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

by Anne Sebba

  I was always astonished by EP’s total inability to comprehend such ideas … words like ‘decency’ ‘honesty’ ‘duty’ ‘dignity’ and so on meant absolutely nothing to him. If one said to him ‘But surely Sir, you can’t do that,’ he would reply in quite genuine bewilderment: ‘But I don’t know what you mean, Tommy. I know I can get away with it.’

  Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary from 1931 to 1936, was also once heard emerging from a conversation with the Prince ‘coming down the King’s staircase at Buck. Pal. And exclaiming in his shrill staccato “He’s mad – he’s mad. We shall have to lock him up. We shall have to lock him up.”’ Perhaps the most crucial witness is Lord Dawson of Penn, the royal family’s doctor, who was similarly ‘convinced that EP’s moral development … had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence and that would account for this limitation. An outward symptom of such arrestation, D of P would say, was the absence of hair on the face … EP only had to shave about once a week.’

  From the first, the Prince’s entourage was always worried about his unreliable behaviour on foreign tours. Within a decade this had become more and more irresponsible as he would be up all hours at nightclubs drinking and womanizing, not taking his official duties seriously and exhibiting a cavalier attitude to punctuality, much to the consternation of the local dignitaries. His refusal to eat adequately (while drinking and smoking more than adequately) often left him exhausted and without stamina to face the heavy schedule organized for him on tours, so that some of those travelling with him felt he was teetering dangerously on the edge of extreme depression.

  For Lascelles the nadir came innesadir ca 1928, one year after his long talk with the Prince, when George V was, it seemed, close to death while his son was away on a trip to Kenya. The government sent a telegram saying that the King was extremely ill and urgently requesting that the Prince return. When Lascelles showed him the telegram he joked about ‘silly old Baldwin’ and accused the Prime Minister of using the wire as an electoral dodge. He was not going home. ‘l said “Sir, the King is dying and if that doesn’t matter to you it certainly matters to us.” The Prince of Wales shrugged and gave me a look and went on with his plans for seducing the wife of a colonial official, Mrs Barnes. He was very happy to tell me what he’d done the next morning.’ The Prince did return sooner than intended, but, shortly afterwards, Lascelles resigned in disgust at the Prince’s attitude; by way of explanation, he was to tell the above story many times. As Duff Hart-Davis, the editor of his diaries, remarked, perhaps Lascelles was the wrong person for the Prince of Wales. ‘It could be said’, Hart-Davis went on, ‘that his moral outlook was too severe, his idea of duty too rigid, his code of conduct too unbending for him to be compatible with such a high-spirited employer. Yet it could equally be said that he was exactly the right person for the Prince and that someone of precisely his calibre, with his powerful intellect and high principles, was needed to shape the future King for his role.’

  After his resignation from Edward’s service, Lascelles took up another post abroad. But in 1935 he returned to royal service as assistant private secretary to the Prince’s ailing father, George V, and thus was at the epicentre of the unfolding royal drama. In addition to his intimate knowledge of the protagonists, he was a cousin of Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, who married Mary, the Princess Royal, sister of the Prince of Wales and the future George VI, and therefore was also an insider who saw events coloured by the considerable distaste of the rest of the royal family. What was becoming clear was that the Prince’s household, now based in London at York House, a wing of St James’s Palace, was increasingly alienated from his father’s Court at nearby Buckingham Palace. While it may be true that many of the courtiers reflected the snobbisms of a previous age, isolation from sources of good advice had taken the place of legitimate independence for an heir to the throne. The Prince resented what he called the old order and as Hector Bolitho, an early biographer of Edward VIII, wrote, ‘conventional society did not amuse him … In time the dwindling ranks of society resented the originality of his choice of friends. He seldom went to stay in great country houses, where he might have met and known his contemporaries and … he was almost stubborn in his habit of turning his back upon the conventions of polite society.’

  Those who spoke with an American accent had a much easier chance of amusing the Prince. He liked almost everything that he characterized as new and modern and much of it was American. His foreign tours (including the one to Australia, where he narrowly missed meeting Wallis in Coronado en route) had done much to introduce him to the wider world – or at least that part of it that was still called the Empire. His intensely English good looks – blond hair, wistful blue eyes and generous mouth, often with cigarette dangling – had ensured he was a pin-up figure for millions. As he said to Freda in some half-Americanese he had picked up on his travels, ‘Princing’ was much easier abroad. The ecstatic response he received wherever he went led to an easy belief that his views chimed with those of ‘ordinary men and women’ in a way that his father’s did not. He did, however, have a genuine sympathy with those who faced unemployment and destitution so soon after offering thethaofferinir lives in the Great War. ‘One can’t help seeing the work people’s point of view,’ he told his mother, Queen Mary, ‘and in a way it’s only human nature to get as much as one can out of one’s employer.’ But there’s scant evidence that he had any notion of what to do about the situation. It was sincere but vague benevolence, the original triumph of style over substance.

  He loathed ceremony of all kind and in 1922, when his sister Mary married Viscount Lascelles, wrote to his mother that he did not mind not being able to attend as ‘I have an inordinate dislike for weddings … I always feel so sorry for the couple concerned.’ The following year his closest sibling, Bertie, the Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the vivacious and highly suitable twenty-three-year-old daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, a marriage which brought his parents much pleasure. Elizabeth had once harboured romantic feelings herself for the Prince of Wales and had initially been extremely reluctant to accept Bertie’s proposal of marriage. True she came from impeccable stock, but there was one skeleton in her ancient cupboard: her great-grandmother Anne, possessing ‘a flirtatious nature’, divorced her dull husband and eloped with Lord Charles Cavendish-Bentinck and had his child. She was never again received in society.

  But the marriages of Edward’s siblings scarcely relieved the pressure on him to marry immediately. However much he might wish it away, his awareness of his duty to marry and produce an heir to continue the dynasty was ever lurking. As he told his close friend and travelling companion Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1924, ‘I suppose I’ll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days tho’ I’ll put it off as long as I can cos it’ll destroy me.’

  In 1932, in an unusually frank conversation with his father, the King asked him if he had ever considered marrying ‘a suitable well born English girl’. The Prince answered that the only woman he had ever wanted to marry had been Freda Dudley Ward. But she was not available. As long as he remained in love with Freda he persuaded himself that his commitment to her prevented marriage. Yet even though he balked at marriage he longed for an emotionally and physically fulfilling relationship. His liaison with Thelma Furness never really promised this. The pair met at a provincial cattle show while he was still involved with Freda. The Prince, undertaking the sort of mindless royal task which he hated, was awarding rosettes to prize-winning cows.

  Thelma, like Freda, was half American and bored in her marriage to a much older man. Thelma Morgan was first married, aged seventeen, to James Vail Converse, but was divorced three years later and in 1926 settled for a second marriage to Marmaduke, 1st Viscount Furness, nearly twenty years older than her. They had a son, Tony, born in 1929, but then led separate lives indulging in frequent affairs. Thelma was exquisitely pretty with dark hair and eyes inherited from her mixed Irish-American and Chilean ancest
ry, and was allowed plenty of money by her elderly husband, who was known as Duke. His immense wealth derived from the Furness Withy shipping company, founded by his grandfather, of which he was chairman.

  Both Thelma and Freda pandered to the Prince’s needs to be mothered and indulged his childish whims, especially his craving for teddy bears. One of the biggest, a giant topiary teddy bear at Sunbury, given by the Prince to Freda, is still there today for all who pass the river bank to admire. However, Thelma was much more of a hedonist than Freda and enjoyed encouraging rather than curbing the Prince’s natural tendencies towards selfishness and self-indulgence. Shetheulgence admitted that her conversations with the Prince were ‘mostly about trivialities’. According to Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the well-connected, American-born diarist, it was Thelma Furness (although unnamed by him at the time) who was ‘the woman who first “modernised” him and Americanized him, making him over-democratic, casual and a little common. Hers is the true blame for this drama.’ From now on observers were often struck by his inimitable blend of cockney and American, which he mixed into his upper-class drawl.

  Thelma swiftly moved into the Prince’s life and into his new country home – Fort Belvedere – memorably described by Lady Diana Cooper as a child’s idea of a fort ‘missing only fifty red soldiers … between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy’. The eighteenth-century house, thirty miles outside London in the grounds of Windsor Great Park and not far from Sunningdale, was originally constructed as a folly, before being converted into a royal hunting lodge and gradually extended until it had seven bedrooms. In 1929 the building became vacant once again and was given to Prince Edward by his father ‘for those damn weekends, I suppose’. Thelma tinkered with various renovation schemes there and had one guest room done up in shocking pink, decorating the top of the bedposts with the Prince of Wales feathers – an exhibition of vulgarity that apparently the Prince found vastly amusing. He installed central heating and up-to-date bathrooms and often arrived in a private plane – all examples of what he had in mind by modernizing. The Fort became his favourite residence and retreat from reality. He remembered playing there as a child with his sister and brothers, some of his happiest moments. The Fort offered a chance to return to that lost world.

  A year after they met, the Prince suggested that Thelma and her husband might like to join him and his party on a continuation of the African safari which he had been forced to leave hurriedly when his father was ill. Once his father seemed to have recovered he could see no reason not to return and was away from January until April 1930. In February Lord and Lady Furness met up with the Prince in Kenya. Thelma later wrote in purple prose how, after a day of lion hunting organized by the Governor, she and the Prince had a secret rendezvous:

  This was our Eden and we were alone in it. His arms about me were the only reality; his words of love my only bridge to life. Borne along on the mounting tide of his ardour I found myself swept from the accustomed mooring of caution. Each night I felt more completely possessed by our love, carried ever more swiftly into uncharted seas of feeling content to let the Prince chart the course heedless of where the voyage would end.

  Wallis became a friend of Thelma through her connection with Benny and Consuelo Thaw. The women often met for lunch at the Ritz and in early January 1931 Consuelo invited the Simpsons to the Furness home at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire in the heart of England’s fox-hunting country for a Saturday to Monday. The Prince of Wales was to be there, as was Thelma, the hostess, but without her husband, who was away. Convention demanded that one married couple should also be there to act as chaperones, but Consuelo herself could not make it. Would Wallis and Ernest help out?

  Wallis was extremely nervous, but accepted. For her, this promised an important step up the social ladder. For Ernest, who revered the monarchy, it was close to his pinnacle of achievement. For both, it was amusing to see Maud Kerr-Smiley provoked into jealousy, especially as she insiill as shested on giving Wallis last-minute etiquette lessons. Wallis admitted that she spent an entire Friday on ‘hair and nails etc’ and on Saturday 10 January she, Ernest and Benny Thaw went up to Melton Mowbray by train. Wallis had a cold and could not prevent herself snuffling and coughing. But her poker-playing skills came in useful once again as they played for stakes that even she considered ‘frighteningly high’. According to the Prince’s later account, they discussed central heating or the lack of it in British houses. Wallis was to claim that she did not remember the conversation, only the Prince’s ‘very loud-checked tweeds … and utter naturalness’. But according to other versions of the occasion, she boldly told the Prince that she was disappointed in his predictable choice of topic of conversation: ‘Every American woman is asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’ Thelma Furness insisted there had never been such a conversation and if so Wallis’s brusque answer would have been ‘not only bad taste but bad manners’. But by the time everyone was recalling in print their memories of this meeting, Wallis had shown herself to be a woman never afraid to adopt this sort of tone when speaking to the Prince in public. Others present maintain that she made little impression on the Prince that weekend, while Wallis herself wrote: ‘the facts are as I shall now relate them … we met late in the fall of 1930 … I am sure I am right.’ She dates the meeting according to the clothes she remembers wearing and is dismissive about the conversation. But in a letter dated 13 January 1931 it is clear that she wrote to Aunt Bessie about the weekend, saying ‘what a treat it was to meet the Prince in such an informal way’, though she later added, ‘probably we will never hear or see any of them again’.

  Wallis was certain about the date because she had just been to Paris in the autumn of 1930 and had indulged herself in what she called ‘a little splurge’ – buying a dress from each of the three or four leading couturiers. ‘The prospect of having a few chic clothes from the great couturiers was more than I could resist.’ Why? Any woman will immediately understand. She knew, given the circles in which she was moving in this ‘frowzy dressed town’, that an invitation to meet the Prince would come her way very soon and she was going to be prepared for it, in control of how she looked insofar as she could be. She was not buying couture clothes to hang in her wardrobe for quiet dinners with Ernest.

  Although some weeks passed with no prospect of a second meeting because the Prince was travelling, Wallis was now busy arranging to have herself presented at Court that season. On 15 May Thelma again invited the Simpsons to a cocktail party she was giving for the Prince’s return from a tour of South America. Wallis was excited about this ‘as I would like to be given the once-over without the cold’. Also invited was Felipe Espil, the diplomat who had spurned Wallis eight years earlier. But any chagrin she might have felt over seeing him again was more than mitigated by the Prince, who when introduced to the Simpsons that evening, whispered to Thelma that he thought he recognized Wallis. Thelma reminded him of the weekend at Melton Mowbray and, as Wallis rose from her curtsey, he told her how much he had enjoyed that encounter.

  By the time Mary Raffray arrived in London later that month Wallis, not yet thirty-five, was moving, if not exactly in the highest echelons of London society, then in those circles which had access to the Prince. When they last met, Wallis had crossed the Atlantic to say goodbye to her dying mother and was feeling lonely and friendless in London. Mary considered that the transformation in her friend’s life, just over two years.over twrs after making a new start in England, was extraordinary – a transformation that, as Ernest understood, would have been inconceivable had she been Mrs Solomon.5 On the day of her arrival there was a lunch at the Thaws’, so Wallis explained that she could not make it down to the docks to greet Mary after her long voyage but instructed her to take a train into London the minute she disembarked. From the station she was to go directly to the lunch before seeing Bryanston Court or changing her clothes. After lunch the women played bridge all
afternoon – not what Mary wanted: she complained that she could play bridge any day in New York – then went to Ethel Lewis for a KT. When they returned from Ethel’s that first night, Wallis and Mary changed into ‘tea gown and pajamas’ for dinner. ‘Ernest of course always dresses and, except for such evenings at home, wears full dress designated here simply as “white tie” and we sat around and talked until 2 o’clock.’

  The next day another American friend who had made a successful marriage to an Englishman, Minerva Dodge, called round early, inspected Mary’s wardrobe and went with them for a lunch at the Ritz given by some Argentine diplomats for Lord and Lady Sackville, who were among Wallis’s newest friends and owners of the historic Knole House in Kent. Lady Sackville was another American – the former actress Anne Meredith Bigelow. After lunch there was shopping and in the evening Wallis gave a dinner for twelve, which included Ethel and Bill, Corinne and Lieutenant Commander Murray and the Rickatson-Hatts plus Minerva ‘and her pompous husband, John’. The next day was lunch with Gilbert Miller, a theatrical producer married to the fabulously rich New Yorker Kitty Bache, followed by a few hands of bridge.