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

by Anne Sebba

  The Duke’s close involvement with Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish millionaire owner of Electrolux, was part of this backlash. Wenner-Gren, a suave white-haired businessman, part-educated in Germany, had made his money through patenting a type of vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Having built his fortune in the early part of the century it suited him now to preach a doctrine of peace in order to protect his worldwide interests and to continue dealing with Nazi Germany as well as Britain and the United States. A friend of Charles Bedaux and Hermann Göring, he also had an interest in the German arms manufacturer Krupp, and manufactured munitions for the Germans through another Swedish company, Bofors, which was protected by Swedish neutrality. Before the war he bought one of the world’s largest and most lavishly appointed yachts, the Southern Cross, once owned by Howard Hughes, and set sail for the Bahamas with his American wife and children in 1939. There he took up residence in an impressive mansion, which he named Shangri-La, founded the Bank of the Bahamas and used the island as a base from which to continue his business activities.

  Wenner-Gren was tipped off in a cryptic message in 1940 that the new family arriving in Nassau would be of interest to him and his friends. This message, intercepted by Washington, was assumed to mean that Wenner-Gren was a German sympathizer and would quickly recruit the Duke and Duchess to his cause. British and American diplomats were from the first deeply worried about this connection as the Duke, pleased to find a man who was not only cultured but offered a chance to build up investment on the island, did indeed nurture the friendship. Wenner-Gren – a boastful man – would often brag about having friendships with other unsavoury political figures, such as Mussolini and Mexico’s pro-Fascist General Maximino Camacho, and in fact may not have been as important as he made out. The American government was so concerned it placed Wenner-Gren on the black list of those to be treated as enemy aliens, which effectively put a stop to his friendship with the Windsors. The Duke’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, commented that ‘it is not hard to feel that in this case he – as well as the unfortunate Swede – was misused. On other points he is less easily defended.’ And his friendship with Charles Bedaux was equally dubious. For the Duke and Duchess to befriend such questionable characters at this dangerous time was ill advised at the very least.

  Throughout the war, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a sizeable file on the couple, now largely declassified but with names redacted, mostly comprising unsubstantiated denunciations from outside sources explaining why they believed the loyalty of either the Duke or Duchess, or both, was suspect – beliefs based on little more than gossip or hearsay. There are many notes in the file insisting on a pre-war affair or relationship between Wallis and Ribbentrop and on the Windsors’ pro-German tendencies. Others express apprehension about the couple’s friendship with Wenner-Gren or even suggest that, as the Duchess sent her clothes for dry cleaning in New York, she doubtless used this as a method of sending secret messages.

  Later in the war, in August 1944, when there was a revival of interest in the Duchess, the FBI undertook a survey of opinion sey ther in the literary and publishing world to ascertain the attitude of publishers and others in the US media to the Windsors. They concluded ‘that the Dutchess [sic] was of extreme news interest and that she was exceedingly unpopular in certain political circles of the US and England because of her social contacts prior to her marriage … however no sources could give evidence of a concerted effort to campaign against her’. Moreover, an influential New York advertising executive stated that ‘she and her husband are considered a pathetic couple by the leading publishers and editors’. The couple were well aware they were being watched – when they travelled to the United States they were accompanied not only by bodyguards but by FBI special agents ‘to exercise discreet observations’, but they believed they were being spied on in Nassau as well. At a formal dinner in Government House, after the Duke and Duchess had been piped in, ‘the Duchess made some remark to a dinner guest and then turned to the piper and said: “you can also report that to Downing Street”, an indication to everyone present that they thought the piper was some kind of spy for England’. They were ‘forever making remarks like that which were out of place’.

  Once America entered the war, the Windsors took a more positive view of the likely outcome. Yet, throughout the years she was in Nassau, Wallis never stopped worrying about whether she would have enough money once the war was over, only now ‘enough money’ was a rather different proposition as she needed enough to live in the style to which a king and his consort were accustomed. She admitted to Monckton her anxieties about ‘money in the years ahead’. She asked him what would happen if ‘the Windsor holdings are perhaps lost in the shuffle’. She reminded him of ‘the need to keep our heads above water in the long pull ahead … unless we take a job in the U.S. There seem to plenty of those dangling in front of the Duke’s eyes.’ But by the end of the war, with doubts about his loyalty circulating freely, jobs in the US for the Duke were no longer being dangled. There was some discussion about finding him ‘a high level job’ at the Washington Embassy. But it was hard to specify precisely what task he was best fitted for other than a vague desire to further Anglo-American relations, and the proposal was apparently abandoned because Clement A

  ttlee, who became Prime Minister in July 1945, and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin were adamant that it was not a good idea. Churchill continued to hope that there might be an ambassadorial job available for the ex-King and insisted that he was ‘very sorry about this foolish obstruction by Bevin and Attlee and I wish I had it in my power to overcome it’ – a comment which, the Duke told Monckton, ‘has amused us a good deal for, after all, he wasn’t all that cooperative himself during his five year residence at Number 10’.

  The Windsors left Nassau on 3 May 1945 ahead of another sweltering summer, and went first to America with no clear idea of where they would settle or what they would do. Relations with Churchill were from now on edgy, although he remained always respectful towards his former monarch, and in 1948 he and Clemmie spent their wedding anniversary staying with the Windsors at La Croë. But there are known to be letters, kept secret at the request of the royal family, which reveal his anger and frustration with the Duke, exacerbated by the ex-King offering unsolicited advice about the prosecution of the war. Churchill did not flinch from telling him he could not accept advice from someone who ‘had given up the greatest throne in world history’.

  13

  Best-Dressed Wallis

  ‘The Windsors’ prestige is not what it used to be’

  After six years of uncertainty following the end of the war, Wallis still felt rootless and ‘homeless on the face of the earth’. The Windsors rented and borrowed houses until there could be no possible doubt that returning to England was out of the question. It was Wallis who finally recognized that there would never be meaningful work offered to the Duke anywhere in the world and that they would never be able to make their home in England. She had summoned up the necessary courage to face the future life of which she had been the cause. She had always shown remarkable self-awareness of her own shortcomings, even if she was unable to change them, and now she tried to give the Duke some of the courage she was scraping together as he, often depressed or ill, faced a still-hostile family and an ever colder world. She was now determined to create in France, where they felt welcome, an environment fit for a former monarch and attended to the Duke’s emotional and physical needs in minute detail. All their guests and visitors attested to her extraordinary resolve to make wherever they lived as regal as possible. But how, as well as where, to fill their remaining days was the immediate post-war priority.

  Their first trip to England together in the autumn of 1946 was a disaster. They stayed with their friends the Earl and Countess of Dudley at Ednam Lodge near Sunningdale, hurt that the Fort was clearly not available19 and that no other royal residence was on offer. On 16 October a burglar broke into the house, apparently through an o
pen window, and stole more than £25,000 worth of Wallis’s jewellery, which she had decided to bring with her in a small trunklike jewel case and had left unsecured when they went out for the evening. Wallis was distraught; the jewellery had defined her romance with the then Prince and given her security. An exotic bird of paradise brooch, with a cabochon sapphire breast and a plumage of diamonds, had just been made for her by Cartier that year. She never saw it, or any of the other stolen pieces, again.

  The household was in turmoil, as police taking fingerprints jostled with reporters seeking interviews. The quiet visit with a minimum of publicity that they had promised an ‘unrelenting royal family’ was now splashed all over the British newspapers. In a country hard hit by post-war austerity, discussion of such a fabulous haul of jewellery (estimated by the Windsors to be worth $80,000) elicited little sympathy. According to Lady Dudley, Wallis in the hours after the robbery showed ‘an unpleasant and to me unexpected side of her character … She wanted all the servants put through a kind of third degree. But I would have none of this, all of them except for one kitchen maid being old and devoted staff of long standing … the Duke was both demented with worry and near to tears.’

  The next day there was another drama. Before going out for a stroll Wallis, according to Laura Dudley, who told the story in her memoirs, asked the Duke to put away a small brooch of sapphires and rubies with their entwined initials and an inscription ‘God Bless WE Wallis’, which had been an early gift in 1935 and had eluded the burglars only because she had been weari {ad Gng it. When they returned from the walk he could not remember where he had put it. ‘We stayed up most of the night; he obviously feared to go to bed empty-handed. At about 5 a.m. by some miracle we found it, under a china ornament. Never have I seen a man so relieved.’

  Lady Dudley, indignant at the way Wallis had behaved, wrote later that the haul had included ‘a great many uncut emeralds which I believe belonged to Queen Alexandra’, a comment that caused, yet again, an enormous brouhaha over why the Duchess had had these in the first place. Most likely she did not, but the rumours were reignited and the friendship with the Dudleys came under severe strain.

  Ten days later, Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy, daughter of the American Ambassador and now the widowed Lady Hartington, who met the Windsors at that time, wrote: ‘The Duchess continues to talk of nothing but her robbery [the words ‘and is really nothing but a bore’ are crossed out but remain visible] and how she has nothing left – so far I haven’t seen her with the same jewel. He seems so pathetic but full of charm … Really no one here takes any notice of them and the extraordinary thing is that I actually feel that she is jealous of what I, an American, have got out of England20 and which has always been denied to her.’

  The Duke never gave up trying to rectify that which had been denied his wife. Insurance money helped him to start a new collection of jewellery for her and in April 1949 he again consulted Viscount Jowitt for a legal opinion on the question of her title. In 1937 the then Sir William Jowitt had based his opinion on the view that ‘he became “His Royal Highness” not by virtue of any Letters Patent, but for the simple reason that he was the son of his father who was the Sovereign of this country’. He went on to declare ‘that the Duchess of Windsor is, by virtue of her membership of the Royal family, entitled in the same way as other royal duchesses, to be known by the style and title of “Her Royal Highness” ’. This time, while not wavering from that opinion, he concluded in a clever note for the record, ‘that the marks of respect which the subject pays to Royal personages are, as I said, in no source a legal obligation. They are rather a matter of good manners.’ Yet while insisting that it was simply a matter of good manners he nonetheless pointed out that the present situation, however erroneous, could be formally and effectively reversed only by fresh Letters Patent and since these would not be issued by the King save on the advice of his ministers it was unlikely they would be issued at all. This meant, effectively, that the Duke and Duchess were permanent, half-royal exiles – arguably the desired effect. Notwithstanding this, their staff in France, thirty in all spread between two houses, learned to refer to her as ‘Son Altesse Royale’ (perhaps SAR sounded less threatening than HRH and certainly fell into the category of ‘good manners’), footmen wore royal livery and Wallis’s notepaper had a small crown above a ‘W’.

