doris duke adopted daughter

And when she left, that adverse thing ceased. How Claus von Blow Became the Original True Crime Star She really considered herself a dancer. . He was later retried and acquitted. WebLafferty relinquished control as co-executor of the Duke estate in a 1995 settlement with Duke's disinherited adopted daughter. To this day he maintains, "A lot of injustice was done to me. sometimes I can't believe it's real. He had been recommended by Ron Oldenburg, a Honolulu lawyer who handled immigration matters for the employees of both Doris Duke and Imelda Marcos, and hired as a bodyguard for Heffner when she was hospitalized for severe sinusitis in February 1989. 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Nelson Seabra told me, "A very close friend of Doris's said that she committed suicide. She was so alive. Seemed. Ferencz Soltesz [the Peltzes' majordomo] told me he's an excellent butler so long as you keep him off the bottle. Bernard Lafferty, the Butler For Doris Duke, Dies at 51 They all of a sudden just totally cut me off, and I can't believe that was Doris. Burns alleges that in June, Heffner repudiated and breached her agreement to share her windfall and that he suffered humiliation, mental anguish and emotional injuries.. "She got us our first booking, in that black church in New Jersey. "Bernard got out of the hospital. One night at dinner, Heffner told me, "Doris said to me, 'You're my daughter reincarnated. It will be wonderful.' 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. I remember her referring to 'we dancers.' "Buck" Duke was obsessed with his only child. I knew from the beginning she was a son of a bitch." Like all of her houses, it was guarded by fierce Dobermans or German shepherds. He used to take her to Gold's Gym." In November 1991, Duke had a new will written, naming Irwin Bloom and Chemical Bank as executors. 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. And I didn't sense any antagonism between Chandi and Bernard." Two years later she bought Falcon's Lair, the Beverly Hills house where Rudolph Valentino once lived. She was alarmingly fragile." "I said, 'What's wrong?' The next day Duke's lawyer called Heffner again and informed her that Duke wanted her out, too. She wasn't Barbara Hutton," says Marina Cicogna, who was a friend of both heiresses. Marcos has said that she and Duke were friends of almost 20 years, but others say that they met in the late 1970s through Franco Rossellini. Until she was 10, when she started at the Brearley School, she was tutored at home. Doris Duke Profile - Photos of Heiress Doris Duke - Harper's BAZAAR And then Chandi said something that took me aback: 'Bobby, I can't understand why you have a friend like that and yet you're struggling to have a dance publication. 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. She was very into the ritualistic part of Hawaiian dance. Everything good I could say about Bernard, I do. But I have no real medical knowledge of what transpired in California during the spring and summer of last year.". Chandi called Steve Levyhe did security for Doristo find out what to do. "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. This was at 11 in the morning. "I looked upon Bernard as a member of the small Doris Duke family," says Donald Robinson. She was ahead of her time. I came back clean as a whistle. They hired him on Ferencz Soltesz's recommendation. "It was strange. Duke last made news in 1988, when she posted the $5.3 million bail for her close friend Imelda Marcos, the former Philippines First Lady. DUKES ADOPTED DAUGHTER SETTLES FOR $65 MILLION Until Doris Duke's death, this would be her principal residence. ", In February, a few weeks after Protas returned to New York with Graham, he received a phone call from Duke at three in the morning. I do feel like I'm being drugged. The tiara would eventually find its way back to Cartier who bought it for $298,000 in the 2004 Christies auction held to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. However, her achievements were tarnished with tragedy. . 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. Of course, many of the sources for these allegations are people who were left out of the will, or cut out of the will, or people who hope to eventually receive grants from the Duke foundations. Kids get annoyed with their parents.". The balance is due Wednesday. In whirlwind order, Chandi became Dukes adopted daughter, had her adoption reversed by her loving Mom, was banished from the kingdom and was cut out of the will. When I go I'll be eaten by the sharks.". WebWhen tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. He has an alcohol problem, but he's a basically good person. ", Thomas Rybak, who had been working as Doris Duke's chef for several months when Lafferty was hired in May 1987, at a salary of about $500 a week, paints a different picture. "She looked great," Warnecke says. His breath almost knocked me off my feet.' "It was unbelievable how hard she worked. . . 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. After Bloom was fired, Protas was told the loan was being reviewed. 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. Ignoring Chandi Heffner, the latter-day flower child whom she ", Duke gave him a house in Paris for a wedding gift, and a plane before their divorce one year later. In June 1985, Duke and Heffner traveled to Russia together. ", James Cromwell maintained that it was not his child, and friends assumed that it was Cunningham-Reid's. "Chandi works very hard for Doris. "She got baby doses for a few weeks and that was it. Doris Duke 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. James Burns, now an aspiring actor in Los Angeles, says that he and Chandi "are giving each other space for a while.". And he would tell me, 'Miss Heffner's complaining.' As a young girl, she wrote him love notes, which he pored over again and again. This was the fifth time that Duke had rewritten or revised her will since Heffner's banishment 26 months earlier. "Sometimes people are attracted to the thing they fear the most.". (The hospital said that Bernard Lafferty was a patient from July 1 to July 14, 1987.). "There was a rumor that she did it deliberately. The adopted daughter of the late billionaire Doris Duke has agreed to drop several claims against the estate in return for more than $65 million, according to a And he called from a pay phone, and I felt so sorry for this guy, I said, 'Come to Somerville.' "I don't think you're supposed to use alcohol with steroids, and she was drinking sherry in the evenings." Also at Duke Farms, she constructed a series of 11 greenhouses containing elaborate recreations of English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and other gardens, which she opened to the public. We don't hear anything. She was very happy doing that.". This stuff was from Miss Duke's father. 