There was a deadly side to Doris. She wasn't about being a pretty, rich American girl. She wasn't Barbara Hutton," says Marina Cicogna, who was a friend of both heiresses. Although she was constantly compared to Hutton from the time they both had fairy-tale coming-out parties the year after the stock market crashed, Duke always hated the comparison to the much-married Woolworth heiress, who died penniless.
Yet it is the underlying misconception of almost everything ever written about her, including Stephanie Mansfield's biography, The Richest Girl in the World. I've talked to bankers who said she knew where every last nickel was. This was not a frivolous woman, either. We used to sit in the sunroom with these tiny bits of broken porcelain and she'd say, 'It's got to be fixed, and I can do it better than most people.
He rushed to complete what was then the most expensive house on Fifth Avenue in time for her birth at home, on November 22, He named both his private Pullman car and his foot yacht after her, and surrounded her with bodyguards. Until she was 10, when she started at the Brearley School, she was tutored at home. As a young girl, she wrote him love notes, which he pored over again and again. He also instilled in her an almost reflexive inability to trust people.
Ron Protas, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, says, "Doris was very shy, and never thought enough of herself, because she was so beat up emotionally by her father. One night at dinner, she told me, 'You know, my father always said no one would ever love me except for my money, and to be very careful.
Her mother was another story. A stingy southern belle, Nanaline Holt Inman was a widow with one son when she married Buck Duke in Although Duke was determined to produce his own heir, Nanaline was as surprised as everyone else when she became pregnant at the age of 42, and she always favored her son, Walker Inman, over Doris. Nanaline worshiped Society, and she disapproved of her tall, awkward, studious daughter.
When Doris was only 14, she successfully sued her mother to stop her from selling Duke Farms, the estate her father had created out of New Jersey flatlands, including a room mansion with an indoor pool and indoor tennis courts, artificial lakes, and man-made hillocks.
Until Doris Duke's death, this would be her principal residence. Two years later, against her mother's wishes, she married James Cromwell, who was 16 years older than she, and whose family had lost its fortune in , and embarked on a two-year honeymoon through the Middle East and Asia. Inspired by this trip, they bought the most spectacular piece of property near Diamond Head in Honolulu, on which they built a Mogul-style fortress and named it Shangri La.
Like all of her houses, it was guarded by fierce Dobermans or German shepherds. According to the Mansfield biography, Cromwell asked her on their sexless wedding night what his annual income from her would be. He also hoped she would finance his campaign for U. Alec Cunningham-Reid. Then she became pregnant and had a premature daughter named Arden, who lived only 24 hours.
James Cromwell maintained that it was not his child, and friends assumed that it was Cunningham-Reid's. Chandi Heffner told me that Duke confided the truth to her: "It wasn't Cromwell's, and it wasn't her lover Alec's. It happened on a train to California. She said, 'There was nothing to do on that train. I think she said when she came home from the hospital she began swimming out into the ocean, just swimming and swimming, not caring whether she lived or died. Duke Kahanamoku went in after her and saved her.
She was so distressed about losing the baby. Despite the negative publicity, she fought her husband in the courts for five years, until he gave in.
I used to tell her, 'You know, Doris, some people do like you for yourself. In she married again, but handed the groom a prenuptial agreement at the altar. Duke gave him a house in Paris for a wedding gift, and a plane before their divorce one year later. She continued to give him money, and friends say that their sexual relationship never really ended.
When he died in a car crash in , she took to her bed for two days. She never married again, and from then on the men in her life, whether they were lovers or not, were considerably younger and came from the creative world. Her longest relationship was with Joey Castro, the Mexican-born jazz pianist at the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, whom she met in , when he was 23 and she was By she was having Castro trailed by a private investigator. On New Year's Day , she ordered him out, and he retaliated by suing her, claiming that they had been secretly married.
Denise Hale recalls meeting Eduardo Tirella on the set of The Sandpiper, which was directed by her then husband, Vincente Minnelli, and having several dinners at Falcon's Lair. The rest of the house was dark, which was odd. We would go into the kitchen, just the four of us. They had done the whole kitchen together—the carpentry, everything.
He was cooking and she was serving. The only times I saw Doris really relaxed were these few times in Beverly Hills. Duke may have been infatuated, but friends of Tirella's told me that he was unabashedly gay.
