So how did this book start? That’s always the question. Remains something of a mystery as it always does. Doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for me. She couldn’t be less like me. She was enormously wealthy as we all know, much more wealthy than I’ve ever been or dreamed of being so that’s not the connection. She was not politically evolved at least during most of her life, which is also different from me, and she has all the attributes of the upper class in the U.S.: degree of snobbery, acceptance of social rules (at least in the first half of her life). And so the differences really don’t explain why I became so fascinated by her and with her. But I can give some ideas and it’s the ideas about her disappearance that really fascinates me.
I’ve always been fascinated by stories of women who are erased for various reasons. My step grandmother was the first one that I became aware of. And so I decided to try to find out as much as I could about her to see if I could find the seed for this curious expulsion. I was very fortunate in having the support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation which gave me the permission to look at Doris Duke’s big archives which she left to Duke University in 1993 when she died.
Doris Duke’s Silence
Doris Duke for complicated reasons did not write herself. There are only a few letters from her in her archive, there are a few interviews and the only way I can explain that is that her mother was opposed to her having more than about an 8th grade education. This was very hard on Doris who was a very bright girl who really wanted to go to university, wanted to become an educated woman—which she did largely through self-education—but she never had the credentials that are usually what allowed women to feel they could write. She may have been a little uneasy about her basic skills as a writer. And so that may be one reason, the other reason is that her father James Buchanan Duke who was known as ‘Buck’ Duke who created this enormous fortune because he perfected the Bonsack machine—he didn’t invent it but he perfected it, which made it possible for him to manufacture thousands of cigarettes rather than the old hand-rolled ones which were limited to hundreds of cigarettes and to launch a major publicity campaign which started the spread of nicotine not only in this country but worldwide. Because even then, in the early 20th century and the late 19th century there were studies being done that proved the toxic effects of nicotine. He too, Buck Duke, was being pursued and he too chose not to give interviews and did not write very much.
He had been haunted all his life by questions about why he was invested in creating the appetite for nicotine—everyone knew even in the early 20th century when he was starting or had started that nicotine destroyed health. So he could never evade the difficult questions for which there was really is not much of an answer if you’re making a great fortune as we know off something that is destructive. And he began to be so sick of being pursued by reporters and asked difficult questions that he not only refused all interviews he wrote very little himself other than letters to the family.
So Doris who modelled a lot of her life on her father—he died when she was 12—but she deeply admired him and he was passionately fond of her, I think also decided the silence was the best way to go. She began to be pursued really from the time she inherited what would become her trust when she was 12 and her father died, she began to be pursued by the press. It was the time in U.S. of scandal mongering, of the kind of gossip columnists that fortunately we don’t see very much these days. And so she knew what it was to try to avoid public scrutiny from the time she was a very young girl and again a reason not to write, not to speak, not to give interviews for fear of always being misunderstood and misinterpreted which she certainly was. And that misunderstanding and misinterpretation was another reason for my fascination.
During her lifetime she aroused interest because she was a free-living individualist at a time where that was still quite rare. She went where she wanted to go, she did what she wanted to do, she often chose to go barefoot… and all of these shall we say innocuous practices opened her up to a great deal of misinterpretation. It’s always true when we are labeled, the label doesn’t really explain us or describe us, but it seems to limit the way other people are willing to look at us and accept us. If we don’t fit the label—the richest girl in the world, the richest woman in the world—because we don’t behave in the conventional way, we’re likely to be misconstrued and misinterpreted and therefore during her lifetime there was an enormous emphasis on what I would consider rumor. Things she supposedly did, people she supposedly knew, love affairs she supposedly had with people that her culture considered unsuitable. That, to me, is not an interesting story. It’s often the familiar story. Women who stick out in any way tend to be pilloried by other people as being reprobates, libertines and so forth. That’s not the interesting part of Doris Duke’s story. The interesting part to me is how she developed as a philanthropist. And I think that is where the book has relevance for many people who might perhaps turn to it because we’re all fascinated by rumors and they’ve heard some rumors about Doris Duke, such as that she married her butler, which I continue to hear. And if that interests them they might possibly find something in the book that goes far behind the issue of whether she married her butler. She didn’t, but whether she did or not is of little interest to me. That’s just a form of canard or rumor and false story that we tend of find generated about prominent women.
