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, and the firm had revolutionized the cigarette industry by introducing paper rolling and chemically manipulating tobacco ingredients. By the end of the nineteenth century, the company was selling roughly ninety percent of all cigarettes smoked in the United States. The Dukes became one of the wealthiest families in America, and James Duke poured enormous sums into philanthropy, most notably Trinity College in North Carolina, which was renamed Duke University in recognition of his support.
Doris grew up on Duke Farms, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. When her father died in 1925, she effectively inherited the bulk of his fortune, valued at that time at upwards of one hundred million dollars, a sum exceeding one billion dollars in today’s terms. Because of her youth, the inheritance was structured so that she would gain control of the estate in stages as she moved through her twenties. She came of age just as the United States plunged into the Great Depression following the Wall Street crash in the autumn of 1929.
In the early 1930s, lavish debutante parties hosted for Doris and her contemporary Barbara Hutton, the heiress to the Woolworth fortune, drew both fascination and criticism from the American press. The two young women were nicknamed the Gold Dust Twins, and each was labeled the richest girl in the world or the poor little rich girl. In 1935, at the age of twenty-two, Doris stunned the press and her social circle by marrying Jimmy Cromwell, an aspiring politician sixteen years her senior. Cromwell came from a wealthy background, though considerably less affluent than hers, and he began using Doris’s fortune to advance his political ambitions.
After a two-year honeymoon around the world, the couple settled briefly in Hawaii, where they built a mansion they called 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 left for Hawaii. That summer, their first child was born prematurely in Honolulu and died the following day. The couple gradually drifted apart and divorced in 1943. The death of her child and the collapse of her marriage pushed Doris toward a more tragic path.
News that complications from her 1940 pregnancy had made it almost certain she could never have more children compounded her grief. She responded by consulting fortune tellers and others she believed could help her commune with her dead daughter. More worrying was her growing reliance on alcohol and prescription drugs, including opiates. In 1947, Doris married for the second and last time.
Her husband was Porfirio Rubirosa, a diplomat and playboy from the Dominican Republic. The union caused considerable controversy, and the U. S. State Department warned Doris about allowing Rubirosa to use her immense wealth for his own political purposes.
Despite that warning, she gave him large sums of money. Both were seemingly unfaithful, and the marriage ended in 1951, with Rubirosa receiving a huge financial settlement that bizarrely included a converted B-25 bomber plane. Doris never married again, but continued to attract public attention through rumors of affairs with the actor Errol Flynn and the jazz pianist Joe Castro. One of the most unusual rumors claimed she had briefly been involved with General George Patton during the Second World War, though Patton was nearly thirty years older than her and the story seems unlikely.
Her philanthropic work, however, is a matter of concrete public record. Between the 1940s and the 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. Her horticultural efforts concentrated on Duke Farms, where she had grown up.
In the late 1950s, she began developing Duke Gardens, 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 there herself. She also cultivated friendships with leading figures in the field, including Louis Bromfield, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his novel Early Autumn. With funding from Doris, Bromfield established Malabar Farm in Mansfield, Ohio, an experimental horticulture site on nearly one thousand acres.
She also wrote for a time, and in 1945 briefly served as a journalist in Europe at the end of the Second World War with the International News Service. As she aged, however, she became more eccentric, her mind began to deteriorate, and her writing efforts trailed off. By the 1960s, Doris had acquired several homes across America in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, and Hawaii. Many staff members managed and maintained these large estates.
One of them was Eduardo Tirella, a curator of Doris’s significant art holdings. Tirella had worked for her for years, but in 1966 he was determined to pursue a career in production design in Hollywood. On the evening of October 6, 1966, Tirella went to tell Doris about his decision at her house at Rough Point in Newport, Rhode Island. The two ended up in a heated argument.
They then got into a rented car to drive back up to the house. When they reached the gates of the mansion, Tirella exited the car and went to open them. He had left the engine running. As he did so, Doris got out of the passenger seat and sat in the driver’s seat.
She later testified that she intended only to move the car forward to collect Tirella once he had opened the gates, but that she accidentally hit the accelerator. The evidence at the site was not consistent with that explanation. In the moments that followed, the car crashed into Tirella, smashing him between the vehicle and the gate. He died shortly afterwards from his injuries.
The Tirella family sued Doris for wrongful death, and a settlement of approximately seventy-five thousand dollars was reached, an amount equal to about half a million dollars today. The investigation remained pending for several years. Doris, who was quite probably intoxicated on the evening in question, eventually avoided further punishment or criminal charges through bribes and by providing large amounts of public funding to the Newport town council and other local charities. Her reputation in Newport high society never fully recovered after the Tirella incident.
In the 1970s and 1980s, she became increasingly reclusive, and her already considerable alcohol and drug use grew worse. Towards the end of her seventies, her medical advisors convinced her to undergo a series of operations. Some were necessary measures such as a knee replacement, while others, including a facelift, were purely cosmetic. The knee replacement, though routine today, was still difficult in the early 1990s and was botched in Doris’s case, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
During this post-operative period, increasingly frail and disoriented, Doris 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 purpose. Months later, Doris experienced a bout of choking on her food, and Lafferty refused to call an ambulance. Just weeks after a few trips in and out of the hospital, and while medicated on huge 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. Contention arose immediately over her estate, valued at 1. 3 billion dollars. Lawyers representing various parties accused Lafferty of having manipulated Doris into altering her will in her last months, even as she was increasingly unsure of her own actions.
Eventually, the California courts intervened and decided that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation would receive a very large proportion of the estate. Lafferty still received a one-off 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 Doris had been murdered or died from complications related to her medical conditions. In 2020, the investigative journalist Peter Lance produced a new report on the circumstances surrounding the death of Eduardo Tirella in 1966. After a fresh assessment of all the evidence, he concluded that Doris had not only purposefully run into Tirella with the car while he was opening the gate, but that she had run him over a second time after he was on the ground.
The official reports, he found, had been doctored, or parts of them had been removed from what was made available to the Tirella family.