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Doris Duke

1912–1993 · 81 years Specialist

The richest girl in America, who spent decades outrunning the label

Portrait of Doris Duke — Duke University — 1951 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Doris Duke was the only child of James Buchanan Duke, who had built the American Tobacco Company and Duke Power and endowed the university carrying his name, and Nanaline Holt Inman, his second wife. Her father died when she was twelve, leaving an estate estimated near 100 million dollars, and newspapers immediately began calling the seventh-grader the richest girl in the world. At fourteen she sued her own mother and the estate's executors to stop the sale of property she had inherited, and won. She grew up shuttled between a 2,700-acre New Jersey farm, a Rhode Island mansion, and a Manhattan apartment, privately tutored, endlessly photographed, and treated by the press for the rest of her life as a specimen rather than a person.

At twenty-one she founded her first charity, Independent Aid, and kept building institutions instead of only writing checks. She filled a Honolulu estate called Shangri La, floor to ceiling, with Islamic art gathered on her travels -- it is now a public museum. Starting in 1968 she funded the Newport Restoration Foundation, which bought and saved more than eighty endangered Rhode Island buildings rather than let them be demolished. She converted greenhouses on the family's New Jersey farm into Duke Gardens, free to the public for decades, and funded medical research, including a two-million-dollar gift toward AIDS research in the late 1980s, when few donors would put their name on the cause. Her will created the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which has since distributed well over a billion dollars into the arts, the environment, and medicine.

Her personal life did not track the generosity. Both marriages -- to James Cromwell in 1935 and to Dominican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa in 1947 -- ended in divorce within a few years. Her only child, a daughter born seven weeks premature in 1940, died the next day -- Duke kept the details private for decades. In 1966 her Rolls-Royce killed her friend and curator, Eduardo Tirella, in the driveway of Rough Point, her Newport mansion, as he opened a gate -- police ruled it an accident, though a 2020 reinvestigation raised questions never resolved in court. In 1988 she adopted a 35-year-old Hare Krishna devotee, Chandi Heffner, at times calling her the reincarnation of the daughter she had lost, then cut her from the will -- Heffner later settled a challenge to the estate for 65 million dollars.

She died at eighty in her Beverly Hills home in 1993 after complications from cosmetic surgery, and was cremated within twenty-four hours on the order of her butler, Bernard Lafferty, whom she had named sole executor. Lawsuits followed almost immediately: a nurse alleged Lafferty and a physician had hastened Duke's death with morphine and Demerol, though the Los Angeles District Attorney found no evidence of foul play in 1996 and a court removed Lafferty and installed new trustees. What survived the mess was the giving. Shangri La and Rough Point both opened as public museums, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation still operates today, funding exactly the ordinary, well-governed work the chaos around her death made look unlikely.

Lifespan

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Doris Duke's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Independent Aid, Inc. company
Her first charitable foundation, founded at 21 1934
Shangri La building
Honolulu estate built to house her Islamic art collection, now a museum 1938
Duke Gardens building
Eleven-greenhouse indoor garden complex on the family's New Jersey farm 1958
Newport Restoration Foundation company
Saved more than 80 endangered colonial-era Rhode Island buildings 1968
Doris Duke Charitable Foundation company
Created by her will -- still funds the arts, environment, and medicine 1996

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 22, 1912 aged 0 Born in New York City
1925 aged ~13 Her father dies -- newspapers dub the 12-year-old "the richest girl in the world"
1935 aged ~23 Marries James Cromwell Divorced 1943.
July 11, 1940 aged 27 Gives birth to a daughter, Arden, who dies the next day
1966 aged ~54 Her car kills curator Eduardo Tirella at Rough Point Ruled accidental by police at the time.
1988 aged ~76 Adopts 35-year-old Chandi Heffner Later removed her from the will entirely.
October 28, 1993 aged 80 Dies in Beverly Hills at 80