The Duchess Of Windsor (78 page)

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Authors: Greg King

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Only one man outside the narrow circle controlled by Maitre Blum managed to penetrate the thick veil of secrecy covering the Duchess’s last years. Once each week, the iron gates to the Windsor villa parted to allow Rev. Jim Leo, of the American Cathedral in Paris, entrance. In the cool, brooding house, he would ascend the marble staircase to the second floor, walk through the boudoir, still piled with books and papers, and quietly open the door to the Duchess’s bedroom. The once-vibrant blue silk on the walls had faded, washed by the sunlight that spilled through the windows. Here, surrounded by photographs of the Windsors from their happier days, Leo prayed before the silent, curled figure that lay on the bed before him, the centerpiece of the twentieth century’s most famous romance, unable to speak to, see, or comprehend the world which had passed her by.
 
Wallis died on April 24, 1986, of heart failure arising from a recent bout with pneumonia. She was just two months short of her ninetieth birthday. “Death,” Rev. Jim Leo told the press, “came round the corner as a very gentle friend, and she was content, she was happy.”
26
Her body was washed and carefully laid out on her bed; as with her husband, no autopsy was performed on the Duchess.
27
Georges Sanegre supervised as the frail body, clad in a simple black dress, was gently placed in the plain oak coffin when it arrived at the villa.
28
Her only adornment was a jeweled belt, one of several Wallis had purchased in the 1960s from designer Kenneth Jay Lane.
29
On Sunday, April 27, the lord chamberlain, on Queen Elizabeth II’s instructions, flew to Paris to collect the Duchess’s body and return with it to England for burial alongside the Duke at Frogmore. Georges and Ophelia Sanegre, along with the remaining staff, stood on the steps of the villa, watching in silence as the coffin, covered with a spray of white lilies, was carried from the house and placed in a waiting hearse. Within two hours, the plane had landed at RAF Benson, and Wallis entered, for the last time, the country which had rejected her fifty years before.
Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, waited to escort the body to Windsor. With television lenses and cameras trained on the plane, the coffin was unloaded and, carried by eight members of the Royal Air Force, placed in the hearse. A motorcycle policeman led the small motorcade as it left the base, followed by a limousine carrying the Duke of Gloucester and, finally, the hearse. Small crowds of curious onlookers had gathered around the streets in Windsor, watching in silence as the cars sped through the town and disappeared into the castle. Eight members of the Welsh Guards carried Wallis’s coffin up the steps to the west door of St. George’s Chapel, through the chapel itself, and on into the adjacent Albert Memorial Chapel, where it would lie until her funeral.
Wallis’s funeral took place at three-thirty in the afternoon on Tuesday, April 29, at St. George’s Chapel. One hundred seventy-five guests received invitations, including the Duchess’s friends Lady Mosley, the Countess of Romanones, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, and Grace, Lady Dudley. Wallis’s country of birth was represented by U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Charles Price. Each guest received a simple two-page program whose white cover bore the inscription “Funeral of the Duchess of Windsor” as well as a black cross.
The constable of Windsor Castle, marshal of the RAF Sir John Grandy, and the Military Knights of Windsor Castle formed the guard of honor that accompanied Wallis’s coffin as eight Welsh Guardsmen, attired in scarlet tunics, bore it upon their shoulders down the nave of St. George’s Chapel and into the choir aisle. Wallis’s body rested on the same catafalque before the high altar that had borne her husband’s coffin fourteen years earlier. Atop the simple coffin was a wreath of yellow and white madonna lilies from the queen.
Sixteen members of the Royal Family attended Wallis’s funeral. The Queen was accompanied by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Prince of Wales wore formal mourning clothes, while his wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, in the words of Lady Mosley, “looked too beautifully lovely” in her simple black dress, coat, and hat. The Queen Mother, who had despised her sister-in-law for half a century, appeared unusually serene.
30
The service began with the choir intoning “I Am the Resurrection and the Life,” the anthem which traditionally opens all royal funerals. This was followed by Psalm 90, a blessing, and then a prayer, read by Dr. Michael Mann, the dean of Windsor. At the conclusion of the lesson, taken from 2 Corinthians, the choir sang “Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace.” A number of prayers followed, ending with the words of the dean of Windsor: ”O Father of all, we pray to Thee for those whom we love, but see no longer. Grant them Thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and in Thy loving wisdom and Almighty power work in them the good purpose of Thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen. Almighty God, Father of all mercies and giver of all comfort: Deal graciously, we pray Thee, with those who mourn; that casting every care on Thee, they may know the consolation of Thy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” The congregation sang the hymn “Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us” before the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced a final blessing and prayed for Wallis. At the conclusion of the service, to the organ music of Sir Edward Elgar’s
Enigma Variations,
Wallis‘s coffin was carried out of the chapel into the bright afternoon sunlight. The service, which had lasted just twenty-eight minutes, was undoubtedly unique: Not once was the name of the deceased—in any form—mentioned during her own funeral. “It was the most impersonal funeral service I have ever been to,” says Linda Mortimer.
