The $5.3 Billion Tobacco Heiress Who Killed Her Interior Designer and Got Away With It: Doris Duke – HT
There is a woman buried in no grave, scattered in waters off Honolulu by a butler who would be dead himself within 3 years, whose life contained more wealth, more violence, and [music] more betrayal than any novelist would dare put between two covers. She was born in a mansion on East 78th Street in New York City, the only child of a tobacco baron who named his 80-ft yacht after her, took her to business meetings as a toddler, and repeated one instruction until it became the organizing principle of her psychology, trust no one.
Her father showed her the bags of mail he had hidden, death threats, ransom demands, letters from strangers who wanted a piece of the Duke fortune, and by the time she was 12, she owned more money than almost anyone on Earth. She stood 6-ft tall, married a fortune hunter, and then a playboy, lost a baby who lived 24 hours, ran over her interior designer with a station wagon at the gates of her Newport estate, and was never charged, adopted a woman she believed was the reincarnation of her dead daughter, and died at 92 lb while a
morphine drip climbed to 25 mg per hour, and a butler told the cook she would be dead by morning. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how Doris Duke inherited $100 million at 12, survived two disastrous marriages and the death of her only child, killed a man, and watched the police close the case in 96 hours, and spent her final months under the total control of an illiterate Irish butler who named himself executor of everything she owned.
The $5.3 billion tobacco heiress who killed her interior designer and got away with it, Doris Duke. At the peak of her wealth in the 1960s, Doris Duke was earning approximately $1 million per week [music] in interest alone, a figure that rendered the concept of spending almost meaningless, because no matter how many properties she furnished or how many continents she crossed, the pile grew faster than she could disperse it.
Her fortune, built on the back of American tobacco and Carolina hydroelectric stations, had compounded so relentlessly since her father’s death in 1925 that by the time she was 53 years old, the money was essentially generating itself without [music] any human intervention. She owned Duke Farms, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, with a 30-room mansion, indoor swimming pool, indoor tennis courts, artificial lakes, and man-made hillocks that her father had sculpted from flat farmland, like a man who refused to
accept the geography he had been given. She owned Rough Point, a 49-room English manor on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, the legendary Millionaire’s Row, originally built by the Vanderbilt family, and purchased by her father in 1922 as casually as other men purchased summer cottages. She owned Shangri La, a 4.
9-acre compound on Diamond Head in Honolulu that housed what is now recognized as the largest private collection of Islamic art in the world, more than 4,500 objects she had gathered over 57 years of obsessive hands-on collecting, often cleaning the tile murals herself. She owned Falcon’s Lair in Beverly Hills, the former home of silent film star Rudolph Valentino, and kept two Bactrian camels named Princess and Baby who summered on the terrace at Rough Point, and wintered in a heated stable at Duke Farms, animals that came bundled
with the purchase of a Boeing 737 private jet. For those of you who enjoy stories like this one, we cover them regularly on our free Substack newsletter, where we examine how America’s greatest fortunes were built, spent, and sometimes destroyed. Some estimates placed her total wealth at $5.3 [music] billion when all properties and assets were counted, though the officially probated estate at her death would land at 1.
2 billion, making her the 18th richest woman in America, barely trailing Estee Lauder. She had grown her father’s $100 million inheritance fourfold across seven decades, yet the money was the least interesting thing about her, because the story of Doris Duke is a story about what wealth allows you to do when there is no who will tell you no.
But to understand how one woman came to own all of this, you have to go back to a farm in Durham County, North Carolina, where a Confederate prisoner’s son figured out how to roll 120,000 cigarettes a day and use that machine to build an empire that the Supreme Court itself would have to tear apart. James Buchanan Duke, known to everyone as Buck, was born on December 23rd, 1856 in Durham County, North Carolina, to a father named Washington Duke, who had survived the Civil War as a Confederate prisoner, and returned home to a farm
with nothing but a pile of tobacco leaf. Washington and his sons began producing cigarettes by hand in the 1880s, but it was Buck who saw the future and lunged at it with a ferocity that his competitors found genuinely frightening. He licensed the Bonsack cigarette machine, a device capable of rolling 120,000 cigarettes per day compared to 3,000 by hand, and used it to flood the American market with [music] cheap branded product at a pace no competitor could match.
In 1890, he consolidated his business with four rivals to form the American Tobacco Company, an early trust that would control 80% of all tobacco production in the United States within a single decade. The Supreme Court broke up American Tobacco in 1911 under the Sherman Antitrust Act, but by that point Buck Duke had already pivoted to his second empire, hydroelectric stations along Carolina rivers, built through his Southern Power Company, later renamed Duke Energy, investing $25 million in water power over 5 years to electrify the textile
mills, transforming the New South. By 1916, his personal fortune was estimated at $150 million, >> [music] >> and the combined Duke family net worth approached $500 million. On December 11th, 1924, Buck created the Duke Endowment, placing securities worth $40 million into a perpetual charitable trust whose largest share went to Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina, with one stipulation, that Trinity change its name to Duke University.
Trinity’s board voted that very day, >> [music] >> and a small Southern college became a university bearing the name of the man who wrote the check. 10 months later, on October 10th, 1925, 44 days before his daughter’s 13th birthday, James Buchanan Duke died of pneumonia at 68, >> [music] >> adding $67 million to the Duke Endowment in his will, and leaving virtually everything else to a 12-year-old girl the press had been calling the million-dollar baby since the day she was born.
The fortune he bequeathed, estimated between $60 million and $100 million, with the most commonly cited figure at $100 million, would be held in trust with installments at 18, 21, and 22. But the first thing Doris did when she accessed the principal at 21 was establish a charitable foundation called Independent Aid, which would become the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
The press dubbed her the richest girl in the world, and the label stuck for life. But the instruction her father left behind, that she trust no one, was about to be tested by the person who was supposed to protect her. Nanaline Inman Duke was a stingy, socially ambitious Southern belle from Atlanta, who had married the cotton broker William Patterson Inman, been widowed, and then married Buck Duke in 1907 at the age of 42, a union that produced one child she had never expected and a fortune she was not allowed to touch.
Buck Duke’s will left Nanaline only a modest trust fund while directing the bulk of his estate to 12-year-old Doris, and the resentment that decision created was permanent, visible, and corrosive. Nanaline had always favored her son from her first marriage, Walker Inman, over Doris, and the disparity in the will turned a maternal preference into something closer to open hostility directed at the child who had everything Nanaline wanted and could not reach.
She controlled the social presentation of her daughter, managing the European tours, the wardrobe, the debutante season, the careful image of the world’s richest girl, but she could not control the money, and the money was what mattered. When Doris was only 14 years old, she had to sue her own mother in court to stop Nanaline from selling Duke Farms, the New Jersey estate that Buck Duke had built from scratch and loved more than any other property he owned.
Doris won the lawsuit, and the court clarified that Duke Farms, the 78th Street mansion, and Rough [music] Point all belonged to Doris directly, a legal victory that taught a 14-year-old girl a lesson most people spend decades learning, that family loyalty and financial self-interest rarely survive contact with each other when there is real money at stake.
Nanaline then blocked Doris from attending college, instead dragging her daughter across Europe and pushing her into the society circuit that Nanaline herself worshipped with a capital S, determined to mold the tall, shy, bookish girl into the debutante that New York expected. Ron Protas, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company and a close friend of Doris in later years, recalled a dinner at which she told him something that explained her entire adult life.
“You know, my father always said no one would ever love me except for my money and to be very careful.” That warning, planted by her father, reinforced by her mother’s avarice, confirmed by every fortune hunter who would follow, became both her greatest protection and her deepest wound. Nanaline died in April 1962, leaving Doris her jewelry, a fur coat, and $250 million.
The accumulated wealth of a woman who had lived frugally off a trust fund for nearly four decades while resenting every single dollar her daughter possessed. And just as Doris was learning how little she could trust her own mother, the press was busy manufacturing a comparison that would follow her for the rest of her life, pairing her with another heiress born eight days earlier in the same city, as if American wealth produced its daughters in matched sets.
The press had a nickname for them, the Gold Dust Twins, a term borrowed from a brand of laundry powder. And the parallel between the two girls was so precise that [music] the newspapers treated them as a controlled experiment in what American money could do to American daughters. Barbara Hutton was born on November 14th, 1912, eight days before Doris Duke in New York City, the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, founder of the five-and-dime empire, and the inheritor of a $28 million fortune she would not control until 21.
Barbara’s mother had committed suicide when Barbara was 4 years old. The child discovered the body in the family hotel suite, and her father, Franklin Hutton, largely abandoned her to relatives thereafter, producing a girl whose relationship to money would be shaped entirely by grief and the absence of anyone who loved her without conditions.
