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

by Anna Pasternak

  The weight of his decision was resting on the fragile shoulders of the duchess, bereft and confused in her pew. “During these days of death, she has behaved with extreme dignity. She has by the simplicity of her silhouette made the rest of the Royal Family appear dowdier than ever, but she made me marvel once again that she should ever become a figure in such a drama,” wrote Cecil Beaton. “Wallis has been a good friend to me, I like her. She is a good friend to all her friends. There is no malice in her. There is nothing dislikeable.”43

  After the funeral, at a lunch at Windsor Castle, the duchess was seated between the Duke of Edinburgh and Lord Mountbatten. She later told the duke’s old friend Walter Lees, a Scottish diplomat who lived in Paris, that Prince Philip had asked her what her plans were and if she was going back to America. She replied: “I won’t be coming back to England if that’s what you’re afraid of, except to visit the grave.”44

  A private burial followed at Frogmore. The original intention was that the queen mother would not go to the committal, but, at the last minute, she decided she would. Undoubtedly her motives were more to do with public opinion than a genuine sense of remorse. At 2.25 p.m., the queen stood next to the duchess as the duke’s body was lowered into the grave on the site he had chosen. Beneath a wide-spreading plane tree, surrounded by hawthorns, rhododendrons, wild azaleas and flowering cherries, it was close to where he had played as a child. As the body was lowered, the queen asked the duchess where she would like to be eventually laid to rest: to the right side of Edward’s grave, or to the left? The duchess—who commented that she did not anticipate flowers would be placed on her grave—said she would like to be buried to the left, beneath the plane tree. She loved the leaves of plane trees, often collecting them from the garden for her dressing table, and liked the idea of their falling onto her grave in the autumn.45

  Shortly afterwards, the duchess flew back from Heathrow to Paris on an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. As she left the tarmac, press lenses trained on her, she painted a forlorn picture. Her minute figure in her black Givenchy mourning coat, walking up the aircraft steps alone, underlined the fearful loneliness that lay ahead for her. She did not turn and look back.

  She would return to England only once again in her life: a year later on July 11, when she visited Frogmore to put flowers on the duke’s grave, by then covered by a plain white stone of Portland marble.

  At 5:20 on the afternoon of her husband’s funeral, the duchess’s plane landed at Villacoublay air base, from which she was driven to her Paris home. “To get back to the empty house; never more to be greeted by the duke’s call: ‘Darling, darling, I’m here!’ was unbearable for Wallis,” said Diana Mosley. “He had cherished, adored and protected her for nearly four decades with his extraordinary devotion. There can hardly be a widow with quite so much to miss.”46

  With the duke’s death, Wallis’s raison d’être was extinguished. Her visceral emptiness was tangible. She had created her own version of a fairy-tale castle with the duke; now it became a mocking fortress. Everything was a reminder that the sovereign of their gilded kingdom was gone. The royal portraits, coats of arms and grand images of the Prince of Wales’s feathers remained; but what did it matter any more if the staff addressed her as “Votre Altesse Royale” or bowed and curtsied to her? Terrified of penury, she swiftly reduced the Paris staff from twenty-five to fourteen and sold the Mill for £320,000 to a Swiss millionaire. Her lifelong terror of destitution was still not quelled when she received £3 million in the duke’s will. However, her fears that the French government would evict her from the Bois de Boulogne mansion were allayed when the French foreign minister reassured her that his government would not be imposing death duties on the former king’s estate and that she would continue to remain immune from taxation for her lifetime. Furthermore, she was welcome to stay on as tenant of the villa in the Bois de Boulogne.

