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She looks wonderful. And Phillip! He looks like he just crawled out of his grave, but the cheeky buggar walks - WALKS - to church every Sunday. I mean, what is he now - 852? He just retired!
They are both pretty darn amazing. I hope they stay healthy and with us for another year. I'm not sure how long either of them would go on without the other.
I'll put in a word for Sophie as she looks in good shape in her 50s.
They all have the best coats. I wish I had a closet big enough, or enough places to go to wear that many coats!
Wallis Simpson's one true love... and it wasn't Edward VIII: How the Duchess of Windsor had her eye on rich Yale graduate for years before trying to sabotage his wedding to her love rival
- Wallis Simpson was the American divorcée who triggered a constitutional crisis
- But just two days before marrying Edward VIII she tried to seduce another man
- 'There had only ever been one true love in her life' fascinating biography reveals
By ANDREW MORTON FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 00:13, 5 February 2018 | UPDATED: 00:49, 5 February 201
She was the American divorcée who triggered a constitutional crisis and the abdication of Edward VIII.
In Saturday’s extract from a fascinating new biography of Wallis Simpson, Andrew Morton revealed how she tried to seduce another man two days before she married Edward.
In today’s extract, he describes her catfight with a love rival . . .
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In Saturday’s extract from a fascinating new biography of Wallis Simpson (pictured with Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII), Andrew Morton revealed how she tried to seduce another man two days before she married Edward
Marriage to the Duke of Windsor changed nothing.
There had only ever been one true love in Wallis Simpson’s life, even if she hadn’t yet managed to get him into bed.
A rich Yale University graduate, Herman Rogers was by all accounts an unusually attractive man, with brown wavy hair and the bearing of an athlete.
For all the years that Wallis had known him, however, he’d been happily married.
True, he’d always been devoted to Wallis. It was Herman, with his wife Katherine, who’d sheltered her when she fled to France during the abdication crisis.
And it was Herman who helped organise her wedding and remained the most constant of friends and advisers.
But Wallis had always wanted more — and her chance finally came when Katherine died of throat cancer in May 1949.
There was just one problem: almost before the poor woman had been buried, the Duchess of Windsor had a rival for Herman’s affections.
Lucy Wann, a socially ambitious widow who had befriended both the Duke and Duchess, wasted no time in closing in on the grieving widower.
Instinctively, she knew Wallis would be her main competition.
‘There is no question that these women were rivals in love,’ recalls Lucy’s daughter-in-law, Kitty Blair, who spent many hours alone with her discussing Herman and Wallis.
‘Both wanted Herman. Wallis would have grabbed him and told the Duke to go. Lucy knew that.’
Such was Lucy’s fear of losing out that, within months of Katherine’s death, she was putting pressure on Herman to marry her.
During this critical time, she had one clear advantage: the Duchess had left her home on the French Riviera for a visit to the States.
By June 1950, Lucy Wann had triumphed — and when Herman wrote to the Duchess to tell her he had asked Lucy to marry him, the news came as a profound shock.
In a telegram to Herman she pleaded: ‘DON’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL I GET THERE. YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL.’
Said a family friend: ‘Wallis had come to look on Herman as a form of reserve capital, which Katherine’s death now promised to make available for the first time.
‘For the prize to fall so swiftly and easily to a comparative stranger wounded Wallis deeply, and the wound was plain to see.
'Her boredom in her own marriage had become acute, and she was no longer as discreet as before when it came to hiding her feelings.’
As the wedding day approached, the two women made no effort to hide their mutual animosity.
‘They despised one another,’ recalled Kitty Blair. ‘They were cut from the same cloth — socially ambitious vipers who would do anything, walk over anyone, to get what they wanted.’
With calculated cruelty, Wallis gave Lucy a little straw bag as a wedding gift. It was the kind of present the Windsors would give to a maid, said the bride contemptuously.
As for Herman, they gave him an antique silver salver, bearing the Windsors’ monogram and an inscription that made Lucy’s blood boil.
Not only was the date of their wedding wrong, but — to add insult to injury — the dedication was to Herman alone.
