Doris Duke was born into unimaginable wealth, the only child of tobacco baron James Buchanan Duke. Her father, known as Buck, built a fortune through the American Tobacco Company and later hydroelectric power. By the time she was 12, she had inherited an estimated $100 million, a sum that would grow to over $5 billion at its peak.
Her father’s constant warning shaped her entire life: trust no one. He showed her death threats and ransom demands from strangers who wanted a piece of the Duke fortune. That lesson, reinforced by a mother who resented her, became both her shield and her deepest wound.
Doris’s mother, Nanaline, favored her son from a first marriage and openly resented the daughter who controlled the money. When Doris was just 14, she had to sue her own mother to stop her from selling Duke Farms, the New Jersey estate her father had built. She won, and the court confirmed that the properties belonged to her directly.
The press dubbed her the richest girl in the world. They paired her with Barbara Hutton, another heiress born eight days earlier, calling them the Gold Dust Twins. Both made their debutante debuts in 1930, spending tens of thousands of dollars on parties while millions of Americans stood in breadlines.
Doris married her first husband, James Cromwell, in 1935. He was 16 years her senior, a socialite with political ambitions. She gave him a monthly allowance of $10,000, but the marriage produced only grief. Their daughter, Arden, was born prematurely in 1940 and lived just 24 hours.
The loss devastated Doris. She reportedly walked into the ocean after leaving the hospital, until Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku swam out and brought her back to shore. The divorce from Cromwell was finalized in 1943, and she paid him $250,000 for eight years of marriage.
Her second husband was Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat and former son-in-law of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Doris allegedly paid his second wife $1 million to agree to a divorce. The marriage lasted under 13 months, ending after she caught him with his former wife in Capri.
In 1953, Barbara Hutton married Rubirosa and spent an estimated $66,000 per day on him during a 53-day marriage. Two heiresses, the same husband, and two very different invoices.
After Rubirosa, Doris found Eduardo Tirella, a decorated World War II veteran and interior designer. He had earned a Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge and worked for Doris for about a decade, managing her properties and guiding her art purchases. By 1966, he decided to leave her employ and move to Los Angeles permanently.
On October 7, 1966, Tirella and Doris argued at Rough Point, her Newport estate. They got into a station wagon, and Tirella got out to open the gates. According to Doris, she slid into the driver’s seat, hit the gas instead of the brake, and the car leapt forward, running over him.
Tirella was killed instantly. But the police investigation found six actions that contradicted Doris’s story. The parking brake could only be disengaged by hand. The car struck Tirella once, then accelerated again to run over him. A 13-year-old witness heard two separate roars of the motor and a man screaming.
The case was closed as accidental in 96 hours, without an inquest. The police chief retired seven months later and purchased two condominiums in Florida, a purchase his salary could not explain. Investigative journalist Peter Lance later concluded that Doris conspired with the Newport Police Department to avoid charges.
The wrongful death lawsuit went to trial five years later. Doris was found negligent, but her attorneys used the damage phase to portray Tirella as a professional failure. His family received about $75,000 total. Doris spent more than $102,000 at a single antique auction buying a highboy, more than she paid for the life of the man she killed.
Eight days after his death, she donated $25,000 to restore Newport’s Cliff Walk and $10,000 to the hospital that received his body. She later established the Newport Restoration Foundation, which restored 84 colonial structures. The daughter of the police chief’s secretary called the donations what certain Newport circles used openly: blood money.
In the 1980s, a new figure entered Doris’s life. Chandi Hefner, a former Hare Krishna devotee, met Doris in Hawaii. Doris came to believe Hefner was the reincarnation of her daughter Arden, the baby who had lived only 24 hours. In 1988, at age 75, Doris formally adopted the 35-year-old Hefner.
The relationship deteriorated within two years. Doris began telling people her food was being poisoned and that someone was drugging her. A physician recorded claims that Hefner had been injecting Doris with heparin, and tests of her sherry found traces of warfarin, a blood thinner also used as rat poison. The allegations were never conclusively proven.
In her final will, Doris wrote that she should not have adopted Hefner, saying her primary motive was financial gain. After Doris’s death, the estate settled with Hefner for $65 million, making her the largest individual beneficiary outside the charitable foundation.
In November 1988, the same month she adopted Hefner, Doris posted $5 million in bail for Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines facing federal racketeering charges. The money was never repaid. Doris’s final will included instructions to make reasonable arrangements for repayment, but the debt remains uncollected to this day.
The last person to control Doris Duke was Bernard Lafferty, an Irish butler who was functionally illiterate and a secret alcoholic. He was introduced to Doris by Chandi Hefner in 1987. As Doris’s health declined, Lafferty’s role expanded. He controlled all access to her, managed her household, and edged out everyone who might have checked his authority.
By April 1993, Lafferty held sole executorship of the $1.2 billion estate, a $5 million executor’s fee, and $500,000 per year for life. He also held medical authority over a woman whose neurologist found she could not reliably locate her own elbow.
The final 18 months of Doris’s life were a medical catastrophe. In April 1992, she underwent a facelift and broke her hip two days later. She had knee replacement surgery in January 1993. She was taking more than 15 psychotropic medications simultaneously, along with daily wine and laxatives.
In this confused, heavily medicated state, she signed unrestricted financial authority to Lafferty in March 1993 and signed her final will naming him sole executor in April, while still in a hospital bed. In July, she suffered a severe stroke after a second knee surgery and spent nearly two months in intensive care.
By October 1993, she weighed approximately 92 pounds. On October 26, her doctor stopped her feedings and oxygen. On October 27, Lafferty grabbed a package of medication and announced, “Miss Duke is going to die tonight.” That same day, he authorized a $500,000 gift to her plastic surgeon and arranged for a hearse to be dispatched, a full day before she died.
At 4:00 in the afternoon on October 27, a morphine drip was started at 5 mg per hour. By 7:30, it had reached 15 mg per hour. That evening, the doctor allegedly pushed an additional 10 mg injection directly into the line. At 4:00 in the morning, the morphine was increased to 25 mg per hour.
At 5:15, nurses administered a 100 mg Demerol injection ordered by phone. At 5:48 in the morning on October 28, 1993, Doris Duke stopped breathing. Her body was cremated less than 24 hours after death.
A report prepared by a former Manhattan prosecutor concluded that her doctor had purposely cut her nutrition and hastened her death with a morphine overdose. The Los Angeles Police Department opened an inquiry, but no criminal charges were ever filed.
Lafferty sent the cook to buy an $1,800 makeup case for the ashes, then flew the case to Duke Farms aboard a $25 million Boeing 737, placing it in the seat where Doris had always sat.
The probate of the estate became the largest and most contested will battle in New York history. Lafferty spent $60,000 on Armani clothing, purchased a $54,000 Cadillac, bought a $2.5 million mansion in Bel Air, and borrowed $825,000 from the co-executor bank at zero interest. In May 1995, a judge ordered his immediate removal as chief executor, citing his alcoholism, illiteracy, and cavalier attitude to money.
Bernard Lafferty died on November 4, 1993, just over a year after Doris Duke. The woman who had been told to trust no one had placed her entire fortune in the hands of a man who could barely write his own name.