by Jeremy Scott
Doris had no place in her parents’ social life. She grew up on the country estate and in the New York mansion, looked after by a young French governess, Jenny Renaud. The Manhattan residence had sixteen servants and resembled an echoing museum in its vast expanse of marble floor, statues and sombre walls hung with Old Masters. It had a ballroom and a library whose shelving displayed the leather spines of what looked like books, but were only dummies. Buck had not time for reading, he said books were too slow for him.
Doris was a plain, solitary and lonely child. Not until she was enrolled in New York’s Brearley School, aged ten, did she mix with other girls. She arrived dressed in her mother’s hand-me-down clothes with a hat pulled down over her eyes. The other girls jeered at her, she was greeted with mockery. Tall, thin and gauche, she was nicknamed ‘The Giraffe’. ‘She was kind of scrawny,’ one classmate recalls. ‘She would have fit in better if she’d been more coordinated.’ On vacation at Newport, once she went swimming from fashionable Bailey’s Beach wearing a white swimsuit. It was unlined, and when she came out the water it had become transparent. ‘She was pathetic,’ another Brearley student remembers.
But her Daddy loved her, he still called her ‘the baby’. ‘He really adored her,’ says a family friend. ‘I recall walking into the breakfast room at the Duke mansion and seeing him kissing her and loving her and I said, “Go as far as you like. Don’t bother about us.” He really was devoted to her. And he admired her mind, but he said that she got that mind from him.’
Why did Buck and Nanaline not have another child? Surely he would have wished for a son to inherit his business and fortune? But Nanaline had been damaged in giving birth to Doris, emotionally and perhaps physically. She disliked her own daughter. Parturition had traumatised her, she did not care for the physical side of life and Buck was not insistent. He had needs, but he had mistresses.
His tobacco empire was growing into one of the largest businesses in the country. From the start, Buck had employed market researchers at American Tobacco and commissioned scientific studies, but now these revealed disturbing evidence that cigarette smokers were prone to heart disease and lung cancer. The implication was ominous. He forbade his wife to smoke and Doris ever to take up the habit – unsuccessfully in both cases. Most crucially, he began to transfer capital out of American Tobacco to invest in hydroelectric power in North Carolina and Piedmont, establishing Duke Power and acquiring stock in the oil company Texaco. Prompted by his wife, he increased the million-dollar grant he’d given to obscure Trinity College in Durham by a further $40 million, proposing a whole new campus. In gratitude, the board of trustees voted unanimously to change the name to Duke University.
Then, aged sixty-eight, Buck’s ferocious life-force began to fail. He sickened, lost weight and spirit. In October 1925 Doris’s beloved father died. On the day of his funeral the cities of Winston, Salem and Danville suspended tobacco sales for a full ten minutes in honour of their patron saint.
Doris was twelve years old.
Two weeks later, the will was read. Buck’s worth was assessed at $300 million (the inexact science of historical conversion might arrive at a modern equivalent of $4 billion). The bulk of the estate was left to Doris, with Nanaline receiving an allowance of $100,000 a year and the right to live in the four houses, Manhattan, Duke Farms, Newport and North Carolina. But the will was ambiguous; Nanaline maintained that she was the outright owner. Doris, by now just into her teens, who had inherited her father’s head for business together with his guiding maxim trust nobody, sued for possession and won.
The case did not improve her relationship with her mother, who remained her legal guardian. Nanaline was dismayed by her tall plain daughter, so lacking in social skills, whose only interest was playing jazz piano and learning to dance everything from tap to clog. When she became sixteen, she was packed off to a boarding school, Fermata, in South Carolina, whose students were taught flower arrangement along with the social graces of the Old South.
She loathed the place, and her fellow students loathed her back for all the reasons that can be imagined, plus the fact that her family voted Democrat and she herself was drawn to black men and liked them. Such sedition was anathema to them. Dyed in the wool reactionaries, they existed in a time warp, refusing to acknowledge what had become the modern era.
