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

by Anne Sebba

  For the moment she could genuinely reassure her husband with her belief that the attention was useful for them both, that the infatuation would not last, that soon the Prince would find another girl or return to one of his old flames. In the meantime she found juggling her life to keep two men happy as exciting as it was exhausting. ‘Wouldn’t mother have loved it all?’ she wrote to Bessie. Sometimes she wondered if ‘in any way I’ll ever be able to reward her efforts? Or if my insatiable ambitions will land me back in such a flat as the one room on Conn Hill, the Woburn.’ That building, where Wallis’s mother briefly lodged in the 1920s, had been so grim she nicknamed it ‘the Woebegone’. ‘Only time will show.’ Insecurity at the thought of losing everything, the deepest of all her many fears, was now corrosive; she was becoming mean and grasping in preparation for the day the clocks stopped.

  But there was a more serious concern: how to manage until then? Wallis and Ernest simply could not keep up their lifestyle any longer. That summer Ernest had to forgo an outing to Ascot since he could afford neither the clothes nor the ticket, let alone the time. The Prince provided a single ticket for Wallis and invited her to stay at the Fort for the week, behaviour which appalled Bessie who sent her niece a stern warning.

  Wallis still believed she was in control of the situation and promised her aunt that if Ernest raised any objection she would give the Prince up at once. She admitted that ‘keeping up with 2 men is making me move all the time’. But the Prince was now giving Wallis presents of jewellery as well as money to buy clothes and many other luxuries. It was these she found so hard to turn her back on. Soon he arrived at the flat with another present, a Cairn puppy like his own, suggestively called Slipper but nicknamed Mr Loo. House-training her dogs was a talent Wallis never managed. Ernest, too, came in for occasional appeasement, including a gift of a bolt of brown and beige houndstooth tweed to be made up by the Prince’s tailor into an overcoat, an exact replica of one the Prince himself wore and which Ernest had admired. This coat is still in the possession of the Kerr-Smiley family, giving rise to the family’s jibe that Ernest was the man who sold his wife for a bolt of cloth. Another priceless gift, valued hugely by Ernest, was ensuring his smooth admittance into the Prince’s own Masonic Lodge, presided over by Sir Maurice Jenks, a well-connected former lord mayor. At first Jenks had agreed but was then challenged by fellow Masons who said they would not accept a candidate on the recommendation of the wife’s lover ‘as it would produce a situation in which the fundamental law that no Mason may sleep with another Mason’s wife would be broken. The P of W denied that there was anything between himself & Mrs S & gave a pledge to that effect as a Mason.’ Ernest was duly admitted. According to Godfrey Thomas: ‘The story now goes throughout the city that HRH has violated his Masonic oath, that ES wishes to be a Mason for business reasons and that HRH, to keep him quiet about Mrs S, was more or less blackmailed into sponsoring him.’

  For Ernest this was the pinnacle of social achievement yet it came at a price he may not have realised he was paying at the time: losing Wallis. By May 1934 Wallis had not only replaced Thelma as the Prince’s favourite, she was his only. Even at the height of the Prince’s passion for Lady Furness, Freda Dudley Ward, by then divorced, was still on hand as the mother figure to whom he turned for comfort and advice. The advent of Wallis destroyed that. That month Freda’s elder daughter, Penelope, had an operat Chad foion for acute appendicitis with complications. Freda spent desperate days and nights by her daughter’s bedside, registering only after the crisis had passed that she had not heard from the Prince for several weeks. She called York House, and the telephone operator whom she had known for years answered it with a choking sound, she later recalled. ‘He didn’t seem able to speak. I suddenly realised to my horror that he was crying. “Everyone seems to have gone mad around here,” he said. The Prince had given orders that none of my phone calls be put through. I never heard from him again.’ This was especially hurtful for Penelope and Angela who had been close to the Prince since childhood and viewed him almost as a stepfather. They had given him the only taste of warm family life he was ever to know.

  Thelma was similarly dismissed. She had returned from America in the spring but after one visit to the Fort – her last – knew instantly that something had happened between Wallis and the Prince to the detriment of her own relationship with him. He was not only avoiding her but going out of his way to be charming to Wallis, hanging on her every word even in front of Ernest, who was there too. The Prince and Wallis seemed to have little private jokes. For Thelma, the revelation came when the Prince picked up a lettuce leaf to eat in his fingers and Wallis slapped his hand, telling him he should use a knife and fork in future. ‘I knew then that she had looked after him exceedingly well.’ When he also refused to take Thelma’s telephone calls, she decided to visit Wallis at Bryanston Court to ask if the Prince was keen on her now. ‘This was a question I had expected,’ Wallis wrote in her memoirs. ‘“Thelma,” I said, “I think he likes me. He may be fond of me. But if you mean by keen that he is in love with me, the answer is definitely no.”’

