by Jeremy Scott
‘His face was quite a picture when the lawyers walked in,’ says Kingsbury-Smith. ‘He looked like one of those fierce black Miura bulls about to charge a black cape. I’ve never seen anyone madder. But he signed. There wasn’t much else he could do.’
But Rubi is rattled by the incident. When he does sign, his handwriting is wobbly. He’s noticeably drunk by now, and as the service starts, he lights a cigarette with a shaky hand. He smokes it during the ceremony, extinguishing it only so that he and Doris can exchange rings. Then, as the brief rite ends, Rubi collapses. There will be speculation later that someone, not unconnected with the proceedings, spiked his drink in an attempt to derail the marriage. Whatever the reason, he folds. ‘Big Boy passed out in my arms,’ Doris explains.
He comes to in their honeymoon suite in the Hotel du Cap with no memory of how he has got to Antibes. He is furious about the pre-nup; he can hardly bring himself to speak to his wife.
‘I thought it was funny,’ Doris says. ‘Big Boy was so upset he just paced around the suite smoking cigarettes.’ ‘He was one pissed playboy,’ says Pony Duke.
He is indeed. He’s incensed at his public humiliation. He withdraws his favours, refusing to come to his wife’s bed. But there is no scene, no violence; Doris has him and she knows it. Of course it takes contrition and a little wooing on her part before he starts lighting her cigarettes again. She gives him a make-up present, a seventeenth-century townhouse in Paris, for which she pays $100,000 plus a half million to a decorator to do it up according to Rubi’s wishes as a personal expression of his questionable taste.
The mansion is well-chosen. It is protected by a high wall and has the privacy and security of a stronghold; Doris envisages living here herself. And Rubi is made very happy by the gift. Mr Nasty becomes Mr Nice and Big Boy is back again, quick on the draw with his solid gold lighter. Recovering from his pique, he takes up his role and marital obligations as husband to the richest woman in the world.
As had Jimmy Cromwell twelve years earlier in New York. Both marriages were equally unpromising, and both grooms motivated by desire for her money. In Rubi’s case the discord between bride and husband was soon resolved by great sex. With Jimmy it was not. He was a bit of a limp rag in the sack and, though he’d slept with a number of women, had learned nothing about foreplay.
Doris and Jimmy had embarked on their honeymoon that same afternoon of their wedding to sail for Europe. Doris was nervous, she’d been agitated by the mob of photographers and reporters who had chased after them to the ship. And she was apprehensive of the wedding night ahead.
But Jimmy was cock-a-hoop with joy. In dire straits financially, he’d landed the world’s top-ranking heiress. He reported, ‘We got tremendous publicity when she and I were married. That’s considered something you need in order to be successful in politics.’
He was thirty-eight (she was twenty-two) and strung tight with anticipation. His mother had warned him, she’d told him to wait until they were several days at sea and the marriage well consummated before mentioning money. But Jimmy was impatient and could not restrain himself. That very evening, when Doris had slipped into a negligee, climbed between the sheets and smiled shyly toward him, he lit a cigarette, came to sit on the edge of the bed and leaned ardently toward his bride to say, ‘My darling, what might I expect my annual income to be?’
On the second day of the crossing an embarrassed purser accosted Doris to apologise, but was something being done about the matter of the cheque? It seemed the one her husband gave to Thomas Cook to pay for their tickets had been refused.
Doris was baffled. ‘Why would the bank refuse a cheque?’ When it was explained to her what a bounced cheque was, she was incensed. Furious, she kicked her husband in the shins, he kicked her back. Apart from that, the honeymoon was not attended by much passion. Doris explains, ‘The truth of the matter was that we did try to have sex but there was not much to him. He was small where it would have been nice had he been larger. My experience was very limited so I thought this must be the way all men are. You can imagine my disappointment. But you cannot believe my relief when I learned that some men were far more gifted.’
Jimmy saw it differently. ‘I was as patient as I could be and tried hard to go halfway, make it easier for her if I could. But it was very simple, she was frigid.’
