In many ways she will never be redux for me; as time passes, I find myself facing all her complexities once again—traveller, sybarite, lover, passionate collector, friend to many unexpected and unlikely people, some of whom she tried to save (we do that)—but in the end, like all fully developed characters, unknowable… even after a decade of reading every scrap of information about her and working through draft after draft of The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.
Now I’m about to leave New York City in its grey rain for Newport and Rough Point, the big house on Ocean Avenue she inherited from her father and that seems to have been closely associated, for her, with her mother. It was Nanaline who sat through the prescribed waiting period in a boarding house in Newport—the waiting period required of all newcomers while the old timers decided whether or not to accept them—and, once having been given some kind of invisible and silent stamp of approval, went on to help her husband, Buck Duke, design the house on its craggy point over the Atlantic Ocean and, even more important, to create the elaborate social rituals that insured Doris’ life-long place there. As though in homage to that major effort, Doris kept her mother’s gilded writing desk where she wrote all those invitations and thank-yous.
But it was never Doris’ favorite place. That was Hawaii, although once she had helped to found the Newport Jazz Festival, continuing to this day, the place became more congenial to her; her neighbors didn’t like the visiting black musicians but she did. She had an outsider’s appreciation of other outsiders.
I thought of Doris last night when I saw Confederates at the Signature Theatre here in New York. This astonishing play by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Stori Ayers, mixes pre-Civil War slavery with present-day confusions about race; the black woman college professor is as tormented by racial disparities as her counterpart, the young woman born in slavery and taking up arms to escape. Doris knew there were no easy answers but she would have been as gratified as I was when the play ends with the two women, black and white, reaching toward each other although not quite touching, and the extraordinary words of our revolutionary women writers, words that belong to all of us, arching in lights over the stage.
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