Read That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor Online
Authors: Anne Sebba
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous
That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (15 page)
BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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But there was a deeper meaning of service which the royal family embodied and which could not have been made clearer that week. ‘A leading theme of statements about the monarchy [in 1935] was that although its political power had declined, its public significance had increased,’ notes Baldwin’s official biographer, Philip Williamson. Even renowned left-wingers like George Orwell had to admit they were impressed by ‘the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in some sort of alliance against the upper classes’. For the Jubilee was a brilliant opportunity to raise many thousands of pounds for a wide variety of charities, not just in England but all over the Empire, to launch Jubilee Appeals, usually with members of the royal family as patrons. Canada raised £250,000 for a Silver Jubilee Cancer Fund within weeks of the charity’s launch. Wallis may have thought the celebrations silly but she must have known about King George V’s Jubilee Trust, which quickly raised £1 million to ‘promote the welfare of the younger generation’, as the appeal was headed by the Prince of Wales. According to the historian Frank Prochaska:
Few subjects bring out so well the differences between ourselves and our ancestors as the history of Christian charity. In an increasingly mobile and materialist world, in which culture has grown more national, indeed global, we no longer relate to the lost world of nineteenth-century parish life. Today, we can hardly imagine a voluntary society that boasted millions of religious associations providing essential services, in which the public rarely saw a government official apart from the post office clerk. Against the background of the welfare state and the collapse of church membership, the very idea of Christian social reform has a quaint, Victorian air about it.
Shortly after the celebrations ended in early June, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald resigned on grounds of ill health and was replaced by Stanley Baldwin. At the end of July, Wallis left for Cannes where the Prince had taken a villa. Unfortunately, as she wrote to her aunt, Ernest was not able to join them. All summer Wallis was writing to Bessie about how saintly Ernest was, running the business, looking after his deaf mother, irascible father and jealous sister. He even tried, vainly, to bring over his ten-year-old daughter Audrey to live in London, perhaps to keep him company or perhaps thinking she might benefit from the royal connection his wife had forged. But his former wife refused. Wallis tried to reassure Bessie that no divorce was planned at all and that she, Ernest and the Prince had an understanding. She worried about Ernest endlessly, thought he looked extremely handsome at the Court Ball and described him as ‘still the man of my dreams’. When Ernest made a ten-week business trip to the US that autumn she missed him and wrote to Bessie in early October just before his return: ‘I shall be glad to see that angelic Ernest again.’
But by then the Prin
ce had found he could barely stand a day without Wallis. His love letters to her were increasingly intense and, by now, unambiguous about his intention to marry her. At three o’clock one morning at the Fort he declared: ‘I love you more and more every minute and NO difficulties or complic Ces reeations can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness … am just going mad at the mere thought … that you are alone there with Ernest. God bless WE for ever my Wallis. You know your David will love you and look after you so long as he has breath in this eanum body.’
ce had found he could barely stand a day without Wallis. His love letters to her were increasingly intense and, by now, unambiguous about his intention to marry her. At three o’clock one morning at the Fort he declared: ‘I love you more and more every minute and NO difficulties or complic Ces reeations can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness … am just going mad at the mere thought … that you are alone there with Ernest. God bless WE for ever my Wallis. You know your David will love you and look after you so long as he has breath in this eanum body.’
Wallis Out of Control
‘I have of course been under a most awful strain with Ernest and H.M.’
I
n the years since 1935 Wallis Simpson has acquired the reputation of a seductress with legendary contractile vaginal talents. She had, according to one study, ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a cigar’. Charles Higham, one of her early biographers, went into greater detail, describing an ancient Chinese skill at which she was apparently adept involving ‘relaxation of the male partner through a prolonged and carefully modulated hot oil massage of the nipples, stomach, thighs and after a deliberately, almost cruelly protracted delay, the genitals’. When Thelma Furness was abandoned by the Prince, she made it her business to ensure that everyone in London knew that ‘the little man’ was so called for a reason; he was sexually inadequate and suffered from a common complaint among men at the time – premature ejaculation. Wallis, it was alleged, having spent so much time in Chinese bordellos, had learned special techniques to overcome this and give him the satisfaction he craved. But as the China Dossier, said to detail how she learned techniques variously called the Baltimore grip, Shanghai squeeze or China clinch, has never been found, the intimate pleasures Wallis gave the Prince must remain conjecture. That such breezy rumours landed on so much fertile ground reveals plenty but little that is about Wallis directly. The stories flowered so convincingly because they played on ignorance and fantasy, on the Western vision of the orient as a highly sexualized society coupled with the embarrassed repression and sexual taboos prevalent in most British homes at the time.
n the years since 1935 Wallis Simpson has acquired the reputation of a seductress with legendary contractile vaginal talents. She had, according to one study, ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a cigar’. Charles Higham, one of her early biographers, went into greater detail, describing an ancient Chinese skill at which she was apparently adept involving ‘relaxation of the male partner through a prolonged and carefully modulated hot oil massage of the nipples, stomach, thighs and after a deliberately, almost cruelly protracted delay, the genitals’. When Thelma Furness was abandoned by the Prince, she made it her business to ensure that everyone in London knew that ‘the little man’ was so called for a reason; he was sexually inadequate and suffered from a common complaint among men at the time – premature ejaculation. Wallis, it was alleged, having spent so much time in Chinese bordellos, had learned special techniques to overcome this and give him the satisfaction he craved. But as the China Dossier, said to detail how she learned techniques variously called the Baltimore grip, Shanghai squeeze or China clinch, has never been found, the intimate pleasures Wallis gave the Prince must remain conjecture. That such breezy rumours landed on so much fertile ground reveals plenty but little that is about Wallis directly. The stories flowered so convincingly because they played on ignorance and fantasy, on the Western vision of the orient as a highly sexualized society coupled with the embarrassed repression and sexual taboos prevalent in most British homes at the time.
Every biographer of Wallis, as well as courtiers who knew her, in trying to explain the inexplicable – how could a middle-aged, not especially beautiful, rather masculine-looking woman have exerted such a powerful effect on a king that he gave up his throne in order to possess her? – produces a different theory. What most agree on is that Wallis was the bad girl, the wicked temptress, the
femme fatale
who, in teaching a repressed prince satisfying techniques in bed, nearly destroyed the monarchy. Just as Eve was responsible for man’s original sin, these ideas tap into some deep and ancient fears of women’s carnality. Wigram believed that Wallis was, effectively, a witch, while other scandalmongers, whisperers and tittle-tattlers blabbed that she must have hypnotized the Prince. Servants talked to chauffeurs about rowdy parties, and plenty of the rumours, embellished on the way, reached higher places, including Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Another woman whose sexual allure proved irresistible to an English king, Henry VIII, was similarly accused of bewitching him. Those accusations were based partly on Anne Boleyn’s alleged sixth fingernail and partly, some scholars argue, on the fact that when she miscarried in 1536 the apparently deformed foetus thus ‘prove Fd pd’ that she was a witch, even though serious historians today insist that the foetus bore no abnormalities. After being found guilty of treason on the grounds that she had allegedly committed adultery, she was beheaded for her ‘crime’.
femme fatale
who, in teaching a repressed prince satisfying techniques in bed, nearly destroyed the monarchy. Just as Eve was responsible for man’s original sin, these ideas tap into some deep and ancient fears of women’s carnality. Wigram believed that Wallis was, effectively, a witch, while other scandalmongers, whisperers and tittle-tattlers blabbed that she must have hypnotized the Prince. Servants talked to chauffeurs about rowdy parties, and plenty of the rumours, embellished on the way, reached higher places, including Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Another woman whose sexual allure proved irresistible to an English king, Henry VIII, was similarly accused of bewitching him. Those accusations were based partly on Anne Boleyn’s alleged sixth fingernail and partly, some scholars argue, on the fact that when she miscarried in 1536 the apparently deformed foetus thus ‘prove Fd pd’ that she was a witch, even though serious historians today insist that the foetus bore no abnormalities. After being found guilty of treason on the grounds that she had allegedly committed adultery, she was beheaded for her ‘crime’.
But the difficulty with theories which insist that Wallis was a sexual predator is that they underplay the fact that Edward was a man of considerable sexual appetite and experience. As Prince of Wales he had sought out women for fornication in almost every corner of the globe and, apparently, had no difficulty in possessing them. But who is to know how satisfying these activities had ever been? Clearly this time something was different. Wallis’s remark to Herman Rogers about her marital chastity was now backed up by the Prince’s insistence that he and Wallis had never slept together before marriage and his threats to sue anyone who dared to write that Wallis had been his mistress. Wallis might well have taught him some adventurous new activity. What is not in doubt is that she was at the very least a woman of the world, unusually experienced for a well-brought-up young lady in the early twentieth century who liked to tell people about her ‘tough, rough past life in China and cooking and doing housework for a loathed husband with the smell of your husband’s bacon getting in your hair etc’. What she would have learned from her years as a naval wife married to Win Spencer as much as from life in China was that pleasure as well as pain can be derived from sex. And she probably knew about a variety of non-vaginal sexual techniques, including oral sex, which would not have been standard education for most English or American girls of the day.
The great ignorance in sexual matters in early twentieth-century middle- and working-class Britain is key to understanding the story of Wallis, why she was attacked so fiercely at the time, and why she has since become such a talisman for gay and lesbian minorities even though she herself was not lesbian. For many, her struggle is emblematic of a wider struggle for greater sexual freedom against the establishment’s narrow interpretation of what was acceptable. In the 1930s, some who wanted information about sex resorted to pornography. A variety of erotic literature could be purchased then but only through expensive underground channels, so in practice it was available only to satisfy well-off men, probably those whose wives were shy, ignorant or both. The Rickatson-Hatt divorce, awarded in 1939 on grounds of genuine non-consummation after ten years of traumatic marriage, illustrates only too clearly and in painful detail the overpowering middle-class taboos involved in seeking help, medical or otherwise, to discuss sex. When Rickatson-Hatt died it was discovered that he had amassed a fine collection of erotic literature. But, although he had gone on to marry a second time and father a son, it did not help him in his marriage to an American wife, Frances, who evidently struggled to establish normal marital relations with her reserved husband. Neither of them felt able to talk, even in private, to their friends, Wallis and Ernest Simpson.
Of course there were books, by Marie Stopes and others, containing sexual information for the lay public as well as medical textbooks which, while describing the sex organs, omitted to detail what was done with them. But there was almost nothing for the general reader nor anything that looked at the psychology of sexual behaviour. One trainee gynaecologist who tried to remedy this state of affairs by writing a simple and straightforward guide had to do so under a pseudonym for fear that the medical hierarchy would prevent him getting a post in obstetrics and gynaecology. When he eventually found a publisher – the Wales Publishing Company – they insisted that any illustrations in the book were bound Kk wtuaand sealed separately in a packet at the back of the book as these were, according to the preface, ‘of interest only to the serious reader’. Even so the book, first published in 1939, was banned in some areas and burned publicly in Blackpool.
The Technique of Sex
by Anthony Havil (pseudonym of Dr Elliot Philipp) cost fourpence a copy, stayed in print for a remarkable fifty years and sold half a million copies in hardback alone, clearly satisfying a national demand.
The Technique of Sex
by Anthony Havil (pseudonym of Dr Elliot Philipp) cost fourpence a copy, stayed in print for a remarkable fifty years and sold half a million copies in hardback alone, clearly satisfying a national demand.
But, since no one can know for certain what activities go on behind a closed door except those who are inside, all speculation about what exactly Wallis and her Prince did or did not do together must remain just that – speculation. Of the facts that are known, many of those who saw the Prince naked commented on his lack of bodily hair, implicitly questioning his virility. But, drawing the conclusion that Wallis, with her obvious dominating personality, was therefore able to satisfy both his repressed homosexuality and his yearning for a mother figure is, again, speculation, however likely it may seem. Much could be observed by watching them together in public and examples abound of Wallis bossing the Prince or humiliating him contemptuously, depending on the occasion or one’s point of view. The young Alfred Shaughnessy, stepson of a courtier at the heart of the crisis, Sir Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, was so struck by her manly behaviour that he had to ask his mother ‘who the bossy American woman was’: she had ‘got up at lunch and seized the carving knife from the Prince as he struggled with the roast chicken on the sideboard and told him to sit down saying in a grating voice: “I’ll take care of that, Sir”’. When the weekend guests had departed from the Fort and only Wallis remained, the staff would notice how she would ‘taunt and berate him until he was reduced to tears’. Lady Diana Cooper, one of the keenest observers of the Prince’s demeaning devotion, noticed that once ‘Wallis tore her nail and said “oh” and forgot about it, but he needs must disappear and arrive back in two minutes, panting, with two little emery-boards for her to file the offending nail’. The more Wallis was beset by fears of her future the more, it seemed, she found new ways to humiliate the Prince more brazenly. Philip Ziegler believes that Wallis provoked in him both ‘slavish devotion’ and ‘profound sexual excitement. That such excitement may have had some kind of sadomasochistic trimmings is possible, even likely.’
