by Mitch Silver
The straw that would break the dromedary’s back came from Wallis’s own hand. On 6 December, Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford were secretly married at the home of Dr. Joseph Goebbels in Berlin—a ceremony that featured Adolf Hitler as guest of honour. Our good friends at the telegraph office were kind enough to intercept a congratulatory telegram written to the newlyweds by Wallis Simpson and reroute it to us at Whitehall. The next step was simplicity itself: insinuating to the King that he might some morning open the Daily Express to discover Lord Beaverbrook had printed not just photographs of the wedding but the contents of Wallis’s cable. For the British public to discover, after a two-year press embargo on the King’s affair (engineered in large part by the same Lord Beaverbrook), that his inamorata was enamoured of Fascists and Nazis would damn her in the eyes of the British public and make it impossible for Edward to marry her and keep his throne. Wallis, who could see the handwriting on the wall better than most, naturally chose discretion and a lot of money over valour.
So on the night of 11 December, the British Broadcasting Company’s senior producer found himself counting down from ten on his fingers in the Augusta Tower at Windsor Castle. At five, BBC Director-General Sir John Reith had planned to intone, “This is Windsor Castle. And now, Mr. Edward Windsor,” which everyone agreed was unnecessarily common. So he changed it to “His Royal Highness, Prince Edward,” attesting to the fact that “the Little Man” was the only Englishman in history to be a prince for a day after being a king. Even as the strangely wavering voice read the abdication speech in his Americanised London-Cockney accent, no one could have known he would play a far greater role in determining the fate of Britain as the Duke of Windsor than he ever could have done as King Edward VIII.
Chapter 25
Amy looked up from the pages and glanced out through the thick glass of the plane at the clouds building up below her. She had once learned what the different kinds were called. There were stratus clouds and cirrus…the ones like cotton candy. She thought the storm clouds out there now were something-cumulus. Either nimbocumulus or cumulonimbus, she couldn’t remember which.
This is what you get when you’re an only child raised by old people. Fun games at the dinner table like “name that cloud.” Pop quizzes about the presidents or state capitals. The other kids in high school were having “study dates”: light on the study, heavy on the date. Mima and Chief had decided that schoolwork was something you accomplished on your own, with the radio off and both feet on the floor. If she hadn’t met the Girls in college…
Her mind wandered, as it often did, to Scott. How much had his mother, Maggie, gotten on him about his schoolwork? She probably didn’t have to. Scott’s brain never stopped. Maybe he could figure out what was so threatening in what Fleming had written. Hadn’t he figured out what Caravaggio was saying about sixteenth-century Florence just from the positioning of the figures in his paintings? Which character in each group represented those in power; whether that character was foolish or wise, weak or strong? She could use Scott’s brain right now. And maybe her friend Blanche’s too. Three heads were better than one, right?
Rather than asking herself more questions, Amy picked up the manuscript again, hoping for a few answers.
PROVENANCE
What turns a man against his country? Especially a country that has given him as much as it has given any of its sons? What makes a man a Pétain, a Quisling, an Arnold? More likely than not, he has developed the aggrieved feeling that the country has turned against him. The thing that turned Edward, now the Duke of Windsor, had nothing to do with matters of power and state. And everything to do with a curtsy.
When the last of the champagne had been downed on East Sixty-second Street in New York and the last Ming figurine sacrificed to Wallis’s petulance at the Villa Lou Viei, it remained for the famous lovers to actually marry. It had been assumed all around that the woman who married His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor would become Her Royal Highness the Duchess. Leaving nothing to chance, Edward telephoned his brother Bertie—now officially King George VI—every day. In part, the calls were full of brotherly advice, a genuine attempt to assist the new King in playing a role for which he had never been trained. In part, they were the former King’s way of lording it over his younger brother. But, au fond, they were about one thing and one thing only. Would George VI grant Wallis Simpson the title of Her Royal Highness or not? Would visitors be required to bow and curtsy in the presence of the Duchess or not? Every call—and at trunk rates from the Continent, the telephone bills ran into the hundreds of pounds—began or ended with the same query.
The settled rule had always been “The wife takes the status of the husband.” The most recent precedent on point had been Elizabeth herself, the new King’s wife. Although she was the daughter of an earl, she had been a commoner before marrying Bertie. Now, believing the party responsible for the abdication, Wallis, should be punished and not rewarded, she took her case directly to the lawyer for the Crown, the Home Secretary Sir John Simon. Using an especially tortured line of reasoning, she got Sir John to argue that the title HRH should be borne only by members of the royal family in the line of succession, from which Edward’s abdication had removed the Windsors and any descendants. Edward’s own HRH appellation could be viewed as a gesture of generosity on the part of his brother, who as Fount of Honour was uniquely in a position to confer such a title.
“Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she has done in the country; and would the country understand if she became one automatically on marriage?” was the mostly rhetorical question the new King put to Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin’s own final act as PM was to pass on the question to his Cabinet and the Dominion Prime Ministers, whose negative response was comfortably predictable.
Edward and Wallis had to wait until 3 June 1937, after his brother’s coronation, to say their vows at the Château de Candé near Tours, the Renaissance castle they’d been lent for the wedding. I had previously made it my business to travel to the Riviera on the pretext that I was “breaking it off” with Wallis before her marriage. She was good enough (and devious enough) to let me join a luncheon party given in their honour. So I was right there when the Duke’s closest friend and associate, Walter Monckton, having travelled from Britain to France by plane, handed Edward a letter from his brother George VI. It informed him that an announcement would be published on the eve of the marriage denying the royal title to Wallis. It was the only wedding gift the Duke of Windsor really esteemed for his wife. Edward read the letter standing up and was transfixed, as if poleaxed. Then an oath burst from him: “Damn them. Damn them all. I’ll make them pay for this.” And he broke down in tears. That night, the Duke called his brother one last time to announce “my complete estrangement from all of you.”
Later that summer, when his youngest brother, the Duke of Kent, sent the Windsors a Fabergé box as a belated wedding present, the Duke sent it back with a note. “The only boxes I am collecting at present are those that can be delivered on the ears.” The Duke was heard to say he would one day “get back at all those swine, and make them realise how disgustingly and unsportingly they have behaved.”
All along, Wallis had been more realistic. To a friend, she had written that the title would produce “a little extra chic.” She had no illusions, though, about her standing with Queen Cookie. And the Duke made all their visitors plié to her anyway.
Not a single member of the royal family attended “the wedding of the century.” The King’s argument was that, as head of the Anglican Church, it would be hypocritical of him to attend the wedding of a divorced woman, a marriage that could never be countenanced by the Church. As for the Windsors’ London friends, it was made clear to them that they had to choose: friendship with the former King or the current one. The wedding party, then, came down to Aunt Bessie; Monckton; Herman and Katherine Rogers, Wallis’s American benefactors in Peking and, more recently, at the Villa Lou Viei; a couple of
the lesser Rothschilds; Andrew, a deposed Greek prince who lived in Paris, with his wife and gawky fifteen-year-old son, Philip; and Charles and Fern Bedaux, owners of the Château de Candé.
An uninvited thought made Amy pause. She had so much to get done before her own “wedding of the century.” First off, she had to come up with a maid of honor. How could she possibly choose among the Girls? Or a matron of honor…maybe Scott’s mother. And she wouldn’t mind having a few more wedding guests, maybe a couple of the lesser Rothschilds. Or, more likely, the Friday night pizza regulars from the history of art department. That meant invitations. And there’d have to be shoes to go with the dress and—
Suddenly, the whole ritual seemed ridiculous. Even the abrupt way Scott had asked her. What was it with men, anyway? They act totally uninterested in getting married for years and years, and then out of a clear blue sky…
She looked out her window again. The sky was anything but clear blue. If they had bad weather, it would probably be worse here in the tail of the plane. She decided to concentrate on the pages in front of her. Where had she left off? Oh, the wedding guests.
A little about the château’s owner, this Charles Eugene Bedaux. He was a naturalised American millionaire of French origin, a well-built man with dark, brilliantined hair and prominent ears who habitually wore double-breasted jackets of the best cut, trousers with knife-sharp creases, and two-toned brogues. He was one of those men who had the ability to charm his way in or out of any situation, and his reputation as the kindly philanthropist friend of the Windsors had been very carefully stage-managed.
Known as the “Speed-Up King,” he was the inventor of the Bedaux system, a management efficiency plan so ruthlessly successful it came to be lampooned by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. A factory owner would hire Bedaux to examine his production line and study the routine of his workers. Bedaux would then set new work rates for the staff according to a “formula” that rewarded workers who reached their quotas with small bonuses, penalizing or firing those who came up short. Production increased at minimal cost, and the factory bosses were delighted, even if the “time and motion” studies set the goals so high it was nearly impossible for the workers to achieve them. It was unexciting stuff, but it did present advantages for a man engaged in espionage for Germany.
By the very nature of Bedaux’s business, he had access to a client’s entire production scheme. He would use a camera with a specialized Bausch and Lomb Tessar 8¼ inch lens to photograph the factories where he was consulting and then reduce the photos to postcard size. His first postcards were of Belgian factories before World War I. After he resettled in the American Midwest, he did the same with plants that produced warplanes and munitions and with docks, airfields, Muskegon Naval Harbour, and an armoured car factory.
Fluent in English, French, and German, Bedaux set up efficiency companies throughout the Americas and Europe after the War. By far his most successful company was Deutsche Bedaux-Gesellschaft, thanks to his connections with Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Director of the German Reichsbank, and Dr. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front (men who would one day sit side by side in the dock at Nuremberg). The way it worked by 1936 was that Schacht would impose the Bedaux system on a select group of industrialists, and Ley would make sure that labour in the plants concerned would not be allowed to dissent.
His contracts with Ford, General Motors, Du Pont, ITT, Standard Oil, and I. G. Farben meant Bedaux could keep luxurious apartments in New York’s Chrysler Building and 1120 Fifth Avenue, at the Ritz in Paris and the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. At the top of a graceful sweep of marble stairs, the Adlon’s room 106 directly overlooked the Brandenburg Gate and was across the road from the German Foreign Ministry and Hitler’s brand-new Reich Chancellery. But it was only after the Duke’s wedding that Charles Bedaux really began to endear himself to the Führer.
Chapter 26
PROVENANCE
Wallis and Edward (the shorthand WE had been inscribed onto Wallis’s wedding band) returned to Paris after the honeymoon, installing themselves in a suite of rooms at the Hotel Meurice. Meanwhile, British Intelligence had been tipped off that the movie star Errol Flynn had sailed for Europe on the Queen Mary carrying a bank draft of $1.5 million, raised by Communist and Loyalist sympathizers in Hollywood to aid the Spanish government in Valencia against Franco’s forces. MI5 believed Flynn meant to divert the money to the Irish Republican Army, while the FBI thought Flynn meant to double-cross the Loyalists and hand the money over to Franco’s Falangists.
So two MI5 men and two from the FBI were staking out Flynn at the Hotel Plaza-Athénée when he jumped in a cab for the Gare du Nord and boarded a train for Berlin. Who met him at the station? Charles Bedaux. Together, they travelled to the Kaiserhof Hotel. While Washington and London were trying to deduce what it meant, Flynn left the hotel accompanied by two well-dressed Germans with suitcases, who turned out to be the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, and Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann. The three then boarded the overnight express back to Paris.
The agents followed Flynn, Hess, and Bormann to the Hotel Meurice, where they were shocked to find two more MI5 agents standing in the foyer. To their utter disbelief, the man the last two agents had been sent to guard, an immaculately dressed man of slight stature, sauntered down the grand staircase, reached out to Hess, and firmly shook his hand. He then shook hands with Bormann and Flynn and led them back upstairs to his suite. After several hours, the three visitors left, without their suitcases.
It was only after the war that I read Hess’s personal report to his Führer, which said, “The Duke is proud of his German blood and is keenly interested in the development of the Reich….There is no need to lose a single German life in a future invasion of Britain. Edward and his clever wife will deliver the goods.” So it appears the Hollywood money became a down payment on services to be rendered. And that it went neither to Ireland nor to Spain but rather into the wide-open pockets of the Duke of Windsor.
In October, Charles Bedaux arranged for the Windsors to be received by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy in a full-blown state visit. The takeover of Austria was still six months away. Even so, relations between London and Berlin had grown increasingly frosty, to the degree that Edward and Wallis were warned against making the trip by British officials who worried what kind of signal it would send. The Duke and Duchess, who had no such worries, arrived at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Station on Monday, 11 October 1937. They were greeted by a glittering array of Germany’s new elite, among them Schacht, Ley, and Germany’s new Foreign Minister, the omnipresent Joachim von Ribbentrop. To the Duke’s delight, several hundred citizens rhythmically chanted, “Heil Windsor!” and “Heil Edward!”
A few interesting bits I learned about their trip: While Wallis would stay at the hotel and rest or shop, Edward toured factories and workers’ housing in the company of high German officials. At night, dinner parties included Ribbentrop, Himmler, Hess, and Goebbels, whom Wallis described as “a wispy gnome with an enormous skull.” At all times, Wallis was scrupulously bowed to and addressed as “Your Royal Highness.”
One afternoon, the Goerings invited them to tea at the Air Minister’s famous hunting lodge, Karinhall, in the pretty Schorfheide countryside thirty miles north of Berlin. Emmy Goering was very much taken with Wallis, saying later, “This woman would certainly have cut a good figure on the throne of England.” Meanwhile her husband, “Fat Hermann” in his huge white uniform, had taken the Duke to see his well-equipped gymnasium, the massive dining room that could accommodate a hundred guests, and the attic “playroom” that housed his nephew’s magnificent train set.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe probably gave his hand away when he showed the Duke how to employ a model aeroplane to cross the playroom on wires and scatter wooden bombs on the trains below. In Goering’s study, the Windsors were treated to a glimpse of the future. On the wall behind Hermann’s desk was a large marquetry map, showing m
ost of Europe and Russia as a German possession, the Greater Germany and Reich. With the Austrian Anschluss still in the offing, Edward asked him, “Isn’t that a little impertinent? A little premature?” “It is fated,” Goering replied with a shrug. “It must be.” (In the plebiscite the next year, the Austrians voted 99.75 percent to join Greater Germany.) After the Windsors had left, Goering stared out of the French doors to the estate’s lake and its brand-new boathouse and mused to his wife, “The natural opposition between British and German policy could easily be set aside with such a man as the Duke.”
A few days later, the Windsors attended a political rally in Düsseldorf, organised as a folk and craft exhibition through the Reich’s Strength Through Joy program. Wallis sent me a few snaps she took of the event. They show Edward, flanked by an SS guard of honour, wandering about looking at the textile weaving and quaint floral wreaths made to look like swastikas. In one, he is clearly returning the Nazi salute. Back in London, government alarm at the Duke’s behaviour was such that all photographs and newsreels of the visit to the exhibition were cut or doctored to take out any of the offending salutes.