Edward VIII, by Frances Donaldson (Lippincott, 440 pp., $15). With kings like Britain’s last Edward among us, monarchy needs no enemies. Lady Donaldson, as if to prove this, has recorded in detail his deterioration from enchanted prince to roué manqué to sad-faced clown (“the weary, wayward, wandering ghost” of the 1950s and ’60s). As Prince of Wales after World War I, Edward, though wan and languorous and far from virile, became a pop hero on both sides of the Atlantic and attained a cult popularity matching that of Valentino, Novarro, and Bill Tilden—nor was mass acclaim all he shared with those idols of long ago. The abdication crisis of 1936 bore out all too clamorously the forebodings of his father, the austere George V: “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.” And the boy did, in 11 months. The boy was 42. Then followed the puzzling marriage to an icy bride and a long flirtation with continental fascism (to the end of his life, the ex-king insisted that Hitler and Mussolini could have been Britain’s best friends). The end was a tiring but opulent pilgrimage across the decades from Paris to Palm Beach to New York to the Riviera, the humiliated Duke and his Duchess ambiguously hovering between café-society and the jet-set.
J. D. FUTCH
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