At Long Last, a Legacy

Four years after tobacco heiress Doris Duke’s death, her billion-dollar foundation announces its first batch of grants

After years of bitter legal battles, the $1.25-billion foundation created by the tobacco heiress Doris Duke has finally started doing what she had hoped it would: make grants for “the improvement of humanity.”

This week, more than four years after her death, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation here plans to announce its first batch of grants, totaling $18.6-million. The awards range from $4.9-million to help young physicians conduct medical research to $2-million to Jazz at Lincoln Center to keep alive the music of Duke Ellington.

The Duke foundation, now one of the nation’s 25 biggest philanthropies, is hard at work trying to figure out how best to live up to the legacy of Miss Duke, a shy and eccentric woman who kept her charitable giving such a tightly held secret that it is only now becoming clear that she was one of the most generous women of her era, giving away tens of millions of dollars in her lifetime.

The daughter of James Buchanan Duke, whose tobacco fortune created another big foundation — North Carolina’s Duke Endowment — left only general instructions about what causes she wanted her fund to support.

Miss Duke’s will made clear that she wanted to prevent cruelty to children and animals and that she wanted her money to support “dancers, singers, musicians and other artists of the entertainment world.” She urged the foundation to support scientists seeking cures for cancer, heart disease, and sickle-cell anemia — “provided that no animals are used to conduct such research” — but she also said the foundation could support efforts to eradicate “other diseases.” And she wrote that she had “a special interest in the preservation of wildlife, both flora and fauna, in the United States and elsewhere,” although she offered little advice about the environmental causes she hoped the foundation would finance.

She also requested, but did not require, that the foundation run six subsidiary operating foundations, whose programs include preserving Islamic art and running botanical gardens.

Miss Duke wrote her philanthropic intentions into her will nearly 15 years before her death in 1993 at age 80, and even though she revised her estate plans many times after that, she never wavered in her decision to leave her fortune to charity. Nevertheless, her philanthropic dreams were ensnared after her death in what some have called the nastiest probate battle ever, during which the foundation’s share of Miss Duke’s fortune was nibbled away by legal fees and court settlements.

Miss Duke’s adopted daughter, Charlene Gail Heffner, and several members of the Duke family sued the estate to get money they said they were due — and ended up receiving a $65-million settlement.

Miss Duke’s doctor, Harry Demopoulos, upset that he was replaced as an executor of the will, sued the estate and ended up being appointed to the foundation’s board. Later, the court removed Miss Duke’s butler, Bernard Lafferty, as executor of the estate and a trustee of the foundation after it determined that he was an alcoholic who was using charitable money for his own purposes.

The foundation also ended up opposing the estate: It unsuccessfully contested Miss Duke’s requirement that $100,000 be left in trust for her dog.

The strong feelings Miss Duke had for her dog, a mixed-breed shepherd named Minnie, may have in part come because of her disappointment in human beings. She often worried that people sought her out more for her money than anything else. Perhaps she inherited that sense of alienation from her father, who was said to have whispered to Doris on his deathbed, “Trust no one.”

That lack of faith may have been what prompted Mr. Duke to leave few details about his philanthropy to anyone else’s whims. He named the causes and some of the charities that would benefit from his foundation, and he set the percentages of money they would receive. He also insisted that the foundation should “have perpetual existence.” To remind the trustees of his values, he asked that the foundation’s detailed legal charter be read out loud once a year at board meetings — a process that takes 40 minutes.

Doris Duke attended many of those board meetings during her life and was adamant in protecting the wishes of her father, whom she adored. She once even voted against the entire board over the selling of Duke Power Company stock.

“She was very loyal to him, and anything that he would write down she would want to carry out,” says Mary Semans, a cousin of Miss Duke’s and chairman of the Duke Endowment. “She really wanted to do good in the world and was very motivated by her admiration for her father.”

But Miss Duke had different interests from her father’s — and a different approach to philanthropy. None of the kinds of restrictions that govern her father’s foundation can be found in her will. She even allowed the trustees to dip into the fund’s principal — or spend all the money and shut down — if they decided that was wise.

Because Miss Duke’s will provided so few instructions about how her foundation would be expected to spend its money, the round of grants announced this week, each of which was for at least $1-million, offer an important glimpse of the kinds of efforts the fund may support in the future.

But foundation officials caution that those grants do not present a full view of all that the fund may take on.

Because the foundation was required by federal law to distribute at least $17.5-million by the end of 1997, officials had to hustle to select grant recipients.

The foundation began receiving money from Miss Duke’s estate about a year ago and has no program officers — just three top executives and several administrative assistants. In 1998, the fund expects to distribute $55-million to comply with federal requirements that foundations distribute at least 5 per cent of their investment assets each year.

Joan Edelman Spero, the foundation’s president, says that because the selections had to be made so fast, she decided that the only way to make prudent choices was to stick to groups that were on the East Coast — relatively close to the Duke fund’s New York headquarters — and that already had strong reputations. In the future, she says, national and possibly international projects will be considered.

In addition, Ms. Spero says, the foundation narrowed its search by focusing on things that were very closely associated with the life of Doris Duke.

To learn more about Miss Duke, Ms. Spero — who until a year ago was Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs — interviewed dozens of people who knew and worked for Miss Duke, pored over documents and personal items, and toured several of the five properties that Miss Duke owned when she died.

The foundation also discovered tax records showing Miss Duke’s charitable giving from the time she was 18, and it has been using that information to shape the priorities of the foundation.

