Miss Jean Drewes, who worked for the Windsors for four years as their private secretary at Government House in Nassau, had concluded that there was “a lonesomeness about the couple—a lonesomeness they shared, and because of it, I felt that there was a selfish devotion to each other.”69 Sadly, the duke never felt truly at home in France. “He never bothered to conceal the fact that he hated living in France,” said John Julius Norwich. “His French was execrable and he made no attempt to improve it.”70
Diana Vreeland agreed that the duke’s love of his home country was “overpowering.” When she arrived for a grand dinner at the Windsors’ Parisian property in the Bois de Boulogne, there was torrential rain. She was wearing white satin slippers. “The Duke was at the door, which I thought was terribly charming . . . and he was just roaring with laughter as I was struggling out of the car. And I got in soaking, absolutely soaking, and I said: ‘Your country, sir!’ meaning that it rained too much there in France . . . and his whole countenance changed. ‘My country?!’ He . . . was . . . furious . . . at my suggesting that France was his country. Oh, he wasn’t joking at all! Of course, immediately he recovered himself and was charming. But I had hit on something that was just about the . . . end.”71
During the autumn of 1951, the Windsors were again in London. The king’s health was deteriorating; a malignant growth had been found in his left lung. The queen, furious that the king was aggravated by the publicity in the British press concerning his brother’s memoirs, wrote to Tommy Lascelles: “You can imagine that I do not want to see the Duke of Windsor—the part author of the king’s troubles.”72
Yet one of the king’s last acts before undergoing an operation to remove the entire left lung was a touching gesture of affection towards his older brother. In his own hand, he gave written instructions for the master of the household to deliver three brace of grouse to the house in Upper Brook Street, where the duke and duchess were staying. “I understand he is fond of grouse,” he said, thoughtfully.73
King George VI died peacefully in his sleep on February 6, 1952. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were in New York at the time and received the news by telephone. The following day, on board the Cunard liner Queen Mary bound for England, the duke, a black mourning band on his sleeve, read a prepared statement to the gathered press: “This voyage, upon which I am embarking aboard the Queen Mary tonight, is indeed sad—and it is all the sadder for me because I am undertaking it alone. The duchess is remaining here to await my return.”74 The duke had been bluntly informed by Buckingham Palace that there could be no question of Wallis accompanying him to his brother’s funeral.
Wallis, present for the press statement before the ship sailed, regarded her husband in watchful silence. Wearing a black suit with a sealskin bolero jacket, the press reported that she “repeatedly glanced at the duke in compassion.”75 As the duke continued his statement, offering his comfort and support to “Her Majesty, my mother,” he omitted to refer to the one person who would feel the king’s loss most keenly: his widow, Elizabeth.76
Wallis sent the duke off to England with the sage advice “Do not mention or ask for anything regarding recognition of me.”77 The duke stayed with his mother at Marlborough House for the funeral. Four days after her son’s death, Queen Mary sent a letter to the king’s widow (who would become the queen mother) with the request that she and “the girls” see the duke “& bury the hatchet after 15 whole years.” Queen Elizabeth, the heir apparent, Princess Elizabeth, and her sister, Princess Margaret, did meet the Duke of Windsor for tea at Buckingham Palace but any attempt at true reconciliation was perfunctory. Edward noted: “Cookie [the Windsors’ nickname for Queen Elizabeth] listened without comment and closed on the note that it was nice to be able to talk about Bertie with somebody who had known him so well.”78 Queen Mary was overoptimistic about the meeting. “So that feud is over, I hope, a great relief to me.”79
Queen Elizabeth was blind in her conviction that Wallis was accountable for her husband’s death. “She felt that the loss of her husband could be laid firmly at the door of Wallis Simpson, blaming her for his early death,” reported her former equerry, Major Colin Burgess.80 Convinced that the strain of being king—the “intolerable honour”81 as Elizabeth called it—caused Bertie’s failing health and cancer, she perhaps never paused to consider that if Edward had been allowed to help shoulder his brother’s duties as king, his royal burdens would have been eased, especially though the war years.