As her wedding day dawned, Lucy vowed that she wasn’t going to allow ‘that woman’ to spoil things.
But her temperature rose the moment Wallis arrived at Herman’s villa near Cannes.
In an obvious attempt to upstage the bride, she’d chosen to wear a beautiful white dress.
To compound matters, just before the bridal party set off for the town hall, Wallis started adjusting Lucy’s wedding dress, saying that it didn’t fit properly.
She tugged at the satin collar, pulling it this way and that, until it was quite out of shape.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s better.’ Lucy simmered, but bit her tongue.
After the wedding, the guests separated to rest before the main reception, which was being held from 6pm to 8pm.
By 8pm, though, the Duke and Duchess had yet to arrive, and many people were drifting away.
When Wallis and Edward turned up 8.45pm, all but two guests had gone. Wallis apologised, saying that they’d had an urgent appointment with their architect which could not be delayed.
‘But Wallis,’ said Lucy sweetly, ‘he was at our reception.’
Later, when they were alone together, Wallis grabbed Lucy’s hands and told her: ‘I’ll hold you responsible if anything ever happens to Herman. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.’
Lucy let those final seven words linger long enough for the enormity of what Wallis had said to sink in.
Then, looking hard into the Duchess’s eyes, she replied: ‘How nice for the Duke.’
Wallis blushed and said quickly: ‘There was never anything between Herman and me.’
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Herman Rogers - the man Wallis Simpson loved and lost - pictured with his second wife Lucy
Lucy replied, triumphantly: ‘Of course not, Wallis.’ Then she spat out: ‘You got your king, but I got your Herman.’
Even before her marriage to the Duke of Windsor in June 1937, Wallis Simpson was no longer playing her allotted role in the so-called royal romance of the century. At least, not in private.
Contemptuous of Edward’s decision to step down from the throne, she addressed him with withering sarcasm as ‘Lightning Brain’, and chided him for never knowing what was going on.
From then on, the Duke would increasingly experience the dark side of Wallis: her sharp tongue, wild temper, wounding criticism and utter self-absorption.
Her growing scorn for him was balanced only by her contempt for his younger brother, King George VI, whom she referred to as ‘that stuttering idiot’.
Meanwhile, the Duke was consumed by guilt at having let down the woman whom he loved to the point of obsession.
‘I have taken you into a void,’ he told her mournfully.
But it was worse than that: she felt she’d been turned into a figure of fun. Within weeks of the abdication, Simpson & Wallis bars were springing up in America, while her old home in Baltimore had been turned into a museum where, for an extra charge, the curious could sit in her bath and have their picture taken.
But the bitterest pill of all was George VI’s announcement that Wallis wouldn’t be granted the appellation of ‘Her Royal Highness’ — a decision that soured Edward’s relationship with his family until his death.
Wallis’s dream of a grand wedding also came to nothing when the King banned anyone linked to the Royal Family from attending.
At this point, Wallis drew on her inner toughness. No one — and especially the new King and Queen — would have the satisfaction of seeing her bowed.
She was determined to pose as the happiest bride in history, her smiling face a rebuke to her detractors.
However, the couple’s wedding, at a friend’s chateau in France, was a disappointingly muted affair, attended only by French functionaries and a smattering of acquaintances.
Afterwards, through the first few weeks of their honeymoon, the Duke of Windsor and his bride bickered and squabbled about the events leading to the abdication.
Wallis left him in no doubt that he’d bungled her chance to be Queen.
During one row at a restaurant in the Austrian Tyrol, she angrily moved to the next table, forcing him to follow like an abandoned puppy.
Acutely aware of Wallis’s disappointment, he insisted on referring to her as Her Royal Highness, and bristled at any informality.
The Countess of Munster, for instance, who’d lent them her castle for part of their honeymoon, had the gall to greet his wife with the words: ‘Wallis, congratulations, how well you are looking.’
The Duke immediately interjected: ‘The Duchess, you mean.’
For the next hour, as Countess Munster recalled, he sulked and pouted, his face screwed up ‘like a naughty little boy’.
