The Duchess Of Windsor, page 73
The week that followed was akin to the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963; for the first time in many people’s lives, the world seemingly ground to a halt at the death of this one woman. The reaction of the Queen and the British Royal Family was widely criticized; while London—indeed, the world—shared in an outpouring of grief, Elizabeth II and her family remained cloistered at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where Prince Charles had been staying with his and Diana’s two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
At the time of the Duke of Windsor’s death in 1972, the public demonstrations of grief had caught the Royal Family off guard. David, as an exiled former king and outcast member of the Royal Family, had fallen beyond the concerns of his British relatives, who had ignored him in life and now attempted to do much the same in his death. Several times—notably the BBC memorial broadcast with Lord Mountbatten and the trooping the color ceremony, among others—Elizabeth II had to be advised to make small concessions to public sympathy. To a lesser extent, this had been the case at Wallis’s death, when the public interest in the Duchess and sympathy for her again took the Royal Family by surprise.
Now, in September 1997, the familiar pattern once again repeated itself, this time with far more serious results. To the Royal Family, Diana—even in death—remained an outsider, the divorced wife of the heir to the throne, having lost her rank and the style of Her Royal Highness. In life, they had marginalized her and attempted to isolate her from public support and affection; in death, they fully expected that she would be treated in the same fashion. Aside from a brief statement released by Buckingham Palace the day Diana died, there was utter silence from the Royal Family for three days. The rest of the world was unanimous in praising the late Princess, but her former family said nothing. The public, overwhelmed at the loss of arguably the most popular member of the Royal Family in the entire century, demanded more. In an increasingly hostile atmosphere, the Queen agreed to return to London.
As defenders of the Royal Family pointed out, no one—not any member of the government or the public on the street—had any right to dictate how the Queen and her family should mourn the late Princess. However, the Queen’s most important constitutional role is that of continued stability; it is she who forms the focal point of national rejoicing, and she has traditionally led the nation in times of crisis, providing a moral and reassuring center removed from the transient political arena. Over the past thirty years of her reign, Elizabeth II had carefully cultivated the media to display her family in the best possible light, asking them to share family holidays and celebrations; now, in a time of national mourning, she was subject to the same forces which had helped craft her very popularity.
Upon the advice of senior palace officials and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Elizabeth II did something unprecedented: She agreed to address the nation on live television. Her five-minute speech recalling Diana, if somewhat impersonal and bearing all the hallmarks of careful scripting, did much to silence the criticism which had resulted in headlines, such as the Daily Express’s banner “Show Us You Care,” in several London papers. Diana’s funeral, on Saturday, September 6, also witnessed another unique move: Amid controversy that the royal standard atop Buckingham Palace was the only flag in the country not at half staff, once the Queen left the palace for Westminster Abbey, it was changed to a Union Jack, which was duly lowered, a tribute to the late Princess. The Royal Family’s famous stiff upper lip, firmly in place during Diana’s funeral, stood in stark contrast to the scene less than three months later when the Queen and other members of her family were seen to wipe away tears as they watched the Royal Yacht HMS Britannia decommissioned, a show of feeling which caused considerable comment in the press.
In New York City, news of the fatal car crash in Paris brought last-minute preparations for the Windsor auction at Sotheby‘s to a halt. No one knew if they should continue with their plans. Finally, on September 3, Diana Brooks, chief executive officer of Sotheby‘s, made the announcement: “Following the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and his eldest son, Mr. Dodi Fayed, Mr. Mohammed al Fayed has consulted with Sotheby’s and together we have decided that it would be appropriate to postpone the auction of Property from the Collection of the The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”27 The auction, it was announced, would take place sometime in 1998, when it could be rescheduled to accommodate both al Fayed and the already-booked showrooms at Sotheby’s in Manhattan; proceeds from the sale would now go to the newly formed Dodi Fayed International Charitable Foundation.
The Windsor auction was eventually rescheduled for the third and fourth weeks of February 1998. Richard Appelbaum Associates of New York was hired to completely transform two floors of Sotheby’s Manhattan showrooms into a re-created Windsor Villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Enormous blown-up photographs of the hall, the drawing room, the dining room, the library, the boudoir, and both the Duke’s and the Duchess’s bedrooms were suspended from the tall ceilings, providing a surreal backdrop for the pieces of furniture, paintings, and porcelains which had seemingly leaped from the second into the third dimension.28
The fame of the love story of the century, now coupled with the links through the al Fayed family to the late Princess of Wales, lent an extraordinary interest to the auction. Just after half-past six on the evening of Thursday, February 19, Diana Brooks ascended the podium in the main auction room and announced the start of the sale. The first lot, a miniature, hand-colored oval portrait of David as a baby, sold to Memphis, Tennessee, designer Pat Kerr for some $24,000; Sotheby’s original estimate had been $2,000–$3,000. This inflated bidding quickly set the tone for the two weeks which were to follow, an increasing spiral of excitement and desire to own a piece of the Windsors‘ lives.
