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

by Anne Sebba

  Her wit, sharpened by the bitterness of exile, was rarely appreciated by visiting Britons, and Giles was not alone in his views. The diplomat Jock Balfour once sat next to her at a dinner in Biarritz. When she dropped her handbag he bent down to pick it up – a gentlemanly gesture which elicited the sharp response: ‘I like to see the British grovelling to me.’ He may not have been amused, but she had a circle of American friends who relished her company.

  From time to time, though, Wallis went too far, behaving disgracefully to the Duke in public. Many of their friends, even as the relationship began, observed her occasionally cruel verbal abuse, which the Duke had always appeared to need and respond to, presumably because the moment of forgiveness was sublime. Those who saw them now, in the last phase of their lives, remarked on the Duke’s total devotion, the way his eyes would follow her around a room and take on a deep sadness when she was not there. Kenneth de Courcy, one-time confidant of Cabinet ministers and a controversial dining {ersdee companion of the Duke of Windsor who had favoured appeasement, recalled a typical occasion shortly after the war:

  I was staying near La Croë and the prefect of the Haute Maritime laid on a dinner for us … [Wallis] was sitting down the table, quite a long way down, and he was sitting almost opposite me, next to the wife of the British Consul in Cannes. The municipality was building a new golf course in Cannes and the Duke of Windsor started talking to this woman about the new golf course. Perfectly harmless conversation but he played golf. Suddenly, in front of forty people, the Duchess yelled across the table: ‘Oh do stop talking nonsense, David, you know nothing whatever about golf courses, do stop lecturing that woman.’

  I lost my cool and said ‘If I may say so, His Royal Highness presided over one of the greatest real estate concerns in the world, the Duchy of Cornwall, and knows all about golf courses and property.’ She piped down at once.

  Much more shocking was Wallis’s flirtation with the millionaire homosexual playboy Jimmy Donahue. The Windsors first met the outrageous Donahue, heir to the Woolworth fortune, in 1947, and Wallis, always restless and often bored, was intrigued by his salacious conversation and often sordid actions. The Windsors and Donahue became a well-known threesome for a while, even though many in society were scandalized by their friendship with such a character. Wallis may have initially responded to Donahue out of jealousy, seeing a mutual attraction between the two men, and then deliberately set about making the Duke jealous in turn by embarking on some sort of a relationship with Donahue herself which excluded the Duke. Many concluded that she had acted out of boredom. Nicholas Haslam’s view was that ‘Donahue had originally caught the eye of the Duke and a sisterly rivalry developed with Wallis … having known Jimmy later and spent weekends at his country house Broadhollow (known as Boyhollow) on Long Island, I can’t think he could ever have touched any woman let alone one as rigidly un-undressable as Wallis.’ But as Michael Bloch recognized: ‘There can be no doubt of the Duchess’s preference for gay men: her favourite people included Cecil Beaton, Chips Channon, Somerset Maugham and indeed Coward himself … many of her favourite moments were spent in the largely homosexual world of the great decorators and couturiers.’

  Whatever went on between them, the Duke was publicly humiliated and privately hurt and the relationship ended suddenly. According to some this was because the Duke demanded it and Wallis obeyed; others claim that Donahue was eating so much garlic that his breath became offensive to the Duke and Duchess. ‘Quite apart from other differences,’ Wallis wrote in her memoirs, ‘women seem to me to be divided into two groups: those who reason and those who are for ever casting about for reasons for their own lack of reason. While I might wish it to the contrary, the record of my life, now that I have for the first time attempted to see it whole, clearly places me with the second group. Women, by and large, I have concluded were never meant for plans and planning.’

  Charles Pick, who published these memoirs, understood as well as anyone why Wallis concluded that planning was futile. Her own determination to lead a life of financial security had brought her neither great happiness nor satisfaction. Some years after publication of that book Pick and his wife were returning from New York on the Queen Mary when he heard that the Duke and Duchess were also on board, and were due to disembark at Cherbourg.

