The Benefactor

The fireworks were imported from the Riviera. The chartered jet flew in from New York with a cargo of famous stars and freeloaders (a redundancy in part). Zsa Zsa was there, and so was Fashion Model Cristina Paolozzi, famed for her recent bare-breasted exposure in Harper's Bazaar, and now doing penance in the form of a needlepoint sampler that reads NUTS TO YOU ("For Mother," she explained). For dancing, there was Society Bandleader Meyer Davis ($7,500 for four hours of music--$1,000 per hour overtime); for super glamour there were the Prince and Princess of Windisch-Graetz, Lady Sassoon, the Earl of Hardwicke, Baroness Peggy de Gripenberg, four U.S. Senators and two people named Connie and Nonnie van Vlaanderen. By rough count, the crew added up to 850 sparkling personalities, all of whom last week jammed onto little Hog Island in Nassau harbor in the Bahamas.

A summit meeting of Cafe Society? No, but the next best thing: the transformation of Hog into Paradise Island and the opening of a brand-new Caribbean resort that features a 52-suite hotel, golf course, statuary in the gardens. Tennis Pro Pancho Gonzales on the courts, and the word PEACE on all of the matchbooks. The champagne, the swimming, the golf and the jet were all provided free, at a cost of more than $100,000, by handsome A. & P. Heir George Huntington Hartford II, 50, a shy, mystical and misty multi-millionaire who is devoting himself to the arduous job of getting poor quick in his search for a satisfying life.

No Sale. By all accounts. Hunt Hartford may never succeed, though he is certainly trying. For one thing, he himself admits that he has at least $65 million to get rid of, and more distant observers have put the figure as high as $500 million. For another, he is spending it in an unusual, for him, kind of way.

Scarcely more than a decade ago, Hartford was a hapless little rich boy, born with a silver cash register in his hand, who rang up No Sale with every transaction in life. Like a busy householder trundling down the aisles of the A.& P. on a Saturday afternoon, he wheeled the sheeniest photographers' models through the aisles of the shiniest cafes and the columns of the gossipiest peepholers. He exhibited no head for business, no great ambition to further the family fortunes, no inclination to develop his intellect beyond the requirements of a bachelor's degree at Harvard. He was, in short, a jaded neon scion, sputtering in the dark.

The Discovery. But then Hartford discovered Culture. He further discovered that Culture had fallen into the hands of a conspiracy, in which avant-garde wild-men were abetted by avant-garde critics and avant-garde patrons. It is an idea that many another citizen has come to share. Hartford, with a sense of having found a mission in life at last, launched a one-man crusade against the conspiracy.

Since then, he has poured millions of dollars into a series of projects supporting the currently unfashionable kind of art that he and a great many other people admire. He set up a foundation for artists, composers and writers, who are invited to spend up to six months at the foundation estate in Los Angeles' Rustic Canyon. He founded the Huntington Hartford Theatre in Hollywood. He is building his own art gallery in Manhattan. Even Paradise Island is intended to become a place for "cultural enjoyment -- no automobiles, no roulette wheels, no honky-tonks."

Squash & Dates. The image of Huntington Hartford II as a serious intellectual is something of a bafflement to those who knew him when. Grandson and name sake of the founder of A. & P. young Hunt inherited about 10% of his grand father's holdings as well as a sizable in come from his father Edward, who made his own fortune with the development of the Hartford shock absorber. He went to St. Paul's before Harvard (class of '34), where his only serious interests seemed to be tennis (good) and squash (excellent).

After that came a clerkship at A. & P., a fling at sailing in the West Indies and newspapering in Manhattan (the defunct PM), and World War II service with the Coast Guard in the Pacific.

For a while after the war he had a good thing going for him: a fashion-model agency, with its ready-made string of dates; it thrived for 13 years before he sold out. He dabbled with movies and got some critical praise for his 1952 production of Face to Face, which featured his second wife, Actress-Painter Marjorie Steele (who divorced him last year, won a whopping settlement of some $2,500,000). Then he tried his hand at playwriting with an adaptation of Jane Eyre for Broadway. It flopped.

Insulted? But with the discovery of Culture, life took on new meaning. In 1951 he composed a scathing 7,000-word tract. Has God Been Insulted Here?, in which he deplored the "vulgarity" of Faulkner, James Jones, Picasso and Tennessee Williams. Four years later, he bought full-page ads in six Manhattan newspapers to complain that the art world was misleading the people with "obscurity, confusion, immorality, violence," demanded that the public rise up against the "high priests of criticism and the museum directors and the teachers of mumbo jumbo." Bolstering his messianic pronouncements with cash. Hartford got Architect Edward D. Stone (TIME cover. March 31, 1958) to design an ornate museum that was to be a counter to Manhattan's prestigious Museum of Modern Art (which, ironically, was also designed by Stone in his earlier, glass-box period ). Still abuilding in New York's Columbus Circle, the Gallery of Modern Art will be completed next year at a cost of $7,000,000. Says Hartford: "The Museum of Modern Art has managed to become the guiding light in modern painting today, an eminence I don't think it deserves. It is far too avantgarde. I want to get away from the ivory tower painters of today who are dreaming up loud-colored messes in their studios instead of going out and opening their eyes and painting what they see for other people to enjoy." Picasso is Hartford's idea of an ivory tower artist ("no communication"); his leading contender for immortality is Dali. from whom he commissioned a 14-ft. by 12-ft. painting, Christopher Columbus Discovers America. He also admires the work of Andrew Wyeth, Robert Vickrey, Aaron Bohrod, "and of course, Marjorie Steele. She may be my exwife, but I think she is one of the greatest woman painters today." Tennis, Anyone? Hartford has many another project. Barring an unfavorable court decision, he is planning to spend $1,700,000 to bring the civilized delights of the Paris sidewalk cafe to Manhattan's Central Park. He recently started the new magazine Show, which is chiefly concerned with the performing arts but will soon add sections on painting and the fine arts. He keeps a wandering and unpredictable eye on these enterprises from a variety of homes: a 33-acre farm in New Jersey, a 117-acre estate in Hollywood, a town house near London's Hyde Park, a villa at Cap d'Antibes, a hacienda in Palm Beach, a 13-room duplex in Manhattan hung with Rubens, Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt.

Currently, his chief disappointment is that his Hollywood theater has not lived up to expectations; the road-show companies it books do better than its own productions. "I felt that a town with so many actors in it should have a place for them to act before live audiences," he says. "They turned their backs on it. It made me sore as hell recently to read that Marlon Brando and some other actors were going to start a theater there so that at last Hollywood would have a living theater. I gave them one in 1954 and spent a million bucks on it." Hundreds of thousands more have gone into Hartford's researches on graphology. He is forever analyzing the handwriting of business associates and friends, believes that some day it will be possible to predict human behavior through handwriting analysis. "My handwriting," says he modestly, "shows I'm something of a perfectionist." And so he is. At Paradise Island last week, for example, he devoted more than an hour of serious conversation with an aide to the question of whether to charge guests $1.50 or $2 for the use of the tennis courts. Following that, he took on the problem of what to do about the massive sliding glass doors that people kept running into. He solved that by ordering the word PEACE etched on the glass. But then came another problem.

"Do you think," he asked a man earnestly, "that PEACE should read from the outside or the inside?"

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