And I didn't sense any antagonism between Chandi and Bernard." In November 1991, Duke had a new will written, naming Irwin Bloom and Chemical Bank as executors. Yet there were smaller indignities such as the ridiculous row about releasing a painting of Doris Duke which he said she disliked and had given to him when he asked for it. ". ", The day after the adoption, the economist Woody Brock went to lunch at Duke Farms with Duke's New Jersey neighbor Jane Engelhard. Jane Engelhard sat next to the bodyguard, and you should have seen her face. Let them kill each other over it.' "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. At a 1990 lunch at Duke Farms for Lord Carrington, then chairman of Christie's, according to Oatsie Charles, "Chandi's attitude toward Doris was awfully offhand. In an earlier will, Demopoulos had been named executor[68] and challenged Lafferty's appointment. [15] She studied singing with Estelle Liebling, the voice teacher of Beverly Sills, in New York City. (Burns dismisses reports that he was once a Chippendales dancer: "Not that I haven't been asked. 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. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. 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.' In later years she did have problems with her hearing and with her legs, but nothing major. One afternoon in February, the architect John Warnecke went to Shangri La for tea. I feel unsure of myself physically. According to a half-page biography released by Howard J. Rubenstein Associates, Bernard Lafferty was born in Ireland in 1945 and immigrated to the United States more than 20 years ago. Duke scoffed, "Oh, come on. Chandi Heffner is a small, sturdy woman with thick black shoulder-length hair and bone-white skin. It's so hard for me still, so hard." Adam Smith followed a century later with direct consideration of the . 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. Lafferty has released few details about Duke's final illness. In January 1995 they revealed their trump card, an affidavit from one of Duke's deathbed nurses, Tammy Payette, insisting that Duke was murdered. ", After Thanksgiving, as she had for five decades, Duke left for Hawaii. For many years she sang in a black gospel choir at the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, and left its minister, the Reverend Lawrence G. Roberts, $1 million in her will. We wouldn't sit in the main dining room. Our six-week newsletter will help you make the right decision for you and your property. And he would tell me, 'Miss Heffner's complaining.' A section of woods there is dedicated to her and bears her name. [18] A lover of animals, in particular her dogs and pet camels, in her later years Duke became a wildlife refuge supporter. 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. [52] The best-known lawsuit[67] was initiated by Harry Demopoulos. ", "I was not involved. [3] Her estimated $1.3 billion fortune was largely left to charity. 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. For several years he managed the theatre in the Sands Hotel in Atlanta where he headlined stars such as Bill Cosby, Joel Grey and Rita Moreno. Duke did much additional philanthropic work and was a major benefactor of medical research and child welfare programs. And all around him were all these liquor bottlesGrand Marnier and sherry. And then eventually somebody else dropped back. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. She was alarmingly fragile." The last words were 'Stay in touch, Harry.' For access to this information, contact . [56] As the Maharishi's International Academy of Meditation, the ashram became the focus of global attention five years later when the Beatles studied there.[57]. "Io sono molto contento. She was so distressed about losing the baby. And that's how the relationship evolved. Some of the traditional handmade Indian products that are in danger of disappearing are pottery, silk and cotton embroidery, utensils and hardware made from raw iron, wood carvings, book bindings, and horse-drawn carts. to see complete work history. "Sometimes people are attracted to the thing they fear the most.". Duke was born in New York City, the only child of tobacco and hydroelectric power tycoon James Buchanan Duke and his second wife, Nanaline Holt Inman, widow of William Patterson Inman. According to financial accounts shes posted on her website, she has about $700,000 parked in CDH to help India. Mahn soon left, and in 1987 co-authored Daddy's Duchess: The Unauthorized Biography of Doris Duke. On Thursday, October 28, 1993, Duke died at Falcon's Lair. [43][30][48][49][18], Duke posted a bail of $5,000,000 for her friend, former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos after the latter was arrested for racketeering.[50]. Auction house Christie's published a heavily-illustrated catalog of more than 600 pages for its auction of "The Doris Duke Collection, sold to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation", held in New York City over three days in 2004. "She moved very well for that kind of dancingwe called it Middle Eastern, or danse orientale, but essentially it's belly dancing. "She out-Leona Helmsleyed Leona Helmsley," Duffy said of Heffner. * The other websites referenced on this site are owned and operated by their respective companies, and the associated trademarks and logos are the property of those companies. Chandi Duke Heffner, the 39-year-old former belly dancer and Hare Krishna devotee who was legally adopted by American Tobacco Co. heiress Doris Duke in 1988, now claims the reclusive 80-year-old billionaire reneged on her promise to make Heffner the sole beneficiary of her estate. Finally, one of her new lawyers, Mr. Doyle, got it back on track. According to a frequent guest at Duke's various houses, Duke became more and more upset with Burns: "Doris told me that James started to strut around the place as if he was Mr. She was also active in preserving more than 80 historic buildings in Newport, Rhode Island. And he had quite a history. 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. She has also been involved in equestrian sports and was the owner of the horse Authentic, whose rider took home the Gold Medal in show jumping for Team USA at the 2004 Athens Olympics. I knew from the beginning she was a son of a bitch." She took daily tap lessons from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson at the Cotton Club, and for years studied ballet under Cyd Charisse's ex-husband, Nico. She began trying to walk while she was still heavily medicated and fell, breaking her hip. In order to do so she released the parking brake and shifted into drive, but instead of putting her foot on the brake pedal she hit the gas. ", "I'm crazy about Bernard," says Oatsie Charles. In 2014, sixty objects from her collection (including ceramics, textiles, paintings, tile panels, and full-scale architectural elements) were displayed temporarily at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the exhibition "Doris Duke's Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art",[24] organized by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. She