Settling Down
On 31 January 1952, looking frail, George VI saw his daughter Elizabeth and husband Philip off at Heathrow for a tour of Africa. He would never see her again. On the morning of 6 February, he was found dead at Sandringham by his valet. The Duke, who was told the news by a reporter, immediately made plans to attend the funeral, but his wife was told she would not be welcome.
Back in Britain, he had tea with Queen Elizabeth; the new Queen, his niece Elizabeth; Prince Philip and Princess Margaret. He then viewed the coffin at Westminster Hall. Dressed in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, which drew some criticism, he was one of the chief mourners at the funeral, but played little part in it.
Never one to miss an opportunity, he used the visit to lobby for a job and to make his case for recognition of Wallis but, as usual, to no avail. He brought with him his lawyer Henry ‘Hank’ Williams, having learnt that the £10,000 annual allowance had lapsed with the death of the King. After negotiations, it was continued on the understanding that he kept out of Britain or he would be taxed. Meanwhile, in his absence, Wallis continued her affair with Jimmy.
In the knowledge that it was very unlikely they would ever be allowed to settle in Britain and with the monies made on A King’s Story, the Duke and Duchess decided to lease a country home from the stage designer Etienne Drian. They chose a seventeenth-century mill, Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, about twenty miles outside Paris, consisting of four stone buildings with a cobbled courtyard and set in twenty acres of land.
The following year they decided to buy it, the first and only home they ever owned. Bathrooms were added to each bedroom, a modern kitchen created and a swimming pool built. This was to be the Duke’s new Fort Belvedere and over the next twenty years it was to be the house where the couple felt most relaxed.
John Fowler and Nancy Lancaster, from the celebrated firm Colefax & Fowler, were brought in to decorate the house, choosing to create in the main house a pink and apricot drawing room with French windows leading onto the garden. Jessie Donahue paid for the redecoration of Wallis’s bedroom, which was all white with beams waxed to dull gold and filled with a huge four-poster bed covered with pillows. The Duke’s bedroom with its barracks cot ‘had the feeling of a loft, littered with golf books, an autographed picture of Arnold Palmer, old 78 rpm records of Carousel, sheet music from Gypsy, stacks of old magazine articles and newspaper clippings.’1
There was colourful Italian pottery, comfortable divans, stone fireplaces, vivid yellow and flame curtains and scores of pillows with embroidered messages such as ‘Never Explain – Never Complain’. ‘It was very bright with patterned carpets, lots of apricot and really more Palm Beach than English or French,’ remembered Diana Mosley.2 ‘Overdone and chichi . . . Medallions on the walls, gimmicky pouffs, bamboo chairs. Simply not good enough,’ was Cecil Beaton’s verdict.3 The designer Billy Baldwin was even more blunt. ‘. . . most of the Mill was awfully tacky, but that’s what Wallis had: tacky Southern taste; much too overdone, much too elaborate, and no real charm.’4
The main guest cottage had two bedrooms and baths and was lined with framed prints of George IV’s coronation and a display of the Duke’s collection of seventy walking sticks. Everything was geared for the comfort of their guests. With ‘a small bar supplied with whisky, gin, vodka, bitters, glasses, ice, and all conceivable cocktail garnishes . . . Each bedroom was also supplied with a thermos of iced water, with the newest books on the bedside table, with writing paper and postcards (even stamps), pen, ink, cigarettes – filtered and unfiltered, plain and mentholated – matches (green folders with “Moulin de la Tuilerie” stamped in white, cigarette lighter, and a radio.’5
The forty-foot barn was converted into a shrine to the life that the Duke had rejected, the walls hung with the pipe banners of the Seaforth Highlanders, pig-sticking and steeplechasing trