Doris Duke was one of the wealthiest heiresses of the 20th century, with a fortune built on the Duke family tobacco business. Despite her immense wealth, her personal life was marked by controversy, and one incident in particular came to define her later years and legacy.
Born on November 22, 1912, in New York City, Doris was the only child of James Buchanan Duke and his second wife, Nanaline Holt Inman. James Duke had founded the American Tobacco Company in 1890, introducing innovations in cigarette manufacturing that helped the company dominate the market. By the end of the 19th century, the company sold roughly 90 percent of all cigarettes smoked in the United States.
The Duke family was among the wealthiest in America. James Duke also became a major philanthropist, funding Trinity College in North Carolina, which was later renamed Duke University in recognition of his contributions.
Doris grew up on the family’s 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, known as Duke Farms. When her father died in 1925, she effectively inherited the bulk of his estate, valued at more than $100 million at the time. Due to her youth, control of the estate was arranged to be transferred to her in stages as she moved through her twenties.
Doris came of age just as the Great Depression began. In the early 1930s, her lavish debutante parties, alongside contemporary Barbara Hutton, drew both interest and criticism from the American press. The two were nicknamed the “Gold Dust Twins,” with Doris often referred to as the “richest girl in the world.”
In 1935, at age 22, Doris married Jimmy Cromwell, an aspiring politician 16 years her senior. Cromwell used her wealth to advance his political ambitions. After a two-year honeymoon, the couple settled in Hawaii, where they built a mansion called Shangri-La. Their marriage began to unravel in the early 1940s after Cromwell was appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada, a post Doris disliked. Their first child was born prematurely that summer and died the following day. The couple divorced in 1943.
The loss of her child and the end of her marriage left Doris increasingly isolated. She began consulting fortune tellers and engaging in eccentric behavior, while also growing reliant on alcohol and prescription drugs, including opiates.
In 1947, Doris married Porfirio Rubirosa, a diplomat and playboy from the Dominican Republic. The union was controversial, and the U.S. State Department warned Doris about allowing Rubirosa to use her wealth for political purposes. Despite this, she gave him large sums of money. The marriage ended in 1951, with Rubirosa receiving a substantial financial settlement, including a converted B-25 bomber plane.
Doris never married again, but rumors of affairs with figures such as actor Errol Flynn and jazz pianist Joe Castro kept her in the public eye. One unusual rumor suggested a brief affair with General George Patton, though this was considered unlikely given the age difference.
Her philanthropic work, however, was well documented. Between the 1940s and 1980s, she invested heavily in the arts and horticulture. She developed a particular interest in Islamic and Southeast Asian art, building an extensive collection of pieces from the medieval and early modern periods. She also focused on developing Duke Farms, creating Duke Gardens in the late 1950s, a series of greenhouses, botanical gardens, and conservatories. She took great personal pride in the project and often worked long days there herself.
In the 1960s, Doris became more eccentric, and her mind began to deteriorate. Her writing efforts, which had included a brief stint as a journalist in Europe in 1945, trailed off.
By the 1960s, Doris owned several homes across the United States, including properties in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, and Hawaii. She employed many staff members to manage these estates. One such employee was Eduardo Tirella, a curator of her art holdings. Tirella had worked for Doris for years but planned to pursue a career in production design in Hollywood.
On the evening of October 6, 1966, at her house in Newport, Rhode Island, Doris and Tirella argued. They then got into a rented car to drive up to the house. When they reached the gates of the mansion, Tirella got out to open them. Doris moved into the driver’s seat. She later testified that she intended to move the car forward to collect him but accidentally hit the accelerator. The car crashed into Tirella, smashing him between the car and the gate. He died shortly afterward from his injuries.
The Tirella family sued Doris for wrongful death, and a settlement of approximately $75,000 was reached. The investigation remained open for years. Doris, who was likely intoxicated that evening, avoided criminal charges. She reportedly provided public funding to Newport town council and local charities, which helped her escape further punishment.
Following the incident, Doris’s reputation in Newport high society never fully recovered. In the 1970s and 1980s, she became more reclusive, and her alcohol and drug use increased.
In her late seventies, Doris was convinced by medical advisors to undergo several operations, including a knee replacement and a facelift. The knee replacement was botched, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
During this period, while frail and disoriented, Doris signed a new will making her butler, Bernard Lafferty, the primary beneficiary of her estate. Lafferty had been hired years earlier, more as a drinking companion than for any other reason. Months later, Doris experienced a bout of choking on her food, and Lafferty refused to call an ambulance. After several trips in and out of the hospital, and while medicated on large amounts of morphine and other painkillers, she passed away on October 28, 1993, at age 80. Her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
Immediate contention arose over her estate, valued at $1.3 billion. Lawyers accused Lafferty of manipulating Doris into altering her will in her final months. The California courts eventually decided that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation would receive a large portion of the estate. Lafferty still received $4.5 million as a one-time amount and $500,000 annually thereafter. He died in 1996, shortly after being exonerated in an investigation into whether Doris had been murdered.
In 2020, investigative journalist Peter Lance released a new report on the death of Eduardo Tirella. Based on a fresh assessment of the evidence, he concluded that Doris had not only purposefully run into Tirella with the car but had also run him over a second time after he was on the ground. He also stated that official reports had been doctored or partially removed from what was made available to the Tirella family.