‘I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage by the other to so remarkable a degree,’ Frank Giles remembered. ‘He seemed to revel in being with the Duchess, in sunning himself in her smile, in admiring her appearance, in listening to her conversation.’21
‘I have never known any person so totally possessed by the personality of another,’ wrote Kenneth de Courcy:
He seemed to me to retain no individuality at all whenever she was present and when we were alone he constantly jumps up looking for her or asking on the house telephone where she was. If she was away he was restless and unhappy. Once in the South of France, when I was staying with my mother and the Duchess was in Paris, the Duke was at a total loss and I was asked to dinner on three successive evenings . . . Did she love the Duke of Windsor? I am afraid the sad answer is that she did not. She admires him, she likes him, but it never went further and I think he knew it and it was that which made him restless and induced him to concede his very innermost person to her authority in the hope that love would come . . . She never learnt to love the Duke and, in my opinion, she never ever experienced love at all for anyone.22
Given the speculation over their relationship, what was the nature of the couple’s sex life? The FBI reported, after interviewing Father Odo, that Wallis had:
told certain individuals that the Duke is impotent and that although he had tried sexual intercourse with numerous women, they had been unsuccessful in satisfying his passions. According to the story related by Father Odo, the Duchess in her own inimitable and unique manner has been the only woman who had been able to satisfactorily gratify the Duke’s sexual desires.23
Count Edward ‘Eddie’ Bismarck told Gore Vidal ‘that Wallis’s sexual hold over the duke was that only she knew how to control his premature ejaculation.’24
‘The Prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform,’ Lady Gladwyn, wife of the former British ambassador in Paris, told Hugo Vickers:
‘It was all over before it began – she called it a hairpin reaction.’ She said that the Duchess coped with it. I commented, ‘She was meant to have learned special ways in China.’ ‘There was nothing Chinese about it,’ said Lady Gladwyn. ‘It was what they call oral sex.’25
What hung over Wallis was the supposed existence of ‘The China Dossier’ relating to her activities in China, mainly sexual but also political, one of three reports supposedly gathered by the British Intelligence Services and shown to King George V in 1935. It was said that members of the Government and Royal Household had seen it, but its details remain vague. Tommy Dugdale, then parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister Stanley Baldwin, told Kenneth de Courcy that the ‘Intelligence Service had a case against Mrs Simpson which, if we could but read it, would entirely change our attitude.’26
Kenneth de Courcy was told about it by Sir John Coke, Queen Mary’s equerry, in the 1950s. He noted in a memo that:
he has read the secret dossier on the Duchess of Windsor, some details of which he told me and said he had recommended Churchill. He says that her personal record is so shocking that no English gentleman could properly advise Queen Mary ever to receive her or in any way relent. He assures me of such facts and challenges me to say whether, having heard such facts, I could tell him that he should advise Queen Mary to relent. I replied that if the allegations were true, I could not.27
De Courcy remembered parts of the dossier including – ‘that she’d got power over Count Charlot amongst other people in that way, and had an illegitimate child by Charlot,28 and abortion . . . that’s why she had this internal problem all her life.’29
The existence of the China dossier has never been proven. Even so, Dudley Forwood told Charles Higham in 1987:
The techniques Wallis discovered in China did not entirely overcome the Prince’s extreme lack of virility. It is doubtful whether he and Wallis ever actually had sexual intercourse in the normal sense of the word. However, she did manage to give him relief. He had always been a repressed foot fetishist, and she discovered this and indulged the perversity completely. They also, at his request, became involved in elaborate erotic games. These included nanny-child scenes: he wore diapers; she was the master. She was dominant, he happily submissive.30
Nicky Haslam agrees about the infantilism. ‘I mean nappies,’ he says. ‘They were all sexually screwed up by Queen Mary. Potty Gloucester [the Duke’s brother] liked wearing Queen Mary’s clothes, though he wasn’t gay. The Duke was certainly gay. I know that for a fact.’31
