The Silver Swan by Sallie Bingham

Author:Sallie Bingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Both before and after the war, Hawaii provided Doris with plenty of spirit-brightening recreation—swimming, diving, surfing, and outrigger canoeing—far from the ceaseless hounding of the press. Dedicated to long twice-daily swims at Rough Point and Shangri La, she adopted in the early 1950s the close-fitting two-piece bathing suits, often manufactured by Jantzen, that would become fashionable.

Doris wanted to share her passion. In 1960, as the United States became concerned about the success of Russian women athletes in the Olympics, she gave $500,000 to the Olympic Committee to investigate ways to improve the performance of American women swimmers.

Determined to improve her diving, Doris might have persuaded the Gold Medal swimmer Duke Kahanamoku to coach her, as he did many others, but instead he remained only a friend.

At Duke’s sixtieth birthday party, Doris’s lifelong friend Wilmer C. Morris remembered, Doris watched Duke with such admiration that Wilmer asked, “You really like Duke, don’t you?”

Doris replied, “Duke has it all. He’s known all over the world, and people admire and respect him, and with all that, he lives a very simple, uncomplicated life. He doesn’t want a lot. Certainly, he’s never asked me for anything.”1

Instead of Duke, Doris hired an Olympic coach (whose name has not been recorded) to help her with her diving, using her swimming pool’s retractable high diving board. (In a home movie filmed in 1960, the board is as tall as the surrounding palm trees. A male figure enveloped in shadow advances along it as if preparing to dive, then retreats.)

But Shangri La was not all about diving, swimming, learning Hawaiian music, and racing outrigger canoes, a sport in which Doris’s proficiency is symbolized by a prize: a gold compact inscribed “Mrs. James C. Cromwell” above “Sam Kahanamoku,” with whom she had won a race. The place also provided a secluded paradise for Doris and her friends until the aftershocks of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began to affect her life there.

On December 19, 1941, the War Shipping Administration requisitioned for possible military use Doris’s fifty-five-foot yacht, the Lihi Lahi, for $20,000. (The name of the yacht incorporates Alec’s boys’ nickname for Doris.) This was the first of many changes. But Doris was extremely patriotic. At the outbreak of the war, she had proposed temporarily turning Shangri La into a rest home for military personnel, but was persuaded that this would be impractical. Instead, she turned over the pool, gardens, and tennis court as a resort for officers on leave from Hawaiian military bases.

Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, military governor of Hawaii, wrote to Doris on August 19, 1942, thanking her for her contribution and agreeing to exclude “female visitors”—Doris may have feared an orgy. He had, meanwhile, invited Admiral Nimitz and Rear Admiral Bagley, along with their staffs, to visit Shangri La: “I am sure that they will also appreciate your kindness.”2

On August 23, 1946, when Doris returned to Shangri La, she found it largely unchanged. For two more years, her arrangement with Swearingen seemed to hold.

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