in twentieth-century Canadian history," for they explain motivations of the Canadian war efforts and describe other events in detail. King's occult interests were kept secret during his years in office, and only became publicized after his death when his diaries were opened. Readers were amazed and for some, King was saddled with the moniker "Weird Willie." King communed with spirits, using seances with paid mediums. Thereby, he claimed to have communicated with Leonardo da Vinci, Wilfrid Laurier, his dead mother, his grandfather, and several of his dead dogs, as well as the spirit of the late President Roosevelt. Some historians argue that he sought personal reassurance from the spirit world, more than political advice. After his death, one of his mediums said that she had not realized that he was a politician. King did inquire whether his party would win the 1935 election, one of the few times politics came up during his seances. However Allan Levine argues that sometimes he did pay attention to the political implications of his seances: "All of his spiritualist experiences, his other superstitions and his multi-paranoid reactions imprinted on his consciousness, shaping his thoughts and feelings in a thousand different ways." Historians have seen in his spiritualism and occult activities a penchant for forging unities from antitheses, thus having latent political import. Historian C.P. Stacey, in his 1976 book A Very Double Life examined King's secret life in detail, argued that King did not allow his beliefs to influence his decisions on political matters. Stacey wrote that King entirely gave up his interests in the occult and spiritualism during World War II. King never married, but had several close female friends, including Joan Patteson, a married woman with whom he spent some of his leisure time; sometimes she served as hostess at his dinner parties. He did not have a wife who could be the hostess all the time and handle the many social obligations that he tried to downplay. Editor Charles Bowman reports that, "He felt the lack of a wife, particularly when social duties called for a hostess." Some historians have interpreted passages in his diaries as suggesting that King regularly had sexual relations with prostitutes. Others, also basing their claims on passages of his diaries, have suggested that King was in love with Lord Tweedsmuir, whom he had chosen for appointment as Governor General in 1935. Legacy Historian George Stanley argues