The Duchess of Windsor, A Guy Thing
by Maggie Van Ostrand
Was the Duchess of Windsor really a he? Should she have instead been called the Dude of Windsor?
If you're from the old school, the one where women and men try to figure one another out and call it The Battle of the Sexes, then we're on the same page in the book of life. But there are other pages in that book.
Members of "different" sexes are rushing out of the closet faster than Paul Newman's popcorn can pop. Those who saw "Transamerica," the Oscar-nominated story of a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual, are now looking at every woman they meet like Felicity Huffman may be in there somewhere. Huffman's character was a man who was really a woman in every way except physical and eventually had the surgery to make womanhood official. If science is to be believed, it's a matter of chromosomes. Take for instance the Duchess of Windsor.
Wallis Simpson had androgen insensitivity syndrome, a hormonal irregularity that causes a genetically male body to develop as a woman, although without fully developed sex organs.
The love affair of the 20th century has long been thought to have occurred when the King of England gave up his throne for "the woman I love," twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. The world may have been wrong all these years, according to Christopher Wilson's book, "Dancing With the Devil." Wilson claims that the love affair of the 20th century was not between Edward the King and Wallis Simpson, later the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but between the Duchess of Windsor and the gay charismatic millionaire socialite, Jimmy Donahue.
Wilson writes that people would rather believe in the myth of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as the 20th-century's greatest love affair, than acknowledge her love affair with Donahue. Both the Duke and the Duchess were originally attracted to Jimmy Donahue because of his connection with the Woolworth fortune (he was F.W. Woolworth's grandson); Donahue's mother, impressed with Jimmy's connections to "royalty," put her multi-million-dollar inheritance at the disposal of the Windsors, who liberally availed themselves of her generosity.
Donahue's money and considerable charm broke through Wallis Windsor's famous iron discipline and steely will power. Donahue, who was also first cousin to Barbara Hutton, heiress to both Woolworth and E.F. Hutton fortunes, was a known homosexual, so it was both mysterious and fascinating to Windsor historians that he formed a sexual relationship with the Duchess.
Jimmy Donahue displayed his homosexuality in public long before the world became "enlightened" and came to accept such sexual behavior. Yet 34-year-old Donahue managed to make the Duchess feel sexually attractive at the post-menopausal age of 54.
Wilson writes, "Dr. John Randall, consultant psychiatrist at the Charing Cross Hospital in London and an expert in the differences btween men and women, told one of the Duchess's biographers, Michael Block, 'I want to tell you something extraordinary about her, to keep at the back of your mind. The Duchess was a man. There's no doubt of it, for I've heard the details from a colleague who examined her. She was a man.'"
It was suggested by a colleague of Dr. Randall's, that what he referred to was "a rare condition known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrom (AIS) where a child is born genetically male with the male XY chromosome. However, the body does not respond to the male sex hormone, and develops as a female. When they reach maturity, such women exude certain male characteristics and can have unusually strident personalities; they cannot bear children and, unless aided by surgery, cannot experience sexual intercourse."
Wilson theorizes that, though Donahue was a practicing and promiscuous homosexual, the magnet that drew him to the Duchess was non-penetrative oral sex. "... for the time it held them together, its effect on both parties was electric."
For over four years in the 1950s, the Duchess and Jimmy were a couple. Once, the Duchess ran away with him for three weeks, during which time, Wilson writes, "... the Duke became suicidal at the thought of losing her." Referring to Donahue, Wilson writes, "Jimmy's homosexuality convinced the world's press that there was no affair, despite the couple's obvious closeness."
The beginning of the Duchess's love affair with Jimmy Donahue took place on the high seas on appropriately, The Queen Mary. "When they got on board they were friends. By the time they disembarked, they were lovers," stated a Windsor intimate in Wilson's book. At a fancy dress ball a few days later in Paris, the Duke left at midnight, while Donahue and the Duchess were two of the last guests to leave. At another Paris ball thrown by Barbara Hutton a week later, the Duke retired early again, while Donahue and the Duchess danced till dawn.
The Duke was "almost as taken with Donahue as Wallis was ... " partly because Jimmy paid the restaurant bills and partly because Jimmy was able to help Wallis cheer the Duke up. The Duke was becoming more difficult, having been rebuffed by both Downing Street and Buckingham Palace -- they were not among the 2,200 guests invited to the future Queen's wedding to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.
Writer Charles Murphy, hired to ghost the Duke's memoirs, "A King's Story," was in Paris at the time and wrote, "... If [the Duchess and Donahue] did not happen to be seated side by side, they wrote notes to each other and passed them behind the intervening chairs and each's languishing glance seldom left the other's face."
"When Jimmy's affair with the Duchess of Windsor became known among their circle -- and, once it took hold, neither was in the mood to hide it -- several people admitted to having introduced them; for to have triggered this most extraordinary of marital deceptions was to lay claim to a piece of history," writes Wilson. Reports outside of their immediate circle, were suppressed. One member of their inner circle, however, saw no need to keep the affair quiet.
Broadway superstar, Ethel Merman, was a friend of the Windsors and said this about the trio in her autobiography: "Jimmy would give the Duchess beautiful jewels, and the little Duke just closed his eyes to everything. [At famed nightclub El Morocco] the Duchess was dancing with Jimmy and everyone else except the Duke. This is a pretty strange story, but Jimmy told it to me himself. I'm not making it up. One night while he was going with the Duchess they got to bickering. Jimmy had been drinking and she'd had her fill of Scotch. The little Duke had gone to bed. Jimmy and the Duchess got into a big fight, yelling and screaming and trading insults. Finally she looked at him and said, "And to think I gave up a king for a queen."
At least she had a sense of humor.
Meanwhile, according to Wilson, the Duke "bleakly, tenaciously, clung on to his wife, perplexed by her closeness to this patently homosexual figure." But Donahue had access to a great deal of money, while all the Duke had was an obsession. An intimate of the couple said, "Quite simply he could not live without her, he was a hundred per cent dependent... He was forced to accept life on her terms -- whatever she wanted, he would put up with. And that included Jimmy."
Donahue encouraged his cousin, Barbara Hutton, to support his most expensive habit: the Duchess. Wilson quotes Philip van Renssalaer as saying "Barbara loved it, she loved the whole clandestine thing. She used to give Jimmy money for the Duchess's presents. She paid out anything up to half a million dollars -- the Duchess was really greedy."
Flaunting the affair outside of their immediate circle was a danger the Duchess did not continue to resist. When an invitation was sent to the Duke and Duchess, the Duchess playfully responded, "Can my naughty boy come too?"
While the Duke was in England for a month attending the funeral of his mother, Queen Mary, the Duchess and Donahue were free to play in New York, since the Duchess was unwelcome in British Royal circles, and never forgiven for her transgressions against the Empire.
As they were leaving El Morocco after an evening of drinking and dancing, Donahue was overheard by the maître d' describing in detail the physical pleasures which awaited him when he and the Duchess arrived back at his apartment. His remarks are simply too graphic to be repeated here.
After the Duke's return, he and the Duchess and the ever-present Jimmy Donahue departed on one of their frequent cruises, this one paid for as usual by Donahue's mother.
The affair finally ran its course, largely due to boredom on the part of Jimmy Donahue, and a surprisingly violent kick on the shin he gave the Duchess under the dinner table in Baden-Baden one evening. At long last, the Duke had a polite and societally valid reason to request that Jimmy Donahue leave their company, not to be seen again.
The Duchess allegedly once said, "No man is allowed to touch me below the Mason-Dixon line." For four years and three months, Jimmy Donahue broke that rule. Was the affair in bad taste? Or just a guy thing.
--
|
