Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reach­ing its read­ers, I find myself in a rather delight­ful quandary: Sarabande Books will pub­lish my next book, The Blue Box, a fam­ily nar­ra­tive based on the let­ters and papers of three of my fore­moth­ers, in August, 2014—which seems a life­time away. As I debate turn­ing my ener­gies in another direc­tion (The Blue Box is vir­tu­ally fin­ished), I am intrigued by the life of Doris Duke, whose papers have just been opened to the pub­lic as part of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.

I have always been intrigued by the life of this woman, who is usu­ally described only in terms of her money and her real or imag­i­nary escapades. She is emblem­atic of the way “rich women” are treated in this cul­ture, with a pow­er­ful mix­ture of pruri­ence and dis­ap­proval; one biog­ra­phy is called, sim­ply, Too Rich, and oth­ers are scan­dalous pot­boil­ers. Yet any­one who lis­tens to NPR knows at least one impor­tant use she made, through her foun­da­tion, of her inher­ited money, sup­port­ing con­ser­va­tion pro­grams long before they became fashionable.

And I met her.

I was a young bride in Paris on my hon­ey­moon, a silent guest at a for­mal lun­cheon where severe-looking French– speak­ing men and women ignored me. At the head of the table, a woman—DD—who seemed unbe­liev­ably old, wielded an author­ity that star­tled me. She had no con­sort, as far as I could tell; she did not hes­i­tate to orches­trate her guests, turn­ing from one to the other, ask­ing ques­tions, solic­it­ing opin­ions. She ignored me; I had noth­ing at that point to offer. She fright­ened me, but at the same time, her unques­tioned author­ity excited me. She unlike any woman I had ever encountered.

Many years passed. Eighteen years ago DD died, leav­ing her enor­mous foun­da­tion to con­tinue her work.

When I vis­ited Duke a few months ago, a small dis­play of mate­r­ial from the DD archives (she is often referred to as DD at Duke) was in the library lobby. I was fas­ci­nated by old black and white footage of a young woman in a white dress, danc­ing with other young women in white dresses on a lawn. Grace, insou­ciance, plea­sure in living—how do these attrib­utes fit with, or con­tra­dict, the heavy aura of scandal?

A few weeks ago, a reporter for the New York Times wrote with rel­ish of a dis­pute in Newport, where DD did much impor­tant work, restor­ing, sal­vaging, cre­at­ing the Historic Newport Foundation. Now, a mon­u­ment designed by Maya Lin “Splits Newport’s Old Guard”, accord­ing to the report.

The mon­u­ment, in Queen Anne Square, cre­ated when DD cleared some derelict build­ings, some­times direct­ing the bull­dozer dri­vers her­self, has caused an uproar, pit­ting ancient peo­ple who actu­ally knew her against one another, some wish­ing a mon­u­ment that points to the future, rather than the past, oth­ers decry­ing it as “ersatz his­tory” they claim the “relent­less prag­matic Mrs. Duke would have hated”. (The Times, titling her Mrs, seems to believe that DD was mar­ried to her own father.)

This is, for me, the open­ing note in what will cer­tainly be sev­eral years of look­ing through an enor­mous archive, find­ing not what suits my preconceptions—and of course I will try to have no preconceptions!—but mate­r­ial that may show the enor­mous com­plex­ity of a woman who not only trans­formed Newport but left two other excep­tional houses, one in New Jersey and one in Hawaii, and an enor­mous foun­da­tion, all to pro­mote her vision.

I’m cer­tain that DD had a vision. No woman encum­bered with the prej­u­dices of the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury could have worked in the pub­lic realm with­out one. For me, her vision is nec­es­sar­ily a mys­tery, like the grace and insou­ciance of the young woman in white danc­ing on the grass in a long passed and for­got­ten summer.

I will fol­low the course of my dis­cov­er­ies here, begin­ning with my first days in the archive at Duke next spring.

Tagged as: Doris Duke, Duke University, Rubenstein Library, Sarabande Books, The Blue Box, Too Rich

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