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

by Anna Pasternak

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  The following summer, 1947, the king’s elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, became engaged to Prince Philip of Greece. A delighted Queen Mary wrote on July 10: “Heard with great pleasure of darling Lilibet’s engagement to Philip Mountbatten. They both came to see me after lunch looking radiant.”34

  Instantly, the press were abuzz and the question was asked: Would the Duke and Duchess of Windsor be invited to the wedding of the duke’s niece? Astonishingly, given the decade of snubs that he had received, Edward still held out hope that he and his wife would be included on the guest list. When he was told that no invitation would be forthcoming, he wrote to Ulick Alexander. “Believe me, Ulick, this form of publicity is as distasteful to the duchess and myself as it is no doubt to the king. But so long as the royal family do not feel disposed to change the attitude they have adopted for more than ten years, these unpleasant exposés of a cheap and undignified family situation will inevitably flare up each time some relevant error occurs to ignite them, until all concerned are in their graves.”35

  To his mother, Edward wrote plaintively: “I am always hoping that one day you will tell me to bring Wallis to see you, as it makes me very sad to think that you and she have never really met . . . it would indeed be tragic if you, my mother, had never known the girl I married and who has made me blissfully happy.”36

  Riled, the duke renewed his battle over the duchess’s right to be restyled Her Royal Highness. In 1937, when the duke had consulted the esteemed lawyer Sir William Jowitt on the question, Jowitt had replied that the duke had never ceased to be a Royal Highness himself, so technically, there was no question of his wife not being entitled to the distinction. Jowitt maintained that the letters patent issued by King George VI, which had granted the title to the duke but denied it to his wife, should never have been issued. Twelve years later, Jowitt was now Lord Chancellor in Attlee’s Labour government. The duke called on him to convince the king of the justice of the duchess’s case.

  This time Jowitt would not be tied to a definite answer. A fresh letters patent, he considered, could not be issued by the king alone but on the advice of his ministers, who would probably feel it necessary to consult all the Commonwealth governments. Tommy Lascelles, who had been informed of the conversation by Jowitt, told the king: “It was the best example I have ever seen of a clever lawyer trying to eat his own words without giving himself indigestion.”37 The matter did not sit lightly with Jowitt, however, who wrote to Lascelles the following week after his conversation with the duke. He said that he still felt a legal mistake had been made: “In reality he remained HRH notwithstanding the Abdication and the attribute to which he was entitled would automatically pass to his wife.”38

  Although he knew nothing of this letter, Edward began to press his case with the prime minister. The king warned Attlee: “You will not encourage him to think that any alteration can be made at this time.”39 When the duke arranged to meet with Attlee to discuss the matter, Queen Mary wrote to the king: “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at your brother being so tiresome about HRH. Giving her this title would be fatal, and after all these years I fear lest people think that we condoned this dreadful marriage which has been such a blow to us all in every way.”40 She encouraged the king to be “very firm and refuse to do anything about it,” insisting that the government back him up. Queen Mary continued, giving no quarter: “I was grieved that Leopold of the Belgians and his wife saw quite a lot of her in the South of France lately, but she is so pushing and she leaves no stone unturned to remain a thorn in our sides and advertise herself whenever she can.”41

  The king sent his brother a stern letter, making it absolutely clear that there was no chance of Wallis’s title being reconsidered. He concluded: “I made your wife a Duchess despite what happened in 1936. You should be grateful to me for this. But you are not.”42 Edward replied succinctly to his brother’s letter. He merely corrected the king’s statement that his life would not be worth living under these conditions. “On the contrary I could not conceive greater happiness than Wallis has given me in these thirteen years of our married life,” he wrote.43

  The queen wrote to her daughter Princess Elizabeth about another badgering visit from the Duke of Windsor: “Papa seems well, but gets a bit tired with all the worries—Uncle David came & had one of his violent yelling conversations, stamping up & down the room, & very unfairly saying that because Papa wouldn’t (and couldn’t) do a certain thing that Papa must hate him. So unfair, because Papa is so scrupulously fair & thoughtful & honest about all that has happened. It’s so much easier to yell & pull down & criticise, than to restrain, & build, & think right, isn’t it.”44

