That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (3 page)

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Authors: Anne Sebba

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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Wallis had undertaken a campaign of persuasion begging her uncle Sol to pay for her to go to Oldfields. In doing so she was already making a clear choice without necessarily understanding the consequences: she would depend for the rest of her life on a man for security rather than pursuing a career for herself that would earn her money. She said later that she did not give a moment’s thought to further education ‘as not a single girl from my class at Oldfields went to college’. That was not exactly true. Oldfields did prepare some girls for careers and for limited independence and from its earliest days prided itself on its curriculum almost as much as on the social standing of its pupils. Miss Nan’s school was one of the first to offer a high school degree to women. Nor is it exactly true to say that no one in her social circle went to college. Both Mary Kirk’s sisters did: Anne to the Peabody Conservatory, graduating with a teacher’s certificate in piano, Buckie to the prestigious Bryn Mawr, afterwards becoming an art editor and published writer who worked all her life as well as bringing up a family.
But Uncle Sol may have needed little persuasion. The Warfield clan no doubt hoped that a spell at this prestigious boarding school, which attracted daughters of wealthy industrialists as well as those descended from a select group of early Dutch settlers such as Julia Douw, daughter of John Douw, Mayor of Annapolis, Maryland at the time, might quell some of the young girl’s more rebellious and dangerous attributes. Julia became a friend ol me a frof Wallis and, like her, was to marry a naval officer. But Wallis’s best friend remained Mary Kirk. Mary and Wallis were room mates ‘and at school we swore eternal friendship … in contrast to the usual boarding school loyalties ours did indeed continue’. That is Wallis’s later version for public consumption. Mary, in private, was to have a dramatically different story to tell. What is not in doubt is that the two teenage girls did everything together, especially gossiping – everyone commented on that. Buckie recalled that even then the girls’ main topic of conversation was ‘the absorbing subject of marriage. On this score I remember very well a remark that Wallis made a number of times, even I think at our family dinner table – it was memorable because so unconventional. She would announce that the man she married would have to have lots of money – the kind of thing that “nice girls” did not say.’
In the spring of 1914, Mary and Wallis graduated from Oldfields following a traditional May Day ceremony which included a maypole dance on the vast Oldfields lawns presided over by a May queen – a role filled that year by their friend, Renée du Pont, heiress of the famous chemical family whose wealth, principally derived from the manufacture of gunpowder, had expanded dramatically during the Civil War years.
When Wallis signed the Oldfields leavers’ book she wrote auspiciously ‘All is Love’ against her name. The remark jumps off the page. Other girls scribbled: ‘It’s the little things that count,’ ‘Three cheers for Oldfields,’ or similarly prosaic pronouncements. But, whatever they wrote, the graduation class of 1914 was largely oblivious to the looming war in Europe, preferring to concentrate on matters closer to home: their high hopes for an exciting future with a handsome man.
Mary and Wallis both became debutantes, an essential prerequisite in the hunt for a suitable husband from the right social background. But by December 1914, when they made their official debut into Baltimore high society at the first Monday German – the name for the coming-out balls given by the exclusive Bachelors’ Cotillion Club – the war in Europe was impossible to ignore. Baltimore’s debutantes that year were asked to sign a public pledge that they would abstain for the duration of the war from ‘rivalry in elegance in respective [sic] social functions’. Such a pledge almost suited Wallis since by this time she and her mother were living together once again in somewhat straitened circumstances in a small apartment near Preston Street following the sudden death in 1913 of Alice’s husband John Rasin. He and Alice had been married for just five years. Released from school to attend the funeral, Wallis was pained to see her mother reduced to ‘a dark shadow’: ‘enveloped in a black crepe veil that fell to her knees she looked so tiny and pathetic that my heart broke’. Now it meant looking once more to her Warfield relations if she was to be launched with any style at all and, although Uncle Sol pressed $20 into her hand – two crumpled ten-dollar bills, as she graphically recounted – for a dress, many of her clothes were made by her mother or by a local seamstress called Ellen according to Wallis’s own designs.
