The press dubs them “the Gold Dust twins.” Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit unimaginable fortunes. By the time of their lavish coming-out balls, they are two of the richest women in the world. Barbara, heiress to the Woolworth millions, amasses seven husbands over her lifetime. Doris, meanwhile, has a sophistication and financial savvy that Barbara tries endlessly to emulate.
When filmmaker Emma Radetsky begins researching her new documentary about prominent women and their jewelry collections, she’s familiar with the lore surrounding both Doris and Barbara—the couture gowns, exotic homes, and romantic interludes—including sequential marriages to the same notorious playboy. And of course, the priceless jewels they acquire as easily as candy.
Yet delving into their backgrounds with the help of one of Doris’s closest companions, Oliver Wendell Shaw, Emma encounters a deeper story—of a private game to manipulate the media, and a hidden, life-long kinship between two complex women who understood each other as no one else could.
Interweaving past and present, filled with sumptuous details from an age of excess, Stephen Greco’s novel is also a mesmerizing story about the nature of celebrity and the transformative power of friendship.
Author
Stephen Greco
An arts-and-entertainment journalist by trade, Stephen Greco is Director of Content for Classical TV, which streams full-length performing arts videos online and across platforms. He is also Intelligence Director of True, an advertising agency focused on global transcultural audiences, with bases in New York and London. He is a former Senior Editor of Interview magazine, the program magazine Stagebill, and the New York weekly, 7 Days.Greco has contributed features on the arts and entertainment, style and fashion, youth culture, and new media to publications such as The Advocate, American Way, aRude, Art News, Casa Vogue, Dancemagazine, Elle, Elle Decor, Empire, France, HX, Harper’s Bazaar, Latina, the London Observer, the Journal of Movement Research, Manhattan File, New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times online, Opera News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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