by Anne Sebba
If Washington was hazardous, Shanghai dangerous and illusory, Peking was exotic, sexually liberating and pulsing with life, yet all from the security of living with a respectable couple, Herman and Katherine Rogers. Life for a foreigner in that walled city enclave, especially in the legation quarter, where bachelors outnumbered women by about ten to one, was magical. It was, she said later, ‘an ideal place for a woman with time on her hands and a secret sorrow in her heart’ – the sorrow more for Espil than for Win. Almost everything about the charm of Peking captivated Wallis, including the noisy street vendors and camel trains. But the language she never mastered, having decided early on that the effort was too great. Herman and Katherine had a Chinese scholar in a long black gown who came to instruct them every day before lunch. Wallis joined in briefly but gave up; it wasn’t that she lacked the ability had she applied herself, but she did not need the skill badly enough. ‘I’m tone deaf and Chinese has different tones on different levels and they all have different meanings,’ she explained. She had the same inability to appreciate music. She pre desic. Shferred riding, swimming in the big new pool at the American Legation, polo and dinner dances every night until the small hours.
Word of Wallis and her doings had spread rapidly long before her train actually reached Shanghai. Even her arrival in Peking was immediately the subject of gossip and scandal among the foreign and Chinese communities alike. There was always a story worth repeating about ‘the lively Mrs Spencer’, and her visit was the source of seemingly endless tales according to long-time Peking resident Diana Hutchins Angulo, whose parents were close friends of Herman and Katherine Rogers. The families spent weekends together in the temples of the Western Hills (Rogers rented his own temple), enjoyed outings to the racecourse together at Pao Ma Chang, and explored the many palaces, temples and monuments of the city.
Herman and Katherine entertained constantly at their courtyard house, with a regular stream of international diplomats passing through, boosting the native coterie of artists and writers. Wallis was often the life and soul of the party. One of those who now fell for Wallis was the Italian naval attaché (later Admiral), Alberto Da Zara, a thirty-five-year-old diplomat, not as handsome as Espil but with a similar gallant charm and perfect manners, love of poetry, command of many languages and broad knowledge, as well as a talent for riding. Based in Peking, he ran military missions along the Yangtze River. Writing of the season of 1924 – 5 and the acres of newsprint devoted to horseracing, beautiful women and other sporting passions in Peking, he said that Wallis Spencer was one of the most enthusiastic racegoers. In his memoirs he talks carefully about their relationship but rhapsodizes about her looks, how ‘her best features were her eyes and her hair worn off the face and the way her classic hairstyle suited the beauty of her forehead’. He then devotes the rest of the paragraph to the exquisite nature of her blue eyes, into which he evidently spent hours staring.
Others remember the affair rather differently. ‘Mrs Spencer was infamous for arousing bouts of passion among adoring males,’ recalls Diana Angulo, who knew Wallis, Robbie and her Italian admirer not only then but later. ‘Through the years I think men found her witty, and that special ability of giving them her full attention, quite an art! I think men were more generous and complimentary than women.’ Angula adds: ‘Lt Alberto Da Zara, an excellent horseman with a keen and practised eye for charming women, fell under her spell.’ Decades later when he returned to China aboard his flagship Montecucolli as Admiral Da Zara there was a splendid photo in his quarters of Wallis in Court dress inscribed ‘To you’. Wallis herself admits that he bequeathed to her some poetry that he had written.
The inscription is worth pausing over, indicating as it does how adept Wallis was at making a man feel he was the only one in the world. There was therefore no need for further identification; he was the only one. In another photograph from a private family collection of Wallis with Lieutenant Da Zara she is not, as others might be, looking at the camera but is focusing entirely on her man. However, as Diana Angulo, whose family knew many Italian old-school diplomats in China, explains: ‘in that league Italians tended to marry into the old aristocratic families’.
