The king’s last long-term mistress was Mrs. Alice Keppel, who was Edward’s junior by 30 years. During Edward’s 12-year romance with her, both Mr. Keppel and Alexandra fully accepted Mrs. Keppel’s role as second wife to Bertie. Mrs. Keppel often called at Windsor Castle, where she became Alexandra’s good friend, and Edward frequented the Keppel home and played with Keppel’s two daughters. Alice Keppel was the first person Alexandra notified when Bertie lay dying of bronchitis at age 68. Alice’s daughter Sonia later wrote about “kingy’s” visits and remembered the game she played with him. They would race buttered toast, buttered side down, along the king’s trousers, he betting a penny on one leg, she betting that the toast on the other leg would be the first to slide to the floor. Bertie was, as Prime Minister Gladstone once wrote, “kept in childhood beyond his time.”
—R.J.F. and V.S.
The Abdicating Lover
EDWARD VIII (June 23, 1894-May 28, 1972)
HIS FAME: King of England for only 327 days in 1936, Edward gained a renown that stemmed not so much from his short reign as from his abrupt abdication in order to marry “the woman I love.” After leaving the throne, Edward became the Duke of Windsor, a title he held until his death.
HIS PERSON: Edward was born to be king. As George V’s eldest son, Edward (David to his friends) passed his youth preparing for his turn to rule. But his childhood was not a happy one. His father, a strict disciplinarian, showed his children no affection. (Edward even admitted to a friend, “My father doesn’t like me…. Not at all sure I particularly like him.”) He preferred his mother, but their relationship was never close either and Queen Mary confessed to her intimates a distaste for raising children.
Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson
Nor was Edward’s youth otherwise auspicious. He completed his prescribed schooling, but did so lackadaisically. During WWI he clamored for a demanding military assignment, but his royal position made that impossible. When the war ended, however, Edward began to come into his own. Dispatched as an unofficial roving ambassador, Edward (as Prince of Wales) toured the globe, and his unaffected bearing and abundant native charm soon made him one of the world’s most popular figures. Even after his abdication he retained his popularity, and his personal wealth (an estimated $15 million) allowed him to pursue a leisurely luxurious life as a resident of France, where he frequented the nightclubs upon which he doted and immersed himself in golf and gardening. A heavy smoker, he died of throat cancer in the arms of the woman he loved and for whom he had abdicated his throne. He was a month shy of his 78th birthday.
SEX LIFE: Edward’s rank, wealth, and charm cinched for the 5 ft. 6 in. slender young man acclaim as the world’s most eligible bachelor. He reveled in that role and enjoyed the women it brought him. His affairs, or at least the bulk of them, were brief. An acquaintance once remarked that Edward “reset his watch by every clock he passed,” and where women were concerned, his fickleness was undeniable. Only four women succeeded in engaging him in lengthy affairs.
He met the first, Lady Coke, when he was 21. Although 12 years older and married, Lady Coke was deluged with Edward’s love for three years. When in England, he strove always to be with her. When he was abroad, Edward’s letters cascaded upon her home by the score. Whether Lady Coke reciprocated his strong affection is unknown. What is known is that her marriage remained firmly intact throughout Edward’s courtship.
When Freda Ward entered the scene, Lady Coke exited. Edward met Freda (who was married to a member of Parliament) in 1918 when an air raid drove the two strangers to seek shelter in a cellar. They conversed, and at the raid’s end Edward insisted that she join him at a party, where they danced for hours. That began their 16-year relationship, during which Edward fell “abjectly” in love, as friends put it, with the learned and witty Freda. He underlined his devotion with telephone calls each morning (calls referred to by Mrs. Ward’s staff as “the baker’s”) and whenever he was in London they invariably met for the evening at 5:00 P.M. sharp.
