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Title: Homicide at Rough Point: the Untold Story of How Doris Duke the Richest Woman in America Got Away with Murder by Peter Lance
Details: Copyright 2021, Tenacity Media Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): ""SHE KILLED HIM TWICE. SHE DESTROYED HIS BODY THEN EVISCERATED HIS MEMORY."
In the fall of 1966, billionaire Doris Duke killed a man in an auto crash that local police quickly ruled "an unfortunate accident." More than half a century later, an investigative reporter returns to his hometown and uncovers evidence, unknown until now, that the legendary tobacco, aluminum and energy heiress got away with murder.
DORIS DUKE was one of the most enigmatic and conflicted figures in modern history. A woman with a voracious sexual appetite, she had affairs with every Alpha male from Errol Flynn to Marlon Brando. she was famously paranoid and aggressively litigious; hiring batteries of lawyers, ex-FBI agents & private eyes to sanitize her records, harass biographers and rewrite the narrative of her troubled life.
EDUARDO TIRELLA, Renaissance man and war hero who'd won the Bronze Star in "The Battle of The Bulge." As a gay man, he returned from WW II and began an exciting new career as an interior designer. A close friend to Sharon Tate, Kim Novak and Peggy Lee, his Hollywood set design career was taking off when he was summoned back to Newport from the West Coast to do one last job for Doris Duke. Within an hour after he told her he was leaving her for good, he was dead, crushed under the wheels of a two-ton station wagon with Doris behind the wheel.
Duke who died at the age of 80 in 1993, was well known for the scandals involving her butler Bernard Lafferty that haunted the end of her life. A late 90's mini-series ("Too Rich") and the 2006 HBO film ("Bernard and Doris") explored that story. But the full truth behind Eduardo Tirella's violent homicide has been secret until now.
BLOOD MONEY:
Ninety-six hours after the crash with no inquest-- basing the probe of the homicide entirely on the word of the killer-- police chief Joseph A. Radice declared the death accidental. Case closed. Within days, Duke began giving tens of thousands of dollars to the City of Newport. She created a foundation, that restored 84 colonial buildings, helping Newport transform into a tourist destination.
"Doris Duke bought the City of Newport and got away with murder," says Denise Clement whose mother Rosemarie was Police Chief Radice's secretary at the time of the incident.
"She read the full police report and knew that there was a cover-up, but there was nothing she could do. After she retired and we drove past those houses Doris had restored, she'd say, 'It was blood money that paid for all of this.'""
Why I Wanted to Read It: Last year, I heard about a book being written based in part on the author's successful and explosive Vanity Fair article about a long-cold cold case that wasn't even thought of as a cold case. A massive cover-up, new information, including that which has since come out after the author's initial article (an eyewitness has come forward, a paperboy at the time whose usually-honest father, terrified of Duke's wrath, forced him into secrecy to save his life) and this is one book I badly had to read.
How I Liked It: Well, it's happened again.
The books I'm reading seem to be talking to each other, or at least referencing one another?
Much like Haywire nodding to Helter Skelter, this book is nodding to the book before it, Bohemian Magick. What on earth would an investigation into a cold case have to do with a book about Witchcraft? You'll see.
But first! The book opens with a story about Sharon Tate. No, really. She was Doris Duke's neighbor in Los Angeles, and six months before she was murdered, her little sister Patti wandered into Duke's property. Hearing her caretaker rebuke the child, Duke instead when she heard to whom the child belonged, cleaned up her scrapes, offered her refreshments, and called the Polanski Tate house. Sharon was quite nervous collecting her younger sister and apologized profusely. But what is it about Duke made Sharon so nervous? The author says we'll never know, given that Tate was murdered. And with that ominous note, into the story.
The author explains that he himself is from Newport and grew up there and tells us a bit about the city. From there, it's into Part I, which is the murder and immediate aftermath, and some backstory. From there, the book seems to go back and forth with the narrative regarding the author's memories of Newport and Newport stories unrelated to Duke, to the Duke case itself. The book ends with a Newport murder case completely unrelated to Duke, and then the author's lengthy acknowledgments.
If you're sensing some irritation there in my summary, you're sensing correctly. I've complained before about magazine writers not transitioning to books well but this isn't a first time author, he's had several other books over the years. I'm wondering from the numerous spelling and punctuation errors (the author's blurb on the back flap boasts that he's "covered 100's [sic] of stories worldwide") if perhaps (not having read any of his other books, of course) the problem lies with the fact this is a smaller publisher. In fact, when I researched "Tenacity Media Books", I got a Linked In page for the company listing the author (Peter Lance) as president and CEO. His author blurb on the back cover touts his four works of investigative journalism for HarperCollins. I'm going to assume HarperCollins has both more stringent proof-readers as well as better editors than what amounts to basically the author's self-published work.
Because this is frankly a bit of a mess. It's all over the place and too often it feels like the author is just slightly padding out his Vanity Fair article which is ridiculous because there's so much more to this story that needed to be told rather than just unrelated stories the author felt like telling about Newport.
I was under the initial assumption these stories were to better illustrate the feel of Newport at the time, and give a sense of the class divide, and how a figure like Duke would've been able to rule with an iron fist.
Early in the book, the author is surprised by his own personal connections to the case he didn't realize:
I was in my first semester at college in Boston when the crash occurred, but my mother sent me copies of The Newport Mercury, a weekly compilation of Daily News stories. Distracted by my course of studies at the time I somehow missed the fact that my own family doctor, Phillip McAllister, was so entwined in the story and to a lesser extent, William Wood, the hospital administrator who appeared to endorse the conflicted Medical Examiner-turned Duke-private-physician's decision to lock her away from the state officials.
That discovery really surprised me. Not only did Bill Wood and his family live next door to me growing up, but his eldest son Michael had been one of my best friends. Knowing Mr. Wood as a man of integrity and based on a recent interview with a surviving hospital staff member, I'm now convinced he never had any personal knowledge of the cover-up. According to the source, who asked not to be identified, Bill Wood was following the dictates of senior hospital administrators at the time.
[...]
Like so many of the Newport police officers who were in no position to challenge the chief or knew only fragments of the truth, I believe that Bill Wood was personally out of the loop.
Dr. McAllister's betrayal of his oath was another matter. It was particularity painful for me to learn about it since my family and I have so much respect for him in the twenty years he cared for us. I was a classmate of his eldest son Phil and knew his younger son Brendan, both of whom later died from drug overdoses. In the end, after falling on his sword for Doris Duke, Dr. Phillip C. McAllister's professional and personal life seemed to unravel; a story we'll examine in Chapter Twenty-Seven, "The Duke Curse." (pgs 40 and 41)
Then I got to the section wherein the author gives a lengthy account of one of his first big breaks as a reporter, his breaking a story about Newport slumlords wherein the author actually includes a scan of the newspaper article about the award he won for the story, featuring a picture of himself as a young man, beaming proudly (and a bit smugly) into the camera. The author ties this story only faintly to the Duke case at the conclusion of the chapter, saying it "gave me the confidence that I could uncover the truth behind Eduardo Tirella's death." (pg 133)
If the author wanted to write a memoir, fine. If the author wanted to write a memoir interspersed with his memories of Newport and stories about how remarkable the place is, fine. But this is advertised as a much needed exposé on a very specific story, which is still being covered up. The author makes this point several times in the book how forgotten victim Eduardo Tirella has been:
Doris Duke's 2,900-word obituary was sprawled across 3⁄4's [sic] of a page in The New York Times. But Eduardo Tirella, her trusted friend and advisor, earned only a single sentence of 34 words. (pg 9)
The gates where Duke allegedly killed Tirella have been removed recently (2019, after severe damage from a catering truck) and literally covered up for years by the Newport Restoration Foundation, under the assumption that it's for their renovation/restoration (although the stone pillars that held them, also damaged by the 2019 crash, have also been altered significantly) but also another critical prop of the story has shifted in a telling way.
The removal of the gates and that artifact [the bust of St Ursula that Tirella and Duke were leaving the estate to appraise before Tirella's death] from public view, suggest a continuing effort by The Newport Restoration Foundation to rewrite the Doris Duke narrative and sanitize the circumstances surrounding Tirella's death. (pg 296)
After [Duke] died and Rough Point became a "home museum," existing today in perpetuity just as she'd left it, the old staff remembered how she'd referred to The Reliquary [the piece that Tirella had gotten] not as the image of Saint Ursula, but as Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music, whose feast day was November 22nd.
That happened to be Doris Duke's own birthday. (pg 297)
(The bust has also disappeared and from 2020 onward, was no longer on public display.)
On April 7th, 2020, after a research, writing and editing process that took seven years, The Silver Swan, author Sallie Bingham's long awaited Duke biography was published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, a division of MacMillian Publishers. A member of the legendary Louisville family that published The Courier Journal, Bingham devoted only 15 paragraphs in her 336 page book to the death of Eduardo Tirella, whom she repeatedly referred to as "Edward." (pg 292)
So wrong does a recent book on Duke get the story that the author of this book literally spends several pages refuting the claims in the Silver Swan book:
FROM THE SILVER SWAN: "Since she walled herself off from the press, refusing interviews that would have given her a chance to explain what had happened, the easy animosity and fascination that often color our perceptions of rich women controlled the story of Edward's death."
RESPONSE: Bingham is correct that Doris "walled herself off from the press," but she fails to note that she did so after effectively compromising Dr. McAllister, the Medical Examiner who sequestered her in Newport Hospital on "the night of." As the newly found Registry of Motor Vehicles report reveals, even after she got home on Saturday investigators Perrotti and Massarone tried to interview her and were then thwarted by her lawyers. (pg 294)
So if all that's true, why do we come away from this book not knowing more about Tirella? He was gay, he was a war hero, he was charismatic, he knew famous people, but what about more of his life story? We never really get a feel for Tirella as person, let alone the way we do Duke. Rather than unrelated stories the author feels like telling about Newport, why not fill the book out with actually relevant information and do Tirella better justice? I understand not lingering too hard on Duke's biography (although a better overview would've been helpful) as she's been the subject of several biographies. But the author is positing himself as a voice for justice for Tirella and his family. Isn't that more important than umpteen "quirky history" stories that have little to nothing to do with Doris Duke or Eduardo Tirella?
The author perhaps gives his true motivation in the acknowledgments:
This book has provided me with the rarest of gifts-- a chance to go back to my hometown and attempt to clarify a story that my own newspaper got wrong at the time-- a story that has haunted many a Newporter. But that process of investigating and writing, which now spans two years, has proven to be so much more. It's been an exercise in self-analysis and memory focus. Was what I recalled as a child and a young man really the way Newport was, or had I succumbed to my own mythology of what I remembered it to be? Answering those questions was the challenge I faced as I sought out to find what Carl Bernstein, my former colleague from ABC News, calls "the best available version of the truth." (pg 311)
Phil Graham, the former published of The Washington Post, is credited with describing journalism as "the first rough draft of history" so when it comes to Newport, I hope that you will consider this book an updated draft of the city's continuing story.
My investigation began with the question: "did Doris Duke get away with murder" and for me, answering that has become a wonderful journey of self-discovery; one that allowed me to revisit the lucky consequence of being a Newporter. In what other city of its size, would the world's greatest jazz and folk musicians, yachtsmen and tennis players gather each season to compete for international headlines? What town of 47,000 (when the ships were in) would play host to two consecutive U.S. Presidents? Where else could a work-class kid grow up with such exposure to natural beauty, historical significance and exceptional people? Gardner Dunton of The Journal and Jim Edward of The Daily News inspired me. My parents, Bina and Joe, gave me the hunger to question, but Newport gave me the capacity to dream. (pg 317)
So while the book may superficially be (and may have started out as) about the Duke case, really, it's an excuse for the author to reminisce and share stories about Newport.
Which would be fine if he could pull it off better.
In theory, this book sounds wonderful: an experienced investigative journalist returns to his hometown to solve a decades old cold case, with new information, and the book is also a strange kind of loveletter to the city of Newport. But in practice, the book is a lagging, disjointed slog and the author doesn't manage to maintain a consistent tone with the material (he gives the same weight to damning evidence about Duke's guilt as he does to minutiae in the many unrelated Newport stories). In short, it's the inversion of the last book of this Challenge, Bohemian Magic (which had a premise I would scoff at, in theory, but delighted in when in practice).
Like an earlier true crime book of this challenge (!), there's no doubt that this book broke new ground on this story (this author literally finds documents that have been "missing" for decades and makes a far more convincing case for discovering the true culprit of a cold case than the author of Tinseltown did) and that this author's findings are sure to change the public outlook on this case. It's just a shame that this author wasn't up to better telling the actual story itself.
Notable: One of my first clues that this was going to be kind of sloppy is the story that opens the book, starring none other than famous murder victim, Sharon Tate.
Once Patti identified herself as the sister of "Sharon," who lived "Across the way in the red barn," Doris Duke knew that this wasn't just any eleven year old. She was the sister of the hottest young star in Hollywood who was married to one of the hottest young directors.
[...]
But Sharon Tate, whose motion picture career was taking off like an Atlas rocket, was royalty herself. Her husband Roman, just coming off the hit film Rosemary's Baby, was a kind of cinematic Polish prince. (pg xvi and xvii)
Sharon Tate was not royalty.
Sharon Tate was never a Hollywood movie star, let alone "the hottest young star in Hollywood."
Her career was still in the works at the time of her death, not "taking off like an Atlas rocket."
This author was in his early twenties when Sharon Tate was murdered although I assume he wasn't paying much attention to Hollywood at the time, but he's regurgitating a falsehood that sprang up after Tate's murder.
Sharon Tate was an aspiring actress and achieved some modest success co-starring in a few pictures (and scored a Golden Globe nomination for what would become her best-known film, the critically panned Valley of the Dolls), but had yet to really have her break-out role. Her biggest claim to fame before she was murdered was mostly marrying a famous and successful director. Only after her death in a famous and well-publicized murder case that has spawned numerous film adaptations did Tate achieve widespread fame (and did studios reissue her movies giving her star billing, capitalizing on her now-infamy). Characterizing Tate as a movie star is not only inaccurate, it's also unfair to Tate herself. She was murdered before she could ever reach that stage in her career.
Would she have reached it? Possibly. She was by most accounts devoting herself to motherhood and not focusing as much on her career at the time of her death and it's possible she might have retired, at least for awhile anyway. But there were rumors she was having issues with her husband and given his persistently wandering eye, she might have eventually left him and have been all the more determined to make something of herself professionally.
But we'll never know, because she was murdered.
And Tate shouldn't need to be misremembered as a Hollywood movie legend for people to care about her death and for her to matter as a person.
Duke likely deferred to Tate's younger sister because she knew this was the sister-in-law of a famous and successful Hollywood director (fresh off Rosemary's Baby, the mega-hit for which Polanski ironically wanted his wife in the lead role, but didn't know how to suggest such a thing, so Mia Farrow was cast instead). Tate herself was likely nervous around Duke because she was new to wealth and fame, her sister was technically intruding on the property of one of the richest people in the country, and also Duke probably wasn't the most welcoming type, even when she was attempting kindness.
I thought it was a bit over the top to compare Duke with the Manson family as the author did ("On the night of August 9th, four hyper-violent members of 'The Manson Family' would invade that red house and murder Sharon, along with three of her closest friends. But strangely, a year and half earlier, Sharon had a short brush with a different killer." pg xv) but that's fairly tame given some of his claims about Duke unrelated to Tirella.
And about those claims... oof.
Look, I fully believe given the evidence provided by the author and the eye-witness that has come forward that Duke killed Tirella in a horrible fashion (hitting him with her car, and when he went up over the hood, she pulled back and shot forward, running him over and literally dragging his body under her car through the gates of Rough Point) and sought to cover it up. I also believe the claims that she was truly a horrific employer and a pretty miserable person that had a not-great upbringing (told to trust no one by her father, she literally sued her own mother as a child) and lived out the rest of her life the way she did as a result of that. But some of the claims the author makes I don't think were thought through.
Take Duke's loss of her only child due to a premature pregnancy.
Since the billionairess and her husband, James Cromwell, hadn't had relations in many months, [Doris's godson] Pony Duke speculated that the father [of Duke's baby] might have been one of Doris's two recent lovers: British MP Alec Cunningham-Reid or ex-Olympic champion and surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku who had introduced her to the long board. In fact, reportedly terrified that she might give birth to a mixed-race child, there was speculation at the time that Doris might have actually sought to induce a miscarriage by entering the turbulent surf off Diamond Head later in her pregnancy.
As Pony Duke later put it in his biography, "The crowd on the beach became alarmed. Duke Kahanamoku stood... and watched in silence. She was bruised and cut when she finally left the water. Doris and Duke drove back to Shangri-La. By the time they reached the mansion, there was blood seeping through her bathing suit. Doris screamed in pain." Later, at Queen's Hospital, she gave birth to a three-pound baby girl she named Arden.
Less than 24 hours later on July 11th, 1940, the child was dead.
Pony recounted that Doris asked to see little Arden so that she could hold her one last time. "The anxious nurses waiting outside the door," he wrote, "first heard a low crying that slowly crescendoed into an animal-like wail."
After being informed by doctors that she would never again give birth, Doris set off on a decades-long pursuit of mystical religions. In 1988 at the age of 75, she adopted Chandi Heffner, a 35 year-old former Hare Krishna devotee she believed to be the reincarnation of Arden.
In a profile of Chandi in Vanity Fair, Doris' friend Nancy Cooke de Herra, told Bob Colacello, "Doris had gone surfing. There was a rumor she did it deliberately." Even esteemed historian Michael Beschloss, writing a tribute to Kahanamoku in The New York Times, gave credence to the story that the legendary surfer was Arden's father. "Several biographers have argued that the baby was almost certainly Kahanamoku's," he wrote. "Three weeks after the birth, his timing perhaps provoked by dread of a public scandal, Kahanamoku married Nadine Alexander, a Cleveland-born dance teacher at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel." (pgs 227 and 228)
A couple of things here. Doris Duke would've been almost twenty-eight-years-old and married for five years at that point. If she's having two different lovers simultaneously, the concept of abortion and contraception would've been not only familiar to her, they would've been available (keep in mind, she was one of the richest and most well-connected people in the country and there were most certainly abortions performed for wealthy people pre-Roe). If she truly wanted to rid herself of that pregnancy, why would she do it in such a public, painful spectacle? Furthermore, her actions after the fact (the emotional outburst in the hospital, the adoption decades later of what she believed to be the reincarnation of her daughter) support her grief and loss.
Of course, she could've changed her mind after the deed was done and was horrified, and there are those who grieve for lost pregnancies that they knew wouldn't have been good ideas.
But the ignorance of the resources Duke would've have available to her is ridiculous.
Also, pretty sure that she could've easily pulled off having a mixed race baby (if it was indeed Kahanamoku's) and she knew it, a child who would've grown up like Duke, cocooned by privilege and no one would've gone against whatever story Duke might have concocted to explain whatever physical differences the child might have displayed ("It's her father's Spanish blood!").
So no, this is ridiculous and unnecessary and doesn't contribute to the theory that Duke was a murderer over a quarter century later (unless you factor in the loss of her only child being one more thing that shoved Duke over the edge, which is not the point the author is making by telling that story).
Speaking of ridiculous and unnecessary! Duke and Tirella's relationship was probably codependent on Duke's part, no doubt, and absolutely controlling. And it may shock you to realize that not all toxic relationships (especially professional ones) need a sexual element, particularly with Tirella being a gay man.
Based on what I'd learned from many of Eduardo's friends, I believed that Doris Duke had coveted his professional relationship with her as chief designer. But what if her jealously [sic] went deeper? What if she had harbored sexual feelings for the handsome designer who was twelve years younger? And if so, who did she think he was "two-timing" her with? She not only knew he was close to Edmund Kara, but she'd hired the two of them to do the design work on The Self Realization Fellowship, a spiritual center she was funding high in the hills above Los Angeles.
Then I thought of that weekend she'd spent at Rough Point with Eduardo and Kaffe Fassett. Thought the two gay men were just friends, could Doris, whom [one-time boyfriend Peter] Byrne called "a nymphomaniac," have suddenly become jealous because she imagined that there was actually something between them and she wanted Eduardo for herself?
In 2007, writing in The L.A. Times, Dr. David Buss, a Ph.D. and psychologist, concluded that "jealousy is possibly the most destructive emotion housed in the human brain. It's the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide (and) those who experience jealousy (themselves) suffer too. They feel anxious, depressed, angry, humiliated, out of control, sometimes suicidal."
Every one of those qualities seemed to describe Doris Duke.
She'd killed Eduardo literally minutes after he'd announced he was leaving, following seven years as her "constant companion." That happened within months of that violent incident at Falcon Lair, where she reportedly got her jaw broken by [common-law husband] Joe Castro, whom she'd stabbed in a jealous rage three years before that. Castro had told his L.A. lawyer Edward Brown that he'd twice saved Doris from suicide. In the months before the Falcon Lair incident she'd been depressed about the death of her second husband, Porfirio Rubirosa. Doris was notorious for her heavy use of drugs and alcohol. Could all of that explain the central element in any murder case: motive? And if she did confess to Peter Byrne was it because she harbored some sense of guilt? (pg 267)
This is absolutely ridiculous. Number one, there's plenty of jealousy to be had by a woman who felt abandoned her whole life (having never had a structured environment it sounds like) from the loss of a trusted employee. There's plenty of jealousy to be had about him leaving her for another employer. The quote from her ex about her being a "nymphomaniac" is... something, but A) it came from an ex she was with briefly and B) they were together for eight months in 1967, a time when pretty much any woman who enjoyed sex would've been labeled a "nymphomaniac" and where exactly was Byrne's psychology degree in diagnosing his ex with nymphomania?
Again, Duke most probably killed Tirella because she felt betrayed (again) by someone she trusted because she didn't form healthy relationships, by all evidence. There doesn't need to be a sexual element to it.
And speaking of elements to Tirella's death we don't need! Get your popcorn because we're going to the movies!
Three months after Eddie's death, Shelia Graham included this in her syndicated column: "The Doris Duke-Eduardo Tirella auto tragedy had a counterpart at the beginning of the Bette Davis/John Crawford horror picture, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Not having screened the 1962 Robert Aldrich picture since seeing it in high school, I found it and watched the opening. In it, Joan Crawford's character crushes her sister "Jane," played by Bette, against the wrought iron gates of their mansion which is identified in the film as "the old Valentino place," Falcon Lair, the very Beverly Hills estate where Eduardo Tirella had redesigned the kitchen for Doris Duke. That classic work of psycho-noir was in theaters four years before the homicide at Rough Point. I wondered, was it just another bit of irony in a story pregnant with it, or could the film have planted a seed in Dee Dee's mind?
The simplest explanation for all of this is that Duke's murder of Tirella began as a spur-of the-moment act, fueled by anger and alcohol that simply veered out of control.
But one thing is clear: once Eduardo went up on the hood of that wagon and rolled off, even if she'd had a flickering moment of doubt that caused her to tap the brakes outside the gates, Doris then decided to commit, confident that her lawyers and damage control specialists would keep her out of prison. (pgs 288 and 289)
A still from the film showing the gates is helpfully provided.
Why... why mention this, save for as a brief curiosity? Do I think Doris Duke really got the idea from a movie she may or may not have seen, but technically had come out before she killed Tirella?
This omits the fact that the incident with Tirella was something they'd done many times (changing seats in the car while maneuvering the gate), it wasn't a gate they hadn't encountered before, or that Duke likely conspired to get Tirella by so she could kill him just like she saw in the movies. When they went out to run an errand, Tirella told her he was leaving, and (according to the eyewitness paperboy that came forward) they had an argument by the car and Duke's anger took over and she killed him.
Again, it could've been easily left at an eerie coincidence.
________________________________________
A character you really don't want to see comes up throughout the book. I understand the author's motivation about Trump's infamous "Fifth Avenue" line, but after awhile, these references are tiresome. Unlike Trump, Duke was actually a billionaire. Unlike Trump, she clearly felt remorse (or at least guilt) for what she did and sought to atone for it in some way.
But when Donald Trump declared, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any votes," a light bulb went off. The notion of a self-professed billionaire openly bragging he could get away with murder sent me back home to the story I should have covered in the summer of '67, when life and my career got in the way. (pgs 11 and 12)
That year Nixon won the presidential popular vote over Hubert Humphrey by only 812, 415, but like Donald Trump in 2016, he captured the Electoral College: 301 to 191. Still, in solidly blue Rhode Island, Humphrey crushed Nixon by more than two to one and in 1972 when the only state Nixon didn't win was Massachusetts (Kennedy country) "Little Rhody," gave George McGovern his second-highest state win the nation.
Nixon retaliated with a vengeance.
A year later he announced plans to move the entire Cruiser Destroyer Force Atlantic Fleet (CRUDESLANT) from Newport to three different bases in the South. He shut down Quonset Naval Air Station across Narragansett Bay and slashed 21,000 jobs in the state. It was a blow that would have bankrupted Newport if tourism couldn't become its salvation and, in this story, with its murderous quid pro quo, that's when Doris Duke stepped in. By the time she'd finished most of her restoration project, the number of tourists visiting Newport jumped from a reported 890,000 a year in 1974 to 3 million by 1977. (pg 19)
Just a reminder that while Nixon is now a better President than Trump, he still sucked.
Trump even finds his way (you could say "grabs" his way) into the author's memoir sections, as seen here as the author is striving in college:
After getting off the elevator, I found myself lucky on three counts: first that Dean Christopher Trump (a handsome Canadian unrelated to "45") was lunching alone in his office (pg 61)
[T]he tobacco heiress was demonstrating the same hardball tactics later perfected by Donald Trump: i.e., when sued, always counter-sue, pay as little to the government or creditors as possible and always seek the maximum advantage in any financial transaction. (pgs 146 and 147)
In an epic example of irony, Rudolf Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for The Southern District of New York, indicted Leona [Helmsley, who was alleged to have similar misuse of funds as Doris Duke] in 1988 on a series of charges including tax evasion and extortion. While acquitted on that latter charge, she was later found guilty of 33 tax-related counts that could have sent her to prison for life. But in a double twist of irony considering all "the President's men" from the Trump era, she hired Alan Dershowitz, who appealed the convictions and achieved such a sentence reduction that Leona was out of prison in 19 months. (pg 149)
The first time I focused on [Eduardo Tirella's] name was in the summer of 2018 after CNN had replayed Trump's 2016 press conference in which he'd made that boast about being able to "shoot somebody" in "the middle of Fifth Avenue." (pg 247)
If this book is proof of anything, it's the enduring importance of local journalism-- particularly the daily print coverage of events in a small community. The Newport Daily News not only offered me a chance to cut my teeth in this profession, but its past issues on newspaper.com allowed me to confirm my reporting after more than 50 years. As denigrated as reporters have been in The Age of Trump, facts will always be facts and well archived print newspaper represent a kind of daily "paper ballot" of history; forever there to be recounted and scrutinized. (pg 312)
But then, he's not entirely wrong that Duke had at least some Trumpy qualities:
[O]n June 21st, [1976], [Duke] took the stand in a Somerset County, New Jersey courthouse testifying in the criminal trial of Arthur Whitaker, a former FBI agent-turned-private investigator whom she'd hired to look into the theft of jewelry and a jade figurine worth $10,000 from her 2,700 acre Duke Farms estate in Hillsborough Township.
After evidence showed that Whittaker had done an extensive investigation, including hiring a private company to give lie detector tests to all 114 Duke employees (at her insistence) and after he'd staffed the estate with additional security, he presented Doris with a bill for $21,000 which she promptly refused to pay. (pgs 218 and 2198)
As to her Karmic bank account, the tall tobacco heiress was deep in the red when it came to how she treated the dozens of workers in each of her estates. The staffs at Duke Farms, Rough Point, Falcon Lair and Shangri-La were victims of regular mistreatment. For decades, not a single one earned medical or pension benefits. According to Patrick Mahn, her former business manager, they were often berated and subject to firing at will.
Further, Doris was notoriously stingy. If a servant broke a single glass, they had to pay for it. Seven weeks before the death of Eduardo Tirella, she exercised enough influence over local authorities in New Jersey to get criminal charges filed against Michael Cilento, a chef at Duke Farms whom she accused of stealing two Limoges china plates allegedly worth $500. Cliento, who denied taking the plates found in his quarters, told police that his three-year-old son had removed them from the pantry. Yet Doris persisted in the prosecution in which the chef faced three to five years in prison. His bail was $5,000, ten times the value of the plates.
Peter Byrne, a former RAF pilot during World War II, who had a five month affair with Doris in Hawaii in 1967, recounted another incident with her staff that he'd witnessed.
