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

by Anne Sebba

  As Harold Nicolson had observed in calling the group surrounding Wallis and the new King second rate, and as the guest books from the Fort reveal, most of those invited to inform or stimulate the King came from their existing small circle of friends in London (the Hunters, Prendergasts, Buists, Lawson-Johnstons), those who took a broad-minded view of divorce, with a sprinkling of courtiers and diplomats every now and again but a marked absence of artists, writers, politicians or statesmen or those who might have challenged them to think differently about a wide range of issues. Fred Bate, the British representative for America’s National Broadcasting Company (NBC) who had lived in Britain for some twenty years, was an exception in that he was better informed than most of their friends. But he too was divorced, in 1929, and remarried. When Wallis and Edward were exposed to the world of culture it was often a disaster, never more Kr, d, so than on 10 June when Sibyl Colefax invited them as guests of honour and persuaded Artur Rubinstein to play after dinner, a rare honour granted by the Polish maestro. Several after-dinner guests swelled the numbers at this point, including Winston and Clementine Churchill, and there was a considerable hubbub about politics which Sibyl did her best to hush as Rubinstein was ready to play. After three Chopin pieces during which the King, seated on a stool close to the piano, had chatted intermittently, openly displaying his boredom, Rubinstein prepared himself for a fourth. But before he could do so the King got up and walked over to him saying, ‘We enjoyed that very much, Mr Rubinstein,’ which, as everyone knew, was a clear command to stop. Rubinstein made a barely audible reply, ‘I am afraid that you do not like my playing, Your Majesty,’ and, accompanied by Kenneth Clark, the influential Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and director of the National Gallery, left the party angered by the humiliation. One of the guests was the Princesse de Polignac, the former sewing-machine heiress Winnaretta Singer and a noted musician herself, who said later how shocked she had been by the rudeness shown to Rubinstein. Such philistinism could never happen in Paris where she hosted musical salons, she declared.

  Among the elite, everyone knew who Wallis Simpson was. But Alan Lascelles noticed how naively keen the King was that they should know her better. He wrote to his wife Joan of a meeting at which the King:

  gave me an example of his ostrich-like mentality, which nearly made me burst out laughing. I was telling him about my hunting experiences in Maryland and he asked me searching questions about various places in that part of the world. I couldn’t imagine why he was so excited about them when he said, ‘I’m very interested in that country because rather a friend of mine, Mrs Simpson, Wallie Simpson, I don’t think you know her? comes from down there.’ It struck me as the most child-like simplicity; can he really think I’ve not heard of Mrs Simpson?

  The King had often in his life revealed a lack of intellectual curiosity but, now with the petulance of a child who does not want to be told no, was going dangerously further by putting himself beyond the reach of anyone who might disagree with his chosen lifestyle. Even the judicious Walter Monckton was forced to remark, ‘he was not well placed at Fort Belvedere to judge public opinion’. Among those whom he rarely saw in 1936 were his brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of York. It was partly in order to remedy that situation that he suggested in the spring that he and Wallis should drive over from the Fort in his new American station wagon, the height of modernity, to visit the Yorks’ nearby home, Royal Lodge; he wanted to show Bertie the car.

  He took enormous pleasure driving there, Wallis recalled. The Yorks met the King at the door and they all had tea in the drawing room. Wallis, in a perfectly polished paragraph of her memoirs, describes how the Duchess’s ‘justly famous charm was highly evident’. The hour passed with innocuous conversation but left Wallis with ‘a distinct impression that while the Duke of York was sold on the American station wagon the Duchess was not sold on David’s other American interest’.

  The antipathy between the two women may have had a deeper source, as Lady Mosley, the former Diana Mitford, who knew both women, believed. ‘Probably the theory of their [the Windsors’] contemporaries that Cake [a Mitford nickname for the Queen Mother, derived from her confectionary fashion sense] was rather in love w Kher[the With him [the Duke] (as a girl) & took second best, may account for much.’ But there were more recent grievances too, such as the occasion when Wallis decided to entertain guests at the Fort with an impersonation of the Duchess, whom she thought not only dowdy but possessed of a ‘goody-goodiness [that was] false and artificial’. The Duchess walked into the room while Wallis was in full flow and, ‘from that moment of overhearing, the Duchess of York became her implacable enemy’, according to Ella Hogg, wife of Brigadier Oliver Hogg, who was there at the time. Wallis maintained that the episode showed the Duchess had no sense of humour; the old courtiers thought it indicated that she had no idea how to behave with royalty.