The press rendered its verdict with characteristic economy, “Doris is the richest, Barbara is the prettiest.” And the two girls were photographed, compared, and cataloged as if they were racing each other toward some finish line that neither of them had agreed to run toward. Both made their debutante debuts in 1930 at the very start of the Great Depression, and both were savaged in newspapers for spending between $60,000 and $80,000 on a single party while millions of Americans stood in breadlines and waited for work that did
not exist. Doris held her ball at Rough Point in Newport with 600 guests. Barbara’s was at the Ritz-Carlton in New York with approximately 100, and neither girl seemed to understand, or perhaps [music] simply could not afford to acknowledge, that the country’s patience with inherited wealth was wearing thin.
Before her debutante ball, Doris had made her formal society debut in London in 1930, appearing before King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, standing 6 ft tall and possessed of a fortune that few men in England could rival. They turned 21 in 1933, when Barbara’s estimated fortune stood at $50 million and Doris’s at $70 million, and both became immediate targets for every fortune hunter with a dinner jacket and a rehearsed expression of devotion.
Errol Flynn, a guest at Doris’s home, once pointed at one of her chandeliers and asked, “What are you doing with one of Barbara’s earrings?” The friendship between the two heiresses was genuine in their youth, but would curdle into fierce rivalry over the decades, >> [music] >> deepening measurably when both women fell for the same spectacularly inappropriate man, and the contrast between their financial fates would become the most devastating scoreboard in the history of American wealth.
But before Doris met that man, she would first have to survive the one she married at 22, a stepson of Philadelphia high society who was 16 years her senior, and who told reporters their union was love at first sight while privately calculating exactly what her fortune meant for his political career. James Henry Roberts Cromwell was the stepson of Philadelphia financier Edward T.
Stotesbury and his wife, Eva, a divorced socialite playboy with political ambitions and a family fortune that had largely evaporated by the time he met Doris Duke at a social function in 1929. He pursued her with the determination of a man who understood precisely what her money could do for his aspirations, and by 1935, with the Depression grinding on, the courtship [music] produced a proposal Doris accepted.
They married on February 13th, 1935. She was 22, [music] he was 38, and the headlines called her the richest girl in the world as they departed on the Italian liner Conte di Savoia for what became an eight-month round-the-world honeymoon that would permanently reshape the trajectory of Doris Duke’s life. Doris gave Cromwell a monthly allowance of $10,000, equivalent to roughly $125,000 today, and used the honeymoon to pursue her own obsessions.
She traveled through North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, falling in love with Islamic art and architecture, and in Honolulu, she fell in love with Hawaii itself, immediately spending $100,000 on a 4.9 acre site at Kauai to begin building Shangri-La. Cromwell parlayed their political connections, the couple had actively supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, into an appointment as United States Ambassador to Canada in 1939, but he resigned the ambassadorship to run for the United States Senate from New Jersey in 1940 and lost the race
badly. He blamed Doris and specifically her indiscreet affairs for his political humiliation, a charge that was probably fair, as Doris had been romantically involved with multiple men throughout the marriage, including British Member of Parliament Alec Cunningham-Reid. Their daughter, Arden, was born prematurely on July 11th, 1940 in Honolulu, and she lived exactly 24 hours, dying July 12th and taking with her any possibility that Doris Duke would ever be a mother because doctors told her she would likely never conceive again. The
biological father was likely Cunningham-Reid rather than Cromwell, though the grief transcended questions of paternity. Doris reportedly walked into the ocean after leaving the hospital, not caring whether she lived or died, until Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer and father of modern surfing, >> [music] >> with whom she was also romantically involved, swam after her and brought her back to shore.
The divorce was finalized in Reno on December 21st, 1943 on grounds of cruelty, and the settlement paid Cromwell $250,000 for eight years of marriage, a transaction that confirmed what Doris had suspected since the beginning. Doris had survived her first fortune hunter, buried the only child she would ever have, and concluded that marriage for a woman of her wealth was less a partnership than a financial negotiation conducted under the pretense of love, a conclusion her second husband would validate in 13 months flat.
Porfirio Rubirosa was, by any objective standard, one of the most spectacularly inappropriate men an heiress could have married, a Dominican diplomat and sports car driver with the physique of an athlete, the morals of a corsair, and the particular talent of making wealthy women feel as though their money was the least interesting thing about them.
He was the former son-in-law of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo through his first marriage to Trujillo’s daughter, Flor de Oro, and he had used that connection to obtain diplomatic postings across Europe while simultaneously working as one of Trujillo’s political enforcers, widely rumored to have participated in political assassinations on behalf of the regime.
Doris first encountered Rubirosa in Rome in 1945 or ’46 >> [music] >> while working as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service, when she interviewed his second wife, French actress Danielle Darrieux, at a hotel with Rubirosa standing in the room, and the attraction apparently was instantaneous and mutual.
