cover image Richest Girl in World

Richest Girl in World

Stephanie Mansfield. Putnam Publishing Group, $26.95 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13672-6

This revealing unauthorized biography of the famed tobacco heiress supports the adage that money doesn't buy happiness. In 1925, according to the author, 12-year-old Duke lost the one man whose love she trusted when her father, hard-driving magnate Buck Duke, died. as is, `according to' refers to dad's death, not author's reading of daughter's life Raised by a cold, aloof mother, she looked fruitlessly for emotional sustenance in marriages to men interested only in her wealth: womanizer Jimmy Cromwell and shady Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa. Both unions ended, and she embarked on a series of turbulent affairs with fortune hunters and hangers-on. Drawing on interviews with Duke's former servants, friends and acquaintances, Washington Post reporter Mansfield paints a convincing portrait of a discontented, eccentric, dictatorial, stingy and bad-mannered woman desperately searching for perpetual youth. This depiction is likely to be a hit with followers of the rich and famous. Photos not seen by PW . BOMC alternate. ( June )