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

by Anna Pasternak

  The Windsors set sail on the short voyage from Nassau to Florida on May 3. Five days later, VE Day, the king and queen stood triumphantly on either side of Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, taking in the jubilation of the London crowds. Edward and Wallis lay aimlessly in the sun in Palm Beach wondering what to do and where to go next. The duke still hankered after some official position but, as one by one the possibilities for him, which had included governorships in Madras and Ceylon, were extinguished from London, it would seem that his public life was over. He was fifty years old.

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  Son Altesse Royale

  The Windsors spent the rest of the summer in the United States, pondering their future. They could have settled in America, or at the duke’s ranch in Alberta, but Edward, who was worried about money, having lost $100,000 drilling for nonexistent oil in Canada, did not want to pay taxes on his fortune. Wallis had infected him with her deep-seated sense of lack and constant anxieties over financial stability. “I hear all these stories that he has become so mean with money,” said Freda Dudley Ward, “that he never tips his servants. He didn’t used to be like that. She must have made him like that.”1

  The duke and duchess decided to return to France, where Edward enjoyed immunity from taxation (the French government having generously bestowed this benefaction on the former king). But it was Wallis, more than the duke, who favored France; she loved its couture, its cuisine, its ineffable chic. She was also astute enough to realize that the British were never going to offer Edward the recognition or role he craved, nor would his family cease their hostility towards the couple. For seven years after the war, the duke refused to settle and buy a house in France, still nursing hopes of returning to England or obtaining a suitable post representing his country abroad. On October 4, 1945, after spending a couple of weeks with his wife, Edward deposited Wallis in France and flew to London. He had asked his mother if he could stay with her at Marlborough House. Without Wallis by his side, he was welcomed. “I need scarcely assure you what a joy it will be to me to see you once again after all these years,” Queen Mary said, “for I have missed you very much indeed.”2

  The king had telegraphed from Balmoral to say that he would come down specially to see his brother. Queen Mary recorded on Friday, October 5: “Lunched with Bertie who arrived this morning from Balmoral. At 4 David arrived by plane from Paris on a visit to me—I had not seen him for nearly 9 years! It was a great joy meeting him, he looked very well—Bertie came to dinner to meet him.”3

  Mother and son both relished their time together; it was probably the longest they had spent, just the two of them, in their lives. Queen Mary delighted in “those nice talks on so many subjects in which both of us are interested.”4 She later wrote to Edward: “I have felt so much being cut off from you for such ages.”5 Yet she was on her mettle for any mention of Wallis, writing to the Countess of Athlone during this time: “I hope he does not bother me too much about receiving her—as nothing has happened since to alter my views about that unfortunate marriage.”6 The duke was uncharacteristically restrained. His last words to his mother were simple yet firm as to the limits to their reconciliation: “I can only ask that you remember that I am no longer a bachelor.”7

  In spite of conversations with the king and Tommy Lascelles, who told him “most frankly” that there could be no return to court life in England if he was with Wallis, Edward did not jettison his wish to spend part of the year in England with his wife. In March 1946 he wrote to Ulick Alexander, requesting that if Fort Belvedere was ever sold by the Crown, could he please be informed. The Fort was never offered to him. It languished, falling into further disrepair, until finally, in 1955, a ninety-nine-year lease was sold to the Honorable Gerald Lascelles, a distant relation of Tommy Lascelles. The building most loved by the former king passed from royal hands.

  It is a mark of Edward’s devotion to Britain that, even if he could not live there, he still wanted to return home in the event of his death. In August 1946 he obtained the king’s permission to erect a mausoleum in the grounds of Fort Belvedere, where he and the duchess could be laid to rest. An architect was summoned to the Fort to draw up plans but was informed that, for fear of vandalism, the site would be changed to Frogmore. As the Fort (and Frogmore) are on private royal lands, vandalism seemed unlikely. More likely, the move to Frogmore was calculated to allow the sale of the Fort, ensuring that the duke and duchess never came back there.

  The duke tried once again to harness the possibility of some official role in the United States, which the king was keen for his brother to have. Bertie was disappointed that it could not be arranged. It was the court, driven by Tommy Lascelles, now the king’s private secretary and keeper of the Royal Archives, who determined that there could be no place for the Duke of Windsor under the British Crown. Lascelles repeated to both the king and the duke that the British Empire was like a clock which had to be kept ticking. He and others had tried to take it to pieces a hundred times to fit in an extra wheel—the wheel of a former king. They had never found a way of doing so without damaging the works. When the duke remonstrated that the extra wheel had worked perfectly well in the Bahamas, Lascelles replied: “Ah, yes, but that was in wartime. The experiment had worked once but could not be safely repeated.”8 When Roger Sherfield, the British ambassador to the United States, was later asked by the duke if he and the duchess could come and stay at the Washington embassy, Sherfield agreed. Lord Sherfield soon heard from an angry Foreign Office that although British embassies were permitted to entertain the Windsors to meals, they should never be invited to stay.9

  “It was not King George who denied his brother, it was the government,” claimed Count Rudi von Schönburg. “The government had such an influence over the royal family. Everything that happened to the duke was political. The only government that behaved well towards them was the French government.”10

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor found on their return to Paris that the freehold of their house on the Boulevard Suchet had been sold. They could negotiate an extension only until April 1946. Later, they took another house, 85 Rue de la Faisanderie, a palatial yet rather gloomy residence that neither of them really liked but was suitable for grand-scale entertaining. Owned by the industrialist and philanthropist Paul-Louis Weiller, it was loaned rent free to the royal couple.11 Paris, that first winter after the war, was a grim city; the electricity was often cut off, restaurants were either closed or subsisted on black-market supplies, and ordinary citizens struggled for basic food and housing. It was good fortune for the Windsors that their close friend Duff Cooper was the first postwar British ambassador to Paris.

  On October 17, 1945, Duff wrote: “We dined with the Windsors. The electric light was out when we arrived. The house was beautifully lit with candles but the dinner could not be brought up except by electric lift so we had to wait for it until the electricity came on again. I hadn’t seen the Windsors since 1940. They have both got extraordinarily thin, but otherwise look very well and he seems as devoted as ever.”12

  Noël Coward met the couple for dinner at the British embassy, an elegant eighteenth-century building on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. “He loves her so much, and at long last I am beginning to think she loves him,” he confided to his diary. A few months later he wrote again: “The Windsors were charming. I like her, and I think she is now genuinely fond of him.”13 (Coward famously once said that “a statue should be erected to Mrs. Simpson in every town in England for the blessing she had bestowed upon the country.” He was referring to the removal of Edward VIII from the throne.)

  The real problem for the duke in France was his interminable boredom. “The duke used to bore my father stiff when he was ambassador,” said John Julius Norwich. “He would call to see him, plop down on the sofa and talk for two hours about his own asinine views on the world. He had nothing to amuse him apart from the duchess and nothing to fall back on.”14

  “The
dinner parties they gave or to which they were invited were impossibly tedious,” recalled Fred de Cabrol. “The duke had little to say, having few centres of interest outside golf and card games, and, if he did make a political remark, it was seldom to the advantage of the discussion.”15 After spending two successive Christmas Eves with the Windsors and other friends, Gore Vidal declared: “I like Wallis. She had a flapper’s wisecracking charm. David, as Wallis called him, always had something of such riveting stupidity to say on any subject that I clung to his words like the most avid courtier of the ancien regime.”16

  The duke’s empty existence consisted of trawling around Paris after the duchess, who was fully able to amuse herself with appointments at hairdressers, couturiers and beauty salons. She especially liked the Elizabeth Arden salon, where she rarely paid and had her own robe with the initials SAR (Son Altesse Royale—the French version of HRH) embroidered on the pocket.17 Then she would return home for her early-evening French lessons. The duke whined that when the duchess had her French lesson, “he had no one to talk to.”18

