George Huntington Hartford II was an American businessman, philanthropist, stage and film producer, and art collector.
34 Facts About Huntington Hartford
2.
Huntington Hartford owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and had numerous other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil Shale Corporation, which he founded in 1955.
3.
Huntington Hartford was once known as one of the world's richest people.
4.
Huntington Hartford was born in New York City, the son of Henrietta Guerard and Edward V Hartford.
5.
Huntington Hartford's father was a successful inventor and manufacturer who perfected the automotive shock absorber.
6.
Huntington Hartford later majored in English literature at Harvard University.
7.
Huntington Hartford lived on a trust fund that generated about $1.5 million per year.
8.
In 1940, Huntington Hartford invested $100,000 to help start a newspaper, PM, with Marshall Field III and worked as a reporter for the publication.
9.
Huntington Hartford started a modeling agency and an artists' colony, and opened a theater.
10.
In 1950, Huntington Hartford produced Hello Out There, the last film of James Whale, the acclaimed director of the 1931 version of Frankenstein.
11.
Huntington Hartford produced several films starring Marjorie Steele and encouraged her to become an artist.
12.
In 1955, Huntington Hartford founded the Oil Shale Corporation, later known as Tosco, and was its majority shareholder and chairman.
13.
Huntington Hartford set up the Denver Research Institute at the University of Denver to find alternate methods of oil extraction.
14.
In 1963, Huntington Hartford offered The Pines as a gift to the city but was turned down by Mayor Sam Yorty.
15.
When his uncle George Ludlum Hartford died in 1957, the trust set up by the elder George Huntington Hartford was liquidated and Hartford inherited his portion of the estate.
16.
In 1959, Huntington Hartford bought Hog Island in the Bahamas, renaming it Paradise Island.
17.
Huntington Hartford developed it over the next three years hoping to turn it into another Monte Carlo.
18.
Huntington Hartford was responsible for getting the gambling license for Paradise Island by hiring Sir Stafford Sands, a Bahamian lawyer.
19.
Huntington 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.
20.
Huntington Hartford 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".
21.
For ten years the Huntington Hartford Theater was Los Angeles's premier venue for Broadway-scale productions featuring the stars of the time.
22.
Huntington Hartford 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.
23.
Pointedly, it did not include Abstract Expressionism which Huntington Hartford panned in his book, Art or Anarchy.
24.
Huntington Hartford was a patron of the architect Edward Durell Stone who designed the modernist marble-clad structure often derided as the "lollipop building".
25.
Huntington Hartford commissioned Salvador Dali to paint The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus for the museum's opening.
26.
Huntington Hartford was married four times, all ending in divorce, and had five children.
27.
Huntington Hartford's 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.
28.
In 1938, Huntington Hartford had a son, Edward "Buzzy" Barton, with dancer Mary Barton.
29.
Huntington Hartford supported the boy financially but refused to legally acknowledge him as his son.
30.
Huntington's second wife was Marjorie Steele, an aspiring actress whom Hartford married in 1949.
31.
Catherine Huntington Hartford died of a drug overdose in June 1988.
32.
Huntington Hartford died of throat cancer on April 15,2011.
33.
In 1962, Huntington Hartford married Diane Brown at Melody Farm in Mahwah, New Jersey.
34.
Huntington Hartford died at his home in Lyford Cay on May 19,2008, at the age of 97.