The years of the Wandering Windsors had begun.
1 The Colonial Office were concerned about the protocol of such visits. CO 537/2250, TNA.
2 Birmingham, p. 226.
3 Cyrus Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles (Macdonald, 1969), p. 392.
4 Birmingham, p. 227.
5 Other guests included Osbert Lancaster, Harold Nicolson and Ben Nicolson.
6 28 May 1947, Miles Jebb (ed.), The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn (Constable, 1995), p. 56.
7 Duke of Windsor to Queen Mary, 15 August 1947, RA GV EE 3, quoted Ziegler, p. 529.
8 Cecil Roberts, The Pleasant Years (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), p. 36.
9 Their yacht Sea Cloud, then the largest privately owned sea-going yacht in the world, was sold in 1955 to the President of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. The Windsors often stayed at Post’s home Mar-a-Largo, later owned by Donald Trump.
10 Birmingham, p. 229. The son of their close friend Margaret Biddle relates the story of the Windsors being invited to dinner by the Biddles. Wallis first rang to ask the menu and then, clearly unsatisfied, asked if she could send her own chef to prepare the Biddle dinner party. Margaret Biddle replied that Wallis should indeed ask her own chef to cook for her that night – at her own home, as the invitation was withdrawn. Interview Tony Biddle, 16 April 2020.
11 See for example, ‘We had another blow about the Long Island house we wished to rent before buying.’ Duchess to Marjorie Post, 25 August 1948, Box 26, Marjorie Post papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Amongst the houses they looked at on Long Island was one owned by Eugene de Rothschild. Bloch, Duchess, p. 186.
12 He also owned the Villa Trianon.
13 12 November 1948, John Julius Norwich (ed.), Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich 1939–1952 (Chatto & Windus, 2013), p. 333. Surmonté means ‘topped off’ and panaché means ‘given panache’.
14 Menkes, p. 28.
15 Darling Monster, pp. 379–80.
16 Menkes, p. 28.
17 £4.6 million in today’s money.
18 Bryan and Murphy, p. 493.
19 King, pp. 426–7.
20 Interview Hon. Sarah Morrison, 22 July 2020.
21 Bryan and Murphy, p. 493.
22 Ibid, p. 497.
23 Bryan and Murphy, p. 543. The Mill was a property they later owned.
24 King, p. 433.
25 Cleveland Amory, The Best Cat Ever (Little, Brown, 1993), p. 127.
26 Birmingham, p. 238.
27 Birmingham, p. 238.
28 Lascelles memo, 19 September 1947, RA KEVIII Ab. Box 3, quoted Ziegler, p. 523.
29 Duke of Windsor to Monckton, 8 December 1948, Monckton Trustees, Box 20, Folio 24, Balliol College.
30 Bryan and Murphy, p. 465.
31 Kenneth de Courcy to Duchess of Windsor, 13 May 1949, De Courcy, Box 3, folder 5, Hoover Institute.
32 Herman had been shocked that, when asked to choose a keepsake of Katherine’s, Wallis had picked not a modest personal item but two gold bracelets valued at 10,000 francs.
33 Interview February 2016, quoted Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 295.
34 Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 299.
35 Bryan and Murphy, p. 523.
36 Bryan and Murphy, p. 523.
37 Ibid, p. 523.
38 Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 299.
39 Bryan and Murphy, p. 524.
40 1 October 1950, Darling Monster, p. 430.
41 Cecil Beaton papers, quoted Vickers, p. 343.
CHAPTER 19
Secret Affairs
In May 1950, the couple sailed from New York to France on the Queen Mary. With them was Jimmy Donahue, the 35-year-old heir to the Woolworth fortune and a cousin of the American socialite, Barbara Hutton. The Windsors had got to know Jimmy and his mother Jessie in Palm Beach early during the war, through a mutual friend Hugh Sefton – Wallis had been placed next to Jimmy at a lunch on 18 April 1941 – and the friendship had developed over the next decade, helped by the fact that the Donahues always picked up the bill.
Jimmy had had an unhappy childhood – his father had committed suicide in 1931, probably over a homosexual affair – which he covered up with outrageous behaviour and attention seeking; a favourite party trick was to put his penis on a dinner plate and ask a waiter to carve it thinly. Reputedly his family kept a lawyer on 24-hour call to buy him out of the most dangerous scrapes, as stories circulated of orgies at his mother’s Palm Beach estate, the castration of a lover, and police investigations into callboys and drug use.
Apart from dancing in the chorus of a musical comedy, Hot and Bothered, Jimmy had never had a job, except perhaps as a court jester. Now he had his court with both the Duke and Duchess captivated by his exuberance and skills as a raconteur. Jimmy intrigued Wallis with his unpredictable and flamboyant behaviour and the fact that he was the opposite of her husband.
Where Jimmy was carefree and impulsive, the Duke was organised and precise. Where Jimmy was generous, the Duke was penny-pinching. Where Jimmy was exciting and cheerful, the Duke was dull and depressed. Where the Duke reminded her of her age, Donahue made her feel young again. She had had to entertain the Duke for the last thirteen years, now Jimmy entertained her. Tired of emotionally supporting her husband, she relished being swept up in Donahue’s dynamic and spontaneous world. ‘She gave herself willingly to the charms of Jimmy Donahue,’ says Grace, Countess of Dudley. ‘It is easy to see why. He was very amusing.’1
Wallis was now in her mid-fifties and taking stock of her life. Her first husband had died in May and the remarriage of Herman Rogers had affected her deeply. She was bored, vulnerable, flattered by Jimmy’s attentions, intrigued by him, his youthful energy and talents – a qualified pilot, he not only could play Tosca on the piano but supposedly could sing it in half-a-dozen languages – and drawn to him by the same sense of humour and fun.
He also had the attraction of being rich and generous. Encouraged by him, she began to amass a substantial collection of furs; one afternoon she picked out thirteen dresses and Jimmy paid the $3,105 bill.2 As a publicly gay man, Donahue was also regarded as safe. The friendship now turned into an affair. She was giving up a king for a queen.
For him, she was a game and, given his detached cold mother Jessie, a maternal figure. There was also a darker side for her. ‘Jimmy also said that she resented the fact that the Duke had lost his throne,’ wrote Mona Eldridge, who knew the couple. ‘Naively she had believed his promise of making her Queen. She despised his weakness and boring ways.’ With Jimmy, she found revenge and enjoyed humiliating her husband – in public if necessary.’3
It was a view shared by Kenneth de Courcy. ‘I think she enjoyed annoying the Duke of Windsor over that. I think it gave her a kick to see him enraged by it, which he was. I think it gave her a feeling of power, that after all those years she could still make him extremely jealous and angry over another man.’4 But there are suggestions that it was not only Wallis who was attracted to Donahue. ‘I think the Duke was in love with Jimmy,’ claims the interior decorator Nicky Haslam, who knew the couple during this period.5
There have long been rumours of the Duke’s bisexuality, which have never been denied. The Duke’s biographer Michael Bloch, himself gay, ‘insisted that Maître Blum never objected to any hints that the Duke of Windsor was a homosexual. She never sued if any such insinuation appeared in print.’6 Anne Seagrim, who worked for the Windsors in the 1950s, in her draft notes for her memoir, wrote that Frances Donaldson in her biography missed ‘the essential point about his character – his fundamental uncertainty about his sexuality – his ability to be a heterosexual man. He was fundamentally afraid of women.’7
A similar view was advanced by a psychiatrist interviewed for a Windsor biography, Lese Majesty, published in 1952. Dr Werther believed the Duke was not a repressed homosexual but an overt one. ‘There is no doubt that Wales has a strong feminine identification, and that it is on
ly with great effort that he can think of himself as a man, or feel like one.’8
Many of the Windsors’ friends were gay, from Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward to the Mendls, from their decorator John McMullin to the equestrian Harvey Ladew, who often acted as the Duchess’s escort. ‘I just love your pansies,’ said one guest at the Moulins de la Tuilerie, looking at the herbaceous borders. ‘In the garden or at my table?’ replied the Duchess.9
The Duke, however, never appeared comfortable in the company of gay men. ‘I have always thought that Edward VIII suffers from sexual repression of another nature,’ wrote Chips Channon in his diary in December 1936:
His horror of anything even savouring of homosexuality was exaggerated, especially in a world where it is far from unknown; and at the same time there are tales (I have heard them all my life and some I believe to be half true) which reveal him in quite another light. Certainly, too, he has always surrounded himself with extremely attractive men. One knows almost in advance the type of man he would like – Fruity Metcalfe, Dicky (Lord Louis) Mountbatten, Sefton, Mike Wardell, Bruce Ogilvy, and even these he dropped as they aged.10
In the 2004 updated edition of his biography of Wallis, Charles Higham reveals that Dudley Forwood had told him that Fruity Metcalfe ‘was an active homosexual and that he had a physical affair with the Prince of Wales’, a revelation he only wanted made public after Forwood’s own death.11
‘I like Jimmy,’ Noël Coward told Truman Capote of Jimmy Donahue. ‘He’s an insane camp, but fun. And I like the Duchess; she’s the fag-hag to end all – but that’s what makes her likeable. The Duke, however well he pretends not to hate me, he does, though. Because I’m queer and he’s queer but, unlike him, I don’t pretend not to be. Anyway, the fag-hag must be enjoying it. Here she’s got a royal queen to sleep with and a rich one to hump.’12
Nicky Haslam recounts how a colleague, the curtain-maker Eddie Page, told him that as a young man he used ‘to go with boys to Hyde Park, that bit by the barracks, which was a great picking-up place for toffs. One day Prince David came with a friend, who approached me on his behalf. They took me to a queer nightclub in Seven Dials, run by Elsa Lanchester’s sister.13
The Duke was the honorary president of the Austrian Sports and Shooting Club, which German police files suggest was a cover for homosexual activities. ‘One royal member has recently fled Vienna because he was under threat of arrest on charges of homosexuality,’ the report ran. ‘In connection with this the (police) report also charges the Duke of Windsor with bisexuality.’14
On the gay forum, Datalounge, a couple of elderly posters shared anecdotes:
We had a good family friend here, who owned a flower shop in our city. In his young adulthood (1940s) he was part owner of a shop in NYC. His business catered to the society crowd. He told us many great stories over the years. One story he told was how he took care of the fresh flowers for the Duke and Duchess when they were in NYC. Our friend told us that sometimes he would literally be chased by the Duke while taking care of the flowers in their apartment.15
One of the Duke’s lovers was supposedly Walter Chrysler Jr (1909–88), son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation. Walter Jr was an art collector, museum benefactor, theatre and film producer, and had probably met the Duke at the Palm Beach Golf Club. Though Chrysler was twice briefly married, his homosexuality was well known. In 1944 he had been forced to resign from the Navy due to wild homosexual parties – sixteen enlisted men had signed affidavits that Chrysler, known as ‘Mary’, had committed unnatural acts with them – and Confidential Magazine had outed him in the 1950s.16
One regular poster to Datalounge, ‘Charlie’, wrote that Chrysler Jr had told him:
a story about him and the Duke of Windsor (the former king of England) throwing a party on a Navy ship docked at Jacksonville, Florida, during World War II, I think. He said there were more than 1,000 sailors, and Walter and ‘David’ hired 200 hookers, but Walter and David sucked so much cock our lips were chapped for a week.17
Chrysler had been based at the Key West Naval Base in Florida between April 1942 and December 1944 and was the subject of an investigation by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Subsequent enquiries revealed that all of the investigation files had disappeared.18
* * *
A few days after arriving in Paris, the ménage à trois of the Windsors and Donahue went to a charity ball in a seventeenth-century mansion, the Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis, with 700 members of Parisian society. Amongst the guests were Barbara Hutton, Henry Ford, Cecil Beaton, Lady Diana Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor. The Duke left at midnight. Two of the last guests to leave close to dawn were Jimmy and Wallis.
On 11 June, Jimmy celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday at Maxim’s with the Windsors as the guests of honour. At the end of the month, the Duke and Duchess joined Jimmy and his mother in Biarritz, where the affair continued. The Duke played golf during the day and then retired early, leaving Wallis and Jimmy to spend both the days and evenings together.
