The night that Edward confronted Wallis over her gay lover:
After 60 years, secret notes reveal truth about playboy pal
Anne Seagrim kept secret notebooks during her service with
the royals
They revealed the Duchess had become bored with her husband
Which led to an affair with an American 19 years her junior
By CHRISTOPHER WILSON FOR MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:32 BST, 20 September 2014 | UPDATED: 11:23
BST, 21 September 2014
The dramatic moment when a devastated Duke of Windsor
accused his wife of adultery has been revealed in the previously unseen papers
of his former private secretary.
In a scene that undermines the myth that the marriage was
‘the greatest love affair in the world’, the former Edward VIII tearfully told
Wallis Simpson, the divorcee for whom he gave up the throne in 1936, to break
off her relationship with a wealthy playboy.
The private notebooks of Anne Seagrim, which she kept
secretly during her service with the royal couple, offer further evidence that
after 13 years of marriage, the Duchess had became bored with her husband,
leading to an affair with a young American 19 years her junior, Jimmy Donahue,
who until then had been a promiscuous homosexual.
In an undated eyewitness account detailing the moment the
ex-king became aware of the affair, Miss Seagrim wrote: ‘The day that he came back from the
[New York] Racquets Club where someone had told him “in his own interests” that
the Duchess had been out every night till
dawn with the same young man – he went
to his room and lay on his bed. She came
in and, gaily unknowing, went into [his
room].
‘I heard him choking back
the tears in his voice, telling her what he had heard. I heard him say
what he had no doubt rehearsed over and over again – “It’s not because you are
the Duchess of Windsor, it’s because you are my wife. Any man would mind his
wife doing this.”
‘His voice wavered. She never said a single word – or at any
rate I didn’t hear her voice, and very
soon she came out, all her gaiety gone – walking slowly with her head bent, her
face submissive, her eyes blue & bewildered. She gave me a quick glance as
she went through my room.
‘She was very quiet and submissive for a long time
afterwards. She telephoned immediately cancelling whatever arrangement she had
made with the young man.’
And Miss Seagrim says damningly of the Duchess: ‘She revelled in this shoddy little success.’
The Duchess had started her affair with Donahue aboard the Queen Mary in May 1950, when she was 54
and he 35, having first met him at his mother’s home in Palm Beach nine years
earlier. He was a grandson of the founder of Woolworth’s and led an indolent
life after being kicked out of Choate,
the ‘American Eton’, for non-attendance.
The affair continued even after the Duke’s intervention, and
came to an end in 1954, when he finally lost patience with his wife’s lover.
Miss Seagrim, who worked
at close quarters with the couple in Paris and New York between 1950 and
1954, wrote in her notebook of the Duchess: ‘She naively always hoped to get
away with her affairs – brazened it out when another would have given herself
away by seeming guilty.’
She added: ‘[She was] determined to have her fun – but when
she realised she had been caught out, she didn’t excuse herself or try to fool
him.
‘She was also really [regretful] at having upset him because
although I was pretty sure she never felt the same passionate love for him as
he did for her, she was very fond of him and had set herself the job of making
him happy. But it was a “job”. It wasn’t a reciprocal love on the same scale as
his for her.’
The notebooks, stored in a recently opened archive in
Churchill College, Cambridge, are particularly revealing because throughout her
life Miss Seagrim, who died aged 92 in 2011, publicly maintained her devoted
support for the Windsors.
She wrote: ‘When HRH was happy, he used to call her
“Peaches”. Nothing could be further from the truth!’ And of the Duke she
observed: ‘Donaldson [Frances Donaldson, one of the Duke’s early biographers]
misses the essential point about his character – his fundamental uncertainty
about his sexuality & his ability to be a heterosexual man. He was
fundamentally afraid of women.’
For four years, as I revealed in my biography Dancing With the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy
Donahue, the trio were inseparable.
The Duke, who was pathologically worried about money and happy to allow others to bankroll his
expensive lifestyle, knowingly allowed himself
to be cuckolded.
Although rumours often swirled about the Duchess’s
relationship with Donahue, his previously homosexual love-life led observers to
believe that there was no sexual attraction between them.
After the affair ended, the dynamic between husband and wife remained unchanged – he needy, she
expecting total devotion.
A bejewelled Cartier tiger brooch and matching bracelet
which were ordered by the Duke after the affair are being sold at Christie’s in November and are expected to
fetch £1.5 million.
 |
The Cartier tiger brooch the Duke gave his wife after the
affair
|
"The story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is one of the
most romantic of all time: Edward VIII abdicated his throne and gave up an
empire so that he could marry the woman he loved, American divorcee Wallis
Simpson. Very few people suspected, and even fewer actually knew, that the
Duchess cuckolded him—and almost gave him up—for a gay playboy twenty years her
junior.
Blond and slender, Jimmy Donahue was the archetypal post-war
playboy. He could fly a plane, speak several languages, play the piano, and
tell marvelous jokes. People loved him for his wit, charm and personality. The
grandson of millionaire Frank W. Woolworth, Jimmy knew he would never need to
work. Instead, he set about carving for himself a career of mischief. Some said
evil.
Gay at a time when the homosexual act was still illegal,
Jimmy was notorious within America’s upper class, and loved to shock. Though
press agents arranged for him to be seen with female escorts, his pursuits,
until he met the Duchess of Windsor, were exclusively homosexual. He was
thirty-five when he was befriended by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1950.
The Duchess was fifty-four, and despite the difference in age, there was an
instant attraction. A burgeoning sexual relationship – a perverse sort of love
– was formed between Jimmy and the Duchess. Together with the Duke, they became
an inseparable trio, the closest of friends. As Jimmy had planned, the royal
couple became obsessed with him.
Donahue claimed he had had a four-year affair with Wallis,
Duchess of Windsor, the wife of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward
VIII. This claim is endorsed by Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of Earl Mountbatten
of Burma and a cousin of the Duke of Windsor:
(…)”In the summer of 1936, a weekend house party included
Wallis Simpson and her husband, along with King Edward VIII. Simpson presented
her hostess with a cold chicken from Fortnum & Mason, which everyone
thought odd. Mr. Simpson left after only one night, but the others remained,
which prompted “a good deal of talking among the adults.” That December, the
King renounced his throne for “the woman I love,” to the shock of
seven-year-old Pammy. “I was surprised to learn my cousin Lilibet and her
sister Margaret Rose would actually have to live in Buckingham Place…. This
took some digesting,” Pamela writes.
In later life, Pamela saw quite a bit of the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor. “Whenever I was in Paris with my father he’d ring up the
Duke: ‘I’ve got Pammy with me,’ he’d say. ‘Would you like us to pop around?’
The Duke would whisper, ‘Oh Dickie, let me see…. Wallis is going to the
hairdresser at 2:30. Come at 2:30.’
“The Duke wanted to reminisce about his old regiment, his
English past, etc., and that stuff bored Wallis to death,” Pamela explains.
“She was the most marvelous hostess,” Pam admits of the
Duchess. “Her houses were perfection. At giving parties and serving food, she
was the best.”
But did she have any warmth? “No. She was an American
hostess,” is her answer.
“She was hard-hearted,” she continues. “I was shocked that
she got this man to give up the throne of England, with the idea that she would
devote her life to him. Instead of which, she had Jimmy Donahue [a rich
American playboy and heir to the Woolworth fortune]. I remember the Duke being
in tears with my father, saying, ‘Wallis is with Jimmy.’ He had no alternative
[other] than her.”
In : “Lady Pamela Hicks and her sister, the Countess, knew
extreme privilege and epic tragedy.”
Scandalous Love Affairs: Jimmy and the Duchess
Monday, October 4, 2010
"You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great
romance." the Duchess of Windsor to a friend.
It was a relationship that baffled and mystified their
friends, and entertained their enemies. She was one of the most famous women in
the world, one half of 'the love story of the century.' He was a rich,
handsome, high school drop-out and mama's boy twenty years younger, and gay.
They were an odd couple in many ways but despite their differences, the Duchess
of Windsor and Jimmy Donahue kept gossips and high society on both sides of the
Atlantic agog as they danced and flirted their way from New York to Palm Beach
to Europe. Wallis was so enthralled with her young swain and the lifestyle that
he offered her that she actually contemplated leaving the Duke for him.
Jimmy Donahue and the Duchess of Windsor had been introduced
in the early 1940's when the Duke and Duchess had traveled to Palm Beach from
the Bahamas where the Duke was serving as Governor General. The Duke of
Windsor's former Lord-in-Waiting, the Earl of Sefton, suggested her as a
hostess to the royal visitors. Jimmy's mother Jessie Woolworth Donahue hoped
that rubbing shoulders with the royal couple would boost her own social
standing. Although she had inherited millions from her father F.W. Woolworth,
she was still considered new money to the old guard of Palm Beach Society. Her
marriage to James Donahue, whose family had made their money from fat
rendering, hadn't burnished her pedigree.
For their part, the Windsors found America more congenial
than Europe where the Duke's indiscret behavior, like his meeting with Hitler
in Germany, embarrassed the royal family. Here the Windsor's were treated like
royalty. Jessie Donahue was thrilled when the Windsors attended lunches and
dinners at her palatial Cielito Lindo in Palm Beach or at her triplex in New
York. As a kid Jimmy had dreamed of being the best friend of the Duke of
Windsor when he was still the Prince of Wales, and now here he was sitting
having tea in his mother's living room. The Windsors were equally impressed by
the Donahue's money, houses, servants and lifestyle.
Everything changed in 1950, when the Duke and Duchess
decided to take the RMS Queen Mary from New York to Cherbourg. It was a trip
they had taken many times before but this time Jimmy Donahue was on board. It
was there, on the high seas, that Wallis fell in love with Jimmy. He was an old
hand at entertaining older women. His mother had often pulled him out of school
to accompany her on her travels. He was a brilliant gossip, prankster and
jokester. At the start of the trip, Jimmy and Wallis were just friends; by the
time they disembarked they were lovers. He was thirty-four and she was
fifty-four. Friends say that Wallis did the chasing, that the idea would never
have occurred to Jimmy to pursue the Duchess.
By the time the Duchess and Jimmy fell in love, they were
both at a cross roads in their lives. The Duchess was bored and vulnerable. It
had been 14 years since the Duke had abdicated the English throne for the
'woman I love' and maintaining the love affair of the century was stifling. The
Duke may have once been King of England but now he was just an ordinary man. He
was needy and childlike, his love smothering. Their love life was unsatisfying,
the Duke not only had a foot fetish but he liked to play 'nanny' games which
infantilized him, wearing a diaper, with the Duchess punishing him for his
being a 'naughty boy.' When she wasn't in the room, the Duke would visibly
wilt. Wallis had also suffered her share of health problems, been diagnosed
with cancer, and would soon have to have a hysterectomy. Life seemed to be
passing her by; ahead of her was a long, lonely, empty road. Not even making
the best-dressed list year after year made up for the slights and snubs from
the Royal Family.
Her relationship with Jimmy was a diversion from the empty
and meaningless life that she had been leading. He was witty and charming, and
despite his sexual inclinations, an intense attraction sprang up between them.
