[ad_1]
A renegade British prince, who renounced his royal life for an American divorcée, is releasing a tell-all autobiography. The palace nervously awaits. A place on the best-seller list is almost a certainty. “Though it has proved my fate to sacrifice my cherished British heritage along with all the years in its service,” the author writes. “I today draw comfort from the knowledge that time has long since sanctified a true and faithful union.”
Sound familiar? But this isn’t the story of Prince Harry, whose highly anticipated memoir, Spare, ghostwritten by journalist J.R. Moehringer, hits shelves January 10, 2023. Instead, the year is 1951, and Harry’s great-grand uncle, the Duke of Windsor, is ready to tell his version of the events that led him to abdicate the throne in 1936 to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson.
The book’s title: A King’s Story.
According to the Duke of Windsor’s ghostwriter Charles J.V. Murphy, in 1947 the Duke of Windsor was feeling forgotten. “To arrest this process, to restore the luster of his reputation, to assure that his side of the story was presented fairly, and to regain some measure of his self-respect, he decided to write an apologia, although it would be disguised as his autobiography,” Murphy and his cowriter J. Bryan III write in the 1979 tell-all The Windsor Story.
Like Harry, the Duke of Windsor chose an American journalist to help him. Murphy was a former Washington bureau chief for Fortune magazine, who also wrote for Time and Life. The two started working on the memoir in 1947, though Murphy was hampered by the duke’s poor attention span, which he estimated was about two and a half minutes. The Windsors’ nightclubbing-Parisian lifestyle didn’t help either. “Murphy became increasingly disheartened to see how much time the Duke devoted to idleness and frivolity,” he writes in The Windsor Story, “and how little he could find for his autobiography.”
But according to Murphy, a bigger obstacle appeared in the form of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, who voiced “her jealousy of the Duke’s absorption in a golden past which she had never known.”
He writes in The Windsor Story:
It began to display itself in constant interruptions…A dozen times a day she would telephone to the Duke in his workroom, reminding him of a dinner party that evening, or asking him to fetch her a letter from his files, or ordering him to attend at once to some trifling household matter…With a ‘Yes, darling!’ he would leap to his feet, glad of the excuse to break off, and would sprint away on her errand.
In her own autobiography, 1956’s The Heart Has Its Reasons, the duchess admitted she found her husband’s new job frustrating. “When David started his book some years ago, I found it difficult to understand how he could spend so much time staring at a blank sheet of paper,” she writes. “I had often been a golf widow; this was my first experience being a literary one.
According to Murphy, as deadlines from publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons came and went, the duchess began to feel more and more neglected. The Windsor Story posits that it helped drive her into the arms of the dissolute, outrageous Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, with whom the duchess began a bizarre relationship in the summer of 1950. While the duke stayed in France to finish the book, the duchess took off for NYC, cavorting with Donahue and ignoring her husband’s calls. The duke was beside himself, and soon took off for New York, telling Murphy that he must be with the duchess since it looked like a war in Korea was on the horizon.
[ad_2]