Yet sexual magnetism was clearly not all that Wallis offered the Prince, even if it was at the root of their relationship. Edward may not have realized how deeply he needed someone like Wallis, nor she him, until they became entangled. If Wallis had grown up with an unexplained and unnamed Disorder of Sexual Development she would always have known there was something unusual about her that she could not talk about, something that was humiliating, and she may have discovered that she was more comfortable when projecting this on to someone else. Wallis could be remarkably self-aware on occasions and in letters as well as her memoirs often talks of the ‘two sides’ of her own personality in flat, straightforward terms such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. At the same time she now said of her husband, Ernest, that he is ‘much too good for “the likes of me”’.
Psychologists may have an explanation for this behaviour: the ideal partner for her personality would be one who allowed her to appear as the perfect one, the other (him) as the inadequate one and the one who carried the flaw. This allowed for an aspect of herself, instead of being owned by her, to be projected on to someone else. This type of personality needs someone else to engage with closely so that the other person can be the receptacle of those part Kof r: the s of oneself that are despised. In this way an aspect of one is transferred to the other which makes both partners feel good and as a result each person develops a vital sense of closeness with the other.
To the outsider this phenomenon is observed by watching the transference process which is effected, however unconsciously, by giving the other person tasks and then criticizing them for the way they do them, thus making them feel at first inadequate but then eager to do better another time. Wallis excelled at this and the Prince responded by returning for more.
Outsiders were indeed aware that the Prince was in the grip of an abnormal obsession but were at a loss to explain it. He insisted it was love and in some ways it was. Walter Monckton, a barrister friend of Edward’s since Oxford days who acted as his trusted legal adviser in the months to follow, commented:
It is a great mistake to assume that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual companionship … He felt that he and Mrs Simpson were made for one another and there was no other honest way of meeting the situation than marrying her.
Winston Churchill MP, whose warnings in the 1930s of the need for Britain to rearm in the face of the Nazi threat made him suspect as a warmonger, was even more understanding and retained a roseate romantic view of the relationship longer than most. Churchill felt deeply that abdication should be avoided in the hope that the crisis would resolve itself. He believed that ‘the Prince found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who … watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul.’ Churchill wrote shortly after the abdication that:
the King’s love for Mrs Simpson was branded with the stigma of a guilty love … no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness …The character and record of the lady upon whom the affection of Edward VIII became so fatally fixed is relevant only upon a lower plane to the constitutional and moral issues which have been raised. No one has been more victimised by gossip and scandal but gossip and scandal in themselves would not have been decisive. The only fact of which the Church could take notice was that she had divorced one husband and was in the process of divorcing another.
Lord Dawson of Penn, asked by the King for a medical opinion on his son’s infatuation, believed that the Prince’s age had something to do with his obsession. ‘A
first
absorbing love coming after 40 is so apt to take possession. To have abandoned it would have spoilt life and work and therefore worth. To preserve it in marriage was impossible, ’ the doctor wrote. By the late autumn of 1935, the old King was, after years of poor health, seriously ill, suffering from bronchitis and a weak heart aggravated by heavy smoking. Worried about his eldest son he now predicted to his Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’
first
absorbing love coming after 40 is so apt to take possession. To have abandoned it would have spoilt life and work and therefore worth. To preserve it in marriage was impossible, ’ the doctor wrote. By the late autumn of 1935, the old King was, after years of poor health, seriously ill, suffering from bronchitis and a weak heart aggravated by heavy smoking. Worried about his eldest son he now predicted to his Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’
BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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