Customer Reviews

Dancing with the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

OK, so the author isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. But why should he? It's a book about an affair. A tawdry affair at that.

Initially, I payed attention to the other reviewers and didn't buy the book. But I have a fascination with Wallis and Edward (as vapid as they might have been...)and wanted to know more about Wallis' relationship with Jimmy Donohue. I must have read at least 10 to 15 books about the couple, and despite what the one of the reviewers said, I've only come across a few rare references to him. This book fills in the gaps.

So is it great literature? No. Is it an interesting book? Yes, if you like the subject matter, and know something about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to begin with. I enjoyed the book.

This book gives you a ringside seat into the lives of three famous people - The Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue. Author Christopher Wilson does a wonderful job of taking the reader into an era that will never be seen again. From the '30s through the '50s the rich lived their lives showing only what was appropriate for the public to see. Any questionable behavior was covered up by their wealth. Enter Jimmy Donahue. Here was a very rich, spoiled, irresponsible, homosexual mama's boy who used his personality and charm to accomplish anything he set his mind to. This included his attempt to be the obsession of both the Duke and Duchess. It wasn't a far cry to upset an already dysfunctional marriage but it was interesting to read the winding road to hell that Donahue lead them to. What's also very interesting is the bizarre relationship Wilson writes of between Donahue and his mother Jessie - very controlling and always covering up every scandal involvoing her son. This book is complete gossip but if that's your liking this book is for you. For all his shocking exploits, in the end, Jimmy Donahue ended up a mere unknown. A complete opposite of how hard he tried to stay in the public eye.

3Dancing With the Devil : The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue2 is a sweeping adventure of scandal and euphoria among glitzy cafe society, adeptly brought to life by biographer Christopher Wilson.

In this case, the name 3Donahue,2 is directly related to a very famous name: Woolworth. When 35 & 102 chainstore mogul Frank Winfield Woolworth died in 1919, he left as part of his substantial legacy great hopes for his cherubic grandchildren. He visualized his heirs evolving into hardworking, benefic, God-fearing, and rational adults. But alas, if he did happen to look down from the heavens years later, I know that several of his descendants would have provoked a disgruntled sigh; including the spendthrift, serial divorcee Barbara Hutton...

But the mischievous, downright extraordinary exploits of his grandson Jimmy Donahue would have sent Woolworth longing for Divine intervention. The fact is that, the only thing Frank Woolworth and his grandson Jimmy shared (other than a notable gene pool) was a compulsion for the spotlight.

That compulsion, along with a host of others (some advantageous, most unsavory) are unveiled in this wonderful, fast-paced book. In Dancing With the Devil, we meet dashing Jimmy Donahue, a man who had entirely too much free time on his hands, and entirely too much money at his disposal. We learn that Jimmy1s access to money, along with his excessive adoration for luxury, his psychological baggage (he even witnessed the suicide of his manic depressive and bisexual father) and the questionable role model Jimmy found in his jetsetting mother --all combined to create an intriguing, complex and colorful personality. Wilson depicts an international playboy who defied reigning sexual taboos and balked at authority, yet was sometimes ridden by deep guilt. Donahue exhibited such random amounts of innocent rakishness and sensual greed; of hearfelt generosity and rash wastefulness-- that even his closest contemporaries were not sure what to think of him.

Wilson expertly peppers his historical accounts with authentic detail, smoothly leading us into post WWII Paris, then sweeping us back to the United States to the playgrounds of Palm Beach and Long Island. Clearly, Wilson did a great deal of research on this book, conducting scores of interviews and tracking down hard to find information.

Of course, Wilson1s readers are also treated to little known details about the odd triangle between Jimmy Donahue and the Windsors, thus providing an interesting account of the last untold episode in their lives.

As in Jimmy Donahue1s life, there is nary a dull moment in Dancing With the Devil. (Do check out the 3Acknowledgments2 which reads like a Who1s Who in and of itself). Definitely recommended!

This book doesn't do much more than re-hash rumor, gossip and innuendo--and some facts--that I've already read in better-written, more thorough and scholarly biographies of the Windsors. I didn't notice any glaring inaccuracies; on the other hand, I didn't notice that the author broke any new ground. He seems to have relied heavily on previously published biographies of the Duke, the Duchess, and the British Royal Family in general, all of which a serious Windsorite will have already read. Also--let's face it--we read books like this one to be titillated, and the author fails utterly to titillate us. Save your money.