Queen Mary, the last royal to believe in the divine right of kings, had never intervened in the callous bullying that George V meted out to his children. ‘Of course, none of them came up to George V for horrors,’ says Diana Mosley. ‘There’s a ghastly photograph in my book where they’re being drilled by their father and they’re all in floods. Oh, I mean, too awful.’ ‘Being treated as a little boy, given orders, and punished when naughty,’ Michael Bloch gathered from his sources, were to the Duke’s taste.32
Charles Wilson, whose mother was married to Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, was told by her that:
Edward gained pleasure from being beaten by Wallis who delivered the strokes with her own small whip . . . He needed the stimulus, I think in order to perform in the normal manner – something with which he had great difficulty in earlier relationships . . . It was at a country house party where the then Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson were guests that the Prince’s private detective came to Ulick one morning with some worrying discoveries. He produced a pair of the Prince’s underpants striped with caked blood and a small whip that he found in Mrs Simpson’s underwear drawer . . . There is no doubt that Edward loved Wallis, but he was frightened of her – this she was quick to exploit.33
In 2012, Scotty Bowers, a Hollywood barman, published his memoirs, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, in which he claimed he had sexually procured men and women for numerous Hollywood stars from 1946. Amongst his clients were Sir Cecil Beaton, who wrote of Bowers in his published diaries, Noël Coward, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Chapter Fourteen in the book, ‘A Royal Affair’, is devoted to the couple, claiming that ‘during the late forties and early fifties’ Cecil Beaton had introduced them to Bowers, saying the Duke was ‘a classic example of a bisexual man’, that ‘Wallis Simpson shared similar bisexual urges . . . but essentially, he was gay and she was a dyke’. According to Bowers, ‘he and I slipped into the guesthouse at the bottom end of the large garden, stripped off, and began making out. Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro.’34
Over the next few days, Bowers writes that he supplied ‘a nice young guy for Eddy and a pretty dark-haired girl for Wally. Each time I sent somebody different. The royal couple enjoyed variety . . .’ Bowers wrote that Wallis ‘was not in any way inhibited. She was very fond of dark-haired women, usually those with hair colour similar to her own . . . Wally really knew what she was doing. She did it in style and with intense passion.’35
Amongst those who confirmed that Bowers’ stories were true were Gore Vidal, who spoke at the book launch, film director John Schlesinger, and the novelist Dominick Dunne. The film director, Lionel Friedberg, who ghosted Full Service, spent 150 hours with Scotty over several months, constantly testing him for accuracy. ‘Not once did he deviate from what he had said before. He had a photographic memory down to remembering number plates from years before . . . I don’t think he could tell a lie . . . I don’t doubt that everything he said about the Windsors was true.’36
A documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, directed by Matt Tyrnauer, was released in 2017. Tyrnauer, who told me he interviewed Bowers on and off camera over a three-year period, confirms that his independent reporting lined up with the information in Friedburg’s earlier interviews. Additionally, Tyrnauer interviewed more than forty friends and associates of Bowers, includi
ng men who were sex workers at Bowers’ gas station in the 1950s, all of whom corroborated Bowers. Friedberg’s view about Bowers’ veracity:
Everything I put in the movie checks out – either in printed documents, books, manuscripts, diaries, newspaper clips, etc. It all matches up. Details regarding homes and home addresses and architectural features of homes he was in that he could not have possibly have known unless he was in the houses. Also sources who were with him at the time who confirmed events. Obviously I could not prove everything he told me, but that would have been beyond the scope of my project. Whenever I went to check something, it panned out, however.37
* * *
‘My husband gave up everything for me; if everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me,’ Wallis told Elsa Maxwell. ‘That’s my chief responsibility.’38 The result was that Wallis spent a fortune on her appearance and clothes.
The Duchess was not conventionally good-looking with a prominent jaw and outsized hands, but she ate carefully – under the guidance of the nutritionist Gayelord Hauser – with the result at 5 foot 4 inches, she rarely weighed over 100 lbs, with measurements of 34 inch bust, 22 inch waist and 34 inch hips.39
Aline Romanones remembered how her shoes were always shined underneath, on the instep and inside the heel, as they could be seen when the legs were crossed, and that she always carried an extra pair of white gloves in her bag: ‘One pair to go, one pair to come back.’40
In the 1930s, her favourite designers were Mainbocher and Schiaparelli, by the 1950s she had switched to Dior, Balenciaga and Chanel, and she even experimented with pants suits in the 1950s and miniskirts in the 1960s. She made the short evening dress fashionable as well as, because of her flat chest, high-necked evening gowns.
This all came at a great cost. ‘The Duchess bought clothes from several couturiers and she would beat the prices down on the pretext that she would advertise the clothes she wore,’ remembered Mona Eldridge. ‘Both she and the Duke were notorious for their stinginess, resorting to all sorts of shameless deceits to avoid paying bills. In the case of the Duke, it was pathological.’41
During the 1950s, staff were used to increasingly angry letters and calls from unpaid suppliers, not least the jewellery houses Cartier and Van Cleef. The result was that a deal was struck that Wallis would borrow jewels for public events as long as the name of the designer was leaked to the Press and they were returned promptly.
The Windsors only kept to the first part of the bargain – they borrowed, but didn’t return. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to identify which items in the collection were paid for and which were not. A wholesale clear-out of all correspondence at the time of the Duchess’s death in 1986 ensured that we shall never know the full extent of this dishonesty. However, one former servant told me grimly: ‘Rarely was anything ever handed back.42
Courtney de Espil, married to Wallis’s former lover Felipe de Espil, had presciently written at the time of the Abdication:
Today in my humble opinion, England must feel luckier to be rid of a man so weak, this Jekyll and Hyde king of so little inner stability and yet such outward charm . . . They have ahead of them years in which to decide where to live. They will have no country and he ‘no job’. Can any love exist or be nourished on this slender fare? . . . For Edward is no longer a king. In her eyes he can only be a poor weak man who depends on her now, who has given away his all. Can they dance every night at a different cabaret to keep life gay?43
The problem for the Windsors was that they were superficial people with little sense of obligation and few interests. When pressed, a friend of Wallis’s came up with ‘gossip . . . and marvellous housekeeping’. Wallis herself said that her talent was ‘getting people to talk’.
The art historian John Richardson says of her:
She was a society rattle, straight out of Thackeray, in a way. She must have been like one of those Regency ladies around George IV, prattling away in this hideous voice. Funny. A marvellous maîtresse de maison. The food was superb, and she got it right – it wasn’t too overdone. The place always looked very attractive – wonderful flowers and modern American touches. You could be sure that cocktails were superb. But the conversation was idiotic.44
‘The Duke and Duchess led totally self-centred lives; there was no consideration for anything but the gratification of their own needs,’ according to Mona Eldridge. ‘The life they led was borne out of disappointment, frustration and unfulfilled expectations.’45
‘It was a really empty life but it was what they enjoyed,’ noted John Utter. ‘She loved anything to do with a party. They were wretched personalities, completely egocentric.’46
Their ambitions were partially satisfied by creating beautiful homes and an extensive social life with equally shallow people, but there was a restlessness as they relentlessly entertained, partied, travelled as if escaping from something – each other, the past, responsibility. Certainly both were escaping from unhappy childhoods – his emotionally barren, hers in terms of wealth and status.
Contrary to a great love story, Wallis had been emotionally blackmailed into marriage and had stuck with it because she had no other option. She had been attracted to him as Prince of Wales and King, but that attraction had waned after he had given up his throne, leading to a mixture of guilt, pity, dissatisfaction, boredom and irritation. The affairs, the constant shopping, the travel and entertaining were an attempt to provide some stimulation in a life with little meaning and with a man she did not love.
1 MacColl, pp. 123–4.
2 McCall’s magazine, June 1961.
3 Birkenhead, pp. 125–6.
4 Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston Churchill: Prophet of Truth, Vol. 5 (Heinemann, 1976), p. 810.
5 ‘The Nahlin’, p. 30, DUFC 2/17, Churchill College Archives.
6 Kenneth de Courcy, p. 6, BREN 2/2/5, Churchill College Archives.
7 Morton, Wallis in Love, pp. 318–19.
8 Rupert Godfrey, Letters from a Prince (Little, Brown, 1998), p. 245.
9 Ziegler, Shore to Shore, p. 237.
10 Amory, Best Cat Ever, p. 142
11 Eldridge, pp. 86–7.
12 Bryan and Murphy, p. 478.
13 ‘TV Tale of Two Windsors’, New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1979.
14 ‘The Windsor Papers’, Kenneth de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.
15 LASL 8/8, Churchill College Archives. Before coming to the throne, the Duke signed himself ‘Edward Princeps’, or EP. His property in Alberta was known as the EP ranch.
16 Sundry Times, p. 24, and Frank Giles, p. 26, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.
17 Eldridge, p. 89.
18 Hood, p. 35.
19 Hood, p. 36.
20 Forwood, p. 5, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.
21 Martin, p. 424.
22 ‘The Windsor Papers’, de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.
23 FBI file, HQ 65-31113.
24 Vidal, p. 208.
25 Hugo Vickers unpublished diary, 2 June 1982, Vickers, Behind Closed Doors, p. 310.
26 Kenneth de Courcy to Duke of Windsor, 27 September 1951, de Courcy Papers, Hoover Institute.
27 10 March 1951, Box 3, Folder 4, de Courcy Papers, Hoover Institute.
28 Philip Ziegler is quoted that she ‘had a child by Count Ciano (later Mussolini’s son-in-law)’, James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
29 Kenneth de Courcy, p. 56, BREN 2/2/5, Churchill College Archives.
30 Higham, Wallis (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), p. 72.
31 ‘The Oddest Couple’, James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003. Confirmed in email by Nicky Haslam to author, 11 April 2021.
32 James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
33 ‘Dark Side of the Great Love Story’, Sunday Express, January 1994, quoted Gwynne Thomas, King, Pawn or Black Knight (Mainstream, 1995), pp. 38–9.
34 Scotty Bowers, ‘A Royal Affair’, Full Service (Grove Pr
ess, 2013).
35 Bowers, ‘A Royal Affair’, Full Service.
36 Interview with Lionel Friedberg, 13 April 2021.
37 Matt Tyrnauer, emails to author, 1 and 2 May 2020.
38 Elsa Maxwell, RSVP: Elsa Maxwell’s Own Story (Little, Brown, 1954), p. 301.
39 Mosley, Duchess of Windsor, p. 188.
40 Countess of Romanones, ‘The Dear Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986.
41 Eldridge, p. 86.
42 Christopher Wilson, Daily Mail, 2 December 2010.
43 de Espil, p. 696, Box 9, Folders 1–3, Library of Congress.
44 James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
45 Eldridge, p. 87.
46 David Pryce-Jones, ‘TV Tale of Two Windsors’, New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1979.
CHAPTER 25
Traitor King
‘It is a rare writer who has not tackled at least one book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,’ asserts Craig Brown. ‘Books have been written proving conclusively that they were a good thing and that they were a bad thing; that she loved him but he didn’t love her; that he loved her but she didn’t love him; that they loved one another and that they both hated one another.’1
Thirty-five years after her death and almost fifty years after his, the books – both fiction and non-fiction – documentaries, musicals, and films continue to appear and to adopt very different points of view towards the couple. Some still argue that this was one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century, others that Wallis felt trapped in a marriage that she had never wanted. No book before has started after the Abdication in 1936 and looked fully at what happened to the Windsors in their exile.
The accepted account is that they were rejected by the Royal Family because the former king had put private desire above public duty, that they could not be seen to support a man who had turned his back on his birthright, and there is some truth in that. The Monarch was head of the Church of England and he simply could not hold that role and marry a twice-divorced woman – but might the royal rejection also be because it was believed that the couple had behaved in a treacherous manner?
Traitor King Page 31
