The American Duchess

Benny and Connie Thaw had become close friends of the Simpsons in London. Wallis and Ernest mixed in society circles thanks to the introductions of his sister, Maud Kerr-Smiley. Maud had married Peter Kerr-Smiley in 1905. He became a prominent Member of Parliament and it was the Kerr-Smileys who facilitated the Simpsons’ entrée into the upper echelons of the aristocracy. It was through Consuelo that Wallis first met Thelma Furness. Consuelo had told her sister that Wallis was fun, promising Thelma that she would like her. In the autumn of 1930, she took Wallis to her sister’s Grosvenor Square house for cocktails. ‘Consuelo was right,’ said Thelma. ‘Wallis Simpson was “fun”, and I did like her.’ ‘She was not beautiful; in fact, she was not even pretty,’ she recalled of thirty-four-year-old Wallis – who was accustomed to an ever-present scrutiny of her looks – ‘but she had a distinct charm and a sharp sense of humour. Her dark hair was parted in the middle. Her eyes, alert and eloquent, were her best feature.’ Wallis was blessed with riveting sapphire blue eyes.

That November, 1930, Wallis received a tantalising invitation. Connie Thaw asked her if she and Ernest would act as chaperones to Thelma and the Prince of Wales at a weekend house party in Leicestershire. Connie had to leave for the Continent at the last minute, due to a family illness, and wondered if Wallis and Ernest would accompany Ambassador Thaw to Burrough Court, Viscount Furness’s country house, instead. The Simpsons had heard the rumours that Thelma Furness was ‘the Prince’s Girl’, having stolen the maîtresse-en-titre role from his previous lover, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward. The prince’s pet name for Thelma was ‘Toodles’ and she was said to be madly in love with him. It was an open secret in society circles that Thelma was unhappily married to Marmaduke, the 1st Viscount Furness. Known as the ‘fiery Furness’, he had red hair and a temper.

Wallis’s first reaction to the invitation was ‘a mixture of pleasure and horror’. ‘Like everybody else, I was dying to meet the Prince of Wales,’ she said, ‘but my knowledge of royalty, except for what I had read, had until then been limited to glimpses at a distance of King George V in his State Coach on his way to Parliament.’ Though unsure of royal etiquette, she was at least confident of looking the part, having been on a shopping spree in Molyneux, Paris, a few months earlier. Her attractive blue-grey tweed dress, with a matching fur-edged cape, ‘would meet the most exacting requirements of both a horsy and princely setting’.

It was past five o’clock on Saturday afternoon when Thaw and the Simpsons arrived at Melton Mowbray, in the heart of fox-hunting country. A thick fog choked the county. Burrough Court was a spacious, comfortable hunting lodge full of traditional mahogany furniture and lively chintz. Thelma’s stepdaughter, Averill, greeted the guests, informing them that the rest of the party had been delayed out hunting on the road, due to the fog. Taken into the drawing room, where tea had been laid out on a round table in front of the fire, Wallis could feel her skin burning. Suspecting she had a slight temperature, she hankered to go to bed. Instead, they were forced to wait a further two hours until the royal party arrived.

After what seemed an age, voices were heard in the hallway and Thelma appeared with two princes: Edward, Prince of Wales, and his younger (favourite) brother, Prince George. To her surprise, Wallis’s curtsy to each prince came off well, to the Simpsons’ shared amusement. Thelma led everyone back to the table in front of the fire and they had tea all over again.

Like many who meet celebrities in the flesh for the first time, Wallis was taken aback; she was surprised by how small the Prince of Wales was. She was five foot five and Edward less than two inches taller. Prince George was ‘considerably taller’, she noted, ‘with neatly brushed brown hair, aquiline features, and dark-blue eyes. He gave an impression of gaiety and joie de vivre.’ Facially, Edward was immediately recognisable. ‘I remember thinking, as I studied the Prince of Wales, how much like his pictures he really was,’ she recollected. ‘The slightly wind-rumpled golden hair, the turned-up nose, and a strange, wistful, almost sad look about the eyes when his expression was in repose.’

