Huntington Hartford, 97, Eccentric Art Patron

Huntington Hartford, the A&P supermarket heir who died yesterday in the Bahamas at 97, was a playboy who blew through a fortune, in part trying to sponsor moral and aesthetic uplift to a largely indifferent public. He left for a monument one of the most flamboyant buildings in the city: 2 Columbus Circle, originally home to his Gallery of Modern Art but known to a generation of New Yorkers as the "Lollipop Building" for its mod Venetian-inspired filigree.

Hartford was also one of the great spendthrifts of mid-century America, and one of its most glamorous celebrities. He opened Hollywood's only live theater, where he produced plays and was often photographed with Lana Turner or Doris Duke on his arm and in the company of Charlie Chaplin, Aristotle Onassis, or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He was surrounded by admirers when at El Morocco and the Stork Club and married a series of young models. When the money was mostly gone, he was found living in a small Brooklyn apartment, discombobulated and strung out.

The Gallery of Modern Art was a brief and expensive experiment that opened in 1964 and lasted barely five years. But by then the peripatetic Hartford was on to other money-losers, including the arts magazine Show, which folded in 1973. Most spectacular was Paradise Island (Hog Island, before he bought and renamed it in 1959) in the Bahamas, where he frittered away tens of millions trying to create a resort worthy of its name. Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed an unbuilt California resort for him, said Hartford was "the sort of man who will come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny, and run."

Born George Huntington Hartford II on April 18, 1911, in New York, Hartford was the grandson of his namesake, a merchant who in 1869 founded the Great American Tea Co. (later the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.) on Vesey Street in Manhattan. Hartford I had three sons. Two, John and George, took over the family business and built it by 1950 into a $2.9 billion corporation, the second-largest in the world after General Motors. The third son, Edward Hartford, was George Huntington Hartford II's father. Hartford grew up in splendor in his family's home on Fifth Avenue, with estates in South Carolina and New Jersey and a winter place in Biarritz, France. His father, Edward, died young, estranged from his brothers and children, and Hartford was raised by his socially ambitious mother, who succeeded in having the family listed for the first time in the Social Register in 1929.

While a student at Harvard, Hartford horrified his mother by eloping with a dentist's daughter and then going to work for his uncles at A&P. Expecting to be assigned to upper management, he was instead assigned to monitoring sales of bread and pound cake. He was fired for incompetence. Still a man of leisure with an income of perhaps $1.5 million, he became a playboy in 1930s New York — though he drank only milk. He had an illegitimate son by a chorine, and his wife left him for Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

After the World War II, Hartford moved to Los Angeles, remarried, and founded an artists' colony. He opened a theater and also produced the movie "Face to Face" (1951), starring his wife at the time, Marjorie Steele. He produced a Broadway stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, which ran to terrible reviews in 1958.

In 1959, he sold $40 million in A&P shares and began laying plans for his museum. He also invested in an automatic parking garage, a shale-oil company, and even a handwriting institute. In 1961, his second wife left him because of his philandering.

In 1964, he opened his Gallery of Modern Art in a startling building on Columbus Circle designed by Edward Durell Stone. That same year, he published his views on art as a book, "Art or Anarchy?" But life was running off the tracks. In 1967, his illegitimate son committed suicide. One of his daughters later became a drug addict and died on a Hawaiian beach. The museum went out of business, as did his Hollywood theater. What money he had left was sluicing into the Bahamas resort off Nassau, which is now home to the giant Atlantis Paradise Island Resort & Casino.

By the mid-1970s, he'd squandered most of his fortune and turned to drugs. Eventually, he declared bankruptcy and was evicted from his 20-room Beekman Place apartment. During the 1990s, he lived in a Brooklyn apartment and then in Warwick, N.Y., in rural Orange County. A few years ago another daughter, Julie, rescued him and took him to live at her home in the Bahamas.

In 2005, he told Vanity Fair he had no regrets about dissipating the fortune that had taken two generations to build. "I spent most of it. I wasted some of it," he said. "I had a lot of money, and now I have enough."