"There was a one time when a delivery truck came in the front of Shangri-La and one of the statues that she had there was broken. Doris was absolutely furious. So she lined up all of the servants in the front year. There were like 20. Gardeners, maids and cooks. She said, 'I want to know who broke this statue.' They wouldn't say anything. So she said, 'You'd better tell me or else.' They all stood silent. So she pointed to five of them (counting) 'One, two, three, four, five. You're fired.' She sacked them all on the spot. There were people who'd served her loyally; many for years. They had families with children. She was very vindictive.
When her chief designer, Eduardo Tirella, turned those abandoned greenhouses into a world-class botanical display, acting as both architect and general contractor, Doris's business manager at the time, the late Pete Cooley, insisted on paying him an hourly wage of $7.00. (pgs 228 and 229)
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Keep in mind as you read this that jury of seven women and five men found [Duke] civilly negligent in the homicide, the same way a civil jury later found O.J. Simpson liable after he was acquitted of criminal charges. The difference was that Simpson still owes some $70 million in damages for the wrongful death of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, but in this instance, after shamelessly denigrating the decedent, the total award Doris Duke was on the hook for was only $75,000, plus interest. (pg 15)
Damn, not just Manson but O.J. Simpson. At least this is a direct comparison of cases, though.
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Might I interest you in some pop culture?
Beginning in 1723 when 26 sailors were hung [sic] as pirates on a warm summer day before what historians later called "a jubilant crowd," Newport has spawned enough moral ambiguity to program five seasons of "Breaking Bad." (pg 17)
It [the Irish diaspora] was the particular scourge of a prominent member of the summer colony, who, in later years would have given Downton Abbey's Maggie Smith a run for her money: Mrs. Peyton J. van Rensselaer. (pg 158)
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Built on a slave economy, but a bastion of early religious tolerance, President Kennedy had planned to make Newport the site of the official Summer White house [sic] when his life was cut short. But his wife, Jackie who spent summers at her mother's estate, Hammersmith Farm, continued to visit and later signed on as Doris Duke's Number Two on the Newport Restoration Foundation. (pg 17)
Interestingly, the Kennedys come up a lot here. Jackie Kennedy and Duke were purportedly close friends.
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[Duke lawyer Aram] Arabian may have even played "the gay card," reinforcing a sexist trope to the urban jury that Tirella was "something less than a man." If that had happened in 1971, years before the gay rights movement shattered that myth, it might, on its own, have insured the paltry $75,000 damage award. (pg 55)
"The gay card" is not a thing in this instance and "employed a bigoted misconception of the time" would've been more accurate than "played the gay card."
It's also not so much as sexist trope as a homophobic one.
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Seriously, WTF.
A blackmail case with a blue blood victims (she's literally from the Vanderbilt family) is offered this solution:
Without informing Donald Homen, Chief of Police in the adjacent community, [Newport Police Chief Joseph] Radice concocted a harebrained "sting" operation in which a heavyset Newport patrolman in a wig would pose as [blackmail victim] Mrs. Adams, then, as the blackmailer approached her car outside the club after dark, he'd be arrested.
But on the night of the set-up, when the extortionist moved toward her vehicle, a second cop hiding in the back seat popped up his head. The suspect saw him and ran off, whereupon the decoy cop jumped out and started firing wildly into the night.
[...]
Retired Newport Detective Al Conti, who helped me immensely on the Duke investigation, told me that the Chief was so obsessed with breaking the Vanderbilt Adams case, that he ordered junior patrolmen, including Conti, to hide up in a tree overlooking Mrs. Adams' mailbox in the nightly stakeouts, on the off-chance the blackmailer would reappear.
He never did. (pg 99)
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Doris Duke's first two husbands disappointed her in different ways. First, there was Palm Beach socialite James Crowell, 16 years older, whose check bounced when he tried to pay for their 1935 honeymoon. Next came notorious Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, whose male endowment was legendary. In Paris restaurants, when diners asked for their steaks to be seasoned, rather than calling for a peppermill, waiters would yell, "Bring me the Rubirosa!" Eartha Kitt, one of many legendary women who succumbed to his charms, was aid to have compared him to Cary Grant, Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster, rolled into one. (pg 101)
I think I'd prefer "phallus" to "male endowment", also, ew. That little story sounds about right when you consider the use of the term "Alpha male" (seriously, why?!) in the book flap.
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In late summer of '66, Eduardo Tirella was in a bind.
"Eduardo really wanted to extricate himself from her clutches. But at the time he needed major dental work that ran into the thousands of dollars and working for her was the only way he could get that kind of money. Everybody else in our circle of friends told him, 'Don't go back to her. You can get the money some other way."
As a precaution, Eduardo agreed to consult with a clairvoyant named Dr. Jacques Honduras, nicknamed "the Psychic to the Stars."
"He had the reading done, said [friend Pola] Sanay and Jacques advised him absolutely not to go back to Newport. He sensed danger there." But, in the end, Eduardo decided to make the trip. (pg 140)
Yet another reason to support universal healthcare, including dental, so you don't have to work for murderous employers even when a Hollywood psychic warns against it. (Seriously, support universal healthcare.)
