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. Warmer storms could cause problems, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, Hyundai was poised to become Teslas top contender. Who can help student-athletes cash in? "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. One of the first things she did was to caution Duke, on the advice of Nelson Peltz, against an investment proposed by her then business manager, Patrick Mahn. She was contemplating having knee replacements. 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. She was having a real whirl." 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. . ", Almost every friend of Duke's I talked to, including her many homosexual friends, told me that she had always been an avid heterosexual. 'Doris Duke really was the last Chinese empress, the last of a type that doesn't exist anymore. "There was such a myth about Doris being a solitary person and not going out, so when she showed up somewhere, it was an event. 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. Alec Cunningham-Reid. Apparently, the warm weather had had a good effect. If I were Victoria Beckham, I wouldnt count on a big wedding present. Richard Banks called Lafferty the next day. . Her lawyer, David Keyko, said yesterday that in. She also told me that Duke was much more taken with Ferdinand Marcos, who was gravely ill in Honolulu, than she was with his wife. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. And when she left, that adverse thing ceased. . This was at 11 in the morning. A stingy southern belle, Nanaline Holt Inman was a widow with one son when she married Buck Duke in 1907. He was later retried and acquitted. For reasons I don't understand, a curtain seemed to come down. Heffner Duke, adopted in 1988 when she was 38 and the heiress was in her 70s, could not be reached for comment. ", Like many of her friends, Protas is unclear about when Duke went into the hospital for the operations on her knees, or when she came out. That evening, I sent up dinner and Chandi came downstairs and said, 'Tom, Bernard just dropped the entire tray.' 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. In her lawsuit, Heffner claims it was she who arranged this transaction, as well as the payment of $5 million of Marcos's legal bills. "I looked upon Bernard as a member of the small Doris Duke family," says Donald Robinson. I've talked to bankers who said she knew where every last nickel was. She continued to give him money, and friends say that their sexual relationship never really ended. You felt that she was going to break. On October 6, it was announced that Duke had made a donation of $1 million to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. She was taking so many pills at the end and, knowingly or not, killed herself. That led to pneumonia and she couldn't eat and it was on and off, on and off, for months.". Paul and his family moved to Sarasota, Florida, when he was nine years old. Then she became pregnant and had a premature daughter named Arden, who lived only 24 hours. Doris wouldn't take a pill unless she really needed it. Id love to be a fly on the wall when David and Victoria Beckham meet their sons fiancees family. 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. ", Nonetheless, Duke seemed increasingly pleased with Lafferty. Chandi sued Dukes estate and wound up inheriting $65 million. The circumstances of Dukes death remain under investigation. I knew from the beginning she was a son of a bitch." Menu. 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. "He was so attentive," Banks says. 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. "He was doing a lot of embroidery work for Doris. Miss Duke, 75, adopted Chandi Hefner, who owns extensive property in Hawaii, and has been living with her for three years, attorney Donald A. Robinson said. She really considered herself a dancer. Chandi Heffner was "planted" on Doris Duke by Imelda Marcos. I thought she was really nice, genuine.". The incredibly eccentric Duke who used to throw lawn birthday parties for her llamas complete with cake and funny hats adopted adult Chandi, after being convinced she was the reincarnation of her dead baby. It was a really loving daughter-mother relationship. In 1968, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, with Jacqueline Onassis as vice president. Like all of her houses, it was guarded by fierce Dobermans or German shepherds. I said, 'Doris, do it, I think it's a good thing.' She really had a feeling for him, and expressed annoyance with Imelda. That was a going-out-of-your-way gesture." When she was a cult member of Hare Krishna she got adopted by a Billionaire Heiress of a Tobacco company and Philanthropist, Doris Duke when she went to Hawaii in the 1980s. Last year she gave $40,000 to help people in India, $45,000 to Bronx Veterans Medical Research, and $2000 to the Hawaii Saddle Club. Yet it is the underlying misconception of almost everything ever written about her, including Stephanie Mansfield's 1992 biography, The Richest Girl in the World. "Bernard got out of the hospital. (Burns dismisses reports that he was once a Chippendales dancer: "Not that I haven't been asked. Toward the end of the summer, in Newport, Heffner told Duke that she had to return to Hawaii, because she was concerned about her horses and dogs, and had planned a trip to Bali with Gordon Damon. . After a two-week rejuvenation cure in Romania with the controversial Dr. Anna Aslan, they stopped in London. ", When I asked Chandi Heffner about the widespread rumors that she and Duke were lovers, she laughed and said, "Oh, right, I've heard that. According to the Mansfield biography, Cromwell asked her on their sexless wedding night what his annual income from her would be. Her telephone was not listed in the Los Angeles area. (The hospital said that Bernard Lafferty was a patient from July 1 to July 14, 1987.). . 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.' Later on we would sleep together and Doris would come in most mornings and sit there on the bed with us and talk. 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. On the last day of the seminar, he spent the afternoon with Duke at Shangri La. And Nicolas first cousin on her fathers side is the great New York broadcaster and filmmaker Perri Peltz, whose father was Nelsons older brother. I remember that most: that she seemed very happy with her life at that period. Shes the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz. There was a deadly side to Doris. "It was shocking," Heffner told me. With a love for all living things, Ms. Heffner maintains a U.S. ranch that takes in rescued horses, birds, donkeys, pigs, and many other animals. Sources at Duke's estates, however, portrayed Heffner in a different light. Farrah says that Duke had returned from her first visit to Manila, with Rossellini, about a week before meeting Heffner. A dedicated philanthropist, Chandi Heffner is the founder and President of CDHIFI a charitable foundation that sponsors medical, veterinary and humanitarian assistance to rural regions around the . It would be her last trip to Europe, and she also visited Poland with Brazilian grande dame Aime de Hereen. "Buck" Duke was obsessed with his only child. . ", A few days before I interviewed Heffner, an item had appeared in Cindy Adams's gossip column: Robert Ibrahim Farrah, an instructor of Middle Eastern dance, who says he introduced Heffner to Duke in 1984, claimed that Duke had come to fear Heffner. "Rubi" was also presented with a string of polo ponies and a house in Paris. ", Dr. Harry Demopoulos, an early promoter of antioxidants and megavitamins, whose patients include Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone, had been Doris Duke's personal physician since 1981. 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. I tried to see her the following week when I was in California, and there were about a dozen times since then that I called when I made trips to California, where I would simply get a response on the other end of the line that was: 'Miss Duke is doing well. I hired him to come out [to Los Angeles] and work for me, to kind of be my majordomo here. 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. ", Duke gave him a house in Paris for a wedding gift, and a plane before their divorce one year later. Nicola has an eclectic family, worthy of a Robert Altman movie a la A Wedding. On the plus side, theres the money. Movies. . . 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. . She's getting better.' That was Doris. She told me that in the months prior to her fall from grace one of Duke's doctors was injecting her with steroids, for knee problems, and that the psychological side effects of "the substance enabled the other people to talk her into whatever they wanted. (After Duke's death, the trustees of her estate became defendants in this lawsuit.). 'I loved her so much. Imelda stayed for a week, I think. Duke left most of her money to charity and named her butler, Bernard Lafferty, co-executor of the estate. When he died in a car crash in 1965, she took to her bed for two days. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. . Doris loved it. Chandi Duke Heffner was recognized for her outstanding support of the Marshall Legacy Institute's, landmine detection program. Because it was her major incapacity; there really wasn't anything else wrong with Doris. "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. Heffner Duke, adopted in 1988 when she was 38 and the heiress was in her 70s, could not be reached for comment. I said, 'Doris, get out of that house. But she had a dramatic change in her lifeand it was weird. 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