The following year, Wallis stayed at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz with another old friend, ‘Foxy’ Sefton. She visited New York, where she had another face-lift, and stayed at the Waldorf Towers where a friend, Nathan Cummings, the founder of Consolidated Foods, had lent her some Renoirs and a Sisley to furnish the suite, and according to one biographer, ‘the hotel staff talked for weeks about her abusive treatment of servants, waiters, bell-boys, and the drivers of her cars.’17
She continued to socialise, attending occasional dinner parties with a 26-year-old companion, Claude Roland. In 1974, it was rumoured she would marry Prince Borromeo, the ageing ruler of the Borromean Islands and an old friend, but she was becoming increasingly aggressive and forgetful. At one dinner party that year, gesturing towards John Utter, she asked, ‘Who’s he? . . . I never saw him before in my life.’18
The Vogue editor-in-chief, Diana Vreeland, found her confused when she visited:
She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend – very rare, you know . . . So we were talking after dinner, the two of us. And then suddenly she took hold of my wrist, gazed off into the distance, and said, ‘Diana, I keep telling him he must not abdicate. He must not abdicate . . .’ Then, suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked back at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.19
The friends began to stop coming or being invited.
She increasingly suffered ill health with broken legs and cracked ribs. In February 1976, she was admitted to the American Hospital with an intestinal haemorrhage – arriving with her own maid and linen, the latter changed daily. To fund medical treatment, Blum had quietly begun to sell possessions, some on the open market, others to friends – Nathan Cummings bought a dining-room table, some silver, and a Meissen Tiger dinner service.
In May 1976, France Soir published pictures of her in a chaise longue on the terrace at Route du Champ d’Entraînement. ‘The Duchess looked pitiful. Her tiny shrunken body was being lifted by a nurse. Her legs were cigarette-thin and they dangled uselessly. Her hair was tied tightly back in a knot. Her head lolled helplessly on her chest. There was a close-up of her face and she looked a little like a Chinese mandarin, but more like a dead monkey.’20 Blum sued for ‘wrongful intrusion on her privacy’ and was awarded 80,000 francs damages from each photographer.
Later that month, Wallis was admitted to the American Hospital with a bacterial infection, remaining until September. The photograph of her leaving would be the last glimpse the public would have of her. The following month, the Queen Mother arranged to see the Duchess on a visit to Paris, but Wallis was too ill to receive her. Instead she sent roses with the message ‘In Friendship, Elizabeth’. The feud was over.
The Duchess was lonely, depressed and longed to die. Two nurses took care of her, working in shifts of three around the clock. Circulatory problems meant she could no longer use her hands or feet and she had to be carried everywhere. She spent most of the time in a wheelchair and was now spoon-fed by a nurse; her weight dropped to eighty-five pounds. Soon she would lose the power of speech, be blind and on an intravenous drip. To keep her entertained, a pianist was brought in to play medleys of her favourite songs, such as ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’.
Blum had dismissed most of her staff, including her secretary, Joanna Schultz – John Utter had left in the autumn of 1975 with neither pension nor severance pay, after she accused him of colluding with Mountbatten for the return of the Duke’s papers. By 1980, the thirty-two staff had been reduced to the butler, Georges Sanègre, his wife Ophelia the housekeeper, Martin the gardener-cum-chauffeur, the laundress, and the Duchess’s Portuguese maid Maria. The pugs had also gone – given away after the Duchess could no longer bear their barking.
Aline, Countess of Romanones, one of the few allowed past the gatekeepers, Maître Blum and Doctor Jean Thin, was shocked by the change in her friend when visiting her in 1984:
This time Georges directed me through the boudoir to her bedroom, where she was seated in the wheelchair, with her back to the door, looking out at the trees and garden. A nurse was with her. Her hearing was excellent, and she turned her head and smiled. Our eyes held for a moment before she turned back for want of something to say, and I was choked by the great difference in her. The hair around her face was white, due to not having been dyed in a long time. The hair was still long and thick, done in a braid pulled down and folded under at the nape of her neck.
She wore a blue wool jacket, and on the sofa behind her were her favourite pillows, one stitched with the words ‘You can never be too rich or too thin’, the other with ‘Don’t worry. It never happens’. Her bed had been replaced with an adjustable hospital one. Although she looked neat and seemed not to be in pain or unhappy, I could see that this fastidious woman would certainly not want to receive her friends any longer. No fancy dress, no makeup, no nail polish – and grey hair!
I pulled up the chair she used at her dressing table and sat down beside her. She was looking at me, and her face had a sweet, almost timid expression. Placing her hand on mine, she asked, ‘Who are you, my dear?’
I saw that it embarrassed her that she did not know. I said, ‘I’m Aline.’
‘Oh, Aline dear, forgive me.’ She patted my hand. ‘Look at the way the sun is lighting the trees. You can see so many different colours. Tell David to come in. He wouldn’t want to miss this.’21
On 24 April 1986 Wallis died, aged eighty-nine, of heart failure brought on by pneumonia. Three days later, the Lord Chamberlain flew to collect her body to make the same journey that her husband had made almost exactly fourteen years earlier.
From RAF Benson it was taken to St George’s Chapel at Windsor for a thirty-minute private funeral attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Baba Metcalfe, Diana Mosley, Lady Dudley and the Countess of Romanones. A bearer party of Welsh Guards carried her coffin to the quire and at the conclusion of the service it was carried out to Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.
‘The service, with much processional pageantry, is beautiful, but deliberately excludes emotion,’ wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary:
After the service, when talking to Robert Runcie in the Cloisters, I ask him when he last attended the funeral of a person whose name was nowhere mentioned from beginning to end. He says: ‘No never.’ . . . Overall it was an odd occasion: all the grandeur and pageantry of a Royal funeral, yet with a cold heartlessness. No hospitality whatever was offered to the mourners: not so much as a glass of sherry or a cup of tea.22
Laura, Duchess of Marlborough added to the invitation in her scrapbook: ‘A sad day, the Queen looked furious, the Queen Mother almost danced behind the coffin.’23
Wallis was buried beside her husband, but set apart from the other royal graves. Her gravestone simply reads: ‘Wallis, Duchess of Windsor’. She would not be designated HRH even in death.
Almost immediately Mohamed Al Fayed took over the lease of the Bois de Boulogne home at a nominal cost, on condition he restore it to its Windsor heyday.
Some jewellery was left to Princess Alexandra, the Duchess of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent and some friends, but most was sold to benefit the Pasteur Institute’s research into AIDS. Some 230 lots were sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva within a year of her death, raising seven times the estimate – $50,281,887. Amongst those who bid were Elizabeth Taylor, who bought a diamond and platinum brooch in the shape of Prince of Wales feathers for $567,000, and Calvin Klein.
In February 1998, Sotheby’s auctioned off the rest of the Windsor possessions, including a slice of their wedding cake – neatly wrapped in a white silk box with their signatures – for $29,000, his wedding morning suit for $27,000, the Brockhurst portrait of Wallis was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery for $107,000, the Munnings painting for $2,312,000, two Cecil Beaton sketches of Wa
llis that had hung in her bathroom for $310,000, and the abdication desk for $415,000.24 Designer Tommy Hilfiger bought many of the furnishings for a new house in Connecticut.
It was the end of an era.
1 Romanones interview, quoted King, p. 486.
2 Bryan and Murphy, p. 563.
3 £4.7 million and £1.1 million today.
4 His godchildren included: Edward Brownlow, son of Perry; Alexander Guest, son of Winston; David Metcalfe, son of Fruity; David, Marquess of Milford-Haven; David Seely, 4th Baron Mottistone; and David, Earl of Westmoreland.
5 The annual allowance was worth £67,000 today.
6 Bryan and Murphy, p. 549.
7 20 June 1972, Roy Strong, Splendours and Miseries: The Roy Strong Diaries 1967–87 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 105.
8 21 January 1983, Kenneth Rose, Vol. 2, pp. 68–9.
9 Higham, Wallis, pp. 484–5. Also Parker, pp. 297–8.
10 Kenneth de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover. This is supported by Ziegler, pp. 680–1 and Vickers, p. 10.
11 Daily Express, 23 July 1977.
12 Now £9.2 million.
13 Just over £300K.
14 Charles Murphy to Joe Bryan, 10 March 1973, Mss 5.9 B 8405:97–119, Virginia Museum of History and Culture.
15 Bryan and Murphy, p. 561.
16 Interview Francine Sears, 8 May 2020.
17 Birmingham, p. 267.
18 Bryan and Murphy, p. 566.
19 Diana Vreeland, DV (Knopf, 1984), p. 68.
20 Blackwood, p. 110.
21 ‘A Bold Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986.
22 Rose, Vol. 2, p. 138.
23 Thanks to Amy Ripley for supplying this.
24 In today’s prices, $29K is worth $47K; $27K is worth $44K; $107K is now $175K; $2,312,000 is $3,820,000; $310K is $512K and $415K is $680K.
CHAPTER 24
Relationships
‘The Duchess rather baffled me,’ remembered her wartime PR spokesman, René MacColl. ‘I was never at my ease with her. What causes one human being to fall madly in love with another is occasionally clear to third persons. More often it remains a mystery to the onlooker. So far as I was concerned, it was emphatically a mystery in this case.’1
It is a question that has continued to intrigue. Was the Windsors’ relationship totally harmonious or did the couple feel they had to pretend to live out the love story that everyone wanted, even if it was not true?
‘I am well aware that there are still some people in the world who go on hoping our marriage will break up. And to them I say, Give up hope, because David and I are happy and have been happy for twenty-four years, and that’s the way it will continue to be,’ Wallis told McCall’s magazine in 1961:
For my part, I have given my husband every ounce of my affection, something he never had a great deal of in his bachelor’s life. Notice, I use the word ‘affection’. I believe it is an element apart from love, the deep bond one assumes as a part of marriage. You may know the phrase ‘tender loving care’; it means much the same thing. It means doing the things that uphold a man’s confidence in himself, creating an atmosphere of warmth and interest, of taking his mind off his worries.2
Is that true? Certainly the Duke remained besotted with her all his life. Lord Birkenhead was later to write:
No one will ever really understand the story of the King’s life . . . who does not appreciate . . . the intensity and depth of his devotion to Mrs Simpson. To him she was the perfect woman. She insisted that he be at his best and do his best at all times, and he regarded her as his inspiration. It is a great mistake to imagine that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship, and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual comradeship . . . He felt that he and Mrs Simpson were made for each other and that there was no other honest way of meeting the situation than marrying her.3
Winston Churchill noticed how:
He delighted in her company, and found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who knew him well and watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul. This experience which happens to a great many people in the flower of youth came late in life to him, and was all the more precious and compulsive for that fact.4
The evidence for her affection for him is less apparent. Wallis had enjoyed the status and social contact that her relationship with the Prince of Wales brought, but it is doubtful that she was ever in love with him, or she fully considered the implications of the relationship. After George V died, she suddenly found herself involved in events she could not control. This included a relationship with a man so obsessed with her that he was prepared to commit suicide if she would not stay with him, and even to forsake the throne. By the time she wished to extricate herself from the relationship, she was stuck.
As far back as the cruise on the Nahlin in August 1936, Diana Cooper had noticed that Wallis did not want to be left alone with the King. She wrote in her diary: ‘The truth is she’s bored stiff with him, and her picking on him and her coldness towards him far from policy are irritation and boredom.’5
One area of hurt throughout their relationship was her status and how she was treated. It began as soon as he abdicated, with long telephone calls to Austria about finances and status, and continued throughout the thirty-five years they were married, much of her venom directed against his family.
‘But of course her great mischief was that she went at him morning, noon and night and right up to one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning, steaming up against his family,’ remembered Kenneth de Courcy. ‘She went on and on and on and on.’6
‘The duchess was a complicated person – cold, mean-spirited, a bully and a sadist,’ observed Dr Gaea Leinhardt, stepdaughter of Wallis’s ghost writer, Cleveland Amory. ‘My parents found the duke not very bright, a wimp, and basically a very sad man. He had made an appalling choice and knew that he had taken the wrong path and now had to live with the consequences. They found him pathetic.’7
Yet it some ways it was Wallis’s very dominant manner that most appealed to the Duke. Writing to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward in January 1920, he had told her:
You know you ought to be really foul to me sometimes swerties & curse & be cruel; it would do me worlds of good & bring me to my right senses!! I think I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt & soft. I feel that’s what’s the matter with me.8
There was certainly a strong masochist and Dom/sub aspect to the couple’s relationship, both sexually and in everyday life. ‘She was harsh, dominating, often abominably rude,’ wrote Philip Ziegler in the official life. ‘She treated the Prince at the best like a child who needed keeping in order, at the worst with contempt. But he invited it and begged for more.’9 ‘She dominated the Duke but he did not just put up with it, he actually liked it,’ remembered Cleveland Amory.10
Mona Eldridge, who met the Windsors on numerous occasions whilst working for the Woolworth heiress and socialite Barbara Hutton, later wrote:
Barbara also believed that Wallis had a sense of having been cheated by life. At times she would sound bitter and implied that her husband had failed her, that he had not kept his promise. She had a way of denigrating him by reminding him that he had let her down again. People on her staff told me how she would reprimand the Duke like a harsh mother with a naughty child, not infrequently reducing him to tears. Paradoxically, this only caused him to cling more tightly to her.11
Charles Murphy remembered on one occasion a journalist called on their Paris home to collect a manuscript from the Duke:
to hear the Duchess rant at him for littering the dinner table with his papers: ‘I’ve got twenty guests dining here in two hours! Why didn’t you make this mess somewhere else?’ The dining room was his
only office and he had no other choice, replying, and the journalist never forgot his exact words, ‘Darling, are you going to send me to bed in tears again tonight?’12
‘He was like a child in her hands,’ Lady Alexandra Metcalfe told Cleveland Amory. ‘Poor little man, he was given hell; it was a stranglehold she had over him.’13 ‘He never had any real mothering, she never had any children,’ remembered Kenneth de Courcy. ‘Both needed each other.’14
Weak and below average intelligence, the Duke needed a woman to dominate him with that abjectness which former girlfriends had found so disconcerting. The result was that he was completely dependent on his wife.
In many ways the Duke had never properly grown up physically or emotionally. Childhood mumps may have led to a hormonal imbalance. Alan Lascelles wrote in his diary:
Wise old Dawson of Penn told me several times that he was convinced that EP’s moral development (not physical) had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence, and that wld (sic) account for this limitation. An outward symptom of such arrestation, D of P wold (sic) say, was the absence of hair on the face of the subject. EP only had to shave about once a week.15
Frank Giles, showering with the Duke in 1940 after a game of golf, noticed that ‘he had absolutely no hair on his body, even in the places where one would most expect it to be.’16
The Duke worshipped his wife, trusted her, felt secure with her and was restless when she was not there. ‘When she was present, he watched her every movement, listened to her every word and responded to every inflection in her voice,’ remembered Mona Eldridge. ‘He often said that nothing was too good for her.’17
‘His wife was constantly in his thoughts,’ later wrote Dina Hood. ‘If he went out alone he looked for her the moment he returned home. If she went out without him and remained away for any length of time, he became nervous and preoccupied.’18 She added, ‘I have seen him in the middle of a haircut in his dressing room get up and run to his wife, leaving his astonished hairdresser agape.’19 ‘If he was in a room and she came in, the moment she came in the room he became vivacious, he became happy, he became full of life, it was just amazing,’ recollected Dudley Forwood.20
Traitor King Page 30