According to Nype’s son, also Russell, there was nothing more to the relationship than friendship. ‘Lots of people have tried to suggest things happened between them, but I don’t believe it for one moment. Humour and fun was the bond between them. They just genuinely liked being together.’28
Nype, young, talented, straightforward, a little unsophisticated and good company, provided a distraction from the Duke, and Wallis enjoyed the fact that her visits to nightclubs with the young singer made her husband jealous. Even after Nype married in 1953 and had a young family, he and his wife continued to socialise with the Windsors in New York and Palm Beach and remained in touch for the next twenty years.
In February 1951, Wallis entered the Harkness Pavilion in New York, registering as Mary Walters, where she was successfully treated for cancer of the womb, which required a hysterectomy. She was in hospital for three weeks, during which the Duke pottered aimlessly around the Waldorf Towers, refusing to see people, and showering her with red roses and beluga caviar – which she complained was too salty.
At the end of May, the Windsors returned to France on the Queen Mary, accompanied by Jimmy, who had taken a suite at the Ritz. The relationship continued, especially when the Duke paid a week’s visit to London, where he desperately went round the Grosvenor Antiques Fair trying to find gold snuffboxes to go with the collection that Jimmy had given to Wallis.
Diana Cooper continued to provide a useful commentary on the Windsors’ behaviour from a succession of dinner parties. In May, she joined Wallis at the Monseigneur nightclub, a regular haunt. ‘We must go on to Monseigneur – the Duke would like it, so don’t argue. She seldom calls him the Duke now, but rather “My Romance” with a funny tone – not sneery but not straight.’29
They were joined by Jimmy ‘shouting, singing and yelling “hit it up, hit it up”. Then he was up to the piano playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude.’ In the car on the way back, Jimmy confessed to Diana, ‘I adore Wallis – she knows she’s only got to call on Jimmy and I’ll do anything for her. I love her – like my mother, you know – not any other way because I’m not that sort, etc, etc.’ Diana for once took pity on the Duke and the situation. ‘Isn’t it all desperately sad? He showed nothing, I have to admit, on his royal wizened face, but if it’s true and he learns it, the wife is gone, the legend dead, he’ll have to throw himself off the Empire State Building.’30
In July, Jessie chartered a boat, with the Windsors as her guests, visiting Antibes, Monte Carlo, Genoa, Viareggio and Elba. The yacht was not sufficiently large to carry all of Wallis’s wardrobe, so her maid Ophelia and the Duke’s valet followed the yacht along the coast in the Windsors’ black Cadillac with a van carrying the luggage. Each evening Ophelia would bring on board the outfit for the evening and next day.
The affair was now blatantly obvious, a humiliation that seemed to excite both Jimmy and Wallis. Lunching with Lady Kenmare in her villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Wallis made an excuse that she wanted to show Donahue the view from the first-floor guestroom. They disappeared upstairs. Meanwhile the Duke remained at the lunch table reminiscing about his time as monarch, the embarrassed guests knowing ‘the duchess was having it off with Jimmy in one of the upstairs guest rooms.’31
In Portofino, which they used to visit each year, the royal couple were guests of the actors Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, who had a house there. The Windsors had first met the couple in New York and, according to Palmer, the acquaintanceship had developed after the Duke ‘in the middle of boisterous parties . . . would seek out a quiet corner to recite German poetry’ with her.32
Palmer remembered that:
although it was twenty years since he had abdicated, he liked to see protocol observed, only you had to guess when to observe it and when to ignore it. Naturally you had to be punctual to the minute and stand up whenever he stood up; even if he was only going to the toilet, respectful attention was drawn to a function that common people prefer to attend to as inconspicuously as possible. When you greeted him, a little bob or rudimentary curtsey was appreciated. I only bobbed to him. His duchess got a firm handshake.33
Entertaining the Duke generally proved a challenge:
His sense of humour on the subject was disturbing. ‘You know,’ he once said to me with a smile, ‘I’ve got a low IQ.’ ‘But, sir,’ I protested loyally, ‘just think of your book, A King’s Story. That’s a fascinating tale and very well written.’ ‘Didn’t write it myself,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that’s all I know.’34
The Duke and Palmer always talked in German and he confessed to her he never felt at home in England:
When I first set foot on American soil as a very young man, it came to me like a flash: this is what I like. Here I’d like to stay. And when I married an American, I hoped we would live in America. But as fate would have it, my wife hates America and only wants to live in France. That’s the way it goes.35
One night during the Windsors’ visit, Greta Garbo and her long-time companion George Schlee were in Portofino and the Harrisons invited them to meet the Windsors. Amongst the subjects of conversation was who might play the Windsors on film.
‘Katharine Hepburn,’ said the Duchess without hesitation.
‘And to play the Duke?’
Wallis didn’t answer. But Windsor nodded politely in Rex’s direction and said: ‘I think perhaps you would be the best choice.’36
Then Rex, in their open US-Army jeep, drove the Windsors from their villa, perched high above the town, down the perilously steep goat track to the harbour, the Duke clutching the windshield. ‘“Don’t you ever have the seats recovered?” said Wallis reproachfully . . . settling gingerly in her white dress on the lumpy back seat, as if she were about to sit on a raw egg.’37 Returning, Rex, who didn’t like the Duke, muttered gleefully, ‘Nearly lost the little bugger on the curve.’38
The next day the Harrisons, with Greta and Schlee, joined the Windsors on their yacht moored in the harbour, to find Wallis furious because Jimmy had not yet returned from the port.
At that moment, Jimmy appeared in the doorway, helloing exuberantly in all directions, his arms full of gardenias, which he deposited grandly on the Duchess’s lap by way of a peace offering. She swept them to the floor, stood up, and said, ‘Do you know what time it is?’39
From there the evening got progressively worse. The only other guest was a former American senator and his wife, the Isolationist senator drunkenly ‘carrying on about his pet aversion, the British who over and over again had sacrificed innocent American boys to save their empire.’40
Jimmy tried to change the subject without success. Now, in order to divert attention, he rose from the table and, still dressed in his midnight-blue velvet dinner jacket, leather pumps and diamond cufflinks, casually jumped into the sea. The Duke was stunned. ‘But there must be some protocol . . . !’41
The crowd in the harbour howled with delight at the sight of Jimmy swimming in the harbour, which was ‘full of refuse, dead rats and condoms’.42 Wallis’s ‘jaws were clenched and her nose white with shock and anger. “That boy has no manners,” she finally managed to say. “I’d like to ask you all not to speak to him when he comes back. We’ll act as if nothing’s happened.”’43
Jimmy now returned in a green velvet dinner jacket, to discover the senator still droning on. ‘We’ll just have to try again.’44 Once more he leapt into the water. It was the end of the dinner party. The guests left silently whilst the hosts engaged in a ‘passionate “conversation” in the library’.45
The Windsors now moved to Biarritz. Doreen Spooner, sent to photograph the Duke, was not impressed by the couple:
It was so hard to see why a king had abdicated his throne for that woman . . . I didn’t take to her at all. The shots were taken out in the garden of the villa. As with so many photographs taken of them, the couple seemed to have an agenda of showing how blissfully happy they were and that the crisis that rocked the monarchy had all been ‘worth it’. The ex-
King Edward VIII, though quite formal in manner, was pleasant and willing to please, but the ex-Mrs Simpson wasn’t. She was brittle, angular, devoid of all warmth. She smiled for the camera, but like a robot. There was no feeling behind it.46
By September, the Windsors were back in Paris and under surveillance by the French Secret Service. When the Duke left for London at the end of the month to see George VI, who had been operated on to have his left lung removed, the relationship with Donahue continued. As one surveillance report noted:
JAMES DONAHUE (said to have had an affair with her for four years) rolls up in the evening, and takes her to the Paprika restaurant and then to the Monseigneur nightclub, where there’s a cabaret. DONAHUE returns to the Duchess’s home at 85, Rue de la Faisanderie in the 16th with her at 2.20 a.m., and then he’s seen leaving alone at 5 a.m.47
The nature of the physical relationship between Wallis and Jimmy intrigued people. According to Billy Baldwin, Jimmy once when drunk had tried to circumcise himself with a pen knife, which made intercourse painful, and therefore they relied on oral sex.48 According to one biographer, Donahue had claimed Wallis as ‘the best cocksucker I’ve ever known’.49
‘Some said they had oral sex, but I can’t believe Jimmy was into that,’ thought Nicky Haslam. ‘He enjoyed her company. There was no way Jimmy could have done it with a woman. He was so gay . . .’ ‘Oh, they did have sex,’ says the art historian John Richardson . . . ‘I asked Jimmy Donahue when he was drunk and ready to say anything, “What was it like going to bed with the Duchess of Windsor?”’ says Richardson. ‘And he said, “It was like going to bed with a very old sailor.”’50
