On the evening of October 6, 1966, one of the wealthiest women in America ran her car into a man standing by the gates of her Newport, Rhode Island mansion. The victim was Eduardo Tirella, her trusted art curator, who had just stepped out of the vehicle to open the estate gates. The car smashed him against the ironwork, and he died shortly afterward from his injuries. Doris Duke, heir to a tobacco fortune worth more than a billion dollars in modern terms, would spend the rest of her life trying to escape the consequences of that night.
The death would stain her legacy and never fully leave the public’s imagination. Doris Duke was born on November 22, 1912, in New York City, the only child of James Buchanan Duke and his second wife, Nanaline Holt Inman. Her father had founded the American Tobacco Company in 1890, introducing innovations that transformed cigarette manufacturing: the paper used to roll cigarettes and early efforts to chemically manipulate the tobacco itself. By the close of the 19th century, his company sold roughly 90 percent of all cigarettes smoked in the United States, at a time when smoking was more common among adults than not.
The profits were staggering, and the Dukes ranked among the most prominent families in America. James Duke gave generously to Trinity College in North Carolina, which was renamed Duke University in recognition of his funding. Doris grew up on Duke Farms, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. When her father died in 1925, she inherited the bulk of his fortune, valued at upwards of one hundred million dollars, an amount exceeding one billion dollars today.
Because of her youth, control of the estate was arranged to pass to her in stages as she moved through her twenties. She came of age just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Her lavish debutante parties in the early 1930s, alongside Barbara Hutton, the heiress to the Woolworth fortune, drew both fascination and criticism from the press. The two young women were nicknamed the Gold Dust Twins, and each was described as the richest girl in the world.
In 1935, at the age of 22, Duke stunned the celebrity press by marrying Jimmy Cromwell, an aspiring politician sixteen years her senior. Cromwell came from a moneyed background, though far less affluent than hers, and he used her wealth to advance his political ambitions. After an extended two-year honeymoon around the world, the couple settled briefly in Hawaii, where they built a mansion they named Shangri-La. Their marriage began to unravel in the early 1940s.
Cromwell was appointed U. S. ambassador to Canada, but Doris disliked the country and returned to Hawaii. Their first child was born prematurely that summer and died the following day in Honolulu.
The couple gradually drifted apart and divorced in 1943. The loss of her child and the failure of her marriage pushed Duke toward tragedy. The pregnancy complications in 1940 had made it almost certain she could never have more children. She began consulting fortune tellers and others she believed could help her commune with her dead daughter.
More troubling was her growing reliance on alcohol and prescription drugs, including opiates. In 1947, Duke married for the second and final time. Her husband was Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat and playboy. The union provoked controversy.
The U. S. State Department reportedly warned her against allowing Rubirosa to use her wealth for his own political ends, but she provided him with enormous sums anyway. Both were seemingly unfaithful, and the marriage ended in 1951 with Rubirosa receiving a huge financial settlement, one that bizarrely included a converted B-25 bomber plane.
Duke never married again, but she remained in the public eye through rumors of affairs with figures such as the actor Errol Flynn and jazz pianist Joe Castro. One unlikely rumor suggested a brief affair with General George Patton, who was nearly thirty years her senior. Such claims remain a matter of disagreement. Her philanthropic work, however, is a matter of public record.
Between the 1940s and the 1980s, she invested heavily in the arts and horticulture. She developed a deep interest in Islamic and Southeast Asian art, building an extensive collection of pieces from the medieval and early modern periods. Her horticultural focus centered on Duke Farms, where she began developing Duke Gardens in the late 1950s: an extensive series of greenhouses, botanical gardens, and conservatories with artificial lakes and patios. She took immense personal pride in the project and often spent long days working in the gardens herself.
She also funded Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Early Autumn in 1927, to establish an experimental horticulture site on nearly one thousand acres in Mansfield, Ohio. Duke even wrote for a time, working briefly as a journalist in Europe at the end of the Second World War with the International News Service, though her writing tapered off as her health and mind deteriorated. As the years passed, Duke’s alcohol and drug problems worsened, leading to the most controversial episode of her life. By the 1960s, she owned homes in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, and Hawaii, and employed many staff to manage them.
Eduardo Tirella was her art curator and had worked for her for years, but in 1966 he planned to pursue a career in production design in Hollywood. When he went to tell her of his decision on the evening of October 6, the two ended up in a heated argument at her Newport mansion. They then got into a rented car to drive up to the house. At the gates, Tirella exited and went to open them.
What happened next is seriously disputed. Duke was driving and had left the engine running when Tirella got out. She later claimed she moved into the driver’s seat merely to advance the car to collect Tirella once the gates were open, but that she accidentally hit the accelerator. The evidence at the scene was not consistent with that explanation.
The car crashed into Tirella, smashing him between the vehicle and the gate. He died shortly afterward. The Tirella family sued Duke for wrongful death and received a settlement of approximately seventy-five thousand dollars, equivalent to about half a million dollars today. The investigation remained open for years, but Duke, who was quite probably intoxicated that evening, avoided criminal charges.
According to the account, she accomplished this through bribes and by providing large amounts of public funding to the Newport town council and local charities. After 1966, Duke’s reputation in Newport high society never fully recovered. In the 1970s and 1980s she became increasingly reclusive, and her alcohol and drug use escalated further. Toward the end of her seventies, her medical advisors convinced her to undergo a series of operations.
Some were medically necessary, such as a knee replacement; others, including a facelift, were purely cosmetic. The knee replacement, though routine today, was still difficult in the early 1990s, and in Duke’s case it was botched, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. It was during this postoperative period, when she was increasingly frail and disoriented, that Duke signed a new will making her butler, Bernard Lafferty, the primary beneficiary of her estate. Lafferty had been employed years earlier more as a drinking companion than for any other role.
The change to her will took on a sinister note months later when Duke choked on her food and Lafferty refused to call an ambulance. Weeks later, after several trips in and out of the hospital and while medicated on large amounts of morphine and other painkillers, she died on October 28, 1993, at the age of eighty. Her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean. Immediate contention arose over her estate, valued at 1.
3 billion dollars. Lawyers for various parties accused Lafferty of manipulating Duke into altering her will while she was increasingly unsure of her own actions. The California courts eventually intervened and decided that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation would receive a very large portion of the estate. Lafferty still received a one-time payment of 4.
5 million dollars and half a million dollars annually thereafter. He left for Los Angeles, where he died in 1996. Shortly before his death, he was exonerated in an investigation launched by the district attorney of Los Angeles to determine whether Duke had been murdered or died from complications of her medical conditions. In 2020, investigative journalist Peter Lance of the Newport Daily News produced a new report on the circumstances surrounding the death of Eduardo Tirella in 1966.
After reassessing all the evidence, he concluded that Duke had not only purposefully driven into Tirella while he was opening the gate but had then run over him a second time after he was on the ground. He also concluded that the official reports had been doctored, with parts removed from what was made available to the Tirella family. Doris Duke died a reclusive heiress, her fortune intact and her final years shadowed by scandal.
The truth of what happened on that Newport gate in 1966 remains the defining controversy of a life marked by immense wealth, personal tragedy, and a legacy that never quite escaped the night she killed a man.