No News at Throat Lake: In Search of Ireland - Softcover

Chapter One: Good-bye

In the summer of '91 a helicopter carrying the Richest Girl in the World floated across the big country sky over Creeslough. An elderly American woman with a face made taut as a snare drum by the plastic surgeon's scalpel peered through the Plexiglas windscreen of the cockpit. She then turned to her fellow passenger and, through bee-stung lips, sighed, "Why did you ever leave, Bernard? It's the most beautiful place in the world."

When one considers the life and times of this elderly woman -- what she had seen and what she had done -- her words could be construed as an enormous compliment for an Irish village as small and unassuming as Creeslough.

Doris Duke was given the epithet "The Richest Girl in the World" at the age of twelve when she inherited $200 million on the death of her father James "Buck" Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. She lived as varied, as opulent and as ridiculous a young life as would be expected of any obscenely rich brat. Every morning the schoolgirl Doris woke to a tape recording of her favorite waterfall before bathing in scented waters in a sunken, solid gold bath. She would dress, then hand her textbooks to a French governess, who would take them downstairs and hand them to the footman, who would give them to the butler, who in turn passed them to the chauffeur. Meanwhile, their young employer undertook the arduous task of choosing which of her eight limousines would carry her to school that day. Two private detectives were detailed to follow her to the classroom and wait outside until her lessons were over.

The young Doris eschewed the traditional childhood pleasures of dolls' houses and scrapbooks. Occasionally, she would pick up the phone and hire a circus for the evening. As you do. She liked to tinker on the piano or converse in French with her governess in order to infuriate a monolingual mother she had grown to loathe. She played the stock market with a gambler's relish that would have made Michael Milken blanch. Alas, in 1929 financial disaster struck with the Wall Street Crash, and Doris was down to her last $150 million.

Somehow she struggled on. Her young adult life was blighted by her constant fretting over the way she looked. She was not, it must be said, a beauty. After a long and fruitless search for the man of her dreams, she married an amateur boxer called Jimmy Cromwell. As a pugilist Jimmy would have lost on points to John Inman but as a gold digger he was in the Sonny Liston class. On their wedding night he carried the blushing bride to the marital bed, where his first thoughts were not sexual but financial. He asked Doris what his annual income paid from her trust fund might be. She locked him out of the honeymoon suite for starters and gave him his final answer in the divorce court a couple of years later: nothing.

Thereafter, according to her army of biographers, Doris Duke embarked on five decades of profligacy, baroque sex and quasi-mysticism. She had a series of love affairs, most famously with Errol Flynn, a Hawaiian swimming champion and a Paraguayan playboy called Porfirio Rubirosa who was afflicted -- if that's the right word -- with a medical condition that left him with a permanent erection.

For reasons that can only be guessed at she was particularly taken with the Paraguayan. She showered him with intimate lover's gifts, like his own B-25 bomber. But not even Porfirio and his amazing magic wand could make Doris truly happy. In her later years she grew increasingly depressed. She sought solace in the dubious attractions of alternative medicine and vaudeville spiritualists. When not being injected with her daily dose of life-elongating sheep's placenta, she would be encased in her personal magnetic rejuvenation chamber. If not having a nose job she would be huddled in a corner with Madame ZaZa and her crystal ball trying to contact the spirit of her prematurely born daughter, Arden, who'd survived only twenty-four hours.

When Doris was doing none of these things, she tended her money with the inconsistency becoming of a true eccentric. She thought nothing of lending Imelda Marcos $5 million to post bail and restock her shoe closet, yet long-serving and trusted members of her staff received jars of jam for Christmas. It was said that any servant who dropped a glass or a piece of crockery would find its replacement cost deducted from their wage slip at the end of the month.

Such parsimony might have explained why at the time of her death in 1993 Doris Duke had an array of palatial homes from Manhattan to Hawaii, her own private police force, a Boeing 737 and a bank account that clocked in just short of $1.5 billion.

There was just one person exempt from the tyrannical, paranoid grip exerted on her household by Doris Duke in these final years and his name was Bernard Lafferty, her homosexual, ponytailed, barefoot Irish butler. It was he who was sitting beside her as she flew over Creeslough on that balmy summer's afternoon.

Lafferty had left the village below twenty years before and never looked back. He didn't exactly dislike the place where he grew up but it was nowhere near big enough to satisfy an imagination filled with youthful dreams of becoming famous. From Ireland, he went to Scotland and from there to Philadelphia. He worked in hotels, casinos and as personal assistant to the lounge singer Peggy Lee. He was the perfect servant, ever attentive, the very soul of discretion and feminine kindliness. He was also an excellent embroiderer. Doris Duke took him on at $500 a week plus room and board.

Before long, she came to trust her butler more than anyone else on earth. It was he who repaired her favorite ballgowns, he who knew exactly what temperature a melon should be before his mistress would eat it. It was Bernard Lafferty, dressed in his favorite gold lamé Armani jacket, who escorted Doris Duke to fashionable charity events in Los Angeles and New York. And it was he who, for old times' sake, brought her back to the Donegal village where he spent his childhood.

There is little doubt that the American billionairess and the Irish butler came to regard each other as mother and son, with all the love, joy and, let's be candid, petty disagreements that the filial relationship entails. Both are now dead, so it is with the utmost confidence, not to mention libel immunity, that I repeat here the words uttered, apocryphally, by Bernard Lafferty when the Richest Girl in the World described this tiny corner of Ireland as the most beautiful place in the world.

"Miss Duke," he said, I think it might be time for your medicine."

I did, I confess, make a silent nod of agreement toward the memory of Bernard Lafferty as I drove past the white fáilte road sign that greets every new arrival to Creeslough. Nightfall had draped the village in a thick black curtain, illuminated only by the muted glow of half a dozen streetlights. A storm was blowing out of the north, buffeting my car and throwing forth white globules of rain that threatened to smash the windscreen. I felt momentarily depressed, as if I had just driven into the end of the world. It had been that kind of day.

If you ask me, there are two great benefits to being as rich as Doris Duke. Like her, you can disregard the mores of polite society and indulge your every whim, be it a well-endowed Paraguayan gentleman or an addiction to LSD and enemas. The second attraction of enormous wealth is that you need never ever experience the economic necessity that requires you to travel second class on a ferry across the Irish Sea in the company of the No. 1 Loyal Limavady Rangers Supporters' Club.

Alcohol has never been a stranger in my life. The only enticement for going to church when I was young was the thought that I might get the chance to see Father McCallum's enormous, stra