Maurice Grosser

The painter, sculptor and writer Maurice Grosser was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1903. He entered Harvard in 1920, and two years later attended a South Boston art class. Within one year following his studies in America, Grosser went to Italy after he was awarded a two-year Holden Fellowship from Harvard.

In 1922, Maurice Grosser first met Virgil Thomson at the Liberal Club at Harvard. Coincidentally, in Paris in the autumn of 1925, Virgil was drinking a café crème on the terrace at Les Deux Magots, on Boulevard Saint Germain des Prés, and noticed Grosser sitting at a nearby table. Thomson then invited Grosser to share a place with him, and on Christmas Eve 1925, they moved into a small apartment which had views of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. During the next two years Grosser studied art in Paris, and he shared the same friends as Thomson, who was first introduced to Gertrude Stein by George Anthiel in the autumn of 1926. Through Miss Stein and Alice Toklas, Grosser and Thomson could include among their friends the artists Pablo Picasso, Bébé Bérnard, Kristians Tonny and Pavel Tchelitchew, the writers Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and the composer Igor Stravinsky, and other notables. In 1927, Grosser left Paris for New York, staying in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, but he returned to Paris in 1929, taking a small apartment near Virgil's. (Thomson's Paris apartment was on the fifth and top floor at 17 Quai Voltaire, on the Seine, directly across from the Louvre museum. Though small, it had twenty-foot ceilings and tall windows.).  In 1930, Maurice Grosser had his first Paris show, followed by exhibitions in the Hague, Amsterdam, Chicago and New York. In Paris in 1931, Virgil Thomson and Maurice Grosser first met Paul Bowles.

Grosser and Thomson remained in Paris from 1925, except for brief visits to the United States, until 1940, when they left occupied Paris during the Second World War and returned to New York. Thomson took a ninth-floor apartment in the Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd Street, where he covered his large living room's walls with numerous paintings acquired during his years in France, and a number of paintings by his friend Maurice. In his Chelsea Hotel salon, Thomson regularly entertained literati, writers, composers and other friends, often preparing in the tiny kitchen the French food he so loved. During the summers of 1944 and 1945, Maurice Grosser vacationed with Jane Bowles at Helvetia Perkins' farm in East Montpelier, Vermont. Maurice and Virgil returned to Paris again in 1977, when Thomson sold his apartment and they visited their old friends. Thomson continued to live for the rest of his life in his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, where he died peacefully in his sleep on September 30, 1989, at the age of 92. Maurice Grosser lived and painted in his Manhattan apartment, and from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, he also spent the summer months in Morocco, living and painting in Jane Bowles' former Tangier apartment. Virgil Thomson visited Paul Bowles and Maurice in Tangier twice, but he didn't particularly like the city. Among Virgil Thomson's musical works are two solo piano portraits of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles: "Souvenir, A Portrait of Paul Bowles" composed in 1935, and "Jane Bowles: Early and As Remembered", begun in 1942 and finished in 1985. Maurice Grosser painted a portrait of Jane Bowles in New York in 1947, before she moved to Tangier.

Maurice Grosser's paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, and the Huntsville Museum of Art; other of his works are in private collections. Maurice Grosser's first book, Painting in Public, was published in 1948. His other books include: The Painter's Eye (1956); The Critic's Eye (1962); Painting in Our Time (1964); and Painter's Progress (1971). Maurice Grosser died from heart failure at St. Vincent's Hospital on the morning of December 22, 1986, at the age of 83.