It was his way of dealing with the endless small humiliations that would mark the rest of his life.
As war loomed over Europe, the couple decided to rent the palatial Chateau de la Croe, on the French Riviera, which the Duke filled with family heirlooms.
He also took great delight in designing his new insignias and crests, which featured on everything from the stationery to the footmen’s red-and-gold frock-coats.
Herman Rogers found them a suitably grand second home in Paris, and the Windsors started throwing two dinner parties a week, for up to 20 people.
The routine was always the same: guests would gather for cocktails and, when — fashionably late — Wallis was ready, the butler would announce the arrival of ‘Her Royal Highness’.
She then expected the various groups of guests to break up to await her greeting.
‘It was,’ observed the Countess Munster, ‘quite a performance. I wouldn’t have expected such behaviour from the Queen herself.’
The one place where the Windsors were assured a deferential welcome was the German Embassy.
They were guests of honour there on June 22, 1939 — just weeks before war was declared — Wallis sparkling in a white gown decorated with rubies and diamonds, which the Duke had given her for her 43rd birthday two days earlier.
The declaration of war didn’t greatly affect their lifestyle at first. Edward spent a few weeks visiting French troop positions, but his findings were studiously ignored.
As a result, he spent more time on his golf than his gunnery.
When Wallis’s friend Clare Boothe Luce suggested he lobby for more time at the front, the Duchess cried: ‘What! And get himself killed in this silly war?’
Everything changed the following summer, with news that Nazi panzer tank brigades were heading their way.
Alarmed at the thought of the Windsors falling into German hands, the British consul offered them a berth on a cargo ship sailing to England.
The Duke turned it down. Pig-headed to the last, he considered it an insult that he and Wallis had been restricted to just two suitcases.
Instead, they made their way to Portugal.
Once again, the government mounted a rescue effort — on Churchill’s orders — to fly them back to London on two Sunderland seaplanes.
With little understanding of the gravity of their position, the Duke foolishly chose this moment to try to negotiate.
He would not return to Britain, he said, unless he was given a significant post, and Wallis was granted equal status to himself and received by his family at Buckingham Palace.
Furthermore, he said, this meeting would have to be acknowledged in the Court Circular.
It was only when Churchill used the carrot-and-stick approach that the crisis was resolved. First, he reminded the Duke that he was — theoretically, at least — a serving Army officer and should obey orders.
Failure to do so could result in a court-martial.
Then he offered him the governorship of the Bahamas, which Edward reluctantly accepted.
It was, as Wallis sourly observed, their Elba — a reference to Napoleon’s exile on a small Mediterranean island.
On August 1, the couple sailed for Bermuda in the company of several senior American diplomats.
During the voyage, the Windsors regularly entertained them to tea, regaling them with their indiscreet views on Hitler, Churchill and the progress of the war.
The Duke thought the war ‘stupid’ and said he and Wallis would be returning to England in a ‘high capacity’ once it was over.
The Duchess of Windsor now ruled over a Ruritanian world seemingly designed to keep her in a state of exasperation, irritation and humiliation.
The standing Foreign Office instruction was that islanders should bow and curtsey to the Governor, but not to his wife. She was ‘Her Grace’; he was ‘His Royal Highness’.
This gnawed away at Wallis’s soul — though the Duke insisted that their staff at Government House in Nassau address her as ‘Your Royal Highness’.
It was too much for an English maid called Firth, who walked out in protest. ‘I couldn’t do it: I would have choked,’ she explained.
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Wallis Simpson (pictured with her husband the Duke of Windsor) shakes hands with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1937
Despite the war, Wallis sent her dry-cleaning to New York and flew in her Manhattan hairdresser, while her husband over-indulged in alcohol, declaring that there were ‘No Buckingham Palace measures here’ as he shakily poured his evening livener.
When a friend of the Duke’s proposed in 1937 that he pay an official visit to Nazi Germany, the idea fell on fertile ground.
Finally, he’d be able to show his carping wife that he could still be treated like a king.
