I spent half of this book wondering if I’d read it before but enjoying it so much I dashed through it in about a day. It is very entertaining and readable, and you can understand why Barbara Hutton took on Philip as a companion. He is a fun narrator and gets across emotion and events very well. Million Dollar Baby is a biography of Barbara Hutton and a memoir the time that Van Rensselaer spent with her in the late 1950s. It is not at all unbiased and has a complete dearth of references beyond a brief list of books he used at the front. It is a dishy society memoir and it works well for what it is, but don’t expect a scholarly work.
Barbara Hutton was the original “poor little rich girl.” Her early traumas — finding her mother’s dead body after she committed suicide, isolation and bullying at boarding school, emotional distance and abuse from her father — compounded with her sensitive nature and the massive amount of money she inherited to create a person who was perpetually unhappy, ill, and who married compulsively. Her desperation for love and the curse of her money led to a string of failed marriages where the gold digging men took large amounts of money from her (except for Cary Grant, the only man to not take advantage of her — this marriage just didn’t work out).
It was a real tragedy on a lot of levels, because Barbara never seems like a bad person, just an easily overwhelmed and depressed one who spent the majority of her adult life getting addicted to drugs and alcohol to cope with her trauma and pain, and then retreated entirely from the world into her bed. Her son’s death was an especially cruel blow on top of everything. The photo section captures her physical and emotional decline, with her smile vanishing and her face turning into a mask of sadness. Van Rensselaer covers all of the incidents of her life in fair detail, and as someone who has read a more researched and balanced biography of her, this one doesn’t have any glaring inaccuracies in it, beyond things like his portrayal of Elsa Maxwell that seem to be based more in rumor (which honestly I could believe). This is the ultimate money can’t buy you happiness book, although I still feel like it did bring her some amount of comfort and happiness in that she was able to sustain herself at a high level for her whole life and never went through any starvation or homelessness (the descriptions of all of her homes and gems and clothes are well done). I’d like to read Van Rensselaer’s other memoir when I get the time, because he is an entertaining companion and I really do enjoy books about this period of cafe society.