Heffner spent almost six months on and off in two Honolulu hospitals, because she also developed a heart problem. (We covered the story in Fame magazine in 1990, and New York magazine did it again in 1993.). I've talked to bankers who said she knew where every last nickel was. 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. So did Imelda. ", "I'm crazy about Bernard," says Oatsie Charles. The billionaire believed that Chandi was the reincarnation of her dead kid. 'Doris Duke really was the last Chinese empress, the last of a type that doesn't exist anymore. '", Heffner dismissed such charges, and also told me that one day during the "steroid" period Duke had called her into her bedroom and said, "I think somebody is putting poison in my food. But she had a dramatic change in her lifeand it was weird. As a young girl, she wrote him love notes, which he pored over again and again. 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. And the whispers about Duke's last years continue. She was very intelligent and very together. Who can help student-athletes cash in? Miss Duke, 75, adopted Chandi Hefner, who owns extensive property in Hawaii, and has been living with her for three years, attorney Donald A. Robinson said. '", In 1947 she married again, but handed the groom a prenuptial agreement at the altar. Irwin Bloom had made the arrangements and then Duke called Protas from Los Angeles and joked, ''For God's sake, try to pay it back," Protas recalled. They talked constantly, and Nelson and Claudia used to go to lunches quite often with Chandi and Doris. In court papers, Heffner -- a Baltimore native -- says the two women met in Hawaii in 1981. After a two-week rejuvenation cure in Romania with the controversial Dr. Anna Aslan, they stopped in London. Mahn soon left, and in 1987 co-authored Daddy's Duchess: The Unauthorized Biography of Doris Duke. . Another time, at a college in upstate New York, Bobby [Farrah] didn't have her dancehe had her completely veiled, and she sat on the stage and played finger cymbals. We used to joke that she'd outlive me. . ") "She's an unusually intelligent person: perceptive, articulate, well-read, culturally alive. Woody Brock, who visited her with Oatsie Charles that summer, says, "It must have been 85 degrees outside, and she had on a white sweater and a roaring fire in every room. Nelson Seabra told me, "A very close friend of Doris's said that she committed suicide. ", "When one of Doris's love affairs ended, there was always great drama," says her friend Consuelo Crespi. Heffner was in New York for a week, visiting her sister Claudia, who had married Nelson Peltz in 1980. ", After Thanksgiving, as she had for five decades, Duke left for Hawaii. Do you think you could help him out?' Today, the museum features objects, furniture, and art selected, arranged, and used by Doris to make Rough Point a home. And Doris said, 'How about the one next to you?' Peggy Lee told me that she had spoken to Duke on the phone several times in her last months, and that Duke had made a donation to an AIDS charity that Lee is involved with. . Lafferty served. After Tirella's death, she seemed consumed with the idea of actually becoming a performer. Chandi sued Duke's estate. After Bloom was fired, Protas was told the loan was being reviewed. Doris bought her a sprawling horse farm worth then 30 years ago over a million bucks. Chandi Duke Heffner, Self: Oh My God. Most of Duke's friends hadn't had an inkling. "I don't think you're supposed to use alcohol with steroids, and she was drinking sherry in the evenings." She was having a real whirl." The legal challenges flooded in, in a queue headed by Chandi Heffner (a grown woman adopted, then disowned, by Duke), a doctor named as executor in a previous will and three former Duke servants. ", 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. The gate had obviously been left open. Her telephone was not listed in the Los Angeles area. 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. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. And I was surprised. "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. She had episodes of pneumonia, she had clots in her veins, and some of those clots may have traveled to her lungs. Brooklyn Beckham, whos 21, has announced hes marrying Nicola Peltz, 25. Column: 15 minutes of fame flies by. Contrary to Heffner's version of events, he told me that he had prescribed anabolic steroids for Duke for her knee problems in late 1989 or early 1990. I think she did it to make James jealous. This is a short video of an imaginary conversation between tobacco heiress Doris Duke and her adopted daughter Chandi Heffner, whom she met in a dance class . sometimes I can't believe it's real. So I fixed another tray and brought it upstairs. . He also hoped she would finance his 1940 campaign for U.S. senator from New Jersey; instead, she helped ruin his political career by snubbing Eleanor Roosevelt and putting private detectives on him to collect evidence of his extramarital affairs. The court also gave Doris title to the Fifth Avenue house, which she gave to New York University in 1957, and Rough Point, a huge Vanderbilt "cottage" in Newport. ", Donald Robinson, who represented Duke in the Marcos matter, recalls going out to Duke Farms after Imelda Marcos posted bail in New York: "The group was Imelda and her lawyer, one of her daughters, Franco Rossellini, his friend Enzo Natale, Chandi, and