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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.