  On Lord Mountbatten’s advice, delivered in person, the duchess returned the duke’s Garter robes, uniforms, orders and decorations to the queen. However, the repeated presence of Dickie in her home, picking over precious objets d’art, insisting that they should be returned to the royal family as they belonged to the Royal Collection, unsurprisingly put her back up. According to Mountbatten’s daughter Lady Pamela Hicks her father was adamant that some gold and kettledrums belonged back in London, not with the duchess in Paris.47 Even royals, or especially royals, fight over the family silver. Lady Gillian Tomkins, wife of the new British ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Tomkins, said: “I have to say that the behaviour of the royal family was quite tactless at this point. They had snubbed the duchess for years and then once the duke was gone, they started making friendly overtures toward her because they wanted her jewels and possessions. The duchess was much too clever not to see through that. She always hid the royal swords before Mountbatten visited her.”48

  “The duchess had no relations but many friends, and her friends tried to help,” said Diana Mosley. “After the first shock of grief she saw them often, but she was often tired and depressed, unhappy and lonely.”49 Diana Vreeland recalled arriving in Paris shortly after the duke had died. “The duchess called me on the telephone and said: ‘Oh, Diana. I know you’ve just arrived, but come out here and have dinner with me. I’m all alone.’ I went out to the house in Neuilly [in the Bois de Boulogne]. The duchess looked too beautiful, standing in the garden, dressed in a turquoise djellaba embroidered in black pearls and white pearls—marvelous—and wearing all her sapphires.”50 After dinner, the two women talked and reminisced. “Suddenly Wallis took hold of my wrist, gazed off into the distance, and said: ‘Diana, I keep telling him not to abdicate. He must not abdicate. No, no, no! No, no, no, I say!’ Then suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.”51

  Without the duke to live for, Wallis’s health swiftly deteriorated. She barely ate, preferring to drink vodka from an iced silver mug. She drank too much, irritating her sensitive stomach. She developed a gastric ulcer, which perforated, and she was rushed to the American Hospital of Paris, where she remained for six months. She began to suffer falls, fracturing her hip over Christmas 1972. Disorientated and enfeebled, she became morbid, longing for death. In one of her more lucid moments, she confided to Gore Vidal: “My life’s not important. But I think [the duke’s] was. Such a waste, really, for everyone.”52

  With lapses into senility, Wallis made a decision that would ensure her last years were a horrific nightmare. In January 1973, she terminated the services of the duke’s long-standing lawyer, Sir Godfrey Morley, of Allen & Overy, London. Vulnerable and fearing for her future, she hired Maître Suzanne Blum, who had been the Windsors’ Paris lawyer since 1946, to take over all her legal affairs. This Machiavellian woman, only two years Wallis’s junior, but robust in health, fueled Wallis’s worst fears that others were taking advantage of her. Although Blum had, in her heyday, acted for Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Rita Hayworth, and remained a formidable legal opponent, she developed a macabre obsession with Wallis. Cleverly and carefully, she dismissed the duchess’s loyal retainers, including Sir John Utter, a retired American diplomat who had been the duke’s private secretary. She seized power of attorney over the duchess and was soon running her entire life, suing newspapers and authors for considerable damages. Under the guise of championing the duchess’s causes, she imprisoned her. Wallis’s friends were soon banned from seeing her as Blum kept Wallis under her perverse, steely control.

  “When I met Maître Blum, she couldn’t have been more charming but in a sinister way,” said Hugo Vickers. “This Satanic figure wore the mantle of good intention to disguise her inner malevolence.”53 The Irish society hostess Aileen Plunket, who was friends with the Windsors, said that Wallis becoming “Blumed” was “just one of those horrible mistakes people make.”54 Before the duke died, Suzanne Blum had no influence. “The
woman came zooming in the moment she heard the duke was dead and tried to make the duchess think that all her staff were cheating her. Poor Wallis was in a terrible state after his death. Her health was getting worse and worse. She became really paranoid and she thought the whole world was against her. Obviously that clever old beast Blum knew exactly how to work on her paranoia. She did a sort of purge and she tried to get rid of everyone who’d ever been fond of the duchess. She wanted Wallis to herself.”55

  The last time that Diana Mosley saw Wallis, she was deeply upset. “The poor little thing was lying there on her side. Her big blue eyes were open and she was staring desperately in front of her. She never said a word. And something had gone horribly wrong with her sad little hands.”56

