Three Notes on an Ill-Spent Life

The Dook and his Duchess arrive in Manhattan, October 22, 1941.  If there was a war on, you wouldn't know it...

On The Avenue...

On this date in 1951, the inconveniently Midtown course of the ticker-tape parade in honor Gen. MacArthur forces a couple of unlikely pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the street.  He looks rather put out, but isn't she reveling in the unexpected attention?  a one-woman parade all on her own, really.  Looks to be this close to just centering herself in the middle of the Avenue and starting to wave.

Funny, isn't it, how ever more difficult it gets, as time passes, to credit that theirs was considered a Great Romance?  Here they look more like they've hardly been introduced, and wouldn't have much in common (taste in overcoats aside) once they were...

The Waxworks

By the early fifties, they started to look like they'd saved on embalming by starting early.

It's strange. I find these two weirdly interesting. Even though the more I learn about the hapless Prince Edward and his ... singular ... choice of One True Love, the more I despise the pair of them, nonetheless there is something about their aimless, vacuous, suffocating life that fascinates.

The long, strange road traveled by Bessiewallis Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor is something that requires a Thackeray or a James to do her justice, although the more lurid details of her varied life (just what did she learn in those Chinese brothels? What was the attraction to her of the bizarrely effete Woolworth heir?) might better be covered by Mickey Spillane or Truman Capote.

The excuses used by their admirers - they were stylish, they were misunderstood, they were the victims of his rapacious family - ring increasingly hollow as they fade into history. What we're left with are images like this: a pair of dazed puppets, stiff and vaguely accusatory, oblivious to their luxe surroundings and even to the pugs at their feet. I wonder if she ever wished she'd stayed in China?

Wally and Windsor

Time is cruel.

(Is is just me, or does the Duke look startlingly like Princess Margaret in her sad last years?)

Evocative Images

So we come strolling up the street to the house today - a rather gray, rainy sort of July day in Provincetown - and see Gracie the Upstairs Corgi hanging out in one of her upstairs windows.



I know a photo-op when I see one, and grab a shot. Later, I sit staring at the picture, and think to myself: "Why does this remind me of something? What is it?"

And then I realize. Gracie, unknowingly - I presume - has taken on one of the iconic images of the 1970s: The Duchess of Windsor, in the first stages of the dementia that would eventually claim her entirely, watching the funeral procession of her husband from a window in St. James Palace.


And then I thought: perhaps it's time to leave Provincetown. I am turning way too much of Teh Gay.