by Diana Mosley
The many people who saw him during these post-war years, particularly those who knew him well, never found him in the least sad. He may not (as the Duchess obviously did) have preferred Paris to London, but it made very little difference because the two cities are now so close that all his old friends came frequently, some of them almost too frequently. As to the Windsors’ American friends, they saw them in New York and Palm Beach and they came over to Paris in droves at certain seasons of the year. The problem was not too few friends but too many.
They considered buying La Croë, which was now for sale. They went back there and found that the Italian soldiers had looted very little, but the South of France had changed and did not attract them as formerly. It had the disadvantage of being far from Paris, too far to go for a day or two, as the Duchess refused to fly.
Like Sydney Smith, she had no relish for the country, ‘a kind of healthy grave’, as he called it. But the Windsors still thought of getting a house in the sun. There was an idea they might build at Marbella in Spain, and the Duchess wanted her old friend from Peking days, Georges Sebastian, now famous for his skill and taste, to design a villa. It came to nothing; they needed to be near Paris and to have three houses was beyond their means. There is pretty country within reach of Paris, and that she could relish up to a point, while the Duke could make a garden.
The Duke with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill at Antibes after the war.
The Duke and Duchess at Portofino, one of their favourite holiday resorts.
In the early fifties she found an old mill, the Moulin de la Tuilerie, in the Vallée de Chevreuse, twenty-five miles from Paris. (It is near the village of Gif-sur-Yvette, then a pretty place, now unimaginably hideous with blocks of appalling flats.) It belonged to the painter Drian, and he was willing to sell. A small seventeenth-century house on a rushing mill stream, it had a cobbled courtyard and there were out-houses and a large barn. All this the Duchess transformed into bedrooms and bathrooms and drawing rooms and dining rooms, some big and some minute. Like many royal personages the Duke loved small, cosy, snug rooms. (This has always been so, as witness the petits apartements in the Château de Versailles.) If there was a big luncheon party two round tables were put in the former barn, now a large and cheerful room, one presided over by her and the other by him. Dinner was usually in the dining room of the main house, and the Duke wore his kilt in the evening. If they were alone or with one or two guests they lunched in an outdoor loggia facing the garden in summer.
Helped by Mr Russell Page the Duke made an English garden, with two herbaceous borders and a lawn between leading down to the Mérantaise, a swiftly running stream. There was a small steep hill beyond with trees, and the Duke piped water to the top so that it splashed down among the rocks and alpine plants. He called it Cardiac Hill because people with weak hearts refused to climb up it for a view of the garden. There was a walled kitchen garden and glass houses for flowers in winter; the Duchess’ rooms were always full of flowers. The head gardener was Alsatian; the Duke was not fluent in French and he could talk to this gardener in German.
Both of the Windsors loved the Mill, the first house that had belonged to them in all their married life. She enjoyed choosing furniture and colours and stuffs for the rooms and he enjoyed making his garden. It only took forty minutes to drive down from their Paris home and he went there often in the afternoon to work in the garden. At weekends they had friends staying and people came in for luncheon or dinner. It was the prettiest, most cheerful place imaginable, with crackling wood fires in winter and in summer the bright flowers.
Guests invited to dine at the Mill in winter drove down a short drive to gates, where the gate-keeper peered through the dark at the car to be sure it was in order for it to enter the precincts, then across a cobbled yard to the house. The front door opened at once, a footman was posted there to keep a look out so that not a second was lost. The front door led straight into the hall, where the Duke and Duchess with the other guests were gathered round a fire with huge glowing logs burning on the wide hearth. The men were in dinner jackets, the women in evening dress, but the Duke wore his Stuart tartan kilt. The Windsors both had the gift of making their guests feel as welcome as if their arrival had been long looked forward to. A variety of cocktails and whisky were offered round and hot savouries in silver dishes, everyone standing or sitting near the fire. After about twenty minutes, soon after nine, dinner was announced to the Duchess and she led the women into the dining room next door, then the Duke made the men go in before him. The table was very pretty and gay with many candles and flowers (the really beautiful things were in Paris; at the Mill countrified simplicity was the note).
The Moulin de la Tuilerie in the Vallée de Chevreuse, with part of the Duke’s garden in the foreground.
The Duke and Duchess at the Mill. The Duke wore his Stuart tartan kilt in the evening.
Sidney, the footman, with some of the pugs at the Windsors’ Paris house.
If there were eight people or less, the conversation was general. There was an atmosphere of great gaiety and amusement, while all the topics of the day were discussed. The Duke loved talking politics and both he and the Duchess, as devoted readers of newspapers and magazines, were well-informed about French, English and American affairs. There was a certain amount of gossip about mutual friends, and here the Duchess succeeded in being amusing without being spiteful, which is not always as easy as it sounds.
A typical dinner might be filets of barbue in a rich sauce, plain roast partridges with salad, an iced pudding and a savoury. The Duke liked the old English custom of a savoury at the end of dinner with which to drink port. It is unknown in France; the French say ‘it is impossible to eat scrambled eggs after chocolate ice.’ But the Duchess’ savouries half conquered her French guests; nobody refused them. The wines were well chosen to go with the food, a Rhine wine with the fish, an old claret with the game and a sauterne with the pudding. Another English custom always observed by the Windsors was that when the women left the dining room the Duke stayed behind with the other men.
