That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (32 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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Churchill was deeply concerned about this sort of attitude, which smacked of defeatism to him and thousands of others, and he well understood the dangers of the Windsors’ comments being misused at such a critical time. In a letter marked ‘secret’, he wrote to the Colonial Secretary on 11 June 1941 about the urgent need to find the Duke a press secretary before he went to America as ‘I hear from various quarters of very unhelpful opinions being expressed both by Duke and Duchess.’ Monckton sympathized; the Duke had been writing to him in appallingly gloomy terms about s teorsthe catastrophic losses in Europe
17
that rivalled blunders made in the First World War and blaming the strategists. Churchill proposed ‘a competent American publicist who’d come down from time to time to Nassau and try to instill sound ideas into that circle. It doesn’t matter if there is a row. We want someone of sufficient character and standing to say “this sort of stuff you put out in your interview has done a great deal of harm. I can only tell you the opinion in the US. It will affect your influence there, or again, language of this kind would cut you off from the great mass of the American people” … the less there is on paper the better.’
17
that rivalled blunders made in the First World War and blaming the strategists. Churchill proposed ‘a competent American publicist who’d come down from time to time to Nassau and try to instill sound ideas into that circle. It doesn’t matter if there is a row. We want someone of sufficient character and standing to say “this sort of stuff you put out in your interview has done a great deal of harm. I can only tell you the opinion in the US. It will affect your influence there, or again, language of this kind would cut you off from the great mass of the American people” … the less there is on paper the better.’
As it happened Wallis, in defiant mood, was also in favour of a press secretary. ‘Every prominent American be they politicians, café society, movie stars or just
too
rich men – employ what is called in the US a public relations man,’ she explained to Walter. ‘He keeps unpleasant items out of the press and for those who want it (as we do) the minimum of publicity.’ The problem was the enormous salary paid to such people. According to Wallis, Viscount Astor paid a hefty $25,000 a year:
too
rich men – employ what is called in the US a public relations man,’ she explained to Walter. ‘He keeps unpleasant items out of the press and for those who want it (as we do) the minimum of publicity.’ The problem was the enormous salary paid to such people. According to Wallis, Viscount Astor paid a hefty $25,000 a year:
So you see we simply could not afford one. What we had in mind was that publicity regarding us would be handled in the same manner that England has conducted publicity regarding its royal family for many years and has been most successful – because any of those members would have a difficult job with the US press were they left on their own, as we have been for four years. The real truth, Walter, is that the government simply do not care what sort of stuff is printed and hide behind or blame us by saying ‘what a pity such things are written’ … it really is a waste of your time to beat around the bush with the idea of anything being done to help us because we realise it won’t be. Anyway such requests are like a thermometer of the powers that be’s policy regarding us. It’s always the same and will never change. However if we didn’t have to work for them it wouldn’t be so difficult. Alas we shall have to carry on I suppose for the duration but with victory won, we’re off!! Best of luck, Walter dear, and what a
shame
Duff was
only
ill two weeks.
The man they found to coach the Duke before and during his American trip was René MacColl from the British Embassy in Washington. ‘MacColl arrives next Friday,’ Wallis told Walter. ‘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.’ Monckton, tactful as ever, replied with the suggestion that they should go to the theatre to see Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
while they were in New York – such a refreshing antidote to war, he told them.
Blithe Spirit
while they were in New York – such a refreshing antidote to war, he told them.
As the time approached for departure Wallis told Walter that she was beginning to feel like the Monk of Siberia, ‘who with a hell of a yell burst from his cell’.
In the event the lunch at the White House had to be cancelled at the last minute when Mrs Roosevelt’s brother fell ill. But they were nonetheless delighted by the warm welcome from large crowds in Washington, New York, Chicago and Baltimore. For the local girl made good, Baltimore was unquestionably the high spot. Here she was heartened to find that she had brought out crowds estimated by some at 200,000, waving Union Jacks and American flags and cheering. As they rode in an open-topped car with Mayor Howard W. Jackson they experienced s exn Ja welcome neither of them was used to. Jackson told them to regard Baltimore as a second home ‘where you will always find peace and happiness’. They also spent time with some Warfield relations in the countryside outside Baltimore where Wallis had passed so many childhood holidays. Some of these relations she had not seen for years and she was as keen for them to meet the Duke as he was to show her his ranch – the EP Ranch as it was known, in the hills of Alberta, near the town of High River. In 1919 he had told his beloved Freda Dudley Ward that if only she would live with him there ‘I’d never want to return to England; I’ve got thoroughly bitten with Canada and its possibilities. It’s the place for a man, particularly after the Great War, and if I wasn’t P. of W. well I guess I’d stay here quite a while!!!’