It was mass communication that cued the period, the explosive growth of the tabloids and commercial radio during the 1920s. In America it was a period of unparalleled prosperity. Business earnings were soaring, so was the stock market. The good times were here and here to stay – or so it felt. It was a wonderful world whose inhabitants had been transformed to include women who wore make-up, silk stockings and cropped their hair; who smoked cigarettes, drank cocktails of bootleg gin, and wisecracked; who flung their lean bodies about dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom with men in wide-shouldered suits and two-tone shoes. Life was fun in the blare of jazz, the gramophone a must-have. A rage to live possessed people, a sharp appetite for everything that was new.
Sheltered from the world though she’d been, Doris was intuitively aware of the modern ethos and in tune with it. She loved its music and she loved to dance, the only time when she could shuck off her self-consciousness and lose herself in the beat. While on vacation at Rough Point, she asked a Princeton man who was one of the Newport bloods to take her to the Cotton Club. ‘I agreed, but I didn’t like it. In those days nobody went to Harlem. I thought we would be murdered or something. Doris just loved it,’ he said.
Though Doris chafed against the antebellum fantasy that was Fermata, she remained there until she was seventeen in December 1929. By that date the world that she and others knew had changed, changed catastrophically: Wall Street had crashed.
The havoc the Crash unloosed upon the country was devastating. On 24 October thirteen million shares had been sold in an avalanche of loss, ruining many on the instant. By 11.30 a.m. the market was in free fall, gripped by blind panic. Outside the Exchange in Broad Street groups of traumatised people gathered into a crowd. The sound coming from them penetrated the building to those within as an animal roar of baffled pain. Police were deployed to keep the peace. Those in the mob outside, and in the city and throughout the country in the days, weeks, months and weary years that followed, felt they had been betrayed. The American Dream had been blown away and exposed for what it was: a dream. In the harsh reality which replaced it they might continue to exist but they had ceased to live. Their illusions had been stripped from them along with their savings, their jobs, and their homes. The idea of a better, fuller life was unimaginable – many were pressed to live at all. Some didn’t, but jumped, shot themselves or hung themselves from a beam in a mortgaged barn. Depending on charity, the rest continued somehow, but all sparkle and all joy had been drained from being, all jaunty pride and strut and hope for tomorrow. In this drab numbness of circumstance only the cinema and soap opera of celebrity provided an escape into a richer, more brightly coloured existence.
Prior to the Crash, Doris’s fortune had been assessed at $400 million (circa $6 billion in today’s language). The money was invested in power companies and tobacco and, so essential were these products to the US population, these stocks remained relatively unscathed. The four vast properties she owned were unsaleable and technically worthless, but, since she lived in them, this mattered nothing to her. She was still by far the richest woman in America. Compared to her, Barbara Hutton – heiress to the Woodworth fortune, known as ‘The million dollar baby’ and with whom she’d been at school – came a poor second.
For a young woman to make her debut into the social world (and marriage mart) at the age of seventeen was a blue-blood tradition – as was her coming-out ball.
Barbara Hutton’s in Manhattan, which Doris attended, was spectacular. It outraged America in its profligacy. Her own, at Rough Point, was more restrained and in keeping with the times. She hated publicity, believed she was ugly and detested being photographed. Never w
as there a more reluctant celebrity. Yet there was a public need for women such as Barbara and her. The development of tabloid newspapers had created a requirement, a hunger for them. Walter Winchell’s column was syndicated in over one thousand national papers. He wielded (and abused) an extraordinary influence in shaping public opinion. Doris was prime game for him and other rival columnists, cannon fodder to the tabloids. She hated their attention, it made her desperately uncomfortable. To see a photograph of herself reminded her she was unattractive, to be questioned was embarrassing. When she went out she wore drab clothes and a cloche hat tugged low on her forehead; she refused all requests for an interview. Nevertheless, she went to dances and parties; she was obliged to, that was what ‘doing the Season’ was about and a cringe-making rite she was forced to endure.
The culmination of Doris’s launch on high society was a voyage to England, where she was to be presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, along with nine other US debutantes – Barbara Hutton would go through the same ritual the following year. For her and the other Americans the purpose of the Presentation, and the round of parties and dances that would follow in the days afterward, was to extend the range of their eligibility to British and other aristocracy in a trade-off between title plus stately home and American wealth, an established historical tradition which strengthened the special relationship between the two countries.
Presentation at the Court of St James did indeed ensure the exposure of both Doris and Barbara Hutton to titled European adventurers; several of Barbara’s later husbands would be accomplished cosmopolitan con-men. Doris’s own renown spread far into the continent’s furthest and most unlettered provinces. Nanaline was approached by emissaries from King Zog of Albania – who was particularly cash-strapped at that time – seeking to negotiate a union. After locating the country in an atlas, Nanaline was tickled by the notion of her ugly duckling becoming a Queen, but Doris vetoed the idea.
She was a prime catch, but for a suitor there was a downside to accommodate. The same Ivy League date who’d escorted her to the Cotton Club describes her as ‘aloof, in the clouds. She was never a very warm person … elusive. Very much into herself. And she was not physically attractive. I think she felt ill at ease. She was conscious of her looks and I think she felt unhappy about it.’
The gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell targeted Doris and would track her through the years to come. Elsa was primarily a social fixer and publicist who threw spectacular well-attended parties in New York, Paris, Venice or Rome (always paid for by someone else). A dowdy squat wide woman with the crumpled face of a toad,† Elsa briefed against Doris from the start. ‘She stands five feet ten in bare feet, is unhappy, shuns people and pinches pennies. She talks in jerky, almost inaudible sentences, wears sixteen dollar dresses which look like sixteen dollar dresses, walks awkwardly … and has the appetite of a farm hand and the manners of a shy child.’
She was also without education. Nanaline had scoffed at the idea of her attending university – even though they owned one – asking, why? What was the use of a degree? She’d never have to teach in school.
Yet Doris had to be found a husband. It was the way things were for heiresses and, despite her anti-social nature – she was happiest slumming – she did not rebel. She did fall unsuitably in love though. She was strongly attracted to the British MP Alec Cunningham-Reid. A worldly sophisticate, he had the habit of travel and infidelity; she slept with him when he visited the US. Alec was thirty-seven, a war hero, handsome, charming and desirably louche – but he was already married to an heiress, the sister of Countess Mountbatten.
Jimmy Cromwell, however, was husband material, 100 per cent American and available. Step-son to the fabulously wealthy market speculator, Edward Statesbury, he was sixteen years older than Doris and had just been divorced from auto heiress Delphine Dodge, but remained very much a mamma’s boy in thrall to Eva Statesbury. Like Cunningham-Reid, Jimmy enjoyed a somewhat tarnished reputation, having been involved in a dubious scheme to transform a tract of swamp between Miami and Palm Beach into a plushy residential estate for the very rich, which had cost its investors a lot of money. Failing as a developer, he had converted from Republicanism to become a New Dealer under Roosevelt. Although not generally known, the Statesbury fortune had been wiped out by the Crash and he had need of a rich wife to back him in his newly chosen political career. With a strong if unsubstantiated belief in his own ability, he had conceived the ambition to become a Senator, and one day President of the United States.
The union between Doris and Jimmy Cromwell was an arranged marriage, set up by his mother Eva with the collusion of Nanaline. It took place in 1935 in what had been Buck Duke’s library in the Fifth Avenue mansion. The ceremony lasted only five minutes and, at Doris’s insistence, the word ‘obey’ was omitted from her vows, and it was reported that in reciting the rite what Jimmy actually muttered was, ‘With all thy worldly goods I me endow.’
† Machiavellian and manipulative, Elsa moved in a world of highly charged sexual liaisons but was herself sexually inactive beyond an obsessive crush on the Duchess of Windsor who, according to Wallis’s persistent biographer, Michael Bloch, may or may not have been a male.
