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This book portrays a portrait of Doris Duke, the defiant and notorious tobacco heiress who was perhaps the greatest modern woman philanthropist.
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The author of "The Silver Swan" is very aware of the history of the Duke Family in Hillsborough, NJ.
She expressed these sentiments in regard to that: "I have been particularly impressed by the important aspect of Doris Duke's philanthropy represented by Duke Farms. In expanding her father’s vision of a great private estate to include aspects of conservation not generally embraced by inheritors in the first years of the twentieth century, she made the Farms a guiding light for the public as well as for more enlightened landowners in the future".
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", Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great under-explored 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. 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.
Presenter/ Author: Sallie Bingham
Sallie has worked as a book editor for "The Courier-Journal" in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published "The American Voice," and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University.
She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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