There is a riveting book to be written about the odd, multi-faceted triangle shared by Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Unfortunately, this book only skims the surface. Rarely do any of the players come to life. More examples of Donahue's supposed wit and cavalier charm, in lieu of his often grotesque pranks, would be welcome. The writing is prosaic and plodding. I often had the feeling the author was writing under the gun of an impending deadline -- there is a rushed quality to much of the book. Still, worth reading if you're fascinated, as I am, about the Windsors, a fascinating era, and great wealth and opportunity squandered.

I read all the reviews of this when it came out a few years ago, and am only mildly disappointed to find that the full copy (obtained at The Strand: hard cover, last copy) tells me nothing new other than that Jimmy Donahue didn't much apply himself at Choate.

This is biography lite, highly entertaining, scantily referenced and hence easy to capsule into a 500-word review. Not a great book or a good book, but a fun book. The sort of book you or I could write over a long weekend simply by Googling a few names and following sources referenced in Wikipedia. In fact, I suspect that is how Christopher Wilson wrote it. He's not big on apparatus. There is a bibliography, true, but it consists mostly of books by names on the order of Charles Higham (you know, the guy who claimed Errol Flynn was both homosexual AND a Nazi spy!). Almost no footnotes, of course. Wilson has a slim grasp on history altogether. He thinks King Charles II was executed (he wasn't). He passes on, as accepted fact, the posthumous tale about how Cardinal Spellman of New York was a notorious homosexual and cruised for new partners to "deflower" after the noon Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. On one page Wilson tells you that the Duchess of Windsor underwent a hysterectomy, on the next he relates the old camp rumor that she was a genetic male with AIS; apparently he doesn't know enough to note a contradiction.

The book seems to have originated in an earlier biography of Barbara Hutton, Jimmy's first cousin and fellow heir to the F. W. Woolworth fortune. There was almost as much information about Jimmy in that book as there is here. The juiciest bit, which Wilson repeats and expands upon before discrediting, is about the sailor whom Jimmy picked up at Cerutti's in 1945. During a drunken party, someone decided to shave the sailor's body hair and accidentally emasculated him. The Woolworth millions hushed up the story. That is the tale as related by that reliable source Truman Capote. Of course it is not true. (It wasn't a sailor, it was a salesman. Sailor, salesman, what's the difference? Oh, and he may have had a bite out of his ear. But $200,000 was the Woolworth payoff, according to Wilson, and the salesman never had to work again.)

Wilson does not have much of a handle on the exact relationship between Donahue and the Duchess, but speculates there was some sort of emotional bonding and maybe some oral sex. He spends many pages speculating why this may have been so. In addition, Donahue and his mother gave the Windsors a lot of money, and that no doubt lubricated the friendship. But then Jimmy was generous with the New York Foundling Hospital and other charitable enterprises as well, so the Windsors weren't the only beneficiaries of this degenerate scamp. Possibly Jimmy just felt sorry for the abandoned and downtrodden.

Good guy, Jimmy. Deserves a decent biography.

But, the story is so tawdry & Jimmy Donahue so scurvy, it's a hard read. The author presents information about his upbringing that tries to make you feel a little sympathy for Donahue but it's hard to feel sympathy for such a loser. The Duke & Duchess of Windsor were wastes of human beings, too. The more you read about them the more discouraged you get. What wasted opportunities! They could have done so much good but were such selfish, self-centered & STUPID people. No wonder the Royal Family can't stand to hear their names mentioned. The book reads kind of like a prolonged Dominick Dunne article in Vanity Fair.

You'd think an author couldn't go wrong with this cast of characters, ultra chic jet set locations, and deliciously lewd sex play. But Christopher Wilson took all this potential and and threw it away with the writing style of a schoolboy whose book report was carelessly dashed off before class. Repetitive adjectives, lackluster prose, and unintelligible chapter beginnings and ends - I was hollering for the editor the entire read. I kept saying aloud "OK, that's a start, but now let's unearth some real dish, and show me the proof!" Gossip CAN be transformed into history with proper scholarship. This promising biography of three fascinatingly spoiled and twisted people disappointed me.