Sallie Bingham - The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

In the late summer of 1958, I was a shy, nearly silent twenty-one-year-old, awkwardly adjusting to my honeymoon with my young husband, when he took me to a formal luncheon in a grand apartment in Paris; his father moved in that world.

I had no idea what to expect. Raised in privilege, but in Kentucky, I spoke only a little French and, as a beginning writer, had little confidence. Although my mother had worked hard to teach me how to conduct myself at adult occasions, a mixture of reticence and inchoate rebellion had caused me to resist learning her useful lessons, beyond shaking hands and murmuring a few polite inanities.

Yet there I was, sitting at a long dining-room table, with ten or twelve dark-suited French gentlemen on either side. The lunch consisted of four courses, passed by silent waiters in livery. My shyness made me afraid of choking, and I hardly dared touch a drop of the three kinds of wine. Embroidered linen napkins and crystal and silver glinting in the dim Paris sunlight did nothing to make me feel at home. And there was no master of the house sitting at the other end of the table.

Instead, very far from me reigned a distinguished presence: a woman of a certain age, filled with power, authority, and dignity such as I had never encountered. What she wore, or even what she looked like or said, escaped my attention. I was overwhelmed, fascinated, and frightened by her sheer presence. I dont believe we exchanged a single word.

Later, my new husband told me that our hostess was Doris Duke, an heiress and a philanthropist.

Decades later, I visited Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, endowed and named by Doris Dukes father after his family, and a recipient of her generosity. With Jean OBarr, distinguished professor and founder of Dukes Womens Studies Department, I was setting up the Sallie Bingham Archive for Womens History and Culture, which now, nearly thirty years later, holds an ever-growing collection of the papers of women writers, artists, and feminist activists as well as records of the institutions they founded.

I was staying at the very comfortable, very Southern Washington Duke Inn, named for Doris Dukes grandfather, near the edge of the West Campus of the university. Every day, as I walked to the elevators, I passed a row of impressive black busts on pedestals, commemorating three generations of Dukes: Doriss father, grandfather, uncle, and nephew.

But where was Doris? Her exotic, heart-shaped face, her sly smile and sideways glances had appeared all over the world in news stories and fashion shots, but none of these were framed and hung at the inn. I searched in vain for a bust, a portrait, or even a photograph, both at the inn and on the campus. I found nothing. Eventually, I was led to a small photograph in the corner of a garden center she had endowed.

Whenever I find a trace of a woman whose story has been expunged, I want to know what caused the omission. What characteristics of the vanished woman resulted in her banishment from history? I was mystified. Doris Duke is by far the best-known member of her family; even today, more than two decades after her death, her name usually evokes a look of recognition, whereas her grandfather, father, and uncles, despite their accomplishments, have vanished into virtual obscurity.

Did Doriss absence from the family portrait gallery reflect her well-known reticence; her, at times, distant relationship with the university? Had the rumors that plagued her from childhood obscured her accomplishments? Or had the mere fact of her independence, her choice of an unconventional way of life, been responsible for her excision?

Dubbed the richest girl in the world when she inherited, at thirteen, the hydroelectric-and-tobacco fortune of her father, James Buchanan Duke, Doris was pursued nationally and internationally by the tabloids all her life. It was not what she wanted. Was this unwelcome attention the cause of her exclusion?

I set out to discover the answer, probing the recesses of the vast archive Doris Duke left to the Rubenstein Library at Duke. Now, eight years later, I have discovered many more mysteries and exclusions, and, at the center of it all, the paradox of a woman about whom everything seems to be known but who retains a certain mystery, her life a template for that extraordinary phenomenon, the New Woman.

Just two years before Doris Dukes birth, on November 22, 1912, Virginia Woolf daringly claimed, On or about December 1910 human character changed. In short, the New Womancomplex, challenging, and, like Doris Duke, a rule unto herself.