Barbara Hutton was born on November 14, 1912, in New York City, the only child of Edna Woolworth Hutton, the eldest of the three daughters of Franklin Winfield Woolworth and his Canadian-born wife Jennie Creighton, whom he married on his farm near Watertown, New York on June 11, 1876. Barbara Hutton's grandfather, Franklin Winfield Woolworth, was born on April 13, 1852 in Rodman, New York. As a child and young man, he lived with his parents and a younger brother, Charles Sumner, on their modest potato farm in Great Bend in upstate New York, Not wanting to be a farmer, the ambitious young Woolworth briefly studied at a business college and then apprenticed and worked for $10 a week at Moore & Smith, a dry goods company in Watertown, New York. On February 22, 1879, F. W. Woolworth opened his first store as "The Great Five-Cent Store", in Utica, New York, on February 22, 1879, but it was not a success and it closed in May. Still determined to make his business idea succeed, Frank W. Woolworth scouted for a better location and found it in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where his new 5-and-10-cent store opened on June 21, 1879. This second store was an immediate success, and the F. W. Woolworth Co., often called simply Woolworth's, began to grow rapidly. The company expanded all across America over the next three decades, and by the end of the century Frank Winfield Woolworth found himself rich beyond his wildest childhood dreams.

In 1886, Frank Woolworth left Lancaster, Pennsylvania and moved his family to New York City, where he rented a house in Brooklyn and leased a small office at 104 Chambers Street in Manhattan for his expanding business. In 1901, F. W. Woolworth finished construction of a four-story, thirty-six-room François I chateau-style mansion for himself, his wife Jennie and their daughters. This home was located at 990 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of East 80th Street, directly across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mansion was designed by the architect Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, (more often referred to as C. P. H. Gilbert). Woolworth also commissioned Gilbert to design and build, between 1910 and 1916, three adjacent early French Renaissance-style townhouses on lots he had purchased around the corner for his three married daughters and their husbands: 2 East 80th for Franklyn Laws Hutton and Edna Woolworth Hutton, Barbara Hutton's mother; 4 East 80th, for Charles E. F. McCann and Helena Woolworth McCann, the eldest daughter; and 6 East 80th for James Paul Donahue ("Jim") and Jessie Woolworth Donahue, the youngest daughter. A fourth townhouse was built for the servants and caretakers. ( F. W. Woolworth was raised as a Methodist; the Huttons were mainly non-practicing Episcopalians; Helena's and Jessie's husbands were Roman Catholics, and these two Woolworth daughters later converted to Catholicism and raised their children in that religion.)

Barbara Hutton's grandfather had dreams for an impressive headquarters building, and in 1911 he began construction on the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway and Park Place, across from City Hall Park in lower Manhattan. Designed by Cass Gilbert, the fifty-nine story neo-Gothic structure stood 792 feet in height, and it remained the world's tallest building until the Chrysler Building was completed in 1930. Frank W. Woolworth paid $13.5 million in cash for the construction costs. It was dedicated as a "Cathedral of Commerce". President Woodrow Wilson inaugurated the skyscraper on April 24, 1913, when he pushed a button in the White House to turn on more than 90,000 light bulbs at the Woolworth Building. In 1918, the F. W. Woolworth Co. opened its 1,000th store on Fifth Avenue at Fortieth Street, across from The New York Public Library.

Barbara's father was Franklyn Laws Hutton, who in 1904 co-founded with his brother Edward Francis Hutton the financial firm Harris, Hutton & Company. A year later, with another partner Gerald M. Loeb, it became E. F. Hutton & Co., a highly-respected investment and stock brokerage firm. Barbara's uncle Edward F. Hutton married Marjorie Merriweather Post Close in 1920, and they lived in Manhattan's largest apartment―the top three floors of 1107 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. While the building's residents entered from Fifth Avenue, the Hutton's address was 2 East Ninety-second Street, the same as their former town home―the mansion originally owned by I. Townsend Burden. The Huttons had decided to sell their mansion to an apartment building developer for the construction of a new luxury apartment building―1107 Fifth Avenue―on condition that the house be virtually recreated on the top three floors. The result was later described as "the largest and very likely the most luxurious apartment ever created anywhere." This triplex had its own triple-archway drive-in entrance at 2 East Ninety-second Street with a separate concierge's apartment, a private elevator, 54 rooms, an indoor swimming pool, huge ballroom, gymnasium, bakery, a silver room, a wine room, cold-storage rooms for flowers and furs, a sun porch, rooftop terraces and gardens, and the dining room accommodated as many as 125 guests. Their spectacular Fifth Avenue residence also had additional rooms for the staff of 18 servants.