In any case, their friendship ended in tragedy that October, when Duke ran him over as he was opening the gate of Rough Point. Newport police declared it an accident, and her friends still swear that it was. In , socialite C. Guest introduced Duke to Leon Amar, a year-old Moroccan decorator.
It was perhaps her last romantic affair, and in some respects foreshadowed her relationship with Chandi Heffner. Like Heffner, Amar quickly became involved in the running of Duke's houses, business affairs, and charities. And, like Heffner, after following Duke from Duke Farms to Rough Point to Falcon's Lair to Shangri La for more than six years he was suddenly given a few hours to pack his bags and leave.
To this day he maintains, "A lot of injustice was done to me. Of course, they had a very attractive life. She really considered herself a dancer. I remember her referring to 'we dancers. Duke had a passion for the performing arts all her life. She started taking piano lessons before she went to school, had pianos in every one of her houses as well as in the black lacquered living room of her Park Avenue penthouse, and played every afternoon.
She was even a buddy of Elvis Presley's. After Tirella's death, she seemed consumed with the idea of actually becoming a performer. According to Robert Farrah, the director of the Ibrahim Farrah company, for several months in the late 60s she took private belly-dancing classes with him every morning for two hours in New York and then flew from LaGuardia to Detroit, where she had rented a motel room near the airport and installed a piano for her afternoon singing lessons with Aretha Franklin's father.
Each evening she would return to Duke Farms or her Manhattan apartment in time for dinner alone on a tray. Phyllis Saretta told me that Duke performed with the Farrah company four or five times, wearing a long black wig. Her stage name was Sahda. One time we were performing at an Arab party at this catering hall in Brooklyn called the Venetian Manor, and Doris and I were partners.
We came out from opposite sides of the stage, and I got to the middle and she wasn't there. I turned and saw her on the floor. She got right up like a trouper and fell right down again. But she got up again, and we did our steps. Another time, at a college in upstate New York, Bobby [Farrah] didn't have her dance—he had her completely veiled, and she sat on the stage and played finger cymbals. She was very happy doing that.
During this period, Duke also plunged into three large-scale public projects. The first one, in Hawaii, didn't work out: she wanted to make a museum out of a Thai temple that she had saved from destruction on one of her many trips to Southeast Asia. After testy negotiations with local authorities, she finally shipped the pieces to New Jersey and installed them in her indoor tennis court. Also at Duke Farms, she constructed a series of 11 greenhouses containing elaborate recreations of English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and other gardens, which she opened to the public.
In , she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, with Jacqueline Onassis as vice president. Over the next few years, she bought almost an entire neighborhood of dilapidated 17th- and 18th-century houses, restored them, and rented them to town residents.
Though she still would occasionally joke, "I haven't had any greens lately," which Nancy Cooke de Herrera says was Duke's code for sex, she seemed to be settling down. The press decided she had become an eccentric recluse. In Doris's case, she had done that.
In Newport, she loved going to the jazz festival, and then one would sometimes have dinner in that huge house with the ferocious dogs snarling behind the gates.
There was lack of ostentation. We wouldn't sit in the main dining room. There was a little alcove under the stairs, and the food would be nice but ordinary. And when I smacked my lips in ecstasy, I found that three or four bottles would be left off at my house the next day as a gesture.
And let me tell you that she gave a really nice dinner party for me at the nadir of my fortunes. That was a going-out-of-your-way gesture. He was later retried and acquitted.
By then the center of her social life was Franco Rossellini, the extremely amusing and gay Italian movie producer, whom she had met about He spent many weekends at a guesthouse at Duke Farms and was her escort when she went into the city for lunches and dinners with friends such as Diana Vreeland, Nan Kempner, and Kenneth Jay Lane.
She was very intelligent and very together. She was a cool lady. Robert Farrah agrees: "Doris Duke was not this elusive reclusive. Nor was she a crazy eccentric. She was ahead of her time. Years ago, she was talking about the things we all talk about now—the environment, battered women and children, animal rights. In later years she did have problems with her hearing and with her legs, but nothing major.
I thought she'd live to 90 or But she had a dramatic change in her life—and it was weird. It was , and Heffner was taking a class at Farrah's studio near Times Square.
She told me she was supposed to start hula dancing professionally at a hotel in Hawaii. She was very into the ritualistic part of Hawaiian dance. They were disciples of A. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the spiritual master of the Hare Krishna movement, and they had been unofficially married in a ceremony in India in the 70s.
