It became clear that her passion was waning. She underwent surgery for cancer of the womb in 1951. This bizarre ménage-à-trois became a fixture on the international circuit, but behind the scenes the infatuated Duchess was tiring. The Duchess, for her part, was equally outrageous, and would adorn her bedroom door with 'Keep Out' and 'Don't Come in Here'. 'The Duke is a very sad person these days,' wrote the Mirror's Walter Winchell.Īccording to observers, he seemed mesmerised by the audacity of Donahue's attentions. The cuckolded Duke had no idea how to deal with an infidelity so flagrant that even the gossip columns of the day did not flinch from coded references to the liaison. Jimmy and the Duchess plummeted into a relationship based on sexual practices inappropriate for a Sunday newspaper. A scion of the Woolworth family, he was notorious within the East coast establishment for his outrageous homosexuality.Īnd yet, according to Wilson, the moment Donahue and the Duchess met, there was a coup de foudre, despite a 19-year age-gap.
In this stinking rich, and utterly futile, world of playboys and wastrels, no one was more charming, better connected, and apparently more talented than the captivatingly youthful figure of Jimmy Donahue. After much sleuthing Wilson shows that once Wallis Simpson failed to get her hands on the crown, she became more interested in the seedy by-ways of Anglo-American demi-monde.
In the Bahamas, where he found some comfort, it was said he 'used to be First Lord of the Admiralty, but now he's third mate on an American tramp'. It's well known that royalty attracts a dismal, often homosexual, cast of toadies, timeservers, creeps, and arse-lickers, but the Windsors' court-in-exile was, as Christopher Wilson expertly demonstrates in this gruesomely fascinating tale, one of the queerest and nastiest entourages in recent memory. When she appeared on television, the Duke would yodel: 'Here comes the Blimp', while the Duchess, not to be outdone, described her nemesis as 'that 14-carat beauty' and 'the monster of Glamis'.
According to this spicy rendering of one of the many sad, shameful footnotes in the life of former king Edward VII, the Windsors routinely referred to her as 'that fat Scotch cook' and 'the Loch Ness monster'.
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