Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same
are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke
from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and
creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits
us to this day." --Gloria Steinem
**
A bold portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress
who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist**
In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great
underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of
the modern woman. "Don't touch that girl, she'll burn your fingers," FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of
James Buchanan Duke's billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her
lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother
and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was
twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy,
Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships;
and adopted a thirty-two year-old woman she believed to be the
reincarnation of her deceased daughter. This is also the story of the
great houses she inhabited, including the classically proportioned
limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the sprawling Duke Farms in New
Jersey, the Gilded Age mansion Rough Point in Newport, Shangri La in
Honolulu, and Falcon's Lair overlooking Beverly Hills.
Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the
tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when
eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available,
Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring
woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early
war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of
Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father's fortune, and
a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic
preservation to human rights.
In The Silver Swan, Bingham is especially interested in dissecting the
stereotypes that have defined Duke's story while also confronting the
disturbing questions that cleave to her legacy.
