Even Imelda didn't see her.". She didn't like medicine in general. ", Dr. Demopoulos told me, "I spoke to her in early January. Chandi called Steve Levyhe did security for Doristo find out what to do. In 1925, at the age of 13, she inherited an estimated $100 million in trusts from her father, James Buchanan Duke, a coarse but brilliant self-made man who founded the American Tobacco Company and the Duke Power Company, and who endowed Trinity College in North Carolina with millions, reportedly on the condition it change its name to Duke University. Guest's in Old Westbury: "She came by helicopter. There were four witnesses, including Dr. Charles Kivowitz, a fashionable Beverly Hills internist. 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. About the time Bloom was fired, Duke also abruptly left Chemical Bank and replaced her estate lawyer, William Zabel, of Schulte Roth & Zabel, with William Doyle, of the Chicago firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis. ", "I was not involved. ", Rybak says that Lafferty got off to a good start at Duke Farms. This was not a frivolous woman, either. ". She's a very nice girl, really first-rate, and she will keep Doris's foundation going in the futureyou know, not a law firm but a human being. But her only child, a daughter, was born three months premature and died, according to reports at the time. "It was shocking," Heffner told me. I do feel like I'm being drugged. Why doesn't she help you?' "She out-Leona Helmsleyed Leona Helmsley," Duffy said of Heffner. Doris Duke was murdered. In Doris's case, she had done that. I think she did it to make James jealous. She had received another $10 million of her inheritance in 1937, and would receive at least as much in 1942. As Heffner fights to undo the will, she speaks exclusively to BOB COLACELLO, who delves into the mystery of Duke's final years. and I finally quit just before Labor Day. Immediately prior to going to work for Duke, he was employed by Heffner's sister Claudia and her husband, Nelson Peltz, one of the leading takeover tycoons of the 80s. Demopoulos wasn't the only one to notice a change in Duke's attitude after Heffner was out of her life. Up to that point, Heffner alleges, the two women shared an extremely close relationship, enjoying not only the opulence of Duke's estates, but also trips to Russia, "fountain of youth" treatments in Romania, finding suitable maids for the ornery billionaire after she'd been "blacklisted" by employment agencies, shopping for a $25 million Boeing 737, and a shared belief that Heffner was the reincarnation of Duke's only child, a daughter who died shortly after birth in 1940. And he would tell me, 'Miss Heffner's complaining.' Doris Duke and Sharon Tate - Another Good Read Doris Duke certainly was quite a colorful character. Of course, they had a very attractive life. He was cooking and she was serving. A Peltz-family friend told me that, contrary to reports in the press, "there was never any rivalry of any kind at any time between Claudia and Chandi. "Doris was seeing a Japanese therapist for her knee problems . ", "What struck me about Chandi was her hairit came all the way down below her waist," says Phyllis Saretta of her first meeting with Chandi Heffner. "Cromwell was quite nice," says Nelson Seabra, a rich Brazilian friend of Duke's. ", Burns began working out with Duke on a regular basis. We would be four, six, eightOatsie Charles, Nuala Pell, Minnie Cushing, Lita McBean and her husband, and Sunny and me. Doris Duke - Wikipedia "Io sono molto contento. April 7, 1993 Chandi Duke Heffner, the 39-year-old former belly dancer and Hare Krishna devotee who was legally adopted by American Tobacco Co. heiress Doris That was a going-out-of-your-way gesture." The balance is due Wednesday. He wanted me out of there. 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. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. She's getting better.' Having lost her only child to early death, she legally adopted a Hawaiian daughter who was 32 years old. Duke turned up at the Ritz in Paris that October walking with a cane. He also hoped she would finance his 1940 campaign for U.S. senator from New Jersey; instead, she helped ruin his political career by snubbing Eleanor Roosevelt and putting private detectives on him to collect evidence of his extramarital affairs. Heffner also said that Duke confided that she thought her mother had wanted to abort her. They were disciples of A. C. 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. The power that this will gives Bernard Lafferty is "awesome," says one attorney. The gate had obviously been left open. BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) _ Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress as famous for her philanthropy as for her social escapades, has died at age 80. Much to the surprise of almost everyone who knew Duke, she named her butler of six years, Bernard Lafferty, as executor of her estate and placed him in control of the newly created Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which is to receive almost her entire fortune. Chandi was into environmental concerns. ", James Cromwell maintained that it was not his child, and friends assumed that it was Cunningham-Reid's. I have come to the realization that her primary motive was financial gain. Doris was into it, too. In 1968, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, with Jacqueline Onassis as vice president. "He seemed depressed, and Doris thought it would give him more self-esteem. "They did not meet in dance class," he insists. Nor was she a crazy eccentric. He used to take her to Gold's Gym." Webadvertisement Doris Duke Art Collector November 22 , 1912 Also Known For : Family Member, Philanthropist Birth Place : New York City, New York, United states of America Died On : October 28, 1993 Zodiac Sign : Sagittarius Doris Duke Biography, Life, Interesting Facts And he had quite a history. ", They went into Duke's fabled Islamic Room"you'd think you were in the salon of Sleyman the Magnificent" and over tea and sherry they discussed the pet boar that Heffner had nursed with a baby bottle after it had been abandoned by its mother, as well as Heffner's leg problems. Doris Duke 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. And then the wine was $1,000 a bottle; it came from her father's cellars. The adopted daughter of Doris Duke has dropped her claims against the late heiress's estate in exchange for a $65 million settlement, the New York Daily News reported. Subsequently Claus adopted his mothers maiden name: Blow. Her stage name was Sahda. Shortly after Duke's 80th birthday, in November, Nelson Seabra saw her at C. Z. He named both his private Pullman car and his 80-foot yacht after her, and surrounded her with bodyguards. . In published accounts of Duke's break with Heffner, Bernard Lafferty, who was worried about Duke's health, had called Rossellini in Europe a few weeks earlier and told him, "Something is really wrong here. Earlier this year, Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger removed Lafferty from that position for allegedly squandering the estates assets on lavish living but Lafferty is appealing the ruling. 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. ", Heffner blamed Duke's altered feelings on the steroids she claims Duke was taking then. Franco Rossellini assured everyone that he was all for it. Doris Duke was born November 22, 1912, in New York City. Ferencz Soltesz [the Peltzes' majordomo] told me he's an excellent butler so long as you keep him off the bottle. It was a really loving daughter-mother relationship. Keep in mind, people are entitled to a change of heart. John Warnecke was told by Johnny Gomez, Duke's elderly caretaker in Honolulu, that "she was so full of beans, she decided to have both knees done at one time, and one knee got infected and she had to have another operation. In court papers, Heffner -- a Baltimore native -- says the two women met in Hawaii in 1981. Doris Duke dumped Chandi Heffner because Heffner wanted to marry one of their bodyguards. In 1966 her art curator and great friend, Eduardo Tirella had visited her to resign his position in favour of a career in Hollywood, only to be run over and killed in a car driven by Doris shortly after. I remember that the captain of the helicopter was very worried and wanted her to leave early. "We were sitting on the rocks, and she said, 'I will take care of you and all of your animals for the rest of your life. Most of Duke's friends hadn't had an inkling. He came over here, and she died. 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.' If someone crossed them, they just put them out of their lives. He had also treated Chandi Heffner, and counted both women as friends. The Sands says that Lafferty managed the theater, which headlined such stars as Bill Cosby, Joel Grey, and Rita Moreno. On Thursday, October 28, 1993, Duke died at Falcon's Lair. Slim, tall, even without standing on her father's tobacco millions, she loved men, sex, clothes, jewels and intrigue. ", Robert Farrah agrees: "Doris Duke was not this elusive reclusive. "He had done her hair in a pageboy, and she looked so pretty, though she was painfully thin." 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. He also said he had worked on and off for Peggy Lee for 10 years. Mercedes Bass remembered Duke's coming for tea at the Carlyle Hotel a year or so earlier and introducing Heffner as "my niece." Quite suddenly, early in 1991, Doris called me in distress from Hawaii and said that she was leaving in an urgent way for California and she had become fearful of Chandi. Peggy Lee told me that she had spoken to Duke on the phone several times in her last months, and that Duke had made a donation to an AIDS charity that Lee is involved with. I called the California home and the other sites many times. Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton Rivalry - Town & Country Magazine It was at that juncture, Heffner claims, that Duke made the oral promise that is the basis of her breach-of-contract suit. 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 30-room mansion with an indoor pool and indoor tennis courts, artificial lakes, and man-made hillocks. There was a gradual onset of a depressed relationship between Doris and Chandi, starting about the middle of 1990 and going progressively downhill. . Her longest relationship was with Joey Castro, the Mexican-born jazz pianist at the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, whom she met in 1950, when he was 23 and she was 38. Both Heffner and her lawyers emphatically deny that Nelson Peltz is financing Heffner's legal efforts. "Most of them didn't want to leave. Burns said that he was also training Lafferty, to help him lose his paunch. ", She had already been planning to divorce Cromwell, but he apparently demanded a $7 million settlement. ", Duke gave him a house in Paris for a wedding gift, and a plane before their divorce one year later. I'll go to dinner with them. In 1995, Chandi Heffner Duke, the disinherited adopted daughter, reached a $65 million settlement with Mr. Lafferty and the estate. For reasons I don't understand, a curtain seemed to come down. Moreover, Heffner's legal complaint against Duke states: Doris . The Dukes of Hillsborough Duke died last October, leaving an estate reported to be between $750 million and $1.3 billion and lengthy obituaries which focused on her husbands and lovers, her houses in New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Hawaii, her collections of Oriental and Islamic art, her $5 million bailout of Imelda Marcos, and her perplexing relationship with Chandi Heffner. This whole thing is such a shock." (Duke had a similar fascination with spiritualism: she gave $100,000 to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 60s; fell under the spell of Norbu Chen, a pseudo-Tibetan lama, in the 70s; and left $500,000 to the Self-Realization Fellowship.). Imelda stayed for a week, I think. This stuff was from Miss Duke's father. It was 1982, and Heffner was taking a class at Farrah's studio near Times Square. Duke left most of her money to charity and named her butler, Bernard Lafferty, co-executor of the estate. WebIn a peculiar arrangement, in 1988, the 76-year-old Duke legally adopted the 35-year-old Heffner and bought her a $1 million ranch in Hawaii, where the two lived together as mother Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. ". I hired him to come out [to Los Angeles] and work for me, to kind of be my majordomo here. Jane Engelhard sat next to the bodyguard, and you should have seen her face. Ron Protas also told me that Duke had a fear of fire, and that when he told her about "the terrible experience" of scattering Martha Graham's ashes, Duke said, "It's never going to happen to me. "One hears all sorts of stories about how Rubi started in life, that he was Trujillo's sort of 'Press the doorbell, you answer the doorbell, and he went bang-bang.' After Heffner returned to Hawaii, she kept in touch with Farrah and Saretta, and in February 1983 helped them organize a Middle Eastern dance seminar in Honolulu. So did Imelda. And last May, Surrogate Preminger The press decided she had become an eccentric recluse. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our. "She's an unusually intelligent person: perceptive, articulate, well-read, culturally alive. One of Chandi's doctors thought that pregnancy might help her conditions, and Chandi was discussing this with Doris one evening in Newport while I was sitting there. I fumbled through an introduction. She told me she was supposed to start hula dancing professionally at a hotel in Hawaii. In a so-called "galimony" lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Somerville, N.J., where the heiress lives several months of the year at her 5,000-acre compound known as Duke Farms, Heffner claims she is entitled to compensation from Duke, who abruptly broke off their live-in relationship in 1991. Heffner almost broke down again. (Marcos was eventually acquitted, and returned to the Philippines.). "Sometimes people are attracted to the thing they fear the most.". 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.' Meanwhile, Bernard said he wasn't feeling well and went back up to his room. One night at dinner, Heffner told me, "Doris said to me, 'You're my daughter reincarnated. Only one other trustee was named in the will, Marion Oates Charles, Duke's longtime summer neighbor in Newport, Rhode Island. While Lafferty was hospitalized, Rybak says, "Doris said to me, 'Tom, we are going to leave this up to you. She was even a buddy of Elvis Presley's. "Both of them greeted us at the door. I never heard from Doris again and I could never reach her again. Heffner paints a sedate portrait of their life together, with Doris retiring to her music room, Chandi dealing with the employees and both women sharing vegetarian dinners. Other people told me that Duke suspected Heffner of poisoning or drugging her, and that she credited Lafferty with saving her life. Doris wouldn't take a pill unless she really needed it. . Doris Duke committed suicide. "When we were together," Heffner continued, "when things were really great, Doris was in wonderful shape. Heffner spent almost six months on and off in two Honolulu hospitals, because she also developed a heart problem. In the car, Chandi was saying, 'Oh, she's such a nice lady, and the house is gorgeous!' Once a day, she meditates in her "deity room," which is filled with golden statues from India. But I have no real medical knowledge of what transpired in California during the spring and summer of last year.". In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, James Burns, 32, does not ask for money directly from the Duke estate, but seeks half of the $65.8 million paid to the heiresss adopted daughter, Chandi Heffner Duke. On New Year's Day 1964, she ordered him out, and he retaliated by suing her, claiming that they had been secretly married. Doris Duke's estate in Newport, Rhode Island. "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. Heffner was in New York for a week, visiting her sister Claudia, who had married Nelson Peltz in 1980. After a facelift in 1992, Doris fell and broke her hip, eventually giving rise to a stroke and fatal cardiac arrest. And the person who could best illuminate Doris Duke's declining days, Bernard Lafferty, refused to talk to me. "Her legs were almost starting to atrophy from lack of exercise." 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. . Ignoring Chandi Heffner, the latter-day flower child whom she adopted in 1988, Duke left control of the bulk of her fortune to Bernard Lafferty, her butler of six years. The rest of the house was dark, which was odd. In return, Heffner claims, the twice-divorced Duke promised to "take care" of Heffner for the rest of her life. And along about March, I sent flowers and candy to her California home. Finally, one of her new lawyers, Mr. Doyle, got it back on track. She clapped her hands in glee. AN OVERDOSE OF GREED? - The Washington Post Duke, who had managed to avoid almost all publicity since the Tirella scandal, stunned the world in November 1988 by putting up the $5 million bail for Imelda Marcos, whom the U.S. government had charged with racketeering. Then someone new entered the small Doris Duke family: James Burns, a 25-year-old former Marine and martial-arts enthusiast with a notably "buff" physique. Lafferty can appoint the bank that will serve as the estate's co-executor, and three of the four other trustees of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. "She looked great," Warnecke says. Duke is portrayed by her adopted daughter as a lonely, paranoid recluse in need of constant care. ", Heffner was with Gary McElroy, with whom she was then living on a communal farm on the Big Island of Hawaii. . California Ex-Guard Seeks to Share Inheritance of Doris Dukes Adopted Daughter L.A. Times Archives July 11, 1996 12 AM PT Just when it looked like legal I remember that most: that she seemed very happy with her life at that period. His family all died, and he had one remaining relative, in Philadelphia. Contrary to Heffner's version of events, he told me that he had prescribed anabolic steroids for Duke for her knee problems in late 1989 or early 1990. I would have to reheat it. They were putting up a curtain rod together. But by the following summer she was noticeably declining again. She had just been through three days of depositions in New Jersey, where her lawsuit was filed, and had two more days to go before she could fly back to Hawaii, where she lives on an isolated 300-acre horse ranch, which Duke had bought for her on the Big Island for about $1.5 million before their rupture, and where she keeps a loaded pistol beside her bed. She was very happy doing that.". We wouldn't sit in the main dining room. I was not aware of what management roles he might or might not have had. Because it was her major incapacity; there really wasn't anything else wrong with Doris. In an April 1992 codicil, she replaced them with her nephew, Walker Inman Jr., and Bernard Lafferty, and in a March 1993 codicil she made Bernard Lafferty her sole executor. Duke Kahanamoku went in after her and saved her. It doesn't mean I'll go to bed with them.". . She was a cool lady. One afternoon in February, the architect John Warnecke went to Shangri La for tea. Christopher Duffy, the former manager of Duke's Hawaiian estate, has told of a volatile relationship between the billionaire and Heffner, including frequent arguments and thrown crockery. "People always think that if you can have 200 people to dine at home without moving the chairs around and you don't, you must be very sad," says Claus von Blow. ", Heffner wryly noted that Bernard Lafferty, accompanied by a bodyguard and chauffeur, had sat through her depositions wearing a five-carat-diamond earring, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond watch. Her former physician, Dr. Harry Demopoulos, is seeking to unseat Lafferty as co-executor. In the last year of Duke's life, Bernard Lafferty persuaded her to drop her physician of 12 years, her accountant, her bankers, and the lawyer who drew up her next-to-last will. Doris Duke 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 1929, and embarked on a two-year honeymoon through the Middle East and Asia. I remember her referring to 'we dancers.' On the last day of the seminar, he spent the afternoon with Duke at Shangri La. "I was not aware of his drinking problem when I placed him there, but I did inform Chandi [before sending him to Doris Duke's]. A few hours later, when Heffner returned from a show-jumping lesson, she was informed that Doris had flown to Los Angeles. Doris's statements to Chandi to this effect were confirmed by [her lawyer Donald] Robinson as well, who told Chandi he had prepared the necessary documents to make provision for the disposition of Doris's estate, and that Chandi would be "totally in control. She did not directly accuse Lafferty of turning Duke against her. I think somebody is trying to kill me.". Their patients dont know where they went, Column: Threes not a crowd. ", After Thanksgiving, as she had for five decades, Duke left for Hawaii. Heffner, 42, was adopted by Duke in 1988, but after the two had a falling out, Duke wrote her out of her will. "Chandi loved animals. Chandi got a couple of the housemen, and they brought him to the Somerville hospital." Duke may have been infatuated, but friends of Tirella's told me that he was unabashedly gay. She was a competitive surfer, jazz pianist and early environmentalist. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Doris told Chandi that she was happy about her having a man in her life. One of those servants was the future executor of Doris Duke's estate. Charles became so concerned about Duke's condition that she called her and asked if Heffner had been "giving her something, I don't know what"even though Heffner had been out of the picture for a year and a half. We came out from opposite sides of the stage, and I got to the middle and she wasn't there. ", Thomas Rybak maintains, "I personally believe that Chandi was pushed out by Bernard. The next morning, the day after Valentine's Day, James Burns remembers, Duke told Heffner she had a dentist's appointment and left the house with Bernard Lafferty. This month, Chandi Heffner's lawyers, Ben Michel of Riker, Danzig and David Keyko of Winthrop, Stimson, will file her objections to Duke's will in New York State Surrogate Court, accusing Bernard Lafferty of "undue influence and sequestering." In the proceedings, Heffner formally renounced her natural parents, certified that she was not consenting to be adopted out of financial considerations, and legally changed her name from Charlene Gail Heffner to Chandi Duke Heffner. In 1933, when she turned 21, Doris Duke came into the first $10 million left by her father. WebLafferty relinquished control as co-executor of the Duke estate in a 1995 settlement with Duke's disinherited adopted daughter. Do you think you could help him out?' She was having a real whirl." . But she got up again, and we did our steps. Such was her wealth that when she married her second husband, Porfirio Rubirosa from the Dominican Republic, the US State Department insisted that a prenuptial agreement was signed to ensure that her money could not be used for a political agenda. That led to pneumonia and she couldn't eat and it was on and off, on and off, for months.". 'I loved her so much. . Alec Cunningham-Reid. . ), By then the center of her social life was Franco Rossellini, the extremely amusing and gay Italian movie producer, whom she had met about 1975. ", Another of Duke's intimates said that the real reason her closest friends were in favor of the adoption was that "Doris had contemplated suicide, and we thought we could have some peace of mind that she wouldn't kill herself as long as Chandi was around. I turned and saw her on the floor. Heffner said that she had asked for them almost as a joke, and that Duke was laughing when the agent for the ownerrumored to be Adnan Khashoggi or a Kuwaiti sheikhcalled back and agreed. I suppose it was Doris's fault for never talking about what she did.". When he died in a car crash in 1965, she took to her bed for two days. . Mahn soon left, and in 1987 co-authored Daddy's Duchess: The Unauthorized Biography of Doris Duke. "Buck" Duke was obsessed with his only child. 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. Chandi said, 'But where do I find a man?' And then he was going to A.A., and he did very well in A.A., as far as I know. ", Almost every friend of Duke's I talked to, including her many homosexual friends, told me that she had always been an avid heterosexual. Instead, she was cremated during the weekend following her death, and her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean off Shangri La on November 17, 1993, by Bernard Lafferty and Johnny Gomez, along with the hibiscus leis she loved. He's a sweet human being, and he seemed to be honest and fiercely defensive of Doris. It would come back. To this day he maintains, "A lot of injustice was done to me. The Secret History of Doris Duke's Famous Hawaiian Mansion, It was at this time, she said, that Duke told her that she thought her food was being poisoned. How Claus von Blow Became the Original True Crime Star NEW YORK . I feel in danger.' Doris loved it. One week later, Doris Duke stunned the world again by adopting Chandi Heffner at the Somerset County Court House in Somerville, to which the two women were accompanied by Donald Robinson. "I said, 'What's wrong?' "That was quite an event. Lafferty has released few details about Duke's final illness. I almost feel . Chandi Heffner choked back tears as she talked about Doris Duke, the worldly and restless tobacco heiress who legally adopted her in 1988, when Heffner was 35 and Duke was 75, and cast her out less than three years later. ''Doris and I had been in the Gobi Desert together, and we found out they were becoming a threatened species." His breath almost knocked me off my feet.' Heffner told me that Duke was annoyed with Rossellini for falling behind on the rent on the New Jersey guesthouse. Apparently, the warm weather had had a good effect. . They all of a sudden just totally cut me off, and I can't believe that was Doris. Nelson Peltz is financing Chandi Heffner's legal battle. He was later retried and acquitted. Call your pilot tonight and leave immediately and go to Los Angeles and get checked up.' 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.