Days & Nights of Duke

“I think money can kill people like this,” says Lauren Bacall of Doris Duke, whom she portrays in the CBS miniseries “Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke,” which begins Sunday at 9 p.m. and concludes on Tuesday.

Over a recent lunch at the Bel Air Hotel, Bacall looked every inch the movie star, wearing tailored pants, a wheat sweater and burnt orange wrap. Her blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail and she was wearing dark sunglasses as she talked about the sad life of Doris Duke and the unexpected ways in which her own life had intersected with Duke’s.

Until her death in 1993, the tobacco heiress was the wealthiest woman in the world. But the legacy from Duke’s father was far more than money: It was to distrust everyone, even her mother. Throughout her 80 years, Duke craved and searched for love to no avail. Her own mother hated her. She went through a string of bad marriages and unsatisfactory lovers. Her daughter only survived a few days. Her adopted daughter turned on her. And her butler connived his way into her trust to become executor of her vast estate and may have even hastened her death on Oct. 28, 1993.

As it is constructed, the movie tracing Duke’s life becomes a morality play. Bacall is at the center of the story, book-ended by veteran Richard Chamberlain as her devious butler Bernard Lafferty and Mare Winningham protraying her adopted daughter, Chandi Heffner.

“Money was a real curse,” says the 74-year-old Bacall, who came to fame 55 years ago playing opposite her future husband Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not.”

As executive produce Bob Sertner puts it: “You know it’s a cliche that money can’t buy happiness and in this case it truly couldn’t. [Doris] couldn’t find love. She tried with man after man.”

One of those men was novelist Louis Bromfield. Bacall and Bogart were married at his farm in Ohio. “Not only that, but my mother, who became a friend of Louis Bromfield as a result of meeting him during our wedding, worked with him for about six months because she was a great secretary,” Bacall recalls. “She met Doris Duke with him.”

Years later when Bacall and Duke met at a Hollywood event, Duke still remembered Bacall’s mother. “She said, ‘I loved your mother,’ ” says Bacall. “I thought, she loved my mother. She can’t be all bad. It’s six degrees of separation.”

When it came to playing Duke as a young woman, Lindsay Frost stepped in.

Though Lafferty’s shadow colored Duke’s last days, the actress believes the butler, who died in November, 1996 at age 49, did in his own way care for Duke. Still, she says, he was evil.

Chamberlain, who clearly relishes playing the bad guy for a change, thinks Lafferty really did have feelings for Duke. “But he was also scared of her,” he says. “He was also incredibly attracted to her wealth. So it was a very mixed relationship and he was a very complicated, strange guy.”

The role of Lafferty gives Chamberlain, 63, a chance to break free of his romantic image from such miniseries as “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” as well as from his classic ‘60s TV series, “Dr. Kildare.”

“Lafferty was sort of pudgy and he was a hard drinker,” says Chamberlain. “He was Irish and had this incredible pony tail and wore a diamond earring that got bigger and bigger as she got sicker and sicker.”

Chamberlain was set to play Lafferty with padding, a pony tail and a diamond earring. He had even worked with coaches on an Irish accent. But shortly before production began, Chamberlain says, CBS called in a panic and told him not to even think of portraying Lafferty that way.

“They said, ‘We paid for Richard Chamberlain and we want Richard Chamberlain.’ So I had to do an about face. I defied them to the extent that I used the tiniest bit of an Irish accent,” he says. “The idea was that the entire Midwest could tune out the minute they heard an accent of any kind.”

Chamberlain manages to make Lafferty quite sinister by his vocal inflections and a slick, devious smile. He also worked with the wardrobe department to get the right look for Lafferty.

“The wardrobe is wonderful,” Chamberlain says. “It is so awful. His taste was rotten. It’s all kind of shiny suits. Character work is so much more fun than playing leading men. It was so much fun working with Bacall; she’s such a pistol.”

“Too Rich” marks Bacall’s first miniseries. She says it is the best part she’s been offered since her Oscar-nominated role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”

“It’s a woman who had a complicated life,” Bacall explains. “She’s not just a stereotypical mother or grandmother. It focuses on one human being who had a life and was an adult. Those parts are so rare that I was just thrilled to be able to be offered to do it.”

“Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke” airs Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG.