Doris Duke

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The Italian garden designed by Doris Duke with replicas of classical sculptures

Doris Duke (born November 22, 1912 in New York , † October 28, 1993 in Beverly Hills ) was an American entrepreneur , art collector , animal rights activist and patron . The media dubbed her a million dollar baby and later the richest woman in the world . Her extravagant life served as a template for two Hollywood productions and numerous books. Today, most of her wealth is available to charitable institutions. The film theater belonging to the Honolulu Academy of Arts bears her name (Doris Duke Theater) .

family

Washington Duke (1820-1905), the grandfather of Doris Duke, came from a working-class family and founded the family fortune. He also began the Dukes' charitable tradition by donating $ 300,000 to Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina . Some of the grants were conditional on allowing women to study.

His son James Buchanan Duke (1856-1925) was the founder of the tobacco company American Tobacco and the energy company Duke Energy . Doris Duke comes from his marriage to his second wife Nanaline Holt Inman, as his only child. He was also one of the patrons of Trinity College, which was renamed Duke University after further endowments in the millions in honor of the family .

James Buchanan Duke died in 1925, a few weeks before Doris Duke's 13th birthday, leaving her with half of his fortune. Your inheritance share of about $ 100 million corresponds to about $ 1,460,000,000 in today's purchasing power. The other half of the fortune went to The Duke Endowment . This foundation supports several universities, hospitals, children's homes and church organizations in North and South Carolina .

Early years

Doris Duke grew up with her mother at the James B. Duke House on posh Fifth Avenue in New York City. After reaching the age of 21 at the age of 21, she undertook extensive trips around the world, pursued artistic interests and lived for a while in Paris. She developed into a committed animal rights activist, promoter of nature conservation and monument protection. Her interest in horticulture led to a friendship with author and farmer Louis Bromfield , who ran Malabar Farms in Ohio . Today his farm is part of Malabar Farm State Park , which was made possible by Doris Duke's donations.

Marriages

Doris Duke (right) with her first husband

Her first husband was James HR Cromwell (1896-1990), a Democratic politician and later US Ambassador to Canada. The daughter Arden emerged from their marriage in 1935 in 1940, but she only lived one day. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943.

Three years later, during a stay in Paris in 1947, Doris Duke met the diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa . Rubirosa, who came from the Dominican Republic, was still married to his second wife, the French actress Danielle Darrieux , at the time. To get approval for a quick divorce, Doris Duke allegedly paid Darrieux $ 1 million. The marriage with Rubirosa, which was concluded in the same year, was divorced again at the end of 1948.

Even if the media repeatedly speculated about Doris Duke's further circumstances, she never married again.

Residences

At the time of her death, Doris Duke had five residences, three of which are now used as museums and open to the public. In addition to a penthouse on New York's Park Avenue , which, according to her will, was sold for the benefit of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation , her property also included:

Falcon's Lair

The Falcon Lair Villa was originally built by the silent film star Rudolph Valentino in Benedict Canyon above Beverly Hills in 1924. Her friend Gloria Swanson drew Doris Duke's attention to Falcon Lair after Valentino's death in 1926 and brokered the purchase of the 400 m² house with the 1.3 hectare property. Doris Duke had the building extensively redesigned several times. This also included the installation of original furnishings that had previously belonged to Napoléon Bonaparte . After Doris Duke died in Falcon Lair at the age of 80, it became the property of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation . The foundation separated from Falcon Lair in 1998 and achieved sales proceeds of three million US dollars.

Rough Point

Rough Point was Doris Duke's home in Newport , Rhode Island, USA . Originally built for Frederick William Vanderbilt in 1891 in the English Gothic Revival style, the house sits on rocky grounds overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Doris Duke's father acquired the property in 1922, which was already considered out of fashion in terms of style. Doris Duke's parents commissioned the architect Horace Trumbauer with extensive renovation work, including the removal of heavy oak floors, wall cladding and stucco work. In addition, the house was expanded to more than 100 rooms. After the death of James Buchanan Duke, the house was uninhabited for a long time.

Doris Duke began to refurbish the house in the late 1950s. In addition to French furniture from the 18th century, Brussels tapestries from the 16th century and vases from the Ming Dynasty it was also a collection of paintings including works by Thomas Gainsborough , Anthony Van Dyck , Joshua Reynolds , Ferdinand Bol and Pierre-Auguste Renoir together .

Today Rough Point is part of the Newport Restoration Foundation and is open to the public as a museum.

Rough Point was also the location of one of the most controversial episodes in Doris Duke's life. On October 7, 1966, she ran over her interior decorator Eduardo Tirella when he tried to open the gate to the property. According to the police, who assume an accident, the car started moving, dragged Tirella across the street and crushed him on a tree. The Newport Police Chief resigned immediately after the investigation. To avoid a lawsuit, Doris Duke later reached an agreement with the Tirellas family about financial compensation.

