The ‘Duchess’ Who Posted Bail : Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke Shares a Love of Art, Music, Good Life With Her Friend Imelda Marcos

NEW YORK —  Reclusive tobacco heiress Doris Duke lives in a 30-room mansion on a 2,700-acre estate with 42 miles of paved road in New Jersey. Once known as “the richest little girl in the world,” she oversees the powerful Duke Charitable Foundation and possesses what is said to be one of the world’s most extensive private art collections. She is worth at least $875 million.

She may be history’s least likely bail bondsman.

But last week, she stepped forth with $5 million to bail out former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, who this past weekend was resting up at the estate, recovering from her ordeal of pleading innocent to federal charges of fraud and embezzlement.

Duke also lent Marcos the private jet that brought her from Hawaii to New York for last Monday’s court proceedings on the federal indictment that charged the Marcoses with looting the Philippine treasury of $103 million and committing fraud in obtaining U.S. bank loans. Then, when Imelda Marcos seemed unable to raise the necessary bail because the family assets were tied up in legal entanglements, Duke dropped by Marcos’ $1,800-a-day suite at the Waldorf Towers to tell her she would gladly put up the money. To account for market fluctuations, Duke posted about $5.3 million in municipal bonds to cover the $5 million in bail.

‘Embarrassed and Ashamed’

“I shall do all I can to help my friends, the Marcos family, in this terrible time of need,” Duke said in a statement released by her lawyer, Donald A. Robinson. Duke would answer no questions directly, referring all inquiries to Robinson.

“I am disgusted, embarrassed and ashamed of my country’s mistreatment of Imelda and her ailing husband, Ferdinand,” Duke’s statement went on. “Why should America spend millions and millions of dollars prosecuting two people who for a generation have been our closest allies, including our Pacific outpost against communism?”

But for many people, the real question was why the 75-year-old heiress would rush to the defense of the fallen Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E. Marcos, and his 59-year-old wife? In the Marcoses’ star-studded circle of celebrity friends, Duke’s was not a name instantly recognizable.

Duke said through her lawyer that she and Imelda Marcos have had a long friendship. Their relationship deepened in the last three years, she said, while the Marcoses have been living in exile in Hawaii. One of Duke’s five homes is Shangri-La, a large compound guarded by two life-size stone camels and overlooking the ocean at the foot of Diamond Head with a decor said to reflect Duke’s fascination with Asia and the Middle East. Her other homes include a penthouse in New York and a mansion in Newport, R.I.

In a comment relayed through Robinson, Imelda Marcos described Duke as “an outstanding and remarkable American lady.”

How and when Imelda Marcos and “Dee Dee,” as Duke is known to intimates, first met is not certain. But Max Solivan, a Manila newspaper journalist, said that in 1979, Duke stayed as a guest of the Marcoses in the Goldenberg Pavilion, a highly ornate, Spanish colonial-style guest house on the grounds of the Malacanang Palace. The pavilion was reserved for the many international celebrity guests, including George Hamilton, Christina Ford and Van Cliburn, who visited the Marcoses and attended their frequent and lavish gatherings at the palace before the Marcos government fell in 1986.

According to Solivan, Duke was assigned an escort on that 1979 visit, Mini Montemayor Nartiso, then an official of the Philippine Tourist Ministry and a close friend of Imelda Marcos’. Traveling in a Philippine army helicopter, they visited beaches and mountain resorts around the country.

Patrick Mahn and Tom Valentine, co-authors of “Daddy’s Duchess,” an unflattering, unauthorized biography of Duke published by Lyle Stuart in 1987, said they were certain Duke had visited the palace in Manila many times, as early as 1968, and traveled there with her former companion, film maker Franco Rossellini.

Valentine, a journalist in Iowa City, Iowa, who first met Duke more than a decade ago, said by telephone that Duke has “strong Philippine connections” and is “very knowledgeable about Oriental art.”

Mahn, who was Duke’s former financial manager, said Marcos and Duke had continued the friendship begun sometime in the 1960s “primarily because of their love of music.” A cabaret singer before her marriage, Marcos still breaks into song with only the slightest encouragement.

Love of Music

Duke refined her skills as a jazz pianist during her lengthy acquaintance with musician Joseph Castro, who sued her for divorce, although there was no evidence that they had been married. Castro is now a band leader in Las Vegas. Duke reportedly does daily vocal exercises, and she at one time sang with black church choirs in Harlem and New Jersey. Another time, disguising her identity, she played for a while with a jazz group in Switzerland.

Music “was the initial interest” for Marcos and Duke, said Mahn, who is in Hollywood attempting to sell a screenplay based on “Daddy’s Duchess.” “Then she and Imelda shared a love of fine collectibles, antiquities and the like,” he said.