  And the British royal family could not prevent the Duke buying Wallis gifts of jewellery fit for a royal highness. The Duke had visited Cartier in Paris just before the fall of France with pocketsful of stones, some of Wallis’s bracelets and a necklace, together with instructions to make up at least one piece, a remarkable indication of his obsession with pleasing one woman above all the terror, privation and dislocation surrounding him in France. He was apparently oblivious to the notion that his requirements for the production of such a jewel in wartime might strike some as insensitive. The bold diamond flamingo clip, with startlin {wit thg tail feathers of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, was made in Paris in 1940 according to his instructions that the brooch should have retractable legs so that Wallis could wear it centrally without a leg digging into her chest if she bent down. Wearing this magnificent three-dimensional flamingo with its brilliant plumage would have been audacious at any time. Wallis, who used jewellery not simply as a display of wealth but to express her bold style and above all her personality, wore it as she set off on her controversial October 1941 visit to the United States with the Duke. Where clothes or jewels were concerned, she was never fearful. She had some magnificent jewelled powder compacts ‘and was always making up at table, which of course is very sexy’, according to the high-society interior designer Nicholas Haslam. The Duke’s habit of providing the stones by breaking up existing pieces in order to create an original object in a modern setting resumed as soon as the war was over in 1945. Together he and the Duchess became major jewellery buyers and connoisseurs. Wallis loved daring colour combinations and original designs, such as the two so-called gem-set bib necklaces made by Cartier, one in 1945 with rubies and emeralds, the other in 1947 with amethyst and turquoise, both large, strikingly modern pieces and stunning pieces of jewellery at any time. In those post-war years, when many in Europe were concentrating on basic necessities such as food and homes, they were especially remarkable. Although Wallis patronized different jewellers, she was lucky to find in Jeanne Toussaint, Louis Cartier’s intimate companion, a woman who understood her position as an outsider and with whom she developed a strong personal and professional relationship. Toussaint and the Duke collaborated on many jewellery projects for the Duchess, and her post-war ‘Great Cat’ jewels were the inspiration of Toussaint, herself known as La Panthère, and Cartier designer Peter Lemarchand. One of the most striking of these brooches features a sapphire and diamond panther astride an enormous Kashmir sapphire; bought and made in 1949 ‘for stock’ but with the Duchess in mind. Wallis chose to wear on her coat this beautiful, strong panther sitting proudly on top of the world when she attended the 1967 unveiling in London by Queen Elizabeth II of a memorial plaque to Queen Mary at Marlborough House in Pall Mall.

  In the photographs taken at this event Wallis appears soignée with her bouffant hairstyle and well-cut coat, although a fur wrap around her neck is a somewhat odd choice for June. But, perhaps not surprisingly, she looks worried and drawn. She seemed to be in good health but by this time had had at least two serious internal operations and long-standing problems, apparently from an ulcer. Philip Ziegler writes of stomach cancer in 1944 followed by cancer of the womb in 1951. Charles Higham specifies cancer of the ovaries in 1951. Others commented on the Duchess being hospitalized for a major internal operation, the nature of which was never disclosed. Without access to hospital records, which have never been made available, all that can be stated for certain is that Wallis had serious problems which necessitated internal surgery. Quite possibly she was suffering from a complication arising from an internal abnormality which had been treated earlier and now flared up again but wh
ich it was imperative to keep secret. But the idea of her having a cancer as life threatening as ovarian cancer in 1951 and surviving into her ninetieth year is insupportable. Without the chemotherapy regime available today, women diagnosed with ovarian, stomach or womb cancer rarely lived ten years and most managed only five. Whatever the problem, she made a good recovery.

  There is another interpretation of her frequent operations. It is not uncommon, according to clinical psychiatrist Dr Iain Oswald, ‘for a patient who {a pon is preoccupied with her body to undergo a series of investigations and even operations in an attempt to attend to these feelings. This can be seen as a form of displacement where attention is shifted from one part of her body felt to be defective (for instance where she is unable to have a child) to a hyper-attention to correct another part of her body. This, of course, could include cosmetic surgery as well as other forms of surgery.’

  At all events by 1952 the Windsors had reached a decision about where they should base themselves: France. They would live informally at the Mill, a house they bought at Gif-sur-Yvette, forty-five minutes outside Paris to the south of Versailles and the only house after the war that they owned, and in formal splendour in Paris itself at a house in the Bois de Boulogne, 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement, loaned to them for a peppercorn rent by the City of Paris. It was Wallis who arranged the decor of both, making sure the town house appeared as imposing a mansion as possible for a building that was not an actual palace. In the drawing room hung a full-length portrait of Queen Mary, the mother-in-law who would never agree to meet her daughter-in-law, as well as one of the Duke, equally resplendent in Garter robes. His red and gold silk banner, with coat of arms, hung over the galleried marble entrance hall where other royal memorabilia were also displayed.