There are unfounded rumors that this street honors Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton (1912-1979), a major celebrity in her day. Although her son Lance Reventlow did live in Benedict Canyon from 1956 onward, Hutton Drive was named fourteen years earlier on property co-owned by Romaine Boardman Hutton (1912-1987) and his wife Rosalee “Polly” LeNoir Hutton (née Powell, 1917-1994). The Huttons were both natives of Rockford, IL who married in Milwaukee in 1938 and moved to Beverly Hills shortly thereafter; Romaine, a graduate in engineering from the University of Illinois, had taken a job out here. They resided on their eponymous drive by 1950 but eventually moved to Brentwood. Although they divorced in October 1960, an August 1961 Los Angeles Times feature showed them dining with their daughters Pamela and Melinda and about to take an overseas vacation together. Regardless, Polly remarried in 1964 (to another engineer) and moved to Carpinteria. I found nothing about Romaine after that curious piece in the Times, other than his tombstone in Westlake Village, which eulogizes him as “beloved husband and father”. Nearby Arby Drive might be a nod to his initials R.B.
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