"Maternal Instinct"

American Nobility

Dean MacGuigan was born Simpson Dean Chandor in 1957, the second son of E. Haring "Red" Chandor, a handsome and wealthy New York man-about-town, and the beautiful and fabulously wealthy former Lisa Dean, great-granddaughter of Lammot du Pont and an heir to the nearly incalculable du Pont family fortune.

Since their marriage in 1953, the Chandors did what many upper-crust, New York society couples do best — they had fun. As New York socialite Anne Slater told Dominick Dunne: "Weekends were very long. You'd leave Thursday and come back on Tuesday, so there wasn't a lot of time to go to offices. All the men had an office, but they used it to get their mail and get telephone messages."

Although Red and Lisa Chandor appeared to be the perfect blueblood couple, their five-year marriage came to a sudden end within a year of Dean's birth, when Lisa dumped her husband and ran off with her obstetrician, Dr. John MacGuigan. The scandal, a shocker for the late 1950s, rocked New York's social elite.

Red Chandor grabbed his older son, Peter, and fled to French Riviera, but French authorities caught up with him a few months later and shipped him and Peter back home. Red got four months in jail and a hefty $47,000 fine. He also lost his sons, permanently. Lisa married her lover and changed the boys' last name to MacGuigan. She also moved — with her sons and new husband in tow — back to Delaware, the center of the du Pont empire, and took up residence again at the family's estate of Serendip.

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1. LAS VEGAS — August 5, 1998
2. From the Chateau to the Desert
3. American Nobility
4. Growing up du Pont
5. A Death in the Family
6. A New Player
7. "Operation Dean"
8. Friends in Low Places
9. Death at the Del Mar
10. "Bumbling Idiots"
11. Unraveling the Knot
12. Another World
13. End Game
14. Sources