At eight o’clock, Prince George’s friends arrived and took him to another house party. Finally, the Simpsons could retire upstairs to change. Wallis had a much longed-for hot bath and took two aspirin, while Ernest – from America but naturalised British – remarked on the charm of the two royal brothers and how they instantly put everyone at their ease. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ he added, ‘that you Americans lost something that is very good and quite irreplaceable when you decided to dispense with the British Monarchy.’

The dinner party that night for thirty guests was late even by European standards, past ten o’clock. Ernest and Wallis knew no one and were at a conversational loss as they had no knowledge of, or curiosity about, hunting. A fact not lost on the prince. ‘Mrs Simpson did not ride and obviously had no interest in horses, hounds, or hunting in general,’ Edward later wrote. ‘She was also plainly in misery from a bad cold in the head.’ Discovering that she was American, the prince kicked off conversation by observing that she must miss central heating, of which there was a lamentable lack in British country houses and an abundance in American homes. Wallis’s response astonished him: ‘On the contrary. I like the cold houses of Great Britain,’ she replied. According to the prince ‘a mocking look came into her eyes’, and she replied: ‘I am sorry, Sir, but you have disappointed me.’

‘In what way?’ said Edward.

‘Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’

***

Wallis, born Bessie Wallis Warfield on 19 June 1896, took pride in coming from old Southern stock. ‘Wallis’s family was very old by American standards,’ said her friend, Diana, Lady Mosley, approvingly. Wallis’s mother, Alice, gave birth to her in a holiday cottage at Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania, where she had gone with her consumptive husband, named Teackle, to escape the heat of his native Baltimore. Alice and Teackle, both twenty-six years old, were fleeing their disapproving parents. Wallis wrote that her mother and father had married in June 1895: ‘without taking their parents into their confidence, they slipped away’. Records show that they actually married on 19 November, seven months before her birth, in a quiet ceremony with no family present. Wallis was conceived out of wedlock, a fact she tried to blur in later accounts of her life. She recalled how she once asked her mother for the date and time of her birth ‘and she answered impatiently that she had been far too busy at the time to consult the calendar let alone the clock’. Wallis learned early the benefits of discretion.

Her mother was a Montague from Virginia. They were famous for their good looks and sharp tongues. When Wallis was growing up, if she made one of her familiar wisecracks, friends would exclaim: ‘Oh, the Montagueity of it!’ Perhaps it was a Montagueism that caused Wallis as a young child to drop the first name Bessie and say that she wished to be known simply as ‘Wallis’. She was ‘very quick and funny’, remembers Nicky Haslam. ‘She could be cutting too. She put people’s backs up amid the British aristocracy in the sense of being too bright and witty.’ On meeting Wallis, Chips Channon declared: ‘Mrs Simpson is a woman of great wit’, she has ‘sense, balance and her reserve and discretion are famous’. ‘Her talent was for people,’ said Diana Mosley. ‘Witty herself, she had the capacity to draw the best out of others, making even the dull feel quite pleased with themselves.’

From a young age, realising that she was not conventionally attractive, and could not rely on the flimsy currency of her looks, Wallis developed an inner resilience and astute insight. ‘My endowments were definitely on the scanty side,’ she later recalled. ‘Nobody ever called me beautiful or even pretty. I was thin in an era when a certain plumpness was a girl’s ideal. My jaw was clearly too big and too pointed to be classic. My hair was straight where the laws of compensation might at least have produced curls.’

Wallis’s father died from tuberculosis when Wallis was five months old, leaving her mother penniless. The Warfields supported Alice and their granddaughter, affording Wallis a happy childhood. An only child, she plainly adored her mother, who summoned up ‘reserves of will and fortitude’ to surmount her single-mother status. Wallis admired her mother for never ‘showing a trace of self-pity or despair’ – characteristics that she inherited and would employ throughout her own life with similar aplomb. Alice urged Wallis never to be afraid of loneliness. ‘Loneliness has its purposes,’ she counselled her daughter. ‘It teaches us to think.’