had had several leg operations, after a riding accident, but she participated in the seminar. Duke moved from the passenger seat to the driver's seat in order, she said later, to drive the car forward and pick up Tirella once the gate was open. When he went to pick her up, Lafferty told him, "Always keep me informed, so that I can be sure everything works." [8] Due to ambiguity in James Duke's will, a lawsuit was filed in 1927 to prevent auctions and outright sales of real estate he had owned; in effect, Doris Duke successfully sued her mother and other executors to prevent the sales. "He was obviously unhappy. I turned and saw her on the floor. Her Newport artist pal Richard Banks said that that summer "Doris decided to do the whole social thing and she loved it. Her first husband, James R. Cromwell, called Duke "my frigidheiress" and engaged in a lengthy court battle to win a financial settlement. And he called from a pay phone, and I felt so sorry for this guy, I said, 'Come to Somerville.' In a settlement signed Thursday by Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Renee Roth, Chandi Duke Heffner, 42, dropped claims to the $1,2-billion estate and dropped a . I called the California home and the other sites many times. The will provides Lafferty with an executor's fee of up to $5 million, a lifetime annuity of $500,000 a year, and commissions, which could run into the millions annually, as a trustee of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and of three other closely related new foundations: the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of Endangered Wildlife, the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of New Jersey Farmland and Farm Animals, and the Doris Duke Foundation of Islamic Art. "That's what the picture was worth," said one of Lafferty's lawyers, "but here you had maybe 15 lawyers arguing over it and running up the bills.". Doris Duke (November 22, 1912 October 28, 1993) was an American billionaire tobacco heiress, philanthropist, art collector, horticulturalist, and socialite. "He was doing a lot of embroidery work for Doris. . I never heard from Doris again and I could never reach her again. Richard Banks called Lafferty the next day. A. once a week wherever we were. Duke's interest in horticulture led to a friendship with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientific farmer Louis Bromfield, who operated Malabar Farm, his country home in Lucas, Ohio in Richland County. She was even a buddy of Elvis Presley's. She was ahead of her time. He found initially that the police file on the case and the transcripts of the wrongful death suit brought by Tirella's family were missing from archives where they would normally be kept, but was able to find some of those documents later. We use cookies to personalize & enhance your experience. . . If you want, we will give Bernard another chance, or we will get another butler. ' A day after returning home from this second surgery, she suffered a severe stroke. Shortly after Duke's 80th birthday, in November, Nelson Seabra saw her at C. Z. There are many ways to date the development of the economics of education. 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. He could barely speak.". I came back clean as a whistle. If so, wrote Donders, "interposing into the process some new components of . Only five function as museums. Irwin Bloom had made the arrangements and then Duke called Protas from Los Angeles and joked, ''For God's sake, try to pay it back," Protas recalled. [64], In her final will, Duke left virtually all of her fortune to several existing and new charitable foundations. That was a going-out-of-your-way gesture." We came out from opposite sides of the stage, and I got to the middle and she wasn't there. Guest introduced Duke to Leon Amar, a 30-year-old Moroccan decorator. He died as he had lived in recent years, in flamboyant splendour, in his 8,000 sq ft Los Angeles home, a $2 million Bel Air fantasy, decorated with enormous silver urns, formal oil paintings and framed photographs of his old mistress, Doris Duke, lined up alongside long dead matinee idols. To this day he maintains, "A lot of injustice was done to me. The two camels were right outside the dining room on a blue tarpaulin. A member of the Duke family, who requested anonymity, said yesterday, "I think Doris will turn it over to her lawyer and say, 'Crush her.' . He went to Sarasota High School. Chandi, which means "female energy personified" in Sanskrit, was born Charlene Heffner in Baltimore on August 26, 1953, the eldest of three daughters of William Heffner, a lawyer, and his wife, "Bunny," a nurse. She's getting better.' 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. When he first met Peggy Lee (with whom he worked on and off for 10 years), it was while he was manager of the Versailles Room of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. Heffner is also claiming her right to inherit two trusts which Buck Duke created in 1917 and 1924, on the ground that she is his lineal descendant and grandchild. Tours are limited to 12 people. One repeated her response to a straight man who was reluctant to have dinner with Rock Hudson for fear that he would be molested. She was so alive. 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. 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. Doris Duke was murdered. [36], Shortly after the case was closed, Duke began making considerable philanthropic contributions to the city, including the repair of Cliff Walk around her estate, previously a source of friction between her and the city when her dogs had attacked tourists, and $10,000 to the hospital she had been taken to the night of the accident. Duke was twice divorced and had no other children. Banks never saw her again. They were initially awarded a larger sum that was subsequently reduced with the aid of Duke's lawyers. She said, 'There was nothing to do on that train.' [45], On September 1, 1947, while in Paris, Duke became the third wife of Porfirio Rubirosa, a diplomat[clarification needed] from the Dominican Republic. [67] The fees for their lawsuits exceeded $10 million, and were paid by the Duke estate. We don't hear anything. People get annoyed with their kids. The following February, Farrah repeated the seminar, and it was apparently then that Chandi Heffner entered Doris Duke's life. He made a comment that Doris had a fair number of complications as a result of the surgery. . 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. Here she created Duke Gardens, a 60,000-square-foot (5,600m2) public indoor botanical display that was among the largest in America. . 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. He was born on August 27, 1952, in Peekskill, New York, USA, as Paul Rubenfeld. Why is Frank McCourt really pushing this? [47], She reportedly had numerous love affairs, with, among others, surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku, film actor Errol Flynn, British politician Alec Cunningham-Reid, U.S. Army General George S. Patton, jazz pianist Joe Castro and U.S. writer Louis Bromfield.
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