That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

by Anne Sebba

  Ernest had few friends of his own, but Bryanston Court was five minutes from the home of his closest companion, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, whom he had met during his time in the Brigade of Guards. Rickatson-Hatt had seen action in France and had been badly gassed, which left him permanently nervous. He remained in the army however until 1925 when he joined Reuters News Agency and was soon promoted to the role of editor in chief. He too was newly married to an American woman, Frances née Sharpe, whom he had met while working for Reuters in New York, and they too were childless, enduring a deeply unhappy and fraught marriage. He had read classics at Oxford and, like Ernest, was an enthusiastic bibliophile with a fine collection of Greek and Latin books. Rickatson-Hatt was easy to mock with his monocle, bowler hat and small pug dog, usually carried under his arm. Some evenings he and Ernest read aloud to each other in Latin, but both were far too constrained to discuss their marital problems with each other. For such men in the 1930s to have discussed personal matters of this nature is unimaginable, but each may have had his suspicions about the other having to put up with a disappointing marriage. The details of Rickatson-Hatt’s eventually emerged before a divorce court judge in 1939, and it is fair to say that his staunch support and his determination to help his friend in the years ahead owed more than a little to the unfulfilled and deviant nature of his own marital arrangements.

  As for Wallis, now she had somewhere to entertain she set about collecting an interesting array of guests, inevitably with a strong American nucleus. Those whom she invited for dinner were drawn almost entirely from her carefully nurtured contacts. Chief among these was Benjamin Thaw, newly appointed First Secretary of the US Embassy, married to Consuelo, one of the trio of glamorous Morgan sisters who had exotic Spanish looks and lots of money. Wallis had known Benjamin’s brother, Bill, at Coronado where he had been a beau of Katherine Bigelow before she married Herman Rogers. She also knew of, though she had not met, Consuelo’s twin sisters Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt, both celebrated society beauties. Thelma was currently the much gossiped-about lover of the Prince of Wales and Wallis knew that the pair sometimes met at the Thaws’ home.

  Among regulars at her table there was also Wallis’s favourite cousin Corinne, now married to Lieutenant Commander George Murray assigned as assistant naval attaché at the Embassy, Major Martin ‘Mike’ Scanlon, ‘a dashing bachelor who gave gay cocktail and dinner parties’ at his house, the former Ethel Noyes now Lady Lewis and her husband Sir Bill (Willmott), Vincent Massey, the Oxford-educated and immensely wealthy Canadian diplomat and his pretty film-actress wife Alice and many others passing through, as well as an occasional sprinkling of British friends for form’s sake.

  Wallis quickly established a reputation as a successful and unusual hostess. Her food, her conversation, her decor and her circle were all considered original and of note. Her parties were small but the attention to detail was second to none and the food and wines were lavisllys were h. She exaggerated her Americanness with a smattering of Southern recipes, food no one else prepared, and by her ability to mix cocktails – ‘a trifling but widely appreciated knack’. With her cocktails – or KTs as she called them – she served sausages, but not on skewers, followed perhaps by caviar with vodka, soup with sherry, and fish with white wine, as well as champagne and brandy. ‘Wallis’ parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave,’ commented one guest.

  In 1931 Mr and Mrs Kirk, Mary’s parents, came to Europe and, while they were in London, Wallis proudly invited them to see her new home. She told Edith Kirk that she loved living in England, ‘though there is one thing that bothers me a little. I don’t know a single Englishwoman well enough to go to the bathroom with her.’ Mrs Kirk thought the words sounded vulgar, implying that Wallis wanted to go to the powder room in order to confide some interesting remark or incident about a tall handsome man she might have been dancing with. They knew Wallis well enough to see that she was constantly on the lookout for excitement and interesting people to spice up her life. They could not fail to be impressed at seeing how the poor gir

  l from Baltimore with one broken marriage behind her had succeeded in swiftly making a place for herself in London society thanks to her second marriage to a dull but worthy shipbroker. It was after this visit that Wallis wrote to Mary encouraging her to come and stay, learning from her parents of further unhappiness in her schoolfriend’s marriage.

