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

by Anne Sebba

  As the time approached for departure Wallis told Walter that she was beginning to feel like the Monk of Siberia, ‘who with a hell of a yell burst from his cell’.

  In the event the lunch at the White House had to be cancelled at the last minute when Mrs Roosevelt’s brother fell ill. But they were nonetheless delighted by the warm welcome from large crowds in Washington, New York, Chicago and Baltimore. For the local girl made good, Baltimore was unquestionably the high spot. Here she was heartened to find that she had brought out crowds estimated by some at 200,000, waving Union Jacks and American flags and cheering. As they rode in an open-topped car with Mayor Howard W. Jackson they experienced s exn Ja welcome neither of them was used to. Jackson told them to regard Baltimore as a second home ‘where you will always find peace and happiness’. They also spent time with some Warfield relations in the countryside outside Baltimore where Wallis had passed so many childhood holidays. Some of these relations she had not seen for years and she was as keen for them to meet the Duke as he was to show her his ranch – the EP Ranch as it was known, in the hills of Alberta, near the town of High River. In 1919 he had told his beloved Freda Dudley Ward that if only she would live with him there ‘I’d never want to return to England; I’ve got thoroughly bitten with Canada and its possibilities. It’s the place for a man, particularly after the Great War, and if I wasn’t P. of W. well I guess I’d stay here quite a while!!!’

  It was there in October 1941 that Wallis heard the news that Mary Simpson, her once best and oldest friend from Baltimore, had died after a two-year fight with an aggressive and intensely painful cancer. Like Wallis, she was just forty-five. Mary had been ill on and off since the birth of her son, Ernest Henry Child Simpson, in September 1939 and within months had had a radical mastectomy and been told that her chances of survival were slim. Having qualified as a St John Ambulance first-aid worker at London’s Lancaster Road Baths, she continued her volunteering work as long as she could, telling friends that, in spite of her illness, ‘life is pretty good after all when one has an Ernest like mine’. In addition to the cancer, the Simpsons had recently lost most of their possessions in a fire at the warehouse where they had been stored while they looked for a house. Ernest’s lifelong collection of antiquarian books was destroyed as well as the furniture from Bryanston Court, chosen by Wallis, ‘which we are not crying over’.

  Mary, bravely facing up to the knowledge she did not have long to live, desperately wanted to be reunited with her baby son, who had been evacuated to friends in North America at the start of the war, and to bring him back to England where his father could take care of him. But a return flight across the Atlantic in the middle of war was an impossibility, they found. As they made enquiries the Prime Minister came to their rescue. ‘Winston Churchill, recognising what a gentleman Ernest had been in 1937 and how smoothly the divorce had gone through thanks to him when he might have put all sorts of information and obstacles in the way’, managed to arrange a government plane for Mary, who was so fragile she had to be carried on a stretcher and driven to and from the plane by ambulance. ‘The family always knew this was Churchill’s recognition of Ernest’s good behaviour. But the gesture could never be made public.’ Just before she died, Mary wrote pathetically in her diary, ‘Ernest still thinks the Windsors are perfect.’ After Mary’s death Wallis wrote to Ernest from the ranch telling him, ‘God is difficult to understand at times for you deserved a well earned happiness. If ever I can soften the blow that fate has dealt you, the Duke and myself are ready to help in anyway you may ask. Dear Ernest, I who know you very well and all your honest and beautiful qualities, I know the depth of your sufferings – your son will be a stronghold for the future.’18

  In early November, the Windsors returned to Nassau having avoided the worst of the heat but not the opprobrium heaped on them, as expected, for escaping. Even MacColl had not been able to prevent that. He wrote in his memoirs not merely of how Wallis dominated the Duke – ‘I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage to quite so remarka ste doble a degree’ – but of the intense pleasure he derived whenever he won her approval. MacColl noticed how once during the trip an American journalist had asked him to make the Churchillian V-sign. He had started to lift his hand when the Duchess shot him a look. ‘She shook her head. The Duke dropped his arm.’