Duke Farms

In 1893, James Buchanan Duke began purchasing farmland in Hillsborough , New Jersey, United States . By 1905 the property grew to over eight square kilometers and was initially used for agriculture. Cattle and horses were raised on the property and a horse racing track was on the property. At the end of the 19th century, James Buchanan Duke decided to stop farming and create a public park on the property. Five lakes, 29 km of paths, 35 fountains, greenhouses and rooms for visitors were created. Exhibitions were held in the greenhouses of Duke Farms , and the park was used for various forms of recreation and recreational activities such as picnicking and ice skating. Due to vandalism, the park closed to the public in 1915. After the USA entered the First World War, the property was again used for agriculture and rye, wheat, corn and potatoes were grown on a large scale.

When James Buchanan Duke died in 1925, there were 45 buildings on the property. Doris Duke later added the so-called Hollywood Wing to the main building. In addition to a tennis hall, a swimming pool, a shooting range, a cinema and a theater were built here. At the end of the 1950s, renovations began to make the greenhouses accessible to the public again. The park has been open to visitors again since 1964. In 1969 and 1972, Doris Duke acquired neighboring historic farms to the west, which are now also part of Duke Farms . The property is now owned by the Duke Farms Foundation .

Shangri-La

Shangri-La, exterior view

In 1937 Doris Duke bought a piece of land directly on the Pacific Ocean in Kāhala, east of Waikīkī on the island of Oʻahu ( Hawaiʻi ) near the extinct volcano Diamond Head ( geographical coordinates : 21 ° 15 ′ 24.1 ″  N , 157 ° 47 ′ 41 , 6 ″  W ). It was there that her Shangri La property was built . The villa now houses Duke's collection of Islamic art with objects from Syria, Morocco, India, Turkey and Iran. The name Shangri-La goes back to the 1933 novel The Lost Horizon by James Hilton .

Of the many houses that Duke lived in, Shangri-La is the only one that has been designed entirely according to her ideas, both inside and outside. The inspiration for this hideaway, intended as a winter residence, came to her in 1935 during her extensive honeymoon, which took her through a number of Islamic countries as well as to Hawaii. The Islamic culture exerted a great fascination on Duke and she felt particularly attracted to Hawai'i, so she commissioned the architect Marion Sims Wyeth to create a symbiosis of landscape and culture. The outer appearance of the villa unmistakably refers to the building forms and decor of the Islamic world and was created using original architectural parts and decor.

The grouping of the individual components around different courtyards and gardens and the arrangement of social and private rooms make the model of oriental living culture clear, even if one excludes the interior decorations of the Damascus room and the two Turkish rooms. In the garden, with its many exotic plants, there is also another pavilion and a large seawater swimming pool. The preoccupation with the culture and art of Hawaii did not leave such a clear mark on the architecture of the house and is therefore more easily overlooked. However, she had a close relationship with Sam Kahanamoku , the brother of the famous Duke Kahanamoku, and was intensely involved with the Hawaiian way of life and culture.

Duke spent the winter months in Shangri-La for almost 60 years and continued her passion for collecting, so that a total of 3,500 objects and artifacts came together. In building up her collection, she occasionally competed with major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York . In addition to artistically carved doors, elaborate tile mosaics, valuable textiles and ceramics, Doris Duke also amassed a considerable collection of oriental jewelry. She turned almost two hectares on Oahu into her private Shangri-La, a place where the richest woman in the world could withdraw from the public eye.

The relationship to the professional world of art historians and archaeologists was characterized by great reluctance on the part of Doris Duke. She occasionally consulted experts, but in principle acted independently and continued to educate herself. It is known that she partially carried out conservation and restoration work herself.

Shangri-La is one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the state of Hawaii. It is open to the public and today belongs to the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (DDFIA), the establishment of which Doris Duke ordered in his will. The purpose of the foundation is to preserve the collection and to promote the study and understanding of Islamic art and culture. Tours and events take place in collaboration with the Honolulu Academy of Arts .

All tours to Shangri-La begin and end at the Honolulu Museum of Art , near downtown Honolulu.

Next life

In addition to collecting art objects, Doris Duke was also interested in the performing arts. Here she was particularly interested in jazz music and ballet. She herself took modern dance lessons, played as a jazz pianist and occasionally sang in a gospel choir in New Jersey.

In 1988, at the age of 75, she met the then 35-year-old Charlene Gail "Chandi" Heffner in a dance school and adopted her a short time later. Chandi Heffner was a supporter of the Hare Krishna movement and the sister of the third wife of millionaire Nelson Peltz, the director of the HJ Heinz Company and Legg Mason, Inc. Duke initially believed Heffner was a reincarnation of their biological child Arden , which briefly died in 1940 died after giving birth.

However, the friendship with the 40 years younger woman lasted only a short time and Doris Duke tried in vain to reverse the adoption. Next, Doris Duke developed a particularly close relationship with her butler Bernard Lafferty and appointed him chairman of her foundations.