  When Aileen Plunket tried to visit Wallis, she was turned away by Maître Blum, saying that she might endanger the duchess’s life. This made Mrs. Plunket, an elegant octogenarian, incandescent. “If the duchess was too ill to want to talk, I only wanted to peek my head through her bedroom door. I wanted to wave to her. . . . I wanted to blow her a kiss and maybe put some flowers by her bed. . . . I only wanted Wallis to know that I hadn’t forgotten her.”57 It was heartbreaking for Wallis’s friends to think that Wallis was lying alone in her Parisian mansion, caged by the despotic Blum, thinking they had all abandoned her. “We all accepted her marvellous hospitality in the old days,” said Diana Mosley. “It’s too dreadful if poor Wallis thinks that now she is old, and ill, and widowed, we have all deserted her.”58

  “Wallis was a very nice woman and she didn’t deserve that awful end,” said Laura, Duchess of Marlborough. “Poor little thing, locked up by her servants. The duke knew something awful would happen to Wallis if she survived him. He loved her so much that he was always worried as to what would become of her once he had gone.”59

  Gore Vidal lunched with the duchess during her last visit to New York in 1974, when, going against medical advice, Wallis underwent another face-lift. Vidal believed that her subsequent lapses into non compos mentis were the result of too many anesthetics; by this time she had had four or five face-lifts. Of her last operation, he wrote: “The result was splendid, but of course, she died on the operating table for several minutes, quite long enough to scramble her oxygen-denied brain.”60

  During the last years of her life, the emaciated duchess was cared for by a rota of nurses. Lying in a narrow hospital bed in her Wallis-pale-blue bedroom, fed by a tube through her nose, she alternated between coherence and fantasy. One of her nurses, Elvire Gozin, was distraught that Wallis’s visitors were turned away, while the mansion fell into a state of disrepair. To the dying duchess, the consummate housekeeper, any knowledge of this would have been another unbearable indignity. The gardens were no longer tended, the house was decaying, her priceless paintings and furniture gathering dust. It had the brooding stillness of a mausoleum, waiting for her final demise. “She was alive, and yet not alive,” said Diana Mosley. “Doctors had become very clever at keeping the heart beating. Who knows what she suffered?”61

  Meanwhile, Maître Blum was ensuring her own future was well furnished. She squirreled valuable possessions away and in 1982 sold twenty-one snuffboxes from the duke’s collection at Christie’s Geneva.

  At last, Wallis’s longed-for release came. Fourteen desperate years after the duke passed away, the Duchess of Windsor died, aged eighty-nine, on April 24, 1986. The duke was able, once again, to protect her in death. As the royal machine clicked into action, any plans that Maître Blum might have concocted for her funeral or her burial place held no sway. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office interceded. The duchess’s body was flown to Britain in an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, then driven to Windsor Castle, where it remained overnight in the Albert Memorial Chapel. Fittingly, her coffin rested on the same spot that had been occupied by the duke, and the kings and queens of England before that.

  At the duke’s funeral, the wreaths and flowers had covered the whole hill in front of St. George’s Chapel. For the duchess’s death, there were only two rows of wreaths in the cloisters. The entire royal family attended the duchess’s funeral. “No one could really be said to be in a funeral mood—except perhaps Granny,”62 said Prince Charles. “I am flabbergasted that they all attended,” said John Julius Norwich. “This was not in very good taste, after the way they had treated her. But it would have been the courtiers who suggested that to ensure favourable publicity for the royal family.”63

  In death, the duchess was afforded the dignity of a royal funeral. The court pulled out all the stops in terms of pomp and pageantry. “There was the queen and the royal family, and the chapel beautifully lit and the choir singing. It was everything the duke would have wanted for the duchess,”64 observed Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, a close friend of the Windsors in Paris. Diana Mosley noted how “The queen in her clever way gave the best seats to George and Ofelia,” the duchess’s long-standing servants.65