  Throughout May and June Wallis had more weekends at the Fort as well as buying sprees in Paris, while the King bought her more and more jewellery to go with the frocks and sent more declarations of eternal love couched in the private, infantile language they used for each other. In March a magnificent ruby and diamond bracelet from Van Cleef and Arpels had come with a note full of underlinings telling her that ‘THEY say that THEY liked this bracelet and that THEY want you to wear it always in the evening … A boy loves a girl more and more and more.’ Inscribed on the clasp are the date ‘27-iii-36’ and the words ‘Hold Tight’, a reference perhaps to Wallis’s sexual prowess as well as to the need to endure political difficulties.

  Meanwhile Ernest bought a small flat for Mary near by at Albion Gate in Hyde Park and although Mary was ‘homesick and lonely’, as she told her sisters, she wanted to stay in London for the sake of Ernest. In early June the King had had another ‘difficult’ talk with Ernest and told Wallis that he ‘must get after him now or he won’t move’. But Ernest was still required to put in an appearance with his wife on occasions and the day she was writing this letter, 28 June, he was at Blenheim with her and the King and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. In her memoirs Wallis wrote that ‘as best as I can recall’ the last time she and Ernest ‘were publicly together in David’s company’ was the dinner on 28 May for the Baldwins. ‘Not long afterwards I told Ernest that I was starting divorce proceedings.’ As Mary’s letter shows this was not the case. Ernest had not quite yet given up on Wallis – nor on his love of visiting England’s stately homes. But this particular occasion of togetherness was one she absolutely could not recall publicly.

  Wallis was suffering from a serious and painful recurrence of her stomach trouble in the summer of 1936. X-rays, she told her aunt, had found ‘a healed ulcer scar’, but this could have been a healed scar from another internal operation. By the end of June she felt better as ‘I have the sort of stomach that needs care and I have a diet which evidently agrees as I haven’t had a pain for a month’, she told her aunt. But the pain from the intensity of her marital situation was harder to assuage. In July, Ernest accepted the inevitable and booked in to the riverside Hotel de Paris at Bray on the night of 21 July with a female companion who gave her name as Buttercup Kennedy. In an interview with the King’s Proctor in 1937 Ernest insisted that on his return he found a formal letter from Wallis suing for divorce which, he explained, meant not that she had been colluding in the proceedings but that she must have had him followed. He immediately moved out of Bryanston Court to live at the Guards Club in Piccadilly. In the letter Wallis wrote to Ernest she complained that ‘instead of being on business, as you led me to believe, you have been staying at Bray with a lady. I am sure you realise this is conduct which I cannot possibly overlook and must insist you do not con Kou at tinue to live here with me.’ Furthermore she was, she told him, instructing solicitors.

  Having set her divorce in motion it was time once again to go on a summer holiday. The King was determined not to follow royal tradition and spend August in Scotland; neither Balmoral nor grouse shootin
g had much appeal for him. He planned at first to rent the American actress Maxine Elliott’s villa on the French Riviera but was later advised against that by the Foreign Office because of the instability in the area caused by the Spanish Civil War. ‘I really am very annoyed with the FO for having messed up my holiday in this stupid manner,’ he wrote to his mother. According to John Aird, increasingly critical of Wallis’s baneful influence, the King was about to offer Maxine Elliott £1,000 as compensation for the cancellation but ‘then consulted Mrs Simpson and reduced the amount to £100’. Her fear – not irrational – that she would be cast aside without enough to live on and have to suffer as her mother had, was still not conquered.

  Instead the King now decided to charter a yacht and after an inspection of Lady Yule’s lavish vessel, the Nahlin – furnished rather like a Calais whore-shop’, as Aird described the floating palace with its own swimming pool, gymnasium and dance floor – plans were nonetheless made for a cruise along the Dalmatian coast. Because Wallis would not fly, they went first to France, then took the Orient Express through Austria to Yugoslavia and on 10 August, with some of their party, boarded the yacht. The other guests included Godfrey Thomas, Aird, the Humphrey Butlers, Helen Fitzgerald, Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, the Earl of Sefton and Alan Lascelles. The latter commented: ‘Outwardly as respectable as a boatload of archdeacons. But the fact remains that the two chief passengers [the King and the Earl] were cohabiting with other men’s wives.’8 Others joined for part of the trip, including Katherine and Herman Rogers – ‘a very good sort of yank and intelligent and much the nicest man here’, according to Lascelles.

