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Currently, his chief disappointment is that his Hollywood theater has not lived up to expectations; the road-show companies it books do better than its own productions. "I felt that a town with so many actors in it should have a place for them to act before live audiences," he says. "They turned their backs on it. It made me sore as hell recently to read that Marlon Brando and some other actors were going to start a theater there so that at last Hollywood would have a living theater. I gave them one in 1954 and spent a million bucks on it." Hundreds of thousands more have gone into Hartford's researches on graphology. He is forever analyzing the handwriting of business associates and friends, believes that some day it will be possible to predict human behavior through handwriting analysis. "My handwriting," says he modestly, "shows I'm something of a perfectionist." And so he is. At Paradise Island last week, for example, he devoted more than an hour of serious conversation with an aide to the question of whether to charge guests $1.50 or $2 for the use of the tennis courts. Following that, he took on the problem of what to do about the massive sliding glass doors that people kept running into. He solved that by ordering the word PEACE etched on the glass. But then came another problem.
"Do you think," he asked a man earnestly, "that PEACE should read from the outside or the inside?"