Seeking the Soul of the Billion Dollar Butler

I must ask for patience, first from those of you who would rush right to the seance in which we speak to Bernard Lafferty, the Billion Dollar Butler, from beyond the grave. Patience, please. Two other nights with spirits come first, one at the doorstep of the great Valentino, the other with Miss Elizabeth Taylor seated in the front row. * I ask for patience, too, from those of you who would scoff at this whole seance business. I understand, I really do. To be honest, we thought we were getting a voodoo doctor to straighten out the Doris Duke mess. And even you skeptics would agree, I’m sure, that voodoo is a good metaphor for what we’re about these days. The needles certainly came out after the reclusive heiress died in her gated mansion and left her fortune in the control of the aforementioned butler--making him a target of the full range of modern predators, from gray-suited lawyers to the sorriest street hustlers. As Alban, the dreadlocked chauffeur, put it: “There is evil forces out there. Evil, evil forces.” * So a voodoo doctor was the first choice. As to how those of us close to the butler wound up instead at a bungalow down in the flats, beckoning his spirit in the living room of Hollywood’s favorite medium . . . well, again, patience. * I think you’ll find the Hollywood metaphor serves just as well. That’s the one in which a man’s destruction becomes fodder for our collective entertainment, fiction serving just as well as fact.

*

Bernard Lafferty earned four screaming tabloid headlines during his short time in our consciousness: “Did The Butler Do It?”; “Liz Has a New Man--He’s a Murder Suspect”; “Greedy Butler Booted”; and “Liz Linked To Double Murder Mystery! Boyfriend’s Death Triggers New Scandal.” * The Liz stuff was a goof, of course, for Lafferty was gay and hardly a boyfriend--merely a supporter of her AIDS causes and an occasional brunch guest. The murder talk was not so easy to laugh off. * That it took such an allegation to bring him to our attention was testimony to how far Doris Duke had slipped on the celebrity scale. For much of the century, she was “the richest girl in the world,” the ingenue who had inherited the fortune of her Tobacco King father. But interest waned as she became an aging eccentric, by the end only occasionally in the news: posting $5-million bail for Imelda Marcos, or adopting a 35-year-old Hare Krishna, then disowning the woman as a “mistake.” ** When Duke died on Oct. 28, 1993, at 80, her obituary was back on page 46 of The Times. Nor was much notice given when her will was filed in New York and named Lafferty, an orphaned Irishman with a long blond ponytail, as both executor and head of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. It became a story only after 15 months and three will challenges, the last by a doctor Duke once sought out as a “longevity” expert and briefly named her executor--and who wanted back in.

On Jan. 20, 1995, the doctor’s lawyers filed an affidavit by Tammy Payette, a young nurse who had helped treat the heiress, that declared: “Miss Duke did not die of natural causes.” Voila!

Payette said that Duke had a life expectancy of “at least five years” when she came home from the hospital after suffering a stroke. She was snuffed out, Payette said, by morphine and Demerol dripped into her veins. She suggested a conspiracy by Lafferty--who stood to gain $5 million as executor--and a Beverly Hills physician. A second affidavit, by a former Duke cook suing the estate, alleged that Lafferty “leapt across the kitchen” when a final package of drugs was delivered “and stated that, ‘Miss Duke is going to die tonight.’ ” At 5:48 a.m. she did, surrounded by Lafferty and her maid, Nuku Makasiale, along with four favorite dogs and a probate lawyer ready to tend to the official business of death.

The day after the murder affidavit was filed, Lafferty had his first tabloid cover, and I was assigned to find out “what really happened.”

*

The folks seeking to oust him kept the stuff of scandal coming: He was “functionally illiterate” and went on “drunken binges”; he orchestrated Duke’s will while she was so weak in the hospital a lawyer had to guide her hand to sign it; he freely used her “mansions, bodyguards, servants” and decked himself in diamonds; even that his “willful neglect” killed one of Duke’s camels. He was mocked with credit card records of his spending sprees along Rodeo Drive (“Hair Barrettes for BL”) and reports on Lafferty’s crashing Duke’s Cadillac when a housekeeper who was driving got angry and fled at a West Hollywood intersection, forcing him to take the wheel. “I don’t drive,” he had told police, “because I have always had a chauffeur.” The butler with his own chauffeur! Amazing.

