That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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Patients with AIS are born genetically male as they have the XY chromosome and produce testosterone. Because the body’s receptors in this case are insensitive to testosterone the individual develops outwardly as a woman, although at puberty therse pubert testosterone buildup may result in strong muscles giving her athletic prowess, long legs or large hands. Such a child to all purposes appears female and only later can it be discovered that their karyotype is XY if a DNA test is carried out, and that of course was not an option during Wallis’s childhood. The first clue for Wallis that something might be different would have been at puberty if she did not have periods. But even this might not have seemed unusual, nor would it have been an easy subject for discussion given the frequent absences of her mother at this time in her life.
Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, the term itself only coined in 1886, ten years before Wallis was born, indicating how little was known and understood about that condition. At the end of the nineteenth century there would have been very little discussion around such a risqué subject, even in medical circles, least of all with the parents of the newborn baby. A patient with pseudo-hermaphroditism has the internal reproductive organs of one sex while exhibiting the opposite in their external genitalia so a man has female characteristics which may include small breasts and a woman some form of male genitalia that are possibly barely noticeable, as well as usually a shallow vagina, but no uterus, cervix or ovaries (though this is variable). Full hermaphroditism, a term now considered offensive, where individuals carry both types of gonad, is extremely rare. For the Victorians, already confused by the Woman Question, the term used to convey the challenge to traditional notions of a woman’s place, merely trying to grapple with such a concept was deeply disconcerting. ‘So much of what is repulsive attaches to our ideas of the condition of an hermaphrodite that we experience a reluctance even to use the word,’ wrote one doctor, Jonathan Hutchinson, in the year of Wallis’s birth. Hermaphroditism challenged notions of what defined a woman or a man and the whole social order depended on these clear definitions. A person who could not be defined was a dangerously disruptive presence. For whatever reason, Wallis was certainly that.
Without a full ultrasound or scan the condition could not possibly have been detected at birth. Young Dr Lewis Allen, fresh out of medical school, who came to deliver the baby in Blue Ridge Summit, might have noticed that the baby had slightly strange-looking genitalia: the most common description is of slightly larger labia than usual or slightly enlarged clitoris resembling a small penis; in some cases the child would have testicles which do not descend (today they would be removed since they could pose a serious medical risk later in life). But in 1896 there was no question that such a child would have been brought up as female; there was no available means of checking chromosomal abnormality. What usually happened in such cases is that the doctor would have done his best to reassure the parents that although the baby might appear unusual, they should not worry. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ he would have told them, or ‘Everything will be normal in a few years.’ And indeed before puberty such individuals would easily pass as normal pre-pubescent females. After puberty there might be a noticeable drift towards the external features of a male including bone structure, muscle development and voice change, but even these features might be easily missed and obvious signs such as facial hair are usually prevented by the condition’s inability to convert the testosterone.
James Pope-Hennessy, visiting the Windsors in 1958 in the course of writing the official biography of Queen Mary, commented in his journal that Wallis was ‘one of the very oddest women I have ever seen. She is, to look at, phenomenal. She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing c waal playard … I should be tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence … were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.’ It was not just her physical characteristics that came under scrutiny. In 1936 Nancy Dugdale, wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Tommy Dugdale, sent a letter written by Wallis to a well-known German graphologist, Gusti Oesterreicher. Mrs Dugdale insisted the analysis had been done in complete ignorance of the writer’s identity and that Oesterreicher did not speak English. Oesterreicher’s report concluded that the author of the letter was:
A woman with a strong male inclination in the sense of activity, vitality and initiative. She MUST dominate, she MUST have authority, and without sufficient scope for her powers can become disagreeable. In a narrow circle without big tasks to perform and the possibility for expansion her temperament would be impatient, irritable … but not without some instincts of nobility and generosity. She is ruled by contradictory impulses … In the physical sense of the word sadistic, cold, overbearing, vain.
According Dr Christopher Inglefield, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender surgery, Wallis’s known physical and behavioural characteristics clearly fit the stereotype. He explains:
The problem for these individuals is how do you confirm that you are female if your biological responses are not like other girls? How do you come to terms with this strange situation? Often these individuals don’t understand what or who they are so, for a female lacking female organs, being boy mad is one typical response, another is to get married as quickly as possible, thereby telling your peers you are a normal female.
Marriage, according to Dr Inglefield, is thus seen as a reaffirmation of being female.
Not only is early marriage often the norm but so is the urge to dress in the most feminizing way because of the need to fit into society. Dressing is just one way of behaving in an ultra-feminine way. Another is sexual behaviour. There is a strong need to do everything in the most feminine way possible. ‘Look at me, I’m a woman,’ Wallis is saying. ‘I’m not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen but I am so elegant. I’m the epitome of womanhood.’ The clothes and the sex are all of a piece.
Thus a deeply significant characteristic for women with some form of DSD is the realization that one of the most powerful ways to reaffirm their womanhood is the ability to give men intense sexual pleasure. Giving intense pleasure can easily lead to manipulating men in order to please them. Vaginal intercourse is often possible, even where the vagina is shallow, but so, of course, are other activities, including oral sex.
Dr Inglefield, through advising patients who seek his advice on corrective surgery, is experienced in assessing a number of factors, including facial and bodily characteristics, to determine if an individual is predisposed to survive as one sex or the other. Wallis, he believes, had an angular, almost square-jawed and masculine-shaped face which indicates a lack of oestrogen. Looking at photographs of Wallis alongside her girlfriends gives an especially good comparison. ‘Oestrogen is very softening. You can see it clearly next to the very rounded face of Mary Ki/ble of Mark. Today a course of oestrogen therapy can transform facial features. Had it been available in Wallis’s day it would have dramatically changed her appearance.’
So there are clues in the behaviour, bone structure and build, as well as in the facial shape. When cousin Corinne shouted out for ‘Skinny’ to come here or go there she was acknowledging, without knowing it, that lack of ovaries affects body shape and breast development. Several successful models with an impossibly lean, rangy look are known to be women born with Disorders of Sexual Development. Keeping slim, which became a lifelong mantra for Wallis, was always of critical importance in avoiding a masculine, solid appearance with no waistline. It was something she appears to have understood intuitively. Once she was in the public eye, controlling her weight with rigid discipline was a matter of survival.
The ultimate confirmation for Wallis of being totally female would be to get pregnant, which is not possible without a uterus. Yet, extraordinarily, this is a subject she never broaches while telling the story of her life. Almost all childless women writing reminiscences, especially those who are married, born a century or so ago when birth control wa
s not readily available, manage in some way or other to refer to their deep longing for a child with which they were not blessed. Or else to insist that a choice was made not to bring children into the world for whatever reason. Wallis’s decision not to cover this subject, even if she had to lie about gynaecological adventures or miscarriages, is striking. On the last page of her book, almost as an afterthought, she writes starkly of a ‘continuing regret. I have never known the joy of having children of my own.’ Yet the assumption must be that, for an ordinary couple marrying in the early part of the twentieth century where the wife had neither career nor desire for one, starting a family would have been the expectation, especially in the Spencer family. So when, after several months, Wallis did not become pregnant it is quite possible that she consulted a doctor and underwent an examination. At that point the doctor might have been suspicious if he could not see a cervix. But even that could have been confusing and, since there was so little scientific knowledge available about what to do in cases of infertility, the embarrassed doctor might not have known what to advise his young patient other than to hope. Contemporary advice in such cases included old wives’ tales such as the importance of drinking the first morning milk of a particular type of cow. Given the unhappy state of her marriage, Wallis may not have been very concerned. But, just as likely, her inability to conceive or difficulties the couple may have encountered having intercourse could have been a contributory factor in the disintegration of her first marriage. Ralph Martin, one of Wallis’s earliest biographers writing about her in 1974, claimed that Alice Montague had said on her deathbed that her daughter could never have children. If that is the case, and if it was something Wallis always knew, she may have steeled herself very early on to the idea of being childless. At all events, she seems by her twenties to have resigned herself rather easily to the idea that she could not have children and, with similar ease, taken the next best algorithm for her life – the discovery that she could use her sexuality to get the status she was denied as a child without risking an unwanted pregnancy, a serious problem for sexually active women at the time.
Discovering that she was in some way different yet unable to discuss, explore or acknowledge this humiliating stigma with anyone would have turned Wallis into a strong personality if she were to survive. Most of those with gender identity issues who survive emotionally undamaged do so behavged do cause they have a robust belief that they are unusual or special; indeed this belief is centuries old, because the condition itself is hardly new. In Wallis’s case a typical result would have been a determination to make herself the most perfect being by over-compensating for the unspoken, humiliating part of her.
‘It’s not only a way of over-compensating. It is also a way of managing the sense of inadequacy which would otherwise have been there. If a woman knows that she possesses a secret which makes her a unique person she can live with this by believing that she has something which makes her stand out against the rest. It is like having a special gift,’ explains consultant psychiatrist Dr Domenico di Ceglie. How she used this gift was to become clear in the years ahead.
But for the first twenty years of her life Wallis would also have had to come to terms with the demands of secrecy. The consequences of secrecy where developing sexuality is concerned are often that the sexuality and the secrecy can be merged, which means that to perform certain activities in a semi-secret way becomes more exciting. And this explains why the risk and excitement element of relationships was attractive to Wallis. Once this is understood, Wallis’s insight into her own condition ‘that when I was being good I generally had a bad time and when I was being bad the opposite was true’, suddenly becomes powerfully clear.
Win seems to have done a good job at Squantum. The couple lived in a hotel and Wallis did not complain of being lonely but filled her day as best she could, largely wandering the streets of Boston and watching court cases. But then, in October 1918, he was moved again. To his bitter disappointment, according to Wallis, instead of being sent overseas in an active fighting role he was ordered to San Diego to set up a new flyers’ base. But setting up the nation’s first naval airbase on North Island, a short commute from the Coronado Peninsula, was not only a mammoth task, it was one which commanded enormous respect from those who served under him, as letters from junior officers to their parents indicate.
Again, Wallis did not find it difficult to spend the day sunbathing and planning meals. For shopping and cooking her Fannie Farmer Cookbook came to her aid; for the cleaning and other chores a Japanese houseboy helped. It was the sort of leisurely lifestyle she had always wanted. The newlyweds entertained frequently, sometimes important naval people, top brass, until the small hours – Wallis, master of the wisecrack, laughing till it hurt. Win, according to Wallis, was furious about his posting, a fury made worse in January 1918 when he learned that his twenty-one-year-old younger brother, Dumaresq, Yale graduate and golden boy of the family, had been killed in action while fighting with the Lafayette Escadrille, an air force squadron composed largely of American volunteer pilots in France. Not only that, his even younger brother, Frederick, aged seventeen, had just been awarded the Croix de Guerre, likewise on the Western Front. That news, together with his mother’s response – ‘I would that I had another son to send to take his place’ – all fuelled Win’s anger at his inactivity and his longing to prove himself. Wallis may have lacked the maturity to tackle Win’s demons – if indeed anyone could have. And Win may have had a violent temper. Mary Kirk, in spite of what happened later, always told her family that she believed Spencer had been brutal, a cad. In addition, his three subsequent wives all cited in their divorce petitions his irritability and irascibility, cruelty and abusive behaviour. But an accurate description of any marriage, especially a disintegrating one, is something only those inside it woe insidcan give. At the time of their marriage, Win was one of an elite band of naval aviators, young, fit, handsome and at the peak of his powers. No doubt like many fellow naval officers at the time he was often drunk and smoked a lot. But what provoked his anger and violence is not clear, and Wallis’s account was written more than thirty years later with a particular agenda.
The marriage, shaky from the start, dramatically deteriorated after little more than a year together. In San Diego Wallis flirted, behaviour which she realized ignited Win’s jealousy and led to further alcohol and violence. ‘I am naturally gay and flirtatious,’ she wrote. ‘I was brought up to believe that one should be as entertaining as one can at a party.’ She also had a low boredom threshold and now seriously questioned whether a service life, constantly on the move and involving ‘brief sojourns in rented bungalows or tasteless government housing, endlessly repeated associations with the same people conditioned to the same interests’, was for her. It is true that he was constantly on the move, sometimes staying in one place for only a matter of weeks and sometimes having to put up in a hotel while a suitable small cottage was found. But the archives indicate that Wallis, unlike other navy wives, did not always follow her husband from one base to another. Almost every document that lists her addresses at this time has her at a different address from him. She is listed either as at the Washington-based Riggs Bank or as at an address in Maryland. In addition, although none of their homes was grand, it is not entirely fair to describe them as tasteless government housing. Their first home in San Diego – two furnished rooms in the fashionable Palomar Apartments – was, as Wallis herself admitted, so delightful that she did not see how she and Win could fail to be happy there.
But Wallis’s life at this time was, she says, ‘a harrowing experience’. She tells of repeatedly being locked up in a room while he went out ‘often for hours on end’ and of being the subject of Win’s ‘running barrage of subtle innuendoes and veiled insults. Outsiders were not supposed to understand these clever thrusts but I certainly did.’ It’s not hard to imagine that these innuendoes and insults might well have been taunts about the unsatisfactory nature of their sex life. Accord
ing to the American author Donald Spoto, in his 1995 book Dynasty, Wallis told her closest male friend Herman Rogers, who was to give her away on her marriage to the Duke of Windsor in 1937, that she had ‘never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below what she called her personal Mason – Dixon line’, more usually the border between the Southern and Northern parts of the United States.
Wallis tried hard to widen her circle of friends – what else was there to do? – while living in Coronado and was photographed with, among others, John Barrymore and Charlie Chaplin. One of the major events during her time there was a ball at the Hotel del Coronado on 7 April 1920 in honour of the then Prince of Wales as he stopped off during a major tour en route to Australia on HMS Renown. For years the romantic story flourished that it was here that Wallis met the Prince for the first time.
Win Spencer, by then Lieutenant Commander Spencer, was later quoted as saying of the evening of the ball: ‘Practically all navy officers stationed here were present with their wives. We all went down the receiving line. My former wife [Wallis] was with me most of the evening. Of course I’m not quite sure but she may have been introduced to him. As I recall she slipped away for a few minutes and may have b bed may heen received by the Prince …’