  Diana Cooper, daughter of a duchess, thought the three women on board were very common: ‘goodness how common they are … they each have a pair of those immense field glasses which they glued to their eyes all saying “I don’t see any hotel. Do you think that’s one?” For all the world as if they had just come off the Gobi desert after weeks of yak milk diet.’ In Diana Cooper’s hilarious account of the cruise nothing seemed to miss her eager eye or wicked sense of fun, from Wallis’s voice rasping out wisecracks and the way she constantly referred to ‘the King and myself’, to her diet of whisky and water, her fear verging on panic when they all rode on donkeys up a hill or the way she could talk everyone’s head off and how parties suited and stimulated her. She wrote: ‘No sooner had we anchored than the king got nakidish [sic] into a row boat and went off to discover a sandy beach for Wallis. He asked her to go with him. She said it was too hot. She looked a figure of fun in a child’s piquet [sic] dress and ridiculous baby bonnet. Her face is an adult face “par excellence” and the silly bonnet’ – she then drew a picture of it – ‘really was grotesque.’

  One day Cooper described how the young King came scrambling down the stairs ‘naked but for two little straw sandals and two little grey flannel shorts and two little crosses on a gold chain around his neck, one of diamonds the other I haven’t seen yet. It always turns the wrong way. I note that Wallis has duplicates on her wrist.’ For some, a king wandering the streets with no shirt on was almost as sh K al noocking as travelling with his mistress, which was what everyone assumed Wallis to be. After a few days, Aird could not take it any longer and told him frankly that ‘Much as I liked him as a man I could not despise him more as a King,’ and threatened to go home.

  The King may have been travelling under a well-worn incognito as the Duke of Lancaster but the yacht, accompanied everywhere by two destroyers, was hardly secret and pictures of him with Wallis were widely splashed across American and foreign newspapers. Amazingly, the story was still ignored in the self-censoring and obedient British press. The King was mobbed wherever the party landed by ‘a yelling jostling crowd that does not leave him … shouting cheerio and following [him]’; and when the King went rowing ‘all the craft and canoes and top heavy tourist launches and the rubber necks glared at the decks of the Nahlin and never knew that this hot, tow-headed little nude in their midst was what they were looking for’. For Diana and her husband Duff the most annoying part of the trip was the way the yacht sailed past the beautiful sights at nighttime – the King not wishing Wallis to suffer from the heat too much – and so missed most of the antiquities. They had to visit temples and churches on their own.

  Frances Donaldson, in her biography of the King, pinpoints an important moment on the cruise when the party visited the King’s cousin King George of the Hellenes, who was accompanied by his beautiful English lady friend, Rosemary Brittain-Jones – ‘Wallis’ opposite number’, as Diana Cooper rather charmingly called her. ‘“Why doesn’t he marry her?” Mrs Simpson asked. Upon which one of the guests replied in astonished tones with a simple statement of fact: it was impossible for the King to marry a woman who was both a commoner and already married. This it seems put the King in one of his black moods but as so often he refused to face the implications and the pair continued their folie à deux.’ But that evening ended badly for another reason, as Cooper saw with embarrassment. The King was constantly fussing over Wallis, proud of her, and once:

  went down on hands and knees to pull her dress from under her chair foot. She stared at him as one would a freak and said, ‘Well, that’s the maust extraordinary performance I ever saw in my life.’ She then started on him for having been silent and rude to Mrs Jones at dinner. On and on she went until I began to think he had perhaps talked too long and too animatedly to Mrs Jones for her fancy. He got a little bit irritated and sad and when I left … I knew that it would not be dropped all night.

  On balance, as they went past five capitals in thirty-six hours, Lascelles was pleasantly relieved by the King’s behaviour. It was better than it had been on earlier royal tours, even though ‘there may be many faults of temperament and character, and though, as I always knew, certain cells in his brain have never grown’. Writing to Joan he said: ‘It is an immense relief to have recovered some confidence, after all these months of gloomy foreboding … Of course I don’t pretend everything in the garden is lovely by any means … I was really rather worried to sit down in St James’s Pa

  lace with an “abandon hope all ye who enter here” feeling. Now I shall have to convince some of my colleagues that things are not quite as black as they have been painting them to me all these months.’ Lascelles’s first impressions were that ‘the lady is a v good influence. She has excellent manners and suggests doing the right thing at the right moment … anyhow it is an immense convenience having a permanency inste Kmans aad of a fresh one in every port as in old days.’