Yet whatever the guy’s extravagances, there were problems with the murder scenario.

First, it was not so out of character for Duke to anoint her butler as executor--she once considered her Hawaiian spiritualist. Although never publicized, a recorded phone call showed a fully alert Duke talking with lawyers about naming Lafferty in 1992, long before she was hospitalized.

Second, it seemed hard to believe Payette’s assertion that Duke, by the next summer, had five years to live. Stacks of nursing notes portrayed a patient dying: falling down, growing disoriented and losing control of bodily functions. A case could be made that Duke, in effect, killed herself--by insisting on having her artificial knees replaced, despite warnings that it was risky in her condition. She wanted “to be able to dance again,” she had confided to a nurse.

Days after the surgery in September, 1993, she suffered her final stroke. Her doctors’ worst crime may have been allowing her to undergo the operation--not how they put her out of her misery at the end. That much, her chief physician admitted, was done, saying drug doses were increased so that “she would not linger.”

You could argue the ethics, but it was hard to push the butler-did-it angle. So I began considering another, having no inkling it would lead me and others--you’ve met a couple already--toward the spirits.

*

My notion was that the best way to tell the Duke story might be through her houses. She was a product of the Gilded Age, after all, when you advertised your station in society through bricks and marble. She’d been born in a Fifth Avenue mansion and inherited 2,700-acre Duke Farms in New Jersey, virtually a feudal village, and Rough Point, a 30-room “cottage” atop the cliffs of Newport, R.I. She also built a Moroccan-theme palace in Hawaii, Shangri-La.

Her California home, by comparison, was a crash pad. Duke bought it in 1953, when she was making time with a bandleader who didn’t like sneaking into her suite at the Bel-Air Hotel. She had run into Gloria Swanson, the old silent screen star who had recently made a sensational comeback in “Sunset Boulevard,” which dissected the soul of Hollywood through a . . . murky murder at a mansion.

Swanson remarked, “Guess where I’m staying?” and invited Duke to tea at the home where she was a guest. The next day, Duke offered the owner cash for the place. The Spanish-style hacienda had carved Florentine doors, a view down Benedict Canyon to the ocean and a motor court ringing a fountain. Mostly, though, it had a pedigree. It was The Valentino House.

Rudolph Valentino had lived at 1436 Bella Drive for only a year before his death, at 31, in 1926. But filmdom’s leading lover had etched “Falcon Lair” into the front gate, branding it forever as the nest of a great bird of prey. Falcon Lair remained a shrine for Valentino cultists through a series of owners. The spiritualist crowd, in particular, found him more fascinating than any figure save Houdini. In 1948, 30 mediums assembled in the den on Valentino’s birthday and competed to come up with the best vision: one saw him “inside an electric bulb”; another saw his noble dog, Kabar, leap through the window; and a third declared, “He is disappointed in the quality of current motion pictures” . . . and was dictating a script to her.

Such spectacles came to an end after Duke bought the home. Though Jayne Mansfield announced in 1963 that she had received advice from Valentino’s spirit while a guest, Duke grew more reclusive, and the public profile of the place sank toward oblivion as well. Now her death would fit nicely into the history of Falcon Lair. In fact, as scandal swirled around the new master of the house in early 1995, we were approaching an anniversary few noticed: May 6 would be Valentino’s 100th birthday.

It might be interesting to be up there, I thought, when the date rolled around.

*

Falcon Lair was not the first thing I brought up, of course, when I finally met Lafferty. That was in the Century City offices of Howard Weitzman, the attorney who had represented O.J. Simpson in his first days as a murder suspect. Seven weeks after the Payette charges, Weitzman decided it was time for his client to make some public comments. Lafferty wore a gray pinstriped suit, two gold-and-diamond bracelets and a diamond-flecked Cartier watch. But he was without his five-carat cubic zirconia earring. “It’s on a vacation,” he said, glancing at his lawyer.