Franklyn and Edna Hutton and their only child Barbara lived in the opulent townhouse F. W. Woolworth built for them at 2 East 80th Street. Barbara Hutton's parents' marriage was an unhappy one. Her father had extramarital affairs, and he was an alcoholic. Unable to cope with her sad situation, Edna Woolworth Hutton was driven out of loneliness to develop a close friendship with Bud Bouvier, the younger brother of John Vernon Bouvier ("Black Jack"), who was the father of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Although Bud Bouvier and Edna Woolworth Hutton never married, their friendship evolved into a romance, but he eventually married a younger woman. F. W. Woolworth became enraged at the infidelities by Edna's husband, and he urged his daughter to seek a divorce, to no avail. Tragically, Edna Woolworth Hutton committed suicide on May 2, 1917. Barbara Hutton was four years old when she discovered her 33-year-old mother's body in the bedroom of their fifth-floor suite at the Plaza Hotel (the Huttons moved there in 1915 so her father could be close to his new office). The New York Times ran a totally misleading and inaccurate obituary for Mrs. Franklyn Laws Hutton in its May 3, 1917 edition. The police had found an empty vial of strychnine poison in the bathroom and a glass of the crystals mixed with water. The police report stated that four-year-old Barbara Hutton, not the maid, had discovered Edna Woolworth's body. No autopsy or official inquest was ever ordered by the coroner's office.

After her mother's death, Barbara Hutton, now five years old, went to live with her grandfather F. W. Woolworth, first at his Fifth Avenue mansion, and later at Winfield Hall, his new estate located on Crescent Beach Road in Glen Cove on the North Shore of Long Island. Completed in 1917, the Beaux Arts mansion cost $9 million and had 56 rooms, a grand ballroom, a pink marble staircase which itself cost $2 million, tennis courts, stables, four caretakers' cottages, three greenhouses, a swimming pool, formal Italian gardens and an 18-car garage. Winfield Hall required dozens of servants for its upkeep and services, and there were numerous gardeners for the estate's 18 acres. F. W. Woolworth lived in his Gold Coast mansion for only two years until he died. Barbara's grandmother Jennie Woolworth was in declining health during her last years, and she had difficulty in adjusting to servants replacing her in the role of caretaker for her husband, family and home, and living in mansions, rather than modest farm or small-town homes. In her old age, Jennie Woolworth became increasingly isolated, psychotic and was mentally incompetent. When F. W. Woolworth died in 1919, he left his entire estate to his wife, Jennie, but due to her premature senility, the estate was administered by a committee that consisted of their two daughters: Helena (Mrs. Charles McCann), and Jessie (Mrs. James Paul Donahue, Sr.), and Hubert Parson, who was the president of the company from 1919 to 1932. After Jennie Woolworth's death in 1924, the estate was divided equally among the two daughters, Jessie and Helena, and his granddaughter, Barbara Hutton.

After the death of her grandfather on April 8, 1919, the young Barbara Hutton was shuffled between various relatives in California and in Pleasantville, New Jersey, having basically been abandoned by her father, who remarried in 1926. Although Barbara Hutton did not have a close relationship with her father, who often treated his daughter coolly, or with her stepmother Irene, Franklyn Laws Hutton did manage to wisely invest money for her, netting his daughter the sizable sum of $10 million when she was only thirteen years old. The teenager was also the primary beneficiary of her mother's one-third share of F. W. Woolworth's huge estate, which Barbara would inherit when she turned twenty-one. Barbara once had to spend a Christmas by herself at Miss Porter's School, where she was snubbed by classmates, who had gone home to be with their families, because her father Frank and stepmother Irene Curley Bodde Hutton couldn't be bothered having her home for the holidays. In 1926 Barbara Hutton decided to live separately from her parents and moved into her own 26-room duplex in the same building at 1020 Fifth Avenue, at 83rd Street. Throughout her mid-to-late teenage years Hutton made regular summer trips to Europe.