The Duchess led the way up a tiny staircase, along a passage past her bedroom, and there, unexpectedly, was an enormous drawing room, formerly a loft. It had French windows leading to the garden; so hilly was the terrain that the Mill had these two levels, part of its charm. In winter the curtains were drawn, and a fire with giant logs would be burning. The predominant colours in this cheerful room were pink and apricot, the bright soft light was becoming, so that women were happy to feel they were looking their best.
After about half an hour the Duke reappeared, a large cigar in his hand, with his men guests. So also did the footmen, offering champagne and whisky. There was more talk and more jokes, and at about half past twelve it was time to go. The Duchess said goodbye, the Duke insisted on accompanying the guests downstairs. The butler appeared with coats and the door was opened to let in a blast of freezing air. Implored by the guests to go back upstairs where it was warm, the Duke in his kilt, with bare knees, insisted on standing outside until the car moved off.
The Duchess now made a real effort to learn French. She asked Walter Lees, an English friend living in Paris, to find her a teacher. ‘I would prefer a woman. I feel I can’t go on making such foolish mistakes,’ she wrote to him. The Duke contented himself with German and Spanish; he was pleased when visitors from Spain or from South America enabled him to air his Spanish.
James Pope-Hennessy says in his biography of Queen Mary that although she spent her life collecting she never bought a good picture. The same could be said of her daughter-in-law. The Paris house in particular became more and more royal, with incredible numbers of ornaments and knick-knacks. There was a whole table covered with Meissen pugs of all sizes.
The cairn terriers had long since been replaced by pugs, which snuffled and leaned heavily against the legs of the guests as pugs will. They were not allowed to get fat and the Duchess rationed them, so they were overjoyed when the footman, Si
dney, appeared to take them off for their dinner. They were loved and cherished by the Duke as well as the Duchess, but he dreaded her finding out about a pug show for fear that she might buy several more.
In August the Windsors usually went to an hotel at Biarritz with the Dudleys. Grace Lady Dudley says she was ‘very fond’ of the Duchess, so ‘quick, intuitive and generous’,22 and that the Duke and Lord Dudley had a wonderful time remembering the past. They played golf and went swimming: there were plenty of friends in the neighbourhood.
Sometimes they went to Venice where they also found many friends. During those years Carlos de Beistegui spent the summers at his Palazzo Labia, a gloriously beautiful palace. The big high room with Tiepolo frescoes of Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the loveliest in all Venice; Charlie Beistegui hung eight Venetian glass chandeliers, four high up and four lower, and kept the room practically empty—there were many other drawing-rooms where guests could sit. One day he asked the Duchess whether there was anything in particular she would care to see in Venice, because if so he could fetch her in his gondola. The answer was unexpected. ‘Oh yes, I should love to see Countess Laroche’s house,’ she replied. Charlie Beistegui told the author: ‘Of course we all love her—but her house is hideous. However, the Duchess didn’t think so, she told me after we had tea there it was her dream house.’ The truth is that she preferred something up-to-date, bright and smart to real beauty.
Nevertheless in her own house there were many beautiful objects and the dining-room table was always perfectly lovely, and always different, with silver, vermeil, porcelain.
The Duke still enjoyed his game of golf as much as ever. From Paris he played at St Cloud or St Germain, and as he preferred to eat no lunch the ideal time from his point of view was between 12.30 and 2 p.m., the sacred hour of déjeuner for the French, when there were few people about. His friends fell in with this plan. One was Sir Berkeley Ormerod, a former British Army golf champion. His wife Bea was the widow of Frederick Sigrist—it was she who had lent the Windsors her house near Nassau while Government House was done up. Bill Ormerod had been Director of Public Relations for the British Information Service in New York during the war, and the Duke made use of the BIS when researching for his autobiography, A King’s Story. Bill cheerfully gave up his luncheon for the Duke’s sake, who, when the game was finished, would ask for hot water to make tea with China tea leaves he brought in a little canister; he drank his tea while the starving Bill Ormerod ate a bun. (Incidentally, he says the Duke always insisted on paying his green fees, he mentions this because of stories about the Duke being stingy in small ways.)23
Sir Berkeley was an expert on Wall Street and had written a book on Dow Jones. This expertise fascinated the Duke, who found the book very interesting. The Windsors were rich, but extravagant in their mode of life, and with inflation creeping up the Duke tried to get the best advice on his investments.
In 1951 he sold his memoirs for enormous sums, about half a million pounds (when the pound was worth many times what it is now). The Duchess also made money with her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons. The idea of actually earning money appealed greatly to the Duke, and when Jack Le Vien came to him with a proposal that he should make a documentary film out of A King’s Story, giving the Duke the same contract as had been agreed with Sir Winston Churchill’s tough American lawyers a few years before, the Duke studied the contract for a long time. Finally Jack Le Vien said: Sir, is there anything wrong with the contract? It is identical with the one we made with Sir Winston when we did a documentary film about him.’ The Duke replied: ‘I was just looking to see if there was anything about an expense account.’