Doris nicknamed her husband ‘The Pope’, because of his pomposity and habit of wearing a small hat to conceal his bald spot. ‘He was very grand and very expensive but he did nothing in bed.’ Under-endowed, yet in every other way stereotypically male, Jimmy attributed the problem to Doris. He called her ‘the Fridgidairess’.
The couple’s honeymoon took in India, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines and Japan, while they bickered continuously. In August they arrived in Hawaii. And here, free of the press photographers in this lush paradise Doris found the secluded spot upon the globe where she would make her spiritual and physical home. Deciding to build a dream house on the island, she rented a cottage and cased the island for the perfect site.
Great wealth confers a magic wand upon its owner, a power not far short of God’s when He decreed, Let there be land. In Hawaii there was already land and beach aplenty; Doris required a location she could restructure to her own design.
She loved beach life. She was a strong swimmer and now she learned to surf. It was a new sport, unknown except in Hawaii. Her instructor was Sam Kahanamoku, and through him she got to know his brother Duke, an Olympic swimming champion, 6ft 3in in height and sheriff of Honolulu. ‘She liked dark people,’ says Jimmy Cromwell. While riding a surfboard Doris discovered a freedom and co-ordinated body rhythm she’d known only in dancing. First she took Sam Kahanamoku to be her lover then, more enduringly, his brother. ‘My father, Duke, was the only person I was sure really loved me, but another man named Duke would teach me how to make love.’
Jimmy Cromwell, fretful at his exclusion and cross that his allowance was only ‘a measly $10,000 a month’, went home to mother. Eva sent him back quickly, but not before Doris had bought four and a half acres of land near Diamond Head for $100,000. She hired a local architect to draw up plans for a fortress, impregnable to the outside world, a perfect Shangri La.
Then the Jimmy Cromwells returned to the US, for him to pursue his political career. By now Doris knew – she’d known from the first night of their honeymoon – that he was a mistake. But a husband was thought to be a necessary accessory for an heiress, conveying a respectability that made it possible for the partners in the marriage to live as they chose. She didn’t need Jimmy, she was admirably independent by nature and, with the assurance of great wealth, genuinely did not care a hoot what others thought.
Yet, very generously, she donated $50,000 to the Democrats’ campaign, enabling Jimmy to take up cards in this new game. He started work upon a book, In Defense of Capitalism, designed to secure him the reputation of a political pundit. Doris flew between the East Coast and Hawaii to supervise construction of her house. The two led separate lives, covering 500,000 miles in the first two years of their marriage. Jimmy would have liked to have a son, if only to secure their union, but Doris had no wish for a child.
In 1938 the couple sailed together to England to attend the Coronation of George VI on 12 May. Barbara Hutton was there, together with a set of people Doris knew; among them Alec Cunningham-Reid. Doris and he resumed their affair. ‘Oh, I knew he was a lizard,’ she says, ‘but he was the most exciting and best-looking lizard I have ever seen. The best part was that he made Jimmy nervous so I gave him a lot of attention.’
But Jimmy was complaisant about his wife’s affairs, so long as they did not embarrass him or damage his political reputation. Many husbands felt the same way and a line of colluding cuckolds stretches back in history. It was a civilised arrangement, a couple could follow individual lives without rancour. To some husbands it provided sexual stimulus. Others, whose wives dallied with princes, were rewarded with honours or advancement.
Ji
mmy did not object to Doris’s infidelity, while it remained discreet. Egotistical and firmly self-centred, he took himself seriously, mistakenly believing he was an original political thinker. He wrote to an aide to Roosevelt at the White House: ‘I should like to have ten or perhaps fifteen minutes of his time in order to point out certain errors in his recent fireside chat…’ Money may prattle foolishly, still money talks. The Cromwells were invited to cocktails at the White House, Jimmy’s name was announced as contender for a seat in the Senate. Then, to his enormous gratification, Doris was asked to accompany Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s wife, on a visit to a deprived mining community in West Virginia.
