Abigail Kawananakoa, whose claims to be the final princess of Hawaii and the heiress to considered one of its largest fortunes have been solely two excessive factors in a life that additionally encompassed championship horse racing, id theft and a authorized battle along with her personal charitable basis over her huge property, died on Sunday at her residence in Honolulu. She was 96.
Her dying was introduced by Paula Akana, the manager director of the Associates of Iolani Palace, the previous royal residence of Hawaii’s rulers in Honolulu.
Ms. Kawananakoa, who additionally glided by the nickname Kekau, was a generally divisive image of Hawaii’s previous as an impartial island nation. Her great-great uncle, David Kalakaua, was the final king. His successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani, was deposed in 1893 in a coup supported by American sugar barons, which led to Hawaii’s annexation by the USA in 1898.
She was not the one claimant to the nonexistent throne — a cousin, Owana Ka’okhelelani, insists that she is subsequent in line — however Ms. Kawananakoa was extensively thought-about the embodiment of the royal line, largely as a result of she performed the half so exquisitely, at instances outlandishly.
Because the inheritor to a $250 million chunk of the property of her great-grandfather, James Campbell, a sugar baron, she lived a lifetime of luxurious match for a queen. She was educated in boarding faculties in China and California. She raised championship horses at her farms in Hawaii and on the mainland, and was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Corridor of Fame in 2018.
Whereas some in Hawaii thought she was out of contact and unaware of the wants of on a regular basis islanders, others appreciated her concern for the nation’s historic and pure heritage. She funded scholarships, fought a plan to position a big telescope on Mauna Kea and, in her will, left $100 million to assist Hawaiian causes.
For practically 30 years she ran the Associates of Iolani Palace, a high-profile preservation group. She meticulously restored the light establishment to its former glory, touring the world to purchase again furnishings and artifacts that had been bought off by the state authorities.
Like several good noble, she is also imperious. After sitting within the royal — and really fragile — Hawaiian throne for a Life journal photograph shoot in 1998, she dismissed an ensuing rise up by the Iolani palace employees.
“Does the tail wag the canine, or does the canine wag the tail?” she requested The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. “So long as I’m right here, the canine goes to wag the tail.”
Such haughtiness had its limits: She resigned as president after the palace’s curator give up and 150 volunteers threatened to comply with him.
“They requested for my head and I gave it to them,” she informed The Star-Bulletin.
Generally she attracted the improper form of consideration. Beginning within the late Nineteen Nineties, a cafeteria employee in Philadelphia named Abigail Roberts started to impersonate Ms. Kawananakoa, convincing credit score companies that she was the true Hawaiian princess. Twice she bought the I.R.S. to ship her Ms. Kawananakoa’s tax refund. She additionally as soon as traveled to Hawaii to stake a declare, unsuccessfully, to the Campbell fortune.
Ms. Kawananakoa is survived by her spouse, Veronica Gail Kawananakoa, whom she married in 2017, the identical yr she suffered a stroke. Quickly afterward her lawyer, James Wright, claimed that Veronica had bodily abused her, after which Ms. Kawananakoa fired him. She additionally tried to alter her will to incorporate her spouse, a transfer that many feared would endanger the big portion left to charity.
That led to a drawn out authorized battle pitting the Kawananakoas in opposition to Mr. Wright and her personal charitable group, the Abigail Okay.Okay. Kawananakoa Basis. She would arrive in court docket in designer garments and oversize sun shades, along with her spouse and Chihuahua, Girlie Woman, in tow.
The case revolved round Ms. Kawananakoa’s psychological competency — whether or not her stroke had left her incapable of creating knowledgeable modifications to her property. In 2020 the court docket dominated in opposition to her, preserving the desire intact.
Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawananakoa was born on April 23, 1926, in Honolulu to William Jeremiah Ellerbrock, a physician, and Lydia Liliuokalani Kawananakoa, whose father, David Kawananakoa, was an inheritor to the Hawaiian throne.
After her mother and father divorced, Abigail was adopted by her grandmother Princess Abigail Campbell Kawananakoa, to strengthen the lady’s eventual (if at all times hypothetical) declare to the throne.
Ms. Kawananakoa studied for 2 years at Dominican Faculty, in San Rafael, Calif., and briefly on the College of Hawaii. She later labored for the State Legislature, however she spent most of her time constructing her fame because the residing image of the bygone Hawaiian monarchy.
Even after her pressured resignation from the Associates of Iolani Palace, she continued to help it, spending lots of of hundreds of {dollars} to stability its funds within the 2000s. She as soon as paid $110,000 at a fund-raising public sale to purchase the precise to carry a celebration there — largely to stop nonroyals from sullying what she thought-about her ancestral residence.
“The palace ought to be revered, it ought to be handled like a royal palace,” she informed The Honolulu Advertiser in 2007. “To lease it, to have any person have a celebration there, and to attempt to earn a living that method, it’s unseemly.”