Henrietta (Pollitzer) Pignatelli (1881-1948)

She was born at Bluffton in South Carolina, the grand-daughter of Moritz Pollitzer, a Jewish émigré from Austria who settled there after the Revolution in 1848. She was raised an Episcopalian but was never accepted by Charleston society, even though her mother's family were long settled there. Because of this, Henrietta often dropped her father's name in favor of her mother's maiden name, Guerard.

In 1901, she married Edward V. Hartford, the son of the owner of A&P, America's largest chain of grocery stores. But, he made his own success as an inventor who perfected the automobile shock absorber and when he died prematurely in 1922 she and their two children inherited his $200-million fortune. In 1937, she married an Italian prince: she was two years younger than his mother, and he was two years older than her daughter.

Henrietta and Guido lived between the Wando Plantation (her 32-room plantation home near Charleston until it burned down in 1942); Seaverge in Newport; and in Washington, D.C, where he was attached to the diplomatic corps. When she contracted leukemia they retired to Melody Farm in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and shortly before she died in July 1948 she bought the Joseph Manigault House in Charleston that she gifted to the Charleston Museum in memory of her mother. Her millions remained in the family and Guido was left with a lifetime entail that gave him $50,000 plus an annuity of $12,000. Dissatisfied with his lot, just four months after Henrietta died Guido married (October, 1948) Barbara Eastman, a New York socialite and this time eighteen years his junior.