As we know and this is possibly less true today than it was in her lifetime, women who become conspicuous for any reason—either because they have a lot of money, they have some sort of political power, they are in possession of some other gift or luck that makes them stand out, tend to be scrutinized very, very closely by the public. Tend to be treated without any empathy. Any little slip becomes a major slip. So that also fascinated me. The cruel judgement of women who are perhaps seen by this society by being too prominent in some way. We’ve seen this recently in U.S. politics God knows. So these were the reasons I became fascinated by her.
So this challenge to create a woman who in some ways was always in hiding, and I see this in some of her photographs too, always in hiding, for fear of scrutiny, for fear of criticism, for fear of the way people would misunderstand her and misunderstand the way she chose over her lifetime to use her fortune. This fascinated me. Hidden figures in history are often much more interesting than figures that are… if we imagine… perfectly revealed.
Doris Duke’s Philanthropy
I later learned as I learned more about her, that the fact that she’d been pursued by publicity from the time she was a 12 year old and her father died and left her in trust about $100 million—many times more than that by today’s calculation—and she began to be followed assiduously by the press, and always was identified as the richest girl in the world, which I don’t believe she probably was, but anyway that’s what she was called. And later, when she was an adult, she was called the richest woman in the world.
She certainly enjoyed it—she loved clothes, she bought beautiful couture clothes, she loved travelling, she lived well, but she also devoted a substantial amount of her inheritance to philanthropy. I don’t think she ever spoke much about it, she certainly didn’t write about it but that was her ethical choice. Based really not on people she knew or on her family. But based on her own feeling about inherited money. As we all know, inherited money is inherently unjust and particularly polluted when it comes from something like tobacco. Actually most of her inheritance was in hydroelectric. But people don’t remember that, they remember that it was cigarettes and smoking.
So to find the story of her development as a philanthropist brought me of course into the history of the 20th century. And the causes that were becoming very, very important then. I think the two that I want to speak about today are her support of Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger was the initiator of the birth control movement here in this country. She is the one who is able to bring it to legitimacy. It’s the reason we have Planned Parenthood today. And Doris was one of Margaret Sangers first funders, at a time when Margaret Sanger was considered the devil in this country. Barely could keep herself out of jail. She was limited in her efforts, partly through the restrictions that the U.S. Post Office put on shipping materials about birth control though the mails. So I do believe that if Doris had not given her these initial large gifts the whole birth control movement would certainly have been delayed if not completely driven off the track. Very important. And Doris took a great risk in giving money to this revolutionary cause which is what it was. I don’t know how many other privileged women of Doris’ class supported Margaret Sanger. Certainly there were others but probably not a great many. That was the first thing that struck me about her philanthropy. She was still quite a young woman. She started her first foundation when she was in her 20’s.
The next thing later in her life that struck me was that among many, many requests for help she got something from the chairman of the Rosebud reservation—still one of the poorest native reservations in this country. And instead of just sending a token amount or throwing the letter in the trash, she actually visited Rosebud. Very rare at that time or any time for a woman of her class to visit a Native reservation. She was welcomed there. Both as a possible donor but also as a woman from the white super-class that was interested in what was happening to Native Americans. She was adopted into the tribe, she was given a name, she was given regalia to wear which is on display in her house in Newport—Rough Point. Or was when I was last there. And this was significant, it was significant not only for this tribe because she was able to help them materially, but it was significant for her, in terms of opening her horizons to people she probably had never thought much about—certainly didn’t know anything about—and showed again to me the further development of her philanthropy. Starting with the familiar causes of the upper class, which are often largely cultural, and moving into the fringes of social justice. I don’t think Doris Duke would ever even have used that term, but as we find with women who have an effect on their culture she actually was having that effect even though she would never have called it that. She never would have called herself a feminist. But her activities, her independence, her endeavors to me are the definition of feminism. Not the word itself.
So the other thing that she was passionately interested in was modern dance. One of her greatest happinesses was in dancing. She went to Martha Graham’s studio in New York, she even had a Martha Graham jacket. She knew Martha personally, of course she did not dance with the company, she wasn’t a professional dancer. Also, in Hawaii where she ended up spending a lot of time, she became a very accomplished hula dancer, and that was again something that many privileged white women did not do. And the foundation she set up after her death through her will, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continues to support these kinds of causes.
I think it’s very clear even though she was slow to develop her philanthropy—not slow to give, she always was very generous—but slow to develop what her real goals were as a philanthropist. Which is typical, particularly for women of that period because she really had no role models. Her mother never used her fortune she inherited as James Buchanan Duke’s widow—she never used it for philanthropic purposes. There were no other women after one early mentor died, who could help Doris to decide what mattered to her. What she really wanted to support. So this is becoming an essential question now that we do have women in our century—in the U.S. and even in other countries—who are either inheriting or making large fortunes. What is the role of philanthropy? And I don’t think Doris was ever very conscious—and certainly never wrote about what her goals were—but over time it became clear to her that some forms of social justice really did matter, even to this daughter of the Gilded Age.
It’s always to my mind fascinating to try to decipher why a women decides to support one cause and not another cause. Because of course as soon as the newspapers began to call her the richest girl in the world, and then later the richest woman in the world, she was plagued as everyone is, with requests of all kinds, from all over the world—not just all over the U.S.—for money, and she needed to become discriminating about what she was going to support. Like many philanthropists, her early giving when she was in her 20’s—she set up her first foundation when she was in her early 20’s—was largely to support women whom she knew. Or women whose causes she knew about because they appealed to her. And that’s very typical. It doesn’t necessarily mean any of that is unworthy but it doesn’t show any profound thinking about what one wants to use one’s money for.
As she went on through life, and particularly because of her very extensive travelling, she began to develop a much more sophisticated approach to what her money could do. And the reason that in the end when she died in ’93, she had left her estate—by then worth something like $1.3 billion, to establish the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, was that she really believed not in leaving money to relatives or friends—she didn’t have any children—but to establish a very important charitable foundation in this country. And when you look on the website you will see that the causes that the foundation now supports, following her wishes, are diverse. She was always a passionate dancer, she was trained by Martha Graham, so a good deal of money goes to help small dance companies survive. If anyone has ever been to the dance festivals in New England you will often see her name mentioned. She also was an early advocate of conservation and felt that the estate she inherited from her father—Duke Farms in New Jersey—should be used not as an example of a Gilded Age showplace, but as a place where various conservation projects could be pursued on 2200 acres of land.
And then she also was a great believer in the causes of child welfare, so the foundation has devoted some of its funds to that. It’s an extraordinary story, I don’t think there’s another women philanthropist who left behind a legacy of this size. I may be wrong about that, but I don’t believe it has happened. There have been men, as we know, and their foundations, like the Ford and the Carnegie, are even more richly endowed. But the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation stands out for its premiere role as a foundation established by a woman that goes to support the causes that she believed in.
Doris Duke’s Properties
The other thing that is really remarkable about her, is that she inherited through her father three very significant pieces of property. One was the mansion in Newport called Rough Point that he had bought, it was built by a Vanderbilt and extensively remodeled and had become the summer vacation home for Doris and her mother after her father died. She has not only kept that intact so that it’s a reflection of its period, of what magnates were building in Newport, the great roost of very very rich men. But of its period. And it’s open to the public, and is of great interest to the public. We all love big elaborate houses. But there are things in it that are also very reflective of who Doris Duke was, as a daughter of privilege. In her bedroom, there are 3 rather modest silver cups that she won as a girl at various Newport competitions in dance, in tennis and sand building contests. And the fact that she kept these modest trophies all her life shows a degree of humility that of course is very rare in the children of privilege.
There used to be—and I hope there will be once again—a room in that house devoted to their philanthropy. And when I saw it some years ago, it was papered with the names of all the not-for-profits she had benefitted during her lifetime. There were literally hundreds of them. Now some of these doubtless were small donations. But it shows the extraordinary range of her philanthropy and her different attitude towards her inherited money.
That room no longer exists, I hope as I say that one day it will be there again. Because although the house at Rough Point is a good example of Gilded Age collecting and architecture, to me, it is without any inherent interest if you don’t understand it as part of her lifetime goal of philanthropy. And in fact when I went on a tour, a year or so ago, through the house, unfortunately there was not a great deal of mention of Doris Duke and it is very, very fully furnished and one man said in frustration, ‘I never knew anybody to own so many chairs.’ Well owning chairs was not really the goal of Doris’ life. So perhaps that will eventually change.
That’s Newport, that’s Rough Point. But that was not all she did in Newport and it wasn’t the most significant contribution to Newport. She got to know the town, and when she did she realized that the oldest part of the town, which is the enclave of wooden houses near the harbor, was not of much interest to anyone, these are very modest houses, they would have been built and lived in by 19th century carpenters, ships’ captains, the people who were working in the harbor and on the boats that Newport had—Newport had a very important harbor at that time. These wooden houses were just basically being allowed to fall down. So being Doris Duke, she did it on a grand scale. She started buying these houses—at first she was able to buy each one for about $10,000. That didn’t last, they became more expensive. Then she hired local craftspeople to do the renovation work. But not to update them—they are very much the way they would have been. Of course it was important to add bathrooms and kitchens and so on, but the houses in appearance are very much what they would have been when they were first built. And what is so significant to me is that she decided that the best use for these houses, once the work was completed, was to rent them. And they are rented now, through the Newport Restoration Society. And when you rent one of these houses, you have to agree that you’re not going to install air conditioning, satellite discs and all these things that we’re used to because the houses have to remain the way they would have looked when they were first built. I think that’s a fascinating program. And when we contrast it to the other big historical renovations, like Williamsburg, that’s just a place for tourists to go and walk around and look at people in costumes but nobody lives in those restored houses. In Newport it’s actually a community of people living in these restored houses. That I think is unique.
The other thing and probably her major accomplishment in that field was the house she built in Hawaii, it’s called Shangri La. Also open to the public. It really started on her honeymoon in the 1920’s, she and James, as was the habit of that period, went on an 11-month honeymoon covering parts of the world that a lot of white, upper class people at that time didn’t go to very frequently. Particularly the Middle East. And in the course of that honeymoon trip she became fascinated by Islamic arts. Was not at all a part of what she had grown up with. She had grown up in a big house in New York which featured the acceptable 19th century largely French and British paintings, etc. But these—what she saw when she was in these countries—deeply impressed her and she began to buy and collect. When she arrived in Hawaii at the end of this honeymoon she fell in love with Hawaii and she decided she would buy some land and build a house which would be not only her house but also eventually a museum for her collection. It was a great disappointment to Jimmy Cromwell that she did not choose to go back with him and live close to his mother in Palm Beach. That was not the life Doris Duke wanted. She was never what we would call a socialite. That would have bored her a great deal. She had friends… but she never engaged in any kinds of social ceremonies that most privileged women do spend a lot of their time on. So she build this house in Hawaii, she was personally involved in every detail of it and it’s now open to the public. It’s one of the 3 houses she owned that’s open to the public now.
It’s extremely interesting to visit, because it’s unlike any other rich women’s house that I’ve ever seen. It’s not enormously big. Not really built for entertainment although she did entertain there. It really was built as a showcase for her collection. And it’s displayed there as it would have been during her lifetime. Not as things closed away behind glass cabinets but as tiles and ceramics and woodwork and textiles that are just part of each room that people would be in. And they are rare and beautiful. I think the only collection that rivals her collection is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This was a passion for her, and she spent a lot of time and a lot of money accumulating these items over her lifetime. Also brought her into contact with dealers and experts which again was a way to widen her focus and to break out of the constraints of New York early 20th century society.
It gives people an opportunity to see a very different way of using wealth in building a house. It’s not enormous. It’s to my mind not particularly pretentious. But it is built to house what she collected. So it gives people probably their only chance to see what these amazing arts are like. It’s now the Center for Islamic Studies so it also brings in scholars from that part of the world who work there and give presentations [ed. note: it’s actually the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art]. Unique I think in the history of philanthropists. I don’t believe anyone else has ever established a center like this. And the house still has to my mind a great feeling of Doris Duke in it. I can still see her sitting in that living room, with these huge windows looking out over the Pacific, windows that by a miracle of technology lowered into the ground so you have completely open spaces to the Pacific. I can still see her sitting there in one of her beautifully colored kaftans, entertaining her friends… but not masses of friends, very carefully selected friends. It’s where she learned to surf which was unique for a woman coming from the mainland at that period, it’s where she learned to do the hula dances that are native to Hawaii and became quite an expert. It’s where she had her first introduction to a form of spiritual life that she pursued off and on until her death, that was through a woman named Hanaviri or Nanaviri… who was a Hawaiian, I think it would be right to call her a mystic. She was in touch with otherworldly presences. And she introduced Doris—they became very close friends and travelled together—she introduced Doris to a different way of looking at reality. Reality being a screen for the mysterious and invisible presences that are behind it. Very important to Doris as she grew older, she definitely needed some form of spiritual support as we all do. And Christianity which had been—her parents had been church goers—never seemed to particularly appeal to her. But what Hana had believed in, or Nana, she seems to go by both names, really did, and through it Doris became interested in various other forms such as the Self-Realization Society in California [ed. note: the Self-Realization Fellowship]. She also had a house in California.
The other property that was of enormous importance to her was her father’s purchase—Duke Farms in New Jersey. 2200 acres quite close to New York City which he preserved as another Gilded Age mansion, absolutely enormous house and gardens and everything that goes with a formal estate. Doris made a lot of changes there during her lifetime. She had issues—there was great difficulty in getting enough water from the Raritan river to keep all of these gardens and fountains going, so she began to eliminate some of those. She also decided what to do about the snapping turtles that had come to inhabit one of the ponds, which was to catch them and make turtle soup which seemed like a good practical solution for that problem. She was very inventive.
Duke Farms is now also open to the public. And it’s very interesting to me how that foundation that she established, has decided to run that big property, really in line with Doris Duke’s interest in conservation. The enormous house, which she did not leave with any intent, everything in it was sold at an auction to the benefit of the foundation so it was an enormous empty house of no particular architectural distinction, very expensive to maintain and with no real purpose. The purpose as she designated it, was the 2200 acres and the conservation projects that could be carried out there as well as her greenhouses and her orchids. She was a passionate grower of orchids. So the foundation, and I thought in a very wise move, although a very unpopular move, a few years ago decided to eliminate this big expensive house, which is what they did. It no longer exists. To the rage of some of the neighbors. But it was so much in line with Doris original idea for the place that I felt it showed how clearly these trustees are following what she wanted rather than following what might be the opinion of her once-neighbors.
So that’s now open to the public. There are all kinds of conservation projects going on out there, it’s a beautiful piece of land. Relatively close to the city and again a great gift of Doris’ to the public that will go on being a gift for many, many years. All three places are endowed through the foundation or through subsidiary foundations.
This is an extraordinary development for a young woman of the Gilded Age who had no formal education, almost no formal education, no mentors, very male identified—most of the important people in her life were men—and yet she was able to… finally towards the end of her life… have a coherent philosophy and it’s reflected, and will be reflected for unending time, in these 3 houses and in the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Really extraordinary accomplishment.
Doris Duke’s Legacy
So as you can see this is a very wide-ranging woman. Someone who was comfortable traveling all over the world, all of her life. Someone who was comfortable living in 3,4,5 places because she also had apartments in Manhattan and she also maintained a house in Hollywood. Someone who knew all kinds of people, from Hollywood celebrities that she got to know through her house there, to the people working on her various properties. She was very involved. She wasn’t a remote absentee landlord. She was very involved not only in the creation but in the maintenance of her substantial properties. And… the fact that they are all open to the public today to me shows a real commitment to the future on her part. She had no children. But she was committed to the future the way women who have children sometimes are not. In a sense the future was her child. And as a forerunner of the feminist movement which she would never have espoused but because of her independence and her actions she was to me an example of feminism. She’s immensely important.