In a move that should have telegraphed everything about the nature of what followed, Doris Duke allegedly paid Danielle Darrieux $1 million to agree to an uncontested divorce from Rubirosa, essentially purchasing a husband the way other women purchased jewelry, except that jewelry holds its value. They married on September 1st, 1947 at the Dominican Embassy in Paris, Doris, standing nearly 3 in taller than her new husband, wearing a green Dior suit with matching velvet hat, and just before the ceremony, her team of lawyers
appeared with a prenuptial agreement that would prove crucial in limiting the eventual cost of this particular mistake. The marriage was doomed from day one. Duke expected total fidelity, and Rubirosa expected total freedom. The final straw came when Duke caught Rubirosa in the act on the island of Capri with his former wife, Flor de Oro, and Ruby later described the aftermath with the precision of a man who had been through this before.
“There was a new lunch guest. By his looks and his briefcase, he immediately revealed his identity, an attorney. Three minutes later, we signed an agreement.” The marriage lasted under 13 months, and the settlement, constrained by that prescient pre-nup, included a 17th century Paris house, a converted B-25 bomber aircraft, a stable of polo ponies, several sports cars, and $25,000 per year in alimony until he remarried.
In 1953, Barbara Hutton married Rubirosa and spent an estimated $66,000 per day on him during a 53-day marriage, gifting him a coffee plantation in the Dominican Republic, 40 suits, eight polo ponies, an airplane, and $2.5 million in cash before he complained publicly that she stayed in bed and reads all day.
Two heiresses, the same husband, and two very different invoices. But it was only after Doris had disposed of Rubirosa that she found the man whose departure from her life would cost far more than money. Eduardo Tirella was, by the mid-1960s, one of the more quietly extraordinary men in American design, a decorated World War II veteran who had earned the Bronze Star for valor at the Battle of the Bulge, managed the millinery department at Saks Fifth Avenue after the war, and transitioned into interior design that included refurbishing the
homes of the elite, among them Peggy Lee’s residence and Elizabeth Taylor’s beach house for the film The Sandpiper. He was openly gay with a long-term partner named Edmund Cara, and he had been working for Doris Duke for approximately a decade by 1966, serving as her chief art curator, interior designer, and general aesthetic conscience for her properties in New Jersey, Newport, Honolulu, and Beverly Hills.
He earned $43,000 a year, approximately 351,000 in today’s money, and guided Duke in acquiring artworks worth millions. But by late 1966, Tirella’s Hollywood career was catching fire. He had completed advisory work on the film Don’t Make Waves starring Tony Curtis. His set design was being noticed, and Sharon Tate was among the actors associated with his projects.
He made a decision that everyone who knew Doris Duke warned him to reconsider. He would leave her employ and move back to Los Angeles permanently. The maxim circulating among her staff was blunt. Nobody left Doris Duke without consequences. On October 6th, 1966, Eduardo Tirella flew to Newport, Rhode Island, where Duke met him at the airport, and they drove together to Rough Point, her sprawling estate on Bellevue Avenue, where his plan was to collect his belongings, accompany Duke on a brief errand to a local antique dealer, then
depart for his family home in New Jersey before continuing to California. The following afternoon, October 7th, 1966, at approximately 5:00, a fierce argument erupted between Tirella and Duke, overheard by estate staff, before the two got into a rented Dodge Polara station wagon with Tirella at the wheel and Duke in the passenger seat.
As the car approached Rough Point’s massive wrought-iron gates, Tirella stopped, got out, and walked to the gates to unlock and open them manually, a routine procedure he had performed dozens of times. According to Doris Duke’s account, given to police two days later, she slid across to the driver’s seat, her foot hit the gas instead of the brake, and the car suddenly leapt forward through the gates and across Bellevue Avenue.
Eduardo Tirella, 42 years old, a Bronze Star recipient, an artist whose independent career was finally about to begin, was beneath the car, his spinal cord, lungs, and brain destroyed, dead before the ambulance arrived. The vehicle so heavy that ambulance lifts could not raise it, and a tow truck was required to extract his body.
Sergeant Fred Newton, the Newport Police Department’s chief accident investigator, reconstructed the events at the scene and identified six discrete actions that contradicted Doris Duke’s version. Six actions that, taken together, described something far more deliberate than a woman accidentally pressing the wrong pedal.
The Dodge Polara’s parking brake could only be disengaged by hand, not by foot, making Duke’s story of accidentally releasing it a physical impossibility. Evidence showed the vehicle struck Tirella once and sent him up onto the hood of the car, and when he fell off, the car accelerated again and ran over him.
