The dead, of course, cannot sue for libel. Christopher Wilson, an English journalist, exploits this immunity to the full. Here is a very unpleasant posthumous biography of three very unpleasant people that may make even the unpleasantest of readers feel superior. It should be read by normal readers, if read at all, as black comedy. Yet much of it is recognisably true.
It is a matter of verifiable fact that the late Jimmy Donahue, when he was in his 30s, spent several years in a close, triangular relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, when she was in her 50s.
Jimmy, the devil of the book's melodramatic title, was an Irish-American of Cork ancestry, whose father, Patrick Donahue, made a fortune running the Retail Butcher's Fat-Rendering Company of New York and gained access to a much greater fortune by marrying Jessie Woolworth, daughter of F. W. Woolworth, the five-and-dime chain-store multimillionaire. Jimmy's father, a bisexual, an alcoholic and a chronic gambler, was soon out of the way, having committed suicide, and his widow doted on Jimmy, her favourite son. He was free to live the life of an international playboy, with the means to subsidise the Windsors. They were social mercenaries, professional celebrity guests, who lived extravagantly but were reluctant to do so at their own expense.
Wilson chronicles the threesome's lavish gadding about in New York, Palm Beach and in chartered yachts in the Mediterranean. Like many gossip columnists, he seems to disapprove of the rich at play on the higher levels of lunacy, but his prose has the characteristic tabloid quality of drooling envy.
Money, according to Wilson, was not the only adhesive that kept Jimmy and the Windsors together. There was sexual interdependence of a deviant complexity that might have made Masters and Johnson blush. When Wilson gets to the soft core of his prurient thesis, he is obliged to cite that Deep Throat of tittle-tattle, the "unnamed source". From an anonymous fountainhead of questionable purity comes one of the book's key passages:
"It is doubtful whether he (the Duke) and Wallis (the Duchess) ever had sexual intercourse in the normal sense of the word. However, she did manage to give him relief. He had always been a repressed foot fetishist, and she discovered this and indulged the perversity completely. They also, at his request, became involved in elaborate erotic games. These included nanny-child scenes: he wore diapers, she was the master."
Wilson uses the word "master" advisedly, as he evidently believes Dr John Randall, consultant psychiatrist at the Charing Cross Hospital in London and "an expert in the differences between men and women". Quoted by Michael Bloch, the Duchess's biographer, Dr Randall is said to have said: "The Duchess was a man. There's no doubt of it, for I have heard the details from a colleague who examined her."
Another of Wilson's useful unnamed sources, a medical one, suggested that Dr Randall might have been "referring to a rare condition know as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In the case of AIS, a child is born genetically male with the male XY chromosome, but owing to the fact that the boy does not respond to the male sex hormone it develops as a female. When they reach maturity such women exude certain male characteristics and have unusually strident personalities. Such people cannot bear children and unless aided by surgery cannot experience sexual intercourse." So much for medical testimony explaining the Duchess's behaviour.
In spite of her mixed-up genes, the Duchess, Wilson writes, was, "it might be argued, the most admired woman in the world at the time". When she had a long-lasting affair with Jimmy Donahue, a bisexual attracted by older women, "in the history of love," in Wilson's opinion, "it was possibly the greatest betrayal of all time". She was able to gratify Jimmy, as she was what Woody Allen, in another context, called "a state-of-the-art fellatrix".
Disappointed romantics should remember that the Duke of Windsor may have been an impotent Nazi sympathiser but he bequeathed to the world a way to magnify the focal point of a four-in-hand necktie. He invented the Windsor Knot.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic.