The Duke of Windsor always remained deeply in love with the woman for whom he had given up his throne. She hurt him deeply by taking a lover in the 1950s. Alistair Lexden referred briefly to the strange romance in a letter published in the TLS: The Times Literary Supplement on January 13 2017.
Sir, In her unrelentingly venomous review of Mary Lovell’s The Riviera Set (January 6), Lisa Hilton professes disdainful indifference “to the question of whether or not the Duchess [of Windsor] had an affair with a certain Jimmy Donohue” (Donahue is the correct spelling). There is no question about it. The former king’s adored wife had a four-year sexual relationship with this gay wastrel scion of the Woolworth family. The full story is told in Christopher Wilson’s book, Dancing with the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue (2000). The worthless Donahue did one fine thing in his life: he pissed profusely from a hotel balcony in Rome on a fascist crowd celebrating Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1935.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords