By the end of the war, which saw the collapse of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties, the Prince of Wales seemed ordained to protect the House of Windsor.83 It was during the Great War that King George decided that, due to anti-German sentiment in Britain (according to the popular press, even dachshunds were being pelted in the streets of London), the royal family must change its Germanic-sounding surname. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor.
From the war years onwards, throughout his twenties and early thirties, Edward did his duty, dazzling the world as the fairy-tale prince. He visited forty-five countries in six years, travelling 150,000 miles. On a trip to Canada, his right hand became so badly bruised and swollen from too many enthusiastic greetings (which he described as pump handling), that he was forced to proffer his left hand for fear of permanent impairment. Adored and feted like a film star, Edward began to behave like one too. His mood swings became all too familiar amongst his equerries and advisors, as he oscillated between buoyed-up exhilaration and lacerating self-pity. He became irritated with official rigmarole and seemed unable to focus on diplomatic matters. On Christmas Day 1919, before embarking on a five-month trip to the Antipodes, he wrote to his private secretary, Godfrey Thomas: “Christ, how I loathe my job now and all the press ‘puffed’ empty ‘success.’ I feel I’m through with it and long to die. For God’s sake don’t breathe a word of this to a soul. No one else must know how I feel about my life and everything. . . . You probably think from this that I ought to be in the madhouse already. . . . I do feel such a bloody little shit.”84
Another cause of friction with his parents was Edward’s obsession with nightclubs and partying in the burgeoning Jazz Age. King George wrote to Queen Mary of his horror, having heard reports that Edward danced “every night & most of the night too,” fearing that “people who don’t know him will begin to think that he is either mad or the biggest rake in Europe.”85
Edward found some solace in his romantic life, yet here too, he was irreverent. Instead of seeking a suitable single, eligible bride with whom to settle down, he quickly established a penchant for married women. The patience of his advisors was wearing thin. Tommy Lascelles wrote: “For the ten years before he met Mrs. Simpson, the Prince of Wales was continuously in the throes of one shattering and absorbing love affair after another (not to mention a number of street-corner affairs).”86 It was Lascelles’s contention that the prince never grew up; that he remained morally arrested. Stanley Baldwin agreed: “He is an abnormal being, half child, half genius. . . . It is almost as though two or three cells in his brain had remained entirely undeveloped while the rest of him is a mature man.”87
Perhaps this partly explains the prince’s preference for married women and his desire that they play a bossy, maternal role. His first serious relationship was with the British-born socialite Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward, who was half American and had two teenage daughters, Penelope (Pempe) and Angela (Angie), on whom Edward doted. Between March 1918, when the prince first met Mrs. Dudley Ward sheltering in the doorway of a house in Belgrave Square during an air raid, and January 1921, the prince wrote her 263 letters. In total, during their relationship, which lasted over a decade (surviving his affair with Thelma Furness but not his infatuation with Wallis), the prince penned over two thousand letters to Freda Dudley Ward, many addressing her as “my very own darling beloved little mummie.”88 “It is quite pathetic to see the prince and Freda,” Winston Churchill observed after traveling with them on a train. “His love is so obvious and undisguisable.”89
“Freda, whom I knew, was like Wallis in that physically, she was fairly boyish. As far as their relationship went, the prince was a masochist who liked harsh treatment,”90 said Nicky Haslam. “Freda was lovely,” recalled John Julius Norwich. “She was the prince’s mistress . . . and everybody liked her.”91 Chips Channon described her in his diaries as “tiny, squeaky, wise and chic.”92 “Mrs. Dudley Ward was the best friend he ever had, only he didn’t realise it,” said his brother, Prince Henry.93 Later in life, Mrs. Dudley Ward was asked if her first husband, William Dudley Ward, minded about her affair with the Prince of Wales. “Oh, no,” she replied. “My husband knew all about my relationship with the prince. But he didn’t mind. If it’s the Prince of Wales—no husbands ever mind.”94
A hint of Edward’s desire to be dominated in his relationships lies in a letter he wrote to Freda on March 26, 1918. “You know you ought to be really foul to me sometimes sweetie & curse & be cruel. It would do me the world of good and 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.”95
* * *
Wallis Warfield was twenty years old when, in November 1916, she married her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. She had first met the US Navy pilot the previous April during a trip to Florida, when he was stationed at the Pensacola Air Station. The day after she arrived in Pensacola Wallis wrote to her mother: “I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.”96 Ever since she left Oldfields, Wallis, like her contemporaries, aspired to marriage as the sine qua non of achievement. When “Win,” dark haired with brooding looks, proposed eight weeks after their meeting, Wallis was excited to be one of the first debutantes of her coming-out year to get engaged. As much as Wallis thought that she loved Win, a man she barely knew, she later admitted: “There also lay in the back of my mind a realization that my marriage would relieve my mother of the burden of my support.”97
Despite her mother’s fears that a navy life, with no permanent home, constant postings, little money, as well as long and lonely waits for her husband to return from sea, would be too regulated for someone as spirited as her daughter, Alice eventually gave the union her blessing. If only she had not. Wallis discovered on her short, grim honeymoon with Win at a hotel in West Virginia that he was an alcoholic. Wallis—who had only ever had a small glass of champagne at Christmas, as her puritanical family extolled the evils of alcohol—had never tasted hard liquor. West Virginia was a dry state, which further incensed Win, who pulled a bottle of gin from his suitcase. Once inebriated, he would become aggressive, cruel and violent.
Her new life as a navy wife, first in San Diego and then, when Win took a desk job in Washington, DC, became unbearable. Win’s insecurity, frustration at his dwindling career and jealous rages were sadistically vented on his young bride. But when Wallis decided to leave and seek a divorce, her mother was aghast. No Montague had ever been divorced. It was unthinkable. Even her stalwart Aunt Bessie said that it was out of the question. Her Uncle Sol was apoplectic. “I won’t let you bring disgrace upon us,” he shouted.98
Wallis persevered with the marriage. Her mother cautioned her that “being a successful wife is an exercise in understanding.” Wallis retorted bitterly: “A point comes when one is at the end of one’s endurance. I’m at that point now.”99 She moved in with her mother, who was also living in Washington. As Uncle Sol refused her any financial help towards a divorce, her prospects looked bleak. Wallis was suitably thrilled when, in 1924, her cousin Corinne Mustin invited her to go on her first trip to Europe, to Paris. Win continued to write to Wallis and told her that he had been stationed in the Far East. He begged her to join him in China. Perhaps because Wallis could not afford a divorce and was uncertain of her financial and domestic future, she decided to give the marriage yet another go. Win met her in Hong Kong, and soon enough, the familiar patterns recommenced. He became jealous, moody, quarrelsome and offensive. When he began drinking before breakfast, Wallis finally had had enough. She drew their eight-year marriage to a close, seeking a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai.
“Wallis was now twenty-eight and her character was formed,” according to Diana Mosley. “She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company; an addition to a
ny party with her high-spirited gaiety.”100
Wallis embarked on a year’s sojourn in Peking, staying with her good friends Katherine and Herman Rogers. She later described her Eastern sojourn as her “Lotus Year.” As a divorced woman travelling in the Far East on her own, she displayed a spirited independence ahead of her time. According to a friend of Duff Cooper’s in Paris, a French woman who knew Wallis as Mrs. Spencer in Peking, Wallis was “always good-natured.”101 Unfortunately, when news of Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales broke in 1936, her year in China was used against her. It was said that she had visited the “singing houses” of Shanghai and Peking. Unsavory gossip tut-tutted, suggesting that she had acquired “sophisticated sexual techniques” which she then used to entrap and manipulate the Prince of Wales and she became the butt of cheap jokes: “Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.”
Wallis nursed a secret that hit at the very heart of her femininity. She was infertile and had never menstruated. As a young girl, it is unlikely that Wallis would have known that anything was wrong. Perhaps the absence of periods would have been her first sign at puberty that all was not as expected. It has been speculated that Wallis may have had a “disorder of sexual development,” or DSD, a modern term encompassing a wide range of rare genetic conditions. Others have claimed Wallis may have had androgen insensitivity syndrome—that is, she was born genetically male, with the XY chromosome. If this had been the case, the male sexual organs would have been internal and barely noticeable and she would have had an extremely shallow vagina. Yet this is unlikely, as Wallis lacked other physical traits associated with the syndrome. We also know that she would go on to have a hysterectomy in middle age.
Whatever the cause of Wallis’s infertility, it was a source of profound sadness for her. Over three marriages she bore no children, but not out of choice. Though she and Edward seemed to adore children, their lack of parenthood united them as outsiders to a familial club. Instead, they lavished love on their dogs, which became their child replacements. Wallis later wrote that she mourned never being part of the “miracle of creation” and that her “one continuing regret” was never having “known the joy of having children.” The secret inner pain of childlessness must have made the gossip and slurs against her so much harder to bear.102
One of the reasons that Wallis kept herself skeletally thin was that she worried that if she put on any weight she would “bulk up in a masculine way.”103 Diana Mosley said that Wallis “loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion.”104 Elsa Maxwell agreed that Wallis ate very little at the dinner table. When she challenged Wallis about this, she always replied defensively: “I’m an ice-box raider.”105 Clearly any snacking was confined to minuscule amounts. Wallis and Edward were similar in this respect; they both favored starvation diets and punishing regimes, each obsessed with retaining an almost prepubescent slenderness.
Wallis expressed a traditional femininity through her clothes: her sartorial perfectionism—a love of Cartier and couture—served to create an exaggeratedly feminine outline that was more elegant than sexual. Always immaculately groomed, there was a delicacy about her appearance—from her skirts and dresses cinched in at the waist with tiny belts to neat little pairs of heels. Adorned as she was with exquisite statement jewels, there was nothing androgynous about Wallis’s style. She certainly was no “sex siren” or “harlot,” as many made her out to be. Although Wallis often liked to be the center of attention socially, in other ways she came across as old-fashioned and reserved; indeed, her upbringing in Baltimore had been ladylike to the point of prudish. Astonishingly, she told Herman Rogers, who eventually gave her away at her wedding to Edward in 1937, that she “had never had sexual intercourse with either of her two husbands.”106 Nor had she “ever allowed anyone else to touch her below” what she described as “her personal Mason-Dixon Line.”107
Both Wallis and Edward shared insecurities about their sexual identities. Confiding this in each other may have helped forge a strong secret bond between them. Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, whose husband was ambassador to France from 1954 to 1960, knew the Windsors in Paris and confided to Hugo Vickers that “the prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform”—she “called it a hairpin reaction. She said that the duchess coped with it. I commented: ‘She was meant to have learned special ways in China.’ ‘There was nothing Chinese about it,’ said Lady Gladwyn. ‘It was what they call oral sex.’ ”108 Although she could be openly flirtatious in a social setting, Wallis was, as Nicky Haslam observed of her, sassy rather than sexy: her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive. “Wallis wasn’t obsessed by sex,” says Haslam. “If anything, she was rigidly undressable in that she was prudish. Everybody made such a thing of her going to brothels in China, but everyone did that in those days. It was the fashionable thing to do. To have a good look.”109
“It was just the sort of thing that the press would say, that she was a twice-divorced American adventuress out for what she could get,” said John Julius Norwich. “Everything was a bid to discredit her but she was the furthest thing from kinky. You never got the feeling that she was particularly sexually motivated. She was a perfectly normal American woman but not in the least bit depraved. And there was nothing more normal than Ernest Simpson and he fell in love with her.”110
Winston Churchill summed up the controversial couple’s mutual attraction: “the association was psychical rather than sexual, and certainly not sensual except incidentally.”111 Churchill always believed that Wallis was good for Edward; he defended the couple to the last. “Although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness,” he said.112
* * *
Wallis met Ernest Simpson through Mary Kirk, who had now become Madame Raffray, on her marriage to the Frenchman Jacques Raffray. Raffray, a veteran of the Great War, had originally come to America to train US troops to fight in France. Wallis, then living in Washington, enjoyed staying with the Raffrays at their New York apartment. She spent Christmas of 1926 with them awaiting her divorce from Win. Ernest, who was also in the process of getting divorced, from his American wife, Dorothea, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, was frequently asked for dinner or to make up a fourth for bridge. A friendship developed, and when both were granted divorces, Ernest asked Wallis to marry him.
A graduate of Harvard, Ernest had been born in New York of an American mother and a British father. After brief service as a captain in the British army, he began work in the family shipping business, Simpson, Spence & Young. Tall, with blue eyes and a neat moustache, he was a fastidious dresser. In the early 1920s, he was much in demand on the London scene and a regular dance partner of Barbara Cartland. (She later described him as a “handsome young bachelor, who was to figure dramatically in the history of England seventeen years later.”113) The letter Wallis wrote to her mother on July 15, 1928, regarding Ernest’s marriage proposal is revealing: “I’ve decided that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast. . . . I can’t go wandering the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Also 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall settle down to a fairly comfortable old age.”114 After her peripatetic childhood and abusive marriage to Win, Ernest represented financial and emotional stability, comfort and respectability. Wallis worried briefly that his wholesome ponderousness was the polar opposite to her southern emotionalism. She was fun, spontaneous and extravagant. He was methodical and cautious. Later, he was dismissed amid the upper-class circles into which the Simpsons were propelled as “crashingly middle class” and a bore.
Ernest was transferred to run the British offices of his shipping fir
m, and in May 1928, Wallis followed him to London. They married on July 21 at Chelsea Register Office. Wallis wore a yellow dress and blue coat that she had bought in Paris the previous summer. Although they considered the clinical nature of the register office ceremony “a cold little job,”115 she found their honeymoon “a blissful experience.”116 Driving through France, Wallis discovered that her husband was cultured, considerate and spoke French fluently. Ernest may not have been the most exciting or diverting company, but he was a thoroughly decent gentleman. His great-nephew Alex Kerr-Smiley remembers: “Ernest was just a nice person. He was an extremely nice uncle. He was almost like our fairy godfather.”117
After the harrowing uncertainties of the previous decade, Wallis, aged thirty-two, could finally relax. Looking forward to a new life in London, she “felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood.”118 Her domestic equilibrium was to prove short-lived. Three years later, the dull conformity of her marriage was shattered by the arrival in their steady realm of the dazzling Prince of Wales.
* * *
I. Fulco di Verdura was an influential Italian jeweller who designed for the duchess. His career took off when he was introduced to Coco Chanel by Cole Porter.
2
* * *
Ich Dien
After their honeymoon, Wallis and Ernest moved into a small hotel in London while they searched for a suitable home. Ernest’s sister, Maud, helped them to find a furnished house in Upper Berkeley Street, which they rented for a year. Wallis, a natural and dedicated homemaker, was keen to secure an unfurnished property on which she could put her decorative stamp.
Initially, Mrs. Simpson was lonely in London, knowing no other Americans. Unaccustomed and resistant to the formality of English mores, she felt like “a stranger in a strange land.”1 Her sense of isolation heightened in October 1929 when she learned that her mother was seriously ill. Alice had been diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain. As Ernest could not leave his business, Wallis crossed the Atlantic alone. She spent three weeks with her ailing mother, who died shortly after Wallis returned to London. The “sadness” that Wallis carried inside was “a long time lifting.” She grieved bitterly for her adored mother, who she felt was the only person who truly understood her.2
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 4