Power and Glory, page 23
Beneath the usual charm, the message was clear. Return home, fulfil your responsibilities and fall into line. This most private of men would, inevitably, become a public figure. It was not a destiny he relished, and, had some of the seamen under his command known of his inner struggle, they might have exhibited greater understanding, rather than commenting, as one of them did, that ‘he stamped about like a fucking tiger’.19 Wild beasts kept in cages seldom end up tame.
* * *
Shortly after the Duke of Windsor sent his would-be withering reply to the king in June 1950, he heard from an old friend, keen as ever to promote his ideas of what the duke should be doing. Kenneth de Courcy could never be described as unambitious, and from the passive-aggressive wheedling of the opening of his letter of 10 June – ‘You and the Duchess promised to stay with me this summer … [and] I cannot let you off that’ – to the revelation of his impending marriage, ‘upon [which] I fancy Your Royal Highnesses will not cease to congratulate me’, he was on his usual insinuating form. Yet his greater purpose was soon made clear by his description of the response that the duke’s recent Life articles had engendered, supposedly from his New York press office. ‘This extraordinarily effectively written justification of the actions of the former King has led to a widely held view here that this is the first move towards the possible return by the Duke to Britain and a position of very high leadership in British affairs in the event of a world crisis.’
De Courcy omitted to mention that the last time there had been a world crisis, a decade before, the duke’s ambiguous sympathies were felt to be so toxic to British interests that he had been exiled to the Bahamas to sit out the war, thousands of miles from where he could do any damage.* Conveniently, Edward’s publicists suggested that he should give a press conference to hint at his future intentions (‘it is curious that they should suggest this because I have been considering it myself and their suggestion comes to be spontaneously’), and de Courcy said, with his usual lack of ambition for his friend, ‘if this whole situation is now handled very cleverly, it might well be on the road towards a betterment which is of historic importance’.20
If the duke was interested in de Courcy’s suggestion, there is no surviving letter that indicates his acquiescence. Instead, it was left to Wallis to apologise for their being unable to attend de Courcy’s wedding due to a prior engagement, before suggesting that her husband needed to spend the summer working on his book in order to have it ready for publication. She concluded, ‘[we] wish you and the bride-to-be all the good things of life and that you find the same happiness and contentment together that we have found’.21 They were noble sentiments indeed, but the duchess omitted to mention that earlier that year, they had made the acquaintance of the man who, if gossip was to be believed, represented the first true threat to the harmony of their marriage: James ‘Jimmy’ Donahue Jr.
If F. Scott Fitzgerald had created Donahue, he could have been proud of his work. The heir to the Woolworth fortune, Donahue had inherited $15 million in 1950, at the age of thirty-four, and so any work ethic he had possessed – never a strong component of his character – vanished along with any check on his behaviour. Rejoicing in the nickname ‘Jeem’ among the gilded circles in which he moved, he led a recklessly self-indulgent existence, in which his debauched antics had led his family to have a lawyer on hand twenty-four hours a day to keep him out of the papers and the cells alike.
He combined superficial charm with remarkable viciousness when he was crossed or felt that he was disrespected; whether or not one believes the story about how on one occasion he and a friend tried firstly to rape and then castrate a waiter at the Waldorf Towers,* Ziegler’s contemptuous description of him as ‘the American millionaire socialite and pederast’22 seems all too accurate. He was, in other words, the latest in a long line of thorough rotters that the duke and duchess had encountered, and with their usual dismal judgement in such matters, they insisted on taking him up immediately.
