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 Café 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.