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 . Her estate, said one family member yesterday, is valued at more than $1 billion. Nanaline was a shrewd businesswoman, often compared to Hetty Green, and when she died in 1962, she left her daughter an estate then estimated to be worth $250 million. 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's father died when she was 12 years old. James Buchanan Duke, a tobacco and energy mogul, left his daughter around $100 million, which earned her the title "the richest girl in the world" and made her something of a national celebrity. 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. (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.). Doris and I used to go fairly regularly to see the president in the hospital; she would give him reiki treatments.". April 11, 2020. Then [Franco and I] didn't see Doris anymore. Doristall and awkward with a protruding chinwas the only daughter of American tobacco king James B. Duke. The two camels were right outside the dining room on a blue tarpaulin. The tobacco heiress fortune, one of the largest in U.S. history, has been the subject of complicated legal wrangling since she died at age 80 in 1993. We knock, we bang, we yell. I said, 'Sure, have him call me.' Her Newport artist pal Richard Banks said that that summer "Doris decided to do the whole social thing and she loved it. 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. Their patients dont know where they went, Column: Threes not a crowd. 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. She told me that her parents did not approve of her lifestyle, and that they'd cut her off from everything. The 1987 will had designated Heffner executor. 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. "Elvis made whites interested in black music," she once told me, "which was very important, because race is the biggest problem we have in America.". ", By the time Duke returned to Shangri La that fall, she and Heffner were getting together on an almost daily basis, and when it was time to move back to Duke Farms in the spring of 1985, she invited Heffner to go with her. Each evening she would return to Duke Farms or her Manhattan apartment in time for dinner alone on a tray. 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. "It's very important that Doris has done this," he told me at the time. ", Dr. Demopoulos told me, "I spoke to her in early January. . "She wasn't just one of those rich women who said, 'Restore me 60 houses.' "Ferencz said, 'We had a butler who was fired. Ex-Guard Seeks to Share Inheritance of Doris Duke's Adopted The following February, Farrah repeated the seminar, and it was apparently then that Chandi Heffner entered Doris Duke's life. ". In 1969, socialite C. Z. The private pilot hired to fly Duke's Boeing 737 quit his job because of Heffner, and filed a letter with the Federal Aviation Administration complaining of her unstable behavior. She didn't like medicine in general. 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. Her former physician, Dr. Harry Demopoulos, is seeking to unseat Lafferty as co-executor. In any case, their friendship ended in tragedy that October, when Duke ran him over as he was opening the gate of Rough Point. Most of Duke's friends hadn't had an inkling. I said, 'Doris, get out of that house. 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. Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week. It was 1982, and Heffner was taking a class at Farrah's studio near Times Square. 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. Jane Engelhard sat next to the bodyguard, and you should have seen her face. Chandi got a couple of the housemen, and they brought him to the Somerville hospital." 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. She was not on steroids in the latter half of 1990, and this was not a mood swing. Daughter and only child of Tobacco tycoon James Buchanan Duke, Doris Duke was considered to be the 'worlds richest girl' when she inherited her fathers fortune in 1925 at the age of 12. . One evening Steve Levy said that Miss Duke wanted him to administer a urine test on me. Upon her father's death in 1925, the 13-year-old Doris Duke -- known as "The Richest Girl in the World" -- inherited several hundred million dollars. "It was shocking," Heffner told me. By 1963 she was having Castro trailed by a private investigator. The gate had obviously been left open. Her first husband, James R. Cromwell, called Duke "my frigidheiress" and engaged in a lengthy court battle to win a financial settlement. 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 Based on telegrams and phone records from that time, Alec Cunningham-Reid was likely the father, not James Cromwell. I really don't know what the hell was going on, frankly. On the last day of the seminar, he spent the afternoon with Duke at Shangri La. It would be the last time the paparazzi caught her, and, true to form, she slapped Rossellini for not telling her the photographers would be there. ", Glenn Scott Greenhouse, the president of the Pavillion Agency, confirmed that Lafferty's drinking became an issue at the Peltzes'. Doris Dukes adopted daughter has ended her fight to gain control of the late billionaires fortune in exchange for a $65-million settlement from the estate. ", Oatsie Charles had a one-word explanation: "Loneliness. Although she was constantly compared to Hutton from the time they both had fairy-tale coming-out parties the year after the stock market crashed, Duke always hated the comparison to the much-married Woolworth heiress, who died penniless. ", Heffner was sitting in the Manhattan apartment of one of her lawyers on a Saturday afternoon late last December. She was wearing a dark-blue turtleneck, old Levi's, cotton socks, and scruffy moccasins. She thought it was very amusing. Doris Duke News How Doris Duke, once the richest girl in the world, got away with murder By Reed Tucker March 20, 2021 8:52am Updated When Eduardo Tirella told tobacco DUKE'S DAUGHTER GETS MILLIONS - Greensboro News and Record
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