That's the same as around $125 million in today's dollars. A cult member of Hare Krishna, Chandi went to Hawaii in the late 1980s and met with a billionaire, Doris Duke, a billionaire tobacco heiress, philanthropist, art collector, horticulturist, and socialite. The couple lived together from 1990 until 1993. Call your pilot tonight and leave immediately and go to Los Angeles and get checked up.' In June 1985, Duke and Heffner traveled to Russia together. In May, a New York judge approved a plan to send the bulk of her estate to charity. . His articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. "She got baby doses for a few weeks and that was it. 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. . . When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. (Burns dismisses reports that he was once a Chippendales dancer: "Not that I haven't been asked. He was the legendary Latin lover Porfirio Rubirosa, the former son-in-law of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. That was a going-out-of-your-way gesture." Another time, at a college in upstate New York, Bobby [Farrah] didn't have her dancehe had her completely veiled, and she sat on the stage and played finger cymbals. Doris Duke was murdered. About Heffner's sister. Chandi Heffner choked back tears as she talked about Doris Duke, the worldly and restless tobacco heiress who legally adopted her in 1988, when Heffner was 35 and Duke was 75, and cast. "It was unbelievable how hard she worked. We were joking around, because we both had bad knees. . When Doris was only 14, she successfully sued her mother to stop her from selling Duke Farms, the estate her father had created out of New Jersey flatlands, including a 30-room mansion with an indoor pool and indoor tennis courts, artificial lakes, and man-made hillocks. "At the beginning of 1991, she placed an increasing reliance on me and Bernard," Demopoulos told me. I think somebody is trying to kill me.". Heffner also said that Duke confided that she thought her mother had wanted to abort her. The tobacco heiress fortune, one of the largest in U.S. history, has been the subject of complicated legal wrangling since she died at age 80 in 1993. 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. Later on we would sleep together and Doris would come in most mornings and sit there on the bed with us and talk. And he called from a pay phone, and I felt so sorry for this guy, I said, 'Come to Somerville.' Because it was her major incapacity; there really wasn't anything else wrong with Doris. She had several indiscreet affairs of her own, with Errol Flynn, Hawaiian swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku, and British M.P. She also asked to be buried at sea. Like all of her houses, it was guarded by fierce Dobermans or German shepherds. . His mother was a teacher, while his father fought as a pilot during WWII. A Peltz-family friend told me that, contrary to reports in the press, "there was never any rivalry of any kind at any time between Claudia and Chandi. Chandi Heffner was "planted" on Doris Duke by Imelda Marcos. "Chandi works very hard for Doris. Instead, she was cremated during the weekend following her death, and her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean off Shangri La on November 17, 1993, by Bernard Lafferty and Johnny Gomez, along with the hibiscus leis she loved. 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. Heffner told me that "even back in high school I began kind of a quest to see if there was more to life," and that after a trip around the world, she ended up in Hawaii, meditating, surfing, and exercising polo ponies. "Chandi loved animals. I asked Phyllis Saretta what she thought the attraction was. It would be the last time the paparazzi caught her, and, true to form, she slapped Rossellini for not telling her the photographers would be there. She was very happy doing that.". 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. Today, Chandi lives on a palatial farm in. Newsom Closes California Theaters, "Dancing with the Stars" Needs a New Partner: Longtime Host Tom Bergeron Told Goodbye By ABC, Along with CoHost Erin Andrews, The Weeknd, Already on the Outs with the Grammys, Goes After Rolling Stone So They Rip Apart His New Show (Got That? And so I decidedthe biggest mistake of my 41 yearsto give this son of a bitch a second chance . "It was strange. Earlier this year, Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger removed Lafferty from that position for allegedly squandering the estates assets on lavish living but Lafferty is appealing the ruling. Doris and I used to go fairly regularly to see the president in the hospital; she would give him reiki treatments.". Heffner had asked him to have dinner with her and Gordon Damon, and he had told her to pick him up at Duke's front gate. There was lack of ostentation. Finally, one of her new lawyers, Mr. Doyle, got it back on track. . Records: 123. This is a short video of an imaginary conversation between tobacco heiress Doris Duke and her adopted daughter Chandi Heffner, whom she met in a dance class . And that's how the relationship evolved. "Doris had gone surfing," explains Nancy Cooke de Herrera, an old friend from Hawaii. She wasn't Barbara Hutton," says Marina Cicogna, who was a friend of both heiresses. Chandi Heffner In 1984, Doris met a woman named Chandi Heffner in Hawaii. "He seemed depressed, and Doris thought it would give him more self-esteem. The balance is due Wednesday. Charlene Gail Heffner goes by the name Chandi Duke Heffner. And I was surprised. 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. Were there . A few hours later, when Heffner returned from a show-jumping lesson, she was informed that Doris had flown to Los Angeles. This was the fifth time that Duke had rewritten or revised her will since Heffner's banishment 26 months earlier. Franco Rossellini assured everyone that he was all for it. She was alarmingly fragile." Id love to be a fly on the wall when David and Victoria Beckham meet their sons fiancees family. Subscribers have complete access to the archive. Learn how your comment data is processed. Sometimes he acted as the butler, others as a general assistant. Heffner takes credit for everything from improving the dairy herd at Duke Farms to arranging the sale of Duke's gold deposits in Switzerland. He felt deeply grateful to Doris, as I did.". "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.". "And believe me, she didn't get to $1.3 billion without working at it. Heffner was in New York for a week, visiting her sister Claudia, who had married Nelson Peltz in 1980. On October 6, it was announced that Duke had made a donation of $1 million to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. This was not a frivolous woman, either. Chandi lives on the horse farm now and operates a very modest charity called the CDH Foundation, with total assets of $ 2 million. . Duke last made news in 1988, when she posted the $5.3 million bail for her close friend Imelda Marcos, the former Philippines First Lady. 'Doris Duke really was the last Chinese empress, the last of a type that doesn't exist anymore. I turned and saw her on the floor. 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. He was very good at repairing old costumes and fabric. (Marcos was eventually acquitted, and returned to the Philippines.). . 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. He could barely speak.". Usually something came in the mail that she wanted to discuss, because Chandi was taking care of her financial affairs. She was contemplating having knee replacements. Doris was into it, too. Charles became so concerned about Duke's condition that she called her and asked if Heffner had been "giving her something, I don't know what"even though Heffner had been out of the picture for a year and a half. "O.K., I'm not going to see her, but. According to the 1993 Forbes Four Hundred list, Doris Duke was the 18th-richest woman in America, not far behind cosmetics billionairess Este Lauder. 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. In 1987, Heffner handled the negotiations for Duke's most talked-about acquisition: two Bactrian camels, which were thrown in as a sweetener on the deal to purchase a 19-passenger Boeing 737-300 for $25 million. Heffner told me that Duke was annoyed with Rossellini for falling behind on the rent on the New Jersey guesthouse. 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. "Sometimes people are attracted to the thing they fear the most.". ChatGPT who? . Duke's Los Angeles decorator Tony Duquette adds, "He was just marvelous to Doris, and not at all sinister. I think she did it to make James jealous. 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. In court papers, Heffner -- a Baltimore native -- says the two women met in Hawaii in 1981. 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. And when she left, that adverse thing ceased. Lafferty has released few details about Duke's final illness. The Untold Truth of Stephen Hawking's Son - Ti. He was cooking and she was serving. Phyllis Saretta says, "Chandi told me that her sister had a butler and a chauffeur and the whole thing. WHAT'S POPULAR TODAY. In November 1991, Duke had a new will written, naming Irwin Bloom and Chemical Bank as executors. Heffner also claims she saved the heiress's life on more than one occasion: once when Duke collapsed at her Newport estate in a "pool of blood," and a second time when Heffner recalls diving into the freezing Atlantic to save Duke from drowning. In return, Heffner claims, the twice-divorced Duke promised to "take care" of Heffner for the rest of her life. Why doesn't she help you?' (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.). If I were Victoria Beckham, I wouldnt count on a big wedding present. The next day Duke's lawyer called Heffner again and informed her that Duke wanted her out, too. Her Newport artist pal Richard Banks said that that summer "Doris decided to do the whole social thing and she loved it. Her lawyer, David Keyko, said yesterday that in. The gossip at Mortimer's was that Duke was furious with him for talking to Stephanie Mansfield. He made a comment that Doris had a fair number of complications as a result of the surgery. Burns said that he was also training Lafferty, to help him lose his paunch. He received nothing. . As Heffner fights to undo the will, she speaks exclusively to BOB COLACELLO, who delves into the mystery of Duke's final years. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. We would be four, six, eightOatsie Charles, Nuala Pell, Minnie Cushing, Lita McBean and her husband, and Sunny and me. 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. She had episodes of pneumonia, she had clots in her veins, and some of those clots may have traveled to her lungs. Her last will is dated April 5, 1993, was drawn up by Katten Muchin, and was signed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Miss Duke said to me, 'I think I may have been drugged. Richard Banks called Lafferty the next day. And all of a sudden I started hearing, 'The food is cold.' 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. In fact, it was Chandi Heffner who hired Bernard Lafferty for Doris Duke, in 1987. 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. Then someone new entered the small Doris Duke family: James Burns, a 25-year-old former Marine and martial-arts enthusiast with a notably "buff" physique. . And, like Heffner, after following Duke from Duke Farms to Rough Point to Falcon's Lair to Shangri La for more than six years he was suddenly given a few hours to pack his bags and leave. 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. We came out from opposite sides of the stage, and I got to the middle and she wasn't there. Irwin Bloom had made the arrangements and then Duke called Protas from Los Angeles and joked, ''For God's sake, try to pay it back," Protas recalled. And along about March, I sent flowers and candy to her California home. Tom Ford. 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. . [Chandi] is a monster. She thought it was very amusing. (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. And Doris said, 'How about the one next to you?' She was ahead of her time. View their profile including current address, phone number 808-882-XXXX, background check reports, and property record on Whitepages, the most trusted online directory. Heffner Duke, adopted in 1988 when she was 38 and the heiress was in her 70s, could not be reached for comment. ", Nonetheless, Duke seemed increasingly pleased with Lafferty. "She wasn't just one of those rich women who said, 'Restore me 60 houses.' 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. The following February, Farrah repeated the seminar, and it was apparently then that Chandi Heffner entered Doris Duke's life. ", Others insist that Heffner's growing involvement with Burns created new tensions and was the root cause of Duke's disenchantment with her adopted daughter. ", According to Farrah, Heffner never actually took part in a dance class, because her leg was in a cast. ", Rybak says that Lafferty got off to a good start at Duke Farms. "That was quite an event. Duke was spending the spring, as usual, at her 2,700-acre Duke Farms, in Somerville, New Jersey. After giving the matter prolonged and serious consideration, I am convinced that I should not have adopted Chandi Heffner. "Bernard got out of the hospital. "Cromwell was quite nice," says Nelson Seabra, a rich Brazilian friend of Duke's. She told me that her parents did not approve of her lifestyle, and that they'd cut her off from everything. New York magazine reported after her death that she had a knee operation at U.C.L.A. Peltz, a Michael Milken protg, was beginning his rise to the top of the junk-bond heap; he would soon take over Triangle Industries, then National Can and American Can, and be worth $400 million by 1989. I've talked to bankers who said she knew where every last nickel was. Duke was the only child of J.B. "Buck" Duke, who founded the American Tobacco Co. and later endowed Duke University in Durham, N.C. Chandi Duke Heffner, age 60s, lives in Kamuela, HI. Meanwhile, Heffner is holed up on her Hawaiian ranch. Heffner has a sister, Charlene Gail Heffner who goes by the name Chandi Duke Heffner. You don't have to go back. All. She did not directly accuse Lafferty of turning Duke against her. 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. Love. In 1968, she established the Newport Restoration Foundation, with Jacqueline Onassis as vice president. 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. 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