Occasional flings took Edward away from Freda, but their relationship remained strong, continuing even after he met the beautiful Thelma Furness. The 24-year-old “Toodles,” who was Gloria Vanderbilt’s twin sister, was married to Lord Marmaduke Furness, a British shipping tycoon. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, destined to end in 1933 after seven years of mutual infidelity. Physical passion, not the intellectual conviviality he found with Freda, fueled Edward’s intense five-year affair with Thelma. But, despite their selection of the affable teddy bear as an emblem of their love, their liaison was not a thoroughly happy one. Edward, Thelma later complained, suffered from chronic premature ejaculation. (One of Edward’s friends further impugned his sexual prowess, saying, “To put it bluntly, he had the smallest pecker I have ever seen.”)
But both Freda and Thelma slipped from Edward’s life within months of his meeting Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée who, like her predecessors, was currently married. Wallis entered Edward’s life in 1931, when Thelma made the double mistake of introducing her to Edward as well as angering Edward by spending time with playboy Aly Khan. Wallis proceeded to take over Edward’s life. The pair became inseparable. While not a beauty, Wallis’ playfulness captivated Edward, as well as her ability to engage him in talk about his work. “I made an important discovery,” Edward subsequently said, “that a man’s relationship with a woman could also be an intellectual partnership.” Edward soon helped Wallis arrange a quick divorce while he set his sights on marriage.
Edward was king at this point, however, and he had vastly underestimated the royal family’s opposition to Wallis, a woman his mother condemned as “an adventuress” and whose two divorces smacked of scandal. Parliament, too, was unwilling to see Mrs. Simpson become queen, a title that, barring a constitutional change, automatically went to the king’s wife. As the crisis heightened, Edward confronted his options. Either Wallis or the throne had to go. In an emotional speech on BBC radio, Edward announced his decision to abdicate in favor of his younger brother, Albert.
Six months later Edward and Wallis wed, despite continuing disapproval from the royal family and Parliament (the Cabinet withheld from Wallis the title of “Her Royal Highness,” a slight that forever irked Edward). Nonetheless, to all appearances theirs was a storybook romance. Their lavishly opulent life filled the pages of every tabloid, and on the private level their love flourished too. Rare was the evening, even after many married years had passed, that Edward did not place a flower on Wallis’ pillow. But there were discordant undertones in their love as well. Wallis was a hard-edged woman—“If she happened to be hungry, she might have taken a bite out of you,” observed actress Lilli Palmer—and Edward was not spared. During one spat he exclaimed, “Darling, are you going to send me to bed in tears again tonight?” Edward, for his part, upbraided Wallis only once—when rumors reached his ears that Jimmy Donahue, the couple’s frequent nightclub companion and an heir to the Woolworth fortune, had become her lover. Happily, however, the rumors were false, and Wallis could assure him (truthfully) that Donahue was a homosexual, adding, “His friends call me Queen of the Fairies.”
Wallis dominated Edward’s life, that much is certain. And for the man who once was king, it was exactly the way he wanted things to be. His love for Wallis was unwavering. At a 1970 White House dinner hosted by Richard Nixon, Edward offered this apt autobiographical summary: “I have the good fortune to have had a wonderful American girl consent to marry me and have 30 years of loving care and devotion and companionship—something I have cherished above all else.”
—R.M.
The Royal Tease
ELIZABETH I (Sept. 7, 1533-Mar. 24, 1603)
HER FAME: The last Tudor monarch and one of England’s best-loved and most able rulers, Elizabeth reigned for 44 years, a period of unprecedented national peace, prosperity, creative vigor, and geographical exploration.