A sequence that required a second deliberate application of the accelerator, not a single panicked mistake that any driver might have made. The car ended up crashing into a fence and tree across Bellevue Avenue at significant speed, >> [music] >> not the trajectory of a vehicle gently rolling forward through a gate, but of one driven hard across a public road.
Bob Walker, a 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy on his bicycle that afternoon, heard the sequence before he saw it. Two people arguing and screaming, the roar of a motor, the crash, a man screaming, [music] a pause, the motor roaring again, the man’s scream turning to a howl of pure horror, and then a second crash.
Walker arrived on the scene and later described seeing Doris Duke get out of the station wagon and move her body to deliberately block his view of what was beneath the car. And when he asked if she needed help and offered [music] to call the police, she screamed at him to leave. His father warned him to stay silent saying that Duke was a rotten person who had some people on her payroll who were very unscrupulous.
And Bob Walker spent 55 years keeping that secret. Newport Police Chief Joseph A. Radice ran what investigators and journalists would later describe as a deliberately minimal investigation. Duke was interviewed two days after the killing in her bedroom at Rough Point, where she reclined in bed flanked by two German Shepherds, accompanied by her New York attorney and her business manager.
On October 11th, 96 hours after the killing, >> [music] >> Chief Radice closed the case as accidental without an inquest, relying solely on Duke’s account, and a fabricated three-page transcript of a second interrogation written up after the fact by Duke’s own lawyers, so carelessly executed that it misstated her birth date, and she had to correct and initial the error by hand.
Peter Lance, the investigative journalist who spent years uncovering the case, later concluded Doris Duke conspired with the Newport Police Department to get herself out of criminal charges. Radice retired 7 months later after 27 years on the force at an annual salary of $7,000, and subsequently purchased two condominiums in Florida, a real estate upgrade that his salary alone could not explain.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed by Eduardo Tirella’s family went to trial in Providence, Rhode Island, approximately 5 years after the killing, and what happened in that courtroom was, by the account of everyone who knew Tirella, a second and more calculated act of destruction. Duke was found negligent in Tirella’s death, but her attorney used the damage phase of the trial to systematically portray Tirella as a professional failure, demolishing the reputation of a decorated war hero, Bronze Star recipient, and accomplished designer
whose only mistake had been deciding he wanted to build something of his own. Tirella’s friend, the [music] artist Polo Zanai, who had watched the defense attorneys reduce a dead man’s life to a catalog of alleged inadequacies, described the courtroom strategy as the worst kind of character assassination. The final verdict awarded each of Tirella’s five sisters and three brothers $5,620 after legal fees and expenses, a total judgment of approximately $75,000 for the life of a man killed by a woman who was, at that very moment, earning
approximately $1 million per week in interest on her fortune. Tirella’s niece, Donna Lomax, later crystallized the family’s experience in a sentence that captures the full scope of what Doris Duke did. She killed him twice. She destroyed his body, and then she obliterated his memory. Duke had refused to settle with the family who had proposed accepting as little as $200,000 in damages, a fraction of what Duke spent in a single week on art.
And she later spent more than $102,000 at a single antique auction buying a highboy, which meant she paid more for a piece of furniture than she paid for the life of the man she killed. Eight days after Tirella’s death, Duke donated $25,000 to restore Newport’s famous Cliff Walk and $10,000 to Newport Hospital, the very hospital that had received Tirella’s body.
In November 1968, 2 years after the killing, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit that went on to restore 84 colonial era structures in the city, transforming Newport into the tourist destination it remains today, and generating the kind of civic goodwill that makes it very difficult for a municipality to reopen questions about a benefactor who happens to have killed somebody.
Denise Clement, the daughter of Police Chief Radice’s secretary, told investigator Peter Lance that her mother had always called the restoration donations by the name that certain Newport circles used openly, blood money. And so Doris Duke walked free, wealthier than before, her philanthropy purchasing a silence that would last more than half a century.
Until a new vulnerability arrived in her life wearing the face of a woman she believed she had lost 48 years earlier in a Honolulu hospital room. Charlene Chandi Gail Hefner was born in 1953 in Baltimore, Maryland. A former Hare Krishna devotee from a middle-class family with no connection to wealth or celebrity whose sister Claudia would later marry billionaire investor Nelson Peltz.
A family connection that would become legally significant in ways that nobody foresaw when Hefner first appeared in Doris Duke’s orbit. Hefner met Duke in Hawaii in 1984 or 85 through an intermediary associated with Middle Eastern dance and the emotional foundation of their relationship was built on the most devastating belief a grieving mother could hold.
