Doris Farewell

Kristen Costa and Sallie Bingham, Rough Point Museum April 7, 2022

It sank without a trace.

Or so I thought, with considerable bitterness, after a decade of research at Duke University in DD’s voluminous archive, not yet digitalized, when I could still copy documents and take them away (all this is now superseded), three years of writing, then three painful and confusing years of editing—what exactly was my editor looking for?—and an increasing suspicion, never proved, of outside influence—for this is a story of money, among other things, that questions some of our basic assumptions about capitalism—and then the abrupt cancellation of all readings, presentations, workshops and so forth as the grip of the Pandemic tightened.

But the ways of publishing, like all other ways, including the whims of readers, are mysterious. My handsome hardback, and later the paperback, continued to make their appearance in bookstores as well as course in the endless listings of Amazon—and I hope most of my readers will buy from their local independent bookstore, or order from the publisher, rather than throwing more cash into Amazon’s relentless craw. And people, strangers, relatives, friends, continued to hear, somehow, about the book and to buy and read it.

Among them were my devoted friends, and Doris’, at the Newport Restoration Foundation here in Newport, where Doris worked to preserve forty of the original frame colonial houses—forgotten as attention focused on the great “cottages” on Ocean Avenue, including the one she inherited from her parents, “Rough Point.”

And so Thursday night I was privileged to present a conversation about my book and Doris Duke in one of the huge gilded rooms at Rough Point, where it seemed to me the small tapestried child’s chair—or is it a doll’s?—by the fireplace stood in for Doris.

Kristen Costa, head curator at Rough Point who had welcomed me on my first research trip a decade ago, knows as much or more about DD than I do—including the name of the black dancer whose career, in a sea of whiteness, Doris sponsored. She, like Margaret Sanger, could never have had the career, and its public impact, without Doris Duke.

I had been apprehensive. There are several—or maybe it’s only one—male voices that have raised over and over a scandal about the accidental death of Eduardo Tirella at Rough Point’s gates, and I dreaded the repeated interruptions and assertions we have learned to expect at any gathering.

We discussed at length the reason for this continued, vigorous animosity, more than half a century after Doris’ death. I attribute it to misogyny. A woman of independent means and independent character even now in 2022 rouses anger and fear; is she out of our control?

Yes, of course, although controlled to some degree by her own limitations and the expectations of the upper-class white world into which she was born but where she was never entirely comfortable.

But another factor inspires this relentless venom, the same factor we saw in the shameless grilling of Judge Jackson by white Congressmen: we don’t believe in merit. The concept itself is foreign, we esteem movie stars and politicians who have passed some kind of secret security clearance, especially if they are addicts given to compromising actions and decisions—just like us! But a woman like Doris Duke, who usually refused to be photographed and interviewed, will never pass that secret security clearance. She remains mysterious—as reflected in my subtitles—forever beyond our grasp.

Was she a lesbian? A drunk? A murderer?

To people addicted to venom, any of this is possible—and somehow they are all linked as transgressions we will never understand—“transgressions” that do not really deserve to be called that—but what are our other choices?

So my biography will endure, as my friend, Steve Iwanski, founder and manager at the admirable Charter Bookstore here in Newport said when I went in to sign a pile of my books. The mostly self-published attacks—a new one just appeared—will vanish in time, always to be replaced by more of their poisonous offspring—for at least as long as readers continue to want to read them. But the real Silver Swan (a little closer to gold than to silver I realized when I saw her on Doris’ dining room table) will sail on, as mysterious and unreachable as the woman who owned her.

So farewell, Doris. I am grateful for our decade together.

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