31
The coffin was lifted into a hearse and, with the Royal Family and the few remaining members of the Duchess’s household following, driven down the hill to Frogmore, where she was to be laid to rest beside the Duke. A simple service was conducted by Rev. Jim Leo at the graveside before the coffin was lowered into the ground. The Princess of Wales was seen to wipe tears from her eyes as she mourned this outcast member of the Royal Family whom she had never met, and Prince Charles appeared deeply moved.
32
At least one source reports that Queen Elizabeth herself momentarily broke down and cried.
33
“If the Queen wept,” says one of the Duchess’s friends who attended the funeral, “they were tears of guilt, not grief.”
34
After the funeral, as the late-April sunshine slowly faded from the sky, Lady Mosley wandered through the Horseshoe Cloister, which encircled the steps leading to the west door of St. George’s Chapel, examining the “masses” of flowers which had been arranged there.
35
One wreath, from the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had a handwritten note attached reading: “Eddie and Katharine.” Another arrangement bore a card rather formally inscribed “From Her Royal Highness Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester and Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.” There were floral tributes from Wallis’s friends as well as hundreds of bouquets and arrangements, large and small, from people who had never known the Duchess but who had been moved by the story of her life. “The Heart Has Its Reasons” read one card tied to a wreath, while a second was dedicated simply “To a Gracious Lady.” Of all the wreaths, perhaps the most poignant bore a note reading “From RAF Unit III 1942–1945 Now Nassau Association.” Below the inscription was a poem that paid tribute to Wallis’s work in the Bahamas:
Gentle treasures of memories fall,
Heartfelt remembrances from us all,
rest in peace our dear Duchess....
36
 
Epilogue
 
W
HEN THE DUCHESS DIED IN
1986,” writes Piers Brendon, “there were curious manifestations of public grief, sternly discouraged by the Palace, which to the last had denied her the coveted title HRH, and gave her a very private funeral indeed. It was the culmination of fifty years’ vindictiveness, something which the royal image-makers had difficulty in reconciling with the saccharine benevolence they attributed to the Queen Mother. But somehow they managed to incorporate the Duchess into the beatific myth. The nation liked the notion of royal happy families.”
1
That myth, however, was soon shattered. Within a week of Wallis’s death, Maître Blum authorized publication of the Windsors’ private correspondence. Consisting mainly of letters between Wallis and David written between 1934 and 1937, it would form the centerpiece of a book to be edited by author Michael Bloch, who had previously published two works on the Windsors. The private battles Wallis and David had waged with the Royal Family were exposed to public scrutiny, as were the affectionate feelings the couple had shared.
In death, as in the last years of her life, Wallis was still guarded by Blum. In 1973 the Duchess had signed over her personal power of attorney to the French lawyer.
2
In 1975, before her health went into its final decline, Wallis gave most of her private papers to Blum, along with permission to publish them in an effort to present her and David’s side of their story. It is not clear if Wallis realized that her private love letters were to be included in this agreement, and her mental state at the time was already rapidly deteriorating. It is known that Blum certainly began to read through the papers, for she was able to discuss their contents at the time of the production of
Edward and Mrs. Simpson
.
3
Wallis also made a new will, under the direction of Blum, in 1975, in which she appointed the Pasteur Institute in France her principal beneficiary. The Pasteur Institute, a respected medical-research foundation, seems a somewhat curious choice, and Michael Bloch confirms that it was chosen largely on the advice of Blum.
4
The Duchess, however, had always supported cancer research, and it seems likely that her decision was reached with this thought in mind. Then, too, it was, as Michael Bloch has pointed out, a way of expressing her gratitude to France for the years of low rent on the villa in the Bois de Boulogne as well as her continued tax-free status.
5
On March 30, 1973, Wallis had signed an agreement giving the French government nearly 140 important pieces of furniture and works of art from the Windsor villa. This had come about at the suggestion of her friend Gerald van der Kemp, curator at Versailles and the man who had helped craft her appreciation and knowledge of French antiques. The pieces, which were transferred to the government following her death, included all of the Louis XVI furniture, estimated in 1973 at £750,000; several of her gold boxes, estimated at £25,000 each, which are now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre; a Stubbs painting which had hung in the library, formerly in the collection of the Curzon family, which went to Versailles; and some important pieces of eighteenth-century porcelain, which were donated to the National Ceramics Museum.
6
In the late 1970s, Blum began quietly selling pieces of furniture, porcelain, and works of art from the Windsor villa to help pay for Wallis’s medical expenses. A few were placed on the open auction market, while others were offered to several of the Windsors’ friends. Nathan and Joanne Cummings, for example, purchased the table from the dining room, along with silver pieces and the famous Meissen Flying Tiger dinner service. By this time, Wallis, lying upstairs and completely helpless, was no longer able to visit the first floor and had no idea that the rooms below were slowly being stripped of their grand fittings.
The remaining collections in the villa, upon Wallis’s death, became entangled in the disposition of her estate. Her principal beneficiary, the Pasteur Institute, had no use for them, and plans were made to auction off the furniture, paintings, and porcelain. It was at this point, in the summer of 1986, that Mohammed al Fayed, Egyptian-born owner of the Ritz Hotel in Paris as well as fabled Harrod’s department store in London, stepped in and purchased the contents of the villa outright.
Al Fayed also managed, through the generous offer of Paris mayor Jacques Chirac, to obtain a fifty-year lease of the Windsor villa at a nominal cost. The lease, however, came with a condition: He was to restore the house completely, as it had been in the Windsors’ time, at his own considerable expense. “I am in love with the Windsors’ love story,” he said in an interview.
7
He declared his intention of creating a museum dedicated to the Duke and Duchess, using the contents which he had purchased from Wallis’s estate. It was to be a permanent memorial to the royal couple that had lived within its walls.
With the villa under restoration and the majority of the contents purchased by Al Fayed, thoughts turned to the only other item left in Wallis’s estate: her fabled collection of jewelry. David had always expressed the wish that Wallis’s jewels—inscribed with so many private tokens of affection—be broken up after her death so that no other woman could wear them.
8
But neither David nor Wallis had made any such provision for their dispersal. After the Duke’s death, designer Hardy Amies asked the Duchess if she would be willing to leave a piece of her jewelry to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “I guess I could spare a leopard,” she offered. Not realizing that she meant one of her famous jeweled panther bracelets by Jeanne Touissant for Cartier, Amies politely declined. Only later did he realize his mistake.
9
At one time, Wallis had considered leaving the pieces to Prince Charles, hoping that his future wife might wear them. But Lord Mountbatten’s aggressive campaign for furniture, porcelain, boxes, swords, and paintings had left Wallis bitter. Lady Monckton, visiting Wallis in the early 1970s, suggested another course of action: “Princess Alexandra and the Duchess of Kent are loyal, hard-working girls, both of them,” she told Wallis, “and they haven’t many jewels. Unless you’ve made other plans, you might remember them.”
10
Wallis did indeed leave a few pieces of her jewelry to Princess Alexandra; Katharine, the Duchess of Kent; and Marie Christine, Princess Michael of Kent. A few other pieces were left to Aline, Countess of Romanones, and to the Baronne de Cabrol.
11
It was left to Blum to determine the fate of the remaining pieces. Rather than break them up and sell the stones, she decided that they would bring more intact at auction; as all of the money would go to the Pasteur Institute, it was hoped that this deviation from the Duke of Windsor’s wishes would, in the end, prove of greater benefit.
Blum cannot have anticipated the worldwide interest in the auction of Wallis’s jewels. Sotheby’s, in charge of the sale, printed an initial fifteen thousand catalogs; when these quickly sold out, they were forced to republish.
12
When the public exhibition opened in Sotheby’s Manhattan showrooms in March 1987, the lines to view the fabled jewels grew so long that people were repeatedly turned away. Police were eventually called out to monitor the situation, and viewing was limited to fifteen minutes in order to move the massive crowds through the building.
13
The exhibit also traveled to Palm Beach, Monaco, and Geneva, where the actual auction would take place; a London exhibition was deliberately avoided, as Sotheby‘s officials felt it would somehow be disrespectful to the Royal Family.
14
The auction, held beneath a large red-and-white-striped marquee erected in the gardens of the Hotel Beau Rivage, along the shore of Lake Geneva, began precisely at nine on the evening of April 2. Fifteen hundred people filled the tent, among them Prince Serge of Yugoslavia; Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia; Princess Firyal of Jordan; the Princess of Naples; Infanta Beatriz of Spain; Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza; and Wallis’s friends Aline, Countess of Romanones and Grace, Lady Dudley. Another seven hundred people watched the auction on closed-circuit television in the hotel’s ballroom, and satellite links provided coverage to New York and London. Over 250 journalists, fashion experts, and television reporters surrounded the tent and hotel, their arc lights and flashbulbs providing a certain theatrical touch.
15
There were to be two sessions. Nicholas Rayner, Sotheby‘s Geneva jewelry expert, began the auction with a ruby-and-sapphire-bead clip. The estimate was 7,000 francs; it sold for 65,000 francs, the first sign that the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels would likely break all previous auction records. One by one, piece by piece, Wallis’s collection was dispersed: pearls to Japan, diamonds to New York, amethysts to Los Angeles. Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who had previously admired the large diamond-and-platinum Prince of Wales’s feathers brooch, purchased it for $567,000. Other pieces went to fashion designer Calvin Klein and Hollywood divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson. With each lot, the level of excitement grew. “People,” wrote author Dominick Dunne, “realized that they were present at an event, engaged in the heady adventure of watching rich people acting rich, participating in a rite available only to them, the spending of big money, without a moment‘s hesitation or consideration.... Powdered bosoms heaved in fiscal excitement at big bucks spent. Each time the bidding got into the million-dollar range, for one of the ten or so world-class stones in the collection, the tension resembled the frenzy at a cockfight.”
16
At the end of the two days, the auction had raised $50,281,887, more than seven times its presale estimates. The money was welcome at the Pasteur Institute, which it used to fund AIDS research.
Perhaps it was fortunate that Maître Suzanne Blum, who had so zealously guarded their legacy and relentlessly defended the Duke and Duchess in what seemed to be the eternal campaign waged against them by the British Royal Family, died in January 1994, before what one of the Windsors’ friends has termed “the Royal Family’s final revenge.”
17
In 1996, British and American television premiered a new documentary on Wallis and David, a two-hour look at their lives after the abdication. In keeping with the general tone of both books and television specials following Wallis’s death, this program was highly critical in tone; but it had one distinction which set it apart from all other media attention:
Edward on Edward
had been written and produced by Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth II’s youngest son.
Aside from a few brief comments scattered over the years in memoirs and the occasional interview, this program was the first attempt by any member of the Royal Family to address the legacy of the Duke and Duchess. Coming from Elizabeth II’s son and the Queen Mother’s grandson, it was presumed to carry some form of royal approval as well as to convey their true feelings about the Windsors. Prince Edward interviewed many of the Windsors’ friends, along with diplomats, those involved in the Nazi plot in Spain and Portugal in 1940, and former members of the household in Paris.
Others, however, were wary of participating in any film on the Windsors produced by a member of the very family which had never forgiven either the Duke or the Duchess for what some choose to perceive as their offenses. Several of the Windsors’ acquaintances refused to cooperate, while others required many reassurances. Janine Metz at first declined Prince Edward’s request. The Prince, however, made several overtures to the former secretary, declaring that it would be “the film of reconciliation” between his family and the Duke and Duchess and assuring her that what she said would be faithfully reproduced in the final version. With some trepidation, Metz finally acquiesced and submitted to the filmed interviews, which would be pieced together, along with new footage and old newsreels, to form the documentary.
18
Janine Metz was one of the specially invited audience who attended the American premiere at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City in June 1996. Many of the Americans who had participated in the film were there as well, along with Prince Edward himself, who had come from London for the event. After thanking the audience, Edward settled in to watch the documentary along with his guests.
A few weeks earlier, in an article in
Hello!
designed to coincide with the British television premiere, the Prince had inadvertently given a taste of what was to come. “People,” he declared of the Duke and Duchess, “would enthuse about him, but could say little about her. She was a much more difficult character to understand or get close to. Perhaps contrary to expectations, she seems to have been a much more reserved and secretive person. Then again, she might have been a bit superficial—fun, quick-witted, gossipy, with no real personality.”
19
This rather unsubtle suggestion would set the tone for the documentary which followed.
If there was any lingering doubt that this was to be the Royal Family’s view of the Duke and Duchess’s story, it was quickly put to rest. In the opening sentences of the program, Prince Edward spoke of the “appalling shock” which David had “inflicted upon his family.” He proceeded to add that there were still many “who cannot forgive him or her for that,” shifting the blame for the abdication crisis toward Wallis, in complete contradiction of the historical record.

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