The Duchess Of Windsor (2 page)
Read The Duchess Of Windsor Online
Authors: Greg King
This book is an attempt to write a fair and favorable biography of the Duchess of Windsor. I do not claim to have produced the definitive work; it still needs writing. But I think that with the assistance of the Windsors’ friends I have managed to correct many of the misconceptions about the Duchess—and, by extension, the Duke—and answer the years of rumor and innuendo which have plagued Wallis. There remain outstanding questions, and some answers may never be found. But I believe that enough of the pieces have come together to form an accurate picture of her memorable life.
And it was, indeed, a memorable life. Wallis may not have been very different from most women, but she lived through astonishing events and managed to transcend her circumstances and create one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century. She had few talents, but those which she mastered—the decoration of her homes, her fashion sense, her entertainments, and her care of the Dukes—ensured her a place in the public eye for most of her life. And while she famously created brilliant houses and presided over grand parties, perhaps her most unsung and important accomplishments were those she made during the Second World War, when she transformed the struggling relief agencies in the Bahamas into efficient care centers and funded and opened canteens for the thousands of soldiers who never failed to succumb to her charm.
In a life which has largely been condemned as shallow and frivolous, Wallis achieved a rare balance: forced to live in the glare of an unceasing spotlight of publicity, she remained, against all odds, very much the same woman with whom the Duke had fallen in love. It is arguable that, with her proven abilities in the Bahamas and natural ease, she would have made an admirable addition to the British Royal Family had they welcomed her after her marriage. But, condemned for her past and blamed for the feelings of the man who loved her, Wallis was doomed to remain forever anathema in the eyes of her husband’s family. Her contributions, therefore, must be measured against the circumstances which were imposed upon her and the times in which she lived; in this, Wallis rarely failed.
“Mine is a simple story—or so I like to think,” the Duchess of Windsor wrote in her memoirs. “It is the story of an ordinary life that became extraordinary.”
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That story—of the aristocratic but poor girl from Baltimore who inadvertently found herself at the center of the century’s greatest romance—is indeed one which needs a fresh telling.
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That story—of the aristocratic but poor girl from Baltimore who inadvertently found herself at the center of the century’s greatest romance—is indeed one which needs a fresh telling.
Prologue
P
ARIS SWELTERED
in the hot afternoon sun as the car pulled to a stop before the tall iron gates at 4, route du Champ d’Entrainement. Within a few seconds, they parted, and the automobile swept along the drive, beneath the shade of the old chestnut and oak trees, and came to a stop before the portico of the Windsor villa. The glass-and-wrought-iron doors of the house were opened by Martin Gregory, the tall, distinguished-looking man who for many years had worked as assistant butler to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and who now looked after the property for its current resident, Egyptian-born millionaire Mohammed al Fayed. Al Fayed’s forty-one-year-old son, Dodi, escorted Diana, Princess of Wales, up the steps and into the welcome cool of the villa’s entrance hall.
ARIS SWELTERED
in the hot afternoon sun as the car pulled to a stop before the tall iron gates at 4, route du Champ d’Entrainement. Within a few seconds, they parted, and the automobile swept along the drive, beneath the shade of the old chestnut and oak trees, and came to a stop before the portico of the Windsor villa. The glass-and-wrought-iron doors of the house were opened by Martin Gregory, the tall, distinguished-looking man who for many years had worked as assistant butler to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and who now looked after the property for its current resident, Egyptian-born millionaire Mohammed al Fayed. Al Fayed’s forty-one-year-old son, Dodi, escorted Diana, Princess of Wales, up the steps and into the welcome cool of the villa’s entrance hall.
This was thirty-six-year-old Diana’s second visit to the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Five weeks earlier, on July 25, she and Dodi Fayed had spent an afternoon wandering through its magnificent rooms, restored at great cost by his father to their former glory. Now, on this last Saturday in August 1997, the villa stood empty, its chambers stripped of furniture, carpets, curtains, and paintings. In three weeks, Sotheby’s, at the request of Mohammed al Fayed, would auction off the contents of the house in New York City.
Sunlight spilled through the three tall windows of the drawing room, washing the honey-colored parquet floor with a brilliant sheen, as Diana and Dodi entered. Here the world’s most famous royal outcast, Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, had entertained, presiding over sparkling parties attended by the elite of European aristocracy, writers, actors, artists, and authors. Now the only sound came from Diana’s low-heeled shoes as they clicked across the bare floor.
