That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (5 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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Discovering that she was in some way different yet unable to discuss, explore or acknowledge this humiliating stigma with anyone would have turned Wallis into a strong personality if she were to survive. Most of those with gender identity issues who survive emotionally undamaged do so behavged do cause they have a robust belief that they are unusual or special; indeed this belief is centuries old, because the condition itself is hardly new. In Wallis’s case a typical result would have been a determination to make herself the most perfect being by over-compensating for the unspoken, humiliating part of her.
‘It’s not only a way of over-compensating. It is also a way of managing the sense of inadequacy which would otherwise have been there. If a woman knows that she possesses a secret which makes her a unique person she can live with this by believing that she has something which makes her stand out against the rest. It is like having a special gift,’ explains consultant psychiatrist Dr Domenico di Ceglie. How she used this gift was to become clear in the years ahead.
But for the first twenty years of her life Wallis would also have had to come to terms with the demands of secrecy. The consequences of secrecy where developing sexuality is concerned are often that the sexuality and the secrecy can be merged, which means that to perform certain activities in a semi-secret way becomes more exciting. And this explains why the risk and excitement element of relationships was attractive to Wallis. Once this is understood, Wallis’s insight into her own condition ‘that when I was being good I generally had a bad time and when I was being bad the opposite was true’, suddenly becomes powerfully clear.
Win seems to have done a good job at Squantum. The couple lived in a hotel and Wallis did not complain of being lonely but filled her day as best she could, largely wandering the streets of Boston and watching court cases. But then, in October 1918, he was moved again. To his bitter disappointment, according to Wallis, instead of being sent overseas in an active fighting role he was ordered to San Diego to set up a new flyers’ base. But setting up the nation’s first naval airbase on North Island, a short commute from the Coronado Peninsula, was not only a mammoth task, it was one which commanded enormous respect from those who served under him, as letters from junior officers to their parents indicate.
Again, Wallis did not find it difficult to spend the day sunbathing and planning meals. For shopping and cooking her
Fannie Farmer Cookbook
came to her aid; for the cleaning and other chores a Japanese houseboy helped. It was the sort of leisurely lifestyle she had always wanted. The newlyweds entertained frequently, sometimes important naval people, top brass, until the small hours – Wallis, master of the wisecrack, laughing till it hurt. Win, according to Wallis, was furious about his posting, a fury made worse in January 1918 when he learned that his twenty-one-year-old younger brother, Dumaresq, Yale graduate and golden boy of the family, had been killed in action while fighting with the Lafayette Escadrille, an air force squadron composed largely of American volunteer pilots in France. Not only that, his even younger brother, Frederick, aged seventeen, had just been awarded the Croix de Guerre, likewise on the Western Front. That news, together with his mother’s response – ‘I would that I had another son to send to take his place’ – all fuelled Win’s anger at his inactivity and his longing to prove himself. Wallis may have lacked the maturity to tackle Win’s demons – if indeed anyone could have. And Win may have had a violent temper. Mary Kirk, in spite of what happened later, always told her family that she believed Spencer had been brutal, a cad. In addition, his three subsequent wives all cited in their divorce petitions his irritability and irascibility, cruelty and abusive behaviour. But an accurate description of any marriage, especially a disintegrating one, is something only those inside it woe insidcan give. At the time of their marriage, Win was one of an elite band of naval aviators, young, fit, handsome and at the peak of his powers. No doubt like many fellow naval officers at the time he was often drunk and smoked a lot. But what provoked his anger and violence is not clear, and Wallis’s account was written more than thirty years later with a particular agenda.