In Murphy’s pithy description, before he had met the Windsors, Donahue had been ‘a court jester in search of a court’.23 Now, apparently captivated by the pair – but especially the duchess – he ingratiated himself with them both. When they headed back to France in the summer of 1950, they were accompanied by the flamboyant jester, now firmly ensconced in their lives as an apparent fixture. Donahue offered them several things that had previously been missing from their existence. He was witty, in a bitchy, unpleasant way; ostentatiously open-handed, which removed the duke’s brow-furrowing need to pay for anything when they went out; and, to the increasingly fevered hum of gossip, the constant companion of the duchess. As Murphy wrote, ‘they were on display together from noon until dawn … [this] did not go unnoticed’.24
Donahue’s overt homosexuality made him a safe companion for Wallis, at least theoretically. Ella Maxwell, the American gossip columnist and hostess, was a friend of both the duke and duchess, and was driven to ask him, ‘Don’t you get jealous letting the Duchess go out every night with Jimmy?’ Edward was said to have roared with laughter and, ‘in his special semi-Cockney’ accent, replied, ‘She’s safe as houses with him!’25 Yet the gossip around Donahue and Wallis continued to circulate.
It remains uncertain to this day whether their relationship ever had a sexual component. Ziegler believes that the duke’s confidence that their friendship was purely platonic was accurate, but others, from Mountbatten’s daughter, Pamela Hicks, to the duke’s secretary, Anne Seagrim, have suggested that it was a considerably deeper relationship, whatever took place between the two. Given that there has been much speculation as to the sexual dynamic between Wallis and Edward, it would be unwise to categorise Donahue and the duchess’s tendresse as simply the appropriate respect paid by a younger man to an older woman. Yet Donahue was indubitably, in the immortal words of Flanders and Swann, base, bad and mean. Like Charles Bedaux, the Nazi sympathiser who owned the chateau where the duke and duchess married in 1937, he was happy to pick up the bills, but all the while, greater expenses mounted up.
An additional complication for the duke was the knowledge that he was under contract to finish a book that was due to be published the next year. Its creation had proved a gruelling process. Murphy remarked to Monckton on 6 April, while sending him the extracts intended for Life magazine, that ‘these four instalments represent the King’s story as he wishes to tell it. There are many places in it where, if I had my way, the story would have taken a different form. And much is lacking that would have given breadth and depth to his life. But this, after all, is the Duke’s story; there comes at every stage a point beyond which he cannot be taken, and there, always, the narrative stops.’
The ghostwriter was most dismissive of Edward’s belief that the book was ultimately a romance. ‘It is, as no one knows better than you, a love story not out of royal folklore but out of life – and for that reason it suffers somewhat for want of the timeless virtues.’ The only praise he could summon for it was faint – ‘the tale is told simply and with a minimum of platitudes’ – and his truer judgement on the book and its author could be ascertained from his judgement that ‘if occasionally it suddenly splinters off into a startling naivete, that too is in character’.26
Murphy had long since wearied of dealing with the duke. In his later account of working with him, he wrote, ‘[I] tried to tie him to a schedule, however light; and the Duke, moved as much by consideration of the handsome royalties at stake as by his contractual obligations, attempted to discipline himself and cut short his partying and nightclubbing.’27 As the duchess was driven ever further into Donahue’s embrace, it became clear that the duke was not in a position to deliver a finished manuscript for publication in 1950, as had originally been hoped for. Murphy was offered the chance to return to New York, where, in his words, ‘more stimulating assignments awaited’,28 but he stayed, either because of his dedication to seeing the job through or because he feared that if the project collapsed without his involvement, he would lose out on what promised to be a lucrative payday.
He found support from an unexpected quarter. In between assignations with Donahue, Wallis told her husband that it was his duty to finish the book, even if she was bound to return to New York in the autumn of 1950 for a round of social engagements. She eventually left, and work continued. In Murphy’s words, the duke, ‘rubbing his hands’, now announced that ‘There’ll be no distractions. We should wind up the job in a month or six weeks.’ Unsurprisingly, they did not. In Wallis’s absence, Edward was driven to a virtual breakdown, unable to cope without her.
Eventually, he decided that he had to return to New York, citing his belief that war with Russia was imminent, and that it would be a dereliction of his uxorious duty not to be by Wallis’s side ‘as I was in the last war’ if bombs fell in Central Park. Eventually Murphy had to ‘finish the book with only fitful help from the Duke’,29 with sections all but missing and others barely sketched. The duke’s reaction to being asked to provide the unfinished material was an unhelpful one. ‘I don’t want to waste time on things that happened so long ago.’ Murphy did not make the obvious rejoinder that such was the point of a memoir. Eventually, however, A King’s Story was bashed into shape, and left to await its commercial and critical fate upon publication the following year.
Few who had known the duke in Britain looked forward to its appearance with any anticipation. Monckton groaned to Lascelles on 5 May that he and Allen had worked together with Murphy and consequently ‘once again all we have succeeded in doing, by the most drastic attacks, has been to make what was horrible [a] little less so’.30 Churchill, meanwhile, commented to his friend and acolyte Brendan Bracken on 1 August that ‘I am sure it would not be in accordance with HRH’s character or reputation for him to publish reports of private conversations which he had with me, and still less to impute to me political motives and I request and hope that these may be cut out.’31 He was to be disappointed; the book was published with these details intact. Although it made no difference to his re-election hopes the following year, it was still an embarrassing reminder that he had taken the losing side in this particular conflict, for motives that have been debated ever since.
Although no letters detailing the king or queen’s thoughts on the book’s publication exist, it is a safe assumption that their opinion did not stray far from that of Lascelles. The private secretary hinted as much when he wrote to Monckton on 10 May 1950 to thank him for his near-superhuman efforts. ‘Allen & you have done all that mortal men could to make this wretched publication as decent as possible, and you may be sure that all here are deeply grateful to you.’ He described the task that they had accomplished as ‘very disagreeable and exasperating’.32
Lascelles reserved his greatest scorn for his former employer. He responded to a colleague forwarding a horrified letter about the forthcoming memoirs with typical vigour. ‘You are quite right in thinking that we get many communications similar to this. All of them express disgust at a former King of England selling for money his recollections of his family life, in a form that is indecent and for a motive that is squalid. But none of them has yet suggested any machinery whereby such a sale can be prevented.’ He then unburdened himself of decades of contempt towards Edward. ‘The only remedy that has ever occurred to me is that somebody should awake in the author the instincts of a gentleman; but as I devoted the eight best years of my life to this end with signal ill-success, I fear I am not the man to make any constructive suggestion.’33
Murphy estimated that the duke earned close to a million dollars from A King’s Story, a book that Edward soon convinced himself he was solely responsible for.* Its publication would become a cause célèbre, and would give him the financial security he had always desired, even as it estranged him from his family for ever. If it was revenge for all the insults and snubs levelled towards him and Wallis, it was a peculiarly specific kind of vengeance, one that would cause embarrassment and hurt in equal measure.
Chapter Fifteen
‘It May Be That This Is the End’
At the start of 1951, Britain needed cheering up. The years of postwar austerity, bleakness and general belt-tightening meant that the general atmosphere was one of virtually unrelieved misery, as it had been since the VE Day celebrations in 1945. Labour had won the election shortly after that on a platform of rebuilding the country, but their much-reduced majority in the 1950 poll was testament to their qualified success – at best – in such an endeavour. Therefore, with limited funds at their disposal and Attlee’s increasing, and justified, belief that his time as premier was limited, there was only one sure-fire means of increasing the gaiety of the nation: throwing a party.
The Festival of Britain, as it was known, was not a spontaneous occurrence. Herbert Morrison had first come up with the idea in 1947. The initial concept was to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but Morrison soon realised that there could be a wider and broader purpose at hand: ostensibly promoting British endeavour in everything from the arts and sciences to design and architecture, with a distinguished council that included such luminaries as T. S. Eliot and John Gielgud as advisers. That it would also double as a celebration of the Labour Party’s achievements in office was a welcome by-product. In Morrison’s words, it would be ‘something jolly … something to give Britain a lift’.1 The theme decided upon was ‘new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old’, and the site earmarked was on London’s South Bank, close to both Waterloo station and the Houses of Parliament.
