The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor
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In May 1938, exactly a year after their divorce, Wallis wrote to Ernest, who was then in New York. In her valediction, she seems aware that she is at another crossroads in her life. “Ernest dear, what can I say when I am standing beside the grave of everything that was us. . . . Oh my very dear Ernest I can only cry as I say farewell and press your hand very tightly and pray to God. Wallis.”15 For Wallis, living in eternal limbo raised the specter of her peripatetic childhood. She longed for stability in the form of her own domain.
After a brief spell renting a house in Versailles, that spring the duke and duchess settled on a splendid large white-walled villa, known as La Croë, in the French Riviera. Set on the Cap d’Antibes in twelve acres of land stretching down to the sea, the villa boasted a dramatic swimming pool hewn out of rock, and a dining room that could seat twenty-four. Taking a ten-year lease on the property gave Wallis the opportunity to create the home that she and the duke yearned for. The press made a fuss about the ostentation—a bath in the shape of a swan was reputedly made of gold. The swan bath had nothing to do with Wallis, as it had been installed by Sir Pomeroy Burton, a British newspaper proprietor who had built the villa eleven years earlier.
With considerably superior taste to Sir Pomeroy’s, Wallis set about transforming the property. All her belongings from Cumberland Terrace, along with the duke’s prized possessions from the Fort and York House, were taken from storage at Frogmore and shipped to France. “My principal contribution to the decor,” Wallis said, “was a blue and white color scheme, to harmonize with the blue of the sea and the white clouds that drift lazily across the perpetually azure sky.”16 The author Rebecca West said admiringly of the duchess: “There are not many women who can pick up the keys to a rented house, raddled by long submissions to temporary inmates, and make it look as if a family of good taste had been living there for two or three centuries.”17
While never doubting her style, close friends felt that Wallis tried too hard to re-create the grandeur of royal palaces in the Windsors’ residences. Wallis assumed that such decor would comfort the duke, whom she believed expected to be surrounded by the trappings of royal life: coronets on plates and liveried footmen. At the Fort, what Edward had valued most was the relative simplicity and cozy informality he had created there. Wallis, however, ever conscious that because of her, the duke was a royal-in-exile, built a minicourt around him. “While I could not hope to re-create on the Riviera the splendor of the life into which David had been born,” she later explained, “at least he seemed happy in his new role of husband and man of the house.”18
At La Croë, Winston Churchill was amused to find “everything extremely well done and dignified. Red liveries, and the little man himself dressed up to the nines in the Balmoral tartan with dagger and jabot etc. When you think that you could hardly get him to put on a black tie and short coat when he was P of W, one sees the change in the point of view.”19 A flag bearing the Prince of Wales’s feathers flew above the property, the Garter banner of the Prince of Wales hung in the hall, while a large red-and-white tent adorned with the heraldic feathers was used for guests to undress in before bathing.
Every day, a program for the duke was put on the table in the hall. A guest at La Croë, Prince Jean-Louis de Lucinge, saw it and told his friend Diana Mosley about it. The duke liked to know who the guests, if any, were going to be, where they were dining, what time he was meeting someone for golf. “None of it was important,” said Diana Mosley, “but all his life he had been accustomed to a programme, and the duchess wisely saw to it that he should have one.”20 The one thing Wallis was unable to fulfill was the “the calendar blocked out as much as a year ahead.” The duke missed the daily inflow of red boxes from Whitehall bringing the never-ending news of state business. “It was devolved upon me to attempt to fill for him this perhaps unfillable gap,” Wallis recalled. “I sometimes used to say to myself that today I have to be Canada, tomorrow I have to be New Zealand, and perhaps the next day the Fiji islands.”21
The duchess did her best to cocoon the duke from the more mundane aspects of nonregal life. Like all royals, he had never carried cash in his life, so Wallis took care of all payments to tradesmen and oversaw the domestic side of their life; and she reined in his overzealous purchases of everything from tens of thermos bottles to boxes of thermometers, the former king still in the mind-set of buying in bulk for his many royal palaces. La Croë had sixteen servants, including two chauffeurs, an English butler and a French chef. According to Baron de Cabrol, “under the influence of the Windsors, the Château de la Croë was to become a cult café society venue, which it was good form to visit at least once a season and take tea served by manservants in livery and white gloves.”22
Elsa Maxwell recalled: “I found that the duchess had an unusual flair for making a home highly attractive. Her food is superb and she knows how to make the most of furnishing and decorations. So, after dinner, she took us on a group tour of the château, which featured, among other things, a gold bath-tub.” Elsa was particularly taken by the duchess’s dressing table in her bedroom, which was decorated with mementoes of her courtship by the duke. “The top of the table was painted with the first formal invitation she received from the then Prince of Wales, fragments of a letter, a bouquet of flowers with the royal crest, a pair of white evening gloves, a fan and a pair of golf socks evidently worn by the duke on a weekend in the country.” Downstairs in the drawing room, tables were laid out for bridge and gin rummy.23
“In this extremely grand seaside ambiance,” wrote the Baron de Cabrol, “the Windsors received the whole world, and among them their neighbour Willy [Somerset] Maugham, the Aga Khan, Churchill and his wife Clementine”—the Churchills would later celebrate their fiftieth anniversary there—“Leopold, the ex-King of Belgium, likewise a neighbor, Noël Coward, and many other English friends, including the Dudleys, the Seftons, Sir John Aird, the Buists, and the Moncktons. From time to time they also gave dinners in the deluxe hotels round about, particularly the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where they would go gambling at the casino and at the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes.”24
Harold Nicolson was staying with their neighbor Somerset Maugham when the duke and duchess came to dinner. The duke entered with his “swinging naval gait, plucking at his bow tie,” recalled Nicolson. The duke explained their late appearance: “ ‘Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away.’ He had said it. The three words fell into the circle like three stones into a pool. Her (gasp) Royal (shudder) Highness (and not one eye dared to meet another).”25 When Nicolson talked at length with Wallis, she told him that she both wished and intended to return to England, explaining: “I don’t want to spend all my life in exile.”26
Two days later, the writers Nicolson and Maugham were invited back to lunch at La Croë. Nicolson noted the elaborate food: melon filled with tomato sorbet, eggs with crab sauce, chicken with avocado pear salad, a pudding which apparently only Queen Alexandra knew how to make and fruit. The duke, who eschewed lunch, ate nothing, but waited patiently for his cup of tea at five o’clock. Nicolson considered that he looked “epileptic—a brick red face against which his fair hair and eyelashes look artificial.”27 When Nicolson told the duke that he was going back to London the next day, “his eye twitched in pain.”28 At the end of the summer, the Windsors left the Riviera for the Hôtel Meurice in Paris.
That August, the ever-loyal Sir Walter Monckton had visited George VI at Balmoral, where the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was one of the guests, with the aim of negotiating a return for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. As soon as the subject of the Windsors arose, the king insisted that his wife, the queen, must participate in the discussion. Clearly, Elizabeth’s influence would predominate. Chamberlain thought that the right course of action would be for the Duke of Windsor to be treated as soon as possible as a younger brother of the king, in order to take some royal functions off his brother’s hands. “The King himself,” Monckton recorded, “though he was n
ot anxious for the duke to return as early as November 1938 (which was what the duke wanted) was not fundamentally against the Prime Minister’s view. But I think that the queen felt quite plainly that it was undesirable to give the duke any effective sphere of work.”29 Monckton’s own view was that the queen “thought that she must always be on her guard because the Duke of Windsor, to whom the other brothers had always looked up, was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King.”30 Monckton had the unenviable task of telling the duke, desperate to come back to England, that he must postpone his return until at least the new year.
That November, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, on their return from a safari in Kenya, visited the Windsors in Paris. At the Hôtel Meurice, they were met by the British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, and his wife, and taken to the Windsors’ suite. Princess Alice greeted her American sister-in-law with a kiss. The Daily Mail’s Paris correspondent, Harold G. Cardozo, reported: “There was no doubt that the Duke of Windsor was delighted at seeing his brother again and being able to discuss with him details of his own possible future journey back to England to see his mother, Queen Mary, and other members of the Royal Family. It is expected here that the visit will be in time for the Christmas festivities at Sandringham.”31
This expectation proved wildly inaccurate and optimistic. The following day, the Court Circular noted that “the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester have arrived from abroad.” It omitted to mention that they had visited the Windsors. All Princess Alice sourly ventured to Queen Elizabeth of their encounter was that she felt shown up by Wallis’s elaborate purple dress and diamond clips in her hair, as she had worn a simple blue dress, the “red dust of Kenya hardly out of my hair” from the safari.32
When Neville Chamberlain came to Paris that month, Edward requested a meeting with him. “This seemed to David a simple and direct way for him to ascertain the feelings of the Palace and the Government on the question of his returning to Britain,” Wallis recalled. “It was always in David’s mind to retain his British ties; the idea of becoming an expatriate had never occurred to him.”33 Wallis was unclear as to whether the matter was for the British government or the king to decide. She was astonished that when she asked Edward, he could not give her an answer. “In fact,” he said, “I doubt whether anyone can. Because there’s no precedent, this is a twilight zone.”34
Edward reported to Wallis that during his meeting with Chamberlain, the prime minister was “cordial, interested, but non-committal.”35 He proposed to discuss the matter with Parliament and the king.
“David waited hopefully,” Wallis observed. But as the weeks passed, there was no word from Downing Street or the palace. When he finally made inquiries, “all he could ever find out was that the Government considered that the question of David’s returning to Britain was a private matter between him and the king, and the Palace considered it a matter in which the Government should tender advice; and there things lay.”36
“The Palace and Downing Street played a sort of game with him,” said Diana Mosley, “each putting the blame for delay upon the other, turn and turn about. Perhaps neither wished to occur the odium of telling him outright that the reason was they emphatically did not want a living legend to come back to England and had hit upon this simple way of stopping him.”37 The royal embargo on the Windsors showed no signs of abating. When, earlier that year, the king and queen paid a state visit to France, the Duke of Windsor was excluded from the proceedings. Courtiers discouraged the British ambassador in Paris from inviting the duke to diplomatic functions.
With his nostalgia for Fort Belvedere, the duke must have been especially aggrieved to receive an anonymous letter, telling him that all at the Fort was desolation. The swimming pool was full of leaves; weeds were growing between the paving stones. “The King has said he is going to let the house and grounds go to ruins so bad that you will not be able to live in it again. I think this is wicked,” warned the secret correspondent.38
A Gallup poll conducted early in 1939 showed that 61 percent of the British population wanted the Windsors to return (16 percent said they were against it, and 23 percent said they did not know).39 Yet George VI would not relent. By this time, his relationship with his brother had been eroded over constant financial wrangles. The duke felt cheated out of some of his pension and argued over the value of Sandringham and Balmoral; most of all, his resentment burned over the Crown’s attempt to link payment of his allowance from investments in his share of royal properties with his promise not to return to England without the consent of the government. In March 1939 Edward was positively blistering with rage. He had offered to pay £4,000 as half the cost towards an effigy, by Sir William Reid Dick, for his father’s tomb in St. George’s Chapel. Although he realized that he would not be invited to its dedication, he wanted proper acknowledgment of his financial contribution. When this was omitted in the press, he felt that the last vestiges of family loyalty and affection had been obliterated. He wrote a furious letter to his mother and from then on ceased to communicate with her, until the death of his beloved brother the Duke of Kent in 1942. “Queen Mary was actually very fond of the Duke of Windsor and was extremely upset by him,” said Hugo Vickers. “From that point on, he ignored her birthday on May 26 each year, which caused her great distress. She always sent him a gift and a card for his birthday on June 23, which he never acknowledged.”40
As the family squabbles continued, both sides were left feeling that the other had behaved disgracefully. It did not augur well for a return to Britain for the duke and duchess, far less for any form of welcome back into the family fold. At the heart of all the duke’s grievances lay his family’s refusal to accept Wallis. Edward simply could not accept that this was anything other than a temporary aberration which would surely change. Each time the offence was renewed, he felt the same anguished shock, then fury. Colin Davidson, a young, forthright equerry to the duke, warned Edward that “every time they heard in England that he was doing it [referring to his wife as HRH] the reconciliation and arrangements for his return were probably retarded.”41 Davidson also wrote to Monckton of the shabby treatment of Wallis: “The public must soon realise that she is making him very happy and that she must have some reward. And that the only way to manage him is to refrain from what he thinks is insulting him. If only his own family would sink their own personal disinclinations to treat her as his wife, I feel that they would be doing a National Service. She may be a little common and twice divorced but nevertheless she is the legal wife of the ex-King of England and after all he did abdicate. He was not kicked out.”42
In the late autumn of 1938, the Windsors took another temporary lease, on a house in Paris, at 24 Boulevard Suchet. Close to the Bois de Boulogne, it was ideal for walking Pookie, Preezie and Detto, their family of adored dogs, and was not far from the golf links at Saint-Cloud. “The house was more luxurious than beautiful,” Diana Mosley recalled. “It was big, with several drawing rooms, ideal for parties. The duchess took endless trouble with furnishing and decorating this house.”43 The Comtesse René de Chambrun remembered dining there, where footmen in scarlet livery lined the stairs. On the dining room table, lit by copious candles, were gold goblets filled with lilies.44 The duke and duchess would probably have spent gentle years at the house, entertaining and dividing their time between Paris and La Croë, had war not broken out.
Both brothers, the Duke of Windsor and George VI, were united in wanting peace at any price, reflecting the views of the majority of the British public. As a veteran of the Great War who had seen the horrors of modern, industrialized conflict, the duke could not bear to contemplate another generation decimated by total war. The king fervently supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler, but the duke was more aligned with Churchill on the issue of rearmament. While the Foreign Office prevented the king from sending Hitler a direct plea for peace (“as one ex serviceman to another’), the duke sent a p
ersonal appeal on August 27, 1938. It was futile: the Nazi–Soviet pact had just been signed and Germany was poised to invade Poland. The duke, however, never ceased to claim “If I’d been King, there’d have been no war.”45
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Wallis remembered the outbreak of war vividly. The third of September 1939 was an especially hot and humid day, even for the Côte d’Azur. The Windsors were at La Croë. Fruity Metcalfe was visiting. That morning, the French footmen and assistant gardener received a postal summons to report for military duty. They wanted to personally say good-bye to the duke, who shook their hands and wished them well. Unable to reach London by telephone, as the French circuits were jammed, the duke and duchess, along with Fruity, decided to go for a swim. As the trio descended down the lane to the sea, over which hung the pool, a servant hurried out to tell the duke that the British ambassador was calling from Paris. Ten minutes later, Edward returned and said: “Great Britain has just declared war on Germany, and I’m afraid in the end this may open the way for world communism.” He then dived into the swimming pool.46