Barbara Hutton was raised by nannies and governesses, needed a bodyguard for protection, and she was educated at exclusive boarding schools: the Santa Barbara School for Girls near Burlingame, California; Miss Hewitt's School in New York City; and Miss Porter's School for Girls in Farmington, Connecticut. Barbara knew another famous young heiress, Doris Duke, and children from other super rich families. But she was often taunted for being a spoiled rich teenager who had a personal bodyguard and a chauffeur to take her to school. One of Hutton's closest teenage friends and a confidante was her fun-loving first cousin, Jimmy Donahue (James Paul Donahue, Jr.), who later inherited some of the Woolworth fortune from his mother, Barbara's Aunt Jessie Donahue, one of F. W. Woolworth's three daughters. (Jimmy Donahue was also a lifelong friend of Libby Holman, whom he had first met in 1934 in Palm Beach, and also another of Jane Bowles' friends, the Du Pont heiress Louisa Carpenter. After Libby Holman Reynolds was acquitted of the charge of the shotgun murder of her husband Smith Reynolds, Jimmy Donahue lived for a short time with Libby, Louisa, Louisa's adopted daughter Sunny and Libby's young son Christopher.) Barbara Hutton's family maintained homes, in addition to those in New York, in Palm Beach, Florida, a shooting plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, and when not travelling abroad, they spent summers in Newport, Rhode Island.

Aside from Barbara Hutton's grandfather, her most noteworthy relative was Aunt Marjorie Merriweather Post Hutton. (Post was born in Springfield, Illinois on March 15, 1887; she died peacefully at Hillwood in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1973, at age 86.) Mrs. Post was probably America's most regal and gracious socialite and hostess, as well as a philanthropist of exceptional generosity. In 1914, when Marjorie was twenty-seven years old, she inherited the rapidly growing Postum Cereal Company from her father Charles William Post (C. W. Post). His company, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, championed healthy foods which included the coffee substitute Postum. In 1897 the company introduced the first breakfast cereal, Grape-Nuts, followed by Post Toasties. Marjorie Merriweather Post graduated from Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C. In 1945 the college moved from Nebraska Avenue to its current 26-acre parcel on Foxhall Road, one of the most coveted residential streets in the Northwest area of Washington. Mrs. Post was generous in her financial support of her alma mater, and she donated Post Hall in 1956, and Merriweather Hall in 1969, in memory of her father, Charles William Post and her mother, Ella Letitia Merriweather, respectively. In 1969 the school was renamed Mount Vernon College, and since 1998 it has been affiliated with and a campus of The George Washington University.

In 1905, Marjorie Merriweather Post married Edward Bennett Close. She and her husband lived at The Boulders, their country estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, where her first two daughters Adelaide and Eleanor were born. After 1916 they also lived in one of the finest mansions in New York on Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street―the former I Townsend Burden mansion. Edward Bennett Close, who served in Europe during the First World War, and Marjorie were divorced in 1919, and in July 1920 she married her second husband Edward F. Hutton, a financier. Together, E. F. and Marjorie Hutton greatly expanded her company, and it went public in 1922. The Postum Cereal Company was renamed the General Foods Corporation in 1929, and it became the world's largest food business after an aggressive campaign of acquisitions, with well-known brands that included Birds Eye frozen foods, Kool-Aid, Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee, and many others. On December 7, 1925, her third daughter, Nedenia Marjorie Hutton was born in New York City. Fabulously rich, Marjorie Merriweather Post owned and maintained: a 360-foot long luxurious sailing yacht Hussar V (rechristened as the Sea Cloud after her divorce from E. F. Hutton in 1935), the world's largest when it was launched in 1931; and her triplex apartment at 2 East 92nd Street (1107 Fifth Avenue) in Manhattan. In 1921 she and E. F. Hutton began construction of Hillwood, an English Tudor-Elizabethan revival manor house on 177 acres in Brookville, Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. They completed the 70-room house over a ten-year period (since 1955 it has been the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University). In 1955, the year Marjorie divorced her third husband, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, Mrs. Post acquired an extraordinary property in the Nation's Capital, originally called Arbramont, and she renamed it Hillwood, after her former Long Island estate, and spent three years in remodeling, decorating and furnishing the main house, a Georgian-style mansion originally designed by John Deibert in 1926. Hillwood was the largest privately-held residential property in Washington, D.C., situated on 25 acres, including 12 acres of well-manicured French, Japanese and other gardens, and acres of tranquil woodlands bordering Rock Creek Park. Hillwood was filled with important collections of French and Russian art works, tapestries, porcelains, antique furniture and rare jewelry. Marjorie Merriweather Post amassed the largest collections of 18th- and 19th-century Russian Imperial art outside of the former Soviet Union, including over 80 works by Carl Fabergé and two of his Imperial Easter eggs, and an historic 1884 diamond crown worn by Empress Alexandra at her marriage to Czar Nicholas II. She began collecting these items while living in the Soviet Union for two years with her third husband, Joseph E. Davies, a Washington lawyer. Davies was appointed the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1936 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the height of Josef Stalin's reign of terror.

In 1969, Marjorie Merriweather Post gave Hillwood, her Washington estate, to the Smithsonian Institution on condition that she could still live there, but the property was later reverted to the Hillwood Foundation, then directed by her daughter Adelaide. This fabulous property is now the Hillwood Museum & Gardens, and the museum and grounds are open to the public by appointment. Hillwood still has more land than The White House's 18 acres. While married to Edward F. Hutton, she also built Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Designed by Joseph Urban and completed in 1927, it was the fourth largest private residence in the United States with 126 rooms on 18 acres that stretched from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1921 Barbara Hutton's Aunt Marjorie purchased Hutridge, a 207-acre camp retreat in an isolated area of the Adirondack Mountains on Upper St. Regis Lake, twelve miles northwest of Saranac Lake in upstate New York. Hutridge, later renamed Topridge, consisted of a vast, rustic main lodge and numerous cottages for guests, and a large staff to cater to their every whim and need. As a teenager, Barbara Hutton would spend as much time visiting her Aunt Marjorie in Palm Beach as she did with her father and stepmother. Barbara felt loved and cared for by her beautiful and kind Aunt Marjorie, who listened to the teenager and provided her with sound guidance and advice in her troubled young life.

During the fall of 1930 Barbara Hutton attended forty separate balls, receptions, teas and brunches, including heiress Doris Duke's debut in Newport, Rhode Island. Aunt Marjorie gave a tea for five hundred people at her Fifth Avenue triplex, with the Meyer Davis orchestra providing entertainment. Barbara Hutton's own debutante ball was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan on December 21, 1930. This extravaganza was attended by one thousand people from New York's upper-crust Social Register families, other debutantes and their male escorts. The entertainment was provided by four orchestras, and Maurice Chevalier, dressed in a Santa Claus suit, handed out expensive gifts to the guests. (The high-society bandleader Lester Lanin began his long and distinguished career at Barbara Hutton's coming-out party.) Two hundred waiters served dinner and breakfast, and thousands of bottles of champagnes were consumed. Brooke Astor described the event: "to die from―the epitome of the big money deb affair."

On May 19, 1931, Barbara Hutton was formally presented to Queen Mary and King George V at Buckingham Palace, and the next day Edward, the Prince of Wales held a garden party on the palace's grounds. Following London, Barbara Hutton and her father and stepmother travelled to Paris, where they took a suite at the Ritz Hôtel. In Paris, Barbara Hutton first met Elsa Maxwell, noted for her parties and introductions of rich American women looking to marry into impoverished royalty. Paris was followed by visits to Biarritz, France and Rome, Italy.

