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What Gentlemen Don't Do. Doris Duke Cromwell's behavior, her husband charged, was the chief cause of his humiliating defeat when he ran for U.S. Senator from New Jersey in 1940. During the summer, Mrs. Cromwell had been ill at Shangrila, her lush Hawaiian estate with an orchid-hung solarium and a $20,000 hydraulically elevated diving board. When Mrs. Cromwell's secretary learned that Politician Cromwell planned to rush to his wife's bedside, she telephoned from Hawaii to warn him that he would not be welcome —that he would, in fact, be locked out. "I don't care if she wants me to come or not,' Jimmy cried, "I'll come even if it's only for the sake of public appearance. Doesn't she know that I'm about to enter a political campaign? Doesn't she realize what the women of New Jersey will think? They'll think that I'm brutal."
When Doris later brought up the subject of divorce, Jimmy said: "You know you have no grounds. It is I who have suffered the onus of cruelty after you wrecked my political campaign...." Then, he charged, Mrs. Cromwell confessed adultery by proposing that he divorce her in New Jersey "because you have sufficient grounds." In cold, virtuous tones, Jimmy said he replied: "Gentlemen don't divorce their wives in this country."
At week's end, Doris Duke Cromwell appeared undisturbed by the fact that her divorce is good in Nevada, no good in New Jersey, questionable in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Manhattan gossip columnists reported that she had joined the United Seamen's Service, was training as a hostess, might be assigned to duty overseas.