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

by Anne Sebba

  Wallis Warfield, so full of fun and life as a child, had outlived three husbands and most of her women friends. Now she lay in a darkened room, hallucinating, desperately emaciated and bedridden. The house was almost as dilapidated as its former owner with a leaking roof and rising damp. It would be hard to imagine a more desperate, lingering death than hers, just as her erstwhile friend Mary had once imagined for her. She died finally, aged ninety, on 24 April 1986. There was no autopsy.

  The Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie, flew to Paris to escort the body back to an England which had refused to welcome her when she was alive. Nearly 200 people attended her funeral service in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The Duchess of Marlborough, a friend although no longer a close one, observed: ‘I went to look at the flowers … It was tragic. They were all from dressmakers, jewellers, Dior, Van Cleef, Alexandre. Those people were her life.’ After the funeral a small party, including the Queen and the Queen Mother, who went on to live for another eighteen years, saw Wallis to her final resting place. A hedge, which had bothered Wallis when she spotted it at the Duke’s funeral, had now been removed so that Wallis’s earthly remains could be placed next to the Duke’s at Frogmore and not far from those of Queen Victoria and her beloved husband, Prince Albert, for whom the mausoleum at Frogmore had been built.

  The transformation from flesh-and-blood character to imagined myth had begun long before her death, while she was still a ghostly presence often referred to in hushed whispers or angry asides as ‘That Woman’. With no new photographic images, the headlines in the fashion pages of newspapers abruptly ceased just as the mystery increased. The reclusive widow in a darkened room frozen in time has echoes of Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Yet Wallis, far from being jilted, had found herself obliged to go ahead with a wedding she had not wanted. And the abdication, not in itself a crisis but a solution to a crisis, was a drama not unlike a wedding that failed to go ahead. After reigning for 325 days, it was Edward VIII who jilted his country on the eve of his own Coronation. This was too big a drama not to be immortalized on stage and in film, as indeed it has been many times. Crown Matrimonial, a 1972 play by the English writer Royce Ryton, broke new ground for being the first time a living member of the royal family was portrayed on stage. The play, while emphasizing the virtues of duty and responsibility, nonetheless laid the groundwork for what was described as the greatest love story of the century but a love story where the heroine was a one-dimensional, grasping adventuress with an unhealthy knowledge of bizarre sexual practices. Writers and artists, aware of how the establishment wanted her to be seen, remain attracted by the need to get beyond this and strip away the myth. Nonetheless, the perceptions have been exceedingly slow to shift and – to date – most writers and artists have created unflattering portraits.

  The publicity surrounding the first sale of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewellery, held by Sotheby’s in Geneva within a year of her death – selling it in London was considered offensive to the royal family – played heavily on the romance. Although both Duke and Duchess had apparently agreed that no other woman was to wear the jewellery, which they wanted b th roken up and reset, they did not leave written instructions for this. Extracts from the love letters were included in the catalogue, which portrayed the Duke as a man who spoke with authority about style while the lady for whom the jewels were destined was ‘elegance personified’. The sale raised a phenomenal $50,281,887, approximately seven times the estimate. The diamond and platinum brooch in the shape of the Prince of Wales feathers, an item Prince Charles had contemplated buying, was bought by the actress Elizabeth Taylor for $567,000. Even the house where Wallis had died became caught up not in fire but in myth. After the Duchess’s death it returned to state ownership and was immediately leased by Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed and expensively restored over several years, as a fitting tribute to what he described as ‘the couple’s romantic legacy’. It was the last place to which Dodi Fayed, his son, took another royal outsider, Princess Diana, hours before her tragic death in Paris in the early hours of 31 August 1997.

  The American social-realist painter Jack Levine was one of the first to give artistic expression to Wallis. He found the Duke and Duchess rewarding subjects for his Hogarthian, expressionist-style paintings, and Reception in Miami (1948) cleverly satirized the Windsors’ recent visit to Florida as well as recalling the 1937 moment when the Duchess smiled and curtseyed to Hitler. Levine said at the time he had been inspired by the way ‘our co-nationals began to scrape and bow’ as they greeted the honoured guests. He felt ‘it was a kind of violation of everything that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution stand for’.