In late-January 1933 Barbara Hutton sailed to the Far East, with stays in Ubud, Bali, and in Bangkok, Thailand she met up with Prince Alexis Mdivani. In April 1933, the announcement of her engagement to the Georgian prince outraged her father, who adamantly opposed any marriage, especially since she had not yet reached the age of twenty-one. Barbara immediately ordered three custom built Rolls-Royces and gave one to her father as a present. After a prenuptial agreement was agreed upon and signed, giving Mdivani one million dollars and a substantial annual allowance, they were married in a civil ceremony in Paris on June 20th, followed by a lavish formal wedding on June 22, 1933 at a Russian Orthodox cathedral. The international press strongly criticized Hutton for spending a small fortune on her wedding. With seventy pieces of luggage and trunks, the newlyweds spent their honeymoon at Lake Como and the Lido in Venice. In 1934 the couple visited Japan and China, with more spending sprees, and gifts and large checks for Mdivani. By the autumn of 1934, the marriage seemed irreconcilably doomed and she ultimately filed for a divorce, which was granted in Reno, Nevada in May 1935.

On Barbara Hutton's twenty-first birthday on November 14, 1933, she inherited one-third of her grandfather's estate and now had a net worth of over $50 million―including the money she inherited from her mother's estate which had been invested―a sum equivalent to several billion dollars in today's value of the U.S. dollar. This fortune made Barbara Hutton one of the richest people in the world at the height of the Great Depression when millions of Americans had lost jobs and endured great financial hardship. Her first act of generosity was a gift of $5 million to her father, since he had actually increased the amount of her inheritance through wise investment. The Hutton family emerged virtually unscathed from the Depression, and they remained very, very rich. From the time of Barbara's inheritance of this vast wealth, the media constantly reported the details of her extravagances and what would become a pattern of marriage and divorce throughout her life. Not all of the media's reporting about the young heiress was favorable: Barbara Hutton was referred to as the "Poor Little Rich Girl" on the front page of the New York Post and by the public.

At age twenty-four, when Barbara Hutton was married to her second husband, Count Court von Haugwitz-Reventlow, she became concerned about threats to kidnap her baby son Lance Reventlow, who was born in London on February 24, 1936. She decided to give up her house near Marble Arch in London and look for something bigger and more secure. Friends suggested a large, abandoned and dilapidated Regency-style house called St. Dunstan's Villa, that recently had been partly destroyed by fire. In August 1936, Barbara Hutton bought the 12-1/2 acre property and had St. Dunstan's demolished, and built a new mansion in Georgian style. Her new home was named Winfield House, after her grandfather. It was furnished with a treasury of valuable paintings, antique furniture and rare carpets, and old French wood paneling, parquet floors and new marble bathrooms were added. She also planted several thousand trees and hedges on the grounds, along with beautiful flower gardens, and a tall security fence was constructed around the perimeter. Ideal for grand entertaining, her estate was the second largest private residential property in London, after Buckingham Palace. The Count and Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow and their son Lance, moved into Winfield House in 1937. Pressured by her husband, on December 16, 1937, Barbara Hutton renounced her United States citizenship―a move designed to save money on annual taxes, but one which caused a media frenzy in America. Because of dangers from an impending World War II looming on the horizon, in October 1939 the couple, now legally separated and planning to divorce in America, along with Lance, left the London mansion and returned to New York. On arrival in New York, Hutton, now the Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow, was greeted on the dock by union picketers from Woolworth stores with signs that said: "Babs, we live on $15.60 a week. Could you?". To bolster her public image, Barbara Hutton assisted the war effort by giving money to help the Free French Forces, and she donated her yacht to the U.S. government and used her image to help sell War bonds. Eventually, Barbara Hutton received some favorable media publicity after being regularly ridiculed in the press. Her sixty-three year old father, Franklyn Laws Hutton, died on December 5, 1940, at his 5,500-acre plantation in South Carolina.

