That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (34 page)
Read That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor Online
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 Windsors left Nassau on 3 May 1945 ahead of another sweltering summer, and went first to America with no clear idea of where they would settle or what they would do. Relations with Churchill were from now on edgy, although he remained always respectful towards his former monarch, and in 1948 he and Clemmie spent their wedding anniversary staying with the Windsors at La Croë. But there are known to be letters, kept secret at the request of the royal family, which reveal his anger and frustration with the Duke, exacerbated by the ex-King offering unsolicited advice about the prosecution of the war. Churchill did not flinch from telling him he could not accept advice from someone who ‘had given up the greatest throne in world history’.
Best-Dressed Wallis
‘The Windsors’ prestige is not what it used to be’
A
fter six years of uncertainty following the end of the war, Wallis still felt rootle
ss and ‘homeless on the face of the earth’. The Windsors rented and borrowed houses until there could be no possible doubt that returning to England was out of the question. It was Wallis who finally recognized that there would never be meaningful work offered to the Duke anywhere in the world and that they would never be able to make their home in England. She had summoned up the necessary courage to face the future life of which she had been the cause. She had always shown remarkable self-awareness of her own shortcomings, even if she was unable to change them, and now she tried to give the Duke some of the courage she was scraping together as he, often depressed or ill, faced a still-hostile family and an ever colder world. She was now determined to create in France, where they felt welcome, an environment fit for a former monarch and attended to the Duke’s emotional and physical needs in minute detail. All their guests and visitors attested to her extraordinary resolve to make wherever they lived as regal as possible. But how, as well as where, to fill their remaining days was the immediate post-war priority.
fter six years of uncertainty following the end of the war, Wallis still felt rootle
ss and ‘homeless on the face of the earth’. The Windsors rented and borrowed houses until there could be no possible doubt that returning to England was out of the question. It was Wallis who finally recognized that there would never be meaningful work offered to the Duke anywhere in the world and that they would never be able to make their home in England. She had summoned up the necessary courage to face the future life of which she had been the cause. She had always shown remarkable self-awareness of her own shortcomings, even if she was unable to change them, and now she tried to give the Duke some of the courage she was scraping together as he, often depressed or ill, faced a still-hostile family and an ever colder world. She was now determined to create in France, where they felt welcome, an environment fit for a former monarch and attended to the Duke’s emotional and physical needs in minute detail. All their guests and visitors attested to her extraordinary resolve to make wherever they lived as regal as possible. But how, as well as where, to fill their remaining days was the immediate post-war priority.
Their first trip to England together in the autumn of 1946 was a disaster. They stayed with their friends the Earl and Countess of Dudley at Ednam Lodge near Sunningdale, hurt that the Fort was clearly not available
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and that no other royal residence was on offer. On 16 October a burglar broke into the house, apparently through an open window, and stole more than £25,000 worth of Wallis’s jewellery, which she had decided to bring with her in a small trunklike jewel case and had left unsecured when they went out for the evening. Wallis was distraught; the jewellery had defined her romance with the then Prince and given her security. An exotic bird of paradise brooch, with a cabochon sapphire breast and a plumage of diamonds, had just been made for her by Cartier that year. She never saw it, or any of the other stolen pieces, again.
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and that no other royal residence was on offer. On 16 October a burglar broke into the house, apparently through an open window, and stole more than £25,000 worth of Wallis’s jewellery, which she had decided to bring with her in a small trunklike jewel case and had left unsecured when they went out for the evening. Wallis was distraught; the jewellery had defined her romance with the then Prince and given her security. An exotic bird of paradise brooch, with a cabochon sapphire breast and a plumage of diamonds, had just been made for her by Cartier that year. She never saw it, or any of the other stolen pieces, again.
The household was in turmoil, as police taking fingerprints jostled with reporters seeking interviews. The quiet visit with a minimum of publicity that they had promised an ‘unrelenting royal family’ was now splashed all over the British newspapers. In a country hard hit by post-war austerity, discussion of such a fabulous haul of jewellery (estimated by the Windsors to be worth $80,000) elicited little sympathy. According to Lady Dudley, Wallis in the hours after the robbery showed ‘an unpleasant and to me unexpected side of her character … She wanted all the servants put through a kind of third degree. But I would have none of this, all of them except for one kitchen maid being old and devoted staff of long standing … the Duke was both demented with worry and near to tears.’
