Doris Duke
Barbara's famous rival, fellow heiress Doris Duke, was the daughter of tobacco tycoon James B. Duke, and inherited $100 million after his death in 1925. She led a colorful life that fueled the gossip columns, though she was often called "cheap" by her more free-spending contemporary, Barbara. She had a short-lived career as a journalist reporting from war-ravaged Europe and moved to Paris to write for Harper's Bazaar. When she shacked up in Hawaii, she became the first non-Hawaiian woman to take up competitive surfing. After divorcing her second husband, Rubirosa, she attempted suicide. Perhaps the most tragic event of her life, however, happened in 1965, when she drunkenly ran into her interior decorator in Newport, killing him instantly. When she died, shut off from society in her Los Angeles home, she was addicted to antidepressants, painkillers, sleeping pills, and alcohol.
[Photo via Getty/NY Times Archive]
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