The duke, who found his mother “hard as nails but failing,” left with a doomed feeling that his wife would never be welcomed in Britain. The new monarch held no fresh promise, he believed, as the young Queen Elizabeth II could not help but be indoctrinated by her mother and grandmother against Wallis. “It’s hell to be even this much dependent on those ice-veined bitches,” he wrote to his wife.82 Worse, he discovered that the £10,000-a-year allowance that he received from George VI was lost on his brother’s death. This was especially inopportune as he and Wallis were in the middle of renovating the Mill.
The following year, when the duke and duchess were in New York, Edward heard that his mother was gravely ill. He and his sister, the Princess Royal, travelled from America together. Queen Mary died at Marlborough House on March 24, 1953. The duke arrived at her bedside a few minutes too late. At the sight of his deceased mother, all his hopes of her ever accepting or even meeting his wife extinguished, bitter fury welled up with his undeniable grief. Edward told Wallis: “My sadness was mixed with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap. I’m afraid that the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death.”83
Five years later, James Pope-Hennessy asked the duke if perhaps one of Queen Mary’s difficulties in understanding her son’s dilemma was that she had never been in love herself. The duke replied: “No, I don’t think she had. You’re right. My mother was a cold woman, a cold woman. And I, you see, I suppose I had never really been in love before. No, I hadn’t, I thought I had, but I hadn’t ever been in love.”84
Edward stayed with the Gloucesters at York House for the funeral, which must have been difficult, as the brothers never got on. He refused to stay at his mother’s home, declaring of Marlborough House: “I’m not going to sleep in this mortuary.”85 Throughout the stay Edward remained “boiling mad” that the duchess was not at her rightful place by his side, telling Wallis: “What a smug stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.”86 In person, however, he was charming. The Duchess of Gloucester remarked: “It was particularly moving listening to the duke, because he was obviously pleased to be talking within his own family again.”87
The tragedy is that Edward never gave up his longing to be reconciled with his family. Nor did he ever let go of his deepest desire that they acknowledge his wife, the woman he loved and the person who made him happiest in the world. All it would have taken was the smallest gesture of recognition from the royal family towards Wallis, and his resentments would have melted. Grief, an unruly emotion, causes hair-trigger reactions to the tiniest of slights. There were so many opportunities to have healed this wretched familial rift. Ever naive, he still clung to the hope that he and the duchess would be invited to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June that year. But, with Tommy Lascelles installed as private secretary to the new monarch, that was clearly fanciful. The duke wrote to Winston Churchill that he was “disappointed and depressed that you foresee no change in my family’s attitude towards the duchess or to her rightful official status as my wife.”88
The Windsors watched the coronation in Paris, on their black-and-white television, with friends gathered around. In days preceding, when Wallis was asked if the duke would attend his niece’s coronation, she gave the quick-fire reply: “Why should he go to her coronation? He didn’t go to his own.”89
*
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I. After the Duchess of Windsor’s death, her jewels were sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva for prices vastly exceeding the estimates: the sale total was $50,281,887.
