A Very X-Rated Life ; Doris Duke Was One of the World's Richest Women. Her Lovers Included Errol Flynn, Georgepattonandaplayboy of Legendary Proportions - Until Finally She Fell Under the Spell of a Cross-Dressing Irish Butler.No Wonder She Insisted Her Life Should Never Be Turned Into a Film

Summary

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SWATHED in antique silk and surrounded by priceless antiques, quivering servants and every youth-giving lotion on the market, Doris Duke was emaciated, anaemic and barely conscious.

Her recently broken hip was refusing to mend, a Pounds 300,000 facelift was still tender and an operation to replace both arthritic knees - undergone in the hope that she would 'once again wear miniskirts and go dancing' - had left the 79-year-old tobacco heiress crippled, bedridden and increasingly confused.

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A Very X-Rated Life ; Doris Duke Was One of the World's Richest Women. Her Lovers Included Errol Flynn, Georgepattonandaplayboy of Legendary Proportions - Until Finally She Fell Under the Spell of a Cross-Dressing Irish Butler.No Wonder She Insisted Her Life Should Never Be Turned Into a Film

Not least, presumably, by the presence at her bedside of her pony- tailed butler Bernard Lafferty and his lawyer Bill Doyle, who levered her into an upright position, placed a pen in her fist and, firm hand beneath spindly wrist, propelled her liverspotted fingers across a new will.

Six months later - on October 27, 1993 - the woman once known as 'the richest little girl in all the world' would be dead, her $1.2 billion fortune about to become the subject of a bitter ten-year legal dispute and her alcoholic, pillpopping, cross-dressing Irish butler a multimillionaire in sole control of her enormous estate.

Within days, he was sleeping in her now em...

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