In November, Wallis returned alone to the United States, the Duke staying behind to finish his book. The affair continued. The designer Billy Baldwin noticed that the two lovers began to frequent a restaurant he often used, off Park Avenue at 59th Street, and then:
after lunch they would just quietly go to Jimmy’s apartment. The duchess was always well-behaved, but a couple of times I saw that she was rather tight, because she liked to drink. They were inseparable in New York, and I know that during that time in her life she had more fun than she ever had before.19
Alone back in Paris, the Duke could not concentrate. For two weeks he would ring Wallis both at bedtime and first thing in the morning, but whenever he called, the Duchess’s maid was unable to say where she was. When he did reach her, his wife simply replied she ‘had been with friends and cut the conversation short. Three weeks of her evasiveness brought him to the edge of a breakdown.’20
After he had opened some press clipping from a news agency addressed to the Duchess, it became clear what was happening. The Duke abandoned the book and decided to go to New York; Murphy, keen to keep him working on the book, went with him. So concerned was the ghost writer about the Duke’s mental health that he would not allow him on deck alone at night, for fear of him committing suicide. It was the greatest test of the Windsors’ thirteen-year-old marriage.
The Duchess met the Duke, accompanied by their cairn terriers Thomas and Pookie, on arrival and they laughed heartily at published reports they were estranged. But despite their public displays of affection, she continued to see Jimmy during the day – lunching and shopping at Cartier and Mainbocher – and the Duke in the evenings.
That Christmas the three of them attended Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, the first time since the reign of Charles I that a British monarch or ex-monarch had taken the sacrament from a disciple of Rome. Ten days later, the Windsors gave a luncheon for Cardinal Spellman – a homosexual friend of Jimmy’s with a penchant for cross-dressing – all part of Jimmy’s mischievous attempt to persuade Wallis to convert to Roman Catholicism.
Almost nightly, the Windsors and Jimmy would find themselves at the El Morocco nightclub, but the Duke would leave alone at midnight and then:
Jimmy came into his own, wisecracking, cavorting, camping, telling naughty stories and gossiping about the other patrons . . . Next morning, the haggard Duke would make his way to the Duchess’s room to assure himself of her safe return, only to be brought up short by a scrawled warning taped to her door: KEEP OUT, STAY OUT or DON’T COME IN HERE.21
At the end of January, the three decamped to Horse Shoe Plantation at Tallahassee, Florida, the home of the Windsors’ close friend Edith Baker and a regular haunt. ‘What do you and the Windsors talk about?’ Baker was once asked. ‘She seemed startled by the question. “Well, where they’ve just been and who they’ve just seen,” she said at last.’22
On Valentine’s Day, the Windsors were guests of Jessie Donahue at the
Venetian Ball. The gossip was that she had ‘bought’ the Windsors in the way she had seduced the writer and socialite Elsa Maxwell and columnist Maury Paul with substantial cash presents at Christmas and birthdays.
Wallis had also taken a fancy to another young man, Russell Nype, a thirty-year-old actor and singer, starring with Ethel Merman in Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam.23 Often he and Merman would join the Windsors for dinner after the show and the inference in the press was that the relationship with Wallis was more than just friendship. ‘She had been phoning the young man nightly, and sometimes called for him in her car,’ reported Walter Winchell in his ‘Man About Town’ column.24
It was said that the Duchess, whose pet name for Nype was ‘Harvey’, gave the actor expert advice on interior decoration when he moved to a new apartment.25 ‘What could there be romantic between a middle-aged Duchess and a young man who reminds her of an invisible rabbit?’ asked New York Journal-American in October 1951.26
The journalist Alice Moats, researching the story for the columnist Westbrook Pegler, was able to tell him:
It seems to be common gossip that she has a crush on a fellow called Nype who plays in ‘Call Me Madam’. The Duke goes home at night because he theoretically has to write his book – inasmuch as he hasn’t written a line of it or the Life pieces that seems odd, but there it is – and she plays about in night clubs with Mr Nype. However, things don’t seem to be quite as simple as all that; Jimmy Donahue has just written to his boyfriend to tell him that their liaison is over – he has at last fallen in love with a woman (the Duchess) and he is going to marry her! That I got almost straight from the horse’s mouth or whatever – the person who told me had it from Jimmy’s boyfriend who confided the story to her in his anguish.27
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