Doris Duke came to believe that Chandi Hefner was the reincarnation of her daughter Arden, the baby who had lived 24 hours in Honolulu in 1940. Hefner was roughly the age Arden would have been and Duke allowed the coincidence to become a conviction. Hefner moved to Duke Farms in early 1985, traveled the world with Doris, ran her households, assumed an increasing role in every aspect of Duke’s domestic life, and gradually became the closest person in the heiress’s world.
On November 5th, 1988 at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville, New Jersey, 75-year-old Doris Duke formally adopted 35-year-old Chandi Hefner, a legal act in which Hefner renounced her natural parents, >> [music] >> certified that she was not consenting for financial reasons, and changed her surname to Chandi Duke Hefner, creating rights of inheritance that potentially gave her access to the trusts established by James Buchanan Duke himself.
The relationship deteriorated within 2 years. Duke’s cook, Colin Shanley, quit in 1989 claiming Hefner was feeding Duke pizza crusts on a deliberately minimal vegetarian regime and staff reported that Duke’s physical condition was declining under Hefner’s daily management. Duke began telling people her food was being poisoned and that someone was drugging her.
In December 1991, a physician named Dr. Ortega examined Duke and recorded claims that Hefner had been injecting Duke with heparin, an anticoagulant, >> [music] >> and that tests of Duke’s sherry at Shangri-La had found traces of warfarin, a blood thinning drug also commonly used as rat poison. These allegations were never conclusively proven, but Duke ordered Hefner and her boyfriend, James Burns, out of Shangri-La in February 1991.
And in her final will, she wrote, “After giving the matter prolonged and serious consideration, I am convinced that I should not have adopted Chandi Hefner. I have come to the realization that her primary motive was financial gain.” After Duke’s death, the estate settled with Hefner for $65 million, equivalent to $127 million in today’s money, making the woman Duke had tried to disinherit the single largest financial beneficiary of the estate outside the charitable foundation.
And proving that the adoption meant to bring back a dead child had instead created a living claimant who walked away with more money than Tirella’s siblings received by a factor of more than 11,000. In November 1988, the same month she adopted Chandi Hefner, Doris Duke made a second decision that illuminated just how far her judgment had drifted from anything resembling conventional caution and how thoroughly she had come to inhabit a world where loyalty operated on its own private currency.
Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, had been indicted in New York on federal racketeering charges for allegedly looting the Philippine treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars. And she needed $5 million in bail to avoid detention and return to Hawaii to care for her ailing husband Ferdinand, who was deteriorating rapidly in their Honolulu exile after the Marcos family was ousted from the Philippines in 1986.
The Marcoses had been living in Hawaii as neighbors of Duke, who maintained Shangri-La there, and the two women had become close friends, a bond rooted in their shared experience as women whose wealth had become inseparable from their identities. Doris Duke pledged $5 million in municipal bonds to secure the bail.
And Imelda traveled to New York aboard Duke’s private jet with an entourage of more than 20 people, an image that, had it been published, would have served as a fairly complete portrait of how wealth relates to accountability in the American legal system. Duke’s lawyer told the court, “Ms.
Duke is happy to help her friend, Mrs. Marcos, and this court.” Judge Keenan granted Imelda permission to travel to New Jersey and Newport to visit Duke’s residences before returning to Hawaii, a judicial courtesy that suggested the court understood exactly whose money was guaranteeing the defendant’s appearance. On March 6th, 1990, Duke formally issued a demand note for repayment of the $5 million plus accrued interest, but the money never came back and no one in Doris Duke’s employ ever succeeded in collecting it.
Imelda Marcos was acquitted of all charges in New York in July 1990 and returned to Manila in November 1991, leaving behind a debt that Duke’s [music] final will addressed with explicit instructions that her executors make reasonable arrangements for repayment when Mrs. Marcos and the Philippines government settle their financial dispute.
That settlement has still not occurred and the $5 million with decades of accrued interest has more than doubled and remains uncollected, one of the stranger outstanding debts in the history of American philanthropy and one of the stranger line items in the ledger of a woman who fought the Tirella family over $200,000 but handed Imelda Marcos $5 million on nothing more than a handshake.
And while Doris Duke was posting bail for the wives of dictators and adopting strangers she believed were reincarnated infants, a quiet, charming, functionally illiterate Irish butler was methodically positioning himself as the last person standing between the richest woman in America and the rest of the world. Bernard Lafferty was born on April 14th, 1945 in Creevy County Donegal, Ireland, one of the most remote corners of Western Ireland.
The only child of Edward Lafferty and Angela McCalliog, parents who would both be dead before their son turned 21. His father died in September 1964. His mother was killed by a motorcycle the following August, leaving Bernard Lafferty orphaned at 20 years old in a part of Ireland where orphanhood meant genuine economic ruin. He emigrated to the United States around 1980 to live with an aunt in Philadelphia, where he became the maître d’ at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and cultivated relationships with wealthy guests, including notably Peggy Lee,
whom he would later serve as personal assistant for several years, and Elizabeth Taylor. By all accounts, he was charming in a domestic servant manner, attentive, unobtrusive, completely devoted to whoever currently employed him, and possessed of the rare ability to make very wealthy people feel as though his sole purpose on Earth was to anticipate their needs.
There was a serious problem beneath the surface. Lafferty was a secret alcoholic who had been fired by Claudia Hefner Peltz, >> [music] >> Chandi Hefner’s sister, married to billionaire Nelson Peltz, due to his drinking. And in July 1987, he [music] had been hospitalized for 2 weeks after a Grand Marnier binge that nearly killed him.
It was Chandi Hefner who introduced Lafferty to Doris Duke as a butler in 1987, a fateful connection that Hefner would live to regret because the man she brought into Duke’s household would eventually help engineer her expulsion from it. Duke took to Lafferty immediately. And as her health declined in the early 1990s, the butler’s role expanded from domestic service into something far more comprehensive.
He traveled with her worldwide, >> [music] >> became her closest confidant, controlled all access to her, managed her household and her staff, and gradually edged out virtually every other person who might have checked his growing authority. His handwritten notes, later retrieved from his room by a staff member named Ann Bostick, were full of misspellings that spoke to the illiteracy Judge Eve Preminger would cite when she finally removed him.
“Nobody but me understood Doris Duke >> [music] >> and my drinking is not the proper man, it is Hefner.” And the chilling observation, “I think Ms. Duke is fading fast.” By April 5th, 1993, the date of Duke’s final will, Lafferty held sole executorship of the $1.2 billion estate, a $5 million executor’s fee, >> [music] >> $500,000 per year for life as an annuity, unrestricted financial authority, and medical authority over a woman whose staff neurologist had found she could not reliably locate her own elbow.
The woman whose father had told her to trust no one had placed her entire fortune, her medical decisions, and her remaining days in the hands of a man who could barely write his own name. And the ending that arrangement produced was exactly the ending you would expect. The final 18 months of Doris Duke’s life were a medical catastrophe compounded by systematic exploitation at the hands of the people who were supposed to be caring for her.
In April 1992, at age 79, she underwent a facelift along with an eye lift and cheek implants performed by Dr. Harry Glassman, a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. And 2 days after the surgery, she fell out of bed and broke her hip, beginning a cascade of hospitalizations and surgeries from which she would never meaningfully recover.
In January 1993, she had bilateral knee replacement surgery, wanting, she told friends, to be able to dance again, and traveled to Shangri-La in Hawaii to recover, where her cook, Colin Shanley, later stated that Duke did not know where she was or what day it was. She was taking more than 15 psychotropic medications simultaneously, Valium, Haldol, Demerol, Percocet, Ativan, Zoloft, and a cascade of others that at least three doctors stated in affidavits would have significantly impaired her mental function, along with daily wine
and laxatives, and a staff neurologist examining her on March 2nd, found she suffered from mild delirium, possibly exacerbated by prescription drugs. It was in this state, confused, heavily medicated, unable to identify basic parts of her own body, that she signed unrestricted financial authority to Bernard Lafferty on March 8th, 1993, and signed the final will naming him sole executor on April 5th, while still lying in a hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai.
In July, she underwent a second knee surgery, suffered a severe stroke the day after returning home, and spent nearly 2 months in intensive care on breathing and feeding tubes. She was discharged on September 20th to Falcon’s Lair in Beverly Hills, where her bedroom had been converted into a hospital room with two round-the-clock nurses, intravenous lines, and rehabilitation equipment she would never use.
By this point, she had been hospitalized nine times in Los Angeles in 1992 and 1993, and she weighed approximately 92 lb, a skeletal figure for a woman who stood 5 ft 11 in tall. On October 7th, 1993, by grim coincidence, the 27th anniversary of Eduardo Tirella’s death at her gates, Doris Duke told her doctor, Charles Kivowitz, that she did not want to go on living if her health could not improve, and Kivowitz ordered no code blue, meaning no emergency resuscitation if she stopped breathing.