Inheritance dispute and suspected murder

After the death, a media-effective dispute over the inheritance developed between the foundations, Chandi Heffner and Bernard Lafferty. Although Doris Duke expressly decreed to disinherit Chandi Heffner, this was finally settled with 65 million US dollars. Bernard Lafferty, who, like one of their doctors, was suspected of the murder of the extremely wealthy 80-year-old woman, did not seem capable enough of the foundations to run them. He received $ 4 million in severance payment and an annual pension of $ 500,000.

The suspicion of murder was never dispelled and was reinforced by the fact that Doris Duke had been cremated a few hours after her death for no understandable reason. In 2007, The Daily Telegraph wrote on the occasion of the death of Henry Ginsburg , who had helped Doris Duke's foundations, among other things, with the cataloging of her bequeathed treasures and had recognized the extraordinary value of numerous collectibles, that she was probably murdered "after an unhappy and aimless life" .

Although Doris Duke had a lavish lifestyle, spent a lot of money on her collections and donated more than 400 million US dollars to charitable institutions during her life, another 1.3 billion US dollars flowed to her foundations after her death.

Patroness

Doris Duke founded her first foundation at the age of 21. Initially called Independent Aid , it now operates as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation . The foundation supports the areas of medical research, child welfare , environmental protection and culture. During Doris Duke's lifetime, grants for birth control in the 1930s and early support for AIDS research caused controversy, as did a program with which she donated church organs for places of worship visited by African-Americans.

In 1968 Doris Duke founded the Newport Restoration Foundation , which maintains 83 historic buildings in Newport. In addition to the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and the Duke Farms Foundation, other foundations include the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of Endangered Wildlife and the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of New Jersey Farmland and Farm Animals, which are dedicated to environmental and animal protection .

literature

  • Sharon Littlefield: Doris Duke's Shangri La [introduction by Carol Bier]. The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu 2002. ISBN 0-937426-57-1
  • Stephanie Mansfield: The Richest Girl in the World: The Extravagant Life and Fast Times of Doris Duke , New York, 1992, ISBN 0-399-13672-X
  • Tom Valentine, Patrick Mahn: Daddy's Duchess: The Unauthorized Biography of Doris Duke , Secaucus, NJ, 1987, ISBN 0-8184-0443-4
  • Pony Duke, Jason Thomas: Too Rich: The Family Secrets of Doris Duke , New York, 1996 ISBN 0-06-017218-5
  • Ted Schwarz, Tom Rybak: Trust No One: The Glamorous Life and Bizarre Death of Doris Duke , Accord, NY, 2001, ISBN 1-892323-17-6
  • Nancy Tingley: Doris Duke: The Southeast Asian Art Collection [1] New York, 2003, ISBN 0-8248-2773-2
  • Janet Zapata, Ulysses Dietz, Zette Emmons: Gems from the East and West: The Doris Duke Jewelry Collection [2] Doris Duke Charitable Foundation 2003 ISBN 0-9725588-1-0
  • Will of Doris Duke [3]
  • Andreas Zielcke: The Last Playboy, The Life of Porfirio Rubirosa . Pp. 27-36, Göttingen 1992, ISBN 3-88243-230-6
  • SAD: "Nurse: Tobacco heiress Doris Duke was murdered." Hamburger Abendblatt January 31, 1995, 24. [4]

Movies

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ see Honolulu Academy of Arts (English)
  2. ↑ see Andreas Zielcke: The Last Playboy, The Life of Porfirio Rubirosa . Pp. 27-36
  3. ↑ see Falcon Lair at Christie's ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.christiesgreatestates.com
  4. ↑ see Shangri La (Doris Duke) (English); Margaret Bourke-White : Newly-built estate, Shangri-la, belonging to American Tobacco Co. heiress Doris Duke and husband James Cromwell ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ( Honolulu , 1937) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / images.google.com
  5. ↑ cf. also the Damascus room of the collector Herbert M. Gutmann
  6. ↑ Fox News: "Sarandon to Play World's Richest Little Girl ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note . August 2, 2005 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.foxnews.com
  7. ^ Top Three Inheritance Disputes . legalzoom. Archived from the original on April 11, 2010. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 10, 2008. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.legalzoom.com
  8. ↑ http://suche.abendblatt.de/ashao/index.php?method=search&outputs=4&search=*&date=period&dateFrom=23.01.1995&dateTo=23.01.1995  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (last accessed October 30, 2012).@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / suche.abendblatt.de  
  9. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548186/Henry-Ginsburg.html Obituary in English (last accessed October 30, 2012).
  10. ↑ see legal dispute about Doris Duke's legacy ( memento of the original from March 8, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.howarth-smith.com
  • Thomas Tunsch: The collector Herbert M. Gutmann (1879-1942) . In: Jens Kröger, Désirée Heiden (ed.): Islamic art in Berlin collections. 100 years of the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin . Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin 2004, pp. 27–30. ISBN 3-86601-435-X
personal data
SURNAME Duke, Doris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American art collector, patron, and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 1993
Place of death Beverly Hills , California , USA