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

by Anna Pasternak

  The British embassy in Washington dispatched an experienced press officer called René MacColl to coach the duke before the Windsors’ longed-for trip to America. A year earlier, the British government had prevented the royal couple from stopping in the States en route to the Bahamas, but now the duke and duchess were finally able to escape the scorching heat of the islands for the mainland. They were given permission for an extended trip, on the proviso that it did not clash with the Duke of Kent’s presence in Canada and then Washington during the first week of September.

  “That family of my husband’s is always going to snub me,” Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie. “So one has to face the up to the fact, and face up to these humiliating situations which will forever give the American press a chance to belittle us.”24 Two weeks later, she reported: “We have been asked to stay in a hotel rather than in a private house or on Long Island. . . . There seem to be too many jealousies awakened the other way. . . . The world is funny—but not so funny as England’s royal family.”25

  “MacColl arrives next Friday,” Wallis informed Monckton. “I understand he’s very nervous over it all. I believe he thinks HRH is for ‘appeasement,’ ‘negotiated peace’ and all the rest of the lies pinned on the duke.”26

  On September 25, the Windsors arrived in Washington. Unquestionably imprudent, they traveled with 73 pieces of luggage. (They owned 118 traveling trunks, each with a numbered lid.) The duchess, keen to flaunt her style and lavish jewels, having been confined to parochial Nassau, would have been wiser to exercise restraint at a time when Britons were being strictly rationed. The superfluity of their luggage, the splendor of their suite at the Waldorf Towers when they visited New York, Wallis’s determination to make up for the previous year’s deprivation with insatiable shopping, lent an unwelcome air of extravagance which the press leapt upon. Apart from this, the couple conducted themselves well and did nothing to antagonize or embarrass Anglo-American relations. Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, told Baba Metcalfe that the duke had behaved “most sensibly and ordinarily” except for their “ridiculous amount of luggage of which the papers were so critical. . . . I was a little outraged at being presented with a bill for £7.10.0 for hire of a lorry to take their luggage to and from the station.”27

  At a Washington embassy reception, both Lady Edwina Mountbatten and Lady Diana Cooper curtsied to the duchess—but Edwina d’Erlanger, wife of Baron Leo d’Erlanger, did not, on the grounds that Wallis was an American like herself. Lord Halifax, a friend of Queen Elizabeth, had met the duchess only once before. He now admitted to being “impressed with her general dignity and behaviour and . . . adroit good manners.” Although he acknowledged that he was still puzzled as to how the king could have given up everything for her charms, he said: “she conversed quite easily and never said anything that had any east wind in it—again a mark of wisdom.”28

  On October 13, the duchess at last received her triumphant homecoming to Baltimore, where she and the duke were greeted by the mayor and a two-hundred-thousand-strong crowd, cheering and waving Union Jacks and American flags. But the highlight of their trip was lunch at the White House with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt. Lord Halifax reported to the king: “the duchess’s behaviour was completely correct and in one tiny detail I thought she acted with considerable tact by making Mrs. Knox go in to luncheon in front of herself.”29 Yet the British Press Service Report of the Windsors’ American visit came to the unedifying conclusion: “The general impression created was that of a rich and carefree couple, travelling with all the pre-war accoutrement of royalty and with no thought either to the suffering of their own people or the fact that the world is at war.”30

  On their way back to the Bahamas, the couple visited the duke’s ranch in the hills of Alberta, Canada, which Edward had purchased over twenty years earlier. It was whilst she was there that Wallis learned of the unexpected death in England of her former best friend from school, Mary Raffray, who later married Ernest Simpson, from an aggressive form of breast cancer. She and Ernest had had a son together, Ernest Henry Child Simpson, who had been evacuated to friends in North America at the start of the war. Mary had yearned to be reunited with her child before she died. As a return flight across the Atlantic in the middle of war was not possible, Winston Churchill had come to their rescue. He arranged for a government plane for Mary, who was so frail she had to be carried on and off the aircraft on a stretcher, then taken across the runway in an ambulance. This was Churchill’s tacit recognition, which could not be made public, of Ernest Simpson’s exemplary behavior during his divorce from Wallis. Just before she died in October 1941, Mary wrote in her diary: “Ernest still thinks the Windsors are perfect.”31

  After Mary’s death, Wallis wrote to Ernest: “God is difficult to understand at times for you deserved a well-earned happiness. If I can ever soften the blow that fate has dealt you, the duke and myself are ready to help in any way you may ask. Dear Ernest, I know you very well and all your honest and beautiful qualities, I know the depth of your sufferings—your son will be a stronghold for the future.”32

  On December 7, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States formally entered the war. Back in the Bahamas, Wallis’s relief work became more vital. “Wallis is very busy fixing up the RAF canteen,” wrote her assistant Rosa Wood. “I really admire the way Wallis has thrown herself into all her various jobs. She really is wonderful and does work hard. I do hope that people everywhere are realising all the good she is doing. She has such charm and is always amusing to be with I really don’t know what I would do without her.”33 Years afterwards, servicemen remembered the numerous plates of bacon and eggs personally served by the duchess. In 1942 Wallis compiled a book of her favorite southern recipes, donating the royalties to the British War Relief Society. Eleanor Roosevelt contributed the foreword.

  The duke continued, all through the war, to hound Churchill with his endless requests: Wallis required minor medical attention in the United States; staffing arrangements were unsatisfactory at Government House. But most assiduous were his comments on Wallis’s status in England. He never missed an opportunity to drive this point home. When asked by the secretary of state for the colonies to submit a list for the New Year honors, he wrote to Churchill: “I am now asking you, as Prime Minister, to submit to the king that he restores the Duchess’s royal rank at the coming New Year not only as an act of justice and courtesy to his sister-in-law but also as a gesture of recognition of her two years of public service in the Bahamas. The occasion would seem opportune from all angles for correcting an unwarranted step.”34 George VI’s response to Churchill on December 9 was that he was “sure it would be a mistake to reopen the matter. . . . I am quite ready to leave the question in abeyance for the time being but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty.”35

  It was easier for the royal family to believe scurrilous rumors than to consider hard and consistent evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, the duke rarely helped matters. His meddling became tiresome and his new cohorts of friends were regularly deemed unwise. On January 14, 1942, one of the Windsors’ closest friends in the Bahamas, the Swedish millionaire industrialist and founder of Electrolux, Axel Wenner-Gren, in whose yacht the duke and duchess had traveled to Miami two years earlier for the duchess to undergo dental treatment, was placed on the American State Department’s Proclaimed List of Blocked Nationals. Friendship with someone suspected of being a Nazi collaborator did not make a good impression and Churchill wrote to the duke, warning him against having such individuals in his entourage. The duke was forced to sign a warrant that expelled Wenner-Gren from the Bahamas.

  In June 1942, the duke was in Washington when a mass protest sparked two days of rioting in Nassau. Several people were killed and much of the Bay Street commercial district was looted and burnt. The duke flew back to the Bahamas, where he increased wages to five shillings a day, enforced a curfew, banned public meetings and censored the press. The war
demanded labor and the duke secured an agreement from Washington that five thousand Bahamians should be recruited to work in the United States. The scheme, known as “the Contract,” employed a sixth of all males on the island and was deemed “a momentous achievement.”36 Under the duke’s tenure, a project also flourished whereby Americans were employed in the Bahamas to work side by side with local laborers at airports critical to US military strategy.

  Despite these positive achievements, the Duke of Windsor’s governorship was blighted by his handling of the murder of his friend Sir Harry Oakes. The millionaire was found bludgeoned to death in his bed on July 8, 1943, his corpse covered with feathers and set alight. The duke, ill suited emotionally to dealing with anything like murder, became overinvolved, creating a series of almost farcical blunders. He tried to silence the press and brought in two detectives from Miami, who fabricated fingerprint evidence and pushed for the arrest of Oakes’s playboy son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny. So flimsy was the evidence presented in court that Marigny was acquitted. Rumors flared that the duke was involved with Sir Harry in illegal currency trading and thus prevented a proper murder inquiry. Oakes’s killing still remains a mystery and has forever been fertile ground for sensational headlines and slander against the duke, who most likely did nothing more than act foolishly.

  Sir Orville Turnquest, no fan of the duke’s—he considered him “weak” and “racist”—concluded that the royal couple “set about establishing positive roles for themselves throughout their stay, which served to benefit the islands and its people.”37 Of Wallis, he declared: “For most of the duration of World War Two, the Duchess of Windsor served prominently as First Lady of the Bahama Islands, playing a leading and an outstanding role.”38

  During the Windsors’ time in the Bahamas, two private matters caused the duke immense suffering. In January 1942, his beloved uncle Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, died, age ninety-two. This saddened Edward greatly. Wallis felt that “to David the passing of his Uncle Arthur represented the passing of an age—the secure and golden age of the monarchy in which his own splendid youth had been spent.”39 But nothing devastated him as much as the news that arrived by telegram late one evening that summer. His adored brother the Duke of Kent had been heading towards Iceland in a flying boat on August 25. It had crashed near Wick, in Scotland, killing Prince George, the pilot and all others on board. Edward was consumed with grief. Wallis watched his agonies, feeling helpless: “These two deaths brought home to me the essential inner loneliness of every human being.”40 On each occasion, the duke insisted that a memorial be held in the Nassau cathedral. At the second service, at Edward’s request, his servant and piper, Fletcher, joined by the piper of the Cameron Highlanders, played the moving lament “The Flowers of the Forest.” It must have been a truly desolate period for the duke, exiled from his family, excluded from the small comforts of shared grief, mourning his dear brother alone in the baking heat. “I had hoped that under the impact of these two blows so close together there would have been a drawing together of the family,” Wallis recalled. “A softening of all hearts. But even these shared sorrows proved not enough.”41

  It was poignant that a few months earlier, in April 1942, Wallis had tried, without her husband’s knowledge, to make “one last try to reach his mother and to heal the breach between them.”42 Wallis, who had been so close to her own mother, was genuinely pained by her husband’s estrangement from Queen Mary. The bishop of Nassau and chaplain to the Royal Navy, the Right Reverend John Dauglish, had been recalled to Britain by the archbishop of Canterbury. Aware that Queen Mary might receive him, Wallis wrote a generous-spirited letter to her mother-in-law:

  Madam,

  I hope that you will forgive my intrusion on your time as well as my boldness in addressing Your Majesty. My motive for this letter is a simple one. It has always been a source of sorrow and regret to me that I have been the cause of any separation that exists between Mother and Son and I can’t help feeling that there must be moments perhaps, however fleeting they may be, when you wonder how David is.43

  Wallis gently suggested that if Queen Mary wished to hear news of her son, she might like to send for Bishop Dauglish, who could fill her in with “the little details of his daily life,” before concluding:

  The horrors of war and endless separations of family have in my mind stressed the importance of family ties. I hope that by the end of the summer, we will be nearer to the victory for which we are all working so hard and for which England has so bravely lighted the way.

  I beg to remain,

  Your Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, Wallis Windsor44

  “It is a nice letter,” admitted the king, before adding uncharitably: “I wonder what is the real motive behind her having written. I must say I do feel a bit suspicious of it!!”45

  Queen Mary did receive the bishop, who wrote to Wallis, describing his audience with the monarch’s mother. She asked about her son with interest and the work he was doing. When Bishop Dauglish approvingly mentioned the duchess, he met “a stone wall of disinterest.” However, when Queen Mary wrote to Edward about the Duke of Kent’s funeral, she added the line: “Please give a kind message from me to your wife. She will help you to bear the sorrow.”46

  “David was astonished,” Wallis said. “Now what do you suppose,” he asked in genuine bewilderment, “has come over Mama?”47 Wallis did not reply, and it was only thirteen years later, when she wrote her memoirs, that the duke found out the truth.

  Typically, Edward leapt on his mother’s tiny gesture of goodwill, hoping to force a more concrete reconciliation. His obsessive and pushy tendencies regularly undid whatever minuscule steps forward had been made. A more restrained and strategic approach could have resulted in a very different outcome for the duke and duchess. “If you gave the Duke of Windsor an inch, he took a mile,” explained Hugo Vickers. “He could be hugely whiney, especially to Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.”48 Edward immediately wrote to his mother, detailing the love and comfort Wallis had given him, explaining that their long silence had been as painful for him as he was sure it was for her. He ended saying that he hoped he would have “the intense pride and pleasure of bringing Wallis to see you.”49

  As ever, on that, Queen Mary would not yield.

  In May 1943, Churchill addressed Congress; the Windsors, who were in Washington, went to hear his speech, seated in the diplomatic gallery. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, noted that “as the duke descended to his seat in the front row, he got as much clapping as Winston, or more, by which we were surprised.”50 Chips Channon noted: “The newspapers gave a vivid account of Winston’s speech to Congress, and report that the Windsors were cheered on their arrival and departure: never before have they had an ovation in the USA. This is Winston’s doing, and his attentions to them have obviously affected American opinion: people here [at Westminster] are a touch annoyed.”51

  On June 2, the duke and duchess visited the Fifth Avenue studio of the celebrated photographer Dorothy Wilding. They were first photographed separately, then together. As the duke sat for his solo portrait, his expression was melancholy. When Wilding asked what would prompt a smile, “he turned his head and looked across to the dressing room where his wife was receiving the expert attentions of Charles of the Ritz to her hair. ‘You just wait till the Duchess comes out,’ he said simply. ‘She’s the one who’ll make me smile.’ ”52

  Despite their ever-strengthening union, by the spring of 1944, the Windsors as a couple were becoming increasingly disconsolate. Desperate to leave the Bahamas, they began to agitate over their postwar future. The duke was keen for a roving commission in America, cooperating with the British ambassador but acting independently. Despite his popularity, given his notoriety and capacity for faux pas, it was more likely that the government would consider him a rogue diplomat than a safe pair of hands. But the duke never stopped badgering Churchill for a suitable role. Wallis believed that Edward “had been dumped here solely by f
amily jealousy.”53 To a friend she wrote: “They murdered Sir Harry Oakes once. They will never stop murdering the Duke of Windsor. . . . It is his own family who are against him.”54

  In May 1944 the question of what the duke might do after the war was raised in court circles. Tommy Lascelles, by then King George VI’s private secretary, did not want Edward in England. He said that the duke’s presence would be “a constant agony (I use the word advisedly) to the present king, which might have really serious consequences.”55

  Winston Churchill, though, did not abandon the Windsors and made several more attempts to heal the rift within the royal family. The duke, who met with Churchill in September 1944, knew that it was court protocol and the right of every colonial governor and his wife to be received at Buckingham Palace, following an official posting. He pleaded with Churchill that he and the duchess be received by the king and queen, which would have “the merit of silencing, once and for all, those malicious circles who delight in keeping open an eight-year-old wound that should have been healed officially, if not privately, ages ago.” Would Churchill not try to persuade the king and queen to “swallow ‘the Windsor pill’ just once, however bitter they may think it is going to taste?”56

  Typically, the king and queen did not relent. They made the case that in wartime the diplomatic rulers of Britain’s colonies could not expect to be received by the royal family as in times of peace. Churchill delayed replying for three months, as the “King sent a most cold reply” to his request for a fraternal greeting to the duke. The queen told Tommy Lascelles that she and Queen Mary had drawn up a signed statement to clarify that “they were not prepared to receive the Duchess, now, or at any time, for the same reasons they would not do so in 1936.”57 Churchill passed this bitter missive on to the duke, who was understandably outraged. To preserve his pride, he responded that if that was the state of things, he and the duchess would never return to Britain. Faced with the utter hopelessness of the situation, the duke pointedly resigned from the governorship of the Bahamas ten weeks before his term officially expired. His resignation was announced on March 15, 1945.