On October 26th, he stopped her feedings and oxygen entirely. On October 27th, a package of medication arrived at the house, and when it appeared in the kitchen, Lafferty grabbed it from the cook and announced, “Miss Duke is going to die tonight.” That same day, Lafferty authorized a $500,000 gift to Dr.
Glassman and a $56,582.92 gift to himself for credit card bills, and Glassman phoned Pierce Brothers Mortuary to arrange for a hearse to be dispatched, a full day before Doris Duke drew her last breath. Teen. At 4:00 in the afternoon on October 27th, 1993, Dr. Charles Kivowitz ordered a morphine drip beginning at 5 mg per hour, with instructions to increase 1 mg per hour as needed for what he described as pain management and comfort care.
By 6:30 that evening, the drip had climbed to 10 mg per hour. By 7:30, it reached 15 mg per hour, and that evening, Kivowitz allegedly pushed an additional 10 mg injection directly into the line before leaving the house for the night. A bolus dose that, combined with the continuous drip, was delivering morphine at a rate that would suppress the respiratory function of a healthy person, let alone an 80-year-old woman weighing 92 lb.
Nurse Tammy Payette, who was present during those final hours, later alleged in sworn affidavits that Lafferty and co-executor Mr. Doyle asked Kivowitz, “How long to die?” and Kivowitz replied with clinical economy, “Less than 1 hour.” At 4:00 in the morning on October 28th, the morphine was increased to 25 mg per hour by phone order attributed to Kivowitz.
At 5:15, nurses administered a 100 mg Demerol injection ordered by phone by Dr. Glassman at the request of Kivowitz, a secondary narcotic layered on top of the escalating morphine in a manner that multiple medical experts would later describe as inconsistent with standard palliative protocol. At 5:48 in the morning on October 28th, 1993, Doris Duke stopped breathing, and Kivowitz’s partner signed the death certificate listing the cause as progressive pulmonary edema resulting in cardiac arrest, a technically accurate
description that said nothing about what had caused the edema or why a morphine drip had quadrupled in 13 hours. Lafferty and Doyle were at her bedside, and there was no family present at the death, no friends, no relatives, no one who had known Doris Duke before the butler and the lawyers arrived.
Her body was cremated at 4:17 in the morning on October 29th, less than 24 hours after death, and Payette described the entire sequence in a single word that captured the horror of what she believed she had witnessed, Kevorkian. The Koo report prepared by Richard H. Koo, a former Manhattan prosecutor appointed by the court to investigate the estate, concluded that Dr.
Kivowitz had purposely cut Duke’s nutrition and hastened her death with a morphine overdose, and the Los Angeles Police Department opened an inquiry in January 1995. But Payette’s credibility was damaged when she was convicted of grand theft for stealing jewelry from other employers, and no criminal charges were ever filed against Kivowitz, Glassman, or Lafferty in connection with the death of Doris Duke.
Lafferty sent the cook to the Louis Vuitton shop on Rodeo Drive to buy an $1,800 makeup case for the ashes, then flew the case to Duke Farms aboard a $25 million Boeing 737, placing it in the seat where Doris had always sat. A final gesture of devotion from a man who was already calculating what the estate owed him.
The probate of Doris Duke’s $1.2 billion estate became what was described at the time as the largest and most contested will battle in New York history, and at its center stood Bernard Lafferty, newly installed as sole executor, conducting himself as if the money were his own. He spent $60,000 on Giorgio Armani clothing, 25,000 on gold and cubic zirconia jewelry, purchased a $54,000 Cadillac while Duke was still in the hospital, bought a $2.
5 million mansion in Bel Air, spent $60,000 redecorating Duke’s old bedroom at Falcon’s Lair for his personal use, and borrowed $825,000 from US Trust, the co-executor bank, at zero interest. He allegedly crashed the Cadillac into the Whisky a Go Go nightclub and checked himself into Cedars-Sinai under the false name John Mason for a drinking binge that cost $2,200 in cash.
On May 22nd, 1995, Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger, citing Lafferty’s alcoholism, substance abuse, illiteracy, wasting of estate assets, and what she called his cavalier attitude to money, ordered his immediate removal as chief executor. US Trust was removed alongside him for the conflict of interest created by the interest-free loan.
The estate paid over $10 million in legal fees, and the law firm that had drafted Duke’s final will, Katten Muchin and Zavis, billed the estate $13.5 million by March of 1995 alone, meaning that the lawyers who had helped Lafferty secure his position extracted more money from the estate than Lafferty himself.
Bernard Lafferty died on November 4th, 1993,