The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor

by Anna Pasternak

  The prince had started giving Wallis gifts: a photograph of himself in a leather frame, a table for her drawing room—that she chose—for Christmas. Wallis declared Christmas “lovely and gay,” and that New Year’s Eve, she and Ernest partied with the playboy prince until five in the morning.

  On January 25, Thelma left for a three-month trip to America to visit her family. In November, Wallis had written to Aunt Bessie: “I am going to miss Thelma terribly when she goes to NY after Christmas.”59 The day before she sailed, Thelma and Wallis met for cocktails. “We rattled along in our fashion,” Wallis remembered, “as we said goodbye, she said, laughingly: ‘I’m afraid the prince is going to be lonely. Wallis, won’t you look after him?’ I promised that I would.”60

  Thelma’s recollection of events is subtly different. In her memoirs, she wrote: “Three or four days before I was set to sail, I had lunch with Wallis at the Ritz. I told her of my plans, and in my exuberance I offered myself for all the usual yeoman’s services. Was there anything I could do for her in America? Were there any messages I could deliver? Did she want me to bring anything back for her? She thanked me and said suddenly: ‘Oh, Thelma, the little man is going to be so lonely.’ ‘Well, dear,’ I answered, ‘you look after him for me while I’m away.’61

  On Monday, February 12, Wallis’s letter to Bessie illustrated the extent to which she heeded her friend and in the process became indispensable to the demands of the prince. “Darling—I have been very slow with letters these past 2 weeks. We have inherited the ‘young man’ from Thelma. He misses her so that he is always calling us up and the result is one late night after the other—and by late I mean 4 a.m. Ernest has cried off a few but I have had to go on. I am sure the gossip will now be that I am the latest.”62 Six days later, she wrote: “Am also behind on my letters to you on account of the prince who is here most of the time or telephoning 2 and 3 times a day being completely at a loose end. However Thelma will be back very shortly.”63

  The prince’s interest in Wallis intensified during a dinner that he hosted at the Dorchester Hotel for some American friends on January 30. Earlier that day, he had been in Yorkshire, visiting social welfare projects, villages and working men’s clubs. He was astonished that evening, while the other guests were away from the table dancing, when Wallis sat with him, inquired about his day and actually appeared interested in what his role entailed. Instead of the usual “Oh, Sir, how boring for you! Aren’t you terribly tired?” response that he was accustomed to, Wallis, who had read about the Council of Social Service in the newspapers, was genuinely keen to know more about it.

  Wallis recalled this to be a turning point in their relationship: “He began to talk about his work, the things he hoped to do, and the creative role he thought the Monarchy could play in this new age, and also dropped a hint of the frustration he was experiencing,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I was fascinated. It was as if a door had opened on the inner fastness of his character. What I now saw in his keenness for his job, in his ambition to make a success of it, was not dissimilar to the attitude of many American businessmen I had known. I can not claim that I instantly understood him but I sensed in him something that few around him could have been aware of—a deep loneliness, an overtone of spiritual isolation.”64

  Edward was captivated. As the dancing guests returned to the table, he said to Wallis: “You’re the only woman who’s ever been interested in my job.” He later wrote: “She began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps understand. For a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.”65

  Yet the point had come when Wallis could no longer remain oblivious to the prince’s attentions. He took to turning up at Bryanston Court for potluck suppers which he, Wallis and Ernest would enjoy à trois. According to Wallis, Ernest then “developed the art of tactfully excusing himself and retiring to his room with his papers.”66 The work demands were genuine; thankfully Ernest’s shipping business was picking up.

