The Duchess Of Windsor, page 63
Donahue was in his early thirties, of medium height, slightly full in the face, with a receding hairline and piercing blue eyes. He was renowned for his biting, often vicious wit and practical jokes. Donahue was also a notorious homosexual. “Jimmy made no bones about the fact that he was a homosexual,” recalls the Countess of Romanones. “Everyone knew about his pursuit of men—it happened all the time, and he never tried to hide it from either the Duke or the Duchess.”29 Any number of sordid tales surround Donahue: orgies at his mother’s Palm Beach estate, call boys and bribes of police, and even the accidental castration of one of his lovers. He was also heavily involved in drugs. “He was an awful character,” recalls one of the Duchess’s friends, “and he was always drunk or stoned out of his mind. He popped pills, snorted cocaine—God knows what all. The Duchess can’t have been so naive that she didn’t know—we all knew what he was doing.”30
The Duke of Windsor was not known for his love of homosexuals. He referred to them as “those fellers who fly in over the transom.” As he said this, he would make little flapping gestures with his hands. “I won’t have ’em in my house!”31 Donahue, however, was a notable exception; he was not only befriended by Wallis, but the Duke himself welcomed him into their circle. “There’s been such a lot of nonsense about the Duke and Jimmy not getting along,” recalls the countess of Romanones, “but I never saw it. I doubt he enjoyed Jimmy’s company as much as did the Duchess, but there was never any animosity between them that I witnessed.”32
Donahue came along at a time when David was busy working on his memoirs and Wallis was left largely on her own. Although she sometimes bristled at the Duke’s constant attentions, she quickly found that she missed them when he was consumed with his own affairs. Donahue managed to successfully slip into the role of escort; while David remained in Paris working away or returned home early on evenings out, Wallis and Donahue would travel to New York and celebrate with friends all night.
Wallis enjoyed Donahue’s biting humor and his vigor. His money—and the luxuries it helped supply—was another welcome asset. Donahue was also of a different cut than the Duke. “Perhaps she was looking for someone to help her plan her parties and enjoy life with,” said one friend. “He made her life exciting, and his money made it unpredictable. The Duke’s unceasing adoration simply wore her out at times, and she needed to break free now and then. Donahue gave her that chance.”33 There was another element to the relationship: with David, Wallis was always the responsible party, the one who made the plans, who did the entertaining, who ensured that her husband was happy; Donahue took on much of these same functions for the Duchess, and Wallis was ready and willing to sit back and let someone else take charge for once.
Inevitably, tongues wagged, and speculation as to the exact nature of the relationship between Wallis and Donahue was a source of endless gossip. Despite Donahue’s well-known homosexuality, people assumed that he and Wallis were lovers. Donahue himself did nothing to dispel this belief and even amplified it with stories of his own. “She’s marvelous!” he allegedly declared. “She’s the best cock sucker I’ve ever known!”34 Those who knew Donahue well were acutely aware that this was “just the sort of goddamned rubbish he was likely to spew,” in the words of one of the Duchess’s friends. “Everyone knew he lied and lied and lied—nobody believed a word he said.”35 But to those who were unaware of Donahue’s propensity to distort the truth, such tales only fueled the ceaseless gossip alleging that he and Wallis were conducting a scandalous affair right under the Duke’s nose.