The next day there was another drama. Before going out for a stroll Wallis, according to Laura Dudley, who told the story in her memoirs, asked the Duke to put away a small brooch of sapphires and rubies with their entwined initials and an inscription ‘God Bless WE Wallis’, which had been an early gift in 1935 and had eluded the burglars only because
she had been weari {ad Gng it. When they returned from the walk he could not remember where he had put it. ‘We stayed up most of the night; he obviously feared to go to bed empty-handed. At about 5 a.m. by some miracle we found it, under a china ornament. Never have I seen a man so relieved.’
she had been weari {ad Gng it. When they returned from the walk he could not remember where he had put it. ‘We stayed up most of the night; he obviously feared to go to bed empty-handed. At about 5 a.m. by some miracle we found it, under a china ornament. Never have I seen a man so relieved.’
Lady Dudley, indignant at the way Wallis had behaved, wrote later that the haul had included ‘a great many uncut emeralds which I believe belonged to Queen Alexandra’, a comment that caused, yet again, an enormous brouhaha over why the Duchess had had these in the first place. Most likely she did not, but the rumours were reignited and the friendship with the Dudleys came under severe strain.
Ten days later, Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy, daughter of the American Ambassador and now the widowed Lady Hartington, who met the Windsors at that time, wrote: ‘The Duchess continues to talk of nothing but her robbery [the words ‘and is really nothing but a bore’ are crossed out but remain visible] and how she has nothing left – so far I haven’t seen her with the same jewel. He seems so pathetic but full of charm … Really no one here takes any notice of them and the extraordinary thing is that I actually feel that she is jealous of what I, an American, have got out of England
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and which has always been denied to her.’
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and which has always been denied to her.’
The Duke never gave up trying to rectify that which had been denied his wife. Insurance money helped him to start a new collection of jewellery for her and in April 1949 he again consulted Viscount Jowitt for a legal opinion on the question of her title. In 1937 the then Sir William Jowitt had based his opinion on the view that ‘he became “His Royal Highness” not by virtue of any Letters Patent, but for the simple reason that he was the son of his father who was the Sovereign of this country’. He went on to declare ‘that the Duchess of Windsor is, by virtue of her membership of the Royal family, entitled in the same way as other royal duchesses, to be known by the style and title of “Her Royal Highness” ’. This time, while not wavering from that opinion, he concluded in a clever note for the record, ‘that the marks of respect which the subject pays to Royal personages are, as I said, in no source a legal obligation. They are rather a matter of good manners.’ Yet while insisting that it was simply a matter of good manners he nonetheless pointed out that the present situation, however erroneous, could be formally and effectively reversed only by fresh Letters Patent and since these would not be issued by the King save on the advice of his ministers it was unlikely they would be issued at all. This meant, effectively, that the Duke and Duchess were permanent, half-royal exiles – arguably the desired effect. Notwithstanding this, their staff in France, thirty in all spread between two houses, learned to refer to her as ‘Son Altesse Royale’ (perhaps SAR sounded less threatening than HRH and certainly fell into the category of ‘good manners’), footmen wore royal livery and Wallis’s notepaper had a small crown above a ‘W’.
And the British royal family could not prevent the Duke buying Wallis gifts of jewellery fit for a royal highness. The Duke had visited Cartier in Paris just before the fall of France with pocketsful of stones, some of Wallis’s bracelets and a necklace, together with instructions to make up at least one piece, a remarkable indication of his obsession with pleasing one woman above all the terror, privation and dislocation surrounding him in France. He was apparently oblivious to the notion that his requirements for the production of such a jewel in wartime might strike some as insensitive. The bold diamond flamingo clip, with startlin {wit thg tail feathers of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, was made in Paris in 1940 according to his instructions that the brooch should have retractable legs so that Wallis could wear it centrally without a leg digging into her chest if she bent down. Wearing this magnificent three-dimensional flamingo with its brilliant plumage would have been audacious at any time. Wallis, who used jewellery not simply as a display of wealth but to express her bold style and above all her personality, wore it as she set off on her controversial October 1941 visit to the United States with the Duke. Where clothes or jewels were concerned, she was never fearful. She had some magnificent jewelled powder compacts ‘and was always making up at table, which of course is very sexy’, according to the high-society interior designer Nicholas Haslam. The Duke’s habit of providing the stones by breaking up existing pieces in order to create an original object in a modern setting resumed as soon as the war was over in 1945. Together he and the Duchess became major jewellery buyers and connoisseurs. Wallis loved daring colour combinations and original designs, such as the two so-called gem-set bib necklaces made by Cartier, one in 1945 with rubies and emeralds, the other in 1947 with amethyst and turquoise, both large, strikingly modern pieces and stunning pieces of jewellery at any time. In those post-war years, when many in Europe were concentrating on basic necessities such as food and homes, they were especially remarkable. Although Wallis patronized different jewellers, she was lucky to find in Jeanne Toussaint, Louis Cartier’s intimate companion, a woman who understood her position as an outsider and with whom she developed a strong personal and professional relationship. Toussaint and the Duke collaborated on many jewellery projects for the Duchess, and her post-war ‘Great Cat’ jewels were the inspiration of Toussaint, herself known as La Panthère, and Cartier designer Peter Lemarchand. One of the most striking of these brooches features a sapphire and diamond panther astride an enormous Kashmir sapphire; bought and made in 1949 ‘for stock’ but with the Duchess in mind. Wallis chose to wear on her coat this beautiful, strong panther sitting proudly on top of the world when she attended the 1967 unveiling in London by Queen Elizabeth II of a memorial plaque to Queen Mary at Marlborough House in Pall Mall.
In the photographs taken at this event Wallis appears soignée with her bouffant hairstyle and well-cut coat, although a fur wrap around her neck is a somewhat odd choice for June. But, perhaps not surprisingly, she looks worried and drawn. She seemed to be in good health but by this time had had at least two serious internal operations and long-standing problems, apparently from an ulcer. Philip Ziegler writes of stomach cancer in 1944 followed by cancer of the womb in 1951. Charles Higham specifies cancer of the ovaries in 1951. Others commented on the Duchess being hospitalized for a major internal operation, the nature of which was never disclosed. Without access to hospital records, which have never been made available, all that can be stated for certain is that Wallis had serious problems which necessitated internal surgery. Quite possibly she was suffering from a complication arising from an internal abnormality which had been treated earlier and now flared up again but which it was imperative to keep secret. But the idea of her having a cancer as life threatening as ovarian cancer in 1951 and surviving into her ninetieth year is insupportable. Without the chemotherapy regime available today, women diagnosed with ovarian, stomach or womb cancer rarely lived ten years and most managed only five. Whatever the problem, she made a good recovery.
There is another interpretation of her frequent operations. It is not uncommon, according to clinical psychiatrist Dr Iain Oswald, ‘for a patient who {a pon is preoccupied with her body to undergo a series of investigations and even operations in an attempt to attend to these feelings. This can be seen as a form of displacement where attention is shifted from one part of her body felt to be defective (for instance where she is unable to have a child) to a hyper-attention to correct another part of her body. This, of course, could include cosmetic surgery as well as other forms of surgery.’
At all events by 1952 the Windsors had reached a decision about where they should base themselves: France. They would live informally at the Mill, a house they bought at Gif-sur-Yvette, forty-five minutes outside Paris to the south of Versailles and the only house after the war that they owned, and in formal splendour in Paris itself at a house in the Bois de Boulogne, 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement, loaned to them for a peppercorn rent by the City of Paris. It was Wallis who arranged the decor of both, making sure the town house appeared as imposing a mansion as possible for a building that was not an actual palace. In the drawing room hung a full-length portrait of Queen Mary, the mother-in-law who would never agree to meet her daughter-in-law, as well as one of the Duke, equally resplendent in Garter robes. His red and gold silk banner, with coat of arms, hung over the galleried marble entrance hall where other royal memorabilia were also displayed.
Just as the Windsors were deeply involved in expensively refurbishing both houses, the Duke’s brother, George VI, died, aged just fifty-six, in February 1952. A heavy smoker, he had been suffering from lung cancer. But the perception now hardened that somehow the premature death had been Wallis’s fault as the burdens of state, for which unlike his elder brother he had not been groomed, had hastened his death. The Duke went to London alone for his brother’s funeral. The accession of the Duke’s twenty-five-year-old niece, Queen Elizabeth II, was to make little difference to the Windsors’ standing in the eyes of the remaining royal family, even though Elizabeth had been a child at the time of the abdication, because both her grandmother, Queen Mary, and her mother, Queen Elizabeth, now known as the Queen Mother, were still alive. But with the King’s death went the personal allowance from him agreed at the time of the abdication. ‘They are beasts to continue to treat you the way they do … I am afraid Mrs Temple Sr. [the Queen Mother, whose elder daughter they had nicknamed Shirley Temple] will never give in,’ Wallis wrote to the Duke who, in reply, told her that while some Court officials were friendly and correct on the surface there was ‘only granite below’.
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