Like the Duchess of Windsor, Diana, Princess of Wales, stood beyond the bounds of royal convention, having been cast adrift following her divorce from Prince Charles almost exactly a year earlier. She had lost the style of Her Royal Highness; her name as the spouse of the Prince of Wales had been removed from the regular prayers for members of the Royal Family; her foreign tours were downgraded at the request of Buckingham Palace; and, perhaps most significant, she was the victim of a subtle yet persistent campaign to marginalize her role in public life.
Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, had suffered years of deliberate humiliation at the hands of the British Royal Family and the court. Her position as a twice-divorced American commoner made her anathema to many, and she was widely blamed for Edward VIII’s abdication. The abdication was nothing if not a moral crisis—a battle waged between the new King’s modern approach to life and the traditional attitudes of the aristocracy. That the stigma of Wallis’s divorce made her unsuitable as a queen consort in 1936 is without question; that in exile, married to the Duke of Windsor for thirty-five years, she warranted the continued punishment is open to debate. For the very presence of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the Windsor villa that Saturday afternoon proved nothing if not how much values and circumstances had changed in the family of Queen Elizabeth II.
The first cracks in Elizabeth II’s reign came in 1967, when her cousin the Earl of Harewood left his wife to live openly with his mistress, whom he later married. His brother also later divorced his wife. The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, following a very public renunciation of her divorced paramour in the 1950s, found her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, crumbling amid intense media scrutiny. Their marriage was dissolved in 1978.
The painful collapse of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, played out in front pages of newspapers around the world and on television programs, where both partners confessed their affairs, was surely as much a crisis as the abdication, if in a different way. Whereas the abdication had pitted Edward VIII against his government, the disintegration of the Waleses’ marriage seemed destined to tear at the loyalties of those faithful to Elizabeth II and tradition and those who championed the Princess of Wales, arguably the most popular woman of the twentieth century.
Divorce also reared its head in the marriages of Elizabeth II’s other children: in 1992, the same year in which the Waleses’ marriage ended, the Duke and Duchess of York separated; and Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, not only divorced her husband, Capt. Mark Phillips, but remarried in a quiet ceremony in Scotland. This last occasion aptly demonstrated how much the monarchy had changed since the days of the abdication crisis. Not only did Anne marry a man with whom stolen and published letters indicated she had had an affair while still wed to her first husband, but the union was celebrated in the presence of both the Queen and the Queen Mother, the two women who had, for the last forty years, steadfastly refused to accept the Duchess of Windsor. The mounting criticism of the Royal Family, the behavior of its members, the shouts of “Ernest Simpson!” which greeted Andrew Parker-Bowles, husband of Prince Charles’s mistress, when he appeared at the Turf Club, all built into pressures that seemed as threatening to the continued survival of the monarchy as the relationship between Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII nearly sixty years earlier.
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Sarah Ferguson, the estranged Duchess of York, for one, was left pondering her future in a family whose rejection and indifference she had come to know well. Like her sister-in-law, the Duchess of York felt trapped by the machinations of court officials, those same forces whom the Duchess of Windsor had long ago blamed for much of the abdication crisis. “I thought quite a bit about the most famous female outcast of them all,” wrote the Duchess of York of the winter of 1991, “the one who had led a king to abdicate and ultimately brought Elizabeth to her throne. There were yellow roses strangely growing in my garden at Sunninghill at the time, defying the cold. I picked a bunch and took them to Frogmore, the royal mausoleum. And I laid those stubborn flowers on the sparsely kept grave of Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, another woman who could never fit in.”
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As they had done with Wallis Windsor, the Royal Family closed ranks against Diana. Her isolation, her troubled private life, her quest for a meaningful life of her own, had led her to this elegant stone palace. Over the last few weeks, media around the world had reported her relationship with Dodi Fayed, a sometime film producer and rather genial man who both clearly adored her and also undoubtedly relished the idea of a liaison with her. Although the relationship appears to have been little more than a summer romance, there was ample speculation that Diana might find refuge in these regal rooms. The irony that the world’s most famous divorcée might discover peace in the miniature palace created by the subject of the twentieth century’s most famous romance was not lost on the press. That same week, in fact, author Hugo Vickers, in the British magazine
Hello!
had written of the possible benefits Diana might enjoy were she to abandon life in England for the sheltering walls of the Windsor villa.
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Hello!
had written of the possible benefits Diana might enjoy were she to abandon life in England for the sheltering walls of the Windsor villa.
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Just before five, Diana and Dodi left the villa. Diana had looked around carefully, examining the rooms, asking questions about the kitchen and bathrooms. According to one close friend, Diana was considering the idea of dividing her time between London and Paris and the Windsor villa had been proposed as a suitable residence. It seems likely that this—and not a future relationship with Dodi Fayed—was responsible for her interest.