There had been other men friends during the Lotus Year including one described as a ‘dashing British Military Officer’, and she also met at this time, probably through Da Zara, the glamorous and wealthy young Italian aristocrat Count Galeazzo Ciano, playboy son of a First World War hero. Ciano was already a Fema alreadascist sympathizer having taken part in the 1922 march on Rome. Diana Angulo recalls: ‘From Italian friends I often heard that Ciano was very taken by her.’ But the Count was twenty-one at the time, seven years younger than Wallis, a newly qualified law graduate embarking on a diplomatic career which took him to Rio de Janeiro, the Holy See and Peking in the space of one year, 1925. Later, Count Ciano became Mussolini’s son-in-law with a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness and promiscuity and was executed by an anti-Fascist firing squad in 1944. In 1930, newly married to the nineteen-year-old Edda Mussolini, he came to serve as Italian consul in Shanghai. A casual acquaintance with Wallis five years earlier in China was thus embellished to create a story that they had had an affair which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and botched abortion.
But none of her friendships blossomed into likely marriage and, as she was about to turn thirty, she knew it was time to face reality – what she calls the unfinished business of her marriage to Win – and either get a divorce and find another man to marry, or look for a job, a prospect she did not relish.
Wallis writes of a Peking summer and winter and spring, of an inner voice suddenly speaking to her quite severely telling her that she was deluding herself if she stayed any longer. In fact she had returned to Shanghai in the spring of 1925, possibly because she recognized that she was becoming too close to Herman, in many ways her ideal man. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, he would take her walking along the broad parapet of the great wall around the city. She had h
ad many hours to brood about what she should do and, with renewed confidence that she could still attract men, decided it was time to find a ship that would carry her across the Pacific, to take her home to America and to the future that she now had to face.
4
Wallis on the Lookout
‘I can’t go on wandering for the rest of my life’
Wallis sailed from Japan to Seattle in early September 1925, but while en route across the Pacific fell ill with ‘an obscure internal ailment’. She recalled that the ship’s doctor ‘struggled valiantly with a very puzzling case’ and then had her transferred to hospital as soon as the ship docked in Seattle. There followed an operation, which she described as not long but ‘one more thing I had to go through alone in a strange city’. If ever a woman sounded in need of a husband this was she.
The mention of an internal ailment has made critics of Wallis – and some biographers – rush to insist upon a bungled abortion in China being the cause. But if this were the case she would be unlikely to refer to it in this way. Perhaps the ailment was something else, a complication resulting from having internal male sex organs, which is a common problem for DSD sufferers – such an obscure complaint that Wallis might have concluded it was something she would never need to explain, and she was anyway often in pain from what she called ‘stomach attacks’. But in the narrative of her life which Wallis was intent on shaping – that of a lone woman struggling to live a go
In fact she contacted Win after the operation because she had to travel by train across the continent, from west coast to east, while she was still feeling very weak. He was on leave with his family in Chicago and boarded the train there to accompany her on the final leg to Washington. Wallis then went to stay with her mother who, aged fifty-six, had now remarried: her third husband was Charles Gordon Allen, a Washington civil servant. Alice had been unlucky in love and her attempts to make ends meet had often caused embarrassment to her daughter, but she never lost her sense of humour. Photog
raphed sitting on the knee of her new husband she signed the picture: ‘Alice on her last lap’. But Wallis was less keen than ever to stay with her mother and new stepfather, so, as soon as she had recuperated, she set out to get a divorce and make a new life. In the international diplomatic circles in which she moved this seemed to be what women did when things didn’t work out, not only a common occurrence but far removed from the shameful state that her family insisted it was. She soon found the advice she had been looking for. In Virginia she could obtain a divorce for a total cost of $300 (a not insignificant sum) on grounds of desertion if she could prove three years’ separation from her husband. There was also a residency requirement of one year, which was no great hardship. She knew Virginia well, having spent many happy summers there with cousins and at camp. Aubrey Weaver, the young lawyer to whom she had been recommended, was a family friend of the Mustins and he suggested she stay in a small town called Warrenton in Fauquier County, where he knew of an inexpensive but comfortable hotel. It was a horsy place where almost everyone rode or hunted even if they did not own a horse, and the Warrenton Gold Cup Race for Gentlemen Jockeys was a major local event. During the week Wallis could go for walks and read – an activity that held little appeal for her either then or subsequently. Among books she subsequently claimed to have read in that year of waiting, 1927, were the novels of Somerset Maugham, John Galsworthy and Sinclair Lewis, some poetry and one book of philosophy.
She described her time there as the most tranquil she had ever known. ‘I simply rusticated and when I wasn’t rusticating I vegetated with equal satisfaction.’
So it was from Room 212 of the Warren Green Hotel, a room with a view of the Fauquier National Bank, with ‘faded flower wallpaper, a high brass bed, battered night table, imitation mahogany bureau … a classic example of what my mother used to call inferior decorating’, that Wallis set out to rebuild her life. She would have to share a bathroom, but that did not bother her. The other guests were mostly travelling salesmen, but that, too, did not concern her as she had many connections and wasted little time in rediscovering them. There were schoolfriends from Arundell and Oldfields days, mostly married now, and even an old boyfriend, Lloyd Tabb, whom she had dated after meeting him at Burrland summer camp, who was not yet married. But her most loyal escort was Hugh Armistead Spilman, a childhood friend from Baltimore who had served in France during the First World War and now worked at the bank in the main square. He was happy to take Wallis dancing or to dinner parties, but, even though he professed keenness, there was no question of marriage. Wallis made it clear that this time she was going to marry money.
The divorce required a letter from Win stating that he no longer wanted to live with her and had deserted her. Wallis asked him to backdate this statement to v htatemenJune 1924 so that the divorce could, she hoped, be granted in June 1927, exactly three years later. Wallis in her deposition stated that she had not lived with Win for four years, omitting any mention of having seen him in China.
While waiting for the decree she needed little persuasion when invited by her aunt Bessie, who had never remarried and was fond of Wallis’s company, to travel with her to Europe. It infringed the Virginia residency requirement somewhat to be sailing for months around the Mediterranean, but she was prepared to risk that in order to sightsee in Naples, Palermo and along the Dalmatian coast, as well as in Monte Carlo, Nice and Avignon. Wallis was in Paris alone, Bessie having returned home, when she received a cable from her mother telling her that Uncle Sol had died. She arranged to sail home immediately, believing that, as her uncle’s favourite niece, she stood to inherit a considerable fortune. There had been talk of him leaving $5 million – no wonder she had not been in any hurry to tie herself down with another man. However, two months before his death, Solomon Warfield had apparently changed his will, angry with Wallis for going ahead with a shameful divorce against his advice. She was well aware of his views but not that he would behave in such a vindictive manner. He now left most of his money to establish a home for aged and indigent gentlewomen as a memorial to his mother, Anna Emory Warfield. Insultingly, he stipulated that a room be set aside for Wallis in the home if she ever needed it. He also made a bequest:
If my niece Bessiewallis Spencer, wife of Winfield Spencer, shall survive me I give to the Continental Trust Company the sum of $15,000 in trust to collect and receive the income arising therefrom and to pay over the income to my niece in quarterly instalments so long as she shall live and not remarry.
Wallis was not just angry about Uncle Sol’s will, she was, Mary Kirk told her sister Buckie, furious. It showed a cruelly controlling hand from the grave and Wallis contested it, charging that her uncle was mentally incompetent and emotionally disturbed at the time he made the will. On appeal, the court was to impose a slightly more favourable settlement, and a few months later Wallis received about $37,500 worth of US shares from the executors who were concerned that other Warfields were threatening to challenge the will. But for the moment her lawyer advised her to return to Warrenton to maintain her residency requirement if she wanted her divorce to go through smoothly. On 6 December 1927 Judge George Latham Fletcher considered her request and, four days later, granted her a divorce decree.
Wallis was now a free woman but uncertain what to do next or where to go. One of the attractions of Warrenton for her had been its good rail connections, enabling her to see her mother and friends in New York or Washington at weekends. As soon as she returned from China she had renewed the friendship with her old schoolfriend Mary Kirk, now married to Jacques Raffray, a glamorous Frenchman. Jacques Achille Louis Raffray, always known as Jackie, was a First World War veteran who had come to America to train US troops to fight in France. At first the Kirk parents had not been in favour of this moneyless marriage but gave way in the face of Mary’s evident passion for such a charming, unusual and attractive man. Raffray came from a much travelled and adventurous family: his parents had once made a dangerous crossing of the Abyssinian desert. But shortly after Jacques’ birth his mother had died, and he grew up in Rome where his father, a scientist, lived.