  In 1948, the lease expired on La Croë and the couple were on the move again. Wallis wrote to her friend Elsie Mendl, saying that she hoped that they might visit her for the weekend at her house in Versailles, on their way to Paris. Between the lines, Wallis was weary of their peripatetic lifestyle and unpredictable future. (Duff Cooper noted that summer that the Windsors looked “faded and worn.”45) Wallis detailed to Elsie their “traveling army,” her responsibilities for packing up a home again and the difficulties of maneuvering their staff, which included two maids, two chauffeurs, a secretary and a valet, plus the Windsors’ two dogs. There is a sense of despondency about Wallis, who confided in her friend: “I wish that I could come on ahead of the duke and stay with you first but alas it is that I know the things here. Do let me know if you can have us then—but not if we are an effort. I am very sad to give up La Croë and to have to go to a rented house with store houses full of my possessions. I do not think it very intelligent and long to talk to you about everything—you are so very wise and yet is this the time to buy in France? And not being able to move capital out of England—America becomes beyond us—such a messy world, isn’t it darling?”46

  The Windsors always seemed to be traveling but never arriving anywhere meaningful. They stayed in France from April until after Christmas 1948, when they went to America, where they stayed in their six-room apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, or in their friends’ magnificent mansions in Palm Beach. The novelist Cecil Roberts said of their apartment in the Waldorf Towers: “this did not look like exile”; there were full-length portraits of George III and George IV in their coronation robes, other royal portraits, two footmen in livery and napkins embroidered with the royal coat of arms.47

  David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito met the duke and duchess at a party in Palm Beach. “It was at a big house on a beautiful estate with lavish gardens and a large swimming pool. There was a wonderful dinner, then dancing. I was seated across from the Duke of Windsor, who knew the daughter of our hostess,” he remembered. “The duke was so polite and put everyone at their ease. He was charming, laughing with the younger guests. The duchess was sitting at another table. To my great surprise, after dinner, a servant came across and told the duke that the duchess wanted to leave and was waiting in the car. I was shocked when the servant told the duke that he must come immediately or the duchess was leaving without him. When he got the message, he jumped up and said good-bye and took his leave. He was like a little boy, almost running off.”48

  The duchess had various medical treatments in middle age. When they were living at Nassau, she had traveled to Miami to have an operation to help ease her stomach problems. In 1951, she fell ill in New York and had a hysterectomy. Whenever she was unwell, the duke was beside himself. Queen Mary wrote to him at this time: “I feel sorry for your great anxiety about your wife, and am thankful that so far you are able to send a fair account.”49 The duchess joked: “At the moment I am going through the repair shop—every day a doctor for some ‘part.’ ”50

  A few years before, Life magazine had encouraged the duke to write a series of articles about his reign. Although the duke had always considered that a dignified silence was the sine qua non of royal life, as others involved began to make their versions of the abdication
crisis known—stirring him to successful litigation in some cases—he decided to put his own side across. An American writer Charles Murphy helped him with his memoirs, which became A King’s Story, published in 1951. The title alone caused resentment amid palace courtiers. It would earn the duke over £300,000.

  Murphy confided in Cecil Beaton about the Windsors: “The Prince is happy in his relationship with her. He depends on her utterly. It is a mother-mistress relationship. She looked after him like a child, & yet makes entertainment for him as she did in the days when he was the prince coming to her home for relaxation at the end of a long day. She now gives him the antidote to hard work but he has none of the hard work. He has nothing to do. She is nearly driven mad trying to find ways of amusing him. He has no intellect. He has no interests. Steam baths & brandy have made him very weak.”51

  Beaton, who photographed the duke in Paris, reported: “His face now begins to show the emptiness of life. It is too impertinent to be tragic. . . . He looks like a mad terrier, haunted one moment, and then with a flick of the hand he is laughing fecklessly.”52

