KEY POINTS:
At the end of her sometimes scandalous life, American heiress and socialite Doris Duke was unlikely to go into that great good night without some attendant controversy - and she didn't disappoint.
When she died in 1993, aged 80, at one of her homes - the so-called Falcon's
Lair in Beverly Hills, which had belonged to Rudolph Valentino - she left her billion-dollar fortune to her charitable foundation. The catch was that it would be administered by her loyal butler, Bernard Lafferty, a gay Irishman often described as a drunkard and semi-literate.
Duke's was a singular life. When she was 12 she inherited a fortune and was dubbed by the press the Million Dollar Baby. She had two brief, high-profile marriages and serial lovers, and in 1988, at 75, she adopted a 35-year-old former bellydancer and Hare Krishna devotee, with whom some believed she was in a lesbian relationship. Always conscious of her looks, she had a facelift at 79.
With colourful locations, money to fritter and the cast of 20th-century public figures, Duke's life could be read as a script for a brash movie.
And indeed there has been a film made about her final days, Bernard and Doris starring Ralph Fiennes and Susan Sarandon.
Aside from gossip, lovers and a fortune, Duke left a more publicly tangible legacy - her home on the Hawaiian island of Oahu near Waikiki Beach, which she built in the late 1930s and has now opened to small groups of visitors. Few tourists who hit the bars, beaches and aloha-shirt shops on Oahu make it to Duke's ocean-front house. It is under-publicised and only 12 visitors at a time are allowed entry on four days a week.
Shangri La, as she called it, is all but invisible as you come down the driveway to the main entrance, which is simply wooden doors in a white, windowless wall.
Duke - who owned homes and apartments in New York, Rhode Island and Los Angeles, as well as a farm in New Jersey - considered the 2ha property her retreat.
Duke liked her privacy, says Charles, the guide who is showing just two mainland couples and myself around on this typically warm day.
Even when glimpsed from passing boats, little of Shangri La reveals itself. Its discreet low lines offer no hint of its inner opulence.
What makes Shangri La so interesting is that it is a monument to unconstrained wealth, eclectic taste, restless acquisition and eccentricity.
However, Duke's ocean-front home has a more singular focus in its elegant mix of Islamic art and design. Stepping through that wooden door - inscribed in Arabic: "Enter here in peace and security" - you walk into a world which is lavish yet minimal.
Over there are 17th-century ceramic tiles from Turkey, down there in the inner courtyard around the fountain are some from 13th-century Iran, here are light fixtures from Syria, and over there, a mosaic made by Duke in 1938 based on Iranian arabesques.
But in the enormous living room Duke used the modern technology of her time - a glass wall, 12m wide and 5m high, slides into the floor at the push of a button.
Now you have an unimpeded view of Diamond Head beyond the Olympic-size pool, where Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller once swam.
Duke bequeathed this place to her foundation to promote the study and understanding of Middle East art and culture.
Duke saw what she liked, bought it, then placed it where it suited her. Although it draws on Islamic art, there is no consistency.
A beautiful 13th-century mihrab - a wall niche indicating the direction of Mecca - is on an east wall rather than facing northwest. To Duke, it simply looked better there.
Elsewhere, separate centuries and styles are juxtaposed. And in its heyday, Duke had Hawaiian knick-knacks - hula-girl glasses, surfboards - around the place. This was a home to be lived in.
Her collection of 3500 items is where the real treasure for a scholar might lie, but to peruse those you need special permission.
Shangri La rewards a visit on its own terms - and Duke had a bottomless well of money to create it. Her father, James Buck Duke, made his money from tobacco, property and energy companies and when he died in 1935 she inherited most of his estate - more than $1 billion in today's money.
The young Doris was by all accounts a smart and intelligent child, and although her wealth allowed her to indulge various passions such as a love of animals, the arts and travel, she was far from frivolous with her money.
As her third cousin Pony Duke noted, she didn't have hobbies, she had obsessions and she turned all her interests into businesses.
She made large donations to charities, but also took care of her own increasingly rapacious desires.
She married James Cromwell in 1935 and a lengthy honeymoon took them to India where Duke fell in love with the Taj Mahal.
She immediately commissioned a marble bedroom based on the designs of that exotic tomb.
The final stop on their 10-month honeymoon was Hawaii, where she began to conceive a retreat on the picturesque property at Kaalawai.
So, with more than 100 local workers and using designs by architect Marion Sims Wyeth, 100 workers started building the home, and it was occupied by 1938.
Duke used Shangri La - named for the Utopian kingdom in James Hilton's pre-war escapist novel Lost Horizon - as a seasonal retreat, more so after she and James divorced in 1943.
Although she was busy with the house Duke also had time for life.
She was briefly married to the notoriously well-endowed playboy-cum-diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa, entertained herself with travel, alcohol and drugs, played jazz piano, and enjoyed numerous lovers, parties and famous guests.
When she was on the island she surfed competitively and for pleasure - and pleasure, especially of the sexual kind, was something she knew well, as a few salacious biographies attest.
Charles, our guide, is circumspect when I ask whether there is a thorough biography of Doris Duke.
He leaves us in no doubt that any bad press and innuendo about Duke remain outside those wooden doors.
At the end she was left with Lafferty, her beloved dog and the house, with its strange collision of eclectic Islamic decor set on the Pacific island.
In 1938, a reporter for the Honolulu Star Bulletin wrote: "On all the face of the globe there is no other place like it, nor is there likely to be".
- Detours, HoS