13
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My David
The problem for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was that they now had little to give weight to their lives. After the abdication, they lived with a laminated form of grief as it became increasingly clear that their previous existence was unrecoverable. The duchess decided that the best revenge against her harsh and flinty in-laws was a life lived well. The couple became major players amid a dazzling, but ultimately unfulfilling, café society, attending exotic balls and charity functions. “They are like people after a cataclysm or a revolution, valiantly making the best of infinite luxury,” said the writer James Pope-Hennessy. “I am much taken by both of them.”1 The glittering hue of celebrity had a tawdry underbelly: the wealthy, unsophisticated hangers-on. Prince Charles described some of the Windsors’ circle as “the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen.”2
Wallis had a series of cosmetic surgeries to lift her face, yet nothing could conceal the tragic lack of purpose eating into the fabric of their day-to-day existence. Both she and Edward began to drink too much and eat even less than before. A bitter loss for her was the death in November 1958 of Ernest Simpson, who passed away following an operation for throat cancer in London. Ten years earlier, he had been married for a fourth time, to Avril Mullens. Wallis, who had never met Avril, wondered if she should send flowers or a telegram to his widow. The duke advised her to write a kind, handwritten note. The Times obituary commended Ernest Simpson for having maintained “the highest standard of personal conduct. In an age of commercialisation he refused all offers to write his reminiscences or to give interviews to the Press. He shunned any form of publicity, preferring dignified silence. The courage with which he faced his last illness,” it said, was “typical of the man.”3 The death of Ernest affected Wallis deeply. “She missed him and mourned him like a brother,” observed Rudi von Schönburg.4
In June 1962, the Windsors celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. Wallis wrote to Baba Metcalfe: “It is as you say almost impossible to believe the scene at Candé was 25 years ago—I sometimes wonder how the duke and I have survived the trying years that followed—but now they too are forgotten and life is as serene as it can be living as we all do—with costs mounting and running a house a trial instead of a pleasure.”5 Wallis poignantly admitted that her “one continuing regret” was never knowing “the joy of having children of my own.” She lamented: “Perhaps no woman can say her life has been completely fulfilled unless she has been part of the miracle of creation.”6 The couple’s four pug dogs, like the cairn terriers before them, were totally spoilt and almost like surrogate babies.
Lacking her own progeny, perpetually shunned by her husband’s family, without “My Romance,”7 as Wallis had started to refer to the duke, she faced a desolate slide into old age. Edward had a fresh preoccupation: How could he protect and provide for his wife when he died? What would happen to her, reviled by the world, when he, her emotional bulwark and most ardent defender, was gone? “The duke harboured this terrible fear that they didn’t treat Wallis well when I was alive, how will they treat her when I am dead?” said Rudi von Schönburg. “He confided in me that he was very worried that the duchess would end up in poverty and be badly treated.” The duke’s fears were completely groundless, as Wallis would, by any standards, be a very wealthy woman. Years later, when his health was in rapid decline, Edward appealed to the queen to continue the £10,000-a-year allowance that his brother Bertie had authorized for him for the duchess’s lifetime. She agreed to carry on paying £5,000 a year.8
Every September, for three consecutive years in the early sixties, the duke and duchess stayed at Rudi von Schönburg’s Marbella Club on the Andalusian coast. They had first visited the club with Sir Walter and Lady Monckton, and struck Count Rudi and his wife, Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, as delightfully low key. The Windsors booked a bungalow as normal paying guests, brought only a maid and a valet with them, and never expected royal treatment. However, Count Rudi felt aggrieved that they were not officially entitled to royal treatment. Unlike other members of the British and European royal families, the British government had informed the Spanish Guardia Civil that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor could not have official protection.
