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- Doris Duke, 80, Heiress Whose Great Wealth Couldn't Buy Happiness, Is Dead
By ERIC PACE
Published: October 29, 1993
Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress and philanthropist whose bittersweet life was woven of luxury, disputes and interludes of deep unhappiness, died yesterday at her house in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 80 and had her main residence in Somerset County, N.J. She also had homes on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, in Newport, R.I., and Hawaii.
The cause was progressive pulmonary edema resulting in cardiac arrest, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for Bernard Lafferty, a friend and adviser to Miss Duke who was with her at her death.
Her manifold interests as a philanthropist ranged from animal rights to AIDS, historical preservation to orchids. By some accounts she was an astute manager of her assets, and a person familiar with her affairs said that she had left nearly all her estate of more than $1 billion to charity.
Late one evening in Rome in 1945, Miss Duke, who was then 33 years old, told a friend that her vast fortune was in some ways a barrier to happiness.
"All that money is a problem sometimes," Miss Duke told her companion, a young American journalist, over a glass of wine at the Hassler Hotel. "It happens every time. After I've gone out with a man a few times, he starts to tell me how much he loves me. But how can I know if he really means it? How can I ever be sure?" An Inheritance With a Double Edge
At that stage of her life, Miss Duke, then between marriages and working as a foreign correspondent based in Rome, was known and liked by other American expatriates for her friendly, unassuming ways, her warmth, and her love of jazz and ballroom dancing. But her words that night showed that her life had been profoundly affected, even scarred, by her wealth.
Miss Duke was not only rich; she was also thought for years to be the richest woman in the world. And she had that reputation during the Depression, when her wealth stood out in especially stark contrast to widespread poverty and suffering. As a result, she was always a celebrity, and one who literally stood out, standing six feet one inch tall.
Her millions, and the elegant life they made possible, seemed to be of great importance to her two husbands, James H. R. Cromwell, an American sportsman and advertising man, and Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican playboy and diplomat. She divorced them both.
The Duke millions also attracted cranks and photographers and ordinary curious people, and to avoid them Miss Duke lived a partly secluded life in her later years. In recent years, she traveled extensively and spent much time in Somerville, Newport, Hawaii and Beverly Hills. A Generous Giver With Many Interests
Her many philanthropic activities included paying for the restoration of numerous old buildings in Newport. She also established the Duke Gardens Foundation at Somerville in 1958. The Duke Gardens' trellised greenhouses, open to the public part of each year, contain French, English, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Islamic gardens and a collection of rare orchids.
As a philanthropist, Miss Duke was also active in support of environmental causes and animal rights. This year she contributed $2 million for AIDS research at Duke University in Durham, N.C., which was named for her family, and $1 million to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.
In addition, she was the president of the Doris Duke Foundation, based in Somerville, whose areas of interest have ranged from social and health services to cultural programs. The foundation reported $775,000 in charitable contributions in the 1992 fiscal year.
The president of Duke University, Nannerl O. Keohane, said yesterday, in a statement released by the university, that Miss Duke's "recent gift in support of AIDS research at Duke is but one of many programs here that she supported, from our Primate Center to other programs across the campus." She added: "Many of her gifts were made anonymously."
A spokesman for the university, John F. Burness, declined to say what, if anything, it might receive from Miss Duke's estate.
In an act of personal generosity in 1988 that involved an old friend, Miss Duke posted $5 million bail for Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos, who died in 1989. Mrs. Marcos had been indicted in New York on Federal racketeering charges.
At various times, Miss Duke's millions, and the publicity they generated, also helped to draw her into lawsuits and disputes, including tax litigation in New Jersey, the site of her 2,700-acre estate, Duke Farms. In 1964, she took legal action in Hawaii to obtain a court order forbidding a jazz musician, Joseph Castro, from maintaining, as had been rumored, that he was her husband. A Bomber for Travel And Clean Kitchens
Her fortune also made possible many pleasures, large and small. She once bought a B-25 bomber and had it refurbished for luxury travel. She had her Hawaii house fixed up with ceiling-high goldfish tanks.
She entertained gracefully there and at her various other residences and tried to put shy guests at their ease. As a hostess, she was calm, quiet and a little shy herself, friends said, although she was sometimes angered by sloppiness in the kitchen, as in other realms.