“I don’t tell Bernard how to dress,” Weitzman piped in. “Trust me.”

Such settings are artificial, the client coached. But as Lafferty sat with hands folded on the table and told his side of things in a soft, halting brogue, he sure looked like a classic wounded soul, struggling to fathom how he had become accused “of dastardly deeds.”

Raised an only child in an Irish farm town, he dropped out after grade school to work and then, at 17, lost his father to a heart attack and his mother in a car accident. He loved the pomp of the Catholic church, but how much consolation could it offer a youth whose urges were outside its teachings? He moved to Philadelphia, where an aunt lived, and worked as a hotel waiter and maitre d’. Singer Peggy Lee hired him away and later introduced him to Duke, who added him to her staff in 1986.

He was sensitive about “the butler word” and his enemies’ claims that he came running whenever Duke “rang a little bell.” It wasn’t like that: He traveled the world as her assistant, bringing food sometimes, sure, but also going over the paperwork faxed each morning from her estates.

He did not deny his binges or taking anti-depressants after her death. “You have to understand,” he said, “Doris Duke was like my mother,” one whose ashes he and the maid, Nuku, took to Hawaii and scattered in her favorite waters “as sunset was hitting the ocean.” He was forgiving of others, even Payette. “We liked her very much,” he said, “because she was very good to Miss Duke.” His only harsh words fell on “people who would go out of their way to try and get close to her,” especially doctors who schmoozed with the heiress, fed her vitamins and advice and wound up with gifts or loans, $600,000 in the case of Dr. Harry Demopoulos, the one trying to oust him as executor.

So Lafferty came off as gentle, charitable--and a poor candidate for running what would instantly be one of the nation’s 10 largest foundations. That became clear when he complained how the court battle was keeping Duke’s charity from operating and how--raising his hand high--he’d gotten stacks of letters from poor folk needing help. Didn’t he know a $1.2-billion foundation would hardly sort through such sob stories to weed the scammers from the legitimate hardship cases? No, he was answering every letter to “let them know that we’re keeping it on file.”

I waited to the end to bring up Falcon Lair, asking if there was any way I could see it. “You have a mandate with respect to the house,” I teased. Weitzman threw a “we’ll see” look, meaning no way. But Lafferty seemed intrigued, and said, “Maybe we’ll take a dinner at Eclipse.” That sounded like a start, so I ambushed him at his favorite restaurant.

Eight Rolls-Royces were parked outside the night I tracked him there. It was the weekend of the Oscars, and everyone was making the scene--stars, moguls, half-dressed gold-diggers and at least two billionaires, most going table to table in a hand-shaking, back-slapping orgy of self-affirmation. Taking it in, next to a table with Tony Curtis and two babes, was the Billion Dollar Butler. He was slightly hunched over, arms tight at his side, hands folded in front of him. The gray suit had given way to white silk, and the earring was back. He was nursing a cranberry juice while his eyes scanned the zoo, a bemused smile never leaving his face. Later, I learned he was the same when invited to the Sunday brunches of Duke’s old friend, Elizabeth Taylor, planting himself on a sofa just to look and listen.

It was the worst sort of snooping, my showing up unannounced to check him out. But he graciously introduced me to his dinner companions--his bodyguard and a local antiques dealer--and said he still was waiting for his lawyer to OK the house call.

I said, “See you there.”

*

The night of May 6, 1995 was breezy and cool. the ok had never come through, no surprise. So that morning I faxed a note to the house, alerting him to the significance of the date and my plan: I’d be there at 10 p.m. with cranberry juice for him and Champagne for me and Mr. V.