The marriage, shaky from the start, dramatically deteriorated after little more than a year together. In San Diego Wallis flirted, behaviour which she realized ignited Win’s jealousy and led to further alcohol and violence. ‘I am naturally gay and flirtatious,’ she wrote. ‘I was brought up to believe that one should be as entertaining as one can at a party.’ She also had a low boredom threshold and now seriously questioned whether a service life, constantly on the move and involving ‘brief sojourns in rented bungalows or tasteless government housing, endlessly repeated associations with the same people conditioned to the same interests’, was for her. It is true that he was constantly on the move, sometimes staying in one place for only a matter of weeks and sometimes having to put up in a hotel while a suitable small cottage was found. But the archives indicate that Wallis, unlike other navy wives, did not always follow her husband from one base to another. Almost every document that lists her addresses at this time has her at a different address from him. She is listed either as at the Washington-based Riggs Bank or as at an address in Maryland. In addition, although none of their homes was grand, it is not entirely fair to describe them as tasteless government housing. Their first home in San Diego – two furnished rooms in the fashionable Palomar Apartments – was, as Wallis herself admitted, so delightful that she did not see how she and Win could fail to be happy there.
But Wallis’s life at this time was, she says, ‘a harrowing experience’. She tells of repeatedly being locked up in a room while he went out ‘often for hours on end’ and of being the subject of Win’s ‘running barrage of subtle innuendoes and veiled insults. Outsiders were not supposed to understand these clever thrusts but I certainly did.’ It’s not hard to imagine that these innuendoes and insults might well have been taunts about the unsatisfactory nature of their sex life. According to the American author Donald Spoto, in his 1995 book
Dynasty
, Wallis told her closest male friend Herman Rogers, who was to give her away on her marriage to the Duke of Windsor in 1937, that she had ‘never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below what she called her personal Mason – Dixon line’, more usually the border between the Southern and Northern parts of the United States.
Wallis tried hard to widen her circle of friends – what else was there to do? – while living in Coronado and was photographed with, among others, John Barrymore and Charlie Chaplin. One of the major events during her time there was a ball at the Hotel del Coronado on 7 April 1920 in honour of the then Prince of Wales as he stopped off during a major tour en route to Australia on HMS
Renown
. For years the romantic story flourished that it was here that Wallis met the Prince for the first time.
Win Spencer, by then Lieutenant Commander Spencer, was later quoted as saying of the evening of the ball: ‘Practically all navy officers stationed here were present with their wives. We all went down the receiving line. My former wife [Wallis] was with me most of the evening. Of course I’m not quite sure but she may have been introduced to him. As I recall she slipped away for a few minutes and may have b bed may heen received by the Prince …’
The legend that Wallis and Edward first met in a hotel ballroom in San Diego not only grew but was embellished in subsequent years. Not surprisingly the hotel itself still today fosters the idea, displaying prominently a portrait of the Duke and Duchess as well as featuring a small alcove for parties called the Duchess’s private dining room. According to another story: ‘Mrs Spencer was wearing a red evening gown that night and stood out so much from the rest of the women that the Prince asked to be presented to her.’
But the reality is more interesting. According to a short newspaper article of 31 March 1920 in the
San Diego Union
devoted to social activity in the community, Mrs Winfield Spencer left that afternoon for Los Angeles, ‘taking the
Lark
tonight for Monterey, where she will be the house guest for the weekend at the Del Monte Lodge of Mrs Jane Selby Hayne of San Francisco. Mrs Spencer goes north to attend the polo games.’ Two weeks later, in an issue of the same journal dated Sunday 18 April 1920, there appeared the following: ‘Mrs E. Winfield Spencer returned to Hotel del Coronado Tuesday evening [13 April 1920] after several weeks’ visit with Mrs Jane Selby Hayne at Del Monte.’