CHAPTER 6
DORIS DUKE, PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1947
The last chapter closed at the unpropitious start to Doris Duke’s first marriage. Her second takes place twelve years later. Her new husband is Porfirio Rubirosa and on this occasion ‘obey’ remains in place in the marriage rite but an embarrassing hitch occurs, causing discord and mistrust between the couple before they even reach the crucial point where each is supposed to say, ‘I do.’
The event takes place in the late summer of 1947, when Doris is working for Harper’s Bazaar and staying at the Paris Ritz with the magazine’s editor, Carmel Snow. Carmel informs her that tomorrow they will be photographing the designer’s collection at Balenciaga. Regretfully Doris begs off from the shoot; she has an engagement at the Dominican Legation, where she is scheduled to wed Rubi.
Since their first meeting two years ago, she has continued working for INS in Rome, Paris and London. Meanwhile Doris has maintained a sexual liaison with Rubi, meeting whenever and wherever convenient to both. He is assiduous as a lover and she appreciates his perfect manners. When she – or any woman – reaches for a cigarette, he will already have drawn his gold lighter and be offering flame. Eileen Kingsbury-Smith (wife of INS bureau chief) and some others did not care for him. ‘He was a dreadful creature. When he danced with a woman, it was like paper to a wall. He did everything but make love on the dance floor.’ Some men disparage him, claiming he’s no more than a cliché Latino creep – perhaps that’s jealousy.
But Doris, while fully aware that Rubi is only after her fortune, has remained enraptured by him. She likes black men – she formed a taste for them in Hawaii. Rubi is not black but – despite his claim to Spanish ancestry – a mulatto quadroon, who’s had his hair straightened and his wide nose fixed by the very best. The result is an accessory to be envied by every woman. Rubi is expensive, the best is expensive, but for Doris he is a prize cockerel to be proud of. ‘It was the most legendary penis I have ever seen, there has never been anything like it. It was eleven inches long and thick as a beer can.’ Pony Duke, her godson, describes it as ‘six inches in circumference … much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat’.
But, in the words of a song current at that time, It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Doris explains,
His purpose was to satisfy women. He was sterile and possibly impotent but his prick was so large that it seemed to be in a state of eternal erection … he was able to do whatever I wanted for endless hours. I was always the focus during sex. All that mattered was that I be satisfied. He simply wanted to make every woman on earth experience the ultimate climax. He would even fake an orgasm. Women have had to fake orgasms for centuries to make men think they were better than they were, but Rubi’s dry runs were
absolutely charming. The world would be a better place if more men were capable of faking an orgasm but all other males I have ever known have been basically interested in only satisfying themselves. There is nothing so useless as a man who has just climaxed.
In Paris, Carmel Snow is appalled to learn of Doris’s wedding plans for next day. She fears not just her fortune and safety, but that she may forfeit her US citizenship by marrying on what is legally Dominican soil. ‘It was nearly five o’clock on Friday afternoon and I barely had time to get hold of our French lawyer. He said, “This wedding mustn’t go on unless the girl is represented by counsel.” He got on the phone to America and received his instructions.’
Despite Doris’s aversion to publicity, the press has been tipped off – probably by Rubi himself. The Legation is staked out by reporters and photographers. The room where the ceremony is due to take place has the impersonal décor of an hotel. The guests are few: Carmel Snow, the Kingsbury-Smiths, the racing driver Jean Pierre Wimille. They are not enough to generate a party atmosphere and stand around self-consciously. There is champagne and canapés, but the atmosphere is tense. Rubi is seen to fortify himself with a stiff highball, followed by a second.
All are assembled at the venue and the Dominican consul general is about to start the ceremony when there is an interruption. Two uninvited male guests enter, sombrely dressed in suits, carrying briefcases and walking with intent. Going directly to the groom, they identify themselves as attorneys from the distinguished law firm Condert, with a prenuptial agreement. The legal document is remarkably brief; it is an agreement for Rubi to sign, stating that in marrying Doris he renounces any claim to her fortune.