HER PERSON: Elizabeth Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, endured an emot
ionally battered childhood marked by the execution of both her mother and her stepmother, Catherine Howard, by the headsman’s ax. Ascending the throne in 1558, she strove to reconcile the country’s fierce religious divisions and she built the nation into a major sea and colonial power. She condemned both her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and her favorite, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, to the chopping block, but only after exhausting every other means of subduing them. Physically expressive with her intimates, she often caressed men and struck women; she laughed much and also frequently wept. While she encouraged some personal familiarity, even flippancy, in her courtiers, she would not tolerate disrespect to the throne, and her chilling oath “God’s death, my lord!” usually preceded a royal chewing out that reduced many an arrogant knight to abject trembling. Though not beautiful, she was certainly attractive. Her slender medium stature, shapely hands, pale oval face, and auburn hair were celebrated by poets of the time. Highly educated, she spoke five languages and was an expert rider and dancer. And she thrived on flattery. Even as she faded into a haggard, mirror-hating old woman decked with false red hair and plastered with cosmetics, she maintained her court of blazing young studs, all competing to praise her fantasied physical charms. But her intelligence and razoredged wit never faded, and English veneration for the “Virgin Queen” crowned her with the aura of a surrogate Virgin Mary. “Though God hath raised me high,” she said in 1601, “yet I count this the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves.” She died at 69, apparently of an infection resulting from pyorrhea.
LOVE LIFE: For 30 years Elizabeth kept Englishmen and European courts frothing in a perfect stew of “does she or doesn’t she?” The question of if, when, and whom the queen would marry persisted during most of her reign, and it kept many a powerful man, both at home and abroad, on his best behavior. Basically and always, she didn’t want to marry and frequently said so. Yet she constantly invited men—young, athletic, handsome ones—to chase her. She loved the fore-play of passionate letters, ribald jokes, and heaps of gifts, and at times it seemed she had half the princes of Europe panting to share her bed and kingdom. But if she often hinted yes, she seldom went so far as to say it. She was an expert tease, who always found excellent reasons to delay consummation. Strangely, few of her cocky suitors learned her game, even after years of playing it. She winked and they came with tails wagging, eager to devour crumbs of ecstasy and chunks of exasperation from her lily-white hands—and she loved it. But she had seen too much of what had happened to the royal wives in her own family. To her, a husband represented at best the sharing of her throne; at worst, usurpation of her power.
Her first romance at age 14 was with Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, younger brother of England’s lord protector and a handome rake “of much wit and very little judgment,” as she later described him. Seymour habitually romped into her morning bedroom, where the couple played slap-and-tickle. It was expensive dalliance, eventually costing Seymour his head when his motives—to marry her and stage a palace coup—became known. Elizabeth, under suspicion as heir apparent and ill that summer, may have had a miscarriage. According to biographer Alison Plowden, this was the only time in her life when a pregnancy might have passed undetected. Whatever trouble Seymour caused her, he set the favorite male prototype for her future romances—young, dashing, and usually somewhat longer on muscle than brains.
English noblemen by the dozen courted Elizabeth after she became queen. These included Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Raleigh (who named colonial Virginia for her), and, most enduringly, Lord Robert Dudley. “Sweet Robin,” she called him and nicknamed him her “Eyes.” She tickled his neck during his solemn investiture as the Earl of Leicester, and he teased her openly about their wedding date. Even though married to Amy Robsart, he pursued Elizabeth with such ardor that their eventual marriage seemed likely. They visited each other’s bedchambers, and rumors flew that “Lord Robert did swyve [copulate with] the queen” and had fathered her child. But after Amy’s suspiciously timely death, Elizabeth dared not marry him since this would seem to confirm that Dudley had poisoned his wife. Yet he stayed, a master intriguer who tried to steer her toward suitors he knew she couldn’t marry. Their 30-year affair flamed hot and cold, but not even his secret marriage to Lettice Knollys, which infuriated the queen, interfered for long. Believing herself dying of smallpox in 1562, she swore that “as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them.” Of all the men in her life, he probably knew her best. And when he died in 1588, she shut herself up for grief-stricken weeks and kept his last letter by her bedside until her own death.
At stake in her numerous foreign courtships was the balance of European power. Philip II of Spain, her former brother-in-law and a future enemy, pursued her; and the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles of Hapsburg, the princes of Denmark and Sweden, Charles IX of France and his sulky homosexual brother, the Duke of Anjou, all sent proxies to woo her. At 49 she probably came closest to actual marriage. The 27-year-old Duke of Alençon, the younger brother of the Duke of Anjou, was not much to look at, but he was charming, was considered “apt for the getting of children,” and was the only prince who actually came in person to see her. She called him her “Frog,” but she kept him, like the others, on the burner too long (11 years) and she danced for joy when he finally died. Conveniently for her, the European courtiers who sought her Protestant hand usually were Catholic, so she always had a bottom-line escape clause.
Her sex life became a favorite topic for gossip. In 1581 it was charged that Dudley “hath five children by the queen,” and that she never left long “but to be delivered.” But squads of foreign ambassadors inquired closely and often into her sexual morals, and none ever produced a shred of evidence for scandal. Elizabeth maintained that if she “had ever found pleasure in such a dishonorable life … she did not know of anyone who could forbid her; but she trusted in God that nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself,” and she wanted her epitaph to “declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.”
MEDICAL REPORT: Was Elizabeth really a lifelong virgin? The best contemporary sources indicate that, unlikely as it sounds, she was. A sexual liaison simply could not have been kept hidden in her unprivate milieu. Was she a sexually normal woman? Lord Burghley, after thorough consultations with her doctors, concluded that she was “very apt” for procreating children, and he recommended marital intercourse to cure her of “such dolours and infirmities as all physicians do usually impute to womankind for lack of marriage.” A contradictory report came from Elizabeth’s physician, Dr. Huick, who advised her against marriage owing to a “womanish infirmity.” Playwright Ben Jonson, a contemporary, claimed she “had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of man, though of her delight she tryed many.” A current theory has been advanced by endocrinologist Dr. Robert B. Greenblatt. He speculates that Elizabeth suffered from Rokitansky’s syndrome, a congenital defect which produces a very shallow vaginal canal and an undeveloped uterus. This posthumous diagnosis could be true only if Elizabeth had never menstruated. A 1559 medical report written by Sir James Melville stated that “she had few monthly periods or none.” This may be explained by another conjecture suggesting that Elizabeth suffered from anemia which started during puberty. In any case, sex for the queen was verbal and vicarious, and delightfully so. But no evidence exists that it ever got beyond adolescent slap-and-tickle. For her, that was close enough.
HER THOUGHTS: “I hate the idea of marriage for reasons that I would not divulge to a twin soul.”
“I am already married to a husband, which is the people of England.”
“I will have here but one mistress and no master.”
—J.E.
The Polygluttonous King
FAROUK I (Feb. 11, 1920-Mar. 18, 1965)
HIS FAME: The last monarch to rule Egypt, Farouk (or Faruk) was known for his gluttony, his promiscuity, his capriciousness, and his kleptomania. While he began his r
eign at age 16 with high ideals, these quickly deteriorated under the impact of his monumental physical and emotional problems. He could weep over the death of a rabbit one moment, then pick a cat up by the tail and dash it against a wall the next. One of his first acts as king was to have his cars (more than 100 of them) painted fire-engine red, and then to make it illegal for any other cars to be that color, so that he could speed through the countryside without police interference. In a short time he had alienated his allies and his own army to such a degree that revolutionaries were able to take over in an effortless coup. Farouk went into exile at the age of 32. The deposed king’s possessions, including a vast amount of pornography and the world’s largest stamp collection, were auctioned off, bringing over a million dollars into the coffers of the new Egyptian republic. Farouk’s erotica—the “nudie” playing cards, the pulp porn, the X-rated films, and even the manacles which he supposedly used to chain women to his bed—were a small part of his vast hoard. During his reign he had filched enough to fill several storehouses: bottle caps and toothpaste tubes, clocks and coins, a ceremonial sword and assorted medals stolen from the dead body of Riza Shah Pahlevi of Iran as it passed in state through Cairo, and even Winston Churchill’s heirloom gold pocket watch.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 44