Almost the only question people asked me about her is, “Did Doris Duke marry her butler?” No, she did not. But does that question really matter, in a long, complex and accomplished life?
Doris Duke and Me: Dancing
Doris Duke practiced with Martha Graham’s company in New York and proudly wore their black satin jacket with her name and the company’s name on the back.
Glamour-Puss
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?”
Loving Dogs
Today I find myself in complete sympathy with Doris Duke’s passion, even with the uncomfortable assumption that dogs are sometimes better companions than complicated, changeable humans.
Doris Duke In Love
Was Doris Duke in love with, or—more cogently—did she love any of these men, or the six or seven others who took up portions of her life? Hard to say.
Doris Duke: Getting Dirty
Getting dirty as a child allowed Doris Duke to develop into the daring woman she became. I wonder how many eight year old girls today would be allowed to wander on the beach in a dirty shift, with mud up to their knees?
Doris Duke, Pop Music, and Me
Doris, high-diving, surfing in Hawaii, battling the waves on a stormy day off Newport as she had ever since childhood, might have resisted pop music’s anthem of female submission.
Doris Duke: First White Woman Surfer In Hawaii
Nothing could prevent Doris from seizing that moment in the surf at Hawaii when she reared high in the air, arms thrown back and chin lifted, exulting in her power to do what she wanted.
The Self-Realization Fellowship and Doris Duke
If there is a chance, and I think there is one, that Doris was touched and perhaps even changed by her connection, whatever it may prove to have been, with the Self-Realization Fellowship, her miseries would have been if not reduced, placed in a realistic context, uniting her with her fellows.
Doris Duke’s Death
I’m sometimes surprised that the death of the woman whose vivid, exciting and controversial life I’m recreating in her first serious biography should seem more interesting to more people than her life.