  There were criticisms of the amount of luggage they had taken with them – according to some estimates, eighty cases. The Washington Star’s Henry McLemore commented: ‘you almost have to question the sanity of a man or a woman who would start on a short trip with 58 bags and trunks full of clothing’. The accusations of extravagance could not be easily brushed aside when it was made known that Wallis had set up an appointment with her favourite couturier, Mainbocher, while she was in New York. Much to her annoyance the ‘spoiled Mainbocher, who simply attends to those on the spot’ and had declined to come to Nassau to see Wallis, could not resist talking about his famous client to the newspapers, which gave lurid accounts of Wallis’s improvidence in wartime. She transferred her patronage for a while to Valentina but could not resist returning to Mainbocher soon afterwards. According to one report she had bought thirty-four hats. She retaliated in the press by correcting the number to five and saying that since she had not been shopping since May 1940, more than a year before, ‘I don’t think anyone could consider this outrageous.’ But of course that is precisely what many people in the American, as well as the British, press did consider it: ‘an ostentatious display of jewellery and finery at a period when the people of this country are strictly rationed’.

  But on 7 December 1941, after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war, life changed dramatically for the islanders of the Bahamas and Wallis’s relief work now took on urgent meaning. She spent every morning at the Red Cross HQ and every afternoon at the canteen she had set up in a former gambling casino to feed the thousands of British RAF officers now stationed on the island in connection with the Coastal Command training programme, as well as members of the US Army Air Force detachment based there.

  ‘Wallis is very busy fixing up the RAF canteen,’ wrote Rosa Wood, her friend and assistant. ‘It will be rather a canteen de luxe when it is furnished. It wanted quite a lot doing to it. I really admire the way Wallis has thrown herself into all her various jobs. She really is wonderful and does work hard. I do hope that people everywhere are realising all the good she is doing. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with I really don’t know what I would do without her.’ Wallis changed the name of the Bahamian Club to the United Services Canteen Nassau and herself paid to have some USCN badges made for its workers so that they looked smart and had a sense of identity. She was the guest of honour at bazaars and at garden and cocktail parties, although ‘we have made a rule that we never attend a party that isn’t for charity’, she told Monckton. ‘I have even learned to make short and trembling speeches,’ she added, ‘in the most drab and pathetic surroundings.’ In a turnaround that would have surprised Lucy Baldwin, she also founded a clinic for the care of expectant mothers and young children which involved a considerable commitment of time and money, usually working with the native Bahamian population. But, for servicemen, it was the numerous plates of bacon and eggs, personally served by the Duchess of Windsor at the canteen, that they remembered for years afterwards.

  Wallis herself, writing to her New York friend Edith Lindsay, admitted: ‘We are as busy as bees wit sy a0" h the canteen for the troops plus the outfitting of survivors and it is so much better having personal work to do rather than sweating over taxes being sent off to England.’ But she missed society and wrote constantly to her New York friends, as well as to Herman and Katherine Rogers in Washington, begging them to come and visit and relieve the Nassau tedium or ‘Nassau disease’, which she described as ‘the normal desire of any excuse to stay away as long as possible, which if I didn’t always want to be with HRH, I would be looking for excuses
too. We were offered Bermuda while in NY but the Duke refused, which did not make me sorry as I don’t believe in letting islands become a habit … How I long for the sight and sound of human beings – my mentality is getting very dire after over two years here and only two months leave,’ she complained. When she heard there were to be visitors she wrote that not only was she absolutely thrilled, ‘in fact the whole island is in an uproar at the thought of “new faces”. We had just decided to send for masks as we all felt we could not look at each other any more.’ Even the knowledge that all her letters were read by an official censor, and that in Europe an existential war was being waged, did little to make her tone down her desperation. It was not simply that the endless bridge, golf and fishing did not amuse her. Her frustration was rooted in the anger that, since they had been deliberately placed in a backwater away from the war, there was little they could do to help.

  Two events caused deep concern during their five years in the Bahamas. The first was the death in a plane crash in August 1942 of the Duke’s younger brother, Prince George, who along with his wife Marina had always shown sympathy and understanding for the Windsors. This was a bitter personal blow. It did nothing to promote a rapprochement with his remaining family even though Queen Mary wrote to the Duke: ‘Please give a kind message to your wife, she will help you to bear your sorrow,’ a message which represented a distinct softening of attitudes. Some historians have suggested that, had the Duke been prepared to build on this without constantly pressing for his wife to be called HRH, there might have been further reconciliation. The message had resulted from an initiative taken by Wallis to write to her mother-in-law politely proposing that she might wish to meet the retiring Bishop of Nassau, John Dauglish, who had connections to the royal family and was returning to England and who could pass on details of her son’s life in the Bahamas. Queen Mary did indeed summon the Bishop, who reported back to Wallis that although the Queen listened with interest to matters concerning her son, when he began to talk enthusiastically about the Duchess there appeared ‘a stone wall of disinterest’.

  The second event was the brutal murder of Sir Harry Oakes in July 1943. Oakes was found battered to death and partly burned, with feathers strewn over the corpse. The Duke made a number of blunders in his treatment of the case from the moment he summoned the Miami police force to investigate rather than the local detectives and without consulting Scotland Yard first. He clearly believed that Oakes’s son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, a man he personally disliked, was guilty of the killing. In the event de Marigny was found not guilty at his trial and the police were accused of manufacturing evidence. De Marigny was ordered to be deported, a hazardous procedure in wartime. The crime remains unsolved today, although it has been the subject of several books and a film. Theories abound, the most likely of which, according to the late Diana Mosley, is that his business associate Harold Christie hired an assassin for the job.

  The Duke may have shown poor judgement, at the very least, in the way he dealt wi sy hedure inth the case, but Wallis was circumspect in anything she said then or later. Two weeks after the murder, she wrote to Edith Lindsay: ‘You can imagine what the rumour clinic is doing to the sad Oakes case. It really is all too tragic.’ But she gave nothing else away other than her boredom. July was especially painful because of the fierce heat, which meant, she added, that ‘There is really no one here as with the loosening of the exchange control everybody has fled to the cool breezes … Everything is really so intensely dull here and I long for news of the big world no matter how trivial the news. I miss you very much and would like to go shopping with you this minute.’ But leaving the island was now impossible and in any case ‘each time I find it harder to return! So think I better not tempt myself with all your bright lights and attractive people.’

  To what extent is it fair to see the grumblings of the Duke and Duchess as undermining morale and the war effort and, in addition, to describe them as pro-Hitler or Nazi puppets in waiting? ‘I suppose,’ Wallis herself explained frankly on the eve of their autumn 1941 visit to America,

  even though everybody wants the sufferings of so many to end, one’s own personal feelings can’t help but creep in and I do most devoutly pray for the end of the war so that the Duke may be released from the difficult situation of being in a firm whose head is an arch enemy. Everything so far has gone well with the Embassy in Washington regarding us … Canada is another thing; the family element again and we have had the usual snub from ‘The Great Dominion’. Strange that an Englishman is treated with politeness in a foreign country like the US but Canada, his own land, is rude. So you see what I mean when I pray for the day when the Duke is free once more.

  These feelings, his as much as hers, were not to change throughout their time in Nassau and, in the current atmosphere in Britain, were inevitably seen as defeatist. But then, as she confessed to her principal New York correspondent Edith Lindsay, ‘“Les Anglais” are very strange people, I find.’ The tone of her letters, even those to officials, was defiant, never deferential. As she wrote to her aunt in July 1940:

  We refused to return to England except under our own terms as the Duke is quite useless to the country if he was to receive the same treatment as when he returned in September … one humiliation after another … Can you fancy a family continuing a feud when the very Empire is threatened and not putting every available man in a spot where he would be most useful? Could anything be so small and hideous? What will happen to a country which allows such behaviour?

