NONFICTION - Jan. 13, 1991

SQUANDERED FORTUNE: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford by Lisa Rebecca Gubernick (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $24.95; 272 pp.). Huntington Hartford parlayed his $100-million portion of the A & P supermarket fortune into a life of busted marriages, frantic womanizing, and failed artistic ventures (a museum devoted to representational art) and business enterprises (Show Magazine, which he managed to sink twice, and a resort hotel on Paradise Island in the Caribbean on which he lost more than $30 million). He has been left with capital that generates around $500,000 a year income, enough to keep him, his drug habit (acquired late in life) and a sorry retinue in a shabby New York townhouse. Essentially good-natured and idealistic about his investments, Hartford deserved better than what he got in his life, including Gubernick’s prosaically written history.