I always think of her swimming. She was a passionate swimmer her whole life. Also a surfer in Hawaii which was almost unheard of at that time. And she would swim morning and evening wherever she was. In Hawaii she would swim in the Pacific. At Rough Point she would swim in the Atlantic. Both of the places where she swam were fairly challenging—particularly Rough Point. And as she grew older, her staff at Rough Point who were devoted to her, were concerned about her swimming alone out into the Atlantic as she did twice a day. So they decided that they would try to protect her from her own adventurousness. Very familiar theme for many women. So one of the staff would stand outside behind a tree with rope in case she needed rescue. Well she never needed rescue and that man had to make very certain that she never saw him. She would not have been pleased. She was not a woman who needed rescue. I don’t think she ever aspired to being rescued even at the very end of her life when things became much more difficult for her. Because she was failing physically as we all tend to do, and also she had this turbulent relationship with Chandi Heffner.
But she was fortunate in having the support of one of many lifelong, devoted, largely men, devoted men. This was an Irishman named Bernard Lafferty whom she hired as a butler toward the end of her life. I think she soon realized that he had a lot more to offer to her other than just waiting on her, they became devoted companions and he was the one who was with her at the very end which led to all kinds of scurrilous speculation about what he was doing. He was the one who although she had asked that her body be thrown to the sharks in the Pacific, yet he couldn’t I’m sure bring himself to do that, but he did scatter her ashes along with some leis off Hawaii. A devoted man in a precarious and unpopular position because he was a paid servant but he was far more than a servant. This was typical of Doris all during her life, she didn’t tend to keep to the boundaries of what people expected in her relationships. She had relationships with people who we would consider dark-skinned—both Hawaiians and people from the Middle East and she didn’t seem to suffer from the kind of racism that is often just par for the course with white inheritors. I think it’s again an example of her extraordinary broadmindedness.
Her will became the subject of enormous controversy when she died in ’93. She had adopted a young woman named Chandi Heffner a few years earlier, and they were close companions. I think it’s impossible to speculate much about that relationship because Chandi is not able to be interviewed. But in any event she and Doris parted ways not long before Doris’ death and Chandi after Doris’ death claimed actually the whole of Doris’ estate and that lead to a huge court battle which went on for years and cost immense legal fees. Actually the whole of Doris’ estate went to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation which was her intention. I believe it’s a $1.3 billion dollar endowed foundation, because Doris—through good advisors and boom times in the U.S. economy—was able to triple the fortune that her father had left her so it’s a very well-endowed foundation about which people seem to know almost nothing. Very interesting. Many people have heard of Ford and Carnegie which are larger foundations established by men. Almost no one has heard of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation that I encounter, this is very strange. I hope my book will help to change that. Because the foundation through it’s well-endowed projects has been enormously helpful to many many people. And it deserves to be remembered and Doris deserves to be enshrined as a philanthropist rather as someone imagined as a kind of free-living, spoiled, Gilded Age brat. That’s so inappropriate.
The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke
So that is the genesis of The Silver Swan. And the title is based on the fact that among her many, many possessions Doris Duke cherished a silver swan, a table ornament made by Tiffany which travelled with her when she moved from house to house, and seemed to be a suitable symbol for this mysterious and fascinating woman. The swan is a mythical creature and among many of the roles it is said to have no voice. Apparently when it’s in the death throes it does make some sounds, but it is said to have no voice. And since Doris Duke in effect had no voice—that she left behind at least—the silver swan seems to be an apt symbol for her.
And the subtitle is In Search of Doris Duke which of course allows the reader to question whether I ever found her. And I’m perfectly comfortable to admit that I may never have found her. I certainly found traces, footprints, suggestions, hints but I would never say that I had ever been able really to sum up Doris Duke. A very complex woman is difficult to sum up by any biographer.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to see this biography through to conclusion. I hope that it will find readers who find all kinds of connections as I think are apparent with the life we are living in today in the 21st century where enormously wealthy people are so much watched—even admired—and the questions of what they actually contribute to their society are crucial questions—crucial questions—because they have so much power.
To learn more about The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, please watch The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke or visit The Silver Swan page on this site.
Leave a Reply