The visit was a huge propaganda coup for the Nazi regime.
The Duke and Duchess played with Hermann Goring’s model train-set at his palatial country estate, discussed classical music with Albert Speer, and — the highlight of the trip — took tea with Hitler (above).
His eyes, Wallis recalled, were ‘unblinking, magnetic, burning with a peculiar fire’.
But, despite being an accomplished flirt, she sensed no response in him. ‘I decided he did not care for women,’ she concluded.
For his part, the Duke returned several Nazi salutes, forever sealing his reputation as a Nazi sympathiser.
The immediate fallout was the cancellation of a visit to the U.S. after protests from Jews and labour unions.
It was a humiliating debacle: the Windsors’ suite on the German liner Bremen had been paid for, and they’d already sent 71 pieces of luggage to be put onboard.
Wallis was so angry that she threw herself on the floor of their hotel suite and screamed hysterically.
It was the couple’s own folly that kept them imprisoned on the islands longer than strictly necessary.
Churchill feared that their defeatist talk would give succour to those who wanted to keep America out of the war.
If anything, Wallis was more trenchant than the Duke in her criticism of Britain, claiming that the suffering of the British people was payback for the way the Royal Family had treated her.
Once, at dinner, she told a military aide that she wished Germany had ‘licked’ England, adding that but for President Roosevelt’s decision to lend and lease warships to Britain, the country would surely have been defeated.
On another occasion, during a discussion about a new American loan to Britain, she blurted out: ‘Wouldn’t you think that now they are asking for this money, the least they could do would be to recognise me?’
Her self-absorption shocked even her friends. During the early days of the war, Clare Boothe Luce told Wallis that she sympathised with civilians living on the South Coast of England, who’d been strafed by the Luftwaffe.
‘After what they did for me, I can’t say I feel sorry for them — a whole nation against one woman,’ snapped Wallis.
The entrance of America into the war at least gave Wallis a purpose and focus.
As chair of the local Red Cross, she organised food, blankets and medical assistance for the survivors of ships sunk by German U-boats.
And when the Allies decided to use the islands as a training base for the RAF and American Air Force, she became a familiar face at the canteen, serving up breakfast for hungry squaddies.
The Duke asked her advice on everything, big and small. It became a standing joke in the ruling executive council that he would never make a decision of any consequence without reference to her.
During discussions at Government House, he’d often excuse himself and race upstairs, agenda in hand, looking for his wife.
Wallis, however, was finding that time hung heavily and her thoughts often turned to Herman Rogers.
She sent a blizzard of letters to the apartment where Herman and his wife Katherine were staying in New York — and then, in desperation, took to writing to mutual friends, asking them to encourage the couple to visit her.
Not that she was keen to see Katherine: ‘a dull, stupid, boring woman’, she confided to a friend.
Her incarceration, as she saw it, ended in March 1945, when it was deemed safe for the Windsors to return to France.
Back at their chateau, they hired 26 staff and tried to establish their own little court — at which guests were told to curtsey to Wallis.
One regular guest, Kenneth de Courcy, recalled: ‘I never stayed or dined without hearing a bitter sarcasm directed at the Royal Family.
George VI (a stupid man) could never have successfully competed with the Duchess of Windsor’s tongue, and the Duke could not control it.’
As the Forties drew to a close, the Duke and Duchess’s lives increasingly diverged. Wallis had found herself a regular ‘walker’—a rich American equestrian, Harvey Ladew.
As she liked to say: ‘I married [Edward] for better or worse, but not for lunch.’
But she was uncomfortably aware that their new circle of friends was drawn from the idle and rich in cafe society.
‘She is the most unhappy of women, always trying to get away from life, rushing on feverishly to keep from thinking,’ confided her close friend Betty Lawson-Johnston.
Others noted that she’d talk at great length, mistaking mindless chatter for intelligent conversation.
As for the Duke, Washington grande dame Susan Mary Alsop observed after seeing him in Paris: ‘He is so pitiful. I never saw a man so bored. The highlight of his day was watching his wife buy a hat.’