  The Prince of Wales would sometimes pop in and stay for a quick drink; at other times he would appear twice a week and stay all evening. On February 18, Wallis reassured her aunt in her regular correspondence: “P.S. It’s all gossip about the prince. I’m not in the habit of taking my friends’ beaux. We are around together a lot and of course people are going to say it. I think I do amuse him. I’m the comedy relief and we like to dance together—but I always have Ernest hanging around my neck so all is safe.”67

  A few days later, Wallis wrote once more to her aunt: “I am feeling very well but am quite thin not in the face but in the figure. Naturally worry over finances is not fat-making. I weigh 8 stone undressed but eat and drink as usual.”68 Juggling the attentions of Ernest, as well as the prince, who was proving to be a most determined suitor, similarly took its toll on Wallis’s nervous disposition. Admirably, she did not “junk old friends” when the prince came into her life, making efforts to keep up her acquaintances in her spare evenings. She told Bessie: “I’m a bit worn—never a restful moment as it requires great tact to manage both.”69 She and Ernest had even been asked by the prince to invite their own friends to the Fort for weekends—a tremendous honor. She asked Bessie to send her a pale-blue summer dress for $20, explaining: “The royalty stuff very demanding on clothes.”70

  Wallis was now playing the coveted hostess role. Unwittingly, Thelma provided the prince the perfect excuse to transfer his affection when she returned from America on March 22. In New York and on the crossing home, she had enjoyed the attentions of Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan. Only twenty-three, he had a reputation as a polished seducer. According to Elsa Maxwell, Aly Khan was “un homme fatal.”71 Word of their association reached Edward.

  “The prince arrived at my house in Regent’s Park that night,” Thelma recalled. “He seemed a little distrait, as if something were bothering him. Suddenly he said: ‘I hear Aly Khan has been very attentive to you.’ I thought he was joking. ‘Are you jealous, darling?’ I asked. But the prince did not answer me.”72 When Thelma asked Wallis why the prince was distant to her at the Fort the following weekend, Wallis replied somewhat disingenuously: “Darling, you know the little man loves you very much. The little man was just lost without you.”73

  “Empty as these sentences were, they were a kind of emotional bulwark,” recalled Thelma. Reassured, she invited Wallis and Ernest to the Fort for Easter weekend. However, “that weekend was negatively memorable,” said Thelma. “I do not remember who was there, other than the Simpsons, there were about eight of us in all. I had a bad cold when we arrived. . . . Most of Saturday passed without incident. At dinner, however, I noticed that the prince and Wallis seemed to have little private jokes. Once he picked up a piece of salad with his fingers; Wallis playfully slapped his hand.”74 Thelma caught Wallis’s eye and shook her head at her. “She knew as well as everybody else that the prince could be very friendly, but no matter how friendly, he never permitted familiarity. His image of himself, shy, genial and democratic, was always framed by the royal three feathers. . . . Wallis looked straight at me. And then and there I knew. That one cold, defiant glance had told the entire story.”75

  Thelma left the Fort, and the prince’s life, the following morning. Wallis confirmed that her reign was over in a letter to her aunt on April 15, 1934. Sent tellingly from the Fort, she wrote: “Thelma is still in Paris. I’m afraid her rule is over and I’m trying to keep an even keel with my relations with him by avoiding seeing him alone as he is very attentive at the moment. And of course I’m flattered.”76

  Wallis took to her new role as chatelaine of Fort Belvedere with verve. A footman brought in by Thelma Furness was quickly dismissed; the cook soon followed. Osborne, the butler, was more threatened by Wallis’s presence than those of her predecessors, Lady Furness and Mrs. Dudley Ward. When Wallis presented the prince with a small tray on a folding stand, which she thought would simplify the serving of tea, Osborne was reluctant to use it. When the prince insisted that he bring it in
for the afternoon tea, the butler snapped the tray into position with a vicious jerk and announced contemptuously: “Your Royal Highness, this thing won’t last twenty-four hours.”77

  Wallis’s status was further sealed when the prince arrived at Bryanston Court with a cairn terrier pup under his arm. He presented the dog to Wallis, announcing that it was called Slipper and was now hers. In her letters, Wallis tried to reassure Aunt Bessie that Ernest was fully aware of what was happening and, in fact, colluded with the new order. “Ernest is flattered with it all and lets me dine once or twice a week with him alone,” she wrote, adding: “If Ernest raises any objections to the situation I shall give the prince up at once.”78

  Even at the height of the prince’s affair with Thelma Furness, Freda Dudley Ward was in the background as the maternal figure the prince could always rely on. On April 25, when Wallis wrote to Bessie that the royal affair with Thelma was “very much on the wane,” she continued: “I shall doubtless be blamed as for the moment he is rather attentive though sees equally as much of Mrs Dudley Ward his old flame.”79

  This is the only mention Wallis ever made of Freda in her correspondence, yet ever since the prince’s affair with Freda cooled in 1924 and Thelma came on the scene, he had continued to visit the Dudley Ward family. That month, Freda’s daughter, Penelope, suffered complications after an operation for appendicitis. Freda, who spent anxious days beside her daughter’s bedside, was too distraught to realize that all was suspiciously quiet from royal quarters. As soon as her daughter recovered, she rang York House to speak to the prince. The telephone operator, whom she had known for years, made a strange choking sound when he discovered Mrs. Dudley Ward was on the line. “He didn’t seem able to speak. I suddenly realised to my horror that he was crying,” said Freda. “ ‘Everybody seems to have gone mad around here,’ he said. The prince had given orders that none of my phone calls be put through. I never heard from him again.”80

  In that one act of cowardice, the prince coldly dispensed with Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward. From that moment on, Wallis was to be his “one and only.”

  * * *

  I. Mary Cain was Wallis’s maid.

  II. The Prince of Wales’s brother Albert (Bertie) and his wife, Elizabeth.

  III. King George VI, her father-in-law.

  IV. Wallis Simpson.

  V. Only Edward’s family ever referred to him as David.

  3

  * * *

  One and Only

  By the spring of 1934, Wallis and Ernest’s life was almost “completely caught up and submerged in the prince’s private world.”1 The Simpsons received the ultimate invitation of society’s summer season: to join the prince’s party for Ascot week. The royal procession from Windsor Castle to the racecourse was a brilliant piece of pageantry—the king, queen and their family in open landaus, with bewigged postilions astride the grey horses. “That year, as I watched from the Royal Enclosure,” Wallis recalled, “I felt an odd surge of pride and admiration when I saw that fleeting, boyish smile directed at us from under his grey topper.”2

  When the prince invited Wallis and Ernest as his guests on his summer holiday to Biarritz, Wallis initially declined. Ernest was due to go to America on business and she had invited Aunt Bessie to stay with her in his absence. Not to be deterred, the prince reassured Wallis that he would welcome Bessie. Her seventy-year-old aunt, would, of course, make the perfect chaperone.

  It was a small party that set off for France on August 1: the prince, his assistant private secretary, Hugh Lloyd Thomas, his equerries, “G” Trotter and John Aird, and his old friends, Lieutenant Commander Buist and his wife, Gladys, and Wallis and Aunt Bessie. Edward had rented a sprawling villa called Meretmont, overlooking the ocean. The holiday did not get off to a promising start. There were two days of continuous rain; then their regal host suffered from a surfeit of langoustines and was sick at his table in the Café de Paris. Fortunately, they soon settled into a happier routine. “As at the Fort, life was simple—swimming and sunbathing, golf, sometimes a little bridge,” said Wallis. Once a week, Edward and Wallis would leave the rest of the party and dine alone at local bistros. This was their first opportunity to be together as a couple. John Aird wrote in his diary of the prince at this time: “Behaviour in public excellent, in private awful and most embarrassing for others. The prince has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.”3

  The prince soon tired of Biarritz. When Mrs. Kenelm Guinness, known as “Posy,” joined the party, she invited them to extend their holiday. Her cousin, Lord Moyne, an heir of the Guinness brewing family and Conservative politician, was sailing his yacht, Rosaura, nearby. Edward jumped at the chance to spend more time with Wallis. Bessie, who had planned a motoring trip in Italy, refused to be diverted and left Wallis with the royal party. John Aird, who was responsible for organizing the logistics of joining the cruise, later wrote of Wallis: “I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much cleverer than I think, she does not know how to work it so as to cash in best.”4

