Doris Duke
Doris Duke was an American billionaire tobacco heiress, philanthropist, and socialite. She was often called "the richest girl in the world". Her great wealth, luxurious lifestyle, and love life attracted significant press coverage, both during her life and after her death.
Duke's passions varied wildly. Briefly a news correspondent in the 1940s, she also played jazz piano and learned to surf competitively. At her father's estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, she created one of the largest indoor botanical displays in the United States. She was also active in preserving more than 80 historic buildings in Newport, Rhode Island. Duke was close friends with former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 1968, Duke created the Newport Restoration Foundation, and Kennedy Onassis was appointed the vice president and championed the foundation.
Her philanthropic work in AIDS research, medicine, and child welfare continued into her old age. She also donated funds to support and educate black students in the American South who were disadvantaged because of racism. Her estimated billion fortune was largely left to charity. Duke's legacy is now administered by the trustees of the Doris Duke Foundation, dedicated to medical research, prevention of cruelty to children and animals, the performing arts, wildlife, and ecology.
Early life
Duke was born in New York City, the only child of tobacco and hydroelectric power tycoon James Buchanan Duke and his second wife, Nanaline Holt Inman, widow of William Patterson Inman. At his death in 1925, the elder Duke's will bequeathed the majority of his estate to his wife and daughter, along with $17 million in two separate clauses of the will to The Duke Endowment he had created in 1924. The total value of the estate was estimated from $60 - $100 million, the majority derived from J. B. Duke's holdings in the American Tobacco Company, the precursor of the Duke Power Company.Duke spent her early childhood at Duke Farms, her father's estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. Due to ambiguity in James Duke's will, a lawsuit was filed in 1927 to prevent auctions and outright sales of real estate he had owned; in effect, Doris Duke successfully sued her mother and other executors to prevent the sales. One of the pieces of real estate in question was a Manhattan mansion at 1 East 78th Street which later became the home of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Adult life
When she turned 18, in 1930, the tall Duke was presented to society as a debutante, at a ball at Rough Point, the family residence in Newport, Rhode Island. She received large bequests from her father's will when she turned 21, 25, and 30; she was sometimes referred to as the "world's richest girl". Her mother died in 1962, leaving her jewelry, a coat, and an additional $250 million.When Duke came of age, she used her wealth to pursue a variety of interests, including extensive world travel and the arts. She studied singing with Estelle Liebling, the voice teacher of Beverly Sills, in New York City. During World War II, she worked in a canteen for sailors in Egypt, taking a salary of one dollar a year. She spoke French fluently. 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. After the war, she moved to Paris and wrote for the magazine Harper's Bazaar.
While living in Hawaii, Duke became the first non-Hawaiian woman to take up competitive surfing under the tutelage of surfing champion and Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku and his brothers. A lover of animals, in particular her dogs and pet camels, Duke became a wildlife refuge supporter.
Duke's interest in horticulture led to a friendship with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientific farmer, Louis Bromfield, who operated Malabar Farm, his country home in Lucas, Ohio in Richland County. Today, his farm is part of Malabar Farm State Park, made possible by a donation from Duke that helped purchase the property after Bromfield's death. A section of woods there is dedicated to her and bears her name.
At age 46, Duke started to create Duke Gardens, an exotic public-display garden, to honor her father James Buchanan Duke. She extended new greenhouses from the Horace Trumbauer conservatory at her home in Duke Farms, New Jersey. Each of the eleven interconnected gardens was a full-scale re-creation of a garden theme, country or period, inspired by DuPont's Longwood Gardens. She designed the architectural, artistic and botanical elements of the displays based on observations from her extensive international travels. She also labored on their installation, sometimes working 16-hour days. Display construction began in 1958.
Duke had learned to play the piano at an early age; she developed a lifelong appreciation of jazz and befriended many jazz musicians. She also liked gospel music and sang in a gospel choir.
Duke cultivated an extensive art collection, principally of Islamic and Southeast Asian art. In 2014, 60 objects from her collection were displayed temporarily at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the exhibition "Doris Duke's Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art", organized by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. The collection is on public display at her former home in Honolulu, Hawaii, now the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.
Homes
Duke acquired a number of homes; her principal residence and official domicile was Duke Farms, her father's 2,700 acre estate in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. Here she created Duke Gardens, a public indoor botanical display that was among the largest in America.Duke's other residences were private during her lifetime: she spent summer weekends working on her Newport Restoration Foundation projects while staying at Rough Point, the 49-room English manor-style mansion that she inherited in Newport, Rhode Island.
