In this stinking rich, and utterly futile, world of playboys and wastrels, no one was more charming, better connected, and apparently more talented than the captivatingly youthful figure of Jimmy Donahue. After much sleuthing Wilson shows that once Wallis Simpson failed to get her hands on the crown, she became more interested in the seedy by-ways of Anglo-American demi-monde. In the Bahamas, where he found some comfort, it was said he 'used to be First Lord of the Admiralty, but now he's third mate on an American tramp'. It's well known that royalty attracts a dismal, often homosexual, cast of toadies, timeservers, creeps, and arse-lickers, but the Windsors' court-in-exile was, as Christopher Wilson expertly demonstrates in this gruesomely fascinating tale, one of the queerest and nastiest entourages in recent memory. When she appeared on television, the Duke would yodel: 'Here comes the Blimp', while the Duchess, not to be outdone, described her nemesis as 'that 14-carat beauty' and 'the monster of Glamis'. According to this spicy rendering of one of the many sad, shameful footnotes in the life of former king Edward VII, the Windsors routinely referred to her as 'that fat Scotch cook' and 'the Loch Ness monster'.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |