She formally adopted Heffner in 1988. Why doesn't she help you?' "She used to come and see me and just cry," says singer Peggy Lee, who was friendly with Tirellaand who would later employ Bernard Lafferty as a butler. Heffner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii on a ranch that Duke previously purchased for her, said in court papers that after their February 1991 breakup she learned that Duke had made changes in her will, and "the estate has not been left to Chandi as Doris had agreed." Then one day in June, Miss Duke called me and said, 'Thomas, have you seen Bernard? No wills! He also instilled in her an almost reflexive inability to trust people. 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. We took him to Newport. In fact, it was Chandi Heffner who hired Bernard Lafferty for Doris Duke, in 1987. . They hired him on Ferencz Soltesz's recommendation. "We kept it to ourselves for months, until around July 1990. . 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. "It's very important that Doris has done this," he told me at the time. Chandi Heffner is 69 years old today because Chandi's birthday is on 08/26/1953. The first one, in Hawaii, didn't work out: she wanted to make a museum out of a Thai temple that she had saved from destruction on one of her many trips to Southeast Asia. She was alarmingly fragile." In her lawsuit, Heffner claims it was she who arranged this transaction, as well as the payment of $5 million of Marcos's legal bills. The Sands says that Lafferty managed the theater, which headlined such stars as Bill Cosby, Joel Grey, and Rita Moreno. She's getting better.' I was not aware of what management roles he might or might not have had. . . . The gate had obviously been left open. To this day he maintains, "A lot of injustice was done to me. In 1968, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, with Jacqueline Onassis as vice president. Her longest relationship was with Joey Castro, the Mexican-born jazz pianist at the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, whom she met in 1950, when he was 23 and she was 38. Her telephone was not listed in the Los Angeles area. His paternal grandparents were Polish Jewish immigrants. This Grand Marnier was so old the labels had been written by hand. (Burns dismisses reports that he was once a Chippendales dancer: "Not that I haven't been asked. and I finally quit just before Labor Day. ", She had already been planning to divorce Cromwell, but he apparently demanded a $7 million settlement. Only one other trustee was named in the will, Marion Oates Charles, Duke's longtime summer neighbor in Newport, Rhode Island. . Born on 1940 to James Henry Roberts Cromwell and Doris Duke. I asked Phyllis Saretta what she thought the attraction was. . Lafferty had been working for Nelson and Claudia Peltz for the previous seven months, and Rybak says, "The Peltzes put him in a 28-day program. Usually something came in the mail that she wanted to discuss, because Chandi was taking care of her financial affairs. And Doris said, 'How about the one next to you?' There's no question that Bernard was more than just a butler. He's standing on a street corner in New York right now and needs a place to go. "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. Duke left most of her money to charity and named her butler, Bernard Lafferty, co-executor of the estate. I remember that the captain of the helicopter was very worried and wanted her to leave early. . 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. Some questioned Reubens sexuality at the time until in 1989 when Reubens engaged in a "mock wedding" with Chandi Heffner, the adopted daughter of tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Once a day, she meditates in her "deity room," which is filled with golden statues from India. The power that this will gives Bernard Lafferty is "awesome," says one attorney. She had episodes of pneumonia, she had clots in her veins, and some of those clots may have traveled to her lungs. Then the U.S. government blindsided it, Column: Uber and Lyfts deactivation policy is dehumanizing and unfair. It was 1982, and Heffner was taking a class at Farrah's studio near Times Square. 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. "She forgave Rubi everything," says Reinaldo Herrera, even his subsequent marriage to Barbara Hutton. Chandi Heffner and Doris Duke were having a lesbian affair. (After Duke's death, the trustees of her estate became defendants in this lawsuit.). I think this was the steroid thing happening. One of those servants was the future executor of Doris Duke's estate. I took her to six or seven dinner parties. You felt that she was going to break. . She had this terrible fear of fire." ", Dr. Demopoulos told me, "I spoke to her in early January. It's so hard for me still, so hard." Chandi lives on the horse farm now and operates a very modest charity called the CDH Foundation, with total assets of $ 2 million. Lafferty has released few details about Duke's final illness. ", Almost every friend of Duke's I talked to, including her many homosexual friends, told me that she had always been an avid heterosexual. . What did Disney actually lose from its Florida battle with DeSantis? All; Titles; TV Episodes; Celebs; Companies; Keywords; About the time Bloom was fired, Duke also abruptly left Chemical Bank and replaced her estate lawyer, William Zabel, of Schulte Roth & Zabel, with William Doyle, of the Chicago firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis. 