“They fitted in perfectly,” said Count Rudi. “The duchess felt very happy here because the duke was happy. She was immediately accepted, whereas in other places, this was not always the case as her husband’s relations turned people against her.”9 This understated yet suave club, founded by Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg in 1954, offered tropical gardens, swaying palms and a lively clientele: a heady mix of aristocrats and Hollywood stars. Regular guests included most of the crowned heads of Europe, as well as Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant. The duke played golf daily, then every evening created his own ceremonial ritual. At seven o’clock on the dot, he would pick a fresh lime from the tree in the garden and squeeze it into his dry martini. The Windsors always had the same discreet corner table in the restaurant at dinner. Every evening, when they rose to retire after dinner, such was Edward’s popularity among his countrymen that every single British man in the restaurant got up and bowed to him, then to her.10
Each September, the club held a gala evening to celebrate the end of summer. Prince Alfonso recalled asking “sixty really good friends” to dinner at the Beach Club. He told them that the evening was in honor of the Duke of Windsor. The guests were to arrive at 9 p.m. and Prince Alfonso said that he would collect the duke and duchess from their bungalow in the grounds at 9:15. When the duke was informed that the dress was casual, the duchess was concerned that he would not come, as he had nothing suitable to wear. Later that afternoon, she found Count Rudi and said: “I’m so pleased; I have finally convinced the duke to come. He has found a Hawaiian shirt to wear.”11 However, because of the duke’s presence, everybody ignored the casual dress code and “dressed up in blue suits with ties, looking like lawyers,” recalled Prince Alfonso. “I collected the duke and duchess and we went to the balcony overlooking the pool; the duke was wearing a red and white Hawaiian shirt. So he said, ‘Alfonso, I have to go quickly back to the bungalow’ and he dressed in a dark suit. We came over the terrace and everybody had seen the Duke of Windsor with a colourful Hawaiian shirt, so had taken off their jackets and ties. The duke was so funny,” the prince continued, “because he took his tie and threw it into the pool and he took off his suit jacket and there was big applause. That was what made him come back again and again, because he felt at home. The people respected him but at the same time made him feel comfortable.”12
At the Marbella Club, “the duchess was also respected and we honored her, calling her HRH, because she made the duke so happy,” said Count Rudi, who cohosted the gala dinner. “But she was never trying to act as a deposed queen. The duke suffered very much from the way people, especially his family, treated her.”13
In June 1964, the Duke of Windsor turned seventy. Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulation. To mark the milestone, James Pope-Hennessy wrote a profile for the Sunday Times in which he suggested that the queen and the royal family should relax their rigid disdain and invite the Windsors for lunch. The article caused an uproar in certain quarters. The life peer and former MP for Hemel Hempstead, Viscountess Joan Davidson, was apoplectic. She wrote a public rebuke to the article, thundering that it was “essential to keep the duchess away from England & how dangerous it would be even now after all these years to reverse the original decision.” Tommy Lascelles, retired from royal service in 1953 yet still keen to influence the narrative, put his poisonous point of view of Pope-Hennessy across: “Who the hell does he think he is, to dictate to the queen or to anybody else, whether or not they should invite their aunts to luncheon?”14
It was a tor
rid time for Wallis. In November 1964, her lifelong stalwart Aunt Bessie died, having reached the plucky age of a hundred. Edward attended her funeral, while Wallis remained in New York recovering from foot surgery. But it was the duke’s health that was of greatest concern. In December he underwent an operation to remove a grapefruit-sized “blister” from his aorta. After notifying the duchess, who was waiting in a side room, that the surgery had been a success, the surgeon and British consul general sent a telegram to the queen, who “had asked the consul for periodic reports on the duke’s condition and a report on the operation as soon as it was finished.”15 The queen also sent flowers. Months later, when Edward underwent an operation for a detached retina in a clinic in London, the queen visited him in person. Afterwards, the eye surgeon, a Mr. Hudson, commented to the Windsors’ American doctor, Dr. Arthur Antenucci, that he was “absolutely enchanted with the duchess and her devotion during the duke’s time in hospital.” She took a room next to the duke’s in the clinic and sat with him all day, reading him the newspapers.16
In June 1967, the queen made a startlingly kind gesture towards Wallis. She invited both the duke and the duchess to the dedication of a plaque outside Marlborough House in memory of Queen Mary. It had been the queen’s original intention to hold the unveiling ceremony on Friday, May 26—the centenary of Queen Mary’s birth—but the duke and duchess were in America and unable to attend on that date. Signaling that their presence was important, the queen postponed the occasion until Wednesday, June 7.
The Windsors arrived in Southampton on June 5, on a liner from New York. As the ship docked, the royal couple could be seen waving from the deck rail, the duchess dressed in a summery blue-and-white-striped coat, the duke sporting a matching blue cornflower in his buttonhole. As they came down the gangplank hand in hand, Lord Mountbatten greeted them as a crowd of Southampton dockers gave a loud cheer, yelling: “Good old Teddy!”17
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 31