“There really is an unknown Doris Duke,” Ms. Spero says. “When most people think about her, they think of the legal battles over the will, or her reputation as being reclusive and mysterious. But in fact, there are a lot of fascinating things that this woman did.”

Miss Duke, who inherited $100-million beginning when she was 13, created a foundation when she turned 21 and called it Independent Aid. It later became the Doris Duke Foundation, which is a separate entity from the new Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Foundation officials estimate that Doris Duke gave away $97.7-million during her lifetime. In 1997 dollars, that would be almost $360-million.

Doris Duke and her father were threatened several times with extortion and kidnapping, and she did not want her donations to be reported in the press.

“She wasn’t interested at all if other people knew about it or not,” says Marion Oates Charles, a friend of Miss Duke’s who, along with Mr. Lafferty, were the only people Miss Duke named in her will as members of the foundation board. “She was very private and very generous — not in the sense that she gave presents away, but to causes she thought she could help.”

Some of Doris Duke’s gifts carried on the family legacy. She provided more than $4-million to Duke University in her lifetime. She also gave nearly $22-million to restore 83 historic homes in a rundown section of Newport, R.I., the popular seaside enclave of the wealthy where she kept her summer residence, a 30-room mansion called Rough Point that had been built by the Vanderbilts.

Other donations went to groups that supported the performing arts or worked to protect the environment. She also made gifts to local rescue squads, fire departments, and religious groups. Many donations went to organizations that helped children.

“She was very interested in helping people out who had promise or had trouble but didn’t somehow have the capacity to fill that,” Ms. Spero says. “One of the things that I’ve tried to do in thinking through our strategy is thinking of how to help young people, future leaders. She apparently cared a lot about that.”

Officials plan to use Miss Duke’s past giving not only as guidance in doling out money but also as an influence in running the foundation. In essence, officials say, they want to mirror Miss Duke’s spirit.

“Doris Duke was not a conventional lady,” says Ms. Spero. “She was a free spirit, an iconoclast. And I certainly feel we have a mandate from her to not be conventional.”

For example, Ms. Spero says the foundation will keep the size of its staff relatively small and will probably make big grants — unlike many other grant makers of Duke’s size. Ms. Spero says that Miss Duke was always involved directly in her grant making, so the foundation figured that a small staff would be a way to emulate that approach.

The Duke foundation is one of several new foundations with assets of $1-billion or more that recently have joined the top echelon of organized philanthropy.

In the last five years, new infusions of money have helped to vault the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in Kansas City, Mo.; the California Endowment, in Woodland Hills; and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, in Tulsa, Okla., onto the list of the 30 wealthiest foundations in the country.

As they do with those foundations, many people already have big expectations for Duke’s giving. The fund’s trustees are keenly aware of those expectations, but they warn that it will take time for the foundation’s programs to take shape.

“Everybody smells new money and their nostrils are quivering,” says J. Carter Brown, a foundation trustee and former head of the National Gallery of Art. “But it’s a very unusual foundation, and it is still in a very fledgling state.”

However, this week’s grant announcement offers indications of how the foundation is likely to make its mark in a few key areas:

The performing arts. Relatively few national grant makers focus on the performing arts, so the Duke foundation’s arrival could make a significant difference to many groups.

Even fewer foundations support individual artists, and the National Endowment for the Arts has virtually eliminated such grants.

For the Duke foundation to say it is trying to reach out not only to arts organizations but also to the artists themselves, says Loren Renz, head of research for the Foundation Center, “That will be an important and happy message in the field.”

Medical research. Many researchers say they hope the Duke fund will fill a void left when the Aaron Diamond Foundation closed its doors last year after spending all its money. The Diamond fund was well-regarded for its support of medical research, especially its financing of AIDS projects.

However, the Duke foundation faces a major challenge: Because Miss Duke explicitly forbade the foundation from using any of her money to support research done with animals, it will be hard for the fund to finance projects that lead to cures of major diseases, some researchers say.

In its first round of grants, the foundation avoided that issue by supporting clinical research by young physicians.

Anthony Fauci, a trustee of the Duke fund and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, says the foundation is worried that too many young doctors do not have enough money or other incentives to conduct research. “We wanted to make our first thrust at encouraging people to stay involved in clinical research,” he says.

The environment. Foundation officials consulted with conservation groups and decided to spend $5-million to complete a 20-year effort by several groups to buy Sterling Forest, a 17,500-acre parcel of land in upstate New York that was originally scheduled for commercial development but will now be converted into a public park.

That grant is something Ms. Spero and other Duke foundation officials believe Miss Duke “would have loved.” But Ms. Spero says she does not want to signal that the fund will be in the land-conservation business. Instead, she says, its environmental efforts will focus on issues like the way human beings influence the ecology.

So far, the foundation has decided that it has a role to play in stemming shortages of qualified environmental leaders.

“Because graduate education is very expensive and there are very few limited fellowships in the field of environment, a lot of people go to business school or law school instead of going into environmental schools,” Ms. Spero says. “And they come out with huge debts and don’t feel they can work for lower-paying non-profit institutions.”

Combining Miss Duke’s interest in the environment with her interest in helping young people, the foundation has given $1.2-million to finance a two-year pilot program designed to train future environmental leaders by supporting master’s-degree students at three universities.

Ms. Spero says that as head of the foundation, she sees it as a personal challenge to piece together information about Miss Duke and then devise an appropriate strategy to carry out a philanthropic legacy. The will, she notes with a smile, “doesn’t say, ‘You should do this and you should do that.’ It says, ‘Okay Spero, figure it out.’