PRINCE GEORGE, DUKE OF KENT [George Edward Alexander Edmund] died in this date (b: 12/20/02): The Duke was a member of the British royal family, the fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary. He was a younger brother of kings Edward VIII and George VI. Prince George served in the Royal Navy in the 1920s and then briefly as a civil servant. At the time of his birth, he was fifth in the line of succession to the throne, behind his father and three older brothers. He became Duke of Kent in 1934.

In the late 1930s he served as an RAF officer, initially as a staff officer at RAF Training Command and then, from July 1941, as a staff officer in the Welfare Section of the RAF Inspector General’s Staff. He was killed in the Dunbeath air crash in August 1942.

There were always rumors that he had affairs with both women and men. He was paired with musical star Jessie Matthews, writer Cecil Roberts, and Noël Coward, a relationship which Coward’s long-term partner, Graham Payn, denied. Ineffectively.

There were persistent rumors that George had a 19-year affair with Noël Coward. The British security services  allegedly reported that Coward and George were seen parading the streets in London in drag and had once been arrested by police for suspected prostitution. Love letters from George to Coward were believed to have been stolen from Coward’s house in 1942, and another clutch of letters had to be bought back from a male prostitute in Paris who was blackmailing him. Additional gossip suggested that George dallied with his distant cousin Prince of Prussia Louis Ferdinand and with art historian and, later, Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

George was also rumored to have been addicted to drugs, especially morphine and cocaine, an allegation which reputedly originated from his friendship with Kiki Preston (née Alice Gwynne, 1898–1946), whom he first met in the mid-1920s. Known as “the girl with the silver syringe” due to her addiction to heroin, Preston – a cousin of railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt – was married first to Horace R. B. Allen and then, in 1925, to banker Jerome Preston. She died after jumping out of a window of the Stanhope Hotel in New York City.

His other alleged sexual liaisons include a ménage à trois with Preston and José Uriburu, bisexual son of Argentine ambassador to the UK José Uriburu Tezanos.

In addition to his legitimate children, he was said to have had a son by Kiki Preston. According to the memoirs of a friend, Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, Prince George’s brother, the Duke of Windsor, believed that the son was Michael Temple Canfield (1926–1969), the adopted son of American publisher Cass Canfield – and the first husband of Lee Radziwill, sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.