New York socialite Betsey Barton came to a similar conclusion, branding him ‘rather uninformed and not awfully bright’.
With some perspicacity, she added: ‘They receive adulation and awed acclaim from people whom they do not care to get it from; they must meet the people who they do not really care to meet.’
For all the champagne and flattery, Wallis knew full well that she’d made a dreadful mistake.
It was time to kick up her heels and start living again.
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Wallis sounds like a real peach.
Whoever this guy was, boy, did he ever dodge a bullet by not marrying Wallis. By all accounts she was a reprehensible excuse as a woman and as a human being.
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First, Herman looks a lot like Mr. Rogers of the Neighborhood. I wonder if they were related.
Second, if two (2) wives of husbands you have never slept with refer to you as, "THAT WOMAN," the problem is not likely to have started with them.
Third, if Herman was such a great guy, why did he involve himself with such apparently rapacious women? And why this great guy keep pushing his wives into a social life with the scheming harpy?
Fourth, Wallis and Edward got what they deserved when they ended up in virtual exile with each other. Thankfully, Great Britain and the world ended up with the stuttering idiot and his frumpy wife, Bertie and Elizabeth.
The needy, besotted man-child Edward was her meal ticket to wealth, status and glamour but I don't think she ever really loved him. She knew she was trapped. It's quite probable she had other love interests which Edward knew about but tolerated because he was so suffocatingly dependent on her. I also think their unsatisfactory sexlife was a big factor. He was famously under endowed and she used all her skills including "The Clench" which she learned while visiting Shanghai brothels in her youth which made him even more slavishly devoted. There were even rumours she had surgery to "accommodate" him.
Theirs was a bored, lonely, wasted, unfulfilled life and I mostly pity them.
Having read this transcript/bio, I can't imagine how the Duke did not see this ugly side of her--so I must conclude he was dumb as a doorknob, maybe retarded?
I agree with your post except the pity part. They got the life they earned.
ETA: was responding to A*O
She sounds quite awful and he sounds like helpless loser. I think England got the better end of the stick when he abdicated.
Wallies was so far removed from reality with her illusions of grandeur. Edward was just a little pampered boy, who probably never intended to be King, too much hassle. They deserved each other. And those Nazi connections keep me from feeling any pity for them.
His crowning humiliation: How Edward endured a life of torment at Wallis's hands and was even subjected to a joke coronation by her gay friend in a New York nightclub
- Wallis Simpson, who triggered Edward VIII's abdication, soon grew bored of him
- The American divorcee started outrageous relationships to denigrate the Duke
- She knew the abdication had made divorce from her new husband unthinkable
- One of her relationships was with the young Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue
- Ignored by his wife, the disgraced Duke ended up dying in the arms of a nurse
- Extraordinary claims are made in the final extract of Andrew Morton's biography
By ANDREW MORTON FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 22:19, 5 February 2018 | UPDATED: 00:51, 6 February 2018
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.
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'Their relationship, which had always had a dominatrix-and-submissive element, was now shorn of trust and affection'
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.
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'With each passing day, the Duchess of Windsor found her husband ever more dull, irritating and limited'
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.
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'In short, by the early Fifties, Wallis neither loved the former King of England nor was even particularly fond of him'
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, billets-doux 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.’
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'Wallis knew, of course, that the abdication had made divorce from the Duke of Windsor unthinkable'
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.
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'The little Duke was left in the cold, his presence barely tolerated by his wife'
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.
pBut 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 self-inflicted 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!’
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'For the next four years, she went overboard for the much younger Jimmy Donahue (pictured), spending all her time with him'
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 cocktail-drinking 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.
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Alex Jennings and Lia Williams as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in popular Netflix series The Crown
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 Baden-Baden 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.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5355361/Wallis-Simpson-biography-reveals-tired-husband.html
Just cannot see why Wallis was so fascinating. Was just being available and reckless really enough back then?
He had already had a series of unsuitable older, married women and Wallis just happened to be the last who got stuck with him. Not surprisingly, like many royals, he had Mummy issues.