Find out more about my book, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, now available in paperback.
Doris Duke Swimming (Doris Duke Photograph Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)
April 7, 2020, will welcome my long-awaited biography of Doris Duke, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke into the world with a launch and reading at Garcia Street Books here in Santa Fe, followed by readings in Boston, Newport, Louisville and probably Hawaii.
I’m most excited about presenting my biography in the Great Hall at Rough Point, the Duke house on Ocean Avenue in Newport, because I know how she loved to swim in the ocean off that high bluff. Doris swam everywhere—in the Atlantic and the Pacific—and in the last years of her life (she died in 1993) had a pool built in the basement at Rough Point with a glittering silver dance ball hanging from the ceiling. She also surfed off Diamond Head, said to have been one of the very first non-Native women to assay those big waves.
One of the many surprises that awaited me when I began, nearly ten years ago, to do the research on which my biography is based—in the 800 linear feet of Doris’ paper archive at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina which her father founded and she supported—was her amazing athleticism, especially amazing for a woman in the first half of the twentieth century when we were just beginning to embrace a vigorous physical life.
I was able to include a photo of her swimming, and to me, this photo begins the revision of her life which inspired me to write about her.
Of course, there were many cuts along the way. My editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux was scrupulous about taking out any material she considered superfluous or off the point. One of the cuts was my description of the black architect who, among many other works, was deeply involved in the design and construction of the Duke University Campus. The material that was cut out is below.
I suppose it’s a stretch—but then what is the point of writing without stretching?—but I think if Doris Duke had known about Julian Abele’s work, she would have admired him and regretted that during his life time, he was never given his due.
Nor was she. But all that is changing now.
At 27, Abele became Trumbauer’s chief designer, paid $12,000 a year ($250,000 in current dollars.) He designed Harvard’s Widener Library and Philadelphia’s Free Library and Museum of Art, as well as the campus of Trinity College and its chapel, later Duke University.
But he never visited the campus. In April, 1986, as part of the students’ protest of the university’s investments in apartheid South Africa, his great-niece, Susan Cook, a Duke student, explained to critics that Abele would never have objected to the shantytown the students had built in protest on the main quad. The next spring, Duke’s Black Graduate and Professional Student association began the annual Julian Abele Award; as part of the program, they commissioned a portrait of Abele, which hangs in the foyer of the Allen Building, the first portrait of a black person at Duke.
Abele died in 1950. “The shadows belong to me,” he had said of his hidden career.1
1Rachel B. Doyle, “Meet the Black Architect Who Designed Duke University 37 Years Before He Could Have Attended It,” Curbed (online journal), Jan 16, 2015. Accessed Mar 15, 2015.
I’m glad you posted this Sallie. Seems like an interesting story and perhaps would have been fine left where it was….
When and where will you be doing your reading in Louisville? Am looking forward to having the book in my hand. As my mother always said, “Anything worth having is worth waiting for!”
Dear Ms. Johnson, Ms. Bingham’s reading in Louisville will be at Carmichael’s Bookstore, 2720 Frankfort Ave., at 7:00 p.m., Monday 20 April, 2020. Thank you and best wishes, GB, Assistant to Sallie Bingham.
A complete listing of readings and talks for The Silver Swan can now be found on the events page.