Sabrina Rubin Erdeley profiles twin siblings Patterson and Georgia Inman, heirs to the Duke tobacco fortune who will inherit a $1 billion trust fund when they turn 21. A riveting excerpt:
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell.
And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
“We were so fearful. I would hide in cupboards smaller than that,” says Georgia in her Southern-tinged lilt, pointing to a two-foot-tall cabinet in the kitchen of their spacious Park City, Utah, home where the twins, now 15, are reassembling their lives and residing with their mother, a woman who has seen her own share of trouble and who has only recently become a presence in her children’s lives. Patterson anxiously paces across the house’s open floor plan with its panoramic view of snowcapped mountains while he and his sister take turns narrating their harrowing history. Unfailingly polite, earnest and occasionally skittish, the twins radiate a sheltered naiveté that can make them seem far younger, or like visitors from another culture. For instance, Georgia confesses she’s never heard of the children’s party game musical chairs.
“What is it?” she asks, her eyes wide and curious. “No, really, tell me!”
Such frank sweetness, delivered in their mushy drawl, tends to take the edge off some of the harsh and surprising things they will say in the coming days, as when Georgia wistfully recalls her toddler years: “I remember walking to my dad’s room and holding a gun to his head. I don’t know what stopped me,” she says before bursting into giggles. “I’m sorry, that’s terrible, I laugh when I’m nervous or upset.”
The Dish 