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

by Anne Sebba

  Mary wrote excitedly to her mother about plans for the coming weeks, which included more dinners, more shopping and a visit to Knole. This was a thrill for Wallis because they had been invited to have tea there with Lord and Lady Sackville, a thrill for Ernest because the partly fifteenth-century house was steeped in history. On 3 June there was the Derby, where they went in a jolly party with the US diplomat William Galbraith and his wife, and two days later ‘Trooping of the Colours [sic]’.

  Wallis thinks I have a slim chance of meeting the Prince. She said if I had gotten there a week sooner I would have met him twice but we have nothing booked so far where he’d be apt to be [although] his girl, Lady Furness, is lunching here with us on Monday with Gloria Vanderbilt and Lady Milford Haven. Wallis is to be presented on June 10th. I wish I could see it but I will see her dress for it anyway.

  Wallis insists that the idea for her presentation at Court came first from Maud. ‘I was reluctant … because I would have to buy special clothes for the occasion and I didn’t feel justified in such an extravagance, ’ she claimed. Maud herself could not do the honours as she had just presented her own debutante daughter and, according to the rules, had to wait three years before a second presentation. But in any case she and Wallis were no longer on good terms. The rules demanded that divorcées could be presented only if they were the injured party, so Wallis had to send her Warrenton documentation to the Lord Chamberlain and hope it would be accepted. Another friend was found to do the actual presentation – Mildred Anderson, an American married to a London businessman – and although Wallis borrowed a dress, train, feathers and fan from Connie and Thelma, she could not resist buying for herself some impressive jewellery: a large aqse : a laruamarine cross which dangled on a necklace (‘imitations but effective’) and white kid three-quarter-length gloves.

  Ernest, in his full-dress uniform of the Coldstream Guards, was in his element as his wife waited in line in the magnificent Buckingham Palace ballroom in order to curtsey to the King and Queen on their red dais. Not a word was exchanged but Wallis had overheard the Prince of Wales mutter under his breath as she passed that something ought to be done about the lights ‘as they make all the women look ghastly’. After the formalities there was more partying at Thelma’s house and when the Prince complimented Wallis on her gown she snapped back, ‘But Sir, I thought you said we all looked ghastly’ – the sort of repartee for which she soon became well known. She had quickly learned how the Prince responded to such directness, considering it American. It came naturally to Wallis and was not entirely a studied response. Understanding Wallis means understanding that in Baltimore the Warfields were aristocracy. Not for the last time, the Prince found himself apologizing to this audacious woman, telling her that he had had no idea his voice carried so far. Far from being offended, the Prince was amused and drove the Simpsons home in his own car that night, causing quite a stir at Bryanston Court. ‘She always had a challenging line for the Prince,’ recalled Mary Kirk in her diary. In the early days she used to say to him: ‘You are just a heartbreak to any woman because you can never marry her.’ She understood her prey and knew that the tease would bring a response.

  A month later old Mr Simpson invited Wallis and Mary to go with him and Midget to Paris. Wallis by now had had her fill of having to entertain Mary, ‘the house pest’ as she called her, so she accepted. Wallis in any case was en route to Cannes for a five-week holiday without Ernest but with Consuelo Thaw and Nada Milford Haven, an exotic Russian married to Lord Mountbatten’s brother, and a renowned lesbian. It was a holiday she could ill afford and she had to borrow from the bank ‘as poor old E. can’t help me’. But she concluded that it would be worth it to get to know such nice people. Two days after their arrival Mary had a terrifying accident. She was knocked down on the street by a taxi and rushed to the American hospital in Neuilly where her condition was said to be critical. Wallis telephoned Jackie Raffray, who rang Buckie in a state of near hysteria. The injuries were to her kidneys and it was feared one might have to be removed. Wallis promised that if Mary was still in danger the next day she would stay with her at the hospital. If she was out of danger, she had a lunch engagement with a friend.