More and more, on their evenings out together, David began to disappear earlier, leaving his wife and Donahue with their friends. “I think it was simply because he didn’t like to be out late,” says the Countess of Romanones, “whereas Jimmy and the Duchess loved to stay out all night.”36 Wallis herself made light of the growing concern. “Really, David!” she once exclaimed. “What could possibly be more harmless? Everybody knows what Jimmy is! Why, his friends call me the Queen of the Fairies!”37
In the fall of 1950, the Duchess, according to the usual schedule she and her husband followed, sailed to New York for an annual two-month holiday in America. The Duke, who was busy working on his memoirs, was left behind in Paris at the insistence of his collaborator, Charles Murphy. Over the next few weeks, as the Duke followed press reports of his wife’s adventures with Donahue in New York nightclubs, he became increasingly concerned; finally, he abruptly told Murphy he had to go to America and sailed aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
While he was at sea, on December 4, Walter Winchell reported in his column in the New York Daily Mirror that “the Duke and Duchess thing is now a front” and hinted that a divorce was imminent. The press was out in force to witness the reunion of the Duke and Duchess when the ship docked on December 6, 1950. “The Duke,” wrote Louis Sobol in the New York Journal-American on December 7, 1950, “threw his arms around the Duchess ... seven times they kissed.” The New York Times noted that the Windsors “embraced for the benefit of the camera men.... The couple denied published reports that they are estranged....”38
The Windsors had been reunited, but this public display did not mean that Donahue had disappeared from the scene. Indeed, David simply joined his wife and her friend on their nightly round of New York’s fashionable clubs: El Morocco, the Colony, the Stork Club, and Le Pavillon. Unfortunately, the Donahue story was only replaced in society columns by rumors of a new infatuation on the part of the Duchess. On January 24, Louella Parsons’s syndicated column declared: “From New York comes word that Russell Nype, Manhattan’s new rave—he’s with Ethel Merman in ‘Call Me Madam’—is the Duchess of Windsor’s favorite dancing partner. She and the Duke, who are admirers of his, are reported giving a big party at the St. Regis, where he’s booked for a midnight stint after the show.”39
Five days later, Newsweek reported that the Windsors had attended the American National Theatre and Academy Ball, where the Duke had stayed all of ten minutes for photographs before leaving. Wallis had remained and danced until dawn with Cecil Beaton, who acted as her escort. This did nothing to convince the columnists that the most famous marriage of the century was not about to collapse.40
The heavy hints angered Wallis. Columnist Louis Sobol wrote in the New York Journal-American on January 31, 1951: “The Duchess of Windsor has been telling friends: ‘We no longer care about rumors. We used to be sensitive, but not any more.’ Nevertheless the rumors have been growing—and among those spreading them are the so-called ‘friends.‘”41
Now it was Donahue and Nype who took center stage in the latest controversies. On February 19, 1951, Walter Winchell wrote in his column in the New York Daily Mirror:
The Duchess of Windsor and Mrs. Vincent Astor clashed in a furious scene.... Jimmy Donahue made a reservation at the Maisonette (in the St. Regis), and when they didn’t arrive by 12:30 showtime the table was peddled.... A few moments later James ankled in with Her Grace.... A table was offered on the floor ringside, but it was spurned.... She stalked out in a swivet. ... A few nights later (at a Plaza charity affair) Mrs. Astor danced by Mrs. Windsor’s table.... The latter got up, grabbed Minnie’s best arm and said, “Minnie, you owe me an apology, and I feel it should be a public one”.... Minnie said she didn’t know what she was talking about.... To which the Duchess responded: “I was insulted in that basement saloon your husband runs”.... The diatribe continued with another demand for an apology.... Minnie looked at her coldly and meow’d “My dear woman, why don’t you act your age?” and then floated away.... The noblewoman started after Minnie, but Russell Nype ... pleaded with the husbandless woman to sit down. To which, in her most regal tone, she barked, “Shaddup!”42
Nype was quickly pursued by the press, eager for any revelation about his relationship with the Duchess of Windsor. According to the New York Journal-American of October 19, Nype declared that he was merely the Duchess’s mascot and that she had nicknamed him “Harvey.” “What,” he asked a reporter, “could there be romantic between a middle-aged Duchess and a young man who reminds her of an invisible rabbit?”43
In the fall of 1951, attention was focused back on Donahue. A painful incident took place of which much has been made. In his October 15, 1951, column in the New York Journal-American, Cholly Knickerbocker reported: “The Duchess of Windsor was recently at Chez Florence, one of Paris’ most frequented nite spots, with Jimmy Donahue. He ordered an enormous bunch of red roses for her. At the time she was waving a large feather fan. She put it on the table and said to the girl with the flowers: ‘Put the flowers on the fan. Isn’t it amazing? The Donahue roses on the Prince of Wales’s feathers!‘”44
David had also been present and reportedly took his wife’s gesture as an insult. In retrospect, Wallis’s action appears to have been nothing more than an offhand remark and attempt at a joke; she certainly had not meant to provide her enemies with ammunition. But the result was the same, and gossips once again speculated that the Windsor marriage was on the rocks.
In the American Weekly on December 9, 1951, Elsa Maxwell wrote in a story headlined “Will the Windsors Ever Separate?”: “It is natural for people to gossip—even when they see the Windsors apart on a single occasion. But remember this man gave up his Throne for the woman he loved. She loved him enough to give him up if necessary. ... Will the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ever separate? No, never!”45
In the end, of course it was Donahue whom Wallis gave up. By the middle of the 1950s, the friendship had begun to sour. The Countess of Romanones recalled: “The Duchess and Jimmy were very simpatico, and I don’t think people really remember his great charm, how funny and witty he was. But he was also daring, and one heard more stories about him as time went on. I don’t think he really ever used either of them consciously, but it was impossible not to know that he was involved with them. Eventually the Duchess became upset, because she heard stories, and he began to be rude to the Duke. A few times I saw him be rude to the Duchess, and she said nothing, I think, because she was so shocked. But her attitude changed.”46
The end came during a dinner in Baden Baden. The Duke and Duchess and Donahue were sitting together at a table in the Windsors’ hotel suite. According to what Wallis later told one of her friends, Donahue had been drinking and began to belittle the Duke, saying that the Duke only kept Donahue around to pay the bills. Wallis told him that he was drunk and to be quiet. In response, Donahue violently kicked her beneath the table, and she screamed out in pain. David immediately rushed to her side and helped her to a nearby sofa: Donahue had drawn blood, which was streaming through a hole in Wallis’s stocking down her leg. David rang for a maid and asked for towels and antiseptic and himself knelt down and bandaged his wife’s leg. After he had looked after his wife, the Duke screamed, “We’ve had all we can take of you, Jimmy! Get the hell out of here!”47 Donahue duly slunk away, and the Windsors never saw him again. On December 6, 1966, his mother found him dead, the victim of an overdose of sleeping pills. The end of the Donahue affair marked the beginning of a period of relative calm in the lives of the Windsors. In the spring of 1956, the Duchess released her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons, to great success. Like her husband, she needed a ghostwriter with whom to work. She first turned to Charles Murphy, who had helped the Duke. Then, after a series of heated arguments, Murphy was abruptly fired from the project. Wallis had previously read and enjoyed a book by Cleveland Amory and thought he might prove a good choice. During one of their visits to New York, Wallis contacted him and asked for a meeting at the Waldorf Towers to discuss the project. Amory agreed to begin work on the project, which he proposed to call, as a play on the Duchess’s lack of the style of Royal Highness, “Untitled.” But when Amory shared this suggestion, “there was dead silence. I was not surprised.”48
“The trouble, Amory,” the Duke said, “is that the HRH, H-her R-royal H-highness, which the D-duchess did not r-receive, is not a t-title, it’s an ap-appellation. Could you do anything with the word ap-appellation?” “It was my turn for a long silence,” Amory recalled. “I did think of unappellated, but frankly the more I thought about it the more I was sure it would not fly.”49
Amory believed he would have a certain degree of freedom in working on the book; Wallis, however, had no wish to embarrass her husband by dredging up many past, painful incidents, and she therefore directed that certain topics were not to be pursued. When Amory began research, he would often find that Wallis cut him off, saying that she could not be completely candid for the Duke’s sake.50 These restrictions eventually got to Amory, and he abruptly quit the project. To the press, he angrily declared that he had no desire to help write a book which would make the Duchess of Windsor look like “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”51
A third ghostwriter, Kennett L. Rawson, lasted scarcely more than a few weeks. In the end, Wallis returned to Murphy. The book was well received, although, predictably, certain segments of society were prepared to give it as little attention as possible. The Times (London) review was remarkably concise: “The Heart Has Its Reasons carries the memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor from her childhood in Baltimore to the present day.”52
The Heart Has Its Reasons sold fairly well, and Wallis emerged in a much more sympathetic light. On September 28, 1956, she and David participated in one of the aspects of being a published author which she found less pleasing: a live interview with Edward R. Murrow from their suite in the Waldorf Towers. The majority of the interview was fairly innocuous, with Wallis, clad in a mid-calf satin dress with a full skirt, discussing flower arranging and demonstrating the game of jacks. But Murrow caught the Windsors off guard when he asked them about the abdication. “Do you two ever have occasion to discuss what might have been?” he asked. David’s hesitant reply was awkward and uncomfortable. He shifted uneasily on the sofa and averted his eyes, while Wallis sat forward, looked at him, then away. “Um ... Mr. Murrow,” the Duke stumbled, “... I ... I ... I think you must be referring to ... um ... to the ... to the ... to the events of nineteen hundred ... to the crucial events in my life and our life of nineteen hundred and thirty-six, and are wondering whether they have ever preoccupied our minds since that time. Well now, the answer is most emphatically, No. We both feel that there is no more wasteful or foolish or frustrating exercise than trying to penetrate the fiction of what might have been.”53 Although he had recovered his composure, it was evident that neither of the Windsors relished the idea of discussing the abdication, particularly on live television. The Duke later confessed to a friend that the question had taken him aback; in any other setting, he would have answered promptly, but he was aware that his every word was being broadcast live to millions of homes in the United States.54 It was the last live television interview the Windsors ever gave.
Two years later, Wallis was greatly saddened to learn that Ernest Simpson had died of cancer in London on November 30, 1958. In the fall of 1937 he had married Mary Kirk Raffray, who had divorced her husband, Jacques. Together, the Simpsons had a son, Henry, born in 1939; during the war he was evacuated to the United States along with thousands of other children. Mary discovered that she had cancer but continued to work as a Red Cross volunteer until her illness forced her into hospital. She died in October 1941. Ernest himself had maintained infrequent contact with Wallis, but they had spoken occasionally, and as she later told a friend, she felt “miserable about the trouble I had caused him back then.”55 Wallis sent an enormous bunch of white chrysanthemums to his funeral; attached was a card on which she had written simply, “From the Duchess of Windsor.”
Increasingly, the Windsors spent more and more of each year in America. David had always enjoyed his visits there, and Wallis had found a new purpose in her life through her charity work there. One of the greatest canards about the Duke and Duchess is that they lived an aimless existence, attending frivolous party after frivolous party. In particular, they have been roundly condemned by British critics who assert that, unlike members of the Royal Family in England, who carried out public duties and undertook charity work, the Windsors did nothing to earn their keep and cared only about themselves.
This is simply not true, although as the establishment line promoted both by the Royal Family and by members of the court it is certainly the most prevalent attitude. In fact, the lives the Duke and Duchess of Windsor led were little different from those of any British duke or duchess: presiding over grand houses, supervising their estates and financial concerns, and hosting the odd charity event.
The Windsors did not undertake regular duties in the same way as members of the British Royal Family, but this was through no fault of their own. Both Wallis and David had wished to fulfill such obligations, and the Duke had repeatedly tried to win permission to pursue some sort of semiofficial role in which he could make himself useful. Wallis also repeatedly offered her services to various charities, asking that she be allowed to come and address envelopes, make telephone calls, or assist with fund-raising. On several occasions, however, she was told that her presence might create an unwelcome distraction: because she had been denied the style of Royal Highness, none of the ladies would know how to treat her and would worry over whether they should curtsy or address her as “Your Royal Highness” or “Your Grace.”56
The truth is that George VI denied the Windsors’ requests to perform any useful public duties. The Duke himself told his private secretary, John Utter, that the King, and Queen Elizabeth II after him, had both asked the Windsors not to pursue any projects or charity work likely to attract public attention. The Windsors were free to attend parties, dinners, and receptions but were informed that it was in the best interests of the Royal Family if their profile in Europe was not too high.57