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Describing some lore about a local character that takes place in the 1940s, the author calls upon a friend from Newport to explain how "Con the Bender" got his nickname:
"Cornelius Edward Sullivan was a machinist at the Torpedo Station. Every morning he'd walk from 13 Carroll Avenue in The Fifth Ward to Government Landing on Thames Street and catch the Goat Island ferry. In the winter, decades before Climate Change, he would go down to King Park and walk across the ice of the frozen harbor to the island. When people saw him, bent over with his head into the wind, they started calling him 'Con The Bender.'" (pg 157)
Why is "Climate Change" capitalized? Okay, that's a cheap shot when you consider the various errors throughout the book and this isn't even the only capitalization error in the book I've quoted.
Also, climate change has been reported as happening as early as the 1910s, if not earlier, although it was not called that then. What we are seeing are the more direct results of climate change and we have been for awhile, it's just getting harder to deny it (although the GOP is hanging in there!).
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Built in 1862, [Seaverge, a 19th century timber-framed estate next to Doris Duke's Rough Point] had been the summer residence of Elbridge T. Gerry, the grandson of Elbridge Gerry, one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. As Massachusetts governor in 1812, he was the first to manipulate a political district to his advantage; a practice, called "gerrymandering," that remains the scourge of free and fair elections to this day. (pg 161)
One of the [Rhode Island] Senator [Claiborne Pell]'s greatest achievements was in sponsoring the 1972 education reform bill that created what became known as "Pell Grants," providing financial aid to tens of thousands of U.S. Students. (pg 316)
"He not only worked to establish Newport as JFK's 'Summer White House,' but the bridge spanning Narragansett Bay is deservedly named for him."
The Kennedys again!
Also, now you know how "gerrymandering" and "Pell grants" got their names.
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On shooting The Sandpiper in 1964 in Big Sur with Eduardo Tirella acting as a set designer as well as an extra (seriously! The author provides a still from the film), the author includes some stories.
[Producer Martin] Ransohoff then cast his protégé Sharon [Tate] in a secondary role, but as he later confessed, when he brought her to the set, [Elizabeth] Taylor, jealous of Tate's beauty, chided him playfully, "How dare you bring that girl here while mother is on the stage."
Playful or not, all of Tate's scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, though she attended the premier. (pg 261)
Pretty sure Taylor was kidding around, as she personally was widely considered one of the most beautiful and glamorous women in the world at the time, and why go with the ridiculous and sexist backbiting trope? I'm not saying that a woman widely considered beautiful and glamorous can't be insecure as well, but by most accounts, Taylor had a pretty good sense of humor about herself and her comment might have even been meant to be a compliment to the then-unknown actress. Taylor's film wasn't the only one where Tate's scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. It's less likely that was Taylor's cattiness and more likely the fact Tate was an aspiring actor with a small role.
But that's not the last we heard about Taylor.
According to biography of Elizabeth Taylor by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, which relied on interviews with her long time gay assistant Richard Hanley, Burton, who was said to be bisexual, became smitten with Eduardo. One weekend during production, after Eddie had booked a singing job in San Francisco, Porter and Prince wrote that Burton accompanied him there, while Liz was rumored to have stayed behind in Monterey to spend time with the novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel. Then married to Deborah Kerr, Viertel's many screen credits included The African Queen. According to Hanley (per Porter and Prince) the Burton-Tirella San Fransisco trip "caused some jealous tension between Burton and [director Vincent] Minnelli,' who was also reported to be bi-sexual [sic] and rumored to have "wanted Tirella for himself." (pg 261)
This is somehow the first I'm hearing of the Burton-is-bisexual rumors (a quick search says he discussed sexual experiences with other men). Also, why spell it both bisexual (correct) and "bi-sexual" (what?) in 2021? Why is Taylor's assistant being gay worth mentioning? Because it gives him credibility on Queer behavior? While these are some salacious rumors and I suppose are included to show how charming and desirable Tirella was, they just come across as a bit sleazy.
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Near a bicycle, you can see two of the balusters that snapped off the gates as they were blown out over the two-by-five-inch metal stop. Located in the lower foreground of the shot, you can see that it was riveted into the concrete to keep the freely-swinging gates inward. The owner of that stingray bike was Steve Mey (not pictured) then a nine year old paperboy who delivered The Newport Daily News along the "Avenue route." (pg 273)
This is describing the scene of the crash site, including an accompanying picture. It struck me as extra eerie (and I double-checked the names) to have a paperboy's bike be lying in the shot when it'd be a paperboy that came forward decades later as a witness to the murder.
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My sister Mary, who went on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker, shared with me two of the greatest parents any kids could ever hope for. They weren't just loving, but incredibly supportive and politically "woke" decades before that we even a thing. (pg 316)
...Don't. Just don't. No.
Also, the actual meaning of the word "woke" has always existed. It means "aware of what's happening on a socio-political level." You don't have to appropriate a pretty already-ruined word to communicate your parents were extremely socially aware.
Final Grade: C
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