To reach Falcon Lair from Sunset Boulevard, you head up Benedict Canyon a mile past Greenacres, the old Harold Lloyd estate. Turning left on Cielo, you pass where Manson’s crew murdered Sharon Tate. Bella Drive winds up to the right, bumpy and potholed. All was quiet outside the tall wrought-iron gate, but not dark. The house was ringed with tall security light posts, and all were on. No place in the canyon was so ablaze. I rang the bell. A man’s face looked out the gate. He didn’t identify himself.

“Mr. Lafferty got your message,” he said. “He wanted you to know he’s sorry, but he had to go out.”

He watched until I drove off. Around the first bend, I cut my lights and popped the Champagne. I took a swig from the bottle and, for the hell of it, rolled down the window. Still quiet. Nothing.

Later Lafferty told me, “I wanted you to come up. But it would have been held against me. Everything has been held against me.”

He started calling after Weitzman went show biz as a top exec at MCA. He had been passed to the law firm’s headquarters in Chicago, whose attorneys were too far away to provide the constant reassurance he needed. So Nuku started phoning me and splicing him in--from Falcon Lair, his cars, Eclipse. He often complained about the money not getting to charity while lawyers billed tens of millions. The fight by then wasn’t only between him and the doctor--three of the nation’s biggest banks also were vying to manage Duke’s billion dollars. “The Doris Duke estate is not a pie,” he said, “and it’s not going to be cut up.”

But despair often crept into his defiance. “They have tried to take away every piece of self-respect I have. I look maybe eccentric to them. I don’t maybe fit into what they think of as their society. But I fitted into the Doris Duke society. . . . And I will have to be put out!”

Which he was, soon.

He was right to fear that everything would be held against him. It didn’t even help when Tammy Payette was jailed. With so much at stake, detectives were watching everyone, and they spotted the nurse pawning jewelry on Rodeo Drive. She’d stolen from a Who’s Who of patients, getting $500,000 in watches, crystal, jade, sterling silver corn-cob holders--and Duke’s prized pearl necklaces. She visited one pawnshop the day she signed her affidavit.

It didn’t help much, either, when Los Angeles authorities declared there was “no credible evidence of criminal homicide.” Even without a murder case, his drinking and spending--and who he was--had given Lafferty’s enemies ample ammunition to churn the case for years. So last spring, the New York attorney general’s office brokered a settlement. Dr. Demopoulos would get a seat on the foundation board in return for dropping his suit. Lafferty would step aside as executor in return for money: $4.5 million in executor fees plus a $500,000 yearly bequest.

He was rich--but out. The day after the settlement, armed guards put his belongings in boxes and escorted him out of Falcon Lair. It was a wrenching day, setting off many regrets. Should he have fought on? Had he failed Miss Duke? Another regret had to do with the house--and all those stories of visions of Valentino. “I have yet to see him,” he confided.

*

Last summer, he invited me to his new $2.5-million home, within walking distance of Falcon Lair. It had a screening room, art gallery and pool and was filled with grand pianos, chandeliers and oil paintings of scenes from the hunt. The living room had two pedestals displaying antique English silver urns with angels atop the handles. The bedroom had a 20-foot ceiling, blood-red velvet drapes and a carved headboard made from the door of a Vanderbilt mansion in Newport, adorned with cupids. In the garage? A white Rolls and a black Cadillac.

His butler-driver brought a Diet Coke on a silver tray. Walking by his home office, Lafferty introduced his secretary-assistant, Victoria, a former ballet dancer who coached debutantes for their big night. But he had not found peace in his castle.

There were still fights: over how the estate was keeping a painting of Duke that was his; over how the estate was holding up $3 million earmarked for Taylor’s AIDS foundation; and over whether he could continue to run four smaller charities Duke had set up, including the Newport Restoration Foundation, which was turning her Rhode Island home into a museum. “They thought I would go away,” he said, “but the foundations are mine.”

