Heffner also said that Duke confided that she thought her mother had wanted to abort her. Chandi sued Dukes estate and wound up inheriting $65 million. Also at Duke Farms, she constructed a series of 11 greenhouses containing elaborate recreations of English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and other gardens, which she opened to the public. ", Heffner wryly noted that Bernard Lafferty, accompanied by a bodyguard and chauffeur, had sat through her depositions wearing a five-carat-diamond earring, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond watch. On October 6, it was announced that Duke had made a donation of $1 million to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. 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. Duke." He is also the writer and co-producer of "Only the Strong Survive," a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals, directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. This gives her the air of philanthropy. Her Newport artist pal Richard Banks said that that summer "Doris decided to do the whole social thing and she loved it. ", Duke had a passion for the performing arts all her life. . and as we were leaving they exchanged telephone numbers. "She told me she was bored silly, and the palace was so froufrou. That's not the Doris I knew. 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. She told me that in the months prior to her fall from grace one of Duke's doctors was injecting her with steroids, for knee problems, and that the psychological side effects of "the substance enabled the other people to talk her into whatever they wanted. ", She had already been planning to divorce Cromwell, but he apparently demanded a $7 million settlement. 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. Warmer storms could cause problems, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, Hyundai was poised to become Teslas top contender. The agreement removed the heiresss former butler, Bernard Lafferty, as co-executor of the estate in return for $4.5 million and $500,000 a year for life. ", Almost every friend of Duke's I talked to, including her many homosexual friends, told me that she had always been an avid heterosexual. It will be wonderful.' The circumstances of Dukes death remain under investigation. (Duke had a similar fascination with spiritualism: she gave $100,000 to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 60s; fell under the spell of Norbu Chen, a pseudo-Tibetan lama, in the 70s; and left $500,000 to the Self-Realization Fellowship.). "He wanted a settlement," says Nancy Cooke de Herrera, "but you could not get a nickel out of Doris if you came at her the wrong way." Born Today Most Popular Celebs Most Popular Celebs Celebrity News. 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. Duke turned up at the Ritz in Paris that October walking with a cane. Meanwhile, Heffner is holed up on her Hawaiian ranch. She really had a feeling for him, and expressed annoyance with Imelda. She clapped her hands in glee. Shes the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz. She was contemplating having knee replacements. The two women developed a deep bond almost instantly. Heffner has a sister named Charlene Gail Heffner aka Chandi Duke Heffner. She was having a real whirl." You felt that she was going to break. . Lafferty has released few details about Duke's final illness. I suppose it was Doris's fault for never talking about what she did.". These are just some of the accusations, strange rumors, and conspiracy theories that I heard concerning the last years of Doris Duke's life: Her estate is really worth at least $2 billion. 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. In Newport, she loved going to the jazz festival, and then one would sometimes have dinner in that huge house with the ferocious dogs snarling behind the gates. Movies. I almost feel . And he had quite a history. ", Like many of her friends, Protas is unclear about when Duke went into the hospital for the operations on her knees, or when she came out. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. ", Thomas Rybak maintains, "I personally believe that Chandi was pushed out by Bernard. Keep in mind, people are entitled to a change of heart. We don't hear anything. LOS ANGELES (AP) _ An ex-Marine sued the adopted daughter of late tobacco heiress Doris Duke for $33 million in palimony, claiming he gave up three years of his life to encourage her friendship with Duke. In the last year of Duke's life, Bernard Lafferty persuaded her to drop her physician of 12 years, her accountant, her bankers, and the lawyer who drew up her next-to-last will. We would be four, six, eightOatsie Charles, Nuala Pell, Minnie Cushing, Lita McBean and her husband, and Sunny and me. Chandi Heffner Duke passed away on 1940. 