What Doris chose to wear for this opportune occasion at the side of the First Lady was obviously important. She was normally uninterested in how she dressed. The columnist, Cobina Wright, recalls, ‘One day she came back with a nightgown which she converted into an evening gown. She had a maid take off the flowers. She said it was a bargain.’
Clothes meant nothing to her, yet what she wore at the First Lady’s side to visit impoverished miners and their hungry families in their uninsulated shacks was a statement. Upon the day, she chose to appear in a full-length Russian mink coat and custom-made English walking boots. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled, so incensed she refused to speak one word to her.
Jimmy was mortified. ‘Why would you dress better for some coal miners in wherever that place was, and wear a made-over nightgown to my parents’ ball in Palm Beach?’ he demanded. ‘It does not make any sense.’
It made perfect sense. She disliked parties and a crush of people, was repelled by the political class. By a single aptly styled appearance she ensured that she would never be asked again.
Jimmy’s next move was to use Doris’s money to produce a film, Of Men and Money. He spoke of buying a newspaper and throwing it behind the Democrats’ cause. ‘I don’t think they took him too seriously,’ says a Washington editor. ‘I don’t think people had a great deal of respect for him.’ He was behaving impetuously because he was under the gun; he needed to secure nomination to the New Jersey Senate seat, while maintaining the impression that his wealthy wife was happy in funding his bid from her enormous fortune.
Meanwhile, Doris was following an independent life in Hawaii, where her house was starting to take shape, but also visiting Paris, Athens and London to meet with Alec Cunningham-Reid, who was waiting for the divorce from his second heiress-wife, Ruth Ashley, to become final. Doris seldom read a newspaper, yet not only friends but her business manager, William Baldwin, and lawyer, Tom Perkins, had made her fully aware of Alec’s reputation. She depended on them for advice, which she seldom opposed in any business affair. Yet in this matter of the heart she was impregnable to counsel. She was not blind about Alec, she knew him to be a rat. But the rat came sleekly packaged. He could pass for a respectable establishment figure, while in fact he was an opportunistic chancer. Chancers are attractive, there is an exhilaration in their company. Many women thought so about Alec. Doris knew herself to be physically unattractive; Alec was a validation of her worth. Besides, her advisers were warning her against him and there is a keen thrill in transgressive love.
In the winter of 1939, Jimmy – one of five candidates for the New Jersey seat – was given by Roosevelt the job of US Minister to Canada. And it was at this crucial moment that Doris told him she wanted a divorce, before flying to join Alec on a winter sports vacation. She then left for Hawaii, to await him there when his divorce became final, omitting to mention to either man that she was pregnant.
In Honolulu Doris found her fortress was nearing completion.
Protected by a high white wall the garden contained its own grove of relocated full-grown palm trees. A sand-bottom stream wound its way through the garden and interior of the house. Closed-off on its landward side, the property opened onto its own beach and the sea beyond. It was a dream setting.
Duke’s brother and his wife lived in the grounds as caretakers, and Duke had his own room in the house. Now Doris moved in. She made no effort to entertain or be invited by the resident white community and, piqued, its members gossiped and bad-mouthed her in return.
Doris cared not a fig, but she was concerned about her pregnancy. The baby might be Duke’s or Alec’s, but could not be Jimmy’s, whom she had not slept with for two years.
On 11 July, while Alec was in a plane on his way to join her, Doris went surfing for several hours with Duke. Afterward, she went into premature labour. In Honolulu’s hospital she gave birth to a three-pound dark-skinned baby girl. Unable to sustain life, the infant died less than twenty-four hours later. Doris learned that she could never have another child, went through a minor breakdown, and was comforted by Alec.
Jimmy Cromwell learned of the birth from newspapers. When he called her she forbad him to come to Hawaii, saying if he did she would refuse to see him. He had received a lot of bad publicity of late and now the press shredded him for not being at his wife’s side when she most needed him. In New Jersey, Mayor Hague became aware that Jimmy was no longer funded by the Duke millions, refusing to see him or return his telephone calls. ‘My whole organisation actually turned up their toes and quit,’ he says.
It was the end of Jimmy Cromwell’s career, and he exits this narrative, leaving his own pitiful epitaph:
I was a ladies’ man. I was extremely good-looking. I used to have a perfect physique … But I didn’t have a decent break of luck … Fate has decreed that I will never be a financial success. Mine has been a really weird life in that I have always been connected with great fortunes … but never have I ever had any capital of my own.
Alec Cunningham-Reid was a very different kettle of fish to poor dimwitted Jimmy. It’s true he was a hero, a Conservative MP, a popular figure in London and other capitals. He had wit, charm, looks and upper-crust background. But, as Doris had figured early in their relationship, he was unquestionably a rat.
He lived in England, where he was somewhat idle in his parliamentary duties, and his habit of jaunting off to international social destinations had been curtailed by the war. Britain was a particularly bleak place to live in at that time. The country was governed by emergency restrictions. Black-out and food rationing were in place, food was short, petrol rationed and British subjects were not permitted to travel abroad.
Alec cooked up an ingenious scheme not only to evade these constraints but to secure himself a nice little earner to see out the conflict and provide a safe haven for his family at no cost to himself. Doris, who wanted him with her and wished to marry him, was happy to go along with the racket under his direction. She wrote to old Joe Kennedy, US ambassador in London. She’d known his sons, Jack, Bobby and Ted, since childhood. Through Kennedy she donated $25,000 to the Red Cross to assist British child refugees. Alec created the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, naming himself its chief representative. It was a worthy cause; he experienced no difficulty in obtaining exit permits and US visas for himself, his mother, and his two sons, aged twelve and ten.
At the height of the Blitz, with bombs falling nightly upon London, Alec fled the country with his personal brood of evacuees, travelling First Class to America, where they took up residence in their luxurious refugee camp, Duke Farms. The two boys were enrolled in a nearby private school. His timely flight did not go unnoticed. The war was going badly, and that a Conservative MP should choose to run away with his family to the States was repugnant to everyone. The press vilified him and there were repeated calls for him to resign from Parliament. Eventually he was forced to return. When he slunk back a newspaper named him The Most Hated Man in Britain and, on turning up at the House of Commons, another MP punched him in the face.
In December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, only a few miles down the coast from Doris’s house by Diamond Head.
As a civilian, she was unable to leave mainland America. Duke Kahanamoku was in Hawaii, Alec back in London, and in New York Jimmy Cromwell was proving difficult about the di
vorce. He wanted $7 million to go quietly. He threatened to write a tell-all book; he was an embittered disappointed man and he’d go as low as it took. Nanaline and Doris’s advisers begged her to pay but she jibbed at the price, she hated anyone to cheat her.
In November 1942 Doris turned thirty, then in December won a divorce in Reno, Nevada. It was the best Christmas present she could imagine. On that birthday she came into the last slab of her fortune of over $450 million (around $7 billion in today’s value). She had total control over how she used it; she was guided only by William Baldwin, Tom Perkins and her own good sense. For the first time in her life she was truly free and now in possession of a mature knowledge of what she wanted and – even more important – what she did not want. She was at liberty to act as she liked. This was an epic moment in history. America had entered the war and she wished to make her own contribution to victory – but what? As the reader will recall, she elected to become a secret agent … which led to her marrying Rubirosa.
CHAPTER 7
DORIS DUKE, PARIS, 1947–48
Doris Duke’s rocky honeymoon on Cap d’Antibes with her sulky groom Rubi pacing the floor, chain smoking and glaring at her in ruffled pique, is assuaged and made smooth by her gift of the Paris house. Reconciled, the newly-weds return to the city to put up at the George V while the property is redecorated and made ready for them.
Rubi is overjoyed with the house – he’s never owned his own home before. He is without a job as he is still unacceptable to the French authorities, so has ample leisure to oversee the building’s redecoration. Doris has given him the title deeds and carte blanche to do as he likes.
