She was dubbed the "Poor Little Rich Girl"—first when she was given a lavish and expensive debutante ball in 1930 amid the Great Depression and later due to a notoriously troubled private life.

[1] Heiress to one-third of the estate of the retail tycoon Frank Winfield Woolworth, Barbara Hutton was one of the wealthiest women in the world.

She endured a childhood marked by the neglect of her father and the early loss of her mother at age four who died from suffocation due to mastoiditis.

Publicly she was much envied for her possessions, her beauty and her apparent life of leisure; privately she remained deeply insecure, often taking refuge in drink, drugs, and playboys.

Hutton was an inconsistent and insecure parent to her one child, exacerbated when the divorce from her second husband ended in a bitter custody battle, and she subsequently developed anorexia nervosa.

A life of lavish spending, paired with exploitation by those entrusted to manage her estate, brought Hutton to the verge of bankruptcy before her death.

[5] Edna Hutton reportedly died on May 2, 1917, age 33, from suffocation due to mastoiditis,[6] but rumor persists that she committed suicide by poison in despair over her husband's philandering,[3] especially as the coroner decided that no autopsy was necessary.

[9] Jimmy Donahue inherited a portion of the Woolworth estate with Barbara and also grew up to have notorious, and public, drug, alcohol and relationship problems.

[10] In accordance with New York's high society traditions, Barbara Hutton was given a lavish débutante ball in 1930 on her 18th birthday, where guests from the Astor and Rockefeller families, amongst other elites, were entertained by stars such as Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier.

Their meeting was engineered by Alexis' manipulative sister Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani [de] (aka Roussie) who was always propelling her family into wealthy marriages even if a divorce was required.

Hughes, at the time, was engaged to Katharine Hepburn and had come to London to meet with government officials and arrange permission to overfly Europe as part of a plan to circumnavigate the globe by air.

Hutton was active during the war, giving money to assist the Free French Forces and donating her yacht to the Royal Navy.

Using her high-profile image to sell war bonds, she received positive publicity after being derided by the press as a result of her marriage scandals.

Labeled by the press as the "Poor Little Rich Girl", her life made great copy and the media exploited her for consumption by a fascinated public.

[24] In a scathing review of the marriage ceremony in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Phyllis Battelle coined the oft-quoted phrase: "The bride, for her fifth wedding, wore black and carried a scotch-and-soda.

Her lavish spending continued; already the owner of several mansions around the world, in 1959 she built a luxurious Japanese-style palace on a 30-acre (120,000 m2) estate in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

[citation needed] Hutton lived with Frederick McEvoy, purchasing a chalet at a ski resort in Franconia, New Hampshire, after her marriage to actor Cary Grant.

By this time, her fortune had diminished, due to her extreme generosity, including donating Winfield House to the United States government as a residence for its UK ambassador.

Eventually she began liquidating assets in order to raise funds to live, yet continued to spend money on strangers willing to pay a little attention to her.

She spent her final years in Los Angeles, living at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where she died from a heart attack in May 1979, aged 66.