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  The only time that Wallis let herself down in her thirty-five-year marriage to the duke was in the early 1950s, when she became infatuated with American Jimmy Donahue, a flamboyant playboy nineteen years her junior and gay. His mother was a Woolworth heir; he was a cousin of the socialite Barbara Hutton. Wallis’s flirtation with this spoilt hedonist, who once bought her a jeroboam of perfume at a Paris nightclub, was her visible rebellion against the pressured constraints of her marriage and the cloying, overattentive affections of the duke. Donahue shared Wallis’s taste in witty retorts, nightclubs and dancing until dawn. Sadly, though, Wallis hurt her husband with this liaison and, uncharacteristically, behaved recklessly, generating ugly rumors. In three successive summers, Donahue and the Windsors went on Mediterranean cruises together, paid for by Woolworth money.

  Wallis’s friends were stunned by her behavior, especially when she was usually so “violently fastidious” in her conduct. At a tense and excruciating dinner party in Paris, Wallis mopped up a spilt glass of champagne using a fan representing the Prince of Wales’s feathers.53 The party moved on to the Monseigneur nightclub, where Wallis danced endlessly with Donahue to “La Vie en Rose” and “C’est Si Bon.” As the duke watched, he became increasingly distraught, close to tears. When the couple returned to the “Windsors’ special table,” Wallis asked the waiter for a vase for the red roses Jimmy had bought her. She shoved her soggy ostrich fan and the roses into the vase, inexplicably announcing: “Look, everybody! The Prince of Wales plumes and Jimmy Donahue’s roses.”54

  “The whole evening was ghastly,” said Lady Diana Cooper. “Once it was over, I ended up in a car alone with Donahue. I couldn’t bear him. He was so pleased with himself. He lolled around on the car cushions looking as puffed up as a toad because he had proved he had the power to cause distress. I thought he was seriously cruel and common.”55

  Donahue kept saying to Lady Diana: “ ‘Don’t you love “our Duchess”?’ ” ‘Don’t you think “our Duchess” is fantastic?’ ” She turned to him and retorted coldly: “I happen to be the daughter of a duchess, so Wallis can’t ever be ‘our Duchess’ to me.”56

  “None of us could understand it,” said Laura, Duchess of Marlborough. “Jimmy Donahue was the most dreadful creature. . . . [Wallis] tormented the duke. I remember taking the duke home one night from a Paris nightclub and he was in floods of tears because the duchess had vanished somewhere with Donahue.”57

  According to a friend of Wallis’s, Cordelia Biddle Robertson, the duchess told her exactly why this strange, unsuitable friendship ended. “It didn’t end as we all thought it would with a terrible scandal on the front pages. It just ended one night when Wallis had a date with Jimmy.”58 Wallis went downstairs to wait for Donahue, who was due to arrive in his car at midnight. He was ten minutes late, which annoyed her. But she became incensed when he turned up smelling of garlic, which she loathed. They had a row and never spoke again, which must have been the sweetest relief to the duke. Friends felt that once Wallis had this uncharacteristic rebellion out of her system, she settled comfortably into middle age with the duke. Possibly guilty about her weird infatuation, after that, her watchful maternal devotion to her husband never wavered.

  Shortly after Wallis dropped Donahue, a friend of Lady Diana Mosley’s was dining with the Windsors. “This is our wedding day,” the duke announced out of nowhere. “We’ve been married eighteen years. There may be a happier couple somewhere but I doubt it.”59

  The couple moved again; they accepted an offer from the French government to live for a peppercorn rent on a fifty-year lease in a nineteenth-century mansion in the Bois de Boulogne once owned by the Renault family. The French government had sequestered the property after the Second World War and Charles de Gaulle occupied the house in the late forties. According to Elsa Maxwell: “It is perhaps the most beautiful house in Paris. You have the impression of being in the midst of the country as you look through the spacious windows in the drawing room on to the smooth, green lawn and the trees around. The drawing room in white and silver is entirely lit by candlelight from exquisite silver sconces that rise like silver trees upon paneled walls.”60