Wallis and her mother were so close that Wallis described their relationship as ‘more like sisters’, in terms of their ‘comradeship’. Alice Warfield was both loving and strict. If Wallis swore, she would be marched to the bathroom to have her tongue scrubbed with a nailbrush. When Wallis was apprehensive about learning to swim, her mother simply carried her to the deep end of a swimming pool and dropped her in. ‘Then and there I learned to swim, and the thought occurs that I’ve been striking out that way ever since,’ Wallis wrote years after Edward VIII’s abdication.

When Alice first met Ernest Simpson, she warned her future son-in-law: ‘You must remember that Wallis is an only child. Like explosives, she needs to be handled with care. There are times when I have been too afraid of having put too much of myself into her – too much of the heart, that is, and not enough of the head.’ Alice sent Wallis to a fashionable day school in Baltimore, where Wallis was a diligent student. ‘No one has ever accused me of being intellectual. Though in my school days I was capable of good marks,’ she said. As a young girl, Wallis was already tiring of her unsettled life and ‘desperately wanted to stay put’. This desire to find a stable home would become a constant theme in her life, heightened when forced into exile with the Duke of Windsor. For a few years Wallis and her mother lived with her Warfield grandmother, then with her Aunt Bessie, until Alice, craving a place of her own, took a small apartment when her daughter was seven. Wallis loved her grandmother’s Baltimore house: ‘a red brick affair, trimmed with white with the typical Baltimore hall-mark, white marble steps leading down to the side-walk’. Here her grandmother lived with her last unmarried son, S. Davies Warfield – ‘Uncle Sol’ to Wallis. ‘For a long and impressionable period he was the nearest thing to a father in my uncertain world,’ Wallis recalled. ‘But an odd kind of father – reserved, unbending, silent. I was always a little afraid of Uncle Sol.’

A successful banker, Sol paid the school fees until Wallis’s mother married again. Alice’s new husband was John Freeman Rasin, who was prominent in politics and fairly wealthy. While offering financial security, he took Alice to live part time in Atlanta, which was a wrench for Wallis. She was sent to boarding school – Oldfields – in 1912 where the school motto, pasted on the door of every dormitory, was ‘Gentleness and Courtesy are expected of the Girls at all Times’. Wallis’s best friend at Oldfields was Mary Kirk, who was later to play an astonishing part in her life.

In 1913, Wallis and her mother suffered another shock. Freeman Rasin died of Bright’s disease, a failure of the kidneys. Wallis was heartbroken to see her mother so distressed. ‘It was the first time I had ever seen her dispirited.’ Wallis would never forget her mother whispering to her: ‘I had not thought it possible to be so hurt so much so soon.’ Alice had been with her second husband for less than five years.

Wallis left Oldfields in 1914, signing her name in the school book with the bold and rebellious ‘ALL IS LOVE’, and made her debut as part of the jeunesse dorée at the Bachelors’ Cotillion, a ball in Baltimore, on 24 December. (To be presented at the ball was ‘a life-and-death matter for Baltimore girls in those days’, maintained Wallis.) The Great War had begun in Europe in August, and the US daily newspapers were ‘black with headlines of frightful battles’. Baltimore’s sentiments were firmly on the side of the Allies and the thirty-four debutantes attending the ball were instructed to sign a public pledge to observe, for the duration of the war, ‘an absence of rivalry in elegance in respective social functions’. This was, according to Wallis, an attempt to set an example of how young American women should conduct themselves at a time when other friendly nations were in extremity.

Unable to afford to buy her ball gown from Fuechsl’s, Baltimore’s most fashionable shop, like most other debutantes, Wallis designed her own dress. White satin with a white chiffon tunic and bordered with seed pearls, it was made by ‘a local Negro seamstress called Ellen’. Wallis’s mother permitted her for the first time a brush of rouge on her cheeks, even though rouge ‘was considered a little fast’. Wallis’s love of couture would become legendary; as the Duchess of Windsor, she became an icon of style and an arbiter of meticulous taste. She regularly featured in the best dressed lists of the world. Her sharp eye for fashionable detail burgeoned early. According to Aunt Bessie, Wallis created a ‘foot-stamping scene’ at one of the first parties she ever attended as a little girl, when she wanted to substitute a blue sash her mother wanted her to wear, with a red one. ‘I remember exactly what you said,’ Aunt Bessie later told Wallis. ‘You told your mother you wanted a red sash so the boys would notice you.’ Wallis told a fashion journalist in 1966: ‘Whatever look I evolved came from working with a little dressmaker around the corner years and years ago, who used to make all my clothes. I began with my own personal ideas about style and I’ve never felt correct in anything but the severe look I developed then.’