Miss Duke liked fine porcelain and jewels and enjoyed building her jewelry collection, which included notable Indian pieces and heirlooms from her mother. She liked to bake, and friends said her whole-wheat bread was delicious. She enjoyed relaxing, now and then, with a glass of white wine or a spot of Champagne.
Nonetheless, Miss Duke seemed to experience more than her share of unhappiness. Beyond the two divorces, there was the death of her father, the multimillionaire James Buchanan Duke, in 1925, when she was 12 years old. In July 1940, her premature daughter, her only child, died in a Honolulu hospital after only 24 hours of life.
And in 1966 there was the accidental death of Eduardo Tirella, an interior decorator who was a close friend, when the car she was driving slammed him against a gate on Rough Point, the Newport estate. Fenced with barbed wire and guarded, Rough Point was part of her inheritance from her father, known as Buck, who was president of the American Tobacco Company and had other extensive business interests. A Father's Fortune And a Young Heir
What made Miss Duke so enormously rich was the fact that she was his only child. She was born in Manhattan on Nov. 22, 1912, to his second wife, Nanaline Lee Holt Inman Duke.
Miss Duke, a shy, golden-haired child, had private tutors and for a time attended the Brearley School in Manhattan, where her father had built a three-story, 54-room mansion on the northeast corner of 78th Street and Fifth Avenue. The building now houses the Fine Arts Institute of New York University.
When Mr. Duke died, his total estate was valued at more than $100 million. His daughter's share of the estate was appraised in 1927 at more than $50 million, most of it in trust funds.
As a teen-ager and a young woman, Miss Duke spent much of her time at the 78th Street mansion, to which she sometimes referred jauntily in later years as "the rock pile." She took piano lessons, was tutored in French and Italian, went out to dinner at fashionable restaurants, and frequently went to the theater, although to avoid crowds she did not go to opening nights.
She also acquired a love of travel that was to stay with her through her life.
Miss Duke, who was known to some as Dee-Dee, was guarded by private detectives and sometimes traveled under an assumed name. "It saves trouble," she once said, "and keeps people from paying more attention to me than to anyone else."
Nevertheless, she was continually harassed by cranks, and there was some fear that she might be kidnapped.
Her half-brother, Walker Patterson Inman, who often traveled with her, once said: "Everywhere we go, it's the same. She gets to see a few of the sights, goes out to dinner a few times, and then her identity becomes known and we have to rush off somewhere else. We can't take any chances. When word gets out that she's in town, it's like telling gangsters: 'Here's a lot of money. Come and get it.' "
"But that's not the worst of it," he added. "Mail comes in by the bagful, and every crank in town wants to see her. Every imaginable plea for money comes by mail, to say nothing of threats against her because she's supposed to have so much money."
In hopes of seeing her, reporters gathered outside the 78th Street mansion on the evening of Nov. 21, 1933, but she eluded them and slipped out for a quiet dinner with friends. What made that night newsworthy, it was reported at the time, was that at the stroke of midnight, when she turned 21, she acquired control of one-third of the assets that had been held in trust for her.
Although no precise figures were released, it was estimated that the total value of her inheritance had shrunk by then, because of the financial crash and the Depression, to roughly $30 million. As stipulated in her father's will, Miss Duke acquired control over additional large parts of her inheritance on her 25th and 30th birthdays. Tobacco Queen As Married Woman
Soon after turning 21, Miss Duke began being seen in the company of a dashing, strong-jawed older man. It was James Cromwell, the son and grandson of prominent yachtsmen and the stepson of a partner in the banking house of J. P. Morgan & Company.
Mr. Cromwell and Miss Duke had first met in 1929 in Bar Harbor, Me., when she was a long-legged teen-ager and he was already 10 years out of the University of Pennsylvania.
Rumors of an engagement blossomed, were denied, blossomed again. And then, with little advance notice, the couple were married in a civil ceremony on Feb. 13, 1935, in the 78th Street house. The bride was 22, the groom 38. They sailed off on a prolonged honeymoon.
Visiting Agra, the Indian city that is the site of the Taj Mahal, the bride told a a questioner happily, "I'm a married woman now," and remarked that she did not like it when people called her "the world's richest girl" and "the tobacco queen."
"Tobacco queen -- what a name!" she said.