  Here the duke and duchess entertained in their customary lavish style. “We visited the Windsors often for dinner at their Paris home,” recalled Rudi von Schönburg. “The duchess gave parties that were elegant, formal but not stiff. She was not vulgar as people said. Their home was like being in a small royal principality: lovely furniture and paintings, exquisite flowers.”61

  John Julius Norwich remembered going to dinner there as a young man. “Wallis was fun,” he recalled. “If you found yourself sitting next to her, the ball came back over the net and she made the party go. She was very good with people my age. She wasn’t remotely flirtatious, she just talked to me as if I was a contemporary, which is enormously flattering when you are eighteen. She was a wonderful hostess, perhaps slightly overdoing the splendor, though. There were always too many golden ashtrays.”62

  With the duke finally resigned to settling in France, the Windsors looked to buy their first home. Edward managed to persuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, to release £30,000 from his capital in England, which was still blocked by currency control.63 Edward wanted somewhere in the country, but close enough to Paris to keep the duchess happy. They found an enchanting eighteenth-century water mill at the mouth of the Chevreuse valley, twenty miles from the capital. Moulin de la Tuilerie, known as the Mill, gave the duchess another renovation and decoration project; there were a cobbled courtyard, outhouses and a large barn. Wallis transformed this collection of buildings into entertaining areas and guest cottages. In the barn, one wall was covered with a map of the duke’s world travels when he was Prince of Wales. The large first-floor sitting room opened onto a terrace where the couple and their many and frequent houseguests—who included Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Cecil Beaton—played canasta. Wallis’s decorator, Stéphane Boudin, created her jeu d’esprit in imposing letters on the wall of the sitting room: “I’m not the miller’s daughter, but I have been through the mill.” This frescoed trompe l’oeil depicted a ribbon running through a mill wheel.

  The duke was delighted to have another garden to develop. He commissioned English designer Russell Page to design the grounds. They were fashioned like a traditional English country garden, with two herbaceous borders filled with the flowers—delphiniums, phlox and asters—he loved at the Fort. He created a rock garden with alpine blooms and water splashing from a small, steep hill, exactly as he had done at the Fort. The head gardener, Edouard Kruch, was Alsatian. As the duke was still not fluent in French, he could speak to the gardener in German, which he relished. Endearingly, the duke would come and read comics with Kruch’s sons in the Indian tepee in the garden which he had bought for them.

  Wallis and Edward
loved the Mill, the first house that had belonged to them in all their married life. “It was the prettiest, most cheerful place imaginable,” remembered frequent guest Diana Mosley. “With crackling wood fires in winter and in summer the bright flowers.”64 Her good friend the fashion editor Diana Vreeland recalled being called upstairs into the duke’s bathroom by the duchess. “The tub was covered with a wooden board which he’d obviously had one of the men on the property make—a kind of table. It was piled with papers, papers . . . pa-pers, PAPERS! Bills, little things to do with golf.”65 Wallis affectionately remonstrated about the chaos. “What was so odd was that this mess was in the house of the best housekeeper in the world, where naturally everything, between dozens of housemaids, was perpetually organized every day,” said Vreeland. The two women were helpless with giggles at this messy male domain when the duke appeared. “What are you two doing in here?! May I ask you two ladies to get the hell out! This happens to be my bathroom and that happens to be my table.”66

  “By this time, the couple were absolutely devoted to each other,” recalled Rudi von Schönburg. “They had been through so much together and you could see that just as the duchess was an influence on the duke, he was on her too. He calmed her down. They shared a mutual respect and dedication towards each other.”67

  James Pope-Hennessy, who spent a weekend with the couple at the Mill, was touched by their “very great kindness.” He wrote in his diary that “Every conceivable luxury and creature-comfort is bought, called-on, conscripted, to produce a perfection of sybaritic living. The Queen Mother at Clarence House is leading a lodging house existence compared to this.” The whole atmosphere was “intensely unstrained and unshy, owing, I should say to the duchess and the job she has done on the duke.” Pope-Hennessy concluded that the duke was “one of the most considerate men I have ever met of his generation. Like the duchess, he is perhaps too open and trusting towards others.”68