The Duchess of Windsor Read online

  In 1915 her grandmother, Mrs Warfield, died and the family was plunged into mourning. When some months later a cousin invited her to stay in Florida, Wallis’ mother persuaded her to accept; she thought Wallis had mourned long enough, yet, according to the custom of those days, she could not rush about Baltimore having a good time. Her cousin Corinne was married to the commandant of the newly-established Pensacola Air Station, he was Captain Mustin of the United States Navy. Flying was in its infancy and airmen were all considered dashing heroes. The Pensacola airmen all hoped to get into the war in Europe, a wish that for most of them was soon to be granted.

  The day after she arrived at Pensacola, Wallis wrote to her mother: ‘I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.’ This was Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Junior, United States Navy. They saw a great deal of each other, she was attracted to him and she made various excuses to stay on and on at Pensacola.

  While she was there the foundations were laid for her life-long dread of flying. There was a ‘crash gong’ at the Air Station which often sounded. The wives and friends of airmen were not allowed to use the telephone when they heard the crash gong in case they interrupted an important call, and therefore everyone suffered horrible anxiety waiting to hear who had crashed and whether he was injured or even dead. Often the aeroplanes came down in the sea and the men were quickly picked up, but often too there were fatal accidents.

  Win Spencer and Wallis saw each other every day and became more and more attached to one another. When he proposed she accepted him. A photograph of him taken at this time shows an alarming, rather brutal-looking man. His mouth is tightly shut, but he seems about to open it in order to utter some trenchant sarcasm. However, he is said to have had charm, and when during his next leave Wallis introduced him to her mother, her Aunt Bessie Merryman and her Uncle Sol they gave a qualified blessing. Her mother warned Wallis that she might find it difficult to fit into the restricted life of a naval officer’s wife, but none of them seems to have guessed how difficult, how impossible the man himself would prove to be. Wallis was in love, and she also knew that her marriage would relieve her mother of the burden of supporting her.

  Wallis surrounded by bridal attendants at her marriage to Win Spencer on 12 November 1916. Sitting on her left is Mary Kirk, Wallis’ schoolfriend who was to marry Ernest Simpson after his divorce from Wallis.

  ‘The world’s most fascinating aviator,’ Lieutenant Winfield Spencer.

  The young couple went to stay with the Spencers in a suburb of Chicago, Mrs Spencer was English. They welcomed Wallis and wished her and Win all possible happiness, but they could not help financially, and it was clearly understood that Win’s pay was all the couple would have to live on, which did not worry Wallis in the slightest. She was perfectly accustomed to making do with very little.

  She was twenty when in November 1916 she and Win Spencer were married at Christ Church, Baltimore; the church where she had been confirmed a few years before was now filled with lilies and white chrysanthemums. She had six bridesmaids dressed in orchid-coloured bouffant gowns with blue velvet sashes; the ushers were in naval uniform. Wallis herself wore white panne velvet over a petticoat of heirloom lace, and a tulle veil with a coronet of orange blossom. Her uncle gave her away. When, at the reception, she ‘threw her bouquet’ it was caught by Mary Kirk, her best friend from Oldfield days, and shortly afterwards Mary married Captain Jacques Raffray, a Frenchman who came to the United States as liaison officer after America declared war.

  During their short honeymoon Wallis and Win went to an hotel at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was looking out of the window at the garden when she heard an angry exclamation from Win. He had seen a printed notice under the glass of the dressing table which announced that West Virginia was a dry state and therefore no alcoholic drinks could be sold.

  ‘We certainly can’t stay here,’ said Win, but he opened his box and produced a bottle of gin from among the shirts and socks. Wallis at the age of twenty had never yet tasted alcohol at all except for a glass of champagne at Christmas. At her mother’s dinner parties no wine was given with the delicious food; there were ‘assorted liquors’ on a tray to be drunk before or after eating, which in many American houses is still the custom to this day. She soon discovered that Win drank far too much, and that when he had done so he became aggressive, rude and even violent. Wallis was in for a difficult time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Navy Wife

  Keep up appearances; there lies the test;

  The world will give thee credit for the rest.

  Charles Churchill

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the Air Station at Pensacola Wallis’ cousin Corinne was on the platform to greet them. She ran along beside the train and called ‘Hi, Skinny!’ her name for the new Mrs Spencer. At the seaplane base, no longer a visitor but a Navy wife, Wallis settled into a bungalow, one of a row all alike. It had a living room, three bedrooms and two bathrooms; she put up chintz curtains, painted the furniture white and got a cook and a maid for thirty-two dollars a month. In the evenings she and the other officers’ wives took turns to give little dinner parties and then they played poker. The pilots were forbidden to drink for twenty-four hours before flying, but at weekends they celebrated. On Saturday nights they went to the local hotel and danced till dawn. Win was apt to do embarrassing imitations of vaudeville stars, dancing about in front of the band, but this was harmless enough.

  During the week Wallis dreaded the crash gong more than ever. Once it sounded for Win, but he had come down in the sea and was rescued by the station launch. Now that war was near the number of recruits increased, and Win was kept very busy training them. On 6 April 1917 Congress declared war on the Central Powers. Win was promoted, and sent to Squantum, Massachusetts, near Boston, to take command of a new naval air station. He was bitterly disappointed; he had hoped to be sent to France for combat flying. ‘Squantum! What a place to fight a war!’ he said, and he decided to get away from his new job as soon as possible and go overseas. He was so successful at creating the Naval Air Base that he was ordered to California to organize a naval air station on North Island. This new assignment almost broke his heart; to be sent west, rather than east to the war, was bitter indeed.

  San Diego, where he and Wallis were now to live, was then a small semitropical town with Spanish bungalows set among palm trees and hibiscus. Win was working from dawn to dusk. Wallis began to do her own cooking, with the help of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Book, one of her wedding presents. Before her first dinner party she was so nervous that Win persuaded her to drink a cocktail. ‘One for the cook,’ he said, ‘a sovereign receipt.’ All nervousness banished by a double martini, Wallis produced a perfect dinner.

  Win Spencer and his instructors had created a model air station, but the Armistice in 1918 found him deeply dissatisfied with his lot. There was now no hope for him of flying in combat. He became moody and difficult and he began to drink heavily. He made several enemies in the higher echelons of the Navy, and there seemed to Wallis to be less and less scope for his talents. She would have liked him to go into business in commercial aviation, but Win loved the Navy, and she resigned herself to the gypsy wanderings of a Service wife. Although she made many friends in California things were not easy between her and her husband, and when he was temporarily ordered hack to Pensacola she was pleased, imagining that in new surroundings they could make a fresh start.

  Spencer’s next assignment was to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington. It turned out to be the very worst thing that could have happened. He loved flying, and his new job consisted entirely of paper work, drafting reports and sitting in an office. He took to the bottle, and he was not a quiet drinker. They were living in a service flat in the Hotel Brighton, the walls were thin and Wallis realised that the wretchedness of their life together was known to their friends.

  Then one Sunday afternoon Win locked her in the bathroom. Hours went by, evening came and Wa
llis longed to call for help but was too proud to do so. Finally she heard the key turn in the lock, but at first she dared not try to open the door. By the time she did so Win was in bed asleep. She spent the night on the sofa, and when he had gone to the office next day she went to see her mother who was living in the city in Connecticut Avenue.

  Wallis had decided to leave her husband and get a divorce. Not only had her own life become impossible, she also felt she made things worse for Win. He vented his furious frustrations upon her, and she thought that by removing herself she might be helping him. When she told her mother of her resolve there was a tremendous scene. No Montague had ever been divorced, said her mother, and such a thing was unthinkable. Her Aunt Bessie said the same; so divorce was out of the question. In any case, who would support her? Not her Uncle Sol. The Warfields were every bit as uncompromisingly straight-laced about divorce as the Montagues. When Wallis described the misery of her life with Win her mother relented a little. A separation was considered infinitely less scandalous. To Wallis this seemed not only hypocritical but wrong, since neither Win nor she could re-make life so long as they were bound together.

  Wallis now had to face Uncle Sol; she went to Baltimore and bearded him in his Temple. His reaction was fierce. ‘I won’t let you bring this disgrace upon us!’ he said, and he told her that ever since 1662, which was as far back as their records went, no Warfield had ever been divorced. He urged her to become reconciled to Win and she returned to Washington. It was clear to her that on both sides of the family the thought uppermost in their minds was: ‘What will people say?’ Nothing mattered very much but that; it was the powerful tyranny of public opinion which governed them.

  A fortnight later she definitely made up her mind to leave Win. He behaved rather well. ‘Wallis’, he said, ‘I’ve had this coming to me. If you ever change your mind I’ll still be around.’ She asked her mother if she might stay with her. ‘You are absolutely sure that this is what you really want?’ said her mother. ‘If I’ve never been sure of anything before, I’m sure about this’, was the reply. Wallis moved to her mother’s flat and she wrote to Uncle Sol. He answered that any divorce action she might take must be entirely from her own resources; no help of any description would come from him.

  Although Wallis was sometimes rather lonely in Washington she nevertheless managed to have quite a good time. There were plenty of parties and many of her friends were foreign diplomats. The one she liked best was Don Felipe Espil, first secretary of the Argentine Embassy. He was a good-looking man of thirty-five, and Wallis found him most attractive, but there could be no more than friendship between them since he was a Catholic diplomat representing a Catholic country. However, she makes it abundantly plain in her memoirs that but for this insurmountable obstacle she might have considered marrying him. This worried her mother, for Wallis was not divorced, In order to be more independent, she moved from her mother’s flat and shared a little house in Georgetown, the prettiest part of Washington, with another ‘navy wife.’

  Luncheons given by les soixante gourmets were a highlight, and probably for the first time she realized what French cooking could be. The sixty gourmets met once a week, each of them bringing a lady guest. Years later she looked back on these occasions with undiminished pleasure. Anyone who knows Washington and its restaurants will appreciate how clever the sixty gourmets must have been to induce the cooks at the Hotel Hamilton, where the luncheons took place, to perform so brilliantly.

  Wallis in 1928.

  Don Felipe Espil, first secretary of the Argentine Embassy, who fascinated Wallis in Washington after her first estrangement from Win Spencer.

  Wallis as a young navy wife in Coronado, California.

  Wallis was popular. Lord Colyton, at that time Third Secretary at the British Embassy, writes: ‘I knew her quite well in those days, and although we were not close friends, I was very fond of her.’1

  When her cousin Corinne Mustin, now a widow, invited her to go to Paris she accepted with joy. She went to New York to ask Uncle Sol for money for the journey. She had never before seen his New York flat, and was amused to discover that the walls were papered with photographs of actresses and singers. Uncle Sol had all the traditional obsession with the stage of a typical puritan. After objecting to her plan of going to Paris with Corinne he pressed some bank notes into her hand and when she looked at them in the taxi leaving his flat she counted five new hundred-dollar bills.

  Wallis and Corinne sailed to Europe in a small boat on a rough sea. When they got to Paris they quickly, through friends and the friends of friends, began to have a good time. When a lawyer was consulted about divorce, however, it turned out to be far more expensive than Wallis could afford; he asked several thousand dollars. All this time Win continued to write to her, and he now told her that he had been posted to the Far East. He begged her to join him in China, she could board a naval transport and go there at government expense. Perhaps because there was no practical alternative, perhaps because she was lonely, perhaps because the idea of visiting China appealed to her, Wallis decided to go, and thus give her marriage one more chance of success.

  Back in Washington, Wallis’ mother was surprised, though gratified to hear she was going to join Win Spencer. The Navy Department made arrangements, and on 17 July 1924 she boarded the USS Chaumont, bound for the Philippines, a slow voyage of six weeks. There she took the Empress of Canada to Hong Kong. She found Win looking fit and well, and at first everything was rosy. Before long, however, he started drinking again. ‘I can’t explain it. It’s just me,’ he told her. ‘Something lets go—like the control cables of a plane.’ Although when she became ill with a kidney complaint he nursed her with great kindness, they were soon back to square one. He drank, he was moody, jealous and impossible. She decided it was a hopeless case and that she would try to get a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai. Win saw her off: ‘Pensacola, Boston, Coronado, Washington and now Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘We’ve come a long way, only to lose what we began with.’

  This was the end of Wallis’ first marriage, which had lasted on and off for eight years. She was now twenty-eight and her character was formed. She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company, an addition to any party with her high-spirited gaiety. Without being either particularly beautiful or pretty she was always noticed for her perfect figure and elegant clothes. She loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion. Her talent was for people; witty herself, she had the capacity to draw the best out of others, making even the dull feel quite pleased with themselves. This rare gift developed as the years went by.

  Four generations of British monarchy at the christening of Prince Edward in 1894. Queen Victoria; her son, the future Edward VII; her grandson, the Duke of York, the future George V; and in her arms the future Edward VIII.

  Notes

  1 Letter to the author.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Little Prince

  Love is not changed by Death

  And nothing is lost and all in the end is harvest.

  Edith Sitwell

  FAR FROM EASY-GOING if puritan Baltimore, arranged marriages were still the rule in the royal families of nineteenth-century Europe; they were rather cold-blooded affairs, even though they often worked quite well. The marriage arranged between Prince George of Wales, Duke of York, and Princess May of Teck seemed to many people more than usually cold-blooded.

  Queen Victoria was looking for a girl who would be a suitable Queen consort to marry Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, the Prince of Wales’ eldest son. She thought Princess May of Teck might be the best possible choice, and therefore commanded the Princess and her brother Prince Adolphus to go to her at Balmoral.

  Princess May’s mother, the popular and immensely fat Mary Adelaide, Duches
s of Teck, was Queen Victoria’s cousin. She was enchanted at this invitation to Balmoral, for she guessed its reason. That her daughter should marry the heir to the throne had always been her wildest ambition. Various German princelings who might have been suitors for Princess May’s hand were prevented from proposing to her because of a ‘stain’—the Duke of Teck’s morganatic birth. While the Duchess was a Royal Highness, the Duke of Teck and Princess May were merely Serene Highnesses, a disadvantage swept to one side by Queen Victoria.

  The Duke of Clarence, always called Eddy in the family, was volatile, indolent and pleasure-loving. In contrast to Princess May, and to his father the Prince of Wales, (later Edward VII), he had received only a very sketchy education. He had fallen in love with Princess Hélène of Orléans and she with him, but she was a Roman Catholic and neither her parents nor Prince Eddy’s could allow them to marry, although at one juncture Prince Eddy offered to renounce his succession to the throne in favour of his brother Prince George. This difficulty about Princess Hélène having been surmounted, Prince Eddy fell in love again—twice in as many months. His parents and his grandmother were anxious for the capricious young man, and Queen Victoria thought Princess May might be a steadying influence and set about getting to know her.