A CROWNING HUMILIATION
Mockery. Cruelty. Being told: ‘Buzz off mosquito.’ Edward endured a life of torment at Wallis’s hands — but NOTHING was as abject as the night her gay friend subjected the couple to a joke coronation in a New York nightclub
IN OUR final extract from a fascinating new biography of Wallis Simpson, ANDREW MORTON reveals the American divorcee who triggered the abdication of Edward VIII grew bored with her husband. To amuse herself, she took up a series of outrageous relationships seemingly designed to denigrate the disgraced Duke, who eventually died in the arms of a nurse, ignored by his abusive, estranged wife.
WITH each passing day, the Duchess of Windsor found her husband ever more dull, irritating and limited. What had once charmed her now left her utterly exasperated. In short, by the early Fifties, Wallis neither loved the former King of England nor was even particularly fond of him.
Their relationship, which had always had a dominatrix-and-submissive element, was now shorn of trust and affection.
As observers couldn’t help but notice, she’d rant at the Duke for the least transgression, such as leaving the dinner table littered with his papers.
Nothing Edward could do ever satisfied her. When Wallis had a hysterectomy for ovarian cancer in 1951, he visited her every day, always bringing red roses and beluga caviar — but the lady was not for tempting, complaining that the caviar was ‘too salty’ and shooing him away.
The change in her behaviour dated from the summer of 1950, when the man she considered the love of her life had married another woman.
Wallis knew, of course, that the abdication had made divorce from the Duke of Windsor unthinkable. Had she been free, however, she would have married her old friend Herman Rogers in a heartbeat.
Indeed, she was still so close to the rich and good-looking American that he’d actually invited the Duke and Duchess to accompany him and his second wife on their honeymoon aboard a yacht.
By the second day of the trip, Wallis, feeling utterly bereft at what she considered the loss of her closest companion, had thrown herself into a wild and improbable romance.
They’d stopped off at Monte Carlo, docking alongside a boat hired by Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue. Already acquainted with his mother, Wallis insisted the party join him for lunch on board. Herman alone, who was aware of Jimmy’s reputation as an outrageous homosexual, declined to accompany her.
For the next four years, she went overboard for the much younger Jimmy Donahue, spending all her time with him.
FoR his part, he showered Wallis with jewels — including a magnificent sapphire ring — furs, flowers, chartered yachts, billetsdoux
and, above all else, uncomplicated devotion.
It was a very public relationship that shocked and surprised even the most sophisticated. Many thought Wallis had gone quite mad; those who knew her best saw Jimmy as ‘the rebound guy’ now that Herman Rogers was tantalisingly out of reach.
Lady Gladwyn, one of the Windsors’ acquaintances, recalled: ‘She became rude, odious and strange. one had the impression she was either drugged or drunk.
‘She spent all her time with effeminate young men, staying in nightclubs until dawn and sending the Duke home early: “Buzz off, mosquito.”
‘What a way to address the once King of England.’
The beginning of the dalliance with Donahue marked not only a new coolness between Wallis and Herman, but also a step change in her treatment of Edward.
She’d always been sarcastic and sharp-tongued — ‘I wasn’t castle-born like you,’ was a frequent retort — and now she became increasingly cruel.
‘Will I be going to bed in tears tonight?’ was the Duke’s abject refrain when she was being particularly unpleasant.
Yet he seems to have taken a lifelong delight in this degradation.
As veteran courtier Ulick Alexander observed, the former King enjoyed the ‘sexual perversion of self-abasement’.
Donahue was ever-present, joining the Windsors for dinner, late-night cabarets and parties. Much to the delight of the Duke, who had a thick streak of parsimony, his wife’s admirer always picked up the cheque.
The inclusion of a gay man in their inner circle was nothing unusual, though the Duke had a well-known disdain for homosexuality. on one occasion, when they were having an argument about their gay friends, Wallis spat: ‘You should listen to them — they are much brighter than you.’
Unlike other gay men in the Windsor circle, however, Donahue loved to shock. one of his regular party tricks was to strip naked during dinner.
Whenever he was in America, he hosted wild parties at his Long Island home for boys and young men. once they were drunk, they’d be taken to his basement rooms, decorated in either all-black or all-red, to await the master of the house.
‘All I want to be able to see is their teeth and their eyeballs,’ Donahue told his interior designer friend Billy Baldwin.
The Windsors regularly attended much more decorous affairs at Donahue’s home, complete with a full dance orchestra.
on one occasion, however, he gave them a tour of the basement rooms, without telling them that they were used for late-night orgies. It was Jimmy’s sly, knowing joke at their expense. Such was Wallis’s respect for Donahue’s taste that he was the first male outsider to be invited to look over an 18th century mill house near Paris, which the Windsors bought in 1952.
Tongues wagged as her friendship with him intensified. In autumn 1950, while the Duke was in France working on his autobiography, she was in New York, hitting the town nightly with Donahue.
Twenty years her junior, he made Wallis feel young and lively again. He was gay, in all senses of the word: a fizzy antidote to her suffocating husband and a jolly companion to help share the onerous burden of perpetually entertaining the Duke.
‘You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance,’ Wallis once said.
The two became inseparable, giggling and whispering in restaurants and nightclubs, their intimacy plain for all to see.
Some have suggested that Jimmy and Wallis were lovers. In fact, Donahue later boasted of performing oral sex on the Duchess, a sexual favour he claimed was eagerly reciprocated.
But those who knew him say this was just a spiteful boast, as he’d always found women sexually repellent. Interior designer Nicholas Haslam recalled: ‘Having known Jimmy, I can’t think he could have touched any woman, let alone one as rigidly un-undressable as Wallis.’
Moreover, Donahue had a selfinflicted infirmity that made sexual congress painful and difficult. one night, in a state of drunkenness, he’d circumcised himself with a penknife, a rash act that left him scarred and painfully sensitive.
Still, the Duke began to get worried after reading the stories about his wife’s antics, now regularly appearing in the New York press. Worse, he was distraught that Wallis was ignoring his increasingly frantic phone calls.
So he raced off to join her, solemnly telling his exasperated ghostwriter that he needed to be in America as the Soviet Union seemed likely to launch an attack on Europe.
Just before he arrived, the New York Daily Mirror printed rumours that ‘the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are phfft’ — a report the Duke was able to scotch by embracing his wife several times during a well-publicised dockside reunion.
It was a brief respite: Jimmy and Wallis resumed their whispering and giggling, passing notes to one another at dinner if they happened to be separated. The little Duke was left in the cold, his presence barely tolerated by his wife.
HE’D tag along to nightclubs and restaurants with her and Donahue, but Wallis started packing him off home ever earlier, so she could carry on partying with her playmate. In every respect but the physical, it was a love affair, complete with lovers’ tiffs.
During one row between the Duchess and her unlikely paramour, Wallis yelled: ‘And to think I gave up a King for a queen!’
of course, this public humiliation of the once King and Emperor could not continue indefinitely.
one night, the Duke’s secretary overheard him telling his wife that she shouldn’t be seeing the same single man every night. ‘It’s not because you are the Duchess of Windsor, it’s because you are my wife,’ he said. ‘Any man would mind his wife doing this.’
The secretary noted that Wallis
was very quiet and submissive for a while. She had no intention, however, of missing out for ever on all the fun. The crowning moment came on New Year’s Eve 1953, when Donahue organised a mock coronation for the Duke and Duchess at El Morocco, a Manhattan nightclub.
Watched by a rowdy cocktaildrinking crowd, he placed two elaborate paper crowns reverently on the heads of the man who was once King and the woman whose greatest desire was to be his queen.
It was the closest they ever got to the real thing, and clicking cameras captured their self-conscious embarrassment. Partygoer Bill Nichols, one of the few Englishmen to witness this tawdry scene, recalled: ‘One didn’t know whether to be more surprised at the awesome insensitivity of the Duchess, or the awful weakness of the Duke.’ Gradually, though, Donahue’s jokes began to wear thin, even for Wallis. As with most love affairs, it was the little things that irritated at first — such as Donahue’s inability to be punctual.
The end was messy, bloody and unpleasant. Donahue had taken to kicking the Duchess under the table whenever she was regaling people with a tale he considered boring.
While he and the Duke and Duchess were eating at a spa in BadenBaden in August 1954, he lashed out when Wallis chided him over his garlic breath. The kick was so hard that it left her bleeding and the Duke had to help her to a sofa.
This was a lese-majesty too far. Red-faced and coldly furious, the Duke turned to Donahue. ‘We’ve had enough of you,’ he told him. ‘Get out.’ They never saw him again. Typically, Donahue had the last word. When asked about the rift between him and the Windsors, he quipped: ‘I’ve abdicated.’
Wallis didn’t seem too perturbed by her loss: her next project was to ‘write’ her autobiography, with the help of a ghostwriter.
The first candidate, however, soon dropped out after discovering that the Duchess had only a passing acquaintance with the truth, changing her story at whim.
The second, Boston-born Cleveland Amory, who spent six months talking to the Duke and Duchess and their friends, was shocked at how gratuitously vicious Wallis could be to her husband, often leaving him in tears.
She’d allow her pug dogs into the sitting-room, but keep the Duke’s dogs out, much to his distress.
Or she’d be furious when he kept singing jingles from adverts he’d seen on television, or used Americanisms such as ‘I guess’ or ‘making a buck’.
‘The Duchess was a complicated person — cold, mean-spirited, a bully and a sadist,’ says Amory’s stepdaughter Dr Gaea Leinhardt. ‘My parents found the Duke not very bright, a wimp, and basically a very sad man.
‘He had made an appalling choice and knew that he had taken the wrong path, and now had to live with the consequences. They found him pathetic.’
Every day, the Duke would appear in the Duchess’s quarters at precisely 11:30am to receive his daily marching orders. And whenever Wallis called, he came running, on one occasion leaving his barber mid-haircut to attend to his wife.
Yet however mean she was to him, he was always considerate of her. He refused, for example, to allow her to handle old francs, so each day he gave her a wad of freshly minted notes.
‘He was like a child in her hands,’ said Lady Alexandra Metcalfe. ‘Poor little man, he was given hell; it was a stranglehold she had over him.’
Another thing that hadn’t changed was his anti-Semitism and continuing sympathy for Hitler.
‘My parents were horrified by their dinner-table talk, where they made it perfectly clear that the world would have been a better place if Jews were exterminated,’ recalled Dr Leinhardt.
At one dinner party, the Duke told an English friend: ‘I have never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.’ At another party, he took hold of the hands of a lady guest, intertwining his fingers in hers to illustrate his view that the Jews had their tentacles around German society.
‘All Hitler tried to do was free the tentacles,’ he told her as the other guests looked on in horrified silence.
Finally, New York advertising executive Milton Biow interjected. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘with all due respect, I never believed I would ever hear, at a civilised dinner table, a defence of Adolf Hitler.’ The Duke had the grace to blush.
AMORY soon realised that Wallis’s first ghostwriter had been right: she lied whenever it suited her. It was only by interviewing her friends that he learned the true version of events — though his hand-written observations have remained unpublished until now.
Among those he interviewed were Wallis’s lost love Herman Rogers and his second wife Lucy. Afterwards, the Duchess tried to renew the severed relationship, inviting the couple to stay at the mill — but they turned her down.
In 1957, a year later, Herman — who had developed Parkinson’s — died in Lucy’s arms.
Neither of the Windsors turned up at his funeral or sent so much as a flower.
According to Lucy, Wallis sent her a telegram saying: ‘All my love and sympathy over my loss.’ A mistake? Not a bit of it, said Lucy, who was furious.
Despite this slight, she later accepted invitations from Wallis to the mill. It must have given Lucy
some satisfaction to know that she could now hold court over the Duchess, tantalising her with memories of Herman.
By the Sixties, the Windsors were generally viewed as a couple killing time, tripping from one party to another. The Duke had become such a bore that guests would inwardly shudder if they were seated next to him at dinner.
They had a rigid daily routine: their 11.30 morning meeting, her lunch with friends, his afternoon golf, his 7pm date with a bottle of 25-year-old malt, her 7:30 hairdresser appointment, their dinner party at 9.
If they went to a restaurant and their conversation faltered, the Duchess insisted that they recite the alphabet to one another so that other diners would see their animation.
no one really cared about them any more; international society was turning to new darlings such as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Aristotle and Jacqueline Onassis.
In 1972, by which time the 78-year-old Duke had cancer of the throat, the Queen and Prince Philip paid him a courtesy call during an official visit to France. Although mortally ill, Edward could not resist raising, for the last time, the possibility of Wallis being given the appellation ‘Her Royal Highness’. His request was denied.
At this critical time, the Duke was being looked after by another woman from Baltimore, a feisty 26-year-old nurse called Julie Chatard Alexander.
Each night, she did a 12-hour shift at his final residence in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. The Duke had sacked several nurses, but seemed to like Julie because she hailed from his wife’s hometown.
Apart from her, he had no other company in the evenings apart from his pug dog, Black Diamond.
During the two weeks Julie was with the former King, he was never once visited by his wife, whose quarters were on the same floor of their home, but separated by what Wallis liked to call ‘the boudoir’. Instead, she was spending her evenings with an American female guest.
Julie recalled: ‘She never came to see him or kiss him good night or see how he was. not once. Poor fellow. He would call her name over and over: “Wallis, Wallis, Wallis, Wallis.” Or “darling, darling, darling.” It was pitiful and pathetic. Just so sad, like a lamb calling for its mother.’
When his breathing changed one night, Julie cradled him soothingly in her arms. At 2:20am on Sunday, May 28, 1972, the once King and Emperor died in the arms of a woman from Baltimore.
‘Right city, wrong woman,’ recalled Julie. So ended the royal romance of the century.
After a doctor had been summoned to pronounce the Duke dead, the Duchess was woken. She sat with him, holding his hand and whispering sweet nothings. There were no tears or cries of anguish. In the months after Edward was buried in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Wallis started becoming forgetful. After that, her descent into dementia was rapid.
For years, the Duchess lingered on and on, becoming progressively more and more physically and mentally debilitated.
Her home became something of a ‘living tomb’, her circle shrinking to an ever-changing parade of hired nurses.
After she died on April 24, 1986, aged 89, the Royal Family allowed her to rest next to her late husband in the Windsor grounds.
At her funeral service, held at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and attended by the Royal Family, the Duke would have been pleased to see that her coffin was carried by eight soldiers from one of his former regiments, the Welsh Guards.
There was, however, a bitter irony in her send-off. In death, Wallis found herself lying next to a man she barely tolerated, in the private cemetery of a family she loathed, covered by the earth of a country she hated.
Wallis in love: The Untold True Passion Of The Duchess Of Windsor by andrew Morton is published by Michael O’Mara Books, price £20. To order a copy for £16 (20 per cent discount) visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until February 17.