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
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.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1951, the year after she started her affair with Jimmy Donahue
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.
Jimmy Donahue with the Duchess at a nightclub in New York
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.
Wallis with the Duke at a fancy dress party in America in the 1950s
The Cartier tiger brooch the Duke gave his wife after the affair
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.
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