Jimmy wasn't raised to have a career; he was raised to be rich which gave him
ample time to cater to the Duchesses whims. He was the archetypal postwar
playboy; he spoke several languages, could fly a plane, play the piano, and had
impeccable manners. He was also mischievous, loving to shock high society with
his pranks. For instance, the time he dressed up as a nun, pulled up his habit
and squatted in the middle of the road, defecating. And all those grand dinner
parties when, according to Aileen Plunket, the Guinness heiress, he'd liven
things up by unbuttoning his trousers and laying his private parts on his plate
among the potatoes and gravy and sauces, "looking like some pink
sausage."
Like Wallis, Jimmy was trapped. In his case, it was his
wealth and the Woolworth name. He was the quintessential 'poor little rich boy'
Jimmy was kept on a tight leash by his mother Jessie, who alternately smothered
and neglected her favorite son. She kept such a tight leash on her money that
even after her death Jimmy wouldn’t have inherited the Woolworth millions if he
had outlived her. Jimmy often had to borrow money from his wealthier cousin
Barbara Hutton to fund his expensive lifestyle.
But Jessie was quite willing to open the purse strings now
that Jimmy was close chums with Wallis and the Duke. Jimmy treated Wallis to
shopping sprees at Mainbocher and Hattie Carnegie where she bought dresses and
hats as if they were going out of style. He encouraged her to acquire a
substantial wardrobe of furs, which he paid for. The two would lunch together
at the Colony and at Le Pavillion, their heads pressed together as they joked
and gossiped. At night the trio would hit El Morocco, the Stork Club and '21
with Jimmy picking up the check. When the three of them went out, it was not
uncommon for the Duke to leave Wallis and Jimmy to dance the night away while
he went home to bed alone. Jimmy would whisk the couple away on pleasure
jaunts, cruising the Mediterranean on a private yacht, treats they would never
have been able to afford on their own. There was never a dull moment when he
was around. But it wasn't just Jimmy's unlimited expense account that kept
Wallis happy. According to biographer Christopher Wilson, Jimmy offered Wallis
pleasure in the boudoir like she'd never experienced before which boggles the
mind.
At first the Duke was pleased with Jimmy's friendship, they
would play golf together, but he soon realized that he was becoming the odd man
out in the little trio. When the Duke had to go to England for the deaths of
his brother King George VI and his mother The Queen Mary, Wallis and Jimmy
painted the town red in his absence. The Duke would place frantic phone calls
trying to reach her only to be told that she was unavailable, or worse there
was no answer at all. The poor Duke watched helplessly as his wife slipped away
from him.
But after the idyll couldn't last. Jimmy was tired of having
to address the Duke in a courtly fashion, and Wallis had become too possessive.
Behind her back, Jimmy told friends, that on the pillow, her face looked like
an old sailor. There was also the matter of the Windsors treating Jimmy and his
mother like their own personal cash machine. The Windsors gave little in return
other than themselves. On Wallis' side, she began to realize that Jimmy was
limited intellectually. She was used to hobnobing with politicians,
ambassadors, and generals. Friends also warned her that her association with
Jimmy was ruining the couple's already tarnished reputation.
The end came while the trio were in Baden-Baden. Jimmy was
bored, the atmosphere in the spa town was too full for him. At dinner that
night, Wallis remarked that Jimmy reeked of garlic. Jimmy drunk after an
several pre-dinner cocktails saw red. He kicked Wallis in the shin hard enough
to bleed under the table. After tending to his wife, the Duke turned to Jimmy
and said, "We've had enough of you. Jimmy get out."
With those words four years of friendship went down the
tubes. Jessie Donahue was devastated, but the door was shut tightly in the
Donahues face. The cold front lasted for almost twelve years. Finally the
Windsors consented to attend a lunch with Jessie, and later visited Jimmy's
house on Long Island but there was no renewal of the special bond that had
existed. The relationship with Jimmy in the end brought the Duke and Duchess
closer together. In the end, the Duchess realized that she had made her bed and
seemed to finally settle into it.
Jimmy's life drifted on in a never ending quest to stave off
the boredom in his life, drifting from relationship to relationship until his
death in 1966.
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