Despite her massive fortune and apparently charmed life surrounded by staff, reporters, and a series of husbands, Barbara Hutton was always profoundly lonely. In the biography "Million Dollar Baby: An Intimate Portrait of Barbara Hutton" she is quoted as saying that she "inherited everything but love" and had spent her entire life trying to find it.
While few would consider inheriting a vast fortune to be a burden, Hutton described her experience as being the heir of an industry titan as being like, "the backwash after a great ocean liner sank to the bottom of the sea...the flotsam that came to the surface...a desperate drowning man struggling to survive in a raging sea."
Hutton was desperate for an escape that would never come. As a teenager, the usually quiet and introverted Hutton spontaneously stole a boat and sailed it out to sea. As recounted in "Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton" she described the feeling of being alone on the ocean as euphoric. Soon, she would be taken in by the Coast Guard and assigned a bodyguard to keep her in line, who she would seduce to irritate her distant father. The rest of her life would be marked by profound loneliness, pain, loss, and tragedy, but on the deck of her stolen ship, she was free.
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