A Hawaiian Shangri La

MANILA, Philippines - Over two years ago Honolulu guides started adding a new item in their “half-island” Oahu tour: Barack Hussein Obama trivia.

There’s the Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital (now the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children) where the future 44th president of the United States was born (and we now know, a tour guide said, that the birth certificate is genuine, don’t we?). There’s the apartment where Obama stayed and the route he took as he walked to the private Punahou college preparatory school where he graduated. Several blocks away is the Baskin-Robbins branch where the teenage Barack worked.

For Filipino visitors, guides add another point of interest: the secluded compound where dictator Ferdinand Marcos spent his final days in exile, with Imelda by his side and a coterie of security personnel in tow. The Filipino community in Hawaii, with its largest group from Marcos’ home region of Ilocos, knows the compound well.

What the community - and many Hawaiians - are less familiar with is the opulent Honolulu home of the reclusive heiress who remained a friend of Ferdinand and Imelda, and of the former first lady in particular, even after their dramatic fall from power.

Doris Duke built her Hawaiian refuge on 4.9 acres of prime property at Ka’alawai overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Diamond Head. She called it Shangri La, and turned it into a showcase of one of the world’s most extensive private collections of Islamic art.

The emphasis on Islam gave us the privilege of holding two session days at Shangri La to cap our three-week senior journalists’ seminar on bridging gaps between the United States and the Islamic world. The seminar was sponsored by the East-West Center in Honolulu.

All of Hawaii’s beaches are open to the public, and anyone can swim and walk along the rocks on Shangri La’s beachfront. But uninvited guests will have to scale a steep rock wall to enter the estate from the ocean. From the road the estate cannot be seen. It is approached through a sloping driveway that ends at an unimposing main entrance guarded by two stone camels in repose. An old balete tree, not yet the size of the one at Malacañang, dominates the courtyard.

The simple entrance makes the ornate interior all the more startling. Duke collected art and artifacts in her travels throughout the Islamic world. New York’s Brooklyn Museum has a section devoted to Islamic art, which features individual tiles and fine art particularly from Iran. Doris Duke’s Hawaiian refuge uses such tiles for its walls. Fine art and antique Islamic furniture fill Shangri La, which has been turned into a museum.

The house was constructed at a cost of $1.4 million from March 1937 until 1938, when Duke and her husband of three years, James Cromwell, moved in on Christmas Day. After their separation two years later, Duke spent her winters in Shangri La.

Architect Marion Syms Wyeth and design supervisor Drew Baker largely followed Duke’s wish for a Hispano-Moorish estate, but many other elements were thrown in. Duke’s white marble suite was inspired by India’s Taj Mahal and features inlaid lapis lazuli, jade and malachite. Duke and her husband had visited the Indian mausoleum in Agra during their 10-month honeymoon world tour, when she was only 22.

Changes and renovations continued at Shangri La as Duke collected more art until her final days.

Duke inherited homes in New York City, Rhode Island and New Jersey. She bought more homes in Beverly Hills and New York after she donated her 5th Avenue mansion to New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. But Shangri La was the only home whose construction from the ground up she personally oversaw, and which she filled and decorated from the inside out.

Doris Duke was born to wealth in New York City on Nov. 22, 1912, and inherited the wealth early. She was the only child of James Buchanan Duke and Nanaline Holt Inman. “J.B.” Duke founded the American Tobacco Co. and Duke Energy Co., building a fortune that placed the young Doris in the company of prominent families such as the Vanderbilts and Astors. When J.B. died in 1925, leaving the bulk of his wealth to 13-year-old Doris, she was dubbed by the press as “the richest girl in the world.”

The wealthy young girl pursued interests in the arts, history, and environmental conservation. She traveled extensively, collecting a trove of art, antiques and other precious items along the way.

Shortly before her death in 1993 at the age of 80, the heiress placed Shangri La under the ownership of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

The foundation was tasked to “promote the study and understanding of Middle Eastern art and culture” and to make Shangri La “available to scholars, students and others interested in the furtherance and preservation of Islamic art and make the premises open to the public.”

In Shangri La, Doris Duke opened a part of her life to the world.