Doris. . . We would hear it, and we would just joke about it. It will be wonderful.' She formally adopted Heffner in 1988. Heffner Duke, adopted in 1988 when she was 38 and the heiress was in her 70s, could not be reached for comment. She was so distressed about losing the baby. Over the next few years, she bought almost an entire neighborhood of dilapidated 17th- and 18th-century houses, restored them, and rented them to town residents. "She out-Leona Helmsleyed Leona Helmsley," Duffy said of Heffner. In an April 1992 codicil, she replaced them with her nephew, Walker Inman Jr., and Bernard Lafferty, and in a March 1993 codicil she made Bernard Lafferty her sole executor. I thought she'd live to 90 or 100. After repeated requests for an interview, I received the following statement through the New York public-relations firm representing him: "My duty to Miss Duke is to maintain her privacy even though she is gone.". He went to Sarasota High School. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. This went on almost every meal. Community. A member of Heffner's family said yesterday that it is likely Chandi Duke Heffner, who legally changed her name, will accept a settlement for several million dollars. She also lent another $5 million to Marcos to cover her legal expenses (and asked for it back in her will). He rushed to complete what was then the most expensive house on Fifth Avenue in time for her birth at home, on November 22, 1912. About Heffner's sister. And then the wine was $1,000 a bottle; it came from her father's cellars. [Chandi] is a monster. Ron Protas told me that in February or March of last year Duke agreed to guarantee a loan of $1 million for the Martha Graham Dance School. I almost feel . He also said that she had lent $600,000 for his company, Health Maintenance Programs, Inc., in 1989; the loan is to be converted into stock, according to the will. Kids get annoyed with their parents.". Denise Hale recalls meeting Eduardo Tirella on the set of The Sandpiper, which was directed by her then husband, Vincente Minnelli, and having several dinners at Falcon's Lair. I asked Doris and she said, 'Yeah, it's fine.' I remember that most: that she seemed very happy with her life at that period. As she spoke, she leaned forward like a child who is eager to please, but when she sat back and let her lawyers take over, her face lost its animation and she seemed older, harder, drained. "Chandi works very hard for Doris. Subscribers have complete access to the archive. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. In 1966, a few days after Duke suddenly shut down the record company she had started for Castro, he broke her jaw, according to Mansfield, and she fled to Newport with Eduardo Tirella, a handsome young set designer. Although polo and horse jumping are her favorite equestrian activities, Chandi Heffner currently spends the majority of her time overseeing CDHIF USA and CDHIFI. Meanwhile, Heffner is holed up on her Hawaiian ranch. Her first husband, James R. Cromwell, called Duke "my frigidheiress" and engaged in a lengthy court battle to win a financial settlement. Nanaline worshiped Society, and she disapproved of her tall, awkward, studious daughter. . Duke. Duke scoffed, "Oh, come on. In her will, Duke requested that no funeral or memorial service be held for her. Virtually inseparable, the two women shuttled back and forth between Duke Farms, Duke's Newport estate "Rough Point" and her palatial Indo-Persian "Shangri-La" in the exclusive Diamond Head section of Oahu. In 1925, at the age of 13, she inherited an estimated $100 million in trusts from her father, James Buchanan Duke, a coarse but brilliant self-made man who founded the American Tobacco Company and the Duke Power Company, and who endowed Trinity College in North Carolina with millions, reportedly on the condition it change its name to Duke University. Her lawyer, David Keyko, said yesterday that in. His paternal grandparents were Polish Jewish immigrants. ", Glenn Scott Greenhouse, the president of the Pavillion Agency, confirmed that Lafferty's drinking became an issue at the Peltzes'. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. . "He was marvelous," says Claus von Blow, who later became Duke's neighbor in Newport. . Heffner also said that as next of kin she would have requested an autopsy, but she was never officially notified of Duke's death, and by the time she learned of the cremation, it was too late. ", The day after the adoption, the economist Woody Brock went to lunch at Duke Farms with Duke's New Jersey neighbor Jane Engelhard. When he died in a car crash in 1965, she took to her bed for two days. Although Duke was determined to produce his own heir, Nanaline was as surprised as everyone else when she became pregnant at the age of 42, and she always favored her son, Walker Inman, over Doris. . (Burns dismisses reports that he was once a Chippendales dancer: "Not that I haven't been asked. "He was doing a lot of embroidery work for Doris. Heffner claims she gave up her own life to immerse herself in being a companion to the eccentric Duke: helping to manage the Duke Farms dairy, advising her on financial matters, overseeing her "disorganized and run-down estates," selling gold deposits from her myriad Swiss bank accounts and hiring a bodyguard to protect her from kidnappers. . 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. 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