  Shortly after Wallis wrote that letter, the Duke foolishly gave an interview to the American novelist Fulton Oursler, which was published in Liberty magazine in March 1941. Appearing at this critical moment in the battle to persuade America to join the Allies, the article could scarcely have been worse timed. Discussing whether an outright victory was ever possible in modern warfare, Oursler opined: ‘I am inclined to doubt it … The Germans might say there will always be a Germany so long as one German remains alive.’ The Duke responded rhetorically: ‘And you can’t execute the death sentence on 80,000,000 people?’

  However much the Duke insisted that he had been fed the answers, the interview greatly angered Churchill. It coloured all their subsequent wart sbsebt iime exchanges. Churchill told the Duke that the article:

  gives the impression and can indeed only bear the interpretation of contemplating a negotiated peace with Hitler. That is not the policy of the Government and vast majority of the people of the United States … later on, when the atmosphere is less electric, when the issues are more clear cut and when perhaps Your Royal Highness’s public utterances … are more in harmony with the dominant tides of British and American feeling, I think that an agreeable visit [to the US] for you might be arranged.

  This exchange deteriorated when the Duke pointed out that a recent American edition of Life had carried an article in which his sister-in-law, the Queen, referred to the Duchess as ‘that woman’. But eventually, after a three-month silence, the Duke ate humble pie and wrote to Churchill assuring him that as long as he held an official position, ‘I play the game of the Government that appointed me.’ Six months after the disastrous article in Liberty, ‘chaperoned’ by MacColl, the Duke and Duchess were allowed to make their first official visit to the American mainland.

  Yet the Duke never gave up bombarding Churchill with requests for Wallis to have minor medical treatment in the US or about staffing arrangements at Government House, as well as reverting to the one major request that was consuming them both: her royal status, or lack of it. In an eight-page letter to Churchill in November 1942 he not only reminded the British Prime Minister that ‘I asked you to bear me in mind should another suitable appointment fall vacant’. He also urged that ‘after five and a half years, the question of restoring to the Duchess her royal status should be clarified’. He went on to explain that he had been officially requested by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to submit the names of local candidates for the New Year hono
urs list. ‘I am now asking you, as Prime Minister, to submit to the King that he restores the Duchess’ royal rank at the coming New Year not only as an act of justice and courtesy to his sister in law but also as a gesture in recognition of her two years of public service in the Bahamas. The occasion would seem opportune from all angles for correcting an unwarranted step.’

  The King replied to Churchill on 9 December that he was ‘sure it would be a mistake to reopen this matter … I am quite ready to leave the question in abeyance for the time being but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty.’ There was a part of Wallis which also longed for the whole issue to be dropped or just kept in abeyance. It was tiring to go on and on fighting. As she wrote to Edith Lindsay in 1943: ‘I can’t see why they just don’t forget all about the Windsors and let us be where we want to be in obscurity …’

  But as the King expanded his views in a separate memorandum, addressed to the Prime Minister and marked ‘private and confidential’, there was ‘no question of the title being “restored” to the Duchess because she never had it. I am sure there are still large numbers of people in this country and in the Empire to whom it would be most distasteful to have to do honour to the Duchess as a member of our family … I have consulted my family, who share these views.’

  While it may be open to debate whether the royal family seriously questioned her loyalty to Britain or whether this was a convenient umbrella, several British politicians before the abdication believed, as Sir Horace Wilson state s Wiherd, that Wallis Simpson was a woman of ‘limitless ambition’ with a desire to ‘interfere in politics’ and who was in touch with the Nazi movement. In 1940 Churchill, in writing to Roosevelt, had said of the Duke, ‘though his loyalties are unimpeachable there is always a backlash of Nazi intrigue that seeks to make trouble about him now that the greater part of the continent is in enemy hands’.