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  I spoke to the captain to ask if perhaps the Duke would like to meet. He explained that the Duchess was ill and that he had been given strict instructions that neither the Duke nor the Duchess were going to come out of their state room. All their meals were to be sent up and they didn’t want to meet anybody.

  When we arrived at Cherbourg at about 6 o’clock in the morning I was up and looking over the rails at the few passengers who disembarked. One was the Duke of Windsor, carrying a plastic carrier bag full of dirty laundry, and as he waited at the quayside various other items bought in America were unloaded and piled up beside him. He looked such a sad figure and I thought how pathetic that this once King of England should be taking his own laundry off the Queen Mary.

  At the Mill, ‘our only real home’, as Wallis insisted, the Duchess had a mural painted on the main wall of the upstairs reception room showing a stone watermill wheel entwined with the words ‘I’m not the miller’s daughter but I’ve been through the mill.’ The Duke enjoyed showing visitors a map displayed in his room with small lights which lit up to illustrate the places where he had travelled as Prince of Wales. But what he really treasured, on the opposite wall, was a framed collection of the regimental buttons of every British unit which fought in the trenches in the 1914 – 18 war, a further indication of his abiding sense of guilt at not being allowed to stay longer at the front and do more himself. His punishing physical regime and profound need for Wallis’s harsh words make sense in this context. Nothing else in his life gave him any sense of achievement other than his marriage to Wallis. For him it was enough, almost. Wallis provided him with a mother’s love and a mother’s chiding. He genuinely saw no other way to continue his life and adored her to the end. It was an obsession. For her, the slavish devotion was at times claustrophobic and she was not afraid to show it. But love is famously impossible to define and in their case especially so. Few who knew them well described what they shared as love.

  The Duke died, on 28 May 1972, after six months of acute pain from throat cancer, Wallis, as ever, his only solace. She was summoned to his bedroom at 2 a.m., took his hand and kissed his forehead, whispering ‘My David’. He was seventy-five and, like his brother, had been a heavy smoker all his life. Just ten days earlier he had had a meeting with his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, who was then making a state visit to Paris. The Duchess received the royal party graciously, took tea with them, and then left the desperately ill Duke to meet the Queen of England alone, upstairs. The two women met again in England for the Duke’s funeral on 5 June.

  The Duke, like all old people, had worried about arrangements for his funeral. But in his case it was imperative to have a watertight agreement for himself as well as for Wallis, and he was relieved two years before he died to learn that permission had been granted by Queen Elizabeth for both his and Wallis’s remains to be buried in the royal burial ground of Frogmore, the secluded Georgian house in the grounds of Windsor Castle where many of the British royal family had been buried since 1928. The Duchess, having long since conquered her fear of flying, flew over on 2 June 1972, accompanied by her French maid, American doctor and Grace, Lady Dudley, the 3rd Earl of Dudley’s third wife, now one of her most loyal friends and a widow herself. She spent three nights as a guest of the Queen at Buckingham Palace and later told friends that although everything was correct she found the attitude of t {att ofhe royal family cold. Little had changed, even now.

  At almost seventy-six, Wallis looked as elegant as ever in her mourning clothes, a plain black Givenchy coat with matching dress and waist-length chiffon veil, made in twenty-four hours especially for this occasion. She could not resist remarking to friends
later how amusing she found her sister-in-law’s outfit, especially the hat which she described as looking as if a white plastic arrow had been shot through it. In the morning at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, she looke

  d bewildered but showed dignity and composure, just as she did after lunch as she watched the Duke’s coffin being lowered into the burial plot at Frogmore. Once again all those who saw her either face to face at the small private ceremony before lunch or in the televised proceedings of the afternoon could not escape their thoughts dwelling on 1936.