  In the following months Mrs Simpson’s place in the King’s life threatened to take on rather more permanency than the Court was comfortable with.

  8

  Wallis in the Witness Box

  ‘I’ve been pretty flattened out by the world in general’

  When Wallis attended Ascot in June 1936 she had to go alone, without the King, who was still officially in mourning. But he sent the woman widely touted as his mistress in a royal carriage, causing consternation and fury in official circles. Ramsay MacDonald, the former Prime Minister, made a trenchant observation: had she been a widow there would have been no problem. ‘The people of this country do not mind fornication, but they loathe adultery.’

  Wallis has been caricatured both then and now as witch, whore or Nazi spy – some believing she combined elements of all three. Yet ultimately it was not any of these accusations which made the idea of her marrying the British sovereign so unacceptable to ‘the people of this country’. Her unacceptability was, as MacDonald understood, because she was a woman with two living husbands who now appeared ready to make sacred promises to a third to love him for better or for worse and for all time. Lady Diana Cooper, the duchess’s daughter, Harold Nicolson, married to a well-known lesbian, and Lord Sefton, an earl with a mistress, were all part of a privileged elite who took a broad-minded attitude to sex. But they were not remotely representative of ordinary people, especially those outside London and those who were regular
churchgoers. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, on the other hand, was. ‘If compared to a wireless, Mr Baldwin has his earth in the British soil and his aerial listening in to the British public,’ wrote Nancy Dugdale, wife of his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Tom. Baldwin was a plain, undemonstrative Englishman, prosperous and in a way unambitious. He was a man whose jackets became shapeless from the large tobacco tin and pipe in his side pockets, who walked ‘with a quick, long stride that suggested one accustomed to tramping much over ploughed fields with a gun under his arm and smoking a pipe with unremitting enjoyment’. The objection that ‘ordinary people’ had to Wallis was not that she was common, brash or American but the awkward fact that she already had two living husbands.

  Divorce was a fiendishly hot issue in late 1930s Britain, for some a much greater and more tangible threat than anything happening in Europe, which felt remote. By coincidence there was a Bill (eventually the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937) currently before Parliament and just at the crucial Committee stage in the autumn of 1936. Divorce in England, first legalized in 1857, had changed little since then and was a two-stage process: first a decree nisi and then (but not automatically) a decree absolute six months later after a full investigation, if necessary, by a government official known as the King’s Proctor, into the truth of the matters alleged in the petition. Although the number of divorces was increasing slowly, there were still in 1937 fewer than 5,000 a year – a figur Nmans ulle that was to double by 1939 when the law changed, giving an indication of the frustration among many who felt trapped in broken marriages. Until 1937, divorce was a costly and complex business available to a wife only in cases of her husband’s adultery. It was necessary to prove not only the guilt of the respondent but also the ‘innocence’ – in the sense of not being an adulterer – of the petitioner and to demonstrate that none of the other bars to divorce, such as the couple putting up an agreed story (that is, collusion), were operative. In effect this meant that it was easy for the rich to divorce by mutual consent if the husband was willing to provide his wife with the evidence by a procedure known as ‘a hotel bill case’. What usually happened was that an impoverished young (female) stranger was hired for a free trip to an expensive seaside hotel where the couple were found in bed together as breakfast was brought in. So the double standards and hypocrisy involved in obtaining a divorce had engendered a widespread sense of moral shame, as the collusion and duplicity so often involved appeared just as scandalous as the adultery. The current Bill was sponsored by the MPA. P. Herbert, who in a novel entitled Holy Deadlock had pointed out the absurdity of a law where, if it could be proved that husband and wife had each committed adultery, then neither could obtain a divorce. For most of law-abiding Britain this was an issue of the deepest significance; once divorce was made easier, the looming idea that, if you were married and saw someone you liked better you could simply ditch your current husband or wife and snatch a new one, was appalling. Women, most of whom did not have access to jobs or money at this time, had much to fear from family break-up. Not surprisingly, one of the most active bodies opposing any change in the divorce laws was the 500,000-strong Mothers’ Union.