That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (33 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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The second event was the brutal murder of Sir Harry Oakes in July 1943. Oakes was found battered to death and partly burned, with feathers strewn over the corpse. The Duke made a number of blunders in his treatment of the case from the moment he summoned the Miami police force to investigate rather than the local detectives and without consulting Scotland Yard first. He clearly believed that Oakes’s son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, a man he personally disliked, was guilty of the killing. In the event de Marigny was found not guilty at his trial and the police were accused of manufacturing evidence. De Marigny was ordered to be deported, a hazardous procedure in wartime. The crime remains unsolved today, although it has been the subject of several books and a film. Theories abound, the most likely of which, according to the late Diana Mosley, is that his business associate Harold Christie hired an assassin for the job.
The Duke may have shown poor judgement, at the very least, in the way he dealt wi sy hedure inth the case, but Wallis was circumspect in anything she said then or later. Two weeks after the murder, she wrote to Edith Lindsay: ‘You can imagine what the rumour clinic is doing to the sad Oakes case. It really is all too tragic.’ But she gave nothing else away other than her boredom. July was especially painful because of the fierce heat, which meant, she added, that ‘There is really no one here as with the loosening of the exchange control everybody has fled to the cool breezes … Everything is really so
intensely dull
here and I long for news of the big world no matter how trivial the news. I miss you very much and would like to go shopping with you this minute.’ But leaving the island was now impossible and in any case ‘each time I find it harder to return! So think I better not tempt myself with all your bright lights and attractive people.’
To what extent is it fair to see the grumblings of the Duke and Duchess as undermining morale and the war effort and, in addition, to describe them as pro-Hitler or Nazi puppets in waiting? ‘I suppose,’ Wallis herself explained frankly on the eve of their autumn 1941 visit to America,
even though everybody wants the sufferings of so many to end, one’s own personal feelings can’t help but creep in and I do most devoutly pray for the end of the war so that the Duke may be released from the difficult situation of being in a firm whose head is an arch enemy. Everything so far has gone well with the Embassy in Washington regarding us … Canada is another thing; the family element again and we have had the usual snub from ‘The Great Dominion’. Strange that an Englishman is treated with politeness in a foreign country like the US but Canada, his own land, is rude. So you see what I mean when I pray for the day when the Duke is free once more.
 
These feelings, his as much as hers, were not to change throughout their time in Nassau and, in the current atmosphere in Britain, were inevitably seen as defeatist. But then, as she confessed to her principal New York correspondent Edith Lindsay, ‘“Les Anglais” are very strange people, I find.’ The tone of her letters, even those to officials, was defiant, never deferential. As she wrote to her aunt in July 1940:
We refused to return to England except under our own terms as the Duke is quite useless to the country if he was to receive the same treatment as when he returned in September … one humiliation after another … Can you fancy a family continuing a feud when the very Empire is threatened and not putting every available man in a spot where he would be most useful? Could anything be so small and hideous? What will happen to a country which allows such behaviour?
 
Shortly after Wallis wrote that letter, the Duke foolishly gave an interview to the American novelist Fulton Oursler, which was published in
Liberty
magazine in March 1941. Appearing at this critical moment in the battle to persuade America to join the Allies, the article could scarcely have been worse timed. Discussing whether an outright victory was ever possible in modern warfare, Oursler opined: ‘I am inclined to doubt it … The Germans might say there will always be a Germany so long as one German remains alive.’ The Duke responded rhetorically: ‘And you can’t execute the death sentence on 80,000,000 people?’
However much the Duke insisted that he had been fed the answers, the interview greatly angered Churchill. It coloured all their subsequent wart sbsebt iime exchanges. Churchill told the Duke that the article:
gives the impression and can indeed only bear the interpretation of contemplating a negotiated peace with Hitler. That is not the policy of the Government and vast majority of the people of the United States … later on, when the atmosphere is less electric, when the issues are more clear cut and when perhaps Your Royal Highness’s public utterances … are more in harmony with the dominant tides of British and American feeling, I think that an agreeable visit [to the US] for you might be arranged.
