The Duchess Of Windsor (69 page)
Read The Duchess Of Windsor Online
Authors: Greg King
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.‘”
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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.‘”
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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!”
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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?”
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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?”
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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!‘”
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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!‘”
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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!”
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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!”
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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.”
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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!”
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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It was the last live television interview the Windsors ever gave.
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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The Windsors reluctantly agreed to do as Buckingham Palace wished. They lent their financial support, albeit anonymously, to several French charities. “Everything was done quietly, under cover,” recalls Janine Metz. “They sent regular checks to a private foundation in France dedicated to rescuing animals from slaughterhouses, and there were other gifts to cancer research.”
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In America, however, Wallis was less fearful of retribution from London. She had demonstrated during her time in the Bahamas that she was fully capable of performing under pressure; she was, however, in her sixties when most of her work took place in the United States, and it is not surprising that she often chose to sponsor events or appear as guest of honor at fund-raisers. Among their concerns, the Windsors sponsored a clinic for rehabilitation of the handicapped in New York City and later set up a branch of the same organization in Paris. Wallis also served as patron of a number of other charities, including the Heart of America Charity Ball; Cancer Care U.S.; the April in Paris Ball; and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.
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Because she sought out no publicity for herself, according to the dictates laid down by Buckingham Palace, these endeavors rarely received any press attention. Few knew that Wallis did more than accompany her husband to parties. But a considerable majority of the affairs she and David attended were charitable, and invitations were accepted simply because it was a way of helping raise funds. In England, members of the Royal Family undertook two kinds of engagements: public duties, such as hospital openings, tree plantings, and factory inspections, and social duties, appearing at charity premieres or events. Thus, the Windsors, restricted by Buckingham Palace from undertaking the first, were doing no more than the rest of their family in concentrating on the second.
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