That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (6 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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She discussed it first with her mother, who warned her that she would be making a terrible mistake if she went ahead. Aunt Bessie was similarly appalled by the idea of Wallis being the first Montague to be divorced. ‘Unthinkable,’ she told her niece. As a divorced woman she would be entering the wilderness. She would be a woman who had failed as a wife. These two were partly concerned for Wallis but also aware of the realities in the 1920s. In order to have something to live on she would have to square it with Uncle Sol and he, when she paid him a visit in Baltimore the next day, predictably thundered: ‘I wonhund ‘I wt let you bring this disgrace upon us.’ She would be the first Warfield to be divorced. But then he softened slightly and admitted that, never having been married himself, perhaps he was not the best person to pronounce. But he was not going to support her and urged her to return to Win and try again.
This she did for two more weeks. But she could stand it no longer. When she finally told Win she was leaving he was, she says, essentially a gentleman. Wallis now moved in with her mother, and in June 1921 gave her address to the US naval board as Earl Court, Baltimore – her mother’s apartment. But life was tough for Alice, working as a paid hostess at the Chevy Chase Country Club. In February 1922 Win was posted to the Far East as commander of a gunboat stationed in Hong Kong. There was no question of Wallis accompanying him. It was easier for unhappy naval wives like Wallis to keep up appearances of st
ill being married while living alone. Wallis was twenty-five, and she now discovered freedom. Win’s regular cheques for $225 a month were all she had to live on.
 
Wallis in Wonderland
 
‘Too good for a woman’
 
 
 
N
ineteen-twenties Washington was a most exciting place to be. In 1921 the country had a new president, the Republican Warren G. Harding, and political talk was everywhere. There was also discussion of his controversial private life, including his marriage to a divorcée five years older than him and his extramarital affairs. Harding was to serve for just two scandal-ridden years and his administration was generally considered a disaster. Wallis loved the political buzz as well as the gossip but, desperate to lead an independent life, found living with her mother unbearably constricting. Alice always waited up for her to come home, even if it was 2 a.m., and as one who had suffered from unpleasantly wagging tongues herself, disapproved of her being out after midnight with a man who was not her husband.
‘Hazardous’ is the word Wallis herself used about life for a single woman in 1920s Washington surrounded by so many surplus men. Single women needed a code of behaviour and she believed she had just such a personal rule, ‘which was never to allow myself to drift into light affairs of the moment … I was determined to wait until I was sure I had found a deep love that would engage both my mind and my emotions.’ But her mother took a different view about what constituted a suitable code and did not hesitate to tell Wallis. Not surprisingly, as soon as she could, Wallis moved out and, in the autumn of 1922, went to stay in the Georgetown house of a naval friend whose husband was also in the Far East. Living with Admiral’s daughter Dorothy McNamee gave Wallis social standing and enabled her to move effortlessly into a diplomatic and political circle where she honed her natural talent for making friends in high places, and remembering them. Her cousin Corinne Mustin – now a widow after her husband Henry died suddenly in 1923 – was also in Washington at this time opening another door for her into naval circles. In addition to Corinne, she had a small coterie of women friends, including Marianna Sands, from San Diego, and Ethel Noyes, daughter of the president of the Associ woated Press, both separated from their husbands and with whom she often went to embassy parties and weekend picnics.
Wallis, finding herself in what she described as a ‘special paradise’ for a woman on her own, among so many unattached, attractive and cultured men, was an eager learner. This exposure to an international network of men in high-powered jobs taught her some basic rules for a woman who wished to engage in conversations with the opposite sex in the early part of the century. She made sure she was always well informed about world affairs in general and about the individual person in particular; then she listened and flattered. This was a skill Wallis was determined to master if she was to move up the social scale.
A favourite event was a weekly meeting of a group known as the Soixante Gourmets. Each of the sixty young men in this exclusive club brought a female companion to lunch at the Hotel Hamilton and it was here that Wallis was introduced to the most stimulating group of men she was ever to meet. They included the witty and opinionated journalist Willmott (Bill) Lewis of
The Times
, who was to marry her friend Ethel Noyes; Prince Gelasio Caetani, the Italian Ambassador, fierce nationalist and First World War veteran, a brilliant and handsome man who planted the seeds of Wallis’s interest in the Italian political scene.
She may have written off her marriage with Win, but she insisted she still believed in marriage and was keen to marry again:
In my mind I had the picture of the sort of man I wanted. Ideally he would be a young man who was making his mark in business, diplomacy or one of the professions. He would like and understand people and above all appreciate me. I wanted someone who would make me a part of his life and whom I could help in his career. I wanted a man who would draw me into the full circle of his existence in all its aspects.
 
The description, although written by Wallis years after her marriage to the ex-King, is probably a fair account of what she hoped, indeed was working, to achieve at this time, while still in her twenties. Apparently she met several men in this enticing milieu who measured up to her ideal, but only one of them ‘stirred her heart’. She described him as a young diplomat of great promise attached to the Embassy of a Latin American country, ‘both teacher and model in the art of living … in many respects, the most fascinating man I have ever met with principles of steel and a spirit that bubbled like champagne’. Her use of ‘ever’ can hardly have been an accident.
Don Felipe Espil, at thirty-five, was eight years older than Wallis and a man of experience of women and the world. He was slim, dark and tall and spoke with an attractively marked South American accent. A qualified lawyer, his interests were extraordinarily wide ranging and included music, economics, bridge, baseball, golf and riding, at all of which he excelled. Many a Washington matron hoped to catch him for her daughter. When he met Wallis he was first secretary at the Argentine Embassy, but no one was in any doubt of his ambition to be ambassador, a position that would require considerable funds. He indulged in a brief relationship with Wallis, which caused some scandal in Washington, presumably because she was considered unsuitable, and it may have been this affair in particular that Alice Rasin so objected to. Espil clearly enjoyed Wallis’s company – for a while – and perhaps especially while he thought she was safely married. But she, as she confided in friends, was passionately in love wf gly in lith him and was prepared to do anything to keep him, including converting to Catholicism if necessary. Then he fell in love with Courtney Louise Letts, one of the quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in
The Great Gatsby
. Letts was wealthy, beautiful and, as the daughter of a US senator, socially desirable. Although younger than Wallis, she too had already been once married – to the well-connected Wellesley H. Stillwell. But she divorced him in 1924 and married and divorced a second time before eventually marrying Espil in 1933, by which time he had finally been promoted to ambassador to the US. Wallis, the mere wife of a naval lieutenant, with neither money nor social standing, could not compete.
Wallis, furious to learn that Espil was involved with another woman, could do nothing but absorb for herself the mores of the time and the place. She was a novice engaging with a world of deep hypocrisy and it took her some time to learn the rules of this circle. Some got away with scandalous adultery followed by divorce and went on to live a new life with a new partner. Others paid a heavy price. When Polly Peabody met Harry Crosby in 1920 and within two weeks tried to divorce her husband, Richard J. Peabody, who had become a dangerous alcoholic, blue-blooded Boston society was scandalized. Both Crosby and Peabody were wealthy sons of socially prominent Boston families and both were victims and veterans of the recent war. Crosby married Polly in 1922 but, shortly afterwards, he had a passionate affair with Constance Coolidge, the Comtesse de Jumilhac, who later became a close friend of Wallis for a time. In 1929 Crosby committed suicide with his latest young lover, Josephine Rotch, after taking a mixture of drink and drugs.
Espil’s rejection of her for a better-connected rival was publicly humiliating. Wallis, unusually, had lost control of the situation, which represented a crushing defeat. Washington was suddenly cold and unwelcoming. So when Corinne suggested a trip to Paris she jumped at the idea. Ethel Noyes, also getting a divorce at this time, was in Paris just before her marriage to Bill Lewis. The cousins sailed to Europe in January 1924, Wallis half hoping that she might find a divorce easier and cheaper in Paris, or even that Espil might pursue her. He never did and she discovered that a divorce would cost her several thousand dollars, money her uncle Sol had once again declined to provide. Deeply hurt by Espil and, aged twenty-eight, increasingly uncertain of the future, she responded warmly when Win wrote to invite her to forget the past and join him in China. It felt like there was nothing to lose. She would be tougher in future, never lose control. Win sent instructions for her to join a naval transport at Norfolk, Virginia, and then sail on to China at government expense.
Wallis travelled with a cargo of navy wives on the USS
Chaumont
, arriving in Hong Kong in September 1924 after a six-week voyage. Travelling to China at that time was not only prohibitively expensive for most people, it was also exotic and an opportunity to see something of the world – which she realized had become a necessity, having had a taste of it from the talk of others in the hothouse diplomatic circles of Washington. She badly wanted the marriage to work this time and, for a short while, it did. Win, on the dock to meet her, was looking tanned, clear-eyed and physically fit. He took her back to his navy-supplied apartment in Kowloon on the Chinese mainland and told her that he had stopped drinking from the day he had heard she was coming.
This second honeymoon was, however, short lived. Again, there is only Wallis’s account of the final breakdown. She recounts how Win, after two weeks, returned to his old pattern of drinking and erratic behaviour leading to abuse and violence. There is good reason to believe her. Her frame of mind was such that she would have tried hard to keep the marriage together at this point in her life if she could have, and, revealingly, she admits that perhaps there was something about the two of them together that set off this vicious cycle. When she asked Win if she was responsible for lighting the fire of his anger, he apparently responded that he could not explain what happened but ‘something lets go, like the cables of a plane’. In the days before therapy it may be unfair to blame Wallis for a lack of sympathy, as some biographers have done. But, even assuming Win and Wallis did not encounter a physical difficulty in their relationship which unleashed his fury and determination to punish her, it is clear that Wallis was not interested in trying to understand his problems nor in encouraging him to seek help. This may have been because she knew she was the one who needed it more.
There followed another short period of calm for Wallis to reflect as Win, undertaking river patrol duties, was sent away. Wallis set off to join him in Canton, but as soon as she arrived there she came down with a high temperature. She described it as a kidney infection and said that while she was ill he was solicitous. Drinking the polluted water was renowned for causing illness. But it is also possible that the infection was the result of Win kicking her in the stomach and assaulting her, as one biographer claims he was told by a friend of Wallis in her latter years, which would explain his unusual contrition subsequently. His anger presumably derived from jealousy, fed by his accusations, later recounted by Wallis herself, that she had ‘carried on’ with officers aboard the
Chaumont
and flirted with men in Hong Kong during his absence. He now started opening her letters to find evidence of this.
Wallis described what happened next: ‘To his already formidable repertory of taunts and humiliations he now added some oriental variations. I gathered that during our long absence he had spent a considerable amount of his time ashore in the local sing-song houses. In any event, he now insisted on my accompanying him to his favourite haunts where he would ostentatiously make a fuss over the girls.’ It may seem strange that Wallis chose to refer to such activities at all in her memoirs. But, from her perspective, it was vital to prove that her first husband was the betrayer and abuser, even if she was the one who walked out of the marriage – a factor of critical importance at a time when all she was hoping for was special permission to be presented at Court. It’s a paragraph that has given rise to much insidious comment and blighted any subsequent serious discussion of Wallis’s life in China, what she later called ‘her lotus year’. The sing-song houses were places of entertainment where clients were usually entertained with erotic songs and some music and dancing as a prelude to sex. If she admitted to frequenting such places, which usually offered opium and gambling as well and were only slightly more respectable than ordinary brothels, as a threesome, perhaps she also visited brothels without Win and perhaps she learned from Chinese prostitutes some ancient oriental techniques for pleasuring men – it is an impossible scenario to verify or disprove. But what is clear is that a woman with Wallis’s energy and gusto for life travelling alone in the orient at this time was inevitably going to be a target for gossip.
At all events, when Wallis took the decision to ss decisiotell Win that their attempt at a reunion had failed and that she was leaving him for good, he put up no resistance. He quietly offered to resume his monthly payments to her. But instead of going directly home to the US, where she would have to admit to friends and family this new failure in her private life, she went first to Shanghai, perhaps, as she maintained, because someone had told her there was an American court there where it might be possible to get a divorce. Or perhaps she was simply not ready to return and, having come all this way, decided it would be a shame to leave without seeing such an exciting place. However, while still in Washington she had been given letters of introduction to single men living there, so it was clearly always a backstop on her personal horizon, a place to visit if things did not work out with Win.

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