- Born
- Died
- Birth nameGeorge Huntington Hartford II
- Nicknames
- Hunt
- Hartford
- H2
- Height5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
- Huntington Hartford was born into one of America's wealthiest families. His two uncles and grandfather privately owned the A&P Supermarket the largest retail empire in the world with 16 thousand stores in America, a beloved American Company. He grew up America's golden boy idealized by a nation and was one of the world's richest men, building his own empire spanning the globe. He founded Oil Shale which is now Conoco Phillips and owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas.- IMDb Mini Biography By: anonymous
- SpousesElaine Kay(May 21, 1974 - 1981) (divorced)Diane Hartford(October 5, 1962 - July 7, 1970) (divorced, 1 child)Marjorie Steele(September 10, 1949 - February 24, 1961) (divorced, 2 children)Mary Lee Epling(April 18, 1931 - 1939) (divorced, 1 child)
- Very private and reclusive.
- Heir to the A&P grocery/supermarket fortune, at one time the largest retail company in the world.
- Hartford discovered Al Pacino in the 1960s. Hartford produced a play, "Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?" on Broadway, as cast Pacino, who was unknown at the time. After seeing Pacino's performance in the play, Francis Ford Coppola cast Pacino in The Godfather (1972).
- Along with his uncles, George Ludlum Hartford (1864 - 1957) and John Augustine Hartford (1872 - 1951), and his sister, Marie Josephine Hartford (1902-1992), he was heir to his namesake grandfather's, George Huntington Hartford, privately owned Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (later A&P Supermarkets), which reached approximately 16,000 stores in 1930, the largest retail empire in the world at that time. He and his sister became heirs and owners of the private company, after the premature death of their father, Edward V. Huntington, the corporate secretary of A&P, who died in 1922.
- After World War II, he purchased what was then known as "Hog Island" in the Bahamas, the private estate of the Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren, and renamed the island as "Paradise Island." He was the first developer of Paradise Island, where he built several clubs, bars, hotels, resort features, and a world class golf course, including the Ocean Club, Cafe Martinique, Hurricane Hole, the Golf Course, and other landmarks. During development, he purchased (from the Estate of William Randolph Hearst), transported, and re-installed "The Cloisters," a 14th-century French Augustinian monastery, which was originally located in Montréjeau, France, but had been dismantled, moved, and partially re-assembled by Hearst, in a Florida warehouse, in the 1920s. Hartford hired Gary Player to be golf pro and Pancho Gonzales to be tennis pro. Hartford's 1962 grand-opening of Paradise Island was covered in Newsweek and Time magazines, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He took on a limited partner in his original developments on Paradise Island, Jim Crosby, the founder of Resorts International Casinos, who ultimately bought Hartford out in 1981 for $79 million, and in turn sold to Merv Griffin in the late 1980s, who sold it to the current owner, Sol Kerzner, the developer of Atlantis Paradise Island Resort.
- David Frost interviewed Hartford in the 1960s for British Television. Huntington told Frost he had designed a flag for Paradise Island in the shape of a stylized "P" which he hoped would be put on the moon as a symbol of peace for the world.
- The Estate of Huntington Hartford sold a painting which had been owned by Hartford for more than forty years, and had not been seen in public during that time, van Rijn, Rembrandt's "Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo" sold at Christie's London Auction on December 7, 2009 for over £20.2 million, or approximately USD33.21 million, a world record for a Rembrandt at that time.
- I have tried to use my millions creatively. The golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away.
- [After donating the building housing his New York City art gallery to Fairleigh Dickinson University]: It's a very difficult problem for one person to support a museum. It was probably foolhardy for me to try - but then, fools rush in. Perhaps I should get one or two points for not selling it to the telephone company.
- There are two ways of looking at the things I do. One way is the American way, to look at how much money they make. The other way is, what is it that I'm doing? What have I accomplished? You can't judge everything by its dollar value ... For the survival of capitalism, business just can't be business. It must have social awareness of the area in which it operates. Take somebody like Getty or Howard Hughes or H.L. Hunt. What are they doing with their money? They've missed the boat, in my opinion.
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