Viva L'Amore!

Since their marriage the Duke & Duchess of Windsor have bathed and lolled on beaches, put in an appearance at the Salzburg Festival, made a tour of swank night-spots--all the fun of a carefree honeymoon.

Last week they were in Venice where on the fashionable Lido Beach they entertained the former Barbara Hutton, Woolworth heiress, and her husband Count Haugwitz-Reventlow.* At a loose end on the last night of their honeymoon the Duke & Duchess hopped into a motorboat, glided through tortuous canals up to the fac,ade of the stately Foscari Palace now converted into a school. Here in the open courtyard they had come to see Romeo & Juliet. As they entered--the Duke in a dinner jacket, his Duchess with sapphire earclips and a white evening gown--the audience jumped to their feet to roar Viva l'amore Viva l'amore! (Long live love!). At the end of the play Romeo bowed to the couple, threw up his hand in a Fascist salute. The crowd went wild with excitement. It was a typical demonstration of the popularity that greeted the Duke & Duchess wherever they went.

Back at their hotel they gave orders for their bags to be packed, set out next morning for Wasserloenburg Castle, Austria. They were looking forward to a rare treat, a visit from the Duke & Duchess of Kent who had been vacationing in Poland. This would be the first time that the ex-King had had a visit from a member of the Royal Family since his marriage.

When all was set for the Kents' reception, the Duke of Windsor received a telephone call from them announcing that they intended to postpone their visit, they were going to put in a day near Salzburg at the villa of Count Raimund von Hoffmannsthal and his wife, U. S. born Alice Muriel Astor. Rumor immediately went round that the Duchess of Kent, a former Princess of Greece who is "class-conscious" to a degree, and a bit snippy about being "the best dressed woman in the British Royal Family," had changed her mind about visiting her sister-in-law. From British sources in Vienna next day came no more definite news than that the Kents were "leaving for Yugoslavia and would visit the Windsors en route."

British newsorgans continued meantime to devote more & more space to the ex-King and his wife. The evening Star reported last week that the couple propose to devote their future to social work in England as soon as "calumnies and slander" have abated. A stanch little pro-Windsor party in Britain, who would like nothing better, regarded it as a favorable omen that the Duke last week sent $500 to a Leicestershire agricultural society for a new fair ground and the Duchess $25 to a fund for a new church school in Warfield, Berkshire, from which one of her ancestors sailed for the New World in 1662.

The British Government, however, still showed no signs of encouraging the prodigal's return. In a revised list of royal warrants giving merchants the right to say "By Appointment to His Royal Highness So-and-So" Windsor's name was left out, though those of his younger brothers, Kent and Gloucester were both included.

* At Harry's, most cosmopolitan bar and gossip-parlor in Venice, word was going round that "Prince" David, the last of the marrying Mdi-Vani's, had just become engaged to blonde Muriel ("Honey") Johnson of Bronxville, N. Y. The Countess Haugwitz Reventlow was once the wife of his brother "Prince" Alexis.

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