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The couple left 4, route du Champ d’Entrainement. Their car carried them to Dodi Fayed’s apartment and then to his father’s Ritz Hotel, where they shared a late supper. Just after midnight, they left the Ritz in a new car, a sleek black Mercedes, chased by a contingent of paparazzi and driven by a man with over three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. Twelve hours after wandering through the hushed, tomblike villa in the Bois de Boulogne, Diana, Princess of Wales, would be dead.
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The couple left 4, route du Champ d’Entrainement. Their car carried them to Dodi Fayed’s apartment and then to his father’s Ritz Hotel, where they shared a late supper. Just after midnight, they left the Ritz in a new car, a sleek black Mercedes, chased by a contingent of paparazzi and driven by a man with over three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. Twelve hours after wandering through the hushed, tomblike villa in the Bois de Boulogne, Diana, Princess of Wales, would be dead.
“Mortality for others, immortality for oneself.”
—Wallis, Commonplace Book
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Romeo and Juliet in Baltimore
S
IXTY YEARS
after the fact, writing her memoirs from the comfort of her great nineteenth-century Parisian villa and pondering her place in history, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, deliberately altered the date of her parents’ wedding. Records indicate that the marriage was solemnized on November 19, 1895. Wallis Windsor, however, would insist that it had taken place in June, a difference of five months. Like so many aspects of her life, this discrepancy would lead to years of insinuation.
IXTY YEARS
after the fact, writing her memoirs from the comfort of her great nineteenth-century Parisian villa and pondering her place in history, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, deliberately altered the date of her parents’ wedding. Records indicate that the marriage was solemnized on November 19, 1895. Wallis Windsor, however, would insist that it had taken place in June, a difference of five months. Like so many aspects of her life, this discrepancy would lead to years of insinuation.
There was nothing extraordinary in the glum little ceremony that united Teackle Wallis Warfield and Alice Montague in marriage that late November afternoon. The circumstances, however, belied the peculiar nature of the event. The Reverend Dr. C. Ernest Smith faced the couple not before the altar of his Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Baltimore but in the dimly lit drawing room of the adjacent rectory. The customary trappings of a happy society wedding were notably absent: No congregation looked on in support as their vows were exchanged; no organ thundered in celebration; no voices were raised in joyous song; no fragrant scent of flowers filled the air.
It cannot have been the wedding that twenty-four-year-old Alice Montague had envisioned for herself. Tall and slender, with golden hair worn plaited or loosely coiled atop her head, Alice was the product of a proud, aristocratic heritage. In the waning November light, wide deep blue eyes gazed out from the chiseled lines of her ivory face. She possessed other charms as well: In an era when most young women remained carefully sheltered and prided themselves on their domestic skills and comprehension of social expectations, she happily dominated conversations with her biting wit. Her mind was exceptionally quick, and her charm impressed even the most staid of companions.
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Quiet, thoughtful Teackle Wallis Warfield had been attracted to the vivacious and magnetic woman who now stood at his side. T. Wallis, as the groom chose to call himself, looked much older than his bride, an unwelcome illusion aided by his receding hairline and slight, almost-stooped figure. But he was also handsome, with light blue eyes and a dashing little mustache that lent him an air of dignity. Half-hidden in the shadows was the pallor of his skin, the hollowed cheeks, the red-rimmed eyes that spoke of his inability to sleep. His loud coughs, however, interrupting the short, sad service, were an uncomfortable reminder of not only just how ill the groom had become but of the uncertainties the young couple would face in the future. For T. Wallis Warfield, at the age of twenty-five, was already dying.
The nature of his illness, the troubling circumstances surrounding the union, and the absolute hush that descended over the marriage taking place that November afternoon in Baltimore would forever haunt the little girl born to the couple seven months later. It is but one of the many ironies in the life of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, that she, party to perhaps the twentieth century’s most celebrated and publicized marriage, should have been the product of one of the nineteenth century’s most private.
In the fading years of the nineteenth century, the city of Baltimore was a place of great contrasts. Its heritage was firmly rooted in the distant days of the eighteenth century, but the city also reflected the changing times: telephone and electric lines formed aerial lattices over colonial squares, and factory smokestacks spewed forth clouds of industrial waste into the Atlantic sky. The city, like the great mass of America itself, filled with immigrants and tycoons, great wealth and appalling poverty, and the still-bleeding wounds from the devastating Civil War, hovered uneasily between the old century and the new.
Baltimore remained a bastion of the defeated Confederacy, a city that prided itself on its unique, carefully cultivated charm. Although it lay less than fifty miles from the nation’s capital, Baltimore regarded itself not as a northern town but as a refined southern outpost. When the Civil War had come, the city’s sympathies were expressed in lively demonstrations, street parades, and a rebellious state legislature that had argued the benefits of secession from the United States. As a result, it was occupied by Union troops throughout the hostilities, leaving divisive scars which lasted well into the twentieth century.
Mingled with these southern influences was a distinctly English flavor. Baltimore had modeled itself not only on the great cities to the south but also along the more genteel lines of English towns, a holdover from the days before the American Revolution, when an imported British aristocracy ruled the New World and transplanted the ideas of Georgian London to the wild shores of the Americas. Many of the town’s illustrious families were descendants of the first English settlers along the eastern seaboard; in time they had formed into a carefully knit community which believed itself superior to later settlers. Here position and breeding counted for a great deal, and the offspring of these families were raised with high expectations and imbued with a sense of their own social heritage and unique obligations.
The charm of Baltimore lay in its picturesque atmosphere. Cobbled streets, shaded by rows of linden and oak trees, were lined with Georgian and Italianate mansions. Endless rows of upright brick town houses skirted narrow side streets and circled small parks whose stretches of grass were guarded by wrought-iron fences. The smell of salt air wafting in on ocean breezes, the squawking of gulls, clatter of carriages, chiming of clocks, and tolling of church bells filled the senses. Chesapeake Bay brought commerce and trade, and the waterfront was lined with the swaying masts of dozens of ships. When night came, sidewalks were illuminated by flickering gaslights.
Here, in a quiet, dignified house on 34 East Preston Street, an indomitable widow, Anna Emory Warfield, presided over one of the city’s noble old families. The house, like its owner, was austere, solid, and unobtrusive. The Warfields were socially prominent, respectable, and comfortable, if not wealthy. For generations they had acted as civil servants, bankers, businessmen, and public officials. They knew the importance of their place in Baltimore society, and each generation was raised with a careful understanding not only of their position but of their impressive inheritance and breeding.
In the midst of the abdication crisis, Wallis was often dismissed as a common, vulgar American of little breeding and no heritage. In truth, the Duchess of Windsor was born of privileged ancestry, and the number of kings, earls, dukes, and aristocrats in her family tree rivaled those of her most vehement enemy, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Like her future husband, she counted William the Conqueror among her forebears. Indeed, one of her ancestors, Pagan de Warfield, had accompanied William from France and fought beside him in the Battle of Hastings.
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For his service, he was rewarded with a grant of land near Windsor Castle in Berkshire, named Warfield’s Walk in his honor. Thereafter, the Warfield name appeared frequently in British history, and the family could proudly boast of their mention in the famous
Domesday Book.
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For his service, he was rewarded with a grant of land near Windsor Castle in Berkshire, named Warfield’s Walk in his honor. Thereafter, the Warfield name appeared frequently in British history, and the family could proudly boast of their mention in the famous
Domesday Book.
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During the reign of King Edward III, Robert de Warfield was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter, the highest honor in the kingdom.
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The King himself, through one of those murky liaisons that litter royal history, was thought to have been an ancestor.
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Throughout the centuries, Warfields served prominently at the English court, enjoying both close ties with the Royal Family and impressive financial and titular rewards for their loyal sacrifices.
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The King himself, through one of those murky liaisons that litter royal history, was thought to have been an ancestor.
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Throughout the centuries, Warfields served prominently at the English court, enjoying both close ties with the Royal Family and impressive financial and titular rewards for their loyal sacrifices.
The American history of the family was just as illustrious. In 1662, Richard Warfield left his native Berkshire and sailed to the colonies, where he became a prosperous gentleman farmer. He purchased hundreds of acres of fertile land along the Severn River, near what was to become Baltimore, and his wealth ensured his lasting influence in the colony. When he died, he left his six sons an impressive inheritance of land, money, and power.
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In the centuries that followed, Warfields fought in George Washington’s army during the Revolution and became successful bankers, lawyers, and civil servants; several held positions of great political power, including Edwin Warfield, who became governor of Maryland.
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In the centuries that followed, Warfields fought in George Washington’s army during the Revolution and became successful bankers, lawyers, and civil servants; several held positions of great political power, including Edwin Warfield, who became governor of Maryland.
True to the sentiments of their Baltimore neighbors, the nineteenth-century Warfields remained staunch supporters of the Confederacy. Anna Emory Warfield’s late husband, Henry Mactier Warfield, had been one of those local heroes who had proudly upheld the tradition. A prominent member of the Maryland legislature when the Civil War erupted, he had been one of the first officials to call for the secession of his state from the Union. Although there was widespread support for such a drastic measure, the forces of the Union won the day. On September 12, 1861, the night before the scheduled vote, Gen. John A. Dix, Baltimore’s federal department commander, ordered the arrest of the rebel legislators, Warfield included.
For fourteen months, Henry Mactier Warfield and nine of his fellow legislators languished in Union bonds. At first, he was imprisoned within the thick, menacing bastions of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. From the tiny windows of his dank cell he could gaze upon the same impressive ramparts above which, fifty years earlier, Francis Scott Key had spied the fluttering remnants of an American flag and been moved to write
The Star-Spangled Banner.
Warfield was later taken to Fort Lafayette, thence to Fort Warren, located in Boston Harbor. The damp, musty cells, the meager diet, and the ferocity of life in a Union prison took their toll on Warfield’s body, but his spirit remained as independent as ever. He refused repeated offers of freedom, on the condition that he take a public oath of allegiance to the Union and was moved to write to Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton: “Sir, as I am confined without charges, I renew my claim to be discharged without conditions.” Such stubborn resolve eventually paid off, and it was a point of family pride that Warfield was released without ever having taken a Union oath.
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The Star-Spangled Banner.
Warfield was later taken to Fort Lafayette, thence to Fort Warren, located in Boston Harbor. The damp, musty cells, the meager diet, and the ferocity of life in a Union prison took their toll on Warfield’s body, but his spirit remained as independent as ever. He refused repeated offers of freedom, on the condition that he take a public oath of allegiance to the Union and was moved to write to Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton: “Sir, as I am confined without charges, I renew my claim to be discharged without conditions.” Such stubborn resolve eventually paid off, and it was a point of family pride that Warfield was released without ever having taken a Union oath.
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Upon his release from prison, Henry Mactier Warfield resumed his business life with great success. His eventual position as one of the directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad provided ample prestige and financial security for his growing family. He invested large sums of his sizable income in grain and flour exports and further increased his holdings. His success and popularity eventually won him the first presidency of the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce.
Warfield was not a man obsessed with the outward trappings of wealth. The family’s comfortable town house on Baltimore’s East Preston Street, home to the generation of Warfields who would shepherd the family into the twentieth century, was a perfect expression of his solemn character. Here he and his wife, Anna Emory, raised their seven children according to strict Victorian standards. Along with two daughters, Ann and Elizabeth, Anna had given birth to five sons, including Daniel, who died while still a child; Solomon Davies; Richard Emory; and Henry Mactier Jr.
The youngest son, Teackle Wallis, had been named after his father’s great friend Severn Teackle Wallis, a fellow legislator who had been imprisoned at the outbreak of the Civil War for supporting Henry Mactier Warfield’s call for secession. Wallis, like his friend, had been released from prison and gone on to great personal and financial success. His credits included distinguished author and lawyer; in time he became a provost of the University of Maryland, immortalized in a statue that dominated Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Place.
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Teackle Wallis, however, proved unequal to the aspirations implicit in his prestigious name. Although he grew into a rather handsome young man, he never managed to match either the considerable accomplishments of his famous namesake or even those of his successful brothers. Fathered when Henry Mactier was already in his early sixties, T. Wallis was charming and extremely thoughtful; but he was also weak and suffered from chronic illness. Whereas his brothers had been noted for their robust health and physical presence, T. Wallis had never expressed more than a passing interest in athletic pursuits, and whatever intellectual promise he had shown had been cut short when he fell ill with consumption and had to withdraw from the university. The greater part of his life was passed in isolation, alone in his room, with hours spent either in bed or brooding over his future.
Within the sheltered, privileged world inhabited by the Warfields, illness was regarded not so much as a personal misfortune as it was a weakness of character and private disgrace. At the time, America was consumed with a new appetite for healthy living and outdoor exercise, led by future president Theodore Roosevelt; summer camps and rustic hotels had sprung up to accommodate the taste for rural holidays filled with vigorous activity. Weakness and physical frailty were abhorred. A young man such as T. Wallis, therefore, had quickly become a disappointment to his family, and it appears that little attempt was made to disguise these feelings. Rather than acknowledge their son’s illness, the family made a fateful decision: The Warfields deliberately ignored it. T. Wallis was not, as might have been expected, dispatched to some distant health resort in a warmer climate, but instead put to work as a clerk at his uncle’s Continental Trust in Baltimore, to learn the business by starting at the lowest level.
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