Truman's Swans

"Never explain, never complain" The Duchess of Windsor

  A 20-year-old John F. Kennedy shares a laugh with socialite Miss Lillian Feitner at the Club Madrid in Palm Beach, Florida, February 6, 1937 Photographed by Bert Morgan

Let me tell you something about money. About real money. The kind that doesn't keep a tally of itself and the curious effect it has on daughters. It makes them luminous. It makes them reckless. It makes them, in the particular case of Stavros Livanos, into two of the most coveted women in the world, both of whom would be married to the same man. Not simultaneously, naturally. Though with that set, one never entirely rules it out. Stavros Livanos. THE Stavros Livanos, to be precise. Patriarch, shipping magnate, Greek national monument in a suit who built one of the great maritime fortunes of the twentieth century in the quiet and unremarkable way that very rich Greeks tend to accumulate such things: methodically, and with a genius for being underestimated. His tankers crossed every ocean worth crossing. His money sat in every bank worth trusting. And his daughters, well, his daughters were another kind of fleet entirely. There were two of them, Eugenia and Tina, born in the 1920s in...

"Regrets? I think everyone has regrets, and people who say they haven’t are either liars . . . or narcissists. There have been many things in my life to have regrets about, in the sense I wish I could have changed them, or somehow made them not happen. What I don’t have is envy." Lee Radziwill

  Slim Keith with Jimmy Stewart At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City 1948

The Duke and Duchess on the front steps of the 'Villa Windsor' Darlings, come closer… If walls could talk, these would ask for a cigarette and a lawyer. This is Villa Windsor. A house where one King Edward, formerly His Majesty, though one hates to be crude about it, came to evaporate. Once upon a very improper time, a king decided that ruling an empire was far less interesting than chasing an American divorcée who treated him like a particularly needy lapdog. So Edward VIII did the unthinkable. He dropped the crown like yesterday’s lover and followed Wallis Simpson to Paris, where they lived out their exile in silk robes, surrounded by bad art, worse guests, and whispers that never stopped. Tragic, truly. Of course, Europe collectively wondered whether ‘that woman’ had finally gone too far. Because Wallis Simpson did not just love Edward. She had curated him with a precision that only someone as controlled as Wallis could. She adored his devotion because it was total, public, ...