The Duchess Of Windsor (79 page)

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Authors: Greg King

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The Prince’s commentary was emphatic as to the effects of the abdication. He declared that it had brought David “into conflict with everyone from the government to the man in the streets,” again ignoring the historical divide in public opinion at the time. He was particularly hard on the Duchess: “Wallis is often depicted as hard, ambitious and grasping,” he announced. “There were other, much worse descriptions flying around as well.” Edward himself apparently felt no need to correct these assumptions or present alternatives to them, leaving these “much worse descriptions” to the imaginations of his viewers. Tales of the Windsors’ frivolous style of life, their obsession with money, and their sordid friendships were repeated with little or no attempt to present an alternative view. Wallis’s relationship with Jimmy Donahue was declared outright to have been an affair, and John Richardson was allowed to repeat stories from Donahue himself without any warning that the Woolworth heir had been an acknowledged liar. Worst of all was Edward’s treatment of the Nazi plot to kidnap the Windsors: Speaking of the Duke’s requests that Wallis be received and that he be given a proper job, he says, in absolute opposition to the written record, that “it is quite possible that the Duchess was behind much of it.”
20
Few of those interviewed spoke favorably of the Duke and Duchess, and those who did were reduced to brief appearances. In contradiction to what Prince Edward had promised, Janine Metz found that virtually none of her serious comments about the life of the Windsors, their charity work and her correction of the rumors surrounding them—the very reasons she had agreed to cooperate with the Prince—had been used.
At the end of the premiere, Metz felt so betrayed that she quickly exited the theater. Prince Edward spotted her and asked, “How did you like the film?”
“I feel sick at what I’ve just seen and heard,” she told him. She began to explain how disappointed she was in the treatment of the Windsors when John Richardson approached. He began to put his arm around her shoulder, but Madame Metz pushed him away. “How dare you come to me after saying the lies that you said!” she declared.
Meanwhile, Prince Edward continued to stand in silence. He appeared utterly confused and stared pointedly at the floor as Metz walked away. “I don’t think anyone had ever spoken to him before with such frankness,” she says. A short time later, he approached the former secretary once again, asking why she was so upset.
“That film was a lie from the beginning to the end!” she told him. She felt particularly betrayed that the gossip about the Windsors seeking discounts and not paying their bills—rumors which she had carefully corrected in the portions of her interview which had been edited out—had been given such prominence in a film which she had been told was to correct the misconceptions. The Prince tried to object, but Madame Metz was clearly angry and, as she says, “filled with great sorrow at how he had betrayed the Duke and Duchess.” “Of course,” she said to Edward, “you couldn’t do anything else because of your family.”
21
Prince Edward’s cameras would, ironically, be among the last to capture the restored interior of the Windsor Villa in Paris. Mohammed al Fayed had taken great pains to faithfully copy everything as it had been during the Windsors’ lives. He managed to repurchase many of the pieces which Blum had sold and even successfully bid on the Duke’s ceremonial swords and military souvenirs which had been auctioned off along with Wallis’s jewels in Geneva in April 1987. Al Fayed transformed the former secretaries’ office on the first floor into a small Windsor museum, with glass shelves and display cases holding personal memorabilia, including letters, their scrapbooks, and some of the hundreds of photographs and papers which had been discovered beneath the mahogany cover of the Duke’s bathtub. An additional two museum rooms were created in the basement to display the royal souvenirs.
22
Al Fayed decided he wished to live in the Windsor Villa, and so the attic story was converted into a small flat. The restoration was complete, and cataloging of the collection well under way, but al Fayed did little to encourage visits to the house. Although he encouraged and welcomed celebrity visits, he proved less amenable to those with a genuine interest in the Duke and Duchess. Erna Bringe, a member of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor Society in America, recalls: “I did have his approval at one time to visit the house, but I had to find ten others willing to pay the price to stay at the Paris Ritz in order to make it worth his while.”
23
For those who did gain admittance, al Fayed had published a small souvenir booklet describing the restoration of the house and the collection within. “It is certain,” he declared confidently, “that future generations will come here to inspect the souvenirs of the most famous love story of the 20th century, in the way that tourists go to Verona to speculate on the exact position of the balcony under which Romeo professed his love for Juliet. If we had not acted swiftly the furniture, the works of art, the effects and personal objects of the Duke and Duchess would have disappeared to the four corners of the globe.”
24
Despite his assurances that his Windsor museum would survive for “future generations,” al Fayed, in 1997, made the startling announcement that, in September, Sotheby’s would auction off the entire contents of the restored villa. “I think time for me to enjoy the house,” he explained in an interview, “because it’s difficult with five kids just to live in a museum.... I think its time for me, for the whole world to enjoy, you know, I think everyone can have a souvenir from the love story of the century, its nice to restruct all that and just bring it back to life for people and for future generations.” Christiane Sherwen, in charge of the Windsor archive al Fayed had assembled, added: “What do you do? The place is too small to be a museum and you cannot have people passing through and so, as with all human things, it’s going to be dispersed.... One would maybe like to keep it together, but it’s not a real proposition.”
25
These rather peculiar explanations raised more than a few eyebrows. Mohammed al Fayed certainly did not need the money which the sale of the Windsor possessions would bring; nor was his declaration that his children needed additional space any more convincing. Al Fayed was wealthy enough to purchase five separate villas in Paris for his children if they felt cramped. If he truly adored the Windsor villa as a structure, it would have been a simple matter to transfer its carefully accumulated contents to a regular museum or even to found a permanent memorial to the Duke and Duchess where their belongings could be enjoyed by the public and utilized by historians for decades to come. “How much nicer it would have been for the entire collection to have been preserved,” wrote editor Ingrid Seward in
Majesty
magazine, “not in the house in Paris, but in a museum in London with a fee-paying public being granted access to a piece of living history.”
26
But the Windsor auction, scheduled to begin in New York the third week of September 1997, did not take place as planned. On August 31, just after midnight, the Mercedes carrying Diana, Princess of Wales; Dodi, Mohammed al Fayed’s son; bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones; and driver Henri Paul veered out of control and smashed into one of the concrete support piers in the Place de l‘Alma tunnel in Paris. Paul, whose body was later found to contain nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol—along with a mixture of antidepressants and other drugs—was killed instantly, his spinal cord severed by the column of the steering wheel. Dodi Fayed, seated on the left rear, also died on impact. Rees-Jones, the only passenger in the car wearing a seat belt, was severely injured and his face lacerated. Seated immediately behind him, Diana suffered a ruptured pulmonary artery but despite her internal injuries was not killed. Although the French paramedics were on the scene within a few minutes, the Princess did not arrive at La Pitie-Salpêtrière Hospital until some ninety minutes had elapsed, during which time her internal injuries went untreated. At four that morning, she was officially pronounced dead.
The week that followed was akin to the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963; for the first time in many people’s lives, the world seemingly ground to a halt at the death of this one woman. The reaction of the Queen and the British Royal Family was widely criticized; while London—indeed, the world—shared in an outpouring of grief, Elizabeth II and her family remained cloistered at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where Prince Charles had been staying with his and Diana’s two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
At the time of the Duke of Windsor’s death in 1972, the public demonstrations of grief had caught the Royal Family off guard. David, as an exiled former king and outcast member of the Royal Family, had fallen beyond the concerns of his British relatives, who had ignored him in life and now attempted to do much the same in his death. Several times—notably the BBC memorial broadcast with Lord Mountbatten and the trooping the color ceremony, among others—Elizabeth II had to be advised to make small concessions to public sympathy. To a lesser extent, this had been the case at Wallis’s death, when the public interest in the Duchess and sympathy for her again took the Royal Family by surprise.
Now, in September 1997, the familiar pattern once again repeated itself, this time with far more serious results. To the Royal Family, Diana—even in death—remained an outsider, the divorced wife of the heir to the throne, having lost her rank and the style of Her Royal Highness. In life, they had marginalized her and attempted to isolate her from public support and affection; in death, they fully expected that she would be treated in the same fashion. Aside from a brief statement released by Buckingham Palace the day Diana died, there was utter silence from the Royal Family for three days. The rest of the world was unanimous in praising the late Princess, but her former family said nothing. The public, overwhelmed at the loss of arguably the most popular member of the Royal Family in the entire century, demanded more. In an increasingly hostile atmosphere, the Queen agreed to return to London.
As defenders of the Royal Family pointed out, no one—not any member of the government or the public on the street—had any right to dictate how the Queen and her family should mourn the late Princess. However, the Queen’s most important constitutional role is that of continued stability; it is she who forms the focal point of national rejoicing, and she has traditionally led the nation in times of crisis, providing a moral and reassuring center removed from the transient political arena. Over the past thirty years of her reign, Elizabeth II had carefully cultivated the media to display her family in the best possible light, asking them to share family holidays and celebrations; now, in a time of national mourning, she was subject to the same forces which had helped craft her very popularity.
Upon the advice of senior palace officials and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Elizabeth II did something unprecedented: She agreed to address the nation on live television. Her five-minute speech recalling Diana, if somewhat impersonal and bearing all the hallmarks of careful scripting, did much to silence the criticism which had resulted in headlines, such as the
Daily Express’s
banner “Show Us You Care,” in several London papers. Diana’s funeral, on Saturday, September 6, also witnessed another unique move: Amid controversy that the royal standard atop Buckingham Palace was the only flag in the country not at half staff, once the Queen left the palace for Westminster Abbey, it was changed to a Union Jack, which was duly lowered, a tribute to the late Princess. The Royal Family’s famous stiff upper lip, firmly in place during Diana’s funeral, stood in stark contrast to the scene less than three months later when the Queen and other members of her family were seen to wipe away tears as they watched the Royal Yacht HMS
Britannia
decommissioned, a show of feeling which caused considerable comment in the press.
In New York City, news of the fatal car crash in Paris brought last-minute preparations for the Windsor auction at Sotheby‘s to a halt. No one knew if they should continue with their plans. Finally, on September 3, Diana Brooks, chief executive officer of Sotheby‘s, made the announcement: “Following the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and his eldest son, Mr. Dodi Fayed, Mr. Mohammed al Fayed has consulted with Sotheby’s and together we have decided that it would be appropriate to postpone the auction of Property from the Collection of the The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”
27
The auction, it was announced, would take place sometime in 1998, when it could be rescheduled to accommodate both al Fayed and the already-booked showrooms at Sotheby’s in Manhattan; proceeds from the sale would now go to the newly formed Dodi Fayed International Charitable Foundation.
The Windsor auction was eventually rescheduled for the third and fourth weeks of February 1998. Richard Appelbaum Associates of New York was hired to completely transform two floors of Sotheby’s Manhattan showrooms into a re-created Windsor Villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Enormous blown-up photographs of the hall, the drawing room, the dining room, the library, the boudoir, and both the Duke’s and the Duchess’s bedrooms were suspended from the tall ceilings, providing a surreal backdrop for the pieces of furniture, paintings, and porcelains which had seemingly leaped from the second into the third dimension.
28
The fame of the love story of the century, now coupled with the links through the al Fayed family to the late Princess of Wales, lent an extraordinary interest to the auction. Just after half-past six on the evening of Thursday, February 19, Diana Brooks ascended the podium in the main auction room and announced the start of the sale. The first lot, a miniature, hand-colored oval portrait of David as a baby, sold to Memphis, Tennessee, designer Pat Kerr for some $24,000; Sotheby’s original estimate had been $2,000–$3,000. This inflated bidding quickly set the tone for the two weeks which were to follow, an increasing spiral of excitement and desire to own a piece of the Windsors‘ lives.

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