As the Duchess of Windsor, she created an eternal signature style, which became her personal armour. Her dedication to appearance defined her as a Southern woman, hailing from an era when a woman dressed to please her man. ‘She was chic but never casual,’ said the French aristocrat and designer Jacqueline de Ribes, who similarly topped the best dressed lists. ‘Other American society women, like Babe Paley, could be chic in blue jeans. The duchess was a different generation.’ Elsa Maxwell observed: ‘The Duchess has impeccable taste and she spends more money on her wardrobe than any woman I’ve ever known. Her clothes are beautiful and chic, but though she invests them with elegance, she wears them with such rigidity, such neatness, that she destroys the impression of ease and casualness. She is too meticulous.’ Diana Vreeland, later of Harper’s Bazaar and editor of Vogue, described Wallis’s style as ‘soignée, not degageé’ – polished but not relaxed.

Wallis learned to distil every outfit to its essence, later asking Parisian couturiers, including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior’s Marc Bohan, to dispense with pockets. Yet in her choice of nightwear she was the essence of soft, traditionally feminine sensuality. Diana Vreeland, who had an exclusive lingerie boutique off Berkeley Square in London in the mid-1930s, recalled that when Wallis shopped, ‘she knew exactly what she wanted’. One day, in autumn 1936, just before the king’s abdication, Wallis ordered three exquisite nightgowns to be made in three weeks. ‘First, there was one in white satin copied from Vionnet, all on the bias, that you just pulled down over your head,’ said Vreeland. ‘Then there was one I’d bought the original of in Paris from a marvellous Russian woman. The whole neck of this nightgown was made of petals, which was too extraordinary, because they were put in on the bias, and when you moved they rippled. Then the third nightgown was a wonderful pale blue crêpe de Chine.’

Years after the abdication, Elsa Maxwell asked Wallis why she devoted so much time and attention to her clothes. Was it not a frivolous pursuit when she had so many other responsibilities and her extravagance merely invited criticism? Wallis replied candidly: ‘My husband gave up everything for me. I’m not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.’

‘Wallis was a much more artistic creature than people thought,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘She liked beautiful things and had a keen eye.’ Haslam, who worked on American Vogue in the 1960s, was introduced to Wallis in New York by the magazine’s social editor, Margaret Case. ‘We were seated at a booth at the back of the Colony restaurant in New York, on the best banquette, and in walked the duchess,’ he recalled. ‘Every single head turned to look at her and cutlery literally dropped. She was wearing an impossibly wide pink angora Chanel tweed with a black grosgrain bow at her nape. At the end of a wonderful lunch, she took a discreet peek at her watch, which was tied to her bag on a delicate chain. It was Fulco Verdura* who told her that it was common for women to wear a watch.’

Having the sartorial edge hugely increased Wallis’s confidence. Of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales at Melton Mowbray, she said her clothes would give her ‘the added assurance that came from the knowledge that in the dress was a little white satin label bearing the word Molyneux’.

***

It was her sister-in-law, Maud, who suggested that Wallis should be presented at court on 10 June 1931. Ernest Simpson’s rank as a captain with the Coldstream Guards gave him the requisite social status, but Wallis was reluctant to go. Once again, as for her debutante ball in her youth, she did not have the funds to buy the splendid clothes the occasion demanded. However, Wallis’s friends persuaded her that she would be foolish to turn down the generous offer of her girlfriend, Mildred Andersen, to present her. ‘Determined to get through the ceremony in the most economical manner,’ she wore the dress that Connie Thaw herself had worn to be presented, while Thelma Furness lent her the train, feathers and fan. She treated herself to a large aquamarine cross and white kid three-quarter-length gloves, writing to her Aunt Bessie that her aquamarine jewellery looked ‘really lovely on the white dress’.