  5

  Wallis on the Sidelines

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days’

  Ever since her arrival in London, Wallis admitted to her aunt, ‘I’ve had my mind made up’ to meet the Prince of Wales. She accomplished this feat fairly effortlessly in 1931 through her friendship with Thelma Furness, ‘the Prince’s girl’, and considered the achievement a relief. If she had further aspirations they were to be accorded more respect among her friends and to receive more glamorous invitations to fashionable parties as a result. Prince Edward, now thirty-seven years old, with his still boyish good looks and radiant charm, was adored by millions around the world who did not know him at all. Wallis herself knew much about his activities thanks to gossip and to the Court Circular newspaper announcements, but she knew little about the man himself other than what Thelma let slip.

  Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park, the home of his maternal grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Teck. He was the first child born to the future King George V and Queen Mary, although his parents were still Duke and Duchess of York at the time of his birth. Through his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, he was related to most of the crowned heads in Europe. After he had been educated by tutors at home and then at Osborne Naval College, it was decided in 1912 that he would benefit from a more academic life, and Magdalen College, Oxford was selected for him, as were his putative friends there. But, as his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, observed: ‘It cannot be said that Oghtxford widened his cultural horizons. ’ Yet the young Prince was not without attributes, as was noted by Lord Esher, who had been consulted by Queen Mary about the education and upbringing of the Prince and took long walks with him at Balmoral: ‘His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual and, above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.’ But he found university life, and indeed much of his official life, ‘very dull’, and he never acquired a habit of reading or of disciplining those thoughts; moreover, his spelling was a disaster. Always chafing against restrictive authority, he left Oxford without graduating.

  On the outbreak of war in August 1914, aged twenty, he was allowed to join the Grenadier Guards despite being a mere five feet seven inches tall instead of the regulation six foot, but was then kept as far away from danger as possible. As he grew into adulthood he was full of resentment against his parents and advisers over a range of issues. His father, by now King George V, was a shy disciplinarian unable to communicate with any of his children, all of whom were frightened of him, even as adults. He had a terrible temper and, when he was not venting his fury at them, was making fun of them. Even his most loyal staff, such as his Assistant Private Secretary Alexander Hardinge, were moved to comment upon the mystery of why this essentially kind man ‘was such a brute to his children’. His mother, perhaps kinder than history has portrayed her, was also motivated by duty above all and found it hard to display the affection she felt for all her children but especially for her sweet-faced firstborn. Neither parent believed that keeping up with modern trends was important, so many of the arguments they had with David, as Prince Edward was known to the family, were over trivialities such as trouser turn-ups, jazz, cocktails and painted fingernails or the telephone, an innovation which Queen Mary never used.

  The Prince’s determination to get to the front line and be allowed to serve with his regiment whatever the dangers became a major source of friction. He bitterly reproached himself for leading such a comfortable life when his fellow officers were suffering and dying. ‘I do hate be
ing a prince and not allowed to fight!!’ he told Godfrey Thomas, a former diplomat who became his equerry and later his private secretary. In a courageous attempt to share the appalling risk and hardship faced by other soldiers, he appealed to Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, to allow him to go to the front, reminding him that as he had four brothers who could take his place it would not matter if he were killed. But Kitchener responded that the real fear was not that he might be killed but that he might be captured and held prisoner.

  As Philip Ziegler has suggested: ‘The ferocious battering to which he subjected his body, with a regime of endless walks and runs, a minimum of food and sleep, must have been in part a mortification of the flesh to assuage this conviction of his inadequacy.’ One of the specific tasks assigned to Godfrey Thomas when he first joined the Prince’s staff was to try to get him to eat more and exercise less. Even dancing, when part of an official function and with a girl he detested, could be endured only if he looked upon it as strenuous exercise. This sometimes came as rather a shock for the girl involved. Although deliberate self-starvation was hardly new, by the 1880s eating disorders were slowly being recognized as a disease, mostly affecting women and girls, and the label ‘anorexia nervosa’ was introduced in 1873 by Queen Victoria’s personal physician, Sir William Gull.4 Staving off puberty is often cited as a factor in female anorexia, but trying to remain eternally childlike is t whildlikcommon to both sexes. In the Prince’s case, although the symptoms were recognized, no one in royal circles would have dared look into the causes. Thomas became a loyal friend who remained in the Prince’s service until the abdication, ‘never hesitating to point out or tell me of any failings he may think I am guilty of’, according to the Prince. But nor was he ever strong enough to overrule his master.

  Edward’s letters and diary entries in the 1920s are so full of dismal self-disparagement that sometimes they appear close to childish whining at not being given what he wanted, at others they resemble a deeply worrying cri de coeur from a depressed adolescent. One day he wrote, ‘I could not face … any company. I wanted to be alone in my misery!! I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn’t think it unfair on Papa.’ But his desire to be of use was genuine and his brief taste of the war in France in 1915, though he had been kept away from shells and behind the front lines, had left him desperately thirsting to do more than inspect troops, visit hospitals and play the largely morale-boosting role that he had been assigned. He was shown the trenches and even allowed to spend a night in one, but was forbidden by his father to fight. One observer commented: ‘his main desire appeared to be to get either killed or wounded’. His sense of frustration and shame at his own inadequacy are palpable, if exaggerated, and may have been aggravated by sexual deficiencies. Much as he apparently enjoyed sex, girlfriends openly referred to him as ‘the little man’. But he may also have worried that he was sterile. Without tests, he is unlikely to have known whether this was the case but his heavy smoking and drinking were both habits now known to have a drastic effect on sperm count, and he would have had a strong suspicion if, at a time of ineffective contraception, none of his many dalliances with women resulted in a pregnancy. Many of his later ideas about pacifism as well as his deepest feelings of self-loathing can be traced to this time. The love of a good and sensible woman helped him through in 1918.

  One evening while on leave in February that year, Edward was attending a party in Belgrave Square (hosted coincidentally by Maud Kerr-Smiley) when he was suddenly ushered into the cellar following an air-raid warning. There he met Mrs Dudley Ward, who had been out for the evening at a different party in the square but was invited in, with her escort for the evening, to take shelter when the siren went off. When the all-clear sounded, the Prince was introduced to Mrs Dudley Ward and the pair spent the rest of the evening together. The attraction was instant and a month later he was writing her very indiscreet letters – addressed to ‘my Angel!!’ – in which he expressed the hope that he had not said anything terrible, ‘though how I long to angel!!’

  Freda Dudley Ward was the pretty and petite twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a prosperous Nottingham businessman and his American wife. She had been married for the previous five years to a Liberal MP, William Dudley Ward, sixteen years her senior, with whom she had two daughters, Penelope and Angela. Freda was spirited and fun loving, popular in her own circle and always surrounded by a barrage of admirers. Her husband, known as Duddie, was vice chamberlain of the Royal Household and therefore often out late on public duties – the ideal mari complaisant. For the next sixteen years, even though both had other minor dalliances, Freda became the Prince’s ever-supportive confidante and lover. The affair was all consuming for the Prince, but relatively discreet, at least to the wider public. At first the couple would meet in a variety of London houses which Freda would buy, decorate and then sell at a profif al at a t. But shortly after the war, when the Dudley Wards moved to a magnificent Georgian mansion at Sunbury on Thames, the Prince rented a little Georgian cottage just across the road and came to visit his lover through a side gate into the garden and across the tennis court to the house itself. This, he decided, was more proper than entering through the front door a house belonging to the husband of his mistress. The locals in Sunbury all knew when the Prince’s landau arrived for the weekend – a good example of the hypocrisy he was to tell Baldwin later he refused to countenance and of the marital double standards which the Church and the country at large were struggling so hard to oppose.

  Freda became something of an ideal, if unattainable, love for the heir to the throne. In pouring out his feelings to her he was discovering himself, a luxury his parents had not thought a necessary part of his education. ‘How utterly sick of soldiering one is and anything to do with the Army,’ he wrote to her shortly after the Armistice, ‘but one can’t help liking all the men and taking a huge interest in them … And how one does sympathise with them and understand how hopelessly bored and fed up they are.’ His passionate letters to Freda, sometimes three a day, expose a deeply troubled, insecure young man, uncertain of his future who thought his father, the King, was ‘hopelessly out of touch and ignorant’, his ‘studied hostility to the United States … a national disaster’. In 1920, when he undertook a seven-month tour of New Zealand and Australia, he revealed more of his inner turmoil:

  Now I am going to write something that I know I ought not to really … but mon amour I swear I’ll never marry any other woman but you!!! Each day I long more and more to chuck in this job and be out of it and free for you, Sweetie. The more I think of it all, the more certain I am that really the day for kings and princes is past, monarchies are out of date, though I know it is a rotten thing for me to say and sounds Bolshevik.

  It was a particularly jarring comment since the principal reason for sending Edward on such a world tour at this time was to show the world that the monarchies had survived in the wake of the overthrow of the Russian Tsar by the Bolshevik revolution.

  Just before visiting Washington he told her: ‘I’m like you, angel, want to die young & how marvellously divine if only WE could die together … I’m just dippy to die with YOU even if we can’t live together …’ On many occasions he told her that without her love and support he would prefer to die. ‘It’s only you who keeps [me] alive and going … I do get so terribly fed up with it and despondent sometimes and begin to feel like “resigning”!!’

  His letters with their invented baby language, using words like pleath and vewy for ‘please’ and ‘very’ and referring to himself in the third person as ‘your poor hard worked little boy’, are those of an adolescent who has fallen obsessively in love with a more mature woman and convinced himself no one else in the world understands him. To Freda he expressed all the impossibilities of his future life as he saw them and, trusting heavily in her discretion, complained constantly of his difficulties with his ‘tyrannical’ father. ‘He’s really been the absolute limit snubbing me and finding fault sarcas
tically at every possible occasion … he maddens me, beloved one and I often feel like turning Bolshy as it’s so hopeless trying to work for him.’ But however much balm she offered him, and however much he pressed now he pre– ‘I just don’t feel I can even exist let alone try to live much longer without you, my precious darling beloved little mummie!!’ – she would not marry him, knowing the effect this would have on the royal family and the nation itself.

  This dependence on others, frequently a mother figure, is just one aspect of a personality defect brilliantly identified by the psychologist Simon Baron Cohen. In the case of Edward, Prince of Wales, it may not be possible to give it a name but his extremes of behaviour – including a refusal to eat adequately, violent exercise and obsessive concern about weight or the thinness of his legs, verging on anorexia, arranging his myriad clothes in serried rows, his unusual speech, social insensitivity and nervous tics such as constantly fiddling with his cuffs – are just some of the characteristics that come under the broad spectrum of autism or its sometimes less virulent cousin Asperger’s Syndrome. Several of those who worked with him closely believed him in different ways to be ‘mad’, a word that could not be written about him while he was alive. Certainly Prime Minister Baldwin came to believe it to be the case. Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who had joined the Prince’s staff in 1920 as assistant private secretary under Godfrey Thomas, and was himself severely critical of the Prince, nonetheless advised Nigel Nicolson, editing his father Harold Nicolson’s diaries in the 1960s, to remove the word from the text while the ex-King was still alive. ‘One must not print it,’ he wrote, ‘certainly not of anybody with so frightening a mental ancestry as poor Edward P [Edward, Prince of Wales styled himself “EP”].’ Lascelles himself commented after a long conversation with the Prince in 1927 that he had been struck by ‘the curious absence of belief in ordinary general ideas’, what he called his ‘ethical impotence’.