Poor Little Rich Girl by C. David Heymann

At 21, Barbara Hutton was one of the 2 or 3 richest women in the world. Woolworth's estate, which her father had doubled with careful investment, netting her a personal fortune of almost 50 million dollars (which in today's money would be well over a billion dollars) - back when there were very few millionaires in the world, and back when a million dollars really meant something. On her 21st birthday, she inherited a third of F.W. With equally eccentric cousin Jimmy Donahue (Bruce Davison) as her only close companion growing up (they both pledge a pact to 'get through life as quickly as possible'), Barbara's life became increasingly sheltered from the realities of life outside the realm of her wealth.

Indeed, Barbara would take this advice to heart, eventually believing in nothing but gratifying her own selfish needs, while being forever disappointed with the other people in her life who didn't constantly provide 'magic' for her. Woolworth - a calming paternal influence on the child whom nonetheless contributed to Barbara's later neuroses by telling her that only 'magic makes the soul alive,' and that there is 'only 'now',' and to live life accordingly.

Her father, distant and uninterested in raising the child (Barbara overheard her father stating he never really wanted her, and that most children are born 'out of a bottle of whiskey'), passed the child off to be raised by her aunts and F.W. Hutton, was a drunk and a womanizer whose behavior caused Hutton's mother, Edna Woolworth (Toria Fuller) to commit suicide - with six-year-old Barbara discovering the corpse. Her father, Franklyn Laws Hutton (Kevin McCarthy), the co-founder of the investment giant, E. Hutton, raised in a stifling, isolated luxury, had the double misfortune of unstable parents.

Woolworth (Burl Ives), the legendary American business magnate who, through his successful 'five-and-dime' Woolworth thrift stores, pioneered such retail standards as fixed prices for items and self-service goods on display (as opposed to the standard practice of having all merchandise behind a sales counter). One scene after another chronicles the apparent misery that was heiress Hutton's life in this unimaginative (yet expensive) production, creating in the end a sense of overkill for the mini's one-note message: money ain't everything.īarbara Hutton (Farrah Fawcett), born in 1917, was the granddaughter of Frank W. version back in '87 ran closer to 4 hours long), there's just too much of the same thing going on here. This particular version of the Farrah Fawcett starrer is the longer European cut (clocking in at almost 5 hours), and while I always like to see the complete versions of these particular kinds of miniseries (the U.S. A&E and Granada International have released the 1987 NBC miniseries Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story in a 2-disc, expanded edition.

Poor Little Rich Girl by C. David Heymann