The Conservatives, naturally, decried the festival from its inception. Churchill sneeringly described it as Morrison’s ‘fun fair’2 and openly criticised its operation at a time of international crisis, writing to his former scientific adviser Lord Cherwell that ‘I feel increasing doubts about the Festival of Britain now that the United States have declared and are taking vast emergency measures.’3 He may or may not have described the festival as ‘three-dimensional Socialist propaganda’,* but he certainly joined his colleagues in voting down Morrison’s proposal to open the site on Sundays, which was dismissed on 28 November 1950. As Channon put it, ‘the saints triumphed over the sinners … and by an enormous margin defeated the government’s proposal to open the Fun-Fayre of the Festival of Britain on Sundays’. His own motivation for voting was not to keep the Sabbath holy, but ‘to slap Morrison and to catch the nonconformist vote in [his constituency of] Southend’.4
For all the Conservative cavilling about the festival – the author Michael Frayn wrote in 1963 that its opponents could be summarised as ‘the readers of the Daily Express; the Evelyn Waughs; the cast of the Directory of Directors – the members of the upper-and middle-classes who believe that if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker creatures without scruple he would not have made them as they are’5 – it was clear that it was a popular endeavour in the true sense of the term, and one of broad appeal to the entire nation.
It was appropriate that it would be opened by the king, on 3 May, in a ceremony on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately, when the monarch was seen in public – on one of his increasingly infrequent appearances – his declining health was now obvious to shocked onlookers. Channon was able to comment at the end of the month, accurately, that the king ‘is more ill than was announced’,6 although he was typically mean-spirited about the cause. ‘It is not overwork as the newspapers suggest but “over-pleasure”; he is killing himself as we all know, but the secret is kept.’ The so-called secret was the king’s heavy smoking, something Channon described as a ‘harmless pleasure’7 but that had probably caused the lung cancer that was now rapidly leading to his terminal decline.
The tenor of many of Queen Elizabeth’s letters between late 1950 and the summer of 1951 could be described as either optimistic or delusional. She may have genuinely believed, as she wrote to Queen Mary on 15 October 1950, that George ‘is really better I think … it is a great and blessed relief to see him stronger and more able to cope with the many worries & difficulties of life nowadays’,8 but complaints about his declining health now permeated her correspondence. On 12 December, he had ‘a painful attack of lumbago, or something like it, but is better now’,9 and on 7 April 1951, Princess Elizabeth was informed that while he was, again, much better, ‘that flu got him very down, & he took a long time to shake it off’.10 It was the epitome of the uncomplaining stoicism she had manifested throughout the war, and it had worked beautifully then. Now, however, her husband was facing a far more implacable foe than even Nazi bombs: his own mortality.
Shortly after the ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral, the king appeared at Westminster Abbey, on 24 May, to install his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, as Great Master of the Order of the Bath. By now, it was obvious that his illness was more serious than either flu or a chest infection. A few days later, he took to his bed to try to, as he put it, ‘chuck out the bug’, but his condition had moved far beyond bed rest. Although he wrote to his mother two days later, in an attempt to reassure her, that ‘the doctors can find nothing wrong with my chest so rest & quiet is the only thing for it’,11 it was clear that simply removing himself from the stresses of everyday life was insufficient. He was examined repeatedly by doctors, and X-rays indicated that there was a shadow on his left lung. Yet out of complacency, ignorance or a misguided attempt at noblesse oblige, the seriousness of his illness was played down.
Instead, he was told that he had pneumonitis, a less threatening cousin of pneumonia: he informed Queen Mary that ‘at last doctors have found the cause of the temperature. I have a condition on the left lung known as pneumonitis. It is not pneumonia though if left it might become it.’ Although he had been informed about the presence of the ominous shadow, he was prescribed daily injections of penicillin for a week, and wrote blithely that ‘this condition has only been on the lung for a few days at the most so it should resolve itself with treatment … everyone is very relieved at this revelation & the doctors are happier about me tonight than they have been’.12