  Fiction, too, often exaggerates the unbelievable in order to help us understand whatever appears strange in a life and in literature. Any mention of ‘Mrs Simpson’, as she was henceforth generally known to history, soon became shorthand for a certain type of woman. As early as 1960 Anthony Powell in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, the fifth in his twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time, found her compelling as a minor character off. For the awkward, faintly ludicrous Kenneth Widmerpool, a meeting with Mrs Simpson in the 1930s supplies him with lustre; he can talk of nothing else and sees himself as a result as a man of the world. It is perhaps easier for novelists than playwrights to look at the mismatch between public glamour and private anguish by exploring the dark heart of what it was like to be Wallis Simpson. Actors including Faye Dunaway, Nichola McAuliffe, Joely Richardson and Andrea Riseborough have all found Wallis a most challenging and satisfying role, and there is no shortage of those who want to interpret That Woman. But, as theatre critic Dominic Maxwell, reviewing one of the latest attempts to put Wallis on stage, noted, however full of humour and panache, any play on the subject risks suffering from a necessary frenzy of facts when what is wanted is feelings.

  The ‘facts’ were soon supplied by the official histories and biographies. Frances Donaldson started work on her official biography of Edward VIII as early as 1969, when many of the main protagonists, as well as her subject, were still alive, with obvious advantages and disadvantages. Her account, published in 1974 two years after the Duke’s death, was justly praised and provided the basis for the 1978 British television series Edward and Mrs Simpson, to which Maître Blum strongly objected – in vain. Mary Kirk’s sister Buckie belatedly wrote to Lady Donaldson wishing to discuss what she believed were important areas ‘upon which I could throw a little more light’. Her twenty-four-page account was never used, but Buckie’s insight has informed my understanding of the role the Kirk sisterse Khro played in Wallis’s life.

  Sharply aware of the limitations of authorized works, the British essayist and novelist William Boyd wrote a ‘fictional autobiography’ Any Human Heart (2002), in which Logan Mountstuart journeys through the entire twentieth century. Boyd devotes a considerable part of his story to the latter’s meetings with, and ultimate betrayal by, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Boyd is intrigued not only by the dark heart of Wallis herself but by the darkness surrounding her. He not only recognizes the Windsors’ selfishness and obliviousness of those around them but sees how, in marrying the Duke, the Duchess swallowed a form of poison which slowly corroded both their lives. Boyd is especially interested in what he perceives as the Duke’s duplicitous role when, as governor of the Bahamas in 1943, he colluded with corrupt detectives in order to ‘solve’ the Oakes murder case, thereby perverting the course of justice and risking the death of an innocent man. To what extent was his conscience troubled and, if not troubled unduly, what sort of woman can devote her life to such a man, he asks? Although the novel was published in 2002, long after his protagonists were dead, Boyd has written both fiction and non-fiction about the Duke and Duchess, undertaking, as any historian must, months of research ‘poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads … to imagine them into life’. Yet he believes there is a greater truth available to the novelist who tells his story well. His is a da
mning portrait which does little to rehabilitate the pair.

  Other novelists of various nationalities have been attracted not merely by the vivid personalities of the Duke and Duchess but by the dramatic history swirling around them in the 1930s. Timothey Findley, the Canadian author of Famous Last Words (1981), wrote of the Duke and Duchess prepared during the war to sell their souls to the devil. In Findley’s hands Wallis, learning that the Duke had abdicated, reacts with hatred. ‘I hate him,’ she says repeatedly. ‘I do, I hate him.’ Of course the hatred was necessary for the novelist’s plot, which sees the Windsors conspire with Ribbentrop to overthrow Hitler, assume control of the Nazi Party and plan a takeover of Europe. And indeed there were, in real time, moments when something very close to hatred came perilously close to the surface. Perry Brownlow, who knew both the Duke and Duchess well, suspected that living with Wallis taught the Duke to lie. But as a young man the Duke had insisted to Freda Dudley Ward: ‘I feel more and more strongly that it’s absolutely legitimate to lie and that we are more than within our rights to do so when it concerns our own private affairs, angel.’ Perhaps living with Wallis strengthened the toxic mix. More recently the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, in the first part of his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, tells the story of the glamorous naval intelligence officer Sir Peter Russell, thinly disguised as Sir Peter Wheeler, who acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess, ‘that frivolous pair … not prepared to go into exile … without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bed linen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service’. Wheeler in the story insists that the Duchess ‘wasn’t that ugly … well she was, but there was something troubling about her too’. In order to ensure that his charges arrived safely in the Bahamas in 1940 Wheeler was issued with a revolver not simply for use against the Germans. ‘No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler’s hands.’