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. And so I decidedthe biggest mistake of my 41 yearsto give this son of a bitch a second chance . Despite the negative publicity, she fought her husband in the courts for five years, until he gave in. She got right up like a trouper and fell right down again. So did Imelda. Imelda stayed for a week, I think. Of course, many of the sources for these allegations are people who were left out of the will, or cut out of the will, or people who hope to eventually receive grants from the Duke foundations. Through shrewd investments and her legendary parsimony, she managed to more than triple her holdings. "She moved very well for that kind of dancingwe called it Middle Eastern, or danse orientale, but essentially it's belly dancing. Duke died at age 80 in 1988, leaving a hotly contested $1.5 billion estate. According to a frequent guest at Duke's various houses, Duke became more and more upset with Burns: "Doris told me that James started to strut around the place as if he was Mr. If anyone has news on Chandi from the far reaches of Hawaii, drop us a line at showbiz411@gmail.com. The Untold Truth of Stephen Hawking's Son - Ti. In 1945, Duke began a short-lived career as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service, reporting from different cities across the war-ravaged Europe. Heffner spent almost six months on and off in two Honolulu hospitals, because she also developed a heart problem. She never married again, and from then on the men in her life, whether they were lovers or not, were considerably younger and came from the creative world. ", By the time Duke returned to Shangri La that fall, she and Heffner were getting together on an almost daily basis, and when it was time to move back to Duke Farms in the spring of 1985, she invited Heffner to go with her. There was a little alcove under the stairs, and the food would be nice but ordinary. . 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. Wait til the Beckhams Meet the Parents: Nicola Peltzs Aunt Inherited $65 Mil from Doris Duke in Infamous Adoption, Movie Release August Schedule for "Tenet," "Mulan" Will Be Scuttled as Gov. I asked Doris and she said, 'Yeah, it's fine.' Around Christmas, Duke rented a house in Honolulu for Martha Graham and Ron Protas. "We kept it to ourselves for months, until around July 1990. . According to Robert Farrah, the director of the Ibrahim Farrah company, for several months in the late 60s she took private belly-dancing classes with him every morning for two hours in New York and then flew from LaGuardia to Detroit, where she had rented a motel room near the airport and installed a piano for her afternoon singing lessons with Aretha Franklin's father. In May, a New York judge approved a plan to send the bulk of her estate to charity. "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. "Doris was seeing a Japanese therapist for her knee problems . "No cane. . One afternoon in February, the architect John Warnecke went to Shangri La for tea. She grew up near Towson, an upper-middle-class suburb of Baltimore, and graduated from Notre Dame Prep, a private Catholic girls' school, in 1971. Years ago, she was talking about the things we all talk about nowthe environment, battered women and children, animal rights. Do you think you could help him out?' She was like a flower child, even though the era was over. I called the California home and the other sites many times. John Warnecke was told by Johnny Gomez, Duke's elderly caretaker in Honolulu, that "she was so full of beans, she decided to have both knees done at one time, and one knee got infected and she had to have another operation. ", Heffner denies that she had had any previous association with Imelda Marcos. But she had a dramatic change in her lifeand it was weird. Once a day, she meditates in her "deity room," which is filled with golden statues from India. . According to a half-page biography released by Howard J. Rubenstein Associates, Bernard Lafferty was born in Ireland in 1945 and immigrated to the United States more than 20 years ago. We'll have a great life together. The following February, Farrah repeated the seminar, and it was apparently then that Chandi Heffner entered Doris Duke's life. "Chandi loved animals. 