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. And the whispers about Duke's last years continue. And he had quite a history. One afternoon in February, the architect John Warnecke went to Shangri La for tea. . Quite suddenly, early in 1991, Doris called me in distress from Hawaii and said that she was leaving in an urgent way for California and she had become fearful of Chandi. (Von Blow is referring to a 1982 dinner party Duke gave at '21' in New York for his friends shortly after he had been convicted of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny. That fall, she attended a tribute to Sophia Loren at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a fancy party afterward at Tatou, with Imelda Marcos, Rossellini, Natale, and Lafferty, who wore a ski sweater. ". Doris Duke was murdered. 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. ", When I asked Chandi Heffner about the widespread rumors that she and Duke were lovers, she laughed and said, "Oh, right, I've heard that. Heffner takes credit for everything from improving the dairy herd at Duke Farms to arranging the sale of Duke's gold deposits in Switzerland. She was even a buddy of Elvis Presley's. Newport police declared it an accident, and her friends still swear that it was. According to the 1993 Forbes Four Hundred list, Doris Duke was the 18th-richest woman in America, not far behind cosmetics billionairess Este Lauder. She was a cool lady. Enzo Natale says, "Chandi had accused me of trying to rape her in Honolulu. Inspired by this trip, they bought the most spectacular piece of property near Diamond Head in Honolulu, on which they built a Mogul-style fortress and named it Shangri La. How do we get rid of her? Her first husband, James R. Cromwell, called Duke "my frigidheiress" and engaged in a lengthy court battle to win a financial settlement. "O.K., I'm not going to see her, but. When she was a cult member of Hare Krishna she got adopted by a Billionaire Heiress of a Tobacco company and Philanthropist, Doris Duke when she went to Hawaii in the 1980s. Although polo and horse jumping are her favorite equestrian activities, Chandi Heffner currently spends the majority of her time overseeing CDHIF USA and CDHIFI. April 7, 1993 Chandi Duke Heffner, the 39-year-old former belly dancer and Hare Krishna devotee who was legally adopted by American Tobacco Co. heiress Doris Duke in 1988, now claims the. ", Heffner was with Gary McElroy, with whom she was then living on a communal farm on the Big Island of Hawaii. "One hears all sorts of stories about how Rubi started in life, that he was Trujillo's sort of 'Press the doorbell, you answer the doorbell, and he went bang-bang.' The two exchanged their "vows" at Duke's Hawaiian mansion, but it was revealed the whole thing was a hoax. That evening, I sent up dinner and Chandi came downstairs and said, 'Tom, Bernard just dropped the entire tray.' The will provides Lafferty with an executor's fee of up to $5 million, a lifetime annuity of $500,000 a year, and commissions, which could run into the millions annually, as a trustee of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and of three other closely related new foundations: the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of Endangered Wildlife, the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of New Jersey Farmland and Farm Animals, and the Doris Duke Foundation of Islamic Art. 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. Heffner Duke, adopted in 1988 when she was 38 and the heiress was in her 70s, could not be reached for comment. "Sometimes people are attracted to the thing they fear the most.". Today, Chandi lives on a palatial farm in. One week later, Doris Duke stunned the world again by adopting Chandi Heffner at the Somerset County Court House in Somerville, to which the two women were accompanied by Donald Robinson. If I were Victoria Beckham, I wouldnt count on a big wedding present. Burns said that he was also training Lafferty, to help him lose his paunch. I usually got one of the help. In a so-called "galimony" lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Somerville, N.J., where the heiress lives several months of the year at her 5,000-acre compound known as Duke Farms, Heffner claims she is entitled to compensation from Duke, who abruptly broke off their live-in relationship in 1991. Immediately prior to going to work for Duke, he was employed by Heffner's sister Claudia and her husband, Nelson Peltz, one of the leading takeover tycoons of the 80s. It was at that juncture, Heffner claims, that Duke made the oral promise that is the basis of her breach-of-contract suit. "We concentrated on her leg-muscle group," he said. She really considered herself a dancer. 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. Later on we would sleep together and Doris would come in most mornings and sit there on the bed with us and talk. She wasn't sure if she wanted to have a baby, but she said by the third month an incredible mother instinct took over. ChatGPT who? Steve comes about four, and he and I go up to Bernard's room. (We covered the story in Fame magazine in 1990, and New York magazine did it again in 1993.). Chandi Duke Heffner, Self: Oh My God. [Chandi] is a monster. "Elvis made whites interested in black music," she once told me, "which was very important, because race is the biggest problem we have in America.". 