The Butler, the Billions, and ‘Bernard and Doris’s Broken Hearts

But the question, again, is do you ever really want to ever be intimate? If you do, then it might as well be this person. It’s not about gender. It’s not about race, or age, or anything. The hurdle is intimacy. –Susan Sarandon (on Bernard and Doris, from the movie’s official site).

Money changes everything, as noted by deep thinkers from Karl Marx to Cyndi Lauper. The very rich are so interesting because they seem to occupy a different world from us, one where you don’t have to worry about picking up after yourself — you have to worry about the people you’ve hired to pick up after you. Bernard and Doris’ director, Bob Balaban, encountered the dramatic potential of wealth and domesticity when he appeared in 2001’s manor house drama Gosford Park. Balaban’s movie, produced by HBO in 2006, is based on the real life relationship between tobacco heiress Doris Duke (Susan Sarandon) and her gay Irish butler Bernard Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes). Balaban and screenwriter Hugh Costello used this scenario to examine two vulnerable people who crossed class and professional boundaries to make a messy, painful, and touching drama.

Duke controversially changed her will near the end of her life in 1993, leaving Lafferty in charge of her enormous estate. After her death he was accused of manipulation, and even murder. But while the script uses some of the facts of Duke and Lafferty’s time together to begin and end the story, it’s not concerned with trying to build a case for or against him. Instead of going the Law & Order route, it affixes a great big disclaimer in the opening credits in order to play with fictional interpretations.

The result is more than a chance to gawk at the excesses and indulgences of a wealthy woman and her lavish property, or speculate as to what exactly happened in Duke’s final days. Thanks in large part to the brilliant performances by Sarandon and Fiennes, it’s an examination of a peculiar combination of people in extraordinary circumstances who develop a deep bond.

From the priceless opening scene, where Doris spits out an over-chilled cantaloupe and instantly fires a hapless butler without bothering to make eye contact with him, her character’s leadership is established. The rich young socialite seen in the opening credit sequence has grown into an authoritative, frugal, beautifully appointed woman. The film is careful to show early on that there’s nothing simple about having this amount of money to manage. Doris makes her decisions very quickly and very definitively, and if she doesn’t spend much of her leisure time sober, that’s no one’s business but her own.

With her elaborate outfits, fluffy dogs (played by Sarandon’s own pets), and sturdy sexual appetite, Doris could easily be shown following in the snobbish steps of 48 carat ditzes like Goldie Hawn in Overboard or Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. She’s rich and attractive and probably in need of being taken down a peg or two. But the film chooses to revel in Duke’s powers. She’s shown as dominating the various spheres she occupies: business, artistic, political, celebrity. Even her spiritual quest is done with distinct flair: she moves her newly found Indian guru over to America. Doris’s wealth, control and personality are all wrapped up in the New Jersey mansion she hires meek butler Bernard Lafferty to look after.

Doris may be in the habit of shedding staff like so many overchilled cantaloupes, but Bernard proves himself to have an immense practical and empathic capacity. She’s a smart woman who understands the value of a servant who quickly pays off a nurse she’s recently punched out in a plastic surgery clinic.

Bernard is a nurturer, softly spoken and with an awestruck air whenever he’s around Doris. He soaks up every crumb of her attention and is shown trying on her earrings and scarves, lighting up with the reflected glamour. When one of her business managers pushes Doris to fire him, she incredulously points out that he does embroidery.

Under her instruction, he begins to grow more colourful and flamboyant. Like the orchids she nurtures in an immense greenhouse, Bernard blooms with more feminine accessories, brightly coloured shirts, a twinkling diamond earring, longer hair. It’s a sharing of Doris’s personal style, and of her funds that purchase all this glitz. The film shows that all of her relationships are guided by money, and while at first she appears to be in charge of it, it still has the power to unsettle her. In the aftermath of a furious argument with her young lover Ben (Nick Rolfe), she confesses to Bernard that her first husband asked her on their wedding night how much his allowance would be. She lost her infant daughter and her father, the two people she seems to have found unconditional love from, and the rest of the world has offered her only the love that comes with an expense account.

But while Bernard and Doris are brought together by money, they find each other a balm for their loneliness. It’s an imperfect match, as rocky and erratic as any long-term serious relationship. He falls off the wagon and loots her wine cellar. She drives drunk with him in the passenger seat. He sets her against her other advisors and monopolises her healthcare. She derides him for being needy. Neither of them maintains graciousness, for all the wealth that saturates them. This is what’s so effective about the movie–demonstrating the state of love they reach when they do get on. When Doris breaks down over Nick’s betrayal and her only child’s death, Bernard offers her pure acceptance. When his drinking lands him back in rehab, she returns it. It’s this volleying of trust back and forth that the two actors’ brilliant performances make believable. 

The movie has fun with traditional gender roles and domesticity. Every inch the lady, Doris is also the master of the house. She and Bernard love dressing up in beautiful things, not as mere fripperies but as the accessories of power that stuns grey-suited boardroom members. The climactic scene comes when Bernard, wearing one of her gorgeous ballgowns and jewelry, carries the infirm Doris down for a private birthday dinner. It’s a gleefully camp moment, but also a poignant one.

She knows that he’s achieved his dream of shared intimacy, but over a discussion of her funeral plans, she sharply reinstates her superiority, snapping at him, “I must really be crazy to believe a fucker like you.”

Scenes like this pose the question of how little can be known about a close relationship, even from the inside. At the end of the film, Bernard is still inside the house, now the master. Over his head hangs the question of what really passed between him and his former employer. The hothouse environment where Doris grows orchids provides an example of what could have happened, when extremes of wealth, personality, and needs are pushed together to flourish, and possibly rot. Bernard and Doris explores the ambiguities of intimacy between two imperfect people, where there is no happy ever after, but it’s nothing less than a love story to the end.

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Margaret Howie is a London-based bookseller who doesn’t need a butler but wouldn’t mind a wine cellar.