He’d hired a personal lawyer, Charlotte Hassett, whom he had met at Eclipse--she represented the restaurant and a few chic Westside clients. She, in turn, brought in a private detective to handle other problems that had come with wealth: from a street person who kept jumping his fence at night, threatening to make a scene if not given envelopes of cash, to a would-be songwriter who had given him a tape and was pestering him for backing. The private eye, John Nazarian, had been one of the first San Francisco cops to come out of the closet. He had a Fu Manchu mustache and a holster on his ankle and promised to “scorch the earth beneath the feet of these professional leeches.”

Lafferty’s new attorney reassured him: “Everything’s going to be all right, Bernard.”

*

She was the one who called the morning of Nov. 4 to tell me that “Bernard is dead.”

It was three years and a week after the death of the woman he served. On Oct. 28, he went to the ocean to scatter rose petals in Duke’s memory. After that, in the last week of his life, he had served as tour guide for Molly and Sally Blake, a mother and daughter from his part of Ireland, having paid their way over to attend the opening night of “Riverdance”; went shopping for a yellow Viper sports car, though he still didn’t drive; paid for a friend to attend the Betty Ford Clinic; had Nuku cook him a steak dinner; and watched West Hollywood’s Halloween parade, where passerby after passerby stopped to have their picture taken with him. In two years, the Billion Dollar Butler with the blond ponytail had become a celeb in these circles. Some nights he’d put on his real diamonds and his fake diamonds and go out and say, “Watch this,” knowing--and relishing--how the young men would flock around.

But after the parade, he felt ill. He stayed in the house over the weekend. Sally Blake discovered his body about 5 a.m. Monday. He had died in his sleep of a heart attack, though there was some hemorrhaging of his esophagus, likely from drinking. He was 51.

The memorial service was the evening of Nov. 6.

It was supposed to be as secret as possible, to keep out the paparazzi. But a mini-crisis was brewing when I arrived at Lafferty’s house. Charlotte was holding a phone to her ear, announcing, “E.T.’s security people say that if anyone brings a camera to the church, they’ll be killed on the spot!” Yet even as she passed on the warning from Elizabeth Taylor’s people, one of the Irish ladies was sticking a small one into her purse.

Some of Lafferty’s friends drove his Rolls to the church. I headed out in the lawyer’s Range Rover with the secretary, Victoria, and her boyfriend, Yan, a tall, bearded Swedish model who looks like Jesus. A fifth person then piled in--a slender, dreadlocked black man in a rumpled black suit, tie askew. He didn’t say a word.

At the church, you saw why Elizabeth Taylor had been worried. A slew of cameramen rushed to the back entrance as her limo pulled up. The tabloids had decided to make her and Lafferty an item based on one incident: He had gone to her home to console her because the PR woman they both used was fatally ill. That was it. What women like Taylor and Duke found in him was a man who fawned over them, but who could also chide them when their lipstick didn’t match their dress. “He was,” Charlotte said, “a great girlfriend.” Now John Nazarian, the private eye, had to hold a large umbrella over Taylor’s face to shield it from photographers.

She sat in a front-row pew, on the other side of the aisle from Peggy Lee. Sharon Stone sent flowers (“Go With God”). Principals from the Duke case filed in, from her doctors to a dance teacher who had inherited $3 million. But what was Faye Resnick doing there? No one knew.

The Irish priest did not pretend to have known the deceased. “Take a look at your own lives,” he said. “Every one of us is a sinner.”

The eulogy was delivered by one of Taylor’s young staffers, part of the crowd that would come to Lafferty’s house to party around the pool. He described a gentle creature who never thought ill of anyone--thus touching up the blemishes, like many eulogies. It was hard to feel Lafferty in the church. Maybe it was that there was no body--it was still at the coroner’s. Or maybe because of how everyone kept glancing around, checking who was there. Only when a bagpiper in the balcony ended the service with “Amazing Grace” did some soul float through the pews.

Afterward, Lafferty’s antique-world friends took his cars to Eclipse. Only a few of us went back to the house. Wandering to the living room, I noticed the silver urns were gone.

I wound up alone in the kitchen. The dreadlocked man was making a cheese sandwich. I introduced myself. “Alban,” he said in a halting stutter. Originally from St. Lucia, in the Caribbean, he came to work for Duke as a gardener at Falcon Lair. When Lafferty got his own place, Alban helped out with the dogs and by driving for him on weekends. He also worried about his boss.

“I hear people talk sometime when he not around,” Alban said. “They say they his friends, but I know. I tell him, ‘You watch for people.’ He say, ‘I know,’ but not do anything.”

Alban was the one who decided we needed to have a seance.

He told this to Charlotte, who assumed he meant with a “very credible voodoo doctor,” what with Alban being from the islands and talking about “evil forces.” But she didn’t give it much thought at first. There were chores. Lafferty was cremated in his gold silk Armani jacket and Versace black velvet shoes. Nuku took the ashes to Hawaii and scattered them on the same waters as Duke’s had been. Soon after, his will drove home the point that he was a loyal servant to the end--it left all his holdings, if he had a penny left, to the Duke foundation.

Then relatives started coming out of the woodwork--aunts and cousins--wanting a piece of his pie. And a week before Christmas, a Manhattan Beach attorney filed a competing will. The lawyer said his client had an affair with the butler, who had signed a small rectangle of cardboard with one typed sentence, “I Bernard Lafferty . . . give my entire estate to - - - - - .” None of Lafferty’s people had heard of the man named, and the whole thing looked flaky. Lafferty’s will was going the way of Duke’s, into the legal morass. Charlotte said, “I think we should talk to the voodoo doctor.”

That’s when Alban explained that he was thinking about a West Hollywood medium, James Van Praagh. Victoria knew his work well, being a spiritual sort who had seen him often on TV and at demonstrations in auditoriums that attracted hundreds eager to get messages from dead parents, spouses and children. “This guy’s amazing,” she said.

There was a problem, though. He hardly did private sessions anymore and had a three-year waiting list. Victoria asked if I’d give him a call. Van Praagh’s assistant said he was too busy preparing a book tour and a video. I asked to speak to the man just once. Van Praagh called and said, sorry, no. I mentioned that some of the people in our group lived or worked at the home of Valentino.

He said: How about April 2?

He also said it wasn’t as easy as it looked on TV. “It’s an exchange of energy. I’m not going to drain myself for nothing.” It would cost $600.

I told him there would be an unusual mix of people. He said, “You’re telling me unusual people? I talk to the dead for a living.”

*

You don’t rush into a seance. There are preliminaries.

Van Praagh warned us, “Just because we come together to seek someone . . . doesn’t always mean that they’re going to show up.” What’s more, other spirits could crash the party--he sensed Nuku’s father--and some messages would make no sense to us right away. “But when you leave this house, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, you’ll go, ‘Oh, my God, now I know what he’s talking about!’ It always happens.”

We had hoped to use Falcon Lair but the Duke estate was readying it for sale, for $3.9 million, and Nuku worried there might be “bad memories there for Bernardo.” So we found ourselves instead seated in a circle in the living room of Van Praagh’s white-picket-fence California bungalow just below Santa Monica Boulevard: Van Praagh looking like a yuppie accountant with his square jaw, neat mustache and khaki pants; the grandmotherly Nuku in a lush purple blouse matching the rose on the coffee table; Alban looking comfortable now in his usual leather jacket and torn jeans; Victoria and Yan, carrying a large photo of the deceased; Charlotte Hassett in black; and John Nazarian in one of Lafferty’s old sweaters, but making it clear he’d be the hardest sell, declaring how he might someday put on a headdress, rent a hall and promise the paying customers “in 20 years we’ll go on a space ride.”

Van Praagh directed him to the most comfortable chair in the room (“the throne”) and explained the spirit world in simple terms: “You create your own heaven and your own hell based on your thoughts, your words and your deeds. How you live on this earth. The love you make is the love you take. . . . There is not a hell per se of fire and brimstone. But . . . if you are very unloving to people on this earth . . . you will go to a place that you’ve earned. If you were a loving person . . . you will end up going to . . . a beautiful new world. There are houses, there are trees, there are lakes, there are boats on the lake. . . . The person goes, ‘Oh, my God, I haven’t died. I’m alive.’ Because there is no death. It’s a change of energy.”

For spirits to visit us, they must slow down their vibration. He asked us to feel the air in the room. Hadn’t it gotten cooler?

He was still not ready to talk to the spirits. He first wanted to scan the “life forces” up and down our spines. Starting with Alban, he used a pencil to furiously scribble circles on a legal pad.

“Is there a reason for you to be in another country? . . . Because you’re not settled here.”

He scribbled Victoria’s life force, declaring her “a person who had to grow up very quickly. . . . Did anyone ever call you Princess?”

“Everyone in my family.”

“The name Princess is coming through very strongly.”

But the sketching was cut short. Van Praagh said, “I’m sorry. They say to start.”

We closed our eyes, breathed deeply and envisioned “a beautiful white light throughout the room.”

Next a prayer-like poem. “Dear spirit friends draw near to me/Spirit friends talk clear to me . . . “

Then he announced, “OK, this man you wanted to contact is here. He wanted me to tell you that, and he is giving me thoughts and he’s telling me it was a bumpy road to get here. I don’t know what it means. But, ‘It was a bumpy road,’ he says.”

Having thus taken the leap of quoting Bernard Lafferty from the beyond, we need to pause--to address the skeptics among you. I know how you must squirm, picturing Van Praagh seated in his narrow wooden chair, taking a deep breath, tilting his head and muttering “um hum” to the unseen. But be warned: We have no plans of emulating Houdini, who spent his last years asking mediums to contact his mother, then rudely exposed the smoke and mirrors of their seances. We won’t even quibble when Van Praagh asks, “Did this man have a very distinctive laugh?” and is told yes, yes, of course, yes--but then the laugh he produced was bold and robust, hardly like the understated chuckle of the Lafferty we knew.

So you skeptics can check out. But perhaps you can place this evening within your realm of credibility--by viewing it as group dynamics. Think of our medium as a trained facilitator, forever seeking guidance from those close to the departed, asking, “Does that make sense?” then pushing forward if encouraged, retreating if not. Viewed that way, it is us, not him, who conjured up the apparition. It is our requiem to the butler.

Meanwhile, the believers can believe it was Lafferty’s own words that brought Nuku quickly to tears.

“Nuku, he comes and he brings you flowers,” Van Praagh reported. “I don’t know what this means . . . He shows you with a kitchen and a window . . . a big old window. . . . Do you know what this means?”

“Of course.”

“Do you ever go outside and do something with flowers?”

“Yes.”

“He’s giving you lots of love and roses. . . . I feel like this man was like a buddy with you.”

“Yes.”

“Because he wants to put his arm around you. You’ve kept confidences, he says. ‘Thank you for keeping some confidences.’ Were you with him with the Duke lady? Because it feels as if there was something special between you and him regarding her. . . . Now was this lady . . . I don’t mean to judge . . . a bit eccentric?”

Eccentric? This woman who wanted the dishes cleaned a certain way, and “oh, this is weird . . . he’s talking about giving something to a dog . . . fresh meat or . . . steaks . . . butcher cuts? Didn’t she insist on that?”

“Yes, she did,” Nuku said.

“He felt that he was baby-sitting dogs. ‘Most of the time I’m baby-sitting dogs!’ ”

“Yeah,” said Alban, who later did the same for Lafferty.

“This man that passed over,” Van Praagh said, “I must tell you he did not have a very good self-image . . . . It started when he was a very young boy. He also tells me he did not take good care of his health. It’s almost like he’s telling me, ‘I didn’t give a s- - - !’ ”

“Yes, yes, yes,” someone said.

“He didn’t care what anyone thought. He says, forgive my French, ‘They can go f- - - themselves!’ ”

“Yes, that’s him! That’s him!”

In truth, it was a fuller portrait than the one given at his memorial service or in the nasty litigation, where any character quirk becomes fodder. Here, the quirks soon were offered up with laughter: How he joked about putting a tiara in his hair and called himself “Priscilla.” How he “hated the freakin’ lawyers.” How he prayed to the saints, sure, but also stashed bottles of gin in bathroom cabinets.

Speaking of the house, Van Praagh said our ghost reports, “People came and took things. They robbed him blind. . . . ‘The vultures came in and pecked away. Pecked away. Pecked away.’ ”

Charlotte noted that diamond cuff links were missing.

“ ‘Stolen,’ he said, ‘stolen, stolen.’ ”

Van Praagh asked, “Did he ever mention AIDS?”

“The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation,” Charlotte said.

“So give money there. He’s telling me . . . ‘Do it, do it, do it.’ ”

Our host asked the lawyer to pass a message to Elizabeth Taylor. “Would you tell her, please, he’s wishing her well. . . . Stars from heaven send their love.”

It was such a nice notion that we again won’t quibble over our medium’s statement that, “I guess he called her Liz,” other than to say that hell would freeze over before the proper Mr. Lafferty would use such a familiar name for the royal Miss Taylor.

Van Praagh said, “I’m curious. I’m going to ask if he’s met this lady, Doris Duke. Mind if I ask him that?”

We learned that she was still around “big-time people . . . the upper crust,” but couldn’t stop ranting about her possessions. “My rug! My rug! Where is my rug?” At least, “this lady seems very ashamed of things, how she treated people,” Van Praagh said. “Remember how I told you people create their heaven and hell? She’s created some not nice things. . . .” In other words, “she’s in a different place” from her butler and won’t be tormenting him with that damn bell.

She does offer a belated appreciation to her maid. “She owes you much,” Van Praagh told Nuku. “She owes you more than money can buy.”

Bernard forgives their old boss. “He says, ‘I learned my theatrics from the best.’ . . . He understands her more than most people do. She was an extremely lonely woman, he says. . . . In a way, two misfits came together. . . . It’s like two people who are so lonely and they find they can’t fit in society and they come together. . . . Does that make sense? . . . I think he went through a lot of hell with her. He feels like he deserved a lot--”

“He did,” someone said.

“--but maybe he shouldn’t have gotten what he got. He said part of it went to his head. He had no idea how to handle it--”

“That’s true.”

“--He was generous with his money. He says, ‘I gave it away without really thinking. I was stupid with it.’ Now, you guys, it sounds weird . . . but I have to say it to you, he was his own worst enemy.”

“Yes.”

“He feels . . . he was not good enough for this . . . the pressure from people really got to him . . . He hobnobbed with the rich and the wealthy, but he doesn’t feel like he fits in. He says to me, ‘They weren’t my people.’ ”

So he went “BOOM in the night!” and now he’s in a good place, with none of the old monsters and has a new job--making his presence felt every time the stairs creak as Nuku climbs them or the lights flicker around Alban.

“He says, ‘I’m a ghost!’ ” Van Praagh reported. “My guide says we’re going to have to close soon, so I’m going to ask you for questions, quick questions.”

It was my time. Van Praagh had left me alone, for the most part, though he had said Bernard wanted me to have one of his ties. Now I asked:

“Has he heard from Valentino?”

“He says . . . ‘He’s lost his flair!’ ”

Van Praagh explained, “Your friend looked up to Valentino. He says, ‘I wanted to see him for the longest time.’ I don’t need to anymore. Met him. . . . Not as you would think. . . . Not as glamorous as you would think. Real. Real . . . HE’S REAL! . . . He says, ‘More concern about him on the earth than in heaven.’ ”

One more question. Is this mess finally going to be settled?

The final words from Bernard Lafferty were:

“ ‘They’re still going to f - - - around with me. Sorry. They’re still going to f - - - around with me. Love you, gotta go. Love you, gotta go. Love you, gotta go.’ ”