A HEART AND A KIDNEY

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

A Harvard-schooled entrepreneur of impressive means was not the sort of beau Dorothy Zauhar thought herself fated to find. The daughter of impoverished heavy-drinking parents, Zauhar, 59, recalls sleeping nights in a car in a junkyard. She was removed (along with her four brothers and sisters) from her parents' custody when she was five. Zauhar spent the next five years in a Duluth, Minn., orphanage until a loving foster family was found for her. At 20 she married a TV repairman. They were divorced in 1982 after the couple had had three children.

Then, at an age when even the world's most fortunate women find new love elusive, Zauhar met a man who seemed to be life's recompense for all her hardships. In the spring of 1994, Zauhar was introduced to Richard McNutt, a Duluth millionaire and founder of the local Inter City Oil Co. Says Zauhar's old friend Lillian Stocke, who had been the matchmaker: "They were both very vivacious and seemed to have the same types of interests."

Zauhar, who was supplementing her nursing income with a job as a real estate agent at the time, loved her new suitor despite the fact that he had been married three times and had a reputation as a womanizer. "I heard there were problems with his other wives," she reflects, "but he told me I was special. He radiates an air of niceness. When my mom met him, she said he looked like Robert Redford." She adds, "He's a man with a temper who has punched holes in walls and swept the top of an attorney's desk clean with one swipe of his arm. My friends thought it was an unhealthy situation, but I thought I was going to live happily ever after."

Alas, that was not to be. Not only did the couple split, but their parting has also culminated in a bizarre lawsuit filed against McNutt earlier this month by Zauhar and her brother John Dahl. The two are demanding more than $150,000 from the businessman, claiming that he accepted a lifesaving kidney from Dahl in exchange for a promise he did not keep: to love and care for Dorothy Zauhar always.

A few months into the couple's courtship, McNutt, who suffered from a congenital kidney disorder, had begun dialysis treatment and learned that he would eventually need a kidney transplant. Zauhar was eager to donate one of her kidneys, but doctors determined she was not a medical match. By December 1994, after McNutt had presented Zauhar with a 3 1/2-carat, $21,500 engagement ring, Dahl stepped forward as a willing and suitable donor with a gentleman's understanding, Dahl says, that McNutt would buy him a life-insurance policy, give him money to compensate for the pay he'd lose while recovering from surgery and--most important and perhaps most unrealistically of all--promise that he would never disappoint Dahl's sister. "I made it abundantly clear," says Dahl, "that the donation was for Dorothy's happiness."

The couple's romance had been moving rapidly--with McNutt purchasing a $500,000 home for the couple in October 1994. The wedding date was scheduled for September 1995, but McNutt postponed it. A second date was scheduled for July 1996, right after his operation, but McNutt canceled that plan too. Dahl says the insurance policy and cash never surfaced either. Last March, Zauhar says, she confirmed what she had suspected for months: that McNutt was seeing another woman, a dialysis nurse named Patti Sue Bennett. Zauhar left McNutt soon after. He in turn made Bennett his fourth wife in June.

Although McNutt has refused to discuss the lawsuit publicly, his attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the suit last week and denied all allegations made in the complaint, pointing out that a team of doctors and psychologists would have refused the donated organ if Dahl had been unable to convince them that his motivation was anything but humanitarian. It is illegal in nearly every state to enter into a contract for organ donations.

And it is precisely because of these laws that Dahl is unlikely to win the reparations he is seeking for broken promises. "Even if McNutt did say what he is alleged to have said in the lawsuit," explains Stephen Munzer, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles, "I doubt the court would regard this as an enforceable promise." McNutt may wind up vindicated, but his reputation in Duluth is shredded. Sentiment in this small industrial city lies with the woman scorned. Says a local resident and friend of Zauhar's: "Dorothy would have cut off her right arm for him." Alas, he may have wanted only a kidney.

--Reported by Kevin Fedarko/Duluth and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by KEVIN FEDARKO/DULUTH AND ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK