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

by Anne Sebba

  The legend that Wallis and Edward first met in a hotel ballroom in San Diego not only grew but was embellished in subsequent years. Not surprisingly the hotel itself still today fosters the idea, displaying prominently a portrait of the Duke and Duchess as well as featuring a small alcove for parties called the Duchess’s private dining room. According to another story: ‘Mrs Spencer was wearing a red evening gown that night and stood out so much from the rest of the women that the Prince asked to be presented to her.’

  But the reality is more interesting. According to a short newspaper article of 31 March 1920 in the San Diego Union devoted to social activity in the community, Mrs Winfield Spencer left that afternoon for Los Angeles, ‘taking the Lark tonight for Monterey, where she will be the house guest for the weekend at the Del Monte Lodge of Mrs Jane Selby Hayne of San Francisco. Mrs Spencer goes north to attend the polo games.’ Two weeks later, in an issue of the same journal dated Sunday 18 April 1920, there appeared the following: ‘Mrs E. Winfield Spencer returned to Hotel del Coronado Tuesday evening [13 April 1920] after several weeks’ visit with Mrs Jane Selby Hayne at Del Monte.’

  Other articles in the San Francisco Chronicle for the two weeks in question confirm her presence with Mrs Selby Hayne and report that the two women ‘spent much time on the Del Monte Polo field practising with ball and mallet’. In other words, Wallis was not in Coronado at the time of the ball. Instead, she was staying with the prominent San Francisco socialite, skilled horsewoman, ardent polo aficionado and, perhaps most significantly, newly divorced Mrs Selby Hayne. Jane Selby Hayne had been visiting Coronado in March 1920, so quite possibly Wallis met her just a month previously and jumped at the chance to cement the new friendship. In her memoirs Wallis stated emphatically that she did not, ‘as popular story has it’, meet the Prince of Wales when he visited that April. But nor does she say why she did not, nor where she was. She writes evasively that when their marriage was breaking up in earnest many invitations came to them both, including one for ‘polo at Del Monte’. She does not elaborate. Yet had she been in Coronado she would hardly have refused an opportunity to meet the Prince. Most likely it did not suit her story to reveal that she was the one on the move in the young marriage, the one who had gone looking for fun elsewhere and missed the one big social event of her time at Coronado.

  Meanwhile the Prince wrote to his then girlfriend that the dinner dance at the Coronado Hotel was ‘most bloody awful … I’ve never hated a party as much as I did this evening’s … I’m near unto cwying [sic].’

  Wallis insists that her first husband’s drinking was aggravated by lack of promotion or by being passed over when he had the chance to serve in a combat zone. Maybe. But the jobs he was given were not insignificant ones and clearly required a man of forceful personality and talent. Just as likely, if Wallis went north alone and had an exciting time, it was in fact his wife’s behaviour that provoked Spencer, who had plenty of evidence already of how easily his wife could have a good time. Spencer’s sister Ethel, one of Wallis’s bridesmaids, who probably knew her brother as well as anyone, described her former sister-in-law thus: ‘I’d call her just a typical southern belle. She could no more keep from flirting than from breathing. She could come into a room full of women and you wouldn’t pay any attention to her but the minute a man came in she would sparklen would se and turn on the charm. Win was frightfully jealous so that caused them a great deal of unhappiness.’

  So if, as Wallis alleged, Spencer now drank more and shouted more, if he frequently abused her verbally and physically, went out alone after tying her to the bed or subjected her to bizarre rituals such as forcing her to witness the destruction of her family photographs, perhaps there was a part of her that had, wittingly or not, encouraged him, even enjoyed it? A woman who knew Wallis in those days remarked on ‘her beautiful dark sapphire blue eyes, full of sparkle and nice mischief. Her laugh was contagious, like a tonic …’ She was after all reverting to type – the type that needed constant confirmation of her attractiveness to all men, the type who was born with ambivalent sexuality. It was part of her insecurity which would never leave her.

  Later that year Wallis’s mother Alice Rasin came to stay. The visit gave the warring couple a month’s respite as both behaved impeccably in front of her. At the end of the year Win was given a temporary job back in Pensacola and it was agreed that they should live separately for a while, with Wallis staying behind, alone in Coronado for a whole winter. But early in 1921 he was assigned a new and important position with the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington. This time both welcomed the change of location and they decided to move there together, living in a service apartment in a hotel called the Brighton. Wallis recounts: ‘But as so often happens since nothing was right at the office, nothing was right at home. Whatever I did was wrong in Win’s eyes and in this unhappy situation he did what was so easy for him, he took to the bottle.’

  Through the thin walls of the hotel everyone knew about their shouting matches. ‘Brought up as I had been in families ruled by a code of considerate conduct I could not bear any public indelicacy.’ Wallis says that Win was being transformed ‘from a brilliant officer into a mixed-up neurotic’.

  Then, one Sunday afternoon, he locked her in the bathroom of their apartment.

  For hours I heard no sound from beyond the door. Whether Win had gone out or whether he was still in the apartment playing a practical joke I could not tell. I tried to unscrew the lock with a nail file … As the afternoon wore on and evening came I was seized with panic at the thought that Win might mean to keep me a prisoner all night. I wanted desperately to call for help but held myself in check.

  Eventually Wallis heard the sound of a key turn in the lock but was too scared to try it herself and venture out. She finally plucked up enough courage to do so and, seeing him asleep in the marital bed, slept the night on the sofa. By morning she had decided she had to leave him. More than that, she decided she had to divorce him, and she knew that in her family divorce was a matter for deep shame.

  She discussed it first with her mother, who warned her that she would be making a terrible mistake if she went ahead. Aunt Bessie was similarly appalled by the idea of Wallis being the first Montague to be divorced. ‘Unthinkable,’ she told her niece. As a divorced woman she would be entering the wilderness. She would be a woman who had failed as a wife. These two were partly concerned for Wallis but also aware of the realities in the 1920s. In order to have something to live on she would have to square it with Uncle Sol and he, when she paid him a visit in Baltimore the next day, predictably thundered: ‘I wonhund ‘I wt let you bring this disgrace upon us.’ She would be the first Warfield to be divorced. But then he softened slightly and admitted that, never having been married himself, perhaps he was not the best person to pronounce. But he was not going to support her and urged her to return to Win and try again.

  This she did for two more weeks. But she could stand it no longer. When she finally told Win she was leaving he was, she says, essentially a gentleman. Wallis now moved in with her mother, and in June 1921 gave her address to the US naval board as Earl Court, Baltimore – her mother’s apartment. But life was tough for Alice, working as a paid hostess at the Chevy Chase Country Club. In February 1922 Win was posted to the Far East as commander of a gunboat stationed in Hong Kong. There was no question of Wallis accompanying him. It was easier for unhappy naval wives like Wallis to keep up appearances of st

  ill being married while living alone. Wallis was twenty-five, and she now discovered freedom. Win’s regular cheques for $225 a month were all she had to live on.

  3

  Wallis in Wonderland

  ‘Too good for a woman’

  Nineteen-twenties Washington was a most exciting place to be. In 1921 the country had a new president, the Republican Warren G. Harding, and political talk was everywhere. There was also discussion of his controversial private life, including his marriage to a divorcée five years older than him an
d his extramarital affairs. Harding was to serve for just two scandal-ridden years and his administration was generally considered a disaster. Wallis loved the political buzz as well as the gossip but, desperate to lead an independent life, found living with her mother unbearably constricting. Alice always waited up for her to come home, even if it was 2 a.m., and as one who had suffered from unpleasantly wagging tongues herself, disapproved of her being out after midnight with a man who was not her husband.

  ‘Hazardous’ is the word Wallis herself used about life for a single woman in 1920s Washington surrounded by so many surplus men. Single women needed a code of behaviour and she believed she had just such a personal rule, ‘which was never to allow myself to drift into light affairs of the moment … I was determined to wait until I was sure I had found a deep love that would engage both my mind and my emotions.’ But her mother took a different view about what constituted a suitable code and did not hesitate to tell Wallis. Not surprisingly, as soon as she could, Wallis moved out and, in the autumn of 1922, went to stay in the Georgetown house of a naval friend whose husband was also in the Far East. Living with Admiral’s daughter Dorothy McNamee gave Wallis social standing and enabled her to move effortlessly into a diplomatic and political circle where she honed her natural talent for making friends in high places, and remembering them. Her cousin Corinne Mustin – now a widow after her husband Henry died suddenly in 1923 – was also in Washington at this time opening another door for her into naval circles. In addition to Corinne, she had a small coterie of women friends, including Marianna Sands, from San Diego, and Ethel Noyes, daughter of the president of the Associ woated Press, both separated from their husbands and with whom she often went to embassy parties and weekend picnics.

  Wallis, finding herself in what she described as a ‘special paradise’ for a woman on her own, among so many unattached, attractive and cultured men, was an eager learner. This exposure to an international network of men in high-powered jobs taught her some basic rules for a woman who wished to engage in conversations with the opposite sex in the early part of the century. She made sure she was always well informed about world affairs in general and about the individual person in particular; then she listened and flattered. This was a skill Wallis was determined to master if she was to move up the social scale.

  A favourite event was a weekly meeting of a group known as the Soixante Gourmets. Each of the sixty young men in this exclusive club brought a female companion to lunch at the Hotel Hamilton and it was here that Wallis was introduced to the most stimulating group of men she was ever to meet. They included the witty and opinionated journalist Willmott (Bill) Lewis of The Times, who was to marry her friend Ethel Noyes; Prince Gelasio Caetani, the Italian Ambassador, fierce nationalist and First World War veteran, a brilliant and handsome man who planted the seeds of Wallis’s interest in the Italian political scene.

  She may have written off her marriage with Win, but she insisted she still believed in marriage and was keen to marry again:

  In my mind I had the picture of the sort of man I wanted. Ideally he would be a young man who was making his mark in business, diplomacy or one of the professions. He would like and understand people and above all appreciate me. I wanted someone who would make me a part of his life and whom I could help in his career. I wanted a man who would draw me into the full circle of his existence in all its aspects.

  The description, although written by Wallis years after her marriage to the ex-King, is probably a fair account of what she hoped, indeed was working, to achieve at this time, while still in her twenties. Apparently she met several men in this enticing milieu who measured up to her ideal, but only one of them ‘stirred her heart’. She described him as a young diplomat of great promise attached to the Embassy of a Latin American country, ‘both teacher and model in the art of living … in many respects, the most fascinating man I have ever met with principles of steel and a spirit that bubbled like champagne’. Her use of ‘ever’ can hardly have been an accident.

  Don Felipe Espil, at thirty-five, was eight years older than Wallis and a man of experience of women and the world. He was slim, dark and tall and spoke with an attractively marked South American accent. A qualified lawyer, his interests were extraordinarily wide ranging and included music, economics, bridge, baseball, golf and riding, at all of which he excelled. Many a Washington matron hoped to catch him for her daughter. When he met Wallis he was first secretary at the Argentine Embassy, but no one was in any doubt of his ambition to be ambassador, a position that would require considerable funds. He indulged in a brief relationship with Wallis, which caused some scandal in Washington, presumably because she was considered unsuitable, and it may have been this affair in particular that Alice Rasin so objected to. Espil clearly enjoyed Wallis’s company – for a while – and perhaps especially while he thought she was safely married. But she, as she confided in friends, was passionately in love wf gly in lith him and was prepared to do anything to keep him, including converting to Catholicism if necessary. Then he fell in love with Courtney Louise Letts, one of the quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby. Letts was wealthy, beautiful and, as the daughter of a US senator, socially desirable. Although younger than Wallis, she too had already been once married – to the well-connected Wellesley H. Stillwell. But she divorced him in 1924 and married and divorced a second time before eventually marrying Espil in 1933, by which time he had finally been promoted to ambassador to the US. Wallis, the mere wife of a naval lieutenant, with neither money nor social standing, could not compete.

  Wallis, furious to learn that Espil was involved with another woman, could do nothing but absorb for herself the mores of the time and the place. She was a novice engaging with a world of deep hypocrisy and it took her some time to learn the rules of this circle. Some got away with scandalous adultery followed by divorce and went on to live a new life with a new partner. Others paid a heavy price. When Polly Peabody met Harry Crosby in 1920 and within two weeks tried to divorce her husband, Richard J. Peabody, who had become a dangerous alcoholic, blue-blooded Boston society was scandalized. Both Crosby and Peabody were wealthy sons of socially prominent Boston families and both were victims and veterans of the recent war. Crosby married Polly in 1922 but, shortly afterwards, he had a passionate affair with Constance Coolidge, the Comtesse de Jumilhac, who later became a close friend of Wallis for a time. In 1929 Crosby committed suicide with his latest young lover, Josephine Rotch, after taking a mixture of drink and drugs.

  Espil’s rejection of her for a better-connected rival was publicly humiliating. Wallis, unusually, had lost control of the situation, which represented a crushing defeat. Washington was suddenly cold and unwelcoming. So when Corinne suggested a trip to Paris she jumped at the idea. Ethel Noyes, also getting a divorce at this time, was in Paris just before her marriage to Bill Lewis. The cousins sailed to Europe in January 1924, Wallis half hoping that she might find a divorce easier and cheaper in Paris, or even that Espil might pursue her. He never did and she discovered that a divorce would cost her several thousand dollars, money her uncle Sol had once again declined to provide. Deeply hurt by Espil and, aged twenty-eight, increasingly uncertain of the future, she responded warmly when Win wrote to invite her to forget the past and join him in China. It felt like there was nothing to lose. She would be tougher in future, never lose control. Win sent instructions for her to join a naval transport at Norfolk, Virginia, and then sail on to China at government expense.

  Wallis travelled with a cargo of navy wives on the USS Chaumont, arriving in Hong Kong in September 1924 after a six-week voyage. Travelling to China at that time was not only prohibitively expensive for most people, it was also exotic and an opportunity to see something of the world – which she realized had bec
ome a necessity, having had a taste of it from the talk of others in the hothouse diplomatic circles of Washington. She badly wanted the marriage to work this time and, for a short while, it did. Win, on the dock to meet her, was looking tanned, clear-eyed and physically fit. He took her back to his navy-supplied apartment in Kowloon on the Chinese mainland and told her that he had stopped drinking from the day he had heard she was coming.

  This second honeymoon was, however, short lived. Again, there is only Wallis’s account of the final breakdown. She recounts how Win, after two weeks, returned to his old pattern of drinking and erratic behaviour leading to abuse and violence. There is good reason to believe her. Her frame of mind was such that she would have tried hard to keep the marriage together at this point in her life if she could have, and, revealingly, she admits that perhaps there was something about the two of them together that set off this vicious cycle. When she asked Win if she was responsible for lighting the fire of his anger, he apparently responded that he could not explain what happened but ‘something lets go, like the cables of a plane’. In the days before therapy it may be unfair to blame Wallis for a lack of sympathy, as some biographers have done. But, even assuming Win and Wallis did not encounter a physical difficulty in their relationship which unleashed his fury and determination to punish her, it is clear that Wallis was not interested in trying to understand his problems nor in encouraging him to seek help. This may have been because she knew she was the one who needed it more.

  There followed another short period of calm for Wallis to reflect as Win, undertaking river patrol duties, was sent away. Wallis set off to join him in Canton, but as soon as she arrived there she came down with a high temperature. She described it as a kidney infection and said that while she was ill he was solicitous. Drinking the polluted water was renowned for causing illness. But it is also possible that the infection was the result of Win kicking her in the stomach and assaulting her, as one biographer claims he was told by a friend of Wallis in her latter years, which would explain his unusual contrition subsequently. His anger presumably derived from jealousy, fed by his accusations, later recounted by Wallis herself, that she had ‘carried on’ with officers aboard the Chaumont and flirted with men in Hong Kong during his absence. He now started opening her letters to find evidence of this.