The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke by Sallie Bingham
A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist
In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. “Don’t touch that girl, she’ll burn your fingers,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke’s billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two-year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in Honolulu, and Falcon’s Lair overlooking Beverly Hills.
Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father’s fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights.
In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the stereotypes that have defined Duke’s story while also confronting the disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.
Review: She was six feet two inches tall, attracted to both men and women, and wildly travelled. Arguably the most well known in her famous family, she's virtually vanished from the record today. She was heiress to a vast fortune and one of the great modern female philanthropists. She spent much of her formative years in one of the mansions coyly referred to as a "cottage" in Newport originally built by Vanderbilt. She could count numerous well-known people as her friends including Prince Aly Khan, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie Kennedy. She was obsessed with animals, always had a trail of dogs behind her, and a veritable zoo of pets including camels that she traveled with "in a cargo plane outfitted with protective wrestling mats" (180). This is the story of Doris Duke, heir to the great Duke tobacco fortune.
Doris did live exceedingly lavishly with multiple homes and travels all over the globe. However, she was incredibly generous with her inherited wealth, giving to numerous organizations during her lifetime and in her will. While the bulk of her wealth (valued at $1.2 billion) was left to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, she also contributed to the Olympic Committee to improve American women swimmers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Duke University, Duke Medical Center for AIDS research, the New York Zoological Society. On a personal note, I loved hearing about the Duke family's contributions to my own alma mater, Davidson College, referenced. She also left her home Shangri La to be turned into what is now the Shangri La Center for Islamic Arts and Cultures, a "showcase of the fine specimens of tiles, woodwork, and ceramics that Doris collected during her lifetime" (170).
This book was not organized particularly well. It jumps around in time. Not until a good third of the way through the book does the author decide to go back and detail how the Duke family accumulated their wealth and explain Doris's background. Doris had several marriages and multiple relationships. These are not described in a clear order, and I was left confused about the precise series of events. In fact, one of the first aspects of Doris's life the author decides to tackle was her work as a journalist during World War II. The presentation felt chaotic. This was an absolutely fascinating story, and the author has put a lot of detail and work into it, but I do wish it had been edited into a more clear and linear order, so it was easier to follow.
Doris left no journals or memoir and virtually no letters to give a better insight into her interior life so much is unknown about what she thought or her motives for various decisions. She left behind no children who could help tell her story. In her later years, she grew increasingly distant and hard to reach. She legally adopted a grown woman but later rejected her from her life. Her end is obscured by her privacy and the scattering of her servants after her death. However, despite the gaps in knowledge, author Sallie Bingham has given an absolutely fascinating accounts of the details of Doris's life.
Stars: 4
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