The Duke golfing at Deauville.
These two books, A King’s Story and The Heart Has its Reasons, tell us a good deal about their authors and events in their lives. The Duke’s is the better of the two and, although he was helped by a ghost-writer, his own voice can be heard. The Duchess on the other hand is more or less unrecognizable in her book. She was much more amusing and much more of a character than anyone could guess from reading it. The woman in The Heart Has its Reasons could never have captivated for a lifetime the love and admiration of such a man as the Duke, formerly rather fickle and capricious. Both of the Windsors were perfectly capable of writing their autobiographies without help, and maybe it is a pity they did not do so.
James Pope-Hennessy often went to the Mill when he was writing his biography of Queen Mary to talk with the Duke. Later on, casting about for another subject, he thought he would like to do a book about the Windsors. When he spoke of it to the Duke, the response was surprising. ‘What percentage of the money earned by your book on Queen Mary did the royal family get?’ asked the Duke. ‘Oh, they got nothing at all,’ said James Pope-Hennessy. The Duke made it plain that if he were to cooperate with James he would expect to be paid. The huge sums he had made with his memoirs and the money he got from Jack Le Vien’s film had sharpened his appetite. He could not see the point of giving his time to help with a biography which he was not all sure he would approve of and over which he would exercise no control, and do it for nothing. He had a very practical view of money: it was almost as if he could see into the future, the inflation that was coming.
The Duke’s love and need for the Duchess grew with the years and without doubt it imposed a strain. Sometimes she must have slightly regretted the old free days when she did what she liked and said whatever came into her head, before she became Duchess of Windsor. As Duff Cooper once said to her: ‘You have all the disadvantages of royalty and none of its advantages.’ Just occasionally she chose freedom.
It was in 1950 that the Windsors first made friends with Jimmy Donahue, a rich American whose mother was a Woolworth. he was a cousin of Barbara Hutton. The Duchess was delighted by him, he made her laugh with his wisecracks and amused her very much. Donahue was well known to be homosexual, he was also nineteen years younger than she: he was thus considered by her to be a perfectly suitable escort. She liked sitting up late and the Duke did not; often, whether in New York or Paris, he went to home to bed and she stayed on at some party laughing with Jimmy Donahue. The Duke got tired of the sight of Jimmy Donahue, and for a while there was the nearest thing to a rift between the devoted couple that they ever had in their thirty-five years of marriage. When the Duchess saw that the Duke really disliked him she stopped seeing Donahue. Someone asked in 1954: ‘Do you still see so much of the Duchess of Windsor?’ and Donahue replied: ‘No. I’ve abdicated.’
The Duke and Duchess in 1951 when A King’s Story was published.
The Duke and Duchess dancing at the Hotel Plaza in New York.
Jimmy Donahue with the Duke at Portofino, 1953.
Shortly after this episode Gaston Palewski was dining with the Windsors and the Duke said: ‘This is our wedding day. We’ve been married eighteen years. There may be a happier couple somewhere, but I doubt it.’
Notes
22 In a letter to the author.
23 In a letter to the author.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Brilliant Duchess
A land where even the old are fair
And even the wise are merry of tongue.
Yeats
THE DUCHESS OF Windsor was always on the list of the ‘best-dressed women in the world,’ but she did not buy large numbers of dresses. She went to excellent dressmakers in Paris and wore her clothes for years. After Mainbocher, she got most of her clothes from Balenciaga, and some from Dior and Déssès. In his day, Balenciaga was the greatest and most imaginative dressmaker in the world, a true artist. He liked making things for the Duchess. Dior, where she is spoken of affectionately, invented a blue for her. It was not Wallis blue, but a dark purple blue which set off her dark colouring and deep blue eyes. Déssès, like Mainbocher of old, made very plain, well-cut clothes, which could be worn for years. When Balenciaga retired, Hubert de Givenchy, started making for the Duchess, and he asked Balenciaga: ‘Cristobal, may I copy your idea of an
housse in Wallis blue for the Duchess with her name embroidered on it?’ Balenciaga said: ‘Mais bien sûr!’ and it was in that housse that dresses went for fittings in the house in the Bois de Boulogne. It is a dress cover made of linen in what the French call le bleu Wallis and embroidered in white: ‘SAR [Son Altesse Royale] la Duchesse de Windsor.’
People who worked for the Duchess nearly always became fond of her, and Hubert de Givenchy is no exception. From the point of view of a great couturier she was an ideal client, partly because of her fashionable measurements—34-24-34—even more because of the care she took about every detail from shoes to jewellery, and above all for her sure taste. Givenchy says that when it was rumoured that he was to make her dresses he was told (by people who did not know her) that the Duchess never paid her bills; in fact, he found that she paid them on the dot. He treasures in his memory a vision of extreme elegance: the Duchess of Windsor, standing in a window at the seventeenth-century Hotel Lambert on the Ile St-Louis wearing a yellow dress made by Balenciaga and jewels to match.
Horst’s portrait of the Duchess amid flowers in her drawing room in Paris.
One of Horst’s portraits of the Duchess taken in the early 1950s.