Of the magnificent pageantry of the event, what impressed Wallis ‘to the point of awe’ was the grandeur that invested King George V and Queen Mary, sitting side by side in full regalia on identical gilt thrones on their red dais. Standing behind the two thrones were the Prince of Wales and his great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Ernest Simpson, in his uniform of the Coldstream Guards, looked on proudly as Wallis and Mildred performed deep curtsies to the sovereign, then to the queen. The Prince of Wales later recalled of Wallis: ‘When her turn came to curtsey, first to my father and then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.’ After the ceremony, Wallis was standing with Ernest in the adjoining state apartment, in the front row, watching as the king and queen walked slowly by, followed by other members of the royal family. As the Prince of Wales passed her, Wallis overheard him say to his uncle: ‘Uncle Arthur, something ought to be done about the lights. They make all the women look ghastly.’

That evening, at a party hosted by Thelma Furness, Wallis met the Prince of Wales again. Over a glass of champagne, he complimented Wallis on her gown. ‘“But, Sir,” she responded with a straight face, “I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly.”’ The prince ‘was startled’, Wallis noted with some satisfaction. ‘Then he smiled. “I had no idea my voice carried so far”.’

The prince was captivated. No British woman would have dreamed of speaking to him in such a direct and provocative way. ‘In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive,’ he wrote of that encounter. ‘From the first I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.’

***

Prince Edward was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his parents, the Duke and Duchess of York. An extraordinary prophecy was made about the great-grandson and godson of Queen Victoria, the queen then aged seventy-five and in the fifty-seventh year of her reign. The socialist pioneer Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to shatter the polite rejoicing about the royal birth. Instead, he hollered: ‘This boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation … in due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’ As a predictor of Edward’s royal destiny, the Scot proved uncannily prescient.

Baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of holy water from the River Jordan, in the presence of Queen Victoria, ‘David’, as his family always called him, would experience a strict, unhappy and largely loveless childhood. His mother showed little maternal warmth to her six children. While her husband, who in 1910 became King George V, was even more severe. A dogged disciplinarian, with rigid rules on dress and protocol, he ensured that any errant childish behaviour was bullied and beaten out of his offspring. ‘My father was the most terrible father, most terrible father you can imagine,’ Edward’s brother, Prince Henry, later said. ‘He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British,’ said Edward. Handwritten on his father’s desk were the words that Edward was made to memorise as a young boy: ‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.’ These were the lines of an early nineteenth-century American Quaker, Stephen Grellet.

As a sense of duty and responsibility cleaved through every aspect of his royal bearing, the Duke of York made Edward fully aware of the influence of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Her children and grandchildren ruled the courts of Europe. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, was the Dowager Empress of Germany; Kaiser Wilhelm II was the queen’s grandson, and the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was her grandson by marriage. The empire over which Queen Victoria ruled was the most powerful in the world; it embraced a quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population. On her death in 1901, this empire passed to her eldest son Edward VII and then to George. An empire Edward VIII would inherit, albeit briefly.

As Edward later wrote of his childhood: ‘For better or worse, royalty is excluded from the more settled forms of domesticity … The mere circumstances of my father’s position interposed an impalpable barrier that inhibited the closer continuing intimacy of conventional family life.’ Despite having five siblings, and being particularly close to Bertie and later, George, his younger brother by eight years, Edward recalled that: ‘We were lonely in a curious way.’ Denied association with other children their own age and home-educated by uninspiring tutors, behind the turreted facades of the royal households, there was emotional sterility. ‘Christmas at Sandringham,’ Edward reflected, ‘was Dickens in a Cartier setting.’ The writer James Pope-Hennessy described Sandringham as ‘a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue.’ The Hon. Margaret Wyndham, who served as Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary from 1938, recalled: ‘At Sandringham if the king were present they put on Garter ribbons, tiaras and diamonds for every family dinner even without guests.’ Freda Dudley Ward later said of the prince’s childhood: ‘If his life was a bit of a mess, his parents were to blame. They made him what he was. The duke hated his father. The king was horrible to him. His mother was horrible to him, too … The duke loved his mother but his mother wouldn’t let him love her. She always took the king’s side against him.’