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. ", Rybak says that Lafferty got off to a good start at Duke Farms. One night at dinner, Heffner told me, "Doris said to me, 'You're my daughter reincarnated. Shes the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz. "He was doing a lot of embroidery work for Doris. I asked Doris and she said, 'Yeah, it's fine.' Doris loved it. The circumstances of Dukes death remain under investigation. "Buck" Duke was obsessed with his only child. Miss Duke's will went on: "I am extremely troubled by the realization that Chandi Heffner may use my 1988 adoption of her (when she was 35 years old) to attempt to benefit financially under the . One of Heffner's lawyers says that he has 18,000 documents concerning Duke's business and legal affairs, many of which Chandi had "attended to.". ", Donald Robinson, a New Jersey lawyer who had worked closely with Duke since the early 70s, will not comment about the lawsuit, but he speaks glowingly of Heffner's abilities. ", According to Farrah, Heffner never actually took part in a dance class, because her leg was in a cast. 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. ", They went into Duke's fabled Islamic Room"you'd think you were in the salon of Sleyman the Magnificent" and over tea and sherry they discussed the pet boar that Heffner had nursed with a baby bottle after it had been abandoned by its mother, as well as Heffner's leg problems. SOMERVILLE, N.J. (AP) _ Reclusive multimillionaire Doris Duke has adopted a 35-year-old conservationist as a daughter, her lawyer said Friday. Yet it is the underlying misconception of almost everything ever written about her, including Stephanie Mansfield's 1992 biography, The Richest Girl in the World. Although she was constantly compared to Hutton from the time they both had fairy-tale coming-out parties the year after the stock market crashed, Duke always hated the comparison to the much-married Woolworth heiress, who died penniless. . "Chandi works very hard for Doris. James Burns, now an aspiring actor in Los Angeles, says that he and Chandi "are giving each other space for a while.". For many years she sang in a black gospel choir at the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, and left its minister, the Reverend Lawrence G. Roberts, $1 million in her will. "She's an unusually intelligent person: perceptive, articulate, well-read, culturally alive. Because it was her major incapacity; there really wasn't anything else wrong with Doris. Friends of Duke have intimated that the heiress had become fearful of Heffner's behavior, and eventually locked her out of the Hawaiian estate in early 1991. In a settlement signed Thursday by Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Renee Roth, Chandi Duke Heffner, 42, dropped claims to the $1.2-billion estate and dropped a breach-of-contract suit contending that Duke reneged on a promise to support her for life, said Heffners lawyer, David Keyko. It would be her last trip to Europe, and she also visited Poland with Brazilian grande dame Aime de Hereen. 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. "You know, fate is strange. He was going to A. The reason it didn't last long was she didn't want them. There was a gradual onset of a depressed relationship between Doris and Chandi, starting about the middle of 1990 and going progressively downhill. I used to tell her, 'You know, Doris, some people do like you for yourself. They maintained a familial relationship until 1990 when Doris Duke disinherited Heffner. When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. 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. Ferencz Soltesz [the Peltzes' majordomo] told me he's an excellent butler so long as you keep him off the bottle. "She moved very well for that kind of dancingwe called it Middle Eastern, or danse orientale, but essentially it's belly dancing. ". Then [Franco and I] didn't see Doris anymore. And last May, Surrogate Preminger accepted Miss Duke's. Bernard Lafferty, a cook named Colin Shanley, and her longtime Tongan maid, Nuku Makasiale, were at her bedside. . ", 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. Heffner, 40, a former belly dancer and member of the Hare Krishna, was left nothing by Duke and claimed the heiress was not of "sound mind and memory" when she rather feebly signed the new. They were putting up a curtain rod together. ", Burns began working out with Duke on a regular basis. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our. Demopoulos wasn't the only one to notice a change in Duke's attitude after Heffner was out of her life. He named both his private Pullman car and his 80-foot yacht after her, and surrounded her with bodyguards. "It was really sad," Heffner said, "because Martha arrived and Doris wouldn't go see her. 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. And then the wine was $1,000 a bottle; it came from her father's cellars. Duke died at age 80 in 1988, leaving a hotly contested $1.5 billion estate. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Paul and his family moved to Sarasota, Florida, when he was nine years old. That's not the Doris I knew. Claudia Heffner's Sister Has A Weird Story. Chandi Duke Heffner Net Worth Chandi Duke Heffner Net Worth 2022, Age, Height, Relationships, Married, Dating, Family, Wiki Biography. '", 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. "She looked great," Warnecke says. Heffner told me she had left "the farm community" and was living with Gordon Damon, a real-estate agent whose house was near Duke's Diamond Head estate. He said on 08/26/1953 Barbara Hutton were having a lesbian affair maintained a relationship. About Duke 's final illness car and his family moved to Sarasota, Florida, when he was years. To James Henry Roberts Cromwell and Doris said, 'How about the one next to you? it to for. Training Lafferty, to help him lose his paunch this site constitutes acceptance of our could be. 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