In New York, an opponent of the Marcos regime speculated that the original connection might have been more political. Ferdinand Marcos comes originally from the province of Ilocos Norte, where most of the tobacco grown in the Philippines is cultivated. Duke’s fortune, estimated to be at least $875 million without including her art or her real estate, comes from her inheritance from her father, James Buchanan Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Co.

“Theoretically in the last 20 years, any of the tobacco multinationals would not have been able to operate in the Philippines without being friends with Marcos,” this businessperson in New York said.

James Duke died in 1925, when his only daughter was just 13. He had begun his empire with two blind mules and a plug of tobacco that grew into the giant parent company of Lucky Strike, America’s top-selling cigarette in the 1930s and 1940s. His generosity to Trinity College, a small school in his hometown of Durham, N.C., was of such scope that upon his bequest, the school was renamed Duke University.

His deathbed words to the child he called “my duchess” were said to have been, “Take care of our money.” Her inheritance at that time was $30 million.

Doris Duke’s business prosperity was far greater than her success in love. Four years after she made her debut at 18 in Newport, R.I., Duke was married to James Henry Roberts Cromwell. He was 16 years her senior and had been married previously to Delphine Dodge, an heir to the automobile fortune. Eight years after their marriage, Duke and Cromwell had one child, a daughter, who was born prematurely and lived only one day. The marriage broke up soon thereafter.

Cromwell charged desertion in his 1943 divorce suit against Duke, and demanded a $7-million trust fund. Duke countered with her own suit charging extreme cruelty. Their legal battle dragged on almost four years before they settled.

Duke’s second husband was Porfiro Rubirosa, a Dominican polo player and international playboy. Before their marriage, Duke insisted that he sign an agreement providing that his only claim to her fortune would be a yearly payment of $25,000 should they separate.

It turned out to be prescience on the part of Duke, for the marriage ended within a year. Rubirosa went on to marry Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

In 1954, French singer Charles Trenet announced his engagement to Duke. Duke replied that she had never met him and turned the matter over to her attorneys.

Then came the relationship with Joe Castro, which also culminated in a settlement negotiated by lawyers. In 1966, Duke’s close friend Edwarde Tirella was accidentally crushed to death by a car Duke was driving.

For a time in the 1940s, Duke worked as a reporter for the old International News Service. But most of her adult life has been devoted to the acquisition of a huge, eclectic and immensely valuable art collection. Much of it is stored in warehouses, but at her Somerville, N.J., estate, a stable has been converted to a museum, open to the public for a $2.50 admission ticket.

Her mansion is 256 feet long, with each of 30 rooms decorated according to a different period of history and art. The Napoleon room, for example, displays furniture, art and artifacts from that era. In the Spanish room, the walls are hung with paintings by Picasso.

She has also been involved in restoration and preservation of historic architecture in Newport. Duke is the president of the Newport Restoration Fund, of which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has served as vice president.

Building a Monastery

Duke has also displayed an interest in metaphysics, reincarnation and Eastern religion, seeking spiritual guidance from Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, according to her biographers. Valentine said he met her through Norbu Chen, who he said claimed to be the world’s only American-born Tibetan lama. Duke took Chen as her healer and became so fond of him that she commissioned Valentine to help her find a site in North Carolina on which to construct a replica of a Tibetan monastery, Valentine said. The project remained uncompleted, Valentine said, because “Norbu vanished or died.”

Mahn, who was Duke’s financial manager in 1984-85, described the heiress as taller than 6 feet, with blond hair and a youthful appearance which he said was aided by gerovital injections and immersions in a hyperbaric tanks.

Duke wears a Mickey Mouse watch, and apparently loves to pass unnoticed in a crowd.

“I took her to a little health food restaurant, Chez Natural, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City in 1983,” Valentine said. “She loved being among all the people anonymously.”

This past week, she quietly attended some of the designer previews in New York.

Her passion for privacy was an obstacle Duke had to overcome in deciding to put up the bail for Imelda Marcos, Valentine said. “Her worst fear is the fear of public exposure,” he said. “She had to know that by putting up the bail she would make headlines worldwide.”

In Duke’s relatively small circle of close friends, “Imelda is about as close as anybody gets,” Mahn said. On the piano of her penthouse at 475 Park Ave., a picture of Imelda Marcos is the sole photograph, columnist Liz Smith reported in New York last week.

In her statements through her attorney, Duke heatedly defended the Marcoses.

“We seduced the Marcos family into our country by persuading them that it was good for the USA. They obliged. Now we, or at least the prosecutor’s office, claim they are criminals,” Duke said.

“Not all of America believes in the manner of treatment Imelda has received. America is the land of justice, but the recent events make it necessary for some of us to stand up and show that the country is still one that is generous and has a heart.

“I have always believed that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. I wish the rest of America agreed with me.”