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. Lee told me, "Ten or 15 years ago, I went to sing in the Versailles Room at the old Bellevue, and Bernard was the manager of the room, and we became friends. He had been recommended by Ron Oldenburg, a Honolulu lawyer who handled immigration matters for the employees of both Doris Duke and Imelda Marcos, and hired as a bodyguard for Heffner when she was hospitalized for severe sinusitis in February 1989. It was 1982, and Heffner was taking a class at Farrah's studio near Times Square. Talent. She has also been involved in equestrian sports and was the owner of the horse Authentic, whose rider took home the Gold Medal in show jumping for Team USA at the 2004 Athens Olympics. . He was going to A. His movie reviews are carried by Rotten Tomatoes, and he is a member of both the movie and TV branches of the Critics Choice Awards. She started taking piano lessons before she went to school, had pianos in every one of her houses as well as in the black lacquered living room of her Park Avenue penthouse, and played every afternoon. I remember her referring to 'we dancers.' So we let him start, and we had problems with the alcohol and did our best to put him in a situation where he dried out. This went on almost every meal. Then the U.S. government blindsided it, Column: Uber and Lyfts deactivation policy is dehumanizing and unfair. Community. . . . Nelson Seabra told me, "A very close friend of Doris's said that she committed suicide. After Bloom was fired, Protas was told the loan was being reviewed. She was a cool lady. And when she left, that adverse thing ceased. "It was strange. Then she became pregnant and had a premature daughter named Arden, who lived only 24 hours. Doris Duke met Chandi Heffner in 1985 and felt a strong maternal connection to Her. . "I don't think you're supposed to use alcohol with steroids, and she was drinking sherry in the evenings." . "It was really sad," Heffner said, "because Martha arrived and Doris wouldn't go see her. The power that this will gives Bernard Lafferty is "awesome," says one attorney. We used to sit in the sunroom with these tiny bits of broken porcelain and she'd say, 'It's got to be fixed, and I can do it better than most people.' Duke's Los Angeles decorator Tony Duquette adds, "He was just marvelous to Doris, and not at all sinister. ", "Doris wanted the things money couldn't buy. Last year she gave. While Lafferty was hospitalized, Rybak says, "Doris said to me, 'Tom, we are going to leave this up to you. As the organization grew, she set up a program exclusively focused on serving people in rural communities where money, jobs, health care, and education are scarce. "We discussed cremation, and she said, 'Never, never, ever let anyone cremate me.' In any case, their friendship ended in tragedy that October, when Duke ran him over as he was opening the gate of Rough Point. She had just been through three days of depositions in New Jersey, where her lawsuit was filed, and had two more days to go before she could fly back to Hawaii, where she lives on an isolated 300-acre horse ranch, which Duke had bought for her on the Big Island for about $1.5 million before their rupture, and where she keeps a loaded pistol beside her bed. But she got up again, and we did our steps. She did not directly accuse Lafferty of turning Duke against her. But by the following summer she was noticeably declining again. Heffner paints a sedate portrait of their life together, with Doris retiring to her music room, Chandi dealing with the employees and both women sharing vegetarian dinners. His family all died, and he had one remaining relative, in Philadelphia. After Heffner returned to Hawaii, she kept in touch with Farrah and Saretta, and in February 1983 helped them organize a Middle Eastern dance seminar in Honolulu. The 1987 will had designated Heffner executor. She formally adopted Heffner in 1988. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. Heffner said that she had asked for them almost as a joke, and that Duke was laughing when the agent for the ownerrumored to be Adnan Khashoggi or a Kuwaiti sheikhcalled back and agreed. (Other sources say the meeting took place in 1985.) Call your pilot tonight and leave immediately and go to Los Angeles and get checked up.' Toward the end of the summer, in Newport, Heffner told Duke that she had to return to Hawaii, because she was concerned about her horses and dogs, and had planned a trip to Bali with Gordon Damon. ", Robert Farrah agrees: "Doris Duke was not this elusive reclusive. We wouldn't sit in the main dining room. Demopoulos said that Duke had mentioned her suspicions that she was being poisoned. ", Sometimes, Robert Farrah recalls, "Doris would throw up her hands and say, 'No wills! Like Heffner, Amar quickly became involved in the running of Duke's houses, business affairs, and charities. A dedicated philanthropist, Chandi Heffner is the founder and President of CDHIFI a charitable foundation that sponsors medical, veterinary and humanitarian assistance to rural regions around the . Banks never saw her again. She wasn't Barbara Hutton," says Marina Cicogna, who was a friend of both heiresses. . I tried to see her the following week when I was in California, and there were about a dozen times since then that I called when I made trips to California, where I would simply get a response on the other end of the line that was: 'Miss Duke is doing well. I was constantly arguing with Bernard . Duke may have been infatuated, but friends of Tirella's told me that he was unabashedly gay. 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