A&P heir, once tabloid darling, dies at 97

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Huntington Hartford, the deep-pocketed A&P grocery heir who burned through most of a $100 million fortune in a series of fruitless business and cultural endeavors before his life unraveled, has died. He was 97.

Hartford died of natural causes Monday at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau, in the Bahamas, his daughter Juliet Hartford said.

His free-spending ways and roving eye for attractive young women made him a darling of the tabloids in his youth, and he was perceived as playing on the same field as the DuPonts, Rockefellers and Mellons.

At a time when seven-figure divorce settlements made headlines, Hartford paid $2.5 million in 1961 and again in 1970 in splits with the middle two of his four wives.

In later years, Hartford lived on the last of his millions from a trust that was administered for him. He filed for bankruptcy in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1992.

His daughter Juliet, who rescued her father from 10 years as a recluse and took him to his beloved Bahamas to help rehabilitate him, told Vanity Fair in 2004 that Hartford still had $11 million of his fortune, stashed in a trust fund he never touched. Recently she negotiated a return of her father’s archives, donated to Boston University in 2004.

On Monday she recalled her father as a handsome and charming, if slightly eccentric man, similar to the recluse Howard Hughes.

“He wanted to be thought of like a philosopher or a thinker,” she told the Associated Press.