The American journalist Cy Sulzberger often met the Windsors during the 1950s. ‘He is a curious, somewhat pathetic fellow,’ he wrote in his diary after one dinner in October 1951. ‘Although he has, of course, given up any rights to the throne, he still maintains a strict atmosphere of court etiquette; there is much curtseying and bowing, despite the fact that he is extremely informal and friendly.’51
The Duke had just returned from a trip to London and Sulzberger was touched by his obvious affection for Wallis. ‘After dinner we were sitting together talking and every now and then he would look across the room at the Duchess and say: “It’s so wonderful to see her. You know I have not seen her for a week. Isn’t she charming?”’52
Sulzberger found him a little eccentric:
After dinner there was a pianist. The Duke was transported with joy. He sang a few songs rather badly and joyfully imitated the playing of various instruments such as the cello and the violin, waving his arms around like a happy schoolboy . . . The Duke drank a bit and seemed just slightly tight at the end of the evening. He talked steadily during dinner. At one point the Duchess leaned over the table and said: ‘You promised you were going to listen tonight because there are a lot of brains around, but you are talking all the time.’ He replied: ‘I have to talk or otherwise I would fall asleep.’53
A few weeks later Sulzberger attended a ten-course dinner, given for a UN delegation and including the French prime minister René Pleven, for what he described as ‘a weird collection of social derelicts’:
The dinner itself was lavish in the extreme. Cocktails were accompanied by plates spread with caviar or covered with slices of lobster. The dinner comprised about ten courses and was heavily sliced with sherry, white wine, red wine, pink champagne and huge slugs of brandy. During course Number Seven, a complete string orchestra popped in and started playing away in a fashion reminiscent of pre-war Vienna . . . From then on, the Duke couldn’t eat because he was too busy waving his arms around in time to the music – his favourite habit. Whenever I have seen him anywhere near music, out comes his conductor’s complex.54
* * *
Progress on the Duke’s memoirs had been slow. ‘I have read Chapters 19, 20, 21 and 22, which Miss Swann sent me yesterday, and I return them,’ wrote George Allen to Walter Monckton in October 1949. ‘I do not think that HRH himself can possibly be the author of these Chapters. I feel that they are so bad that I am impelled to suggest to you that it may be our duty to advise him against publication, because if they appear in their present form, they will be condemned and must do him untold injury in every quarter.’55
Eventually in January 1950 it was decided that the book was ready for submission and a contract was signed with Putnam, but it was to be another year before it was delivered. ‘In many ways I am disappointed with the state of the work,’ wrote Charles Murphy to George Allen in January 1950:
Certain chapters – notably Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight – have never been gone over by me. They consist primarily of the original LIFE material of the first series (partly finished notes and experimental undertakings which the Duke himself grouped together, adding various bits and pieces of his own). Stylistically they are certainly not up to the standard of the rest . . . it has been like trying to make a rope of sand.’56
The reasons were clear. The Duke had lost interest in the book, focused on saving his marriage.
In April 1951, A King’s Story, which recounts his life up to the Abdication, was published. The Windsors launched it from the Waldorf Towers and then travelled around the States, promoting it. ‘I had editorial advice and assistance in compiling the book, of course, but I wrote every word of it myself,’ the Duke told Nancy Spain for Good Housekeeping, adding, ‘I worked an average of eight hours a day; nine until one o’clock, and then four hours more between lunch and dinner.’57
The New York Times described the book as ‘a character study of a well-meaning, undistinguished individual, destined from birth to a life of monumental artificiality’, whilst Noel Annan, reviewing the British edition in the New Statesman, thought ‘reflections of inconceivable banality succeed descriptions of Court life so bizarre that the characters seem permanently to be playing charades.’58
The reviews did not prevent it from sitting on the bestseller lists for seven months, being translated into over twenty languages, and earning the Duke more than £300,000.59
1 Menkes, p. 163.
2 Wilson, p. 165. Just under £35K.
3 Mona Eldridge, In Search of a Prince (Sidgwick, 1988), p. 93.
4 Kenneth de Courcy, BEN 2/2/5, p. 45, Churchill College Archives.
5 Interview Nicky Haslam, 5 April 2021.
6 Blackwood, p. 130. Maître Suzanne Blum became the custodian of the Windsors’ reputation after the Duke’s death.
7 Notes for memoir, Seagrim, Acc. 1053, 1/7, Churchill College Archives.
8 Norman Lockridge, Lese Majesty: The Private Lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Boar’s Head Books, 1952), p. 115.
9 Menkes, p. 31.
10 December 1936, Heffer, p. 626.
11 Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 95. Forwood died in 2001.
12 Truman Capote, ‘Indelible Exits and Entrances’, Esquire, Vol. 99, No. 3, March 1983.
13 Nicholas Haslam, Redeeming Features: A Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 195.
14 Report of Professor Lehofrich of Vienna, quoted Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 198.
15 http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/2006/04/man-who-cut-off-cocks.html.
16 ‘The Strange Case of Walter Chrysler Jr’, Confidential Magazine, July 1955 and ‘How the Navy Ousted Its No. 1 Gay Gob’, Confidential Magazine, January 1958.
17 https://www.datalounge.com/thread/8581470-walter-chrysler-jr.
18 An FBI file (62-63369 ) was opened on him in 1941 and has full details of his drinking, homosexual activities, failed business ventures, his pornography collection, and how he killed two children in separate car accidents.
19 Billy Baldwin with Michael Gardine, Billy Baldwin, An Autobiography (Little, Brown, 1985), p. 295.
20 Bryan and Murphy, p. 472.
21 Ibid, p. 476.
22 Birmingham, p. 231. Home movies of these visits can be seen in the Baker family papers at Harvard University.
23 ‘The rumour was that Wallis’s real and onl
y attachment was Russell Nype’, Haslam, p. 194. ‘She had a whirl with the leading man in the Broadway show Call Me Madam, and it was the talk of the town.’ Eleanor Davies Tydings Ditzen, My Golden Spoon (Madison Books, 1997), p. 177.
24 ‘Man About Town’, 29 January 1951, quoted Iles Brody, Gone with the Windsors (John Winston Company, 1954), pp. 31–2.
25 Ibid, pp. 31–2.
26 New York Journal-American, 19 October 1951.
27 Alice Moats to Westbrook Pegler, 23 January 1951, ‘Duke and Duchess of Windsor’; Subject Files; James Westbrook Pegler Papers; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.
28 Interview Russell Nype, 6 June 2021.
29 Darling Monster, p. 442.
30 Darling Monster, p. 443.
31 Patricia Cavendish O’Neil, A Lion in the Bedroom (Park St Press, Sydney, 2005), p. 298. Lady Kenmare told her daughter, ‘The duchess was famous for her expertise in fellatio’, p. 299.
32 Lilli Palmer, Change Lobsters and Dance: An Autobiography (Macmillan, 1975), p. 209.
33 Palmer, Change Lobsters and Dance, p. 210.
34 Palmer, Lobsters, p. 211.
35 Palmer, Lobsters, p. 211.
36 Palmer, Lobsters, p. 214.
37 Palmer, Lobsters, p. 215.
38 Carey Harrison to author, 5 April 2021.
39 Palmer, Lobsters, p. 218.
40 Ibid, p. 219.
41 Ibid, p. 220.
42 Ibid, p. 221.
43 Ibid, pp. 220–1.
44 Ibid, p. 222.
45 Ibid, p. 222.
46 Doreen Spooner, Camera Girl (Mirror Books, 2016), pp. 55–6.
47 20 September 1951, declassified French Government file 4AG73. It focused on individuals placed under surveillance by the RG between 1947–53. I’m grateful to Peter Allen for discovering the file and translating it.
48 Baldwin, p. 289.
49 Birmingham, p. 239.
50 ‘The Oddest Couple’, James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
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