‘If you don’t go to the Cotillion, you’re nothing. And if you do, it’s so boring,’ Wallis said later. ‘The thing about Maryland is … they’re the biggest snobs in the world. They never went anywhere outside of Maryland.’ Yet go to the Cotillion she must, and she had to follow the rules; wearing white was
de rigueur
. But the dramatic style chosen by Wallis was a copy of a dress she had spotted being worn by the popular Broadway star Irene Castle – white satin covered wiif n coverth a loose chiffon knee-length tunic which respectably veiled her shoulders and ended in a band of pearly embroidery. It was made by Ellen and in between the endless rounds of debutante lunches, teas and chitchat, Wallis and her mother made several visits by street car to Ellen for fittings. For her escort at the ball she safely chose a cousin. Henry Warfield, aged twenty-seven, came to collect her in her uncle Sol’s Pierce Arrow, lent for the occasion, and presented her with a magnificent bouquet of American beauty roses; and after an evening being whirled around by a variety of partners she was officially ‘out’. But where exactly was ‘out’?
If she wanted her own party, customarily given for a debutante by her father, Uncle Sol would have to fund that. She asked. He refused, citing the war in Europe as an excuse. He told Wallis he had no spare money to spend on frivolities and that every dollar he could spare had to go to help the British and the French in their struggle against the Germans.
Devastated, she accepted whatever invitations came her way, wore whatever corsages were sent her and made a splash wherever she could, for example being the only one in the room on one occasion wearing a blue dress. Wallis, never classically pretty but always well dressed and charming, was widely agreed to be one of the most popular debutantes of the season. But the inevitable anticlimax around the end of the year was made worse in her case by the death of her Warfield grandmother, which demanded a period of serious mourning just when Wallis intended serious party-going. So, when an invitation arrived from one of her mother’s cousins, the beautiful Corinne Mustin, suggesting that Wallis come and stay with her in Pensacola, Florida, Wallis seized on the suggestion. Corinne and her sister, Lelia Montague Barnett, the latter married to the general commanding the US Marine Corps at Wakefield in Virginia, had both extended frequent invitations at critical times to Wallis to come and stay. Lelia had even hosted a debutante party for Wallis in Washington. Wallis felt warmly towards them both and vividly remembered Corinne’s wedding to the then thirty-three-year-old pioneer air pilot Henry Mustin in 1907 as one of the most glamorous events of her childhood. Now the Mustins had three children of their own and Henry, a captain in the US Navy, had recently been appointed commandant of the new Pensacola Air Station. There were family conclaves to decide if Wallis could accept or if her acceptance would be perceived as typical Montague gaiety in the face of Warfield mourning. Eventually it was agreed she could go on the grounds that she needed to see more of the world than Baltimore. After all, everyone knew the place was swarming with virile young aviators.
She arrived, aged nineteen, in April 1916 and within twenty-four hours had written to her mother: ‘I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.’ The day after her arrival cousin Corinne had organized a lunch with three fellow officers. Wallis got on well with Corinne, who always referred to her younger cousin as ‘Skinny’ – a nickname she liked. Later she suspected that Corinne, herself married to a strong and silent older man, may have deliberately selected these men for her:
Shortly before noon, as Corinne and I were sitting on the porch, I saw Henry Mustin rounding the corner deep in conversation with a young officer and followed closely by two more … they were tanned and lean. But as they drew closer my eyes came to rest on the officer directly behind Henry Mustin. He was laughing yet there was a suggestion of inner force and vitality that struck me instantly.
 
Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Jr at twenty-seven was eight years older than Wallis. He had film-star good looks set off by a close-cropped moustache and had already spent six years in the navy after graduating from Annapolis. Wallis was instantly smitten. She wrote that over lunch the gold stripes on his shoulder-boards, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, ‘acted like a magnet and drew me back to him. Above all, I gained an impression of resolution and courage. I felt here was a man you could rely on in a tight place.’
Previously Wallis had dated boys, but now she was in the company of men. Win Spencer was strong, confident, virile – and experienced. He suggested they meet the next day. By the end of that day Wallis was hopelessly in love. Until Pensacola, Wallis had never seen an aeroplane – the art of flying was so new that the navy had only one air station, the one at Pensacola – so everything she discovered that spring was exciting and new. And there were only a handful of pilots. Win Spencer was the twentieth naval pilot to win his wings. According to a limerick in the US naval academy yearbook:
On the stage, as a maid with a curl
A perfect entrancer is Earl
With a voice like Caruse
It’s clearly no use
To try to beat him with a girl
 
Other epithets applied to him in the yearbook included ‘fiery and able’ and ‘a merry devil’.
Win and Wallis started seeing each other at every opportunity. He tried to teach her to play golf – one of life’s games at which she never succeeded. But with Win, she always pretended that at least she enjoyed the attempt. She was blind to the bitter streak in him, the jealous and brooding quality deeply embedded in his nature, let alone the cynicism that she came to know painfully well later. But on the day he asked her to marry him, within weeks of their meeting, she replied that of course she loved him and wanted to marry him but would have to ask her family. He countered: ‘I never expected you to say yes right away … but don’t keep me waiting too long.’ Such a response indicates a man already weary of the games lovers play, telling Wallis he has seen it all before and not to bother with such sham. She promised to let him know in the summer – a decent interval – when he came to Baltimore for his final leave. But he knew that her answer was never in doubt. The next stage was meeting the parents.
Earl Winfield Spencer Sr was a successful and, by the time his son met Wallis, socially prominent Chicago stockbroker. Until 1905 when the Spencers moved to the exclusive suburb of Highland Park, Chicago, the family had lived in Evanston, Illinois. In August 1916, when Wallis went to visit them just before her marriage, they were living in a large clapboard house with a veranda and front lawn at Wade Street. The family was moderately religious and in 1906 – 8 Spencer Sr had served as a vestryman of Trinity Episcopal Church in Highland Park, where his wife undertook various charitable commitments. They had six children – four boys and two girls – all of whom were by 1916 in active service. Two daughters, Gladys and Ethel, had trained for Red Cross work and Gladys went to serve at a hospital in Paris. When America entered the war Mrs Spencer was quoted in a local newspaper as saying: ‘I believe I am the happiest woman in the world. I could not be happier unless I might have a few more to offer for the cause of the nation.’
On 19 September, five mont, wr, fivehs after Wallis and Win had met, Mrs John Freeman Rasin announced the engagement of her only daughter Wallis to Lieutenant Spencer. He might not have offered the sort of marriage to old money and ancient lineage to which the Warfields aspired, but catching a naval lieutenant was the height of excitement for many an Oldfields girl. Wallis had not only caught a handsome one but at just twenty she was one of the first of her group to be married. This was an important race for her to win. Mary Kirk, unattached and sad to see her best friend leave Baltimore, generously hosted a tea with her mother in honour of Wallis at the Baltimore Country Club. She agreed to be one of Wallis’s bridesmaids.
The wedding took place on a cold autumn day, 8 November 1916, against a highly charged political background. It was the day after the US presidential election which had been fuelled by constant discussion about the war in Europe that had been raging for the last two years. Britain and France were deeply embroiled, suffering heavy casualties, but, while public sentiment in the United States leaned towards showing sympathy with the Allied forces, most American voters wanted to avoid active involvement in the war, preferring to continue a policy of neutrality. Hence Woodrow Wilson was returned to the White House on the campaign slogan ‘He kept us out of war’.
The ceremony which saw Wallis marrying into a heavily involved military family, where sacrifice and duty were top priorities, took place at Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in Baltimore, the local church on St Paul Street which she had attended for so many Sunday services with her grandmother. The ushers were all naval officers and flyers in uniform. The
Baltimore Sun
described the evening wedding as ‘one of the most important of the season … performed in front of a large assemblage of guests’. The church was decorated with palms and white chrysanthemums while lighted tapers and annunciation lilies decorated the altar. The bride entered the church on the arm of her uncle Sol, who gave her away. She had designed her own gown of white panne velvet (an unusual fabric for a wedding dress at the time) made with a court train and a pointed bodice elaborately embroidered with pearls. The skirt tumbled over a petticoat of old family lace and her veil of tulle was edged with lace arranged coronet fashion with sprays of orange blossoms. She carried a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley.

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