"Kids"

In London last week, Countess Barbara, the wife of Danish Count Court Haugwitz-Reventlow and her two-year-old son, Lance, were entrenched in Winfield House surrounded by doctors, lawyers, bankers and armed guards. In Paris, Father Franklyn Laws Hutton, ever anxious about the happiness of his "dear little girl," talked things over with her second titled husband. It was after such a conference last week that Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, waylaid by reporters in the Ritz Hotel, hissed through his teeth: "I detest reporters."

The Danish Count's reaction was not surprising. In marrying Barbara Hutton, he married not only a rich chain store heiress but a character created and promulgated by modern U. S. journalism. If he had not realized it, millions of U. S. newspaper readers had. To them, Babs is a serial story, exciting, enviable, absurd, romantic, unreal.

When Barbara was twelve years old, she inherited nearly $20,000,000 of the fortune which her rugged grandfather had amassed from his 5-&-10-c- stores. Barbara's pile grew under her broker father's careful management. At the age of 21 she could write her check for $45,000,000. In 1930, in the teeth of Depression I, her fond father arranged a coming out party costing $60,000. Manhattan's Ritz-Carlton hotel was decorated with birch trees cut down and then covered with branches of fresh green leaves shipped to New York from California. When the debris was cleared away, every news editor in the country knew that Barbara was destined for the front page.

Three years later, Barbara came through. From Bangkok, Siam, where he had chased her, Alexis Mdivani, a polo-playing princeling of the marrying Mdivanis of Georgia, Russia, announced that Barbara had finally consented to marry him. This was real news in anybody's paper. It got better when the prince relinquished any future claim to Barbara's fortune, having first received $1,000,000 from her. Then he married her in Byzantine splendor in Paris' Russian Orthodox Church. Hiring half a deck of an ocean liner, they set off for a round-the-world honeymoon.

"Princess Babs's" subsequent extravagances in Venice and elsewhere not only made great tabloid copy, but fine indignation material for columnists like Westbrook Pegler, who simmered: "At this writing your correspondent has not yet had time to visit any of the Woolworth 5-and-10-c- stores to observe the rejoicing. . . . It was pretty hard to keep the girls within bounds last winter when Woolworth's own little Babbie, the darling of the $10-a-week personnel, married the dream prince from Russia in a love match as pure as anything in the matrimonial record of the Goulds. . . ."

On the princess' 22nd birthday an orchestra was flown to Paris from London, and the total cost of the party was more than $10,000. The Georgian nobleman's comment was: "We didn't think it fitting to spend too much in these times."

Day after her divorce in 1935, Princess Barbara became Countess Barbara. Older and maturer than his predecessor, the Danish Count persuaded Barbara to settle down in London. When Baby Lance arrived he was settled in a separate flat--three living rooms, two bathrooms with heated towel rails. During the birth of her son by Caesarian section, Babs's fantastic serial story had nearly ended tragically. It took the greatest medical skill in England to pull her through, said the papers. Her condition had been aggravated by two years of rigorous and well-publicized dieting--during which she lost 42 pounds, was transformed from the nice, fleshy American girl who married Mdivani to a sleek, chic European.

In 1936, Countess Barbara picked an unpropitious moment to buy Ganna Waiska's emerald collection for $1,200,000. The vigorously pro-Roosevelt New York Daily News took note: "It is incidents of this kind that light up the whole background of the 1936 campaign struggle between the Old Deal and New Deal. . . . We abolished primogeniture ... we refused to have a king; we don't have inheritable titles of nobility, or any such titles. Yet wealth is concentrated power; and we let that kind of power go to the expatriate heirs of the huge fortunes which some pretty rugged and plain American individuals produced long years ago."

Last winter, Countess Barbara was photographed almost hourly as she paid her native land a 36-hour visit to sign away, in a round, schoolgirl hand, her U. S. citizenship. She did it to avoid "various legal complications," one of which might have been an estimated $21,000,000 U. S. inheritance tax. Again the moment was unpropitious. In New York, salesgirls in the Woolworth five-&-tens, from which the Woolworth granddaughter derives but a fraction of her income, were on strike to raise their $14-$16 wage scale. Promptly, pickets appeared with signs:

While we're on strike for higher pay

Babs takes her millions and runs away.

The Count, a solemn Teuton of 42, probably does not like this kind of thing. Even amiable Papa Hutton admitted that the Haugwitz-Reventlows were having a "tiff" last week. But he was hopeful it would blow over. "After all," he purred, "these two are just a couple of kids." Four days later divorce proceedings were instituted in Copenhagen.

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