  Over lunch itself, as Wallis told friends later, both Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten, seated on either side of her, wasted no time in asking her what she intended to do with the Duke’s possessions and papers and where she proposed to live. ‘Don’t worry. I shan’t be coming back here,’ she retorted, sharp as ever. She knew that wherever she lived it would be a kind of hell. She had long been terrified of a life alone and revealed in those frightening days in London that she had always hoped she would die first. Any thoughts she might have entertained about being brought back into the royal fold now that the Duke had gone were dashed when it became clear that no member of the royal family was prepared to accompany her to the airport, behaviour which the British press was not slow to pass comment on. The enduring image of Wallis alone, still in her elegant Givenchy silk mourning outfit, walking across the tarmac to the plane that would take her back to Paris, was for many in Britain the last they saw of her.

  14

  Wallis Alone

  ‘All the wicked things she’s done in her life’

  In one of her last diary entries the former Mary Kirk wrote:

  If I believed in that sort of thing, I might say that my getting cancer again was a judgement on me because I once wished that when Wallis came to die she’d be fully conscious and know it because she is the most arrant coward I ever knew and terrified of dying. I had hoped she knows it is to pay her back for all the wicked things she’s done in her life – for I think of her as people think of Hitler, an evil force, for force she is in her way, not really intelligent or clever because there is no intellect, but full of animal cunning – how she would panic if forced to live now in England. I can just imagine what her terror of bombing would be. So now it is me that has to face dying … and although up to now I am not in the least afraid of dying I do want awfully to live.

  Mary’s anguished pencilled words, written in 1941, forty years or so before Wallis’s eventual death, are one of the most tragic and chilling indictments imaginable – no less for ~ orthe hate and pain embedded in them than for the accurate prophecy they contain. Mary knew and understood Wallis better than anyone and her closeness arguably skewed her final verdict. ‘If anyone could have damaged another person she damaged me. I who had never done an unkind act or treacherous thing to her in the many years we had been friends.’

  There are many accounts of Wallis’s long, lingering death, fed by tubes as she lay on her narrow iron hospital bed, with her few remaining friends such as Linda Mortimer, Grace Dudley, Aline, Countess of Romanones and Diana Mosley prevented from seeing her. One of those who did described her as turning wizened and black, ‘like a little monkey’. The British diplomat Walter Lees, who retained a fondness for the Duchess, was distressed when his glimpse of her lying in bed revealed a lifeless form with a tube in her nose.

  Wallis, by then too ill to show fear, had lost any vestige of the control over her life which she so craved. Maître Suzanne Blum, an elderly French lawyer, who through her first husband had had a connection with the Duke’s legal advisers at Allen and Overy and in her own right had successfully prosecuted a number of high-profile and celebrity cases in the late 1950s and 1960s, assumed total control of Wallis’s life in her final decade. Wallis’s friends blamed Maître Blum for refusing them entry. How did this happen?

  Wallis returned to France after the Duke’s funeral with all the ancient insecurities revived. She was terrified that she might now be bankrupt, that the French would terminate the arrangement on the house and that she would be thrown out on to the streets in poverty. In spite of an emotional attachment to the Mill – several of her pug dogs were buried under its trees – she quickly sold it for nearly £400,000, dispensed with a number of staff and then discussed her financial situation with Lord Mountbatten. He reassured her that as the Duke had left her everything – a fortune of around £3 million – and there was also a small discretionary allowance from the Queen, she would have plenty to live on. But she was not reassured, and when Mountbatten continued to pay her visits, urging her to make out a new will in favour of the Duke’s family, it increased her anger and her neuroses. She told her friends that Mountbatten would sweep through the villa, picking up this and that, and exclaiming, ‘Ah this belongs to the Royal Collection,’ behaviour which made her adamant that it did not.

  In 1973 Wallis visited England for the last time. She laid flowers on her husband’s grave at Frogmore, took tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle and immediately returned to an empty life in Paris, frail and alone. With no family of her own in Europe, she was keenly aware of her continued exclusion from her late husband’s family and of a lack of advisers to help her. Charles, Prince of Wales, wrote her a warm letter of condolence praising his great-uncle, and for a short time Wallis found this a comforting sign that relations might improve. She even considered leaving some of her jewellery to Prince Charles, hoping that his future wife might wear it. But her enthusiasm for this act of generosity petered out in the face of Mountbatten’s aggressive campaign to get as much as he could returned to England.