Heffner was in New York for a week, visiting her sister Claudia, who had married Nelson Peltz in Chandi, which means "female energy personified" in Sanskrit, was born Charlene Heffner in Baltimore on August 26, , the eldest of three daughters of William Heffner, a lawyer, and his wife, "Bunny," a nurse. She grew up near Towson, an upper-middle-class suburb of Baltimore, and graduated from Notre Dame Prep, a private Catholic girls' school, in Heffner told me that "even back in high school I began kind of a quest to see if there was more to life," and that after a trip around the world, she ended up in Hawaii, meditating, surfing, and exercising polo ponies.
Phyllis Saretta says, "Chandi told me that her sister had a butler and a chauffeur and the whole thing. She thought it was very amusing. She told me that her parents did not approve of her lifestyle, and that they'd cut her off from everything. She was like a flower child, even though the era was over. I thought she was really nice, genuine.
After Heffner returned to Hawaii, she kept in touch with Farrah and Saretta, and in February helped them organize a Middle Eastern dance seminar in Honolulu. The following February, Farrah repeated the seminar, and it was apparently then that Chandi Heffner entered Doris Duke's life. Heffner told me she had left "the farm community" and was living with Gordon Damon, a real-estate agent whose house was near Duke's Diamond Head estate.
She had had several leg operations, after a riding accident, but she participated in the seminar. And then eventually somebody else dropped back. We were joking around, because we both had bad knees. That was Doris. She told me during a break that she had studied reiki, a Japanese healing rite, and she said, 'Maybe I could help you with your knee.
And that's how the relationship evolved. According to Farrah, Heffner never actually took part in a dance class, because her leg was in a cast. On the last day of the seminar, he spent the afternoon with Duke at Shangri La.
Heffner had asked him to have dinner with her and Gordon Damon, and he had told her to pick him up at Duke's front gate. The gate had obviously been left open. Because just as Doris was taking me to the door, there was Chandi with the caretaker. I fumbled through an introduction. Doris said, 'Do you have time for a drink? In the car, Chandi was saying, 'Oh, she's such a nice lady, and the house is gorgeous!
Why doesn't she help you? By the time Duke returned to Shangri La that fall, she and Heffner were getting together on an almost daily basis, and when it was time to move back to Duke Farms in the spring of , she invited Heffner to go with her. I asked Phyllis Saretta what she thought the attraction was. Doris loved animals. Chandi was into environmental concerns. Doris was into it, too.
Chandi was into Eastern cultures and all that stuff, and so was Doris. W hen I asked Chandi Heffner about the widespread rumors that she and Duke were lovers, she laughed and said, "Oh, right, I've heard that.
It's not true. It was a really loving daughter-mother relationship. I direct that, to the extent that these loans shall be outstanding at the time of my death, such loans shall be forgiven. Marcos and the Philippines government settle their financial dispute or at such other time as my Executors shall deem appropriate in their absolute discretion.
My Trustees, at any time and from time to time, shall apply such part or all or none of the net income and principal of the trust for the benefit of such dog, at such times and in such amounts as my Trustees, in their absolute discretion, shall deem necessary for the care, feeding, comfort, maintenance and medical treatment of such dog, even though any such application or applications may result in the termination of the trust.
At the end of each year of the trust, my Trustees shall accumulate and add to principal any net income not so applied, any such capitalized income thereafter to be disposed of as a part of such principal. Upon the earlier to occur of i the death of such dog and ii twenty-one 21 years after my death, the trust shall terminate.
At this point, she severed relations with Heffner, giving Lafferty total control over her household. At 79, Duke was encouraged by Lafferty to have a series of operations, including a face-lift and knee replacement surgery. The latter operation was unsuccessful, leaving Duke indefinitely confined to a wheelchair. Increasingly frail and disoriented, she signed a will relinquishing her fortune to Lafferty in April After a summer in and out of the hospital, Duke returned home, where she was heavily sedated with painkillers.
These high doses of morphine culminated in her death on October 28, , a few weeks short of her 81st birthday. An autopsy was not performed, and she was cremated within 24 hours, after which her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. He relinquished his position and retreated to Los Angeles, where he died three years later. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation continues its philanthropic efforts, recently awarding grants to performing arts centers in New Jersey and Massachusetts.
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