  It is this tantalizing version of counterfactual history – what if Hitler had won thlerubling ae war? – that has led not only conspiracy theorists but serious historians as well as novelists to give Wallis Warfield of Baltimore a deeply significant role in world history. Merely by marrying the ineffectual King she did not only England but the world a favour. His removal from the throne ensured that his own patriotism was never tested nor was the nation ruled, in the midst of an existential struggle against Nazi Germany, by a man whose intimates at times questioned his very sanity. And one does not have to believe the extreme versions of some conspiracy theorists to see the merit of such an argument. It leads to another thought about her significance. Every generation throws up an ordinary person who, through luck or circumstance or the infinitely variable nature of the human condition, diverts the course of history in unpredictable ways. In the 1930s Wallis was certainly That Woman.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor Society, an international affinity group dedicated to disseminating information about the historical importance of the lives of the Duke and Duchess through its quarterly journal and website, lists on its home page at least twenty books of fiction which use Wallis as a protagonist. The list is growing and there are dozens more books of non-fiction, some dealing with particular episodes in their lives, as well as films and plays awaiting viewing. Opinions are slowly changing. Rose Tremain, in her 2006 novella The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, imagines the pain of Wallis as an octogenarian whose thoughts were all twisted up, who could no longer walk unaided to the door, begging to be allowed to forget, to be allowed to die. Tremain compounds the already cruel fate of the elderly Wallis by making her character able to remember only her painful early life, while ‘the little man’, the husband who made her notorious, she cannot remember at all. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, and as such may be part of an ongoing reassessment of Wallis.

  Wallis saw herself as an ordinary woman, born with none of the privileges that money or good looks can bring, but possessed of insatiable ambition. So she determined to make the best of what she had and focused determinedly on a goal to enhance that. ‘I really had no idea of exactly what I intended to make of my life, but I was determined to make it a success within my capacities,’ she wrote. ‘It was not quite enough for me to be, or at least to try to be, the life of the party or to spend my existence merely taking part in good conversation. I wanted something more out of life.’

  In fashioning something more of and for herself she collided brutally with others; Win Spencer, Ernest Simpson, Mary Kirk, Audrey Dechert, Foxy Gwynne, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt and Nancy Dugdale, to take a handful, found that their lives were skewed, sometimes painfully, through contact with Wallis.

  Decades after her death, Wallis continues to exercise a stronger magnetism for writers than almost any other royal personality, film star or historical character. Why would a novelist, in the folds of whose rich imagination any invented character in any situation at any time in history can lurk and take shape, choose to limit his or her focus to a character, however enigmatic, who is already known? Perhaps the explanation for our fascination lies partly in the fact that she remains elusive. She is not and cannot ever be completely known. Her personality offered both light and shade, good

  and evil, darkness underneath the gloss. Her life was full of adventure and travel, escape and deception – ingredients a novelist devours – and it followed a natural narrative arc, ending, in one sense, in 1936. Wallis in her lifetime defied her critics and yielded few secrets about what it was about her that forced a mhatact thatan to renounce everything he had been born to enjoy and to give up one of the most illustrious thrones in the world. Because we cannot, by any rational means, explain why a middle-aged, married woman with large hands and a mole on her chin convinced a troubled, boyish prince to believe that his life could have no meaning unless lived alongside her, novelists and playwrights, actors and historians need to dig into their imagination in order to explain it.

  Wallis’s life, unbelievable in so many ways, demands both imagination and factual accuracy if any sense is to be made of it. For her appeal is not simply that a lot happened to her. Above all of this, what has made her irresistible to a wide swathe of writers and artists is her personal sparkle – the echo of her magnificent jewellery – as well as her wit, her charisma and, in the end, her courage and grace that enabled her to endure a predicament she had created for herself and live with a man she privately ridiculed. She may have been terrified of dying, but in a very real way she lives on, preserved for posterity as others saw her.

  List of Illustrations

  Severn Teackle Wallis (Author’s own)

  House at Blue Ridge (International News Photo/Corbis)

  Wallis and Alice Montague (Getty Images)

  Solomon Davies Warfield (State Archives of Florida)

  Alice Montague alone (Corbis)

  Wallis leaving Oldfields (Oldfields School, Baltimore)

  House on Biddle Street (Getty Images)

  Wallis wearing monocle (Oldfields School, Baltimore)

  Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. (US Naval History and Heritage Command)

  Wallis as a debutante (International News Photo/Corbis)

  Wallis as Win’s bride (Getty Images)

  Mrs Wallis Spencer and Lt Alberto Da Zara (Diana Hutchins Angulo)

  Wallis in the blue tiara (Cartier Archives)

  Three generations of royalty (Corbis)

  The young Prince of Wales (Corbis)

  Mr and Mrs Ernest Spencer at court (Private collection)

  Wallis and Edward on the Nahlin cruise (Corbis)

  Wallis looking pensive (Getty Images)

  Bracelet of crosses (Cartier Archives/Louis Tirilly)

  Married at last (Corbis)

  Wallis, Edward and Hitler (Getty)

  Mary Kirk (International News Photo/Corbis)

  Duke, Duchess and Fruity Metcalfe (Getty)

  Wallis making up packages for the troops (Getty)

  Duke and Duchess on their way to the Bahamas (Co
rbis)

  Wallis in Red Cross uniform (Gometiightetty)

  Wallis and Eleanor Roosevelt (Associated Press)

  Duke with Queen Mary (Corbis)

  The new Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson (Private collection)

  One of Ernest’s personal favourites (Private collection)

  The house in the Bois-de-Boulogne (Getty)

  Reception in Miami by Jack Levine (Hirshhorn Musuem & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, gift of Joseph J. Hirshhorn, 1966)

  Wallis taking charge (both Corbis)

  Duke, Duchess and Ben Hogan (courtesy of the Greenbrier Hotel)

  Duke and Duchess dancing (courtesy of the Greenbrier Hotel)

  A selection of Wallis’s Cartier jewels and original sketches (Cartier Archives)

  Duchess at the New Lido Revue (Getty)

  Duchess and Aileen Plunkett (Getty)

  Wallis at Queen Mary centenary commemoration (Corbis)

  Frail Duke leaving a London clinic (Corbis)

  Duke’s funeral, 5 June 1972 (Corbis)

  Duchess looking haggard (Getty)

  Duchess’s funeral, 30 April 1986 (Getty)

  Acknowledgements

  No one who researches the life of Wallis Simpson can go far without looking at letters between Wallis and Edward, many of which have been edited by Michael Bloch. My first debt is to him for this sterling work which has been an invaluable guide over the last years in my quest to understand Wallis and for allowing me to quote from these. For help with understanding the British political situation in 1936, especially with respect to Stanley Baldwin, I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Professor Philip Williamson, Head of History at Durham University, who has not only given up valuable time to talk through some of the issues and discuss current historical interpretations with me but has also located photocopies of documents far beyond any reasonable expectation of a biographer. I have relished our (for me) all too brief conversations and thank him most warmly for sharing his scholarship with me. I want to thank Aharon Solomons, the son of Ernest Simpson and Mary Kirk, who not only opened up his home in Mexico most generously to me, but set me on a new path to seeing Wallis Simpson and her second husband in a different light. He I thank most warmly for some unforgettable conversations and I also thank Maria-Teresa (MT) Solomons for showing me some letters and photographs. I especially want to thank Pascale Lepeu, Curator of the Cartier Collection, for a wonderfully enjoyable day seeing the Collection and Michele Aliaga at the Cartier Archive for generously making available so many wonderful Cartier images, some of which magnificently enhance this edition. My thanks also go to Erika Bard, who has once again provided me not only with original thoughts about and psychological insights into the behaviour of my subjects but has also given me suggestions for further examination.