That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

by Anne Sebba

  But living in a city where at least one-third of the residents are foreign born reinforces notions of separation, especially among those who see themselves as poor relations, which Wallis and her mother clearly were. In addition during Wallis’s childhood, forty or so years after the abolition of slavery, racial segregation was still practised in Baltimore, as it was in many Southern American cities. So deciding where young Wallis Warfield would live and would go to school was a matter of deep concern to her wider family.

  Within a few weeks Anna Emory Warfield, the sixty-year-old matriarch of the family, invited her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to live with her at 34 East Preston Street, a large and solid four-storey brownstone in the centre of the old part of the city, near the Monument. This staid and peaceful house of adults became home for the next four or five years. Wallis recognized later what a disturbing influence she must have been there. Her grandmother, whom she loved, took her shopping every Saturday to Richmond Market, ‘as exciting as a trip to the moon’. Going to market was an important outing for the rich matrons of Baltimore. They dressed up for it and wore white gloves – after all they would not be touching anything. The servants who walked a discreet distance behind them carried out the purchasing.

  Her grandmother – ‘a solitary figure in a vast, awesomely darkened room, rocking evenly to and fro … and so erect that her back never seemed to touch the chair’ – was, as Wallis recalled, in mourning and wore black dresses with high collars and a tiny white linen cap on which were stitched three small bows of black ribbon. ‘“Bessiewallis,” my grandmother would say severely, “how will you ever grow up to be a lady unless you learn to keep your back straight?” Or “Bessiewallis, can’t you be still for just a minute?”’

  But her uncle Sol, a more terrifying presence for the young and not so young child, lived there too. Solomon Davies Warfield, the financier and politician whose hopes to become mayor of Baltimore were not realized, had to make do with the locally prestigious but lesser position as postmaster. He funded Wallis’s childhood but in a cruelly controlling manner, the lessons of which cannot have been lost on this young girl given that she took the trouble to report his behaviour in her memoirs. Every month he deposited a sum of money in his sister-in-law’s account at his bank. ‘The trouble was that the amount was almost never the same. One month it might be quite enough to take care of the important bills, the next month barely enough to cover the rent.’

  Uncle Sol’s bedroom was at the back of the third floor with a private bath. Alice had a room on the same floor at the front, and connecting with it was a small room for Wallis. The arrangement was awkward for Alice and her daughter, who had to use her grandmother’s bathroom on the floor below. But the idyll, if idyll it was, did not last. ‘A subtly disturbing situation seems to have helped precipitate the separation,’ Wallis wrote. She speculates that her uncle fell in love with her mother. ‘She was young and attractive, living under the same roof, and she and uncle Sol were inevitably thrown much together.’ At all events he must have made overtures that either Alice or old Mrs Warfield considered inappropriate.

  So the pair returned to the Brexton residential hotel. There followed a deeply unhappy period for Wallis of meals alone with her mother ‘and rather forlorn afternoon excur thernoon sions to the house on Preston Street about which had so suddenly descended a mysterious and disturbing barrier’. Funds were now sometimes so low that her mother sold embroidery at the local Women’s Exchange shop. But her mother’s newly widowed sister, Aunt Bessie Merryman, then stepped in and invited the pair to live with her. Her own husband, Uncle Buck, had also died young and, childless herself, it suited her to have company. Wallis grew to love Aunt Bessie as a mother. Yet, although the sisters got on, Alice was determined to make one last stab at independence. She moved into the Preston Apartment House, a less than sumptuous set of rooms in the shadow of her Warfield family, and this time tried to make money inviting the other tenants in the block to become paying dinner guests. It was a disastrous experiment in every way. The prime sirloin steak, soft-shell crabs and elaborate pastries were never costed, but the damage this venture did to the reputation of mother and daughter, now branded as boarding-house keepers, was incalculable. These years of struggle and insecurity, when ‘mother had the café and was forever working herself to death to give me things’, were implanted so deeply in Wallis’s psyche that she never entirely shed her worry and fear of what might lie around the corner. Once again it was her aunt Bessie who came to the rescue by insisting on disbanding the dubious operation.

  Wallis went to her first school while living with Aunt Bessie. It was called Miss O’Donnell’s after its founder, Miss Ada O’Donnell. Next, aged ten, she attended Arundell Girls School on nearby St Paul Street, neither the most exclusive nor the most expensive educational establishment, but a place of calm routine for girls of good backgrounds. There she would have learned, as every Baltimore school girl learned, the story of Elizabeth (Betsy) Patterson, a local girl from a wealthy family who married her prince but was not allowed to remain married to him. On a visit to America in 1803, Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, met and married Betsy. But Jérôme was a minor and his brother refused to recognize the marriage. When Jérôme returned to France in 1805, his wife was forbidden to land and went first to England, where her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, known as ‘Bo’, was born. In 1806 Napoleon issued a state decree of annulment to end his brother’s marriage, and Betsy was given a large annual pension but, rather than return to ‘what I hated most on earth – my Baltimore obscurity’, she lived unhappily in exile in Paris for the rest of her life. Wallis never referred to the story in her memoirs.

  Wallis had to take her monthly school reports to Uncle Sol for inspection – a further reminder that her dependence on his charity was not to be taken for granted. However, he did oblige with her next important request – that she be allowed to go to Oldfields for her final two years of education, the most expensive school in Maryland. Oldfields, just beyond the Gunpowder River in Glencoe County, was founded in 1867 in the hills beyond Timonium where Wallis had already spent many happy summers with her Warfield cousins. Although she had been parcelled out to all her cousins at various times, Pot Spring, the home of her uncle Emory and her aunt Betty Warfield, not far from Oldfields, was a favourite summer refuge. The school’s 200-acre site was beautiful and today remains largely undeveloped countryside. For many years, a handsome coach and horses took students back and forth from Glencoe station, past the ante bellum white clapboard mansions and large plantation houses which had once housed hundreds of slaves.

  The legendary co-principal of Oldfields was Anna McCulloh, called Miss Nan by all the pupils, a woman not unlike Grandmother Warfield who rigidly upheld her nty upheldnotion of the correct way to behave. Wallis had become a keen and athletic basketball player in her teens, encouraged by a young teacher, Charlotte Noland, who offered afternoon basketball session three times a week in a rented Baltimore garage. Miss Noland was, for the young Wallis, an ideal woman, ‘a mixture of gay, deft teasing and a drill sergeant’s sternness … cultivated of manner, a marvellous horsewoman and a dashing figure in every setting’. Miss Noland’s sister, Rosalie Noland, also taught at Oldfields, which was noted for its sporting and equestrian facilities, and Wallis, like Charlotte Noland, was a skilled horsewoman not afraid to tackle jumps nor to challenge others with whom she was riding. At Oldfields, basketball was deeply competitive, the girls keen to go out before breakfast to practise. Yet in these sports, as in everything else at the school, the competitive spirit was to some extent reined in by the simple expedient of dividing the girls into two teams, one named ‘Gentleness’ and the other ‘Courtesy’. ‘Gentleness and Courtesy’ was the first rule in the Oldfields handbook, as the sign on the door of each child’s room proclaimed. Wallis represented ‘Gentleness’, who flourished a white banner with green lettering; ‘Courtesy’ had a green banner with white lettering. In addition to sport and et
iquette, acting and drama was encouraged and in one surviving photograph Wallis is dressed as a New Jersey mosquito, alongside a classmate impersonating Governor Woodrow Wilson, echoing a hot political issue of the day.2

  The school fostered an aura of old-fashioned calm anchored by a set of old-fashioned rules. These rules were concerned with how to stand as well as how to behave. There was a Bible-reading group, and the school imposed an honour system on the sixty or so girls whereby each was meant to report her own misdeeds, such as talking or visiting each other’s rooms after lights out or communicating by letter with a boy.

  Wallis is said to have misbehaved by smoking, which was seriously frowned upon, and by jumping from a balcony to meet a boy. Such misdeeds are not recorded in the school annals and it just may be that rumours arose through what she later became. However, at the time she was clearly audacious, a daredevil ringleader never afraid to set the pace, a tomboy. She had at least one boyfriend by the time she went to Oldfields. He was Carter Osburn, son of a Baltimore bank president, who later gave an account that may have been the source of the rumours. His father owned a car which he was allowed to borrow. ‘At a certain point in the road I’d stop, she spotted it. She’d slip out. I don’t know yet how she managed it but as far as I know she never got caught; she not only got out [of Oldfields] but she also got back in without being observed. She was very independent in spirit, adhering to the conventions only for what they were worth and not for their own sake. Those dates were all the more exciting for being forbidden.’ At the same time Wallis was writing to another boy telling him she hoped to go into town from time to time but how lovely it would be if he could come and visit. This was striking behaviour for a refined young lady with aspirations to enter society in the early part of the twentieth century. For a teenager at an elite establishment like Oldfields it was shocking. Some parents at the time believed that there was something extraordinary about Wallis Warfield and that her influence was malign.

  By contrast, another student of that era described a rather more typical day as one that involved:

  Getting up as late as possible … starting our dressing modll dressinestly under both nighties and kimonos. Then we dashed out of our rooms to wash, crowds of us all trying to use the basins … invariably the water stopped running completely whereupon we banged loudly on the pipes to notify the bold souls who had descended to the first floor and were getting all the water that they must stop. Then back to our rooms where we continued dressing still under cover of the kimonos.

  Such rampant modesty is hardly a surprise in a girls’ boarding school of the time. But the desire to be thin is more surprising and Miss Nan thought it dangerously unnecessary. She told the girls she knew they were taking doses of cod-liver oil in order to lose weight and ordered all those who had some in their possession to turn it over immediately to the infirmary. (This is according to a book Wallis later accused her best friend of having written under a pseudonym.)

  Going to Oldfields in 1912 was especially important for Wallis. In the first place her mother had recently remarried and now lived part of the time in Atlanta. Alice Warfield’s second husband was John Freeman Rasin, the wealthy but somewhat indolent son of the Democratic Party leader of Baltimore. The thirty-seven-year-old Rasin, who had not been married before, was already suffering from a variety of alcohol-induced ailments. Although he delivered financial security at last to mother and daughter, he could never replace the lost father figure that Wallis permanently mourned. And for a girl who had hitherto been the centre of a small adult world – her mother, grandmother and aunt – to find that someone else had replaced her in her mother’s affections was a bitter blow. Aunt Bessie, always a more suitable figure as far as Baltimore society was concerned, now became her closest adviser.

  Secondly, Oldfields was where her best friend Mary Kirk, a girl she had just met at Burrland, an exclusive summer camp near Middleburg, Virginia, was already a pupil. Mary’s parents, Edith and Henry Child Kirk, were well born if not exactly rich, with a house full of servants. Samuel Kirk and Son were the oldest silversmiths in the United States, established in 1817, descendants of English silversmiths in Derbyshire and also of Sir Francis Child, Lord Mayor of London, who in 1669 founded the Child Banking House. The firm was known for its ornate repoussé silverware and a set of its heavily embossed flatware was, by the late nineteenth century, to be found in most well-to-do Baltimore families. Kirk and Son dominated the competition and set the style for decoration on fine silver throughout the nation.

  Mary was the extremely pretty middle daughter, born the same year as Wallis and sandwiched in between an elder sister Edith Buckner, always known as ‘Buckie’, and a younger, Anne, born in 1901. The girls’ grandfather had paid a release fee in order not to have to fight during the Civil War. This was a not uncommon practice but according to Anne, ‘all my life I have been ashamed of this act of my grandfather’s … I am sure that our social status was greatly reduced by my grandfather’s act which might be construed as bribery or (even worse in those days) cowardice.’

  Mary and Wallis, just a few months apart in age, became close friends immediately. Buckie, being three years older, took a more measured view of her sister’s new friend and remembered her as ‘the amusing, vivacious girl who so often made us laugh and was always on tiptoe for any gaiety that might be forthcoming. She had a special talent for describing a person or an incident with a twist or a wisecrack that almost invariably made it entertaining.’ She added, ‘Both girls were boy-crazy, and both were far more interwasr more ested in clothes than in school. Also, each girl had discovered at teenage parties that she had only to enter a room to be instantly surrounded by boys in droves.’ Wallis, aged fifteen, was already aware of her magnetic power to attract boys and her first real beau was Lloyd Tabb, a boy she had met at summer camp who drove an exciting red Lagonda sports car. For him, she forced herself to be interested in football and he never forgot the effect. Her ability to make others feel how talented they were was a technique she honed over the years. Helpfully, Lloyd was always accompanied by his slightly older brother, Prosser Tabb, which meant that Wallis and Mary could go out on double dates, a practice that may have been intended to calm the adults and that set a pattern for the future.

  The Kirk parents, far from being calmed, were from the first wary of this intense new friendship. Wallis was in and out of the Kirk house as if she were a member of the family, as even the extended Kirk family could not fail to notice. She took to telephoning her new friend constantly – the telephone still something of a novelty and using it regularly a daring activity for a teenager. Wallis used it so recklessly that, as Anne recalled, her parents would mutter whenever she called that her motives were suspect. Mary’s family clearly saw Wallis as an instigator of trouble, even if they could not quite pinpoint what sort of trouble. ‘Sometimes when “old black John” announced to “Miss Mary” that “Miss Wallis” was on the phone he would grin and steal a sympathetic look at the frustrated expressions on the faces of our parents,’ wrote Anne. Father would then say in a helpless kind of way to Mary, ‘Won’t you tell John to tell her that we are eating dinner?’ John, a loyal servant in the Kirk family for generations – so loyal that he did not live with the Kirk household but walked twelve miles a day to arrive in time to serve breakfast – did what he could to pacify Miss Wallis and the Kirk parents. But the calls usually went ahead and the Kirk dinner hour was deprived of its serenity. ‘As my parents discussed the problems of Wallis Warfield it always seemed that you (Mary) were in the midst of some plot with Wallis. She was a problem and no fun for anyone except YOU!’

  Wallis had undertaken a campaign of persuasion begging her uncle Sol to pay for her to go to Oldfields. In doing so she was already making a clear choice without necessarily understanding the consequences: she would depend for the rest of her life on a man for security rather than pursuing a career for herself that would earn her money. She said later that she did not give a moment’s thought to fur
ther education ‘as not a single girl from my class at Oldfields went to college’. That was not exactly true. Oldfields did prepare some girls for careers and for limited independence and from its earliest days prided itself on its curriculum almost as much as on the social standing of its pupils. Miss Nan’s school was one of the first to offer a high school degree to women. Nor is it exactly true to say that no one in her social circle went to college. Both Mary Kirk’s sisters did: Anne to the Peabody Conservatory, graduating with a teacher’s certificate in piano, Buckie to the prestigious Bryn Mawr, afterwards becoming an art editor and published writer who worked all her life as well as bringing up a family.

  But Uncle Sol may have needed little persuasion. The Warfield clan no doubt hoped that a spell at this prestigious boarding school, which attracted daughters of wealthy industrialists as well as those descended from a select group of early Dutch settlers such as Julia Douw, daughter of John Douw, Mayor of Annapolis, Maryland at the time, might quell some of the young girl’s more rebellious and dangerous attributes. Julia became a friend ol me a frof Wallis and, like her, was to marry a naval officer. But Wallis’s best friend remained Mary Kirk. Mary and Wallis were room mates ‘and at school we swore eternal friendship … in contrast to the usual boarding school loyalties ours did indeed continue’. That is Wallis’s later version for public consumption. Mary, in private, was to have a dramatically different story to tell. What is not in doubt is that the two teenage girls did everything together, especially gossiping – everyone commented on that. Buckie recalled that even then the girls’ main topic of conversation was ‘the absorbing subject of marriage. On this score I remember very well a remark that Wallis made a number of times, even I think at our family dinner table – it was memorable because so unconventional. She would announce that the man she married would have to have lots of money – the kind of thing that “nice girls” did not say.’