept her out of the social swim but, now th
in again, she studied the dailies, Sunday tabloids and fashion magazines closely, and when she did not come upon her own name it was disheartening. She complained to Tiki that she’d become a has-been.
Reconstruction of Winfield House took care of the problem. At a time when unemployment was high, wages low and the future threatening, stories and pictures of the palatial home being built for the girl who already had everything were a welcome diversion. Barbara’s media image was a paradigm of extravagance and waste. Newspaper articles about her invariably reprised the same snide tone. She had been created by the press before she’d been able to create herself, but the way Barbara behaved toward the media throughout her life showed staggering lack of judgement. Despite countless bad experiences she remained unsuspicious of a journalist’s angle when asked for an interview. She invited them to lunch or dinner, took them up, had them to parties … then dropped them when they bored her. It was the way she treated everybody except her own staff: she was an exemplary boss. With the press she never learned when to keep her mouth shut or considered how her actions might be reported.
On St Patrick’s Day the sales staff at Woolworth’s on West 14 Street in New York took over the store and staged a hunger strike in protest against their pay and working conditions. They dispatched a cable to Barbara, who was on vacation with Reventlow in Egypt, asking her to intervene and help them obtain a living wage. Tabloid coverage of the strike featured alongside photographs of a party given in Barbara’s honour at the imaginatively chosen venue in Tutankhamen’s burial chamber, where brunch had been served out of golden dishes laid out on top of his sarcophagus. The contrast was obscene. Barbara’s image could not have been worse. She was clearly in need of professional help and the Hollywood publicist Steve Hannagan (whose clients included Sun Valley, Miami Beach and the Indianapolis 500) made a pitch to handle her PR which she was more than happy to accept.
Even today in a more cynical age it is a relatively simple matter for a skilled publicist with a healthy budget to create an image for a would-be celeb. To change an already existing image in order to rebrand a current personality is very much harder and often impossible. The task facing Hannagan was a tough one. To rebrand Barbara Hutton he went to Hearst’s leading female feature writer, Adela Rogers St Johns, fixing for her to do a major personality profile on Barbara for Life magazine.
Adela’s all-day interview with her subject took place with Reventlow sitting in and listening to every word. The result was published five weeks later. ‘To me there has always been something fantastic, and a little useless and stupid about Barbara Hutton,’ the piece began, but went on to describe her life not at all as people imagined it. She had found fulfilment in motherhood and hardly ever went out except occasionally to the cinema with her husband. It portrayed Barbara as exiled from her own country, wounded and vulnerable. But ‘now at last I’ve found happiness … I love my husband and he loves me. We have our son and we shall have more children. For the first time in my life I am confident of my happiness.’
In conversation with Dean Jennings twenty-five years later the columnist expanded on that interview.
There were many things I didn’t say in the story … Some girls like Barbara are meant to be fat, husky and healthy. Then they diet … Barbara ruined her health forever when she began what she calls her coffee diet. The poor baby. You see, they kept on at her so about the fact that if she’d been a pretty girl, then somebody might have loved her for herself and not her money … They rubbed her nose in the dirt for being so fat and they made fun of her. The story of Barbara is heart-breaking.
Whether Adela’s revisionist line could be successfully marketed was never determined. Any good the story might have achieved was immediately undone by the disastrous act which followed, though this was not Barbara’s own idea. She was indifferent to money; she preferred not to think about the subject, it bored her. But her father and her New York law firm, White and Case, insisted she was spending too much. The scheme put to her was designed to save the $300,000 a year she was paying in US taxes and to protect her capital which would be taxable in the event of her death. Their proposal was that she should renounce her US citizenship.
Inconstant about everything in life, Barbara was reliably consistent only in her bad judgement on men, and the lawyer she chose to represent her – who would manage her business affairs for the rest of her life – was no exception to the rule. Graham Mattison certainly read out well. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, he was a leading expert in the murky water of international tax avoidance but also – as the next three and a half decades would prove – dishonest. He was additionally an overbearing bully, a characteristic shared by most of the men in Barbara’s life, including her own father. Mattison’s negotiations for her to embrace Danish citizenship (which she possessed through marriage to Reventlow) and to take up British residence were conducted at an exalted level. Dealing directly with the British Treasury, Mathson got them to agree to waive both residency and income tax for the indefinite future on the promise that Barbara would transfer her capital to Britain. In another artful move he induced Reventlow to accept a million dollars to forfeit his rights under Danish law to half her property.
Reventlow had some idea of the storm that Barbara’s action would create and was conspicuously not with her when she arrived in New York to sign the Act of Renunciation to her US citizenship. Having done so, Mattison smuggled her back on board the Europa, which sailed for England that same night. Two days later the news broke. Workers in Woolworth stores called a strike and paraded with placards BABS RENOUNCES CITIZENSHIP BUT NOT PROFITS, while chanting limericks reviling her. Newspaper editorials vilified her for diverting Grandfather Woolworth’s hard-earned dollars out of the US and into the hands of European shysters. Church leaders preached sermons on her greed and treachery. People had hated her for years but women had still wanted to be her. Now she’d committed the ultimate betrayal, she’d rejected the country that had made her. For the media she was red meat.
What Barbara sought in life was simple: a fully realised fairytale. She was twenty-five years old and at Winfield House the elements of perfection were in place, from baby to yacht to the gratification of every whim. Yet she was restless, chain-smoking and discontented. The problem was Reventlow. He was handsome, he looked the saturnine villain in a melodrama, but in no other way did he match the bill of goods he’d presented when she married him. His ‘sensitivity’ was a crock, his interest in her poetry did not survive the wedding; he never opened a book. He was bad-tempered, censorious and dominating. He bullied the servants and had the effrontery to fire her chauffeur. ‘The man didn’t know his place,’ he told her.
She was incensed.
‘Know his place? I feel sorry for you: you’re still living in the Dark Ages.’
‘Am I? Perhaps. In any case you should learn to appreciate the status you’ve attained, thanks to your title.’
‘Status?’
‘Yes. Today you’re the Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow because of me.’
‘Who cares?’ she yelled at him. ‘Who cares about such tripe? Do you think I care a jot about your silly title?’
He was a social climber and a galloping snob, which she, despite her fascination with titles, was not herself. She liked the company of people who interested or amused her, regardless of their background. But the milieu she moved in at this time was restricted; later her acquaintanceship would grow wider and more louche.
One day she was visited by a ghost from her past. The butler announced an unexpected guest, Roussie Sert. It was two years since Barbara had last seen her in Venice, where she and her husband were living in the Palazzo San Gregorio which Barbara had paid for. There was, it seems, a curse on the building which years before had been stolen from the Catholic Church. The first new owner had lost both his legs in a railroad accident; the next also met a violent end. Alex Mdivani had died in a car smash and the property had been inherited by his siblings. Along with the malediction f
or, only a few months after his marriage to Louise van Alen, his brother’s widow, Serge Mdivani had been thrown from his polo pony and killed, his skull shattered by a kick to the head.
Barbara was adept at concealing her reactions, but she was shocked by Roussie’s appearance. Her clothes hung limp from an emaciated frame and her once-brilliant eyes stared dull from a haggard face. She’d exploited Barbara from the start, she lived by manipulating others as had all the Mdivanis; she was treacherous and amoral – yet Barbara received her as a friend, even confided in her. There was a past they shared. Roussie was shattered by her brothers’ deaths. She was by now a morphine addict and a long way down the road. And Barbara too was in a bad way, wired on caffeine, sleepless, claustrophobic and detesting Reventlow. Had she ever asked herself why she married him, Roussie enquired.