  Wallis has generally been blamed for the summary dismissal of old friends such as Thelma and Freda on the assumption that she insisted he sever all ties. But her position was not so strong in early 1934. The cruel discarding of Freda and Thelma is however deeply revealing of the Prince’s weak character; confronted with a situation he could not handle, he avoided it. It was not the last time he retreated into the safety of the Fort in such circumstances, unable to summon the moral courage required. In his youth the Prince’s physical courage in wishing to fight in the trenches, to race in dangerous steeplechase events or to fly his own aircraft had been notable; some believed that Wallis’s influence and her own myriad fears sapped his physical courage too. Once Thelma was off the scene, Wallis’s hold on the Prince intensified. Many of the staff at the Fort loathed the new regime from the start as Wallis imposed her ideas on decoration, food and general routine there, causing hurt, annoyance and offence.

  The Prince’s personal entourage had more snobbish but no less negative grounds for complaint. ‘His friends of his own selection are awful,’ commented the Hon. John Aird, the Prince’s equerry. ‘One of the worst examples was there, a couple called Simson [sic], she is an American 150 per cent and HRH seems to like her a bit extra; he is a very unattractive and common Englishman … they seem terrible at first and this feeling does not decrease as one sees them more often.’ Aird did see them more often and detested them both, describing Ernest as ‘full of general information like a Whitaker, while she pretends to have taste in decoration and food – maybe the first, but certainly not the second’.

  That summer the Prince planned to take a house in Biarritz and Ernest was, yet again, fortuitously away on a business trip to the US. While ‘regretting Ernest Cettdth=" couldn’t join the party’, the Prince suggested inviting Wallis’s disapproving aunt along to regularize the arrangement and hoping to win her over. It was the first time that Wallis and the Prince had been seen in public without Ernest, although the British press was still completely silent about the friendship. In addition to the Prince, Wallis and Mrs Merryman, the party consisted of Lieutenant Commander and Mrs Colin Buist, John Aird and a private secretary, Hugh Lloyd Thomas. From Biarritz they decided to go on a cruise on Lord Moyne’s rather unsuitable vessel, the Rosaura, this time leaving Aunt Bessie behind. But they were joined by Herman and Katherine Rogers. The boat hit a storm in the Bay of Biscay and Wallis was terrified. Aird believed that she infected the Prince with her fears as ‘he was really frightened and in my opinion is a coward at heart’. As the equerry responsible for organizing the trip, Aird was appalled by Wallis’s behaviour. She complained to him that she was not being introduced to important and interesting English people in Biarritz, but he noted in his diary: ‘I think she would complain more if she was … I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much clevere
r than I think, she does not quite know how to work it so as to cash in best.’ By the end of the holiday Aird was almost despairing of the Prince, who ‘has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog’. He might have despaired even more had he seen the Prince put a velvet pouch from Cartier in her hand. It contained a small diamond and emerald charm, the first of many. Wallis herself later wrote coyly of the voyage: ‘Perhaps it was during these evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.’

  Having seen the situation for herself, Aunt Bessie was more worried than ever, convinced that the Prince’s undoubted infatuation would pass and that Wallis would end up with neither husband nor Prince. Wallis had tried to set her mind at rest by telling her that she would ‘try and be clever enough to keep them both’. It was some help that Ernest was often away on business. But then she thought up a plan.

  During her recent visit to America she had seen Mary Raffray only briefly. Her old friend was under intense strain nursing her mother Edith, who had cancer, and coping with her alcoholic husband. After Henry Kirk had died in 1933, the responsibility for looking after Edith fell to Mary, the childless sister. Mary and Jackie decided that they would move old Mrs Kirk to New York City with them where they both looked after her with great kindness and devotion in her final year. Mary decided that while her mother was alive there could be no question of divorce or separation. But when she died in 1934 Mary was exhausted. There was no reason for her to remain now watching Jackie destroy himself with drink, however much affection they still felt for each other. Thus Wallis’s invitation to come over to London and stay at Bryanston Court arrived at a perfect moment. Wallis, remembering the outings they had made as a threesome three years back, and how Mary had listened, rapt, to her husband’s historical disquisitions on old buildings, thought she had found the perfect diversion for Ernest while she continued to be entertained by the Prince. Mary accepted with alacrity.

  But whatever line was crossed in the summer, the Prince now decided he wanted to go further and present Wallis to his parents at Buckingham Palace. In November there was to be a glittering reception to celebrate the forthcoming wedding of his younger brother Prince George, Duke of Kent to Princess Marina of Greece. Wallis had got to know George through her weekends at the Fort. But the Ki Ct. here wng did not want to meet Mr and Mrs Simpson and deleted their names from the guest list. The Prince, persuading his parents that inviting the Simpsons was somehow good for Anglo-American relations, managed to reinstate them. And so Wallis, wearing jewels given to her by her royal lover and a tiara borrowed from Cartier, was presented to King George and Queen Mary. Ernest was repeatedly left unhappily standing alone at the edge of the room with no one to talk to. The King was outraged. ‘That woman in my own house!’ he shouted to his cousin, the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Count Albert Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, known to history as Mensdorff and an intimate of King George V as he had been of his father, Edward VII. Afterwards he gave orders that Mrs Simpson was not to be invited to any Silver Jubilee functions being planned for the following year nor to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

  Wallis later characterized the meeting with the King of England – the only time she ever met either of her future husband’s parents – as ‘a few words of perfunctory greeting, an exchange of meaningless pleasantries’. About her husband’s enforced appearance as a wallflower she made no comment. She had had a dress made for the occasion by Eva Lutyens, daughter of the architect, in violet lamé with a vivid green sash, which she believed was ‘outstanding’. Others in the royal party found it brash, like its owner. Prince Christopher of Greece described in his memoirs how the Prince of Wales:

  laid a hand on my arm in his impulsive way.

