Fifteen years after King Edward VIII gave up the British crown to wed divorcee Wallis Simpson, his bride was ready to dump him for a gay playboy, a new book claims.
“Had the divorce occurred, as it so nearly did, it would have been the greatest betrayal in the history of love,” author Christopher Wilson says in “Dancing with the Devil,” published by HarperCollins.
The book chronicles the Duchess of Windsor’s passion for millionaire party boy Jimmy Donahue, heir to the Woolworth fortune.
“Some say it was sex – forbidden, heady sex – which drew the duchess to Jimmy. For four years … up until the summer of 1954, [they] were besotted with each other,” Wilson says.
“He provided the release she had failed to discover in her conjugal life with the buttoned-up and inadequate duke. However, it was not just sex that seduced her – it was the money.”
In December 1936, Edward stunned the world by giving up the throne to wed the twice-divorced Simpson – but a decade later she found herself enamored with the free-spending Donahue.
Because he was gay, it was long assumed Donahue’s relationship with Simpson was platonic. But Wilson says new evidence from friends and family shows they were intimate.
The couple met in Palm Beach at Donahue’s mother’s home and later consummated their love on the Queen Mary, which set sail from New York to France in May 1950, according to Wilson.
They continued the affair “in the black-silk-lined rooms of a French aristocrat’s apartment overlooking the Seine,” he says.
The duke knew about it, but doggedly stuck by his wife as she and Donahue bounced around Paris and New York nightclubs.
“Most times, the ex-king would be sent home and the duchess and her lover would retire to bed elsewhere,” Wilson says.
He adds that the duke looked the other way because Donahue showered him with expensive gifts and always paid all the bills.
The relationship ultimately fizzled.
Donahue died in 1967, the duke in 1972 and the duchess in 1986.