There were also contracts for a life of George III and a childhood memoir, both to be ghosted by Charles Murphy. The latter was to be based on the diaries that he had kept until after the First World War and the 2,000 letters, strung in chronological order on scarlet strings fastened with small brass toggles, that he had written to his parents, but he became discouraged after Wallis told him, ‘Who’ll want to read about a boyhood as dull as yours? It’s a waste of time!’2 This was a part of his life she could not control. Neither book was ever written.
But there were other ways to make money by exploiting their celebrity. The couple lent their brand name to everything from cutlery to dress collections. Wallis launched a syndicated pattern service that led the following February to a monthly column in McCall’s, ‘All Things Considered’, ghost-written by the journalist Etta Wanger, which ran for a year and covered her own experiences in shopping, fashion and entertaining, and most controversially touched on the Royal Feud. ‘My husband has been punished, like a small boy who gets a spanking every day of his life for a single transgression . . . His hurt has been deep.’3
Wallis worked well with Etta Wanger and they planned a further series of articles, but a ‘Duchess of Windsor Etiquette Book’ collapsed when no publisher would come up with the requested $50,000 advance.4
Officialdom, however, remained concerned about their judgement and the commercialism of their royal status. In June 1960, Walter Monckton persuaded the Duke not to sign a contract for a TV series in which he would re-enact the Abdication speech.
But their lives were empty, an endless round of parties, travel, shopping and golf. At the beginning of January 1961, the Conservative MP Charles Curran asked what the Duke had made of his life:
Instead of waiting for Britain to employ him, why does he not employ himself? . . . He is rich, healthy, childless . . . He has spent a quarter of a century treading the social treadmill and travelling to and fro, like an animated luggage label . . . a member of PG Wodehouse’s Drone’s Club, an ageing Bertie . . . His life is a vacuum – a vacuum, deluxe, mink-lined.5
In 1962, yet another volume of German documents was published – this time covering the period 1935–6 and suggesting that the Duke had favoured an alliance with Nazi Germany. The Duke’s stock response was that the documents misrepresented his position and, ‘It is obvious that these reports were slanted in order to curry favour with Hitler and thereby they give a generally false impression.’6
‘The Duke of Windsor has been attacked in the Press for having hobnobbed with Hitler in the late thirties,’ wrote Noël Coward in his diary on New Year’s Eve. ‘Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time. Poor dear, what a monumental ass he has always been!’7
The period also saw a thawing of relations with the Royal Family. When at the end of 1964, the Duke travelled to Texas to be operated on for an aneurysm on his aorta, the Queen sent flowers. Two months later, the Duke was operated on for a detached retina at the London Clinic and the Queen paid a brief half-hour visit – the first time she had met Wallis since before the Abdication. The Duke’s sister, Mary, also visited, followed a few days later by Princess Marina. The Queen Mother went as far as to send flowers.
This was all part of a concerted public relations strategy, but it was done reluctantly. According to the writer Greg King, ‘The Queen, however, originally had no intention of visiting her ailing uncle at all; only after her private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, along with Walter Monckton’s widow, Alexandra, and several others intervened, did Elizabeth II agree to the visits.’8
Ten days after her first visit, the Queen had tea with the Duke at his hotel suite in Claridge’s and agreed to his request for the couple to be buried at Frogmore. It was during his London visit that Mary, the Duke’s sister, suddenly died of a coronary thrombosis whilst walking with her family on her Yorkshire estate. Her memorial service at the beginning of April was the first public appearance of the Windsors together. They returned to Paris on the Royal Flight. The following month Princess Alexandra, on holiday with her husband in Paris, dropped in to see her uncle and his wife.
But every time the Royal Family tried to repair the relationship, the Windsors jeopardised the rapprochement. In May 1965, the New York premiere took place of a documentary based on A King’s Story, a strange mixture of old newsreels and interviews, interspersed with footage of the Duke reciting passages and nervously sitting in the garden with the Duchess. It was made by Jack Le Vien, who had previously produced a telebiography of Churchill’s The Valiant Years, and it was narrated by Orson Welles, and was calculated to have netted the Duke almost $400,000.9 For the documentary, the Duke read out the Abdication speech.
The reception afterwards was held not at City Hall, but the department store Bergdorf Goodman. The Duke was increasingly being used to enhance his wife’s social and financial ambitions. ‘At a cocktail party among the main floor handbag, scarf and sunglass counters, the Duke stood stoically in a receiving line as hundreds of the well-to-do elbowed each other into racks of new umbrellas in an effort to greet him,’ wrote the New York Times. ‘In the end it was his lot to stand by, while the Duchess gave the newspaper interviews, described her clothes, and drew raffle numbers for men’s shoes and sets of Wamsutta superscale sheets.’10
Then in 1966, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Abdication, the Duke wrote a series of newspaper articles that took his story on from 1936 and where he spoke frankly about the bitter relationship with his family. They were published in the New York Daily News and syndicated around the world. He also used the pieces to deny ‘any dealing by me with German or Spanish agents in Lisbon.’11 They did nothing to improve his relationship with the Royal Family.
In June 1967, the Queen invited the couple to attend the dedication of a plaque outside Marlborough House commemorating Queen Mary. The Queen Mother was ‘adamant that if Wallis was invited, she would not attend.’12 The Duke said he would not attend if Wallis was not invited. Eventually the Queen Mother relented and for the first time since 1936, the two women met.
The Windsors arrived at Southampton – now on the SS United States rather than Cunard’s Queen Mary, as they were given a reduced price suite in return for attending some functions, posing for the ship’s photographer, and holding a short press conference.13 They stayed the night with Dickie Mountbatten at his Hampshire home and then took up residence at Claridge’s – there had been no invitation to stay with a member of the family.
A crowd of 5,000 had gathered to witness the historic meeting. The Windsors’ arrival was met with cheers and the Queen Mother kissed the Duke on the cheek. Though the Duchess refused to curtsy to her sister-in-law, they shook hands and talked briefly after the ceremony, which had lasted fifteen minutes. Afterwards a small lunch was hosted for them by Princess Marina at Kensington Palace, whilst the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Gloucester left to watch the Derby at Epsom. The Court Circular the next day mentioned every royal – except the Windsors.
Though the Duke was invited to the investiture of Prince Charles at Caernarfon Castle in July 1969, he chose not to go as Wallis was not asked. Nor, though invited, had the Duke attended the dedication of the King George VI Memorial Chapel at St George’s Chapel a few months earlier.
In January 1970, the Windsors were interviewed for the BBC, an episode watched by 11 million people. The interview, conducted by Kenneth Harris, was in two parts. The first with the couple was dominated by Wallis, the Duke in an over-sized grey suit shifting nervously, his eyes averted from the camera and constantly looking to Wallis for assurance. Asked if she had any regrets, Wallis replied, ‘Oh about certain things, yes, I wish it could have been different. I mean, I’m extremely happy . . . We’ve had some hard times, but who hasn’t? Some of us just have to learn to live with that.’14
The second part was with only the Duke, where he was more confident, claiming to have had no regret
s about the Abdication, except that he would have liked to have reigned longer, ‘. . . but I was going to do it under my own conditions, so I do not have any regrets, but I take a great interest in my country . . . which is Britain, your land and mine, and I wish it well.’
In October 1970, Prince Charles, shooting near Paris, made an unexpected visit. It was not a success, as he wrote in his diary:
The whole house reeked of some particularly strong joss sticks and from out of the walls came the muffled sound of scratchy piped music. The Duchess appeared from among a host of the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen. The look of incredulity on their faces was a study and most of them were thoroughly tight . . . To my relief I managed to escape into a small sitting room, where I was able to have a word with Uncle David by himself. He seemed in very good form, although rather bent and using a stick. One eye was closed most of the time, as a result of his cataract operation, but apart from that he was in very talkative form and used wide, expansive gestures the whole time, while clutching an enormous cigar . . .
While we were talking the Duchess kept flitting to and fro like a strange bat. She looks incredible for her age and obviously has her face lifted every day. Consequently she can’t really speak except by clenching her teeth all the time and not moving any facial muscle. She struck me as a hard woman – totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial. Very little warmth of the true kind; only that brilliant hostess type of charm but without feeling. All that she talked about was whether she would wear a hat at the Arc de Triomphe the next day. The whole thing seemed so tragic – the existence, the people and the atmosphere – that I was relieved to escape it after 45 minutes and drive round Paris by night.15
The opportunity to resolve the ‘Windsor problem’ had been lost.
* * *
The health of the couple continued to deteriorate. Now in his seventies, the Duke was no longer able to work in his garden and his arteriosclerosis was affecting the blood supply to his brain, which resulted in memory lapses and a short temper. ‘When asked questions, he would often fail to answer,’ wrote one biographer. ‘He would forget names and, for long periods, he would sit at parties silently staring into space, with an absent, melancholy look on his lined face. Once he was found wandering aimlessly in an upstairs hallway of Mrs Young’s house, looking lost.’16
‘We dined last night at the Windsors,’ wrote Cyrus Sulzberger in his diary in October 1969. ‘The poor old duke . . . is terribly frail. His bad left eye seems to half close and he has such arthritis in his left hip that he limps heavily and uses a cane . . . He is a tragic little man . . . The Duchess seems increasingly nervous and sad. She kept telling me during the evening, as she looked across at him, ‘He had everything – and he gave it all up for me.’17
Wallis, who had had several face-lifts and dyed her hair each week, did her best to appear younger than her age, but no one was fooled. ‘The Duchess appeared at the end of a garden vista, in a crowd of yapping pug dogs. She seems to have suddenly aged, to have become a little old woman,’ noticed Cecil Beaton, when he saw the couple in September 1970.
Her figure and legs are as trim as ever, and she is energetic as she always was, putting servants and things to right. But Wallis had the sad, haunted eyes of the ill . . . Then an even greater shock. Amid the barking of the pugs, the Duke of Windsor, in a cedar-rose-coloured, velvet golf-suit, appeared. His walk with a stick makes him into an old man . . . But they are a happy couple. They are both apt to talk at once, but their attitudes do not clash and they didn’t seem to have any regrets . . .18
Three months later, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were invited to dinner by the Duke and Duchess, Burton noting in his diary:
with half a dozen of the most consummate bores in Paris. I don’t know their names but I shall never need to remember them for I have an idea they are people who only go to the Windsors and one of them – probably the old Duke – must die very soon, though it is she who is now nearly completely ga-ga. It was a sad and painful evening and needs a long time to write about . . . They both refer continually to the fact that he was once the King. ‘And Emperor,’ I said at one point. ‘And Emperor,’ she repeated after me. ‘And Emperor, we always forget that. And Emperor.’ He is physically falling apart, his left eye completely closed and a tremendous limp and walks with a stick. Her memory has gone completely and then comes back vividly in flashes.19
The Duchess was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. In November 1971, the Duke, who had smoked heavily throughout his life, was diagnosed with throat cancer and prescribed daily cobalt therapy. Though the couple were not told, the doctors knew it was only a matter of time.
Shortly afterwards, Cecil Beaton saw her. ‘The Duchess of Windsor came in and behaved like a mad Goya. She is more than ever a personality and character, but God, what she looks like, her face so pulled up that the mouth stretches from ear to ear. She was galvanised, as if high, her body and arms and hands so thin that one feels she cannot last.’20
At the beginning of February 1972, Dickie Mountbatten, in Paris to dub the French version of a twelve-part television programme based on his career, took the opportunity to see the Duke whilst Wallis was having a minor operation in Switzerland. He thought the Duke had aged ten years.
The Duke was upset about a film based on his life that was being planned called The Woman I Love, starring Faye Dunaway and Richard Chamberlain, and sought Mountbatten’s advice. Mountbatten suggested that the two Windsors be filmed side by side on a sofa reading a statement repudiating the film. Wiser counsels prevailed and the advice was ignored.
It was an opportunity to review the past and patch up a friendship that had never fully recovered from the misunderstandings over the wedding and Mountbatten’s acting as best man. As they parted at midnight, the Duke paused for a final reflection. ‘There’s something I’ll bet you don’t realise. If I hadn’t abdicated, I’d have completed thirty-six years of my reign by now – longer than either my father or my grandfather.’21 It was a rare admittance of what might have been.
A few weeks later, the Duke was admitted to the American hospital in Paris under the name Mr Smith. ‘How pitiable it all is. Now at the end, except for the black Sidney (sic), a late imperial acquisition from the Bahamas, they are quite alone among comparative strangers,’ Charles Murphy wrote to his co-writer Joseph Bryan. ‘The lady made it so. Whatever Court there was, she was determined to rule. And now it is made up mostly of shadows – and the worst of the collaborationists and the robber barons.’22
On 18 May 1972, the Queen, on a state visit to Paris with Charles and the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the couple for tea. The Duke, who now weighed less than six stone, insisted on getting dressed and seeing her, a herculean task that took four hours. He was so weak that he had to be given a blood transfusion and was on a concealed intravenous drip, which he called ‘damned rigging’. The visit lasted only thirty minutes.
The end was now in sight, with nurses caring for him on a 24-hour basis, and an opportunity to reflect on his life. ‘I’ve spent the best part of my life with her, and I can tell you that nothing I gave up for her equals what she has given me: happiness, of course, but also meaning,’ he told his friend David Bruce. ‘I have found her to be utterly without faults, the perfect woman.’23 To C.Z. Guest, he was more succinct: ‘The Duchess gave me everything that I lacked from my family. She gave me comfort and love and kindness.’24
The night nurse, Julie Chatard Alexander, was shocked that Wallis, whose bedroom was on the same floor, ‘never came to see him or kiss him good night or see how he was. Not once. Poor fellow. He would call her name over and over: “Wallis, Wallis, Wallis, Wallis.” Or “Darling, darling, darling, darling.” It was pitiful and pathetic. Just so sad, like a lamb calling for its mother.’25
At 2.30 a.m. on 28 May, the former King Edward VIII died, though versions of the death vary. The myths, which had surrounded the couple throughout th
eir lives, continued even in death. According to Wallis’s close friend, the Countess of Romanones, Wallis was called in the middle of the night and rushed to his bedside. ‘I took him in my arms. His blue eyes looked up at me, and he started to talk. He could only say, “Darling . . .” Then his eyes closed, and he died in my arms.’26
It’s an account confirmed by one nurse, Oonagh Shanley, interviewed by biographer Greg King, who says Wallis was woken and kissed her husband’s forehead, ‘My David.’ Cupping her hands gently round his face, she said, ‘My David – you look so lovely.’27 But John Utter, the couple’s secretary, told author Hugo Vickers that the Duchess was asleep when the Duke died and he had to wake her.
‘Well, it is good that she did not die before him,’ wrote Cecil Beaton in his diary later that day, ‘What will happen to her is not of interest. She made no friends. She will have less now. She should live at the Ritz, deaf and a bit gaga. It is sad because age is sad, but her life has not been a commendable one, and she is not worthy of much pity.’28
Buckingham Palace was immediately informed and an official statement issued just after 6 a.m. The Queen and Queen Mother sent telegrams of condolence to the widow and nine days of court mourning was declared. The former King Umberto of Italy was one of the first to visit and give his condolences, followed by the French foreign minister, Maurice Schumann, who, as a journalist, had attended the Windsor wedding.
Dickie Mountbatten was asked by the BBC to pay tribute to his former best man. Initially he refused, but he felt there should be some response from the Royal Family and he was happy to provide it. He rang the Queen, who ‘after considerable thought, had approved, provided I spoke about him in a balanced way.’29 Mountbatten, who had seen little of the Duke over the last thirty-five years, spoke of how, ‘He was more than my best man, he was my best friend all my life.’30
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