The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor

by Anna Pasternak

  Years after the abdication, Elsa Maxwell asked Wallis why she devoted so much time and attention to her clothes. Was it not a frivolous pursuit when she had so many other responsibilities and her extravagance merely invited criticism? Wallis replied candidly: “My husband gave up everything for me. I’m not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.”39

  “Wallis was a much more artistic creature than people thought,” said Nicky Haslam. “She liked beautiful things and had a keen eye.”40 Haslam, who worked on American Vogue in the 1960s, was introduced to Wallis in New York by the magazine’s social editor, Margaret Case. “We were seated at a booth at the back of the Colony restaurant in New York, on the best banquette, and in walked the duchess,” he recalled. “Every single head turned to look at her and cutlery literally dropped. She was wearing an impossibly wide pink angora Chanel tweed with a black grosgrain bow at her nape. At the end of a wonderful lunch, she took a discreet peek at her watch, which was tied to her bag by a delicate chain. It was Fulco di VerduraI who told her that it was common for women to wear a watch.”41

  Having the sartorial edge hugely increased Wallis’s confidence. Of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales at Melton Mowbray, she said her clothes would give her “the added assurance that came from the knowledge that in the dress was a little white satin label bearing the word Molyneux.”42

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  It was her sister-in-law, Maud, who suggested that Wallis should be presented at court on June 10, 1931. Ernest Simpson’s rank as a captain with the Coldstream Guards gave him the requisite social status, but Wallis was reluctant to go. Once again, as for her debutante ball in her youth, she did not have the funds to buy the splendid clothes the occasion demanded. However, Wallis’s friends persuaded her that she would be foolish to turn down the generous offer of her girlfriend Mildred Anderson, to present her. “Determined to get through the ceremony in the most economical manner,” she wore the dress that Connie Thaw herself had worn to be presented, while Thelma Furness lent her the train, feathers and fan. She treated herself to a large aquamarine cross and white kid three-quarter-length gloves,43 writing to her Aunt Bessie that her aquamarine jewelery “looked really lovely on the white dress.”44

  Of the magnificent pageantry of the event, what impressed Wallis “to the point of awe” was the grandeur that invested King George V and Queen Mary, sitting side by side in full regalia on identical gilt thrones on their red dais.45 Standing behind the two thrones were the Prince of Wales and his uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Ernest Simpson, in his uniform of the Coldstream Guards, looked on proudly as Wallis and Mildred performed deep curtsies to the sovereign, then to the queen. The Prince of Wales later recalled of Wallis: “When her turn came to curtsy, first to my father and then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.”46 After the ceremony, Wallis was standing with Ernest in the adjoining state apartment, in the front row, watching as the king and queen walked slowly by, followed by other members of the royal family. As the Prince of Wales passed her, Wallis overheard him say to his uncle: “Uncle Arthur, something ought to be done about the lights. They make all the women look ghastly.”47

  That evening, at a party hosted by Thelma Furness, Wallis met the Prince of Wales again. Over a glass of champagne, he complimented Wallis on her gown. “ ‘But, Sir,’ she responded with a straight face, ‘I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly.’ ” The prince “was startled,” Wallis noted with some satisfaction. “Then he smiled. ‘I had no idea my voice carried so far.’ ”48

  The prince was captivated. No British woman would have dreamed of speaking to him in such a direct and provocative way. “In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive,” he wrote of that encounter. “From the first I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.”49

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  Prince Edward was born on June 23, 1894, at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his parents, the Duke and Duchess of York. An extraordinary prophecy was made about the great-grandson and godson of Queen Victoria, the queen then aged seventy-five and in the fifty-seventh year of her reign. The socialist pioneer Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to shatter the polite rejoicing about the royal birth. Instead, he hollered: “This boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation . . . in due course . . . he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.”50 As a predictor of Edward’s royal destiny, the Scot proved uncannily prescient.

  Baptized by the archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of holy water from the River Jordan, in the presence of Queen Victoria, “David,” as his family always called him, would experience a strict, unhappy and largely loveless childhood. His mother showed little maternal warmth to her six children, while her husband, who in 1910 became King George V, was even more severe. A dogged disciplinarian, with rigid rules on dress and protocol, he ensured that any errant childish behavior was bullied and beaten out of his offspring. “My father was the most terrible father, most terrible father you can imagine,” Edward’s brother Prince Henry later said.51 “He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British,” said Edward.52 Handwritten on his father’s desk were the words that Edward was made to memorize as a young boy: “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.” These were the lines of an early-nineteenth-century American Quaker Stephen Grellet.

  As a sense of duty and responsibility cleaved through every aspect of his royal bearing, the Duke of York made Edward fully aware of the influence of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Her children and grandchildren ruled the courts of Europe. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, was the Dowager Empress of Germany; Kaiser Wilhelm II was the queen’s grandson; and the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was her grandson by marriage. The empire over which Queen Victoria ruled was the most powerful in the world; it embraced a quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population. On her death in 1901, this empire passed to her eldest son, Edward VII, and then to George—an empire Edward VIII would inherit, albeit briefly.

  As Edward later wrote of his childhood: “For better or worse, royalty is excluded from the more settled forms of domesticity. . . . The mere circumstances of my father’s position interposed an impalpable barrier that inhibited the closer continuing intimacy of conventional family life.”53 Despite having five siblings and being particularly close to Bertie and later, George, his younger brother by eight years, Edward recalled that “We were lonely in a curious way.”54 Denied association with other children their own age and home educated by uninspiring tutors, behind the turreted facades of the royal households, there was emotional sterility. “Christmas at Sandringham,” Edward reflected, “was Dickens in a Cartier setting.”55 The writer James Pope-Hennessy described Sandringham as “a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue.”56 The Honorable Margaret Wyndham, who served as Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary from 1938, recalled: “At Sandringham if the king were present they put on Garter ribbons, tiaras and diamonds for every family dinner even without guests.”57 Freda Dudley Ward later said of the prince’s childhood: “If his life was a bit of a mess, his parents were to blame. They made him what he was. The duke hated his father. The king was horrible to him. His mother was horrible to him, too. . . . The duke loved his mother but his mother wouldn’t let him love her. She always took the king’s side against him
.”58

  In 1907 twelve-year-old Edward was dispatched, in tears, to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight with the bizarre assurance from his father that “I am your best friend.” Edward quickly settled in as a cadet. His letters home were full of boyish excitement: he wrote to his parents of meeting the explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott, and he performed in a pantomime.59 Instead of inheriting his father’s unassailable sense of duty, a duty that was “drilled into” him, Edward, burdened by his regal inheritance, longed to break free. Even as a young boy, he said, he “never had the sense that the days belonged to me alone.”60 Edward progressed to officer training at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he struggled academically—he came bottom of his year—but proudly reported to his parents that he was “top in German.” Perhaps the only thing he excelled in as a boy was German, learning first from his German nursemaid and then from Professor Eugene Oswald, an elderly master who had previously taught his father the language. “I liked German and studied diligently,” he said, “and profited from the hours I spent with the professor.”61

  The death of King Edward VII on May 6, 1910, after a reign of nine years, interrupted Edward’s summer term at Dartmouth for three weeks. Now heir apparent, he was called home to Windsor for his sixteenth birthday. His father informed him that he was going to make him Prince of Wales (the king’s eldest son does not automatically become Prince of Wales; he is anointed by the monarch when deemed appropriate). Edward returned to Dartmouth with a new title, the Duke of Cornwall, and considerable wealth from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. For the first time, he had an independent income. “I do not recall that this new wealth gave rise to any particular satisfaction at the time,” he said.62

  In his last term at Dartmouth, both Edward and Bertie (who had followed his brother’s trajectory from Osborne to Dartmouth, where Edward had “assumed an older brother’s responsibility for him”) caught severe cases of mumps, followed by measles. Two-thirds of the cadets were hospitalized in this epidemic. It is believed that Edward then developed orchitis, a complication of mumps that left him sterile. The knowledge that Edward would not be able to produce an heir may have been significant later, in the establishment’s push to have brother Bertie (George VI) as king.

  The coronation of George V in June 1911 thwarted Edward’s “first serious ambition.” He was forced to forgo the goal of his officer-cadet life and miss a training cruise in North American waters. After completing his naval training, Edward underwent a “finishing” program in preparation for his future full-time role as Prince of Wales. Assumed to be studying for Oxford while his parents traveled to India for the coronation durbar, Edward instead opted to play cards with his grandmother Queen Alexandra, and helped her with jigsaw puzzles.63 Nevertheless, Edward went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1912. Befitting the future king, he had a special suite of rooms installed for him, including his own bath in the first private undergraduate bathroom.

  Missing the camaraderie of his Royal Navy friends, he was “acutely lonely” and “under the added disadvantage of being something of a celebrity.”64 He soon realized that the skills he had acquired in the navy, which included an ability to “box a compass, read naval signals, run a picket boat, and make cocoa for the officer of the watch,” held little sway with learned Oxford dons.65 The prince was tutored by the most eminent scholars, including Magdalen’s esteemed president, Sir Herbert Warren, but Oxford did nothing academically for him. Personally, he seemed uncertain of himself, encouraging familiarity from fellow undergraduates, then swiftly acting with regal hauteur. He found himself happiest on the playing fields, discovering at Oxford a love of sport; he played football, cricket and squash. He beagled with the New College, Magdalen and Trinity packs, took riding lessons—progressing to become a fearless horseman. He punted, gambled, smoked, drank to excess and even smashed glasses and furniture as part of the high jinks of the Bullingdon Club—a club which, the New York Times explained to its readers, represented “the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the ‘young bloods’ of the university.”66

  Like Wallis, Edward displayed a strong early interest in fashion, developing his own flamboyant style. Rather than starchy formal garb, he preferred an eccentric mix of sports coats, loud “Prince of Wales checks” (named after his grandfather, but popularized by Edward), bright tartans, baggy golfing plus fours and boyish Fair Isle sweaters. This was to become a source of conflict with his sartorial stickler of a father. When Edward entered the breakfast room at Buckingham Palace one morning, proudly sporting a suit with the new style of trouser turnups, the king bellowed: “Is it raining in here?”67

  “Edward was completely different to any of the rest of the family,” recalled John Julius Norwich, who, as a young man, knew both Edward and Wallis. “George V was very stiff and regal yet here was his son, a boy in a peaked cap, smoking and winking.”68 The young prince “was dandyish and out to shock,” said David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito. “He wanted to break tradition. He wore his signet ring in the continental way, just to be different. The British wear it facing inward, to use on seals, whereas the Europeans wear it facing out. It was very arriviste of the prince to wear his continental style as no British gentleman would ever have done this.”69

  During his Easter and summer vacations in 1913, Edward went to visit his German relatives. “The purpose of these trips was to improve my German and to teach me something about these vigorous people whose blood flows so strongly in my veins. For I was related in one way or another to most of the many Royal houses that reigned in Germany in those days,”70 Edward wrote. Later in life, “the duke loved to sit with my wife and speak perfect German (with a slight English accent) for hours with her,” recalled Count Rudolf von Schönburg, husband of Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, who was related to Edward through Queen Victoria. “Nothing made him happier than speaking at length about his German relations, to whom he was very close. He was very pro-German and would have liked to avoid a war between the two countries.”71

  “Later in his life, the prince lived in France for over fifteen years, yet he never spoke a word of French,” said John Julius Norwich. “He would start a conversation with a Frenchman in German. As you can imagine, his fluent German did not go down well in 1946 in France. To him, there was English and there was ‘foreign,’ and his ‘foreign’ was German. The prince really was incredibly stupid.”72

  Edward left Oxford before taking his finals and seemingly without the slightest intellectual curiosity, claiming: “I have always preferred outdoor exercise to reading.”73 He was now fully confirmed as the playboy bachelor prince. Painfully thin, he subjected himself to punishing physical regimes throughout his twenties and thirties. He liked to sweat a lot—he wore five layers to exercise74—then party into the early hours, existing on minimal sleep and even less food. According to Lord Claud Hamilton, the Prince of Wales’s equerry from 1919 to 1922, Edward took after his mother, who, “frightened of becoming fat, ate almost nothing at all.”75 Her ladies-in-waiting regularly went hungry as meals consisted of tiny slivers of roast chicken, no potatoes, and a morsel of vegetables, followed by a wafer.

  Edward loathed Buckingham Palace so much, with its “curious musty odour,”76 that he refused to take meals there and only ate an orange for lunch. This became his daily routine. “His amazing energy makes him indulge frantically in exercise or stay up all night,” observed Chips Channon.77 Boyish and hyperenergetic, Edward never had to shave and preferred nightclubs to formal society. Like a more sophisticated Bertie Wooster, he even took up the banjulele. His favorite question to courtiers was the decidedly unroyal, rebellious teenage riposte: “Can I get away with it?”

  “The late king and queen are not without blame,” Chips Channon wrote at the time of Edward’s abdication in 1936. “For the twenty-six years of their reign, they practically saw no one except their old co
urtiers, and they made no social background whatever for any of their children. Naturally, their children had to find outlets and fun elsewhere, and the two most high-spirited, the late king (Edward) and the fascinating Duke of Kent (George) drank deeply from life.”78 Edward partied his way through the last London season before the outbreak of the Great War with gusto. With his angelic looks, electric charm and personality dedicated to pleasure, not pomp, he infuriated his parents with his dilettante behavior.

  Yet when Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, Edward was desperate to unveil his courage and serve his country. Commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, he was vexed to find himself denied a combat role. It was a bitter blow—‘ “the worst in my life,”79 he said later. Sent to France in 1914, he was kept well behind enemy lines at general headquarters, reduced to conducting basic royal duties such as visits and meeting and greeting dignitaries. Complaining he was the one unemployed man in northern France, he did eventually manage to get into the battle zone, where he observed the horrors of trench warfare. The fighting on the Somme, he wrote in a letter home, was “the nearest approach to hell imaginable.” In 1915 a shell killed his personal chauffeur.80

  “Manifestly I was being kept, so to speak, on ice, against the day that death would claim my father,” Edward wrote, expressing his mounting frustration. “I found it hard to accept this unique dispensation. My generation had a rendezvous with history, and my whole being insisted that I share the common destiny, whatever it might be.”81 When he was promoted to captain and awarded the Military Cross, Edward’s feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing spiraled. He wrote to his father on September 22, 1915: “I feel so ashamed to wear medals which I only have because of my position, when there are so many thousands of gallant officers who lead a terrible existence in the trenches who have not been decorated.”82