foundation, on the instructions of Suzanne Blum. The decision took the royal family and Wallis's friends by surprise, as she had shown little interest in charity during her life. In a Sotheby's auction in Geneva, in April 1987, Wallis's jewelry collection raised $45 million for the institute, approximately seven times its pre-sale estimate. Blum later claimed that Egyptian entrepreneur Mohamed Al-Fayed tried to purchase the jewels for a "rock bottom price". Al-Fayed bought much of the non-financial estate, including the lease of the Paris mansion. An auction of his collection was announced in July 1997 for later that year in New York. Delayed by his son's death in the car crash that also claimed the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, the sale raised more than £14 million for charity in 1998. Legacy Wallis was plagued by rumors of other lovers. The gay American Jimmy Donahue, an heir to the Woolworth fortune, said he had a liaison with her in the 1950s, but Donahue was notorious for his inventive pranks and rumor-mongering. Wallis's memoir The Heart Has Its Reasons was published in 1956, and biographer Charles Higham said that "facts were remorselessly rearranged in what amounted to a self-performed face-lift". He describes Wallis as "charismatic, electric and compulsively ambitious". Fictional depictions of the Duchess include the novel Famous Last Words (1981) by Canadian author Timothy Findley, which portrays her as a manipulative conspirator, and Rose Tremain's short story "The Darkness of Wallis Simpson" (2006), which depicts her more sympathetically in her final years of ill health. Hearsay and conjecture have clouded assessment of Wallis's life, not helped by her own manipulation of the truth. But, in the opinion of her biographers, there is no document that proves directly that she was anything other than a victim of her own ambition, who lived out a great romance that became a great tragedy. In the words of one, "she experienced the ultimate fairy tale, becoming the adored favorite of the most glamorous bachelor of his time. The idyll went wrong when, ignoring her pleas, he threw up his position to spend the rest of his life with her." Wallis herself is reported to have summed up her life in a sentence: "You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance." Titles and styles June 19, 1896 – November 8, 1916: Miss Bessie Wallis Warfield November 8, 1916