It was there in October 1941 that Wallis heard the news that Mary Simpson, her once best and oldest friend from Baltimore, had died after a two-year fight with an aggressive and intensely painful cancer. Like Wallis, she was just forty-five. Mary had been ill on and off since the birth of her son, Ernest Henry Child Simpson, in September 1939 and within months had had a radical mastectomy and been told that her chances of survival were slim. Having qualified as a St John Ambulance first-aid worker at London’s Lancaster Road Baths, she continued her volunteering work as long as she could, telling friends that, in spite of her illness, ‘life is pretty good after all when one has an Ernest like mine’. In addition to the cancer, the Simpsons had recently lost most of their possessions in a fire at the warehouse where they had been stored while they looked for a house. Ernest’s lifelong collection of antiquarian books was destroyed as well as the furniture from Bryanston Court, chosen by Wallis, ‘which we are not crying over’.
Mary, bravely facing up to the knowledge she did not have long to live, desperately wanted to be reunited with her baby son, who had been evacuated to friends in North America at
the start of the war,
and to bring him back to England where his father could take care of him. But a return flight across the Atlantic in the middle of war was an impossibility, they found. As they made enquiries the Prime Minister came to their rescue. ‘Winston Churchill, recognising what a gentleman Ernest had been in 1937 and how smoothly the divorce had gone through thanks to him when he might have put all sorts of information and obstacles in the way’, managed to arrange a government plane for Mary, who was so fragile she had to be carried on a stretcher and driven to and from the plane by ambulance. ‘The family always knew this was Churchill’s recognition of Ernest’s good behaviour. But the gesture could never be made public.’ Just before she died, Mary wrote pathetically in her diary, ‘Ernest still thinks the Windsors are perfect.’ After Mary’s death Wallis wrote to Ernest from the ranch telling him, ‘God is difficult to understand at times for you deserved a well earned happiness. If ever I can soften the blow that fate has dealt you, the Duke and myself are ready to help in anyway you may ask. Dear Ernest, I who 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.’
18
the start of the war,
and to bring him back to England where his father could take care of him. But a return flight across the Atlantic in the middle of war was an impossibility, they found. As they made enquiries the Prime Minister came to their rescue. ‘Winston Churchill, recognising what a gentleman Ernest had been in 1937 and how smoothly the divorce had gone through thanks to him when he might have put all sorts of information and obstacles in the way’, managed to arrange a government plane for Mary, who was so fragile she had to be carried on a stretcher and driven to and from the plane by ambulance. ‘The family always knew this was Churchill’s recognition of Ernest’s good behaviour. But the gesture could never be made public.’ Just before she died, Mary wrote pathetically in her diary, ‘Ernest still thinks the Windsors are perfect.’ After Mary’s death Wallis wrote to Ernest from the ranch telling him, ‘God is difficult to understand at times for you deserved a well earned happiness. If ever I can soften the blow that fate has dealt you, the Duke and myself are ready to help in anyway you may ask. Dear Ernest, I who 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.’
18
In early November, the Windsors returned to Nassau having avoided the worst of the heat but not the opprobrium heaped on them, as expected, for escaping. Even MacColl had not been able to prevent that. He wrote in his memoirs not merely of how Wallis dominated the Duke – ‘I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage to quite so remarka ste doble a degree’ – but of the intense pleasure he derived whenever he won her approval. MacColl noticed how once during the trip an American journalist had asked him to make the Churchillian V-sign. He had started to lift his hand when the Duchess shot him a look. ‘She shook her head. The Duke dropped his arm.’
There were criticisms of the amount of luggage they had taken with them – according to some estimates, eighty cases. The
Washington Star
’s Henry McLemore commented: ‘you almost have to question the sanity of a man or a woman who would start on a short trip with 58 bags and trunks full of clothing’. The accusations of extravagance could not be easily brushed aside when it was made known that Wallis had set up an appointment with her favourite couturier, Mainbocher, while she was in New York. Much to her annoyance the ‘spoiled Mainbocher, who simply attends to those on the spot’ and had declined to come to Nassau to see Wallis, could not resist talking about his famous client to the newspapers, which gave lurid accounts of Wallis’s improvidence in wartime. She transferred her patronage for a while to Valentina but could not resist returning to Mainbocher soon afterwards. According to one report she had bought thirty-four hats. She retaliated in the press by correcting the number to five and saying that since she had not been shopping since May 1940, more than a year before, ‘I don’t think anyone could consider this outrageous.’ But of course that is precisely what many people in the American, as well as the British, press did consider it: ‘an ostentatious display of jewellery and finery at a period when the people of this country are strictly rationed’.
Washington Star
’s Henry McLemore commented: ‘you almost have to question the sanity of a man or a woman who would start on a short trip with 58 bags and trunks full of clothing’. The accusations of extravagance could not be easily brushed aside when it was made known that Wallis had set up an appointment with her favourite couturier, Mainbocher, while she was in New York. Much to her annoyance the ‘spoiled Mainbocher, who simply attends to those on the spot’ and had declined to come to Nassau to see Wallis, could not resist talking about his famous client to the newspapers, which gave lurid accounts of Wallis’s improvidence in wartime. She transferred her patronage for a while to Valentina but could not resist returning to Mainbocher soon afterwards. According to one report she had bought thirty-four hats. She retaliated in the press by correcting the number to five and saying that since she had not been shopping since May 1940, more than a year before, ‘I don’t think anyone could consider this outrageous.’ But of course that is precisely what many people in the American, as well as the British, press did consider it: ‘an ostentatious display of jewellery and finery at a period when the people of this country are strictly rationed’.
But on 7 December 1941, after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war, life changed dramatically for the islanders of the Bahamas and Wallis’s relief work now took on urgent meaning. She spent every morning at the Red Cross HQ and every afternoon at the canteen she had set up in a former gambling casino to feed the thousands of British RAF officers now stationed on the island in connection with the Coastal Command training programme, as well as members of the US Army Air Force detachment based there.
‘Wallis is very busy fixing up the RAF canteen,’ wrote Rosa Wood, her friend and assistant. ‘It will be rather a canteen de luxe when it is furnished. It wanted quite a lot doing to it. 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. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with I really don’t know what I would do without her.’ Wallis changed the name of the Bahamian Club to the United Services Canteen Nassau and herself paid to have some USCN badges made for its workers so that they looked smart and had a sense of identity. She was the guest of honour at bazaars and at garden and cocktail parties, although ‘we have made a rule that we never attend a party that isn’t for charity’, she told Monckton. ‘I have even learned to make short and trembling speeches,’ she added, ‘in the most drab and pathetic surroundings.’ In a turnaround that would have surprised Lucy Baldwin, she also founded a clinic for the care of expectant mothers and young children which involved a considerable commitment of time and money, usually working with the native Bahamian population. But, for servicemen, it was the numerous plates of bacon and eggs, personally served by the Duchess of Windsor at the canteen, that they remembered for years afterwards.
everywhere
are realising all the good she is doing. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with I really don’t know what I would do without her.’ Wallis changed the name of the Bahamian Club to the United Services Canteen Nassau and herself paid to have some USCN badges made for its workers so that they looked smart and had a sense of identity. She was the guest of honour at bazaars and at garden and cocktail parties, although ‘we have made a rule that we never attend a party that isn’t for charity’, she told Monckton. ‘I have even learned to make short and trembling speeches,’ she added, ‘in the most drab and pathetic surroundings.’ In a turnaround that would have surprised Lucy Baldwin, she also founded a clinic for the care of expectant mothers and young children which involved a considerable commitment of time and money, usually working with the native Bahamian population. But, for servicemen, it was the numerous plates of bacon and eggs, personally served by the Duchess of Windsor at the canteen, that they remembered for years afterwards.
Wallis herself, writing to her New York friend Edith Lindsay, admitted: ‘We are as busy as bees wit sy a0" h the canteen for the troops plus the outfitting of survivors and it is so much better having personal work to do rather than sweating over taxes being sent off to England.’ But she missed society and wrote constantly to her New York friends, as well as to Herman and Katherine Rogers in Washington, begging them to come and visit and relieve the Nassau tedium or ‘Nassau disease’, which she described as ‘the normal desire of any excuse to stay away as long as possible, which if I didn’t always want to be with HRH, I would be looking for excuses too. We were offered Bermuda while in NY but the Duke refused, which did not make me sorry as I don’t believe in letting islands become a habit … How I long for the sight and sound of human beings – my mentality is getting very dire after over two years here and only two months leave,’ she complained. When she heard there were to be visitors she wrote that not only was she absolutely thrilled, ‘in fact the whole island is in an uproar at the thought of “new faces”. We had just decided to send for masks as we all felt we could not look at each other any more.’ Even the knowledge that all her letters were read by an official censor, and that in Europe an existential war was being waged, did little to make her tone down her desperation. It was not simply that the endless bridge, golf and fishing did not amuse her. Her frustration was rooted in the anger that, since they had been deliberately placed in a backwater away from the war, there was little they could do to help.
Two events caused deep concern during their five years in the Bahamas. The first was the death in a plane crash in August 1942 of the Duke’s younger brother, Prince George, who along with his wife Marina had always shown sympathy and understanding for the Windsors. This was a bitter personal blow. It did nothing to promote a rapprochement with his remaining family even though Queen Mary wrote to the Duke: ‘Please give a kind message to your wife, she will help you to bear your sorrow,’ a message which represented a distinct softening of attitudes. Some historians have suggested that, had the Duke been prepared to build on this without constantly pressing for his wife to be called HRH, there might have been further reconciliation. The message had resulted from an initiative taken by Wallis to write to her mother-in-law politely proposing that she might wish to meet the retiring Bishop of Nassau, John Dauglish, who had connections to the royal family and was returning to England and who could pass on details of her son’s life in the Bahamas. Queen Mary did indeed summon the Bishop, who reported back to Wallis that although the Queen listened with interest to matters concerning her son, when he began to talk enthusiastically about the Duchess there appeared ‘a stone wall of disinterest’.
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