  The yacht was a converted channel steamer. Lord Moyne, a distinguished-looking Irishman, made a point of boasting to his guests that he was an accomplished seaman and the Rosaura could override any Atlantic gale. In spite of a furious storm in the Bay of Biscay as the royal party went aboard, Lord Moyne ordered the vessel to get under way, announcing: “I have yet to see the storm that could keep me in port.”5 Wallis, a seasoned seafarer who rarely got seasick, took to her cabin, clinging to the bed as her trunk was flung back and forth across her berth. As the storm mounted in violence, each of the rest of the party retreated to their cabins, with the exception of John Aird. Wallis, convinced that their host would have to accept defeat, asked a steward who checked in on her later that night, how soon they would be in port. He replied: “I’ve never seen his Lordship in finer fettle. He has just ordered caviar and grouse and a bottle of champagne for Mr. Aird and himself.”6

  The last straw was when Lord Moyne’s pet, a terrifying monkey who had the run of the vessel, suddenly leapt on Wallis’s bed, having jumped through a skylight. Wallis let out such a scream that Lord Moyne himself was startled from the bridge. A steward was sent to coax the spirited animal from Wallis’s berth. Fortunately, the prince, reeling with seasickness himself, struggled to the bridge and, summoning his finest diplomacy, ordered the yacht to the nearby Spanish port of Coruña.

  John Aird felt that Wallis’s fear of physical danger had an enfeebling effect on the prince. Always before, he had been physically intrepid, even recklessly so. He enjoyed flying in aircraft and was always the one who wanted to push ahead in bad conditions. Of the storm they faced on the Rosaura, Aird later wrote bitterly: “He was really frightened, and in my opinion is a coward at heart.”7

  Once the storm had blown over, the party enjoyed a relaxed, delightful cruise down the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. Often finding themselves alone on deck in the evenings, Wallis recognized that here she and Edward “crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.”8 Eleven days after leaving Biarritz, they reached Cannes. After dinner with Wallis’s friends Herman and Katherine Rogers at their hillside villa, Edward placed a tiny velvet pouch from Cartier in Wallis’s hand. It contained a diamond and emerald charm for a bracelet—the first of what would become his legendary acquisition of exquisite jewelry for his beloved.

  The prince’s advisors were aware of the beneficial influence Wallis could have on him. On holiday, Edward liked to sport the simplest of clothes, an antidote to the constant, starchy dressing up that his position required. But Wallis could see that it was inappropriate for the Prince of Wales to go ashore practically deshabille in shorts, shirt and sandals. It took all her powers of persuasion to entice him into linen trousers and a jacket.

  It was their visibility on the Côte d’Azur that inspired the first mention in the press of the new romance. That September, Time magazine referred
to the fun that “Edward of Wales [was] having at Cannes last week with beautiful Mrs. Wallace Simpson.”9 Still, the courtiers were not alert to any real danger. At the end of the holiday, John Aird concluded of Wallis: “She does not seem to have any illusions about the situation and definitely does not want to do anything that will lose her husband.”10

  The wiser, more perceptive Aunt Bessie queried her niece’s motives that September. Over dinner, she asked Wallis: “Isn’t the prince rather taken with you?” adding: “These old eyes aren’t so old that they can’t see what’s in his every glance.” Bessie cautioned Wallis that if she continued enjoying this kind of life—which Wallis herself described as “Wallis in Wonderland”—it would leave her unsettled and dissatisfied with the life she had known before. Wallis batted away her concerns. “It’s all great fun,” she told her. “You don’t have to worry about me—I know what I am doing.” Aunt Bessie’s conclusion was wisely prescient: “I can see no happy outcome to such a situation.”11

  Similarly concerned were the king and queen. Up until then, they had publicly ignored Wallis’s existence. That September, after his prolonged summer holiday, Edward joined his parents at Balmoral. He had composed a tune for the bagpipes, dedicated to Wallis, called “Majorca.” He practiced it relentlessly, marching up and down the castle terrace in the rain until the exasperated king threw open the window and yelled at him to stop.12