Perhaps not surprisingly, over half the lots went to Americans, who had always appeared more interested in, and accepting of, the Windsors. Benjamin Yim of San Francisco spent $29,000 to purchase a piece of the Windsors’ wedding cake, still contained in its neatly wrapped white silk box and bearing David’s and Wallis’s signatures. The Duke’s morning suit, which he had worn at his wedding, sold for $27,000; Wallis’s blue-velvet Christian Dior “Lahore” evening gown brought $26,450; and the red-leather dispatch box emblazoned with “The King” went for $65,000.
Designer Tommy Hilfiger purchased many of the furnishings from the villa for use in his new house in Connecticut. Pat Kerr, who had won the first bid, also purchased the album of the Windsors’ wedding as well as additional items and clothing; eight months before, she had also purchased four of the gowns auctioned by Diana, Princess of Wales. The famous Gerald Brockhurst portrait of Wallis was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in London for $107,000; the Munnings equestrian painting of David as Prince of Wales sold for $2,312,000; and the two sketches Cecil Beaton had made of Wallis in 1936 at Cumberland Terrace and which had hung in her bathroom were sold for over $310,000.
Perhaps the two pieces which drew the biggest interest were the abdication desk and the Duke’s Garter banner. There was a great deal of criticism that these items—historically associated with the history of the Royal Family—were not returned to their collection. But it is difficult to believe that the Royal Family would have wished to add the abdication desk, which eventually brought $415,000, to any of their palaces. Ironically, in 1986, Mohammed al Fayed had given Prince Charles a private tour of the Windsor Villa and offered him the choice of any objects he desired. He had had no interest in the family albums or the Garter banner or any other souvenirs of his great-uncle‘s life.29
Many of the Windsors’ friends and intimates were horrified at the auction. “It was shocking,” says David Metcalfe. “The Duke would have been horrified at the auction. Nothing there had any great value, but it had a lot of sentimental value. I am sure he would have wanted most of it returned to the Royal Family.”30 Metcalfe’s sister Linda Mortimer called the auction “an absolute disgrace. It should never have happened. The Duchess had so much style and dignity and grace, and she would have been appalled by the sale.”31 And Janine Metz adds: “The Duke and Duchess were such private people. They would have died of sorrow at this sale.”32
The auction at Sotheby’s arguably closed the last chapter in the love story of the century: The Duke and Duchess were dead, their possessions scattered to the corners of the globe and their correspondence published. The tangible reminders of their life together have nearly vanished. La Croë still stands on a slope above the Mediterranean, half-hidden in an overgrown garden, its windows open to the sky, its rooms burned-out shells. The Paris villa, emptied of its contents, not only retains poignant memories of the Windsors but is now inexorably linked, through Mohammed al Fayed, with the tragic death of the most famous of royal outcasts, Diana, Princess of Wales. Buried side by side at Frogmore, beneath immense slabs of Portland stone, Wallis and David belong to history.
A few miles away, ringed by thick clumps of azalea and rhododendron and guarded by groves of fir and pine, stands Fort Belvedere. For many years abandoned by the crown, it has been brilliantly restored to its former glory. For twenty years, Wallis and David fought for permission to return to the Fort, where their romance had first played itself out; ironically, in death, they rest in the same idyllic stretch of Berkshire countryside.
“I would hesitate,” Wallis wrote in her memoirs, “to call the Fort mine in the way that women sometimes feel that they have an emotional claim to a setting where they came to share profound love.” Nevertheless, even after many years of exile in France, she declared that “a part of me remains in the vicinity.” After she was gone, Wallis warned, she would return to Fort Belvedere, “a pale and anonymous phantom,” flitting in and out of “the shadows along the Cedar Walk,” high above the tranquil stretch of Virginia Water in Windsor Great Park.33 In death, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, would remain forever with the family that in life had rejected her.
Afterword (2003)
ON MARCH 30, 2002, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, died at the age of 101. In recalling what was by any standard an extraordinary life, the world’s media once again turned to the Duchess of Windsor, and to the Abdication which had thrust her husband on the Throne. Although, in 1967, Prime Minister Harold Wilson had declared that papers related to the reign and abdication of Edward VIII would remain classified until 2036, the Queen Mother’s death removed fears that embarrassing materials might come to light during her life.
