Golden Girl.(Bernard and Doris)(Television program review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

The deeply personal relationship between Doris Duke and her butler comes to life in a seductive film by Bob Balaban. Joan Juliet Buck is dazzled.

Whenever you see Bob Balaban's name you know there's something very good going on: a splendid ensemble cast, a quirky film from a great director. He conceived and produced Altman's Gosford Park, and was also very funny in it. As an actor, he is charmingly self-deprecating. The grandson of one of the founders of old Hollywood, he has an elegant, slightly retro presence--as if he were the 1920s comedian Harold Lloyd, in sneakers instead of a suit. Balaban is a subtle director, able to sketch a believably grand world on a minuscule budget and give dramatic shading to the privacy contained inside. His Bernard and Doris (HBO) is a spellbinding film about the relationship between the tobacco heiress Doris Duke and her butler Bernard Lafferty.

Doris Duke was a willful and adventurous eccentric who lived a long erotic life, became a belly dancer, cultivated a swami, bailed out Imelda Marcos, and took as much care of her prize orchids as she did of her millions. Bernard Lafferty was Irish, alcoholic, homosexual, repressed, a servant and worshiper of famous women who had worked for Peggy Lee and Elizabeth Taylor by the time he replaced one of Duke's butlers in the mid-1980s. Shot at the former Phipps estate--Old Westbury Gardens--on Long Island's North Shore, the film stars Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes. They are miraculous.

As the 70-something Doris, Sarandon doesn't play old, wears no special makeup, uses her face, her body, and her voice to get to the essence of the "richest ...