  ‘Christo, come with me. I want you to meet Mrs Simpson.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘An American. She’s wonderful.’

  The two words told me everything. It was as though he had said she is the only woman in the world.

  The pressure from so insistent a lover was, already, almost more than Wallis could cope with. When the Prince went to Sandringham for Christmas with his family she viewed it as ‘a lovely rest for us and especially me’. The moment he was back he started dreaming up ways to be with Wallis more and now suggested a skiing holiday in Austria. Wallis accepted without consulting Ernest and for the first time he was furious; they had a fierce row and Ernest, uncharacteristically, went out slamming the door. In her memoirs Wallis claimed that her husband did not join the skiing party because he had a business trip to America and had hoped that this time his wife would accompany him. In fact, he remained forlornly at home, unable to watch the increasingly public love affair between his Prince and his wife any longer.

  Wallis now realized that she was indeed pushing her husband over the limit and by playing this dangerous double game risked losing him. But she did not step back. Why? She was not in love with Edward himself but in love with the opulence, the lifestyle, the way doors opened for her, the way he made all her childish dreams come true. She was sure it was a fairy tale that would end, but while it lasted could not bring herself to end it herself. She believed Ernest still loved her enough to catch her when she fell – and for the moment he did. If there was a moment to call a halt this was it. But she could not. She wrote to Bessie about the lovely jewellery she had received so far, ‘not many things but awfully nice stones’, which Ernest had to pay to insure. By October, Lady Diana Cooper, invited to dine at Fort Belvedere, had observed that Wallis was Cat hich Ern ‘glittering, and dripped in new jewels and clothes’. Wallis’s jewellery was now a lively topic of conversation in London society, a spectacle so amazing that many, including the diarist Mrs Belloc Lowndes, assumed when she saw Wallis that same year that it must be costume jewellery. Those in the know put her right, as they ‘screeched with laughter exclaiming that all the jewels were real, that the then Prince of Wales had given her fifty thousand pounds’ worth at Christmas, following it up with sixty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels a week later at the New Year’. This was a staggering amount.

  Wallis hated skiing and the Duke himself hardly excelled. Dudley Forwood, later the Duke’s equerry but then a young attaché at the British Legation in Vienna, who had been hauled out of post and was expected to accompany the Duke everywhere, recalled Wallis standing on the mountainside in Kitzbühel in unsuitable high-heeled shoes looking anxious. As the Duke descended the slopes Forwood heard him call out to her in his strange, half-cockney voice: ‘Aren’t I doing splendidly, Wallis?’ Not many thought he was.

  This almost month-long holiday in February 1935 – after Kitzbühel they went on to Vienna and Budapest – caused a definite turning point in other ways aside from the fact that Austria was an unstable country with a growing pro-Nazi party and that its leader, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, had been assassinated the previous year. A hurt letter from Wallis to the Prince around this time – which she asked him to tear up – indicates just how precarious her position was or at least how precarious she thought it was, as well as pointing to a rare occasion when he did not do as she asked. Preserving smooth relations with Ernest mattered intensely to her and she reveals that she had had ‘a long quiet talk with E last night and I felt very eanum [a private word between Wallis and Edward meaning small, weak or insignificant] at the end’. She berated the Prince for staying too long on his visits to their flat, demanding too much of her, constantly telephoning and thoughtlessly stepping on other people. ‘Doesn’t your love for me reach to the heights of wanting to make things a little easier for me?’ She begged him for a little more consideration of her position with Ernest and told him she thought he had not grown up where love was concerned ‘and perhaps it’s only a boyish passion’. Still convinced that this was an infatuation that would pass, she told him that his ‘behaviour last night made me realise how very alone I shall be some day – and because I love you I don’t seem to have the strength to pr
otect myself from your youthfulness’. If she was not deemed good enough for Felipe Espil when she was a decade younger, surely it was only a matter of time before the heir to the British throne treated her in the same way? Frozen with anxiety, she could not move. The Prince responded by giving her more gifts of money and jewellery, further sapping her resolve to walk away. It would not be out of character to imagine that Wallis was making a mental calculation of what she would need if she were to be abandoned by both men. Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, Comptroller and Treasurer to the Prince since 1920 when he retired from the navy, was the Prince’s closest adviser and, for a time, had the confidence of both King and Prince. He told the King in July 1935 that Mrs Simpson was already receiving ‘a very handsome income’ from the Prince. Aird put the figure at £6,000 per annum.