[6] She attended Piedmont High School with her lookalike sisters, Ardagh and Doryce, and studied bacteriology at Stanford University for three years during the 1940s (Class of '43).
[7][8] De Herrera traveled to Molokai in Hawaii via a military convoy and married Richard Cooke, the son of a well-known missionary family in 1941.
While in Paris in 1951, she met a member of the American team that raced at Le Mans, named Luis de Herrera, whom she married a year later.
[14] During her dozens of trips to India and Tibet she is reported to have had meetings with the Dalai Lama, the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Sir Edmund Hillary, the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, and Satya Sai Baba.
[4] Over the years she is reported to have given meditation lessons to several celebrities, including Madonna, Greta Garbo, Rosie O'Donnell, Lenny Kravitz, Santigold,[15] and Sheryl Crow.