  For a while she had the services of the distinguished lawyer Sir Godfrey Morley, of Allen and Overy, with whom she was on good terms, as well as her private secretary, John Utter, with whom she was not. There was also a personal secretary, the multilingual Johanna Schutz. Wallis dined out occasionally at Maxim’s and received friends at home. Symbolically, she no longer wore her big, bouffant hair creatent uald by her trusted coiffeur, Alexandre, but reverted to the flatter style, with a middle parting, of her younger days. She ate less and drank more, often on an empty stomach. Alcohol had become her closest friend long before the Duke’s death, and the writer Lesley Blanch had memorably described the Windsors as ‘tiny twins with large bottles of drink’.

  Within a year of the Duke’s death, Wallis was in hospital with a broken hip. But, just as this was mending, she fell again while in hospital, apparently demonstrating the Charleston to a bemused nurse. A few months after she was finally discharged she fell once more, this time against a bath, and cracked several ribs. The nurses now found her confused and senile, asking the same questions dozens of times. Friends noticed that she would speak of the past as if the Duke were still present, even begging him not to abdicate. When she was discharged after this accident her doctor, Dr Jean Thin, advised that all alcohol be removed. But it was too late. At the end of 1975 she was back in the American hospital with either a perforated ulcer or Crohn’s disease, or possibly both, seriously debilitated and ill. She recovered enough to be released the following year to a house where most of the staff had now been dismissed, only to be readmitted in February 1976 – this time diagnosed with a near-total physical collapse, according to some reports, following a massive intestinal haemorrhage.

  It is impossible not to imagine that she wanted to die, that she was now terrified of living. Yet, according to a young doctor who attended her at the hospital at this time, although she was confused she still looked immaculate, her hair coiffed and raven black and her lips reddened, thanks to the ministrations of a hairdresser and beautician. In the autumn of that year, the Queen Mother was in Paris on a state visit and proposed a meeting with Wallis, by then slightly recovered but still in a weak and fragile state. Dr Thin and Maître Blum decided that after all these years of silence this was not the moment. Instead, the Queen Mother sent a bouquet of two dozen red and white roses with a card signed, ‘In Friendship, Elizabeth’. Although according to the author, Hugo
Vickers, the visit was never going to happen but was merely ‘a sop to the press’.

  The formidable Maître Blum now became the Duchess’s spokesman and declared herself the Duchess’s friend as well. Blum, born into a provincial French Jewish family as Suzanne Blumel, had survived the war by fleeing with her then husband to the US, where she studied law at Columbia University. She was tough and now saw her role as not only to protect the Duchess’s material interests by preventing the British royals from acquiring the Duke’s possessions, but also to defend the Windsors’ reputation, which she felt had been unjustly maligned. Another responsibility was keeping the Duchess alive as long as possible, which proved an expensive business over more than a decade and, to the horror of friends, necessitated selling off some of the Windsor trinkets. Those who crossed Blum in an attempt to get directly to the Duchess often ridiculed her, but they did not win. For another decade the Duchess lived on, with only occasional moments of semi-lucidity, scarcely able to do anything for herself. Initially she was lifted into a wheelchair for much of the day, bathed and spoon-fed mouthfuls of food. Cruelly, even the weighing continued, although no longer as part of the attempt to shed pounds. Her personal maid, Señora Martin, who had been with the Windsors since 1964, recounted how, just before the final collapse, she would lift the Duchess into her arms like a limp rag-doll and then stand on the scales with her. Señora Martin’s weight would then be deducted from the total in order to assess the dwindling weight of the Duchess.f t of But the decline was steep and soon her long hair was allowed to grow white; she was almost totally blind and paralysed so severely that she could neither speak nor swallow. Still, she was not in a coma and her eyes were said occasionally to flicker into life. Could she have been aware of her suffering and abandonment?