In all, Barbara Hutton married seven times, typically providing generous divorce settlements. Her husbands were, with the years of each marriage and subsequent divorce in parentheses: 1. Alexis Mdivani, a Georgian prince (1933-1935); 2. Count Court von Haugwitz-Reventlow (1935-1938), the Danish-born father of her only child, Lance Reventlow; 3. the actor Cary Grant, the only husband not interested in her money (1942-1945); 4. Prince Igor Troubetzkoy (1947-1951); 5. Porfirio Rubirosa (1953-1954)―her shortest marriage to this playboy and diplomat lasted only 53 days; 6. Baron Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt von Cramm, a German tennis star (1955-1959); 7. her last husband was Prince Pierre Raymond Doan Vinh Na Champassak (1964-1966), for whom she purchased an aristocratic title and who received $2 million after they were divorced.

In 1946, Barbara Hutton bought a Moroccan palace, Sidi Hosni, located in the upper medina of Tangier, just below the kasbah, having doubled the bid of Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain on the purchase price. That same year she donated her London mansion Winfield House, located off Regent's Park, to the United States government for a token sum of one dollar. After initial hesitation, the government finally agreed to accept Hutton's gift, and a thank you letter was mailed to her, personally signed by President Harry F. Truman. Since 1954, her former home has been the residence of the U.S. ambassadors to the Court of St. James's, and visiting presidents of the United States have regularly stayed at the residence.

Barbara Woolworth Hutton lived in Tangier, Morocco only during the late summer months, beginning in 1947, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, until her last visit in 1975. Invitations to her annual lavish parties at Sidi Hosni—always the social event of the season—were much coveted. Hutton would invite 200 guests and 1,000 gate-crashers would show up at her door, only to be turned away. Her friend the Hon. David Herbert, Tangier's long-time social arbiter, advised her on who and whom not to invite. The invitations always read: "Mrs. Barbara Woolworth Hutton requests the pleasure of your company...", and if the party was to be held on the terraces or the roof, there was an added note: "In Case of Wind, Your Hostess Requests You To Indulge Her By Coming Another Night." At other times, Hutton would hold some of her parties in the gardens at Guitta's Restaurant, the Parade, or in large tents set up near the Caves of Hercules outside Tangier.

While Jane Bowles was closer to Barbara Hutton, Paul Bowles was not overly fond of her as she had once expressed a dislike for his novel The Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles wrote: "One summer when she gave a party, she brought thirty Reguibat camel drivers with their racing camels from the Sahara, a good thousand miles away, merely to form a garde d'honneur through which the guests would pass at the entrance of the house. But then she couldn't get rid of them. ...for many days after the party they encamped with their camels outside the walls of Sidi Hosni. The animals produced enough fertilizer during their stay to keep the flowering trees of Tangier blooming for a decade." Each year she also entertained the U.S. Sixth Fleet when in port, one party for the enlisted men and another for the officers. Hutton held an annual party for the Tangier police department and another for her mainly poor neighbors. The presence of such a celebrity in the city was a boon to the tourist industry in Tangier.

Hutton gave generous amounts of money to support local Tangier charities, and she arranged to feed many poor people in the city on a regular basis. As a diversion from Tangier, she would travel to Taroudant in the far south and rent for friends all of the stone cottages at La Gazelle d'Or, long regarded as one of the most luxurious and private of Morocco's hideaways. When her son Lance visited Morocco in 1962, her friend David Herbert made his first visit to La Gazelle d'Or in Taroudant, along with other guests. Throughout her lifetime, Hutton had sudden whims of generosity and would, on more than a few occasions, present friends and mere acquaintancse with a check, a Rolls-Royce, a Patek Philippe watch, jewelry, a sable coat, an entire wardrobe of clothing, or a house.