 
This exchange deteriorated when the Duke pointed out that a recent American edition of
Life
had carried an article in which his sister-in-law, the Queen, referred to the Duchess as ‘that woman’. But eventually, after a three-month silence, the Duke ate humble pie and wrote to Churchill assuring him that as long as he held an official position, ‘I play the game of the Government that appointed me.’ Six months after the disastrous article in
Liberty
, ‘chaperoned’ by MacColl, the Duke and Duchess were allowed to make their first official visit to the American mainland.
Yet the Duke never gave up bombarding Churchill with requests for Wallis to have minor medical treatment in the US or about staffing arrangements at Government House, as well as reverting to the one major request that was consuming them both: her royal status, or lack of it. In an eight-page letter to Churchill in November 1942 he not only reminded the British Prime Minister that ‘I asked you to bear me in mind should another suitable appointment fall vacant’. He also urged that ‘after five and a half years, the question of restoring to the Duchess her royal status should be clarified’. He went on to explain that he had been officially requested by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to submit the names of local candidates for the New Year honours list. ‘I am now asking you, as Prime Minister, to submit to the King that he restores the Duchess’ royal rank at the coming New Year not only as an act of justice and courtesy to his sister in law but also as a gesture in recognition of her two years of public service in the Bahamas. The occasion would seem opportune from all angles for correcting an unwarranted step.’
The King replied to Churchill on 9 December that he was ‘sure it would be a mistake to reopen this matter … I am quite ready to leave the question in abeyance for the time being but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty.’ There was a part of Wallis which also longed for the whole issue to be dropped or just kept in abeyance. It was tiring to go on and on fighting. As she wrote to Edith Lindsay in 1943: ‘I can’t see why they just don’t forget all about the Windsors and let us be where we want to be in obscurity …’
But as the King expanded his views in a separate memorandum, addressed to the Prime Minister and marked ‘private and confidential’, there was ‘no question of the title being “restored” to the Duchess because she never had it. I am sure there are still large numbers of people in this country and in the Empire to whom it would be most distasteful to have to do honour to the Duchess as a member of our family … I have consulted my family, who share these views.’
While it may be open to debate whether the royal family seriously questioned her loyalty to Britain or whether this was a convenient umbrella, several British politicians before the abdication believed, as Sir Horace Wilson state s Wiherd, that Wallis Simpson was a woman of ‘limitless ambition’ with a desire to ‘interfere in politics’ and who was in touch with the Nazi movement. In 1940 Churchill, in writing to Roosevelt, had said of the Duke, ‘though his loyalties are unimpeachable there is always a backlash of Nazi intrigue that seeks to make trouble about him now that the greater part of the continent is in enemy hands’.
The Duke’s close involvement with Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish millionaire owner of Electrolux, was part of this backlash. Wenner-Gren, a suave white-haired businessman, part-educated in Germany, had made his money through patenting a type of vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Having built his fortune in the early part of the century it suited him now to preach a doctrine of peace in order to protect his worldwide interests and to continue dealing with Nazi Germany as well as Britain and the United States. A friend of Charles Bedaux and Hermann Göring, he also had an interest in the German arms manufacturer Krupp, and manufactured munitions for the Germans through another Swedish company, Bofors, which was protected by Swedish neutrality. Before the war he bought one of the world’s largest and most lavishly appointed yachts, the
Southern Cross
, once owned by Howard Hughes, and set sail for the Bahamas with his American wife and children in 1939. There he took up residence in an impressive mansion, which he named Shangri-La, founded the Bank of the Bahamas and used the island as a base from which to continue his business activities.
Wenner-Gren was tipped off in a cryptic message in 1940 that the new family arriving in Nassau would be of interest to him and his friends. This message, intercepted by Washington, was assumed to mean that Wenner-Gren was a German sympathizer and would quickly recruit the Duke and Duchess to his cause. British and American diplomats were from the first deeply worried about this connection as the Duke, pleased to find a man who was not only cultured but offered a chance to build up investment on the island, did indeed nurture the friendship. Wenner-Gren – a boastful man – would often brag about having friendships with other unsavoury political figures, such as Mussolini and Mexico’s pro-Fascist General Maximino Camacho, and in fact may not have been as important as he made out. The American government was so concerned it placed Wenner-Gren on the black list of those to be treated as enemy aliens, which effectively put a stop to his friendship with the Windsors. The Duke’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, commented that ‘it is not hard to feel that in this case he – as well as the unfortunate Swede – was misused. On other points he is less easily defended.’ And his friendship with Charles Bedaux was equally dubious. For the Duke and Duchess to befriend such questionable characters at this dangerous time was ill advised at the very least.
Throughout the war, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a sizeable file on the couple, now largely declassified but with names redacted, mostly comprising unsubstantiated denunciations from outside sources explaining why they believed the loyalty of either the Duke or Duchess, or both, was suspect – beliefs based on little more than gossip or hearsay. There are many notes in the file insisting on a pre-war affair or relationship between Wallis and Ribbentrop and on the Windsors’ pro-German tendencies. Others express apprehension about the couple’s friendship with Wenner-Gren or even suggest that, as the Duchess sent her clothes for dry cleaning in New York, she doubtless used this as a method of sending secret messages.
Later in the war, in August 1944, when there was a revival of interest in the Duchess, the FBI undertook a survey of opinion sey ther in the literary and publishing world to ascertain the attitude of publishers and others in the US media to the Windsors. They concluded ‘that the Dutchess [sic] was of extreme news interest and that she was exceedingly unpopular in certain political circles of the US and England because of her social contacts prior to her marriage … however no sources could give evidence of a concerted effort to campaign against her’. Moreover, an influential New York advertising executive stated that ‘she and her husband are considered a pathetic couple by the leading publishers and editors’. The couple were well aware they were being watched – when they travelled to the United States they were accompanied not only by bodyguards but by FBI special agents ‘to exercise discreet observations’, but they believed they were being spied on in Nassau as well. At a formal dinner in Government House, after the Duke and Duchess had been piped in, ‘the Duchess made some remark to a dinner guest and then turned to the piper and said: “you can also report that to Downing Street”, an indication to everyone present that they thought the piper was some kind of spy for England’. They were ‘forever making remarks like that which were out of place’.
Once America entered the war, the Windsors took a more positive view of the likely outcome. Yet, throughout the years she was in Nassau, Wallis never stopped worrying about whether she would have enough money once the war was over, only now ‘enough money’ was a rather different proposition as she needed enough to live in the style to which a king and his consort were accustomed. She admitted to Monckton her anxieties about ‘money in the years ahead’. She asked him what would happen if ‘the Windsor holdings are perhaps lost in the shuffle’. She reminded him of ‘the need to keep our heads above water in the long pull ahead … unless we take a job in the U.S. There seem to plenty of those dangling in front of the Duke’s eyes.’ But by the end of the war, with doubts about his loyalty circulating freely, jobs in the US for the Duke were no longer being dangled. There was some discussion about finding him ‘a high level job’ at the Washington Embassy. But it was hard to specify precisely what task he was best fitted for other than a vague desire to further Anglo-American relations, and the proposal was apparently abandoned because Clement A
ttlee, who became Prime Minister in July 1945, and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin were adamant that it was not a good idea. Churchill continued to hope that there might be an ambassadorial job available for the ex-King and insisted that he was ‘very sorry about this foolish obstruction by Bevin and Attlee and I wish I had it in my power to overcome it’ – a comment which, the Duke told Monckton, ‘has amused us a good deal for, after all, he wasn’t all that cooperative himself during his five year residence at Number 10’.

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