  Lady Monckton recalled visiting the Windsors in Paris, only to find Wallis had gone to the hairdressers. “The Duke had got himself into the most frantic state. He was pacing round and he couldn’t stop looking at his watch. ‘Why isn’t Wallis back? Why isn’t she back?’ he kept asking me. I tried to explain that it takes quite a time to have your hair set. One always had to explain that things took time to the duke. He always got so upset when Wallis was late coming back from fittings and things like that.”19

  For Wallis, Paris was the perfect city in which to indulge her obsession with fashion. According to Fred de Cabrol: “After a period wearing some of Schiaparelli’s cult outfits, such as the lobster dress, she went through the hands of Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent.”20 Wallis charmed everyone in the designers’ ateliers. “People who worked for the duchess nearly always became fond of her and Hubert de Givenchy is no exception,” said Diana Mosley. “Givenchy says that when it was rumoured that he was to make her dresses he was told [by people who did not know her] that the duchess never paid her bills; in fact, he found that she paid them on the dot.”21

  For thirty years the duchess employed the same hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris, born Louis Alexandre de Raimon. Wallis discovered him as a twenty-two-year-old stylist in Saint Tropez, catapulting him to become one of the most famous hairdressers in the world. The first time she called him, “she gave a thousand explanations as to what she wanted, and then I did her hair,”22 Alexandre remembered. “The next day I got another call. ‘What did you do to my hair?’ she asked. ‘I disobeyed you and did the exact opposite of what you requested,’ I admitted. ‘It’s wonderful!’ she said. ‘For the first time in my life, I woke up with my hair exactly as it was when I went to sleep. From now on, you will stay by my side.”23

  Alexandre did Wallis’s hair daily after her return from the Bahamas. The elegant but severe style, which Alexandre said he had “knitted” for the duchess, became her postwar trademark. The duchess introduced him to hundreds of high-profile clients. Later, propelled to New York, Alexandre, who created the chignon in the late fifties, became Hollywood’s most coveted hairdresser. His clients included Princess Grace, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. He adored the Windsors. “They were like parents to me,” he said.24

  Wallis also established her famed jewelry collection. As well as an icon for Cartier, she was a client of Fulco di Verdura, Harry Winston and Van Cleef & Arpels. Wallis loved bold statement jewelry, such as the two gem-set bib necklaces made by Cartier, one in 1945 with rubies and emeralds, the other in 1947 with amethyst and turquoise. After the war, the duke continued to work with Cartier on many pieces for the duchess, including the “Great Cat” series of jewels, which became legendary. The most magnificent, perhaps, was a sapphire and diamond panther lolling across an enormous Kashmir sapphire.

  In April 1946, when the lease expired on their house in Paris, they moved back south to Antibes. The duke preferred being at La Croë, which was more of a home to him than anywhere else since the Fort. Damage during the war, when Italians and Germans inhabited the house, was negligible; the resourceful duchess soon got the house pulsing with light and life again. By the end of the month, twenty-two staff had been recruited, in addition to the duke’s personal valet, Sydney Johnson, a young Bahamian man who had been with them since Nassau, and who would stay until the duke’s death in 1972.

  Of La Croë, Wallis proudly told Aunt Bessie: “I imagine outside the embassies it is the only house run in this fashion in France and probably England today.”25 As a major general, the duke was able to draw rations from the British army depot at Marseilles, which allowed them to entertain their friends with their inimitable prewar style. “You can’t imagine the sense of luxury at La Croë after the war,” said Daisy de Cabrol. “It was a really good villa and to amuse us, the duchess arranged to serve a dinner in a different room each night the ten days we stayed there.”26

  That autumn, the duke returned to England with Wallis. He made no attempt to ask for an invitation to a royal residence or even to contact his family. The Windsors stayed with their friends the Earl and Countess of Dudley at Ednam Lodge in Sunningdale. Laura Dudley, who became the Duchess of Marlborough on her fourth marriage and chatelaine of Blenheim Palace, referred to Ednam Lodge as their “suburban villa.” The Windsors hoped that their visit would be relatively low profile. Unfortunately, their stay created front-page headlines.

