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You are here: Home / Writing / Glamour-Puss

Glamour-Puss

April 14th, 2015 by Sallie Bingham in Writing 1 Comment

From the series: Doris Duke

Find out more about my book, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, now available in paperback.

Doris Duke - Glamour Puss

Photo by Cecil Beaton. Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Doris Duke, posing with her sphinx smile, one long bare arms decorated with a three-strand pearl bracelet, her hands artfully posed one over the other—this is an image that may arouse more antagonism than enthusiasm. It is certainly not the version I have spent the better part of three years exhuming.

Why does this Glamour-Puss version alienate me—and perhaps other women and even a few men?

Well, clearly it’s posed—I can almost hear the photographer giving instructions—but then all formal portraits are posed.

And Doris chooses here to look her most ambiguous, her most sphinx-like, her face the face of a woman who decided by her mid-twenties that she would never write about herself or allow an interview.

I sometimes think that love never touched her, although she knew many lovers. Always she seemed to be asking as she did of one of them, “Are you doing what you’re doing to please ME?”

You can’t read me, this face seems to be saying, because I don’t want to be read.

Bereft of privacy from childhood, when she was dubbed The RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD after her father died and left her a fortune, in trust, later called THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD, no matter what part of the world she was in or what she was doing, I can manage some sympathy for this portrait’s attempt to shun interpretation.

Of course it didn’t work. It never does. Curiosity is not really idle; it is voracious, and she chose to live a conspicuous life.

But I think there is another way—probably many other ways—of looking at this image. Under the shiny black satin evening dress, a woman’s body was breathing; under the sphinx look was hidden the face of the three-year-old who clung to a fence in New Jersey, crying with loneliness.

Even the frozen hair, the milky make-up, the pursed lips and lowered eyes, can’t quite hide the little girl who was so lonely, and who remained lonely for long periods in her adult life.

I sometimes think that love never touched her, although she knew many lovers. Always she seemed to be asking as she did of one of them, “Are you doing what you’re doing to please ME?”

That me, like a small black pearl, is hidden somewhere in the dark depths of this portrait.

And yet I must grant her the agency of choosing; she did not have to pose for this portrait, or for the hundreds of others that I found in her huge archive at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.

Perhaps, then, the shield she erected as a member of the Best Dressed List, as a debutante and a hostess, seemed safer than the many black-and-white snapshots that show her with her hair blowing and her head thrown back, laughing, wearing nondescript slacks and a top she probably bought at a chain clothing store.

In any event, I must try to incorporate the essence of all these contradictory images in my biography, hoping that at least the gleam of that hidden pearl will emerge.

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In Writing Doris Duke Rubenstein Library

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Nadine Stafford on Facebook says

    April 14th, 2015 at 4:33 pm

    Nothing like being posed by Cecil Beaton for the ultimate glam look, no matter what was trapped in her heart, beating under that black gown.

    Reply

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