  The next morning Buckie telephoned the apartment where Wallis was staying for news. ‘A perfectly familiar voice said without so much as a preliminary “hello”, “Mary’s out of danger, Buckie.”’ Midget had summoned a leading French surgeon who concluded that no operation was necessary and that with proper hospital care and treatment Mary would recover. Wallis had spent the night at Mary’s bedside but, once it was clear she was going to live, continued with her plans to travel to the South of France. Mary made a slow recovery and the pains in her side were often excruciating. But, as she told her sister, she forced herself to get up and take a few steps every day to get over the pins and needles. Her health was permanently impaired, but she returned to New York to see if her marriage could be similarly patched up.

  Wallis cut short her holiday in Cannes, perhaps because Ernest, who could not afford a holiday himself, was restless without her and perhaps because she did not like sharing a room with Nada, who seems to have found her attractive.oul attrac Just as she was building a social circle leading upwards she was terrified of any scandal which might jeopardize this and was only too aware of the power of gossip. At all events she came back to a gloomy autumn in London beset with health and financial worries of her own. Ernest was so deeply concerned about their spending habits and the dark prospects for his business in the wake of the world recession and American

  stock-market collapse of 1929 that he decided they must give up the car and chauffeur, complaining that he was the one who always did the giving up.

  In November Wallis had to go into hospital to have her tonsils removed. But a sparkle of promise came before Christmas when they again met the Prince at the Thaws’ and persuaded him to dine with them at Bryanston Court in the new year.

  6

  Wallis in Control

  ‘Keeping up with 2 men is making me move all the time’

  Early in 1932, the Simpsons entertained the Prince of Wales for the first time to dinner at their flat in Bryanston Court. Many of Wallis’s letters at this time reflect a typical concern about maids – they were not good enough, they wanted too much money or they disliked working in a flat – and a not so typical concern about not really being able to afford to give more than three big dinners a month. But this event put her staff on their mettle. For this, no expense was spared and her cook, Mrs Ralph, was beside herself with excitement. Wallis decided to serve a typical American dinner: black bean soup, grilled lobster, fried chicken Maryland and a cold raspberry soufflé. Since the Prince stayed until 4 a.m. and asked for one of her recipes Wallis concluded: ‘Everything, I am happy to say, went very well.’ Almost immediately came the longed-for invitation in response: to spend a weekend with him at the Fort.

  Wallis described the Princely existence at the Fort as ‘amazingly informal’ compared with the stately routine at Knole, her only point of comparison. There were cocktails before dinner at which the Prince wore a kilt and the ladies – Connie and Thelma – their simplest evening dresses. They all retired to bed before midnight. Others described activities at the Fort rather differently. They were said to include ‘orgies … when Mrs Simpson did the “danse du ventre” and other un-English performances of an unsavoury nature’. In the morning the Simpsons found the Prince up and dressed before them; brandishing a fearsome-looking billhook, he was engaged in cutting back the tangle of undergrowth outside the Fort. The guests were expected to help. Neither Ernest nor Wallis was known for their gardening skills, but while Ernest, typically obliging, promised to join in and went upstairs to get a sweater, Wallis had a private tour of the grounds with the Prince. She was a fast learner where men were concerned and could easily see the intense pleasure that living there, planting flowering rhododendrons where there had once been weeds, creating a haven out of a wilderness, gave their
host. She also understood that he was lonely. ‘Perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness … For a long time,’ Wallis wrote in her memoirs, ‘I would carry in my mind the odd andsta incongruous picture of a slight figure in plus fours loping up the slope of the Terrace swinging the billhook and whistling.’ And at all times he was followed by the dogs, two Cairn terriers Cora and Jaggs, which Wallis, hitherto not a dog lover, tried unsuccessfully to fuss over.

  The thank-you letter they sent was in the form of doggerel which she and Ernest composed together. Ernest, she convinced herself, had had a wonderful time, which on this occasion was no doubt the case. That he was as much appreciated by their host as she was – the two men were able to discuss history together until ‘dates and circumstances were flying back and forth across the table like ping pong balls’ – was less certain. Ernest, working harder than ever in the City, was starting to be exhausted by his wife’s apparently insatiable need to go to and give parties. The shipping business had slumped dramatically after 1929, causing him serious concern as companies defaulted owing the family firm substantial sums. Maud, who also derived an income from SS&Y, insisted she was making economies, though ‘no one seems able to say what’, Wallis complained, deeply worried about how much longer they could hang on to their flat. She and Maud were now, in early 1932, barely on speaking terms.

  In the midst of this difficult year the Simpsons’ social life took what Wallis felt was ‘a battering’. They entertained less – just one dinner a month – but nonetheless managed a short holiday to Tunis where Ernest’s friend Georges Sebastian, a Romanian millionaire businessman with aristocratic connections, lived in a magnificent beachfront home that the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was to call the most beautiful house he had ever seen. When they pleaded poverty he paid for their travel there as well, a gesture they ‘simply could not resist’. Aunt Bessie came to visit them in London in the summer, and in July the threesome set off on a tour of France and Austria. Later in the year there was another weekend plus a tea visit to the Fort, but Wallis, weighing just eight stone at this time, was still suffering recurring stomach trouble, which she believed was caused by an ulcer, so ‘I am only allowed whiskey and plain water for the next six months,’ she told Aunt Bessie.

  But then, over the next year, the Simpsons started to be invited regularly to the Fort. This was partly Thelma’s initiative as she feared she was losing her grip on the Prince’s attentions and cast around to find amusing guests outside the normal circles to keep him happy, and partly the Prince’s, who found he was indeed amused by Wallis with her sharp tongue and risqué repartee. There was one memorable weekend in January 1933 when Ernest was away. It was so cold that she and Thelma along with the Duke and Duchess of York all went skating on the frozen lake, the Prince having presented the two women with skates. Wallis recalled later that in the course of that year ‘we found ourselves becoming permanent fixtures at the Fort weekends. The association imperceptibly but swiftly passed from an acquaintanceship to a friendship.’ But it was not so much ‘we’ as she who had become a permanent fixture – a piece of recurrent misinformation in her otherwise revelatory memoirs.

  Wallis told the Kirk family that she was making weekly visits to the Fort:

  A friend of mine, Thelma Furness, is the Prince of Wales’ girl and I chaperone her when she goes out to Fort Belvedere to stay with him. She comes by for me once a week in her car and we drive out to the Fort together. The first time she came I asked what those long poles were that were strapped to the side of the car but she just lau C shherghed and said I would find out later. It was after dinner that I found out. The three of us came into the sitting room for coffee. On either side of the fireplace, where a grand fire was blazing, stood a comfortable chair and beside each chair stood something that looked to me like an artist’s easel. When I went closer and looked I found that each of these held a piece of canvas on which was an unfinished piece of embroidery. When we had finished our coffee Thelma and the Prince settled themselves down to work and I, sitting between them, was asked to read from a book Thelma handed me.

  Wallis never took up needlepoint, taught to the princes by their mother, Queen Mary, but she now came to know the Prince’s brother Prince George, who was often at the Fort, as well as the Duke and Duchess of York. The Prince of Wales was especially close to the Yorks during his five-year liaison with Thelma Furness, whom they liked very much.

  Wallis and Ernest’s lives, inevitably, also started to diverge now. Ernest’s business, if it were to survive at a time of such reduced economic activity, required him to make frequent trips abroad. And in March, Wallis made a longed-for trip to the US, paid for by her generous aunt, whom Wallis promised she loved ‘better than anyone in the world and [I] will always be on hand when you need me’. She had not been to the United States since her mother died, had friends and family she was desperate to see and wanted a break from money worries. Just as she sailed she received a bon-voyage radiogram signed ‘Edward P.’ wishing her a safe crossing and a speedy return to England. In her memoirs she wrote that she was sailing with Ernest and that the message was for them both. But, as her biographer Michael Bloch tactfully revealed, Wallis’s memory was at fault here because she went alone. The message may have been the first intimation that she had more than piqued the Prince’s interest and so may have foreshadowed the turmoil which was to follow. As such, the radiogram would have loomed large in her memory as a milestone. Nonetheless at this stage Wallis believed that it was evidence of nothing more than a mild interest, though perhaps something to make Thelma jealous, and that she had the situation well under control.

  Wallis needed the trip for another reason too: to act as confirmation, as she approached her fortieth birthday, that she was still attractive to men. She viewed it as her swansong ‘unless I can hang on to my figure’ and thus take another trip in the next three years before hitting forty, an arbitrary date in many women’s lives when they see their femininity come to an end with their childbearing years. Wallis, who had mastered the ability to flirt since Oldfields days, needed this more than most as she was without children to flaunt. She felt a deep emotional, not necessarily sexual, need to show that she was still alluring and believed that she had only three more years in which to do it. As ever, she was on the lookout for interesting diplomats, and in Washington particularly enjoyed the attentions of John Cooper Wiley, subsequently a highly regarded US ambassador.

  She returned with her self-confidence restored and almost immediately the weekend visits to Sunningdale increased. It was her assurance, poise and buoyancy that the Prince admired, as he could not see the underlying insecurity. After her return Wallis wrote to her aunt that ‘Thelma is still Princess of Wales’ – an indication that the women had discussed the possibility that she soon might not be – and then joked that a collection of funny butter moulds she had found, which stamped animal patterns on to butter, were a great success. ‘Thelma is so mad for them and I have refused her,’ revealing that Cveaof furivalry was already under way. On 19 June the Prince gave a birthday dinner for Wallis’s thirty-seventh birthday at Quaglino’s in London’s Jermyn Street. Wallis was already thinking about clever ways to please him in response. A few days later, for his thirty-ninth birthday, she gave him a present which demonstrated how much time and ingenuity she was investing in this relationship. She had borrowed a royal spoon from Osborne, the butler at the Fort, in order to have his cipher engraved on a silver Bryant & May matchbox holder. She followed this up with a special 4 July American Independence Day dinner for him at Bryanston Court. But the shipping business had not picked up that much and since ‘Pa S – the most selfish old pig – ’ had stopped their allowance and was keeping them on a tight rein, the Simpsons found entertaining at this level a huge strain. Wallis now tried seriously to rent out their apartment, which was costing them a hefty £600 per annum, a bill they found hard to meet.

  The night of 31 December saw the Simpsons celebrati
ng with the Prince until 5 a.m. to see in the new year. And shortly afterwards, the situation changed dramatically when it was Thelma’s turn to sail for the United States to see her family. In January 1934, Wallis and she had a farewell lunch at the Ritz, their regular meeting place. According to Wallis, Thelma said laughingly, ‘I’m afraid the Prince is going to be lonely. Wallis, won’t you look after him?’ Thelma’s version of events has Wallis initiating the conversation: ‘Oh, Thelma the little man is going to be lonely.’ Wallis confided to her aunt, ‘I tried my best to cheer him up.’

  Until now, Ernest was still tolerating everything that was happening, flattered that the heir to the throne called at his home sometimes as often as twice a week in the evenings for supper or a KT. Even if he objected, because the society gossip about his wife – ‘that I am the latest’, as she put it – was immediate once Thelma sailed, he did not relinquish his belief that one should at all times be deeply deferential to the future monarch. But, when these evenings went on until the small hours, and Ernest had brought work home he needed to do, ‘he developed the art of tactfully excusing himself and retiring to his room with his papers’. Wallis was left to discuss plans for the Fort or the latest American jazz record or perhaps some project the Prince had in mind to promote British trade. She became adept at making him believe she was truly interested in his work but admitted privately, ‘this man is exhausting’. When occasionally she and Ernest both went to the Fort at weekends, ‘he increasingly singled me out as his partner during the dancing’.

  To Aunt Bessie she was frank about the situation for the moment. ‘I think I do amuse him. I’m the comedy relief and we like to dance together but I always have Ernest hanging around my neck so all is safe.’ And even to herself she was still remarkably clear-eyed about the relationship. She liked the attention and the way other invitations now came flooding in from society hostesses as a result. But the Prince was very demanding, telephoning two or three times a day as soon as Thelma had departed, sometimes in the small hours of the night, as well as visiting the flat most days, and she missed seeing her other friends. She certainly did not want to risk losing Ernest, who not only offered her the best chance of the secure lifestyle she craved above all else but with whom she had a ‘congenial’, easy-going relationship. The need to ‘keep Ernest in good humour’ was critical. ‘At the moment he’s flattered with it all and lets me dine once a week with him alone,’ she reported comfortingly to the increasingly worried Bessie Merryman. But for how much longer? ‘It all takes CIt /spa certain amount of tact handling another swansong before 40.’