Lance Reventlow's mother, Barbara Hutton, was the heir to the Woolworth five-and-dime store fortune. Her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, started his business in 1879 and by the 1920s had amassed a vast fortune from his endeavors. Barbara's father, Frank Hutton, was a stockbroker who turned the prodigious inheritance of his wife Edna Woolworth into an even bigger sum and pulled out of the stock market before the 1929 crash. Barbara, born in 1912, gained the title "poor little rich girl" by the press. First, for the backlash of the excessively lavish coming-out party she had during the dark days of the Great Depression and then for her troubled life that included the suicide of her mother as a child, a contentious relationship with her father, and seven failed marriages.

It was her second marriage to Count Reventlow that produced her only child, Lance. And he, too, had an unhappy early childhood being shuttled between various boarding schools before becoming a pawn between his parents during an acrimonious divorce, all played out in the bright spotlight of media attention.

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