Back in the United States, the Cromwells set up housekeeping in ducal style at Duke Farms, with its 30-room stone manor house, its private movie theater (she loved movies) and 42 miles of private roads. For a change of scene, they built an elegant vacation house on the coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
As time passed, relations between the Cromwells soured, and after protracted legal wranglings Mrs. Cromwell was granted a divorce in Reno in 1943 on grounds of cruelty. She resumed the use of her maiden name. Later, she testified that Mr. Cromwell had demanded an "endowment" of $7 million in return for the divorce. Learning to Work And Enjoying It
In 1944, Miss Duke went to Egypt to help the United States war effort by working, for $1 a year, for the United Seaman's Service, which operated canteens for American merchant seamen.
"I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do something real to help in this war," she said at the time. "This may sound funny, but I honestly believe I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life. I feel I'm doing something worthwhile, earning the right to be friends with a lot of swell, interesting people that I've somehow missed before. I've discovered, I guess, that it's fun to work."
Relishing the overseas life, she went on to Europe, where she wrote dispatches in 1945 and 1946 for International News Service, an American news agency that is now defunct, getting around Rome on a bicycle.
Miss Duke was entertaining an American couple in her Rome apartment one day when a suave and handsome Latin American came to call. He was carrying a guitar, which he was to play while she accompanied him on the piano. It was Porfirio Rubirosa, the high-spirited Dominican society figure.
The harmony beween Mr. Rubirosa and Miss Duke proved so compelling that they were married on Sept. 1, 1947, in a civil ceremony at the Dominican Consulate in Paris, where she had gone to work for Harper's Bazaar magazine. He was 39; she was 34. By some accounts the formalities included the bridegroom's signing a legal document that affirmed the bride's control over her fortune.
They spent their honeymoon at Cap d'Antibes, on the French Riviera, where they swam, sunbathed and went motorboating. Not long afterward, he became the Dominican Republic's Ambassador in Buenos Aires.
Despite his charm, the marriage foundered. Miss Duke obtained a Reno divorce from Rubirosa on Oct. 27, 1948, after charging him with extreme mental cruelty.
As time went on it became clear that Miss Duke preferred to remain single. The life she fashioned for herself was largely centered on her estates, and it involved some frivolity and some high seriousness, along with much unobtrusive travel.
It included both new and old interests. She served as a trustee of Duke University, which her family had built up with donations of many millions, and in her later years she became fascinated by the search for alternative sources of energy. Cultivating Gardens And Saving History
At Duke Farms, she laid out a series of interconnected, glassed-in gardens, totaling thousands of square yards, that were opened to the public in 1964 after much labor by her and her workers.
"Sometimes when we're hanging the flowers I spend 16 hours a day," she once told a friend, adding cheerfully, "I work like a stevedore."
She also had a small museum set up on the New Jersey estate to house her collection of Asian art.
Over the years, Miss Duke and the foundation that bore her name made contributions to many other causes, ranging from the advancement of Russian studies at Princeton University to architectural restoration in Newport. She poured millions into the Preservation Society of Newport County, whose mission was to reclaim the city's rundown 18th-century buildings.
The project was welcomed by many Newporters because, among other reasons, it enhanced property values. They were careful to respect Miss Duke's desire for quiet and privacy, and some came to refer to her, almost reverentially, as "the lady."
In 1988, when she was 75, Miss Duke adopted Charlene Gail Heffner, then 35, a former adherent of the Hare Krishna religious group. But by February 1991, Ms. Heffner, known as Chandi, had become persona non grata at Miss Duke's residences, according to an unauthorized biography of Miss Duke, "The Richest Girl in the World" (Putnam, 1992), by Stephanie Mansfield. The author wrote that Miss Duke told a friend later that adopting Ms. Heffner had been "the greatest mistake I ever made."
Later, Ms. Heffner sued Miss Duke for breach of contract. This month, a New Jersey judge ruled against lawyers for Miss Duke, who had sought to have the suit dismissed.
Miss Heffner survives, as does Miss Duke's nephew, Walker Inman Jr. of Georgetown, S.C., and several cousins.
Photos: Doris Duke (Associated Press, 1975); Miss Duke placing cement on the cornerstone of Duke University in Durham, N.C. in 1929. (Associated Press)
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1912 - 1993 (80 years)