Among the released documents was a draft of the speech Edward VIII wanted to deliver to his subjects, in which he acknowledged that “the newspapers of other countries have given you full cause for speculation as to what I am going to do–as to what is going to happen.” He planned to raise the subject of his relationship with Wallis in a straightforward manner: “It was never my intention to hide anything from you. Hitherto it has not been possible for me to speak, but now I must. I could not go on bearing the heavy burdens that constantly rest on me as King unless I could be strengthened in the task by a happy married life and so I am firmly resolved to marry the woman I love, when she is free to marry me. You know me well enough to understand that I could never have contemplated a marriage of convenience. It has taken me a long time to find the woman I want to make my wife. Without her, I have been a very lonely man. With her, I shall have a home and all the companionship and mutual sympathy and understanding which married life can bring.” He addressed the question of a morganatic marriage: “Neither Mrs. Simpson nor I have ever sought to insist that she should be Queen. All we desired was that our mutual happiness should carry with it a proper title and dignity for her, befitting my wife.” He ended with a plea: “Now that I have at last been able to take you so fully into my confidence, I feel it is best to go away for a while, so that you may reflect calmly and quietly, but without undue delay, on what I have said. Nothing is nearer to my heart than that I should return; but whatever may befall, I shall always have a deep affection for my country, for the Empire, and for all of you.”1
When Baldwin was shown the draft, he refused to let the broadcast proceed, forcing Edward into the position where abdication became inevitable. Further documents reveal how Baldwin manipulated the press and Dominion heads, informing the latter group that Mrs. Simpson’s statement of December 7, 1936, in which she offered to “withdraw” from the situation, was an “attempt to swing public opinion in her favour and thereby give her less reason to be uneasy as to her personal safety.”2
A memorandum from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after the abdication warned that the Duke of Windsor could only return to England with the prior permission of King George VI, and only on the advice of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Should he not meet these conditions, the Government would “doubtless feel obliged to advise His Majesty to suspend payments” to the former King. When the Duke learned of this, he complained that “it would be tantamount to my accepting payment for remaining in exile.” This was precisely the condition imposed, and was used to keep the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in exile, as was the continued refusal to grant the style of “Her Royal Highness” to the Duchess. Although the files contain protests at the illegality of George VI’s actions in denying the Duchess the style, they note “how strongly the King and Queen desire this situation to be established,” adding that it would be hers by right “unless something is done about it.”3 The King himself warned: “I think you know that neither the Queen nor Queen Mary have any desire to meet the Duchess of Windsor.”4
The papers are interesting not so much for what they disclose as for revealing how members of the establishment seized on sordid sexual allegations in their effort to blacken Wallis’s reputation. The British Government collected gossip against her: one letter declared that she was “well-known” in Baltimore as a “gold digger” and a prostitute; another charged that she was a hermaphrodite, while a third claimed that “children” who had played with her when small recalled her genitalia “knotted like a bunch of grapes.”5
Further papers name Guy Trundle as the latest in a long line of those said to have shared her bed. Born in 1899, a married man who worked as a car salesman for the Ford Motor Company, Trundle was described as “very good looking, well-bred, and an excellent dancer,” a “very charming adventurer” who, according to reports, conducted an affair with Mrs. Simpson in the summer of 1935. Special Branch officers, detailed to spy on Wallis, reported: “The identity of Mrs. Simpson’s secret love has been definitely ascertained.” The pair, they said, met “quite openly at informal social gatherings as a personal friend, but secret meetings are made by appointment when intimate relations take place.”6
Contrary to reports, the papers did not “reveal” an affair between Wallis and Trundle; rather, they show the lengths to which the British establishment was willing to go to undermine her position. By the summer of 1935, Wallis was deeply entrenched in her relationship with the Prince of Wales; surely the woman described as cold and calculating by her most dedicated enemies would not have engaged in such an open affair, thus providing them with ammunition to use against her. The entire episode is redolent of the conspiracy to discredit her, much like the infamous, and non-existent, China Dossier. How, we must ask, were these Special Branch officers able to ascertain what presumably went on behind closed doors, particularly as neither Trundle nor Wallis were ever directly confronted? The allegations rested on the pair being seen together, fed by gossip to fill in the gaps. Indeed, it speaks volumes of the level of British intelligence that these dossiers also claimed that she was well-known as a prostitute in Baltimore, and that she suffered from genital malformation–surely an odd affliction for a woman who supposedly made a career out of sleeping her way to power. Their inclusion helps establish the accuracy of these reports as a whole, reflecting not reality, but rather allegation based on rumor. It is difficult to treat the Trundle story as anything but the latest in a long line of scandalous assertions designed to portray Wallis in the worst possible light.
The papers are undoubtedly not the last such “revelations” that will see the light of day. Publication of the late Queen Mother’s papers, now deposited in the Royal Archives at Windsor, will likely shed further light on the attitudes and prejudices which drove her bitter feud with the Duchess. The opening of the dossiers–and the way in which their questionable and erroneous assertions have appeared in the British press without comment or correction–underscores the hardened attitudes. Attempts by George VI and his Queen to manipulate the former King and his wife, also contained in the documents, have been largely ignored in favour of the more prurient assertions which paint the traditional portrait of Wallis as a scheming, vindictive, and brazen woman of loose morals who seduced Edward VIII and brought about the abdication through her reckless adventure. This gross distortion, absolving Edward VIII of personal responsibility, and justifying the less than admirable behaviour of the British Royal Family, stands as a clear indication of the continuing antipathy toward the controversial Duchess of Windsor.
Acknowledgments
ALTHOUGH I HAD MADE a private decision to undertake this book at some future date while I was living in London in 1996, impetus was given to the project by Allan J. Wilson, my editor at Birch Lane Press. During the course of long telephone conversations between London and New York, he persuaded me to seriously consider this as my next endeavor. It was an enormous decision, but throughout the process Allan carefully steered the book from idea to fruition. Had it not been for his diligence, I would certainly have stalled for several years. Now I’m glad I listened to his advice. Throughout the publication of my previous three books, Allan has always been a constant source of encouragement and wisdom, and I owe him an immense debt for whatever success I have enjoyed.