  The Windsors arrived with a huge caravan of luggage in three army lorries under the command of an officer of the Royal Army Service Corps. The duchess always traveled with a series of identical suitcases, in order not to draw attention to the one that contained her jewel box. Only her maid knew which suitcase it was in. The royal couple were given rooms on the first floor of Ednam Lodge, overlooking the front of the house. On Wednesday October 16, the hosts and their guests went to dine in London. The servants had their communal supper at 5.30 p.m. When the duchess’s maid, Joan Martin, returned from supper over an hour later, thieves had entered by an open upstairs window. The jewel box was open, its inner case full of treasures stolen. The following morning, the case was found discarded outside the boundary of Ednam Lodge on the golf course. Eleven significant pieces of jewelry had been taken, including Wallis’s latest acquisition, a vast sapphire converted into a bird of paradise by Van Cleef & Arpels. Further pieces were found left in the bottom drawers of the case, while other valuable jewels, along with Fabergé boxes, were discovered tossed in the long grass, including a string of pearls which had belonged to Edward’s grandmother, Queen Alexandra.27

  According to Lady Dudley, Wallis had earlier rejected their butler’s suggestion that the valuables be locked away in the Dudleys’ safe, in favor of stashing the jewel box under her maid’s bed, as she always did. (This habit apparently stemmed from Wallis’s southern roots. In the American South, it was common practice for rich families to hide their treasures under the mattresses in the servants’ quarters, where thieves were unlikely to look.) Wallis took the theft extremely badly; her response to the incident did not show her in a good light. The jewelry collection probably had a powerful and complex emotional resonance for her. Edward had lavished these wildly extravagant gems upon her since the first days of their courtship, consistently demonstrating his unwavering and obsessive love for her. Subconsciously, perhaps, the jewels were Wallis’s reward for being forced into marriage, and then exile, with him. Edward created for Wallis his own form of crown jewels. The exquisite adornments affirmed her femininity and her status and, as importantly, represented financial security.

  “The duchess was in a bad way,” reported Laura Dudley. “The detectives found something like eighteen odd earrings scattered over the Sunningdale Golf Course but, much to her fury, not one pair. She wanted all the servants put through a kind of third degree, but I would have none of this, all of them except for one kitchen maid being old and devoted staff of lon
g standing.”28

  The next day, according to Lady Dudley, “the duke was demented with worry and near to tears.”29 Wallis wore the only brooch she had left. Before the party went out for a stroll, she asked the duke to put it somewhere safe for her. On their return, he could not remember where he had put it. He thought that he had put it in the room where he was sorting papers that he had collected from Windsor. But to no avail. Wallis and Lord Dudley retired for the evening but the duke could not rest until the brooch had been found. Lady Dudley felt “desperately sorry for him” as he looked “grey with worry and exhaustion.” She stayed up most of the night with the former king, searching for the jewel to which “the Duchess appeared attached.”30

  “He obviously feared to go to bed empty-handed,” said Lady Dudley. “I made endless cups of black coffee while the duke went through his papers. At about 5 a.m. by some miracle we found it, under a china ornament. Never have I seen a man so relieved. He was still ashen in the face, but he rushed upstairs.”31

  It was claimed that uncut emeralds belonging to Queen Alexandra, part of the crown jewels, had been taken in the burglary. The haul was never recovered so the duke used the sizable insurance money to rebuild his wife’s precious pieces. Later in her life, Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, confirmed that Wallis had definitely owned Queen Alexandra’s jewels. “All those jewels were replaced by the duke,” she said. “The replacements may not be royal but they are madly valuable jewels.”32I

  The Windsors left England thoroughly downcast, the duke concluding that “old values have disappeared and been replaced by strange tendencies, and one senses an unfamiliar atmosphere throughout the country.”33