Winters were spent at an estate she built in the 1930s named "Shangri La" in Honolulu, Hawaii; and at "Falcon Lair" in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles, California, once the home of Rudolph Valentino. She also maintained two apartments in Manhattan: a nine-room penthouse with a veranda at 475 Park Avenue that was later owned by journalist Cindy Adams; and another apartment near Times Square that she used exclusively as an office for the management of her financial affairs.
She purchased her own Boeing 737 and redecorated the interior of the plane to travel between homes and her trips to collect art and plants. The plane included a bedroom decorated to resemble a bedroom in a real house.
Duke was a hands-on homeowner, even climbing a three-story scaffolding to clean tile murals in the courtyard of Shangri La, and working side-by-side with her gardeners at Duke Farms.
Three of Duke's residences are currently managed by subsidiaries of the Doris Duke Foundation and allow limited public access. Duke Farms in New Jersey is managed by the Duke Farms Foundation; a video tour of the former Duke Gardens is available. Rough Point was deeded to the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1999 and opened to the public in 2000. Shangri-La is operated by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.
Death of Eduardo Tirella
In 1966, Eduardo Tirella, curator of Duke's art holdings for the previous decade, decided to leave for a career in Hollywood as a production designer. On October 6, he flew to Newport, where Duke was staying at Rough Point, to collect his belongings and let Duke know that he was leaving her employ. His friends warned him she would not take it well. The following afternoon, the estate's staff overheard the two having a loud and lengthy argument before they got into a rented Dodge Polara to leave.In Duke's account of events, she said Tirella, who had been driving, got out at the gate to open it, leaving the engine running, but with the parking brake engaged and the transmission in park. Duke moved from the passenger seat to the driver's seat in order, she said later, to drive the car forward and pick up Tirella once the gate was open. In order to do so, she released the parking brake and shifted into drive, but instead of putting her foot on the brake pedal, she hit the gas. The vehicle, she told police, pinned Tirella against the still-opening gates, knocked them over, and struck a tree. Tirella was found trapped under the car on Bellevue Avenue and was pronounced dead of serious injuries.
After a brief investigation, the Newport police ruled the death was accidental. However, re-examination of the evidence at the scene was not consistent with Duke's account. Tirella's family sued Duke for wrongful death and won $75,000. They were initially awarded a larger sum that was subsequently reduced with the aid of Duke's lawyers. In the end $ in today's dollars was divided among Tirella's eight siblings when Duke was found negligent after a trial held five years later. Later biographies and her obituaries repeated the original police finding.
In 2020, Peter Lance, a Newport native who had begun his journalism career at Newport Daily News shortly after the incident, reinvestigated the case in a Vanity Fair article. He found initially that the police file on the case and the transcripts of the wrongful death suit brought by Tirella's family were missing from archives where they would normally be kept, but was able to find some of those documents. They showed that the investigation into Duke had been cursory and compromised by conflicts of interest. Shortly before the medical examiner arrived at the hospital, for instance, Duke had hired him as her personal physician, meaning anything she told him was protected by doctor-patient privilege.
What Lance was able to find, showed that Duke's account of the incident had changed and was inconsistent with the evidence. The parking brake could not have been released the way she said she had, and all of Tirella's injuries were above his waist, which suggests he was not trapped between the car and the gates when it broke through. The deep grooves left by the Polara's rear tires in the gravel suggest considerably more acceleration than what might have resulted from an accidental depression of the gas pedal. Lance, and several other experts who reviewed the evidence, concluded that it was far more likely that Duke had deliberately run Tirella over out of rage at his decision to leave her for Hollywood. This evidence would be more consistent with Duke running Eduardo Tirella down just outside the gates. Having been flung over the hood of her car, he came to rest in the road. At that point, she proceeded to run over the stricken man, resulting in his death.
Shortly after the case was closed, Duke began making considerable philanthropic contributions to the city, including the repair of Cliff Walk around her estate, previously a source of friction between her and the city when her dogs had attacked tourists, and $10,000 to the hospital to which she had been taken the night of the accident. Within months, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, which has since renovated 84 of the city's colonial era buildings. The police chief retired to Florida within a year and bought two condominiums for himself; he was succeeded as chief by the detective who had investigated the incident, instead of his boss who was next in line. In Newport, belief persists today, that there was a coverup facilitated by Duke "blood money".