Having stayed for some weeal for soeks during March 1926 with Mary and Jackie in their elegant New York apartment overlooking Washington Square, Wallis took to escaping Warrenton for shorter weekend shopping trips in New York. She spent Christmas that year with the Raffrays, waiting out her divorce. The two young women had remained in regular mail contact for the last few years and had plenty to tell each other. Mary, who tried to earn a living by managing a small boutique, no doubt welcomed a chance to tell her old schoolfriend about the difficulties she was encountering in her marriage to Jacques, having suffered three miscarriages. The Kirk family believed that these were most likely caused by Jacques’ syphilis. He soon began drinking heavily and Mary felt powerless to stop him.
Mary’s sister Buckie also saw a lot of Wallis during the two years after her return from China because she too was living in New York. She remembers the first time she introduced her new husband, the artist Will (or Bill) Hollingsworth, to Wallis. ‘En route I warned him not to fall for her and he was vastly amused … I elaborated. Any attention [she gave him] would only be her automatic reaction to any attractive man. I suspected that now her fling at romance had failed she would revert to her intention to marry for money.’ Wallis was included in many Kirk family lunches and dinners at this time, often with others present as well.
Whatever the company, one topic of conversation emerged; how, once she got her divorce, Wallis would support herself. Although this often became hilarious, as Wallis described her deficiencies for every job suggested, Bill and I grew a bit tired of talk we were both convinced was no more than talk – what Wallis wanted was not a job but a husband well provided with money.
Wallis did make some half-hearted attempts at finding work. Her mother suggested a secretarial course, but this foundered on her distaste for the typewriter. Working as a shopgirl was beneath her dignity. She tried to write an essay abo
ut spring hats for a competition in a fashion magazine but one polite rejection letter instantly convinced her that journalism was not her métier either. Her next foray into the job market was trying to persuade Morgan and Elisabeth Schiller, friends who lived in Pittsburgh and owned a company manufacturing tubular steel scaffolding for construction, that she would make a brilliant saleswoman. What appealed to Wallis was the idea of ‘doing something different, something out of the ordinary for a woman, a job in which I could pit my wits not against other women but against men in a man’s world’. She went to Pittsburgh for three weeks, staying with her friends in an attempt to understand all about tubular steel. But, when she realized that the job required quick-fire mathematical calculations, she gave up on that idea too, recognizing that this was never going to be where her future lay. Now a free woman but without Win’s allowance to support her, she had to decide urgently. She could not live on friends’ charity for ever.
Some months earlier, at the Raffrays’, she had met friends of theirs called Ernest and Dorothea Simpson, or as Wallis wrote in her memoir, Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson, never mentioning his wife by name. She was the former Dorothea Parsons Dechert, descended from generations of lawyers and politicians, with one great-grandfather who was a senator and another who was Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons of Massachusetts. The couple, married in 1923, lived in style on the Upper East Side and had one child together, a daughter called Audrey; there was another daughter, Cynthia, from a previous marriage of Dorothea’s. At first Wallis met the Simpsons only on her visits to New York at tr new Yorkhe Raffrays’. But then Mary invited Ernest alone to make up a fourth at bridge and soon Ernest fell prey to Wallis’s magnetism. Although still married, and a father, he started taking Wallis to art galleries and museums in the city, as well as to lunches and dinners. It was not long before he had asked Wallis if she would marry him as soon as they were both free. Wallis, naturally, always insisted that the four-year Simpson marriage was on the rocks long before she met Ernest. But Dorothea, who was unwell at the time and in hospital, said later: ‘From the moment I met her I never liked her at all. I’ve never been around anybody like that … she moved in and helped herself to my house and my clothes and, finally, to everything.’ The dislike was mutual, soon to be compounded for Wallis by increasing resentment of Ernest’s regular payments to his ex-wife and their daughter Audrey which she felt they could ill afford.