Other articles in the
San Francisco Chronicle
for the two weeks in question confirm her presence with Mrs Selby Hayne and report that the two women ‘spent much time on the Del Monte Polo field practising with ball and mallet’. In other words, Wallis was not in Coronado at the time of the ball. Instead, she was staying with the prominent San Francisco socialite, skilled horsewoman, ardent polo aficionado and, perhaps most significantly, newly divorced Mrs Selby Hayne. Jane Selby Hayne had been visiting Coronado in March 1920, so quite possibly Wallis met her just a month previously and jumped at the chance to cement the new friendship. In her memoirs Wallis stated emphatically that she did not, ‘as popular story has it’, meet the Prince of Wales when he visited that April. But nor does she say why she did not, nor where she was. She writes evasively that when their marriage was breaking up in earnest many invitations came to them both, including one for ‘polo at Del Monte’. She does not elaborate. Yet had she been in Coronado she would hardly have refused an opportunity to meet the Prince. Most likely it did not suit her story to reveal that she was the one on the move in the young marriage, the one who had gone looking for fun elsewhere and missed the one big social event of her time at Coronado.
Meanwhile the Prince wrote to his then girlfriend that the dinner dance at the Coronado Hotel was ‘most bloody awful … I’ve never hated a party as much as I did this evening’s … I’m near unto cwying [sic].’
Wallis insists that her first husband’s drinking was aggravated by lack of promotion or by being passed over when he had the chance to serve in a combat zone. Maybe. But the jobs he was given were not insignificant ones and clearly required a man of forceful personality and talent. Just as likely, if Wallis went north alone and had an exciting time, it was in fact his wife’s behaviour that provoked Spencer, who had plenty of evidence already of how easily his wife could have a good time. Spencer’s sister Ethel, one of Wallis’s bridesmaids, who probably knew her brother as well as anyone, described her former sister-in-law thus: ‘I’d call her just a typical southern belle. She could no more keep from flirting than from breathing. She could come into a room full of women and you wouldn’t pay any attention to her but the minute a man came in she would sparklen would se and turn on the charm. Win was frightfully jealous so that caused them a great deal of unhappiness.’
So if, as Wallis alleged, Spencer now drank more and shouted more, if he frequently abused her verbally and physically, went out alone after tying her to the bed or subjected her to bizarre rituals such as forcing her to witness the destruction of her family photographs, perhaps there was a part of her that had, wittingly or not, encouraged him, even enjoyed it? A woman who knew Wallis in those days remarked on ‘her beautiful dark sapphire blue eyes, full of sparkle and nice mischief. Her laugh was contagious, like a tonic …’ She was after all reverting to type – the type that needed constant confirmation of her attractiveness to all men, the type who was born with ambivalent sexuality. It was part of her insecurity which would never leave her.
Later that year Wallis’s mother Alice Rasin came to stay. The visit gave the warring couple a month’s respite as both behaved impeccably in front of her. At the end of the year Win was given a temporary job back in Pensacola and it was agreed that they should live separately for a while, with Wallis staying behind, alone in Coronado for a whole winter. But early in 1921 he was assigned a new and important position with the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington. This time both welcomed the change of location and they decided to move there together, living in a service apartment in a hotel called the Brighton. Wallis recounts: ‘But as so often happens since nothing was right at the office, nothing was right at home. Whatever I did was wrong in Win’s eyes and in this unhappy situation he did what was so easy for him, he took to the bottle.’
Through the thin walls of the hotel everyone knew about their shouting matches. ‘Brought up as I had been in families ruled by a code of considerate conduct I could not bear any public indelicacy.’ Wallis says that Win was being transformed ‘from a brilliant officer into a mixed-up neurotic’.
Then, one Sunday afternoon, he locked her in the bathroom of their apartment.
For hours I heard no sound from beyond the door. Whether Win had gone out or whether he was still in the apartment playing a practical joke I could not tell. I tried to unscrew the lock with a nail file … As the afternoon wore on and evening came I was seized with panic at the thought that Win might mean to keep me a prisoner all night. I wanted desperately to call for help but held myself in check.
 
Eventually Wallis heard the sound of a key turn in the lock but was too scared to try it herself and venture out. She finally plucked up enough courage to do so and, seeing him asleep in the marital bed, slept the night on the sofa. By morning she had decided she had to leave him. More than that, she decided she had to divorce him, and she knew that in her family divorce was a matter for deep shame.

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