  “The atmosphere in the chapel was charged with a moving stillness,” remembered Hugo Vickers. “The sentences were sung and the short service was beautifully conducted, especially the anthem. The only thing that they got wrong was that there was absolutely no mention of the duchess by name. They never commended the spirit of ‘our sister Wallis’. . . . [The courtiers] thought that they would have offended the queen by mentioning the duchess by name. They should have asked the queen, instead of presuming not to mention Wallis. Apart from that, it was everything that the duke would have wanted for her; the flowers on the coffin, the choir, the entire royal family there.”66

  At the private committal at Frogmore afterwards, the Duchess of Windsor was finally mentioned by name. As her body was lowered beneath the wide-spreading plane tree, next to the man who had loved her so deeply that he had renounced everything for her, the queen wept.67

  Years before, Edward had copied out lines from a Tennyson poem, in his own hand on royal stationery, for Wallis. It stood, framed, on her glass-topped dressing table, amid photographs of the duke, the man who had adored her like no other.68

  My friend, with thee to

  live alone

  Methinks were better than

  To own

  A crown, a sceptre, and

  A throne.69

  EPILOGUE

  The Cedar Walk

  In her memoirs, Wallis wrote that she loved the Fort so much that she planned to haunt the Cedar Walk. “A part of me remains in the vicinity of the Fort, and history is herewith given fair warning that one day a pale and anonymous phantom may be observed in the shadows along the Cedar Walk that is such a distinctive feature of the property.”1

  I was honored to be allowed by the present custodians to visit Fort Belvedere while researching this book. To Wallis, the Fort was “the most romantic house I have ever known,”2 a sentiment easy to accept. Like a turreted folly, with its distinctive crisscross markings—flint chips embedded in render—it is unique, quirky and intimate. It was shrouded in mist on the day of my visit, the gentle rain heightening the undeniable nostalgia of the building and its undulating grounds. There were the flint-green ceremonial cannons that the Prince of Wales had installed, twenty of which line the battlements overlooking the vista of the famed Cedar Walk, planted in 1780. I imagined Wallis strolling with her beloved cairn, Slipper, through the grassy sweep of parkland.

  I stood outside the drawing room, on the historic paving stones where Edward told Wallis that he was going to abdicate that foggy night in December 1936. The rock garden, with its stream gushing through and the special lumps of stone that he had had hewn and delivered from Yorkshire, is incomplete; the king had to discard his plans for it when he abdicated. He created an exact replica twenty years later at the Mill. This idyllic home, with its private, peaceful grounds, according to Wallis, “meant more to David than anything else in the world save honour, the honour with which he was so rashly, yet so gallantly, to invest the love he came to have for me.”3

  A private photograph album at Fort Belvedere co
ntains images of a summer lunch captured in 1935; the couple’s ease and carefree bonhomie radiate off the page. Wallis and Edward are entertaining friends. The king larks around in the circular drive in a bearskin, pipe in hand, Wallis oversees lunch on the terrace; they play croquet on the lawn. The most moving image is of the couple walking together in the distance, their heads tilted towards each other, deep in conversation. Of course, this was in the halcyon days before the abdication and the devastation that this decision unleashed.

  I left the Fort, which has a compelling magic, hoping that Wallis—and Edward—haunt the Cedar Walk together, the spirits of their canine companions dancing at their heels. The Duke of Windsor would be enchanted by the love, care and attention that the present owners have lavished on the grounds. It brought tears to my eyes: every bank of snowdrops, every wildflower meadow, every rose trained up a trellis feels in rightful memory of Edward and the garden he adored.

  That afternoon, I was further blessed to be invited to Royal Lodge, also tucked away in Windsor Great Park. The drawing room is imposing with its pale-green paneling, soaring ceilings, vast oils depicting the surrounding park and acres of Persian carpet. I tried to envisage the awkward tea that Wallis endured with the Duke and Duchess of York in the spring of 1936, the judgmental loathing of the late queen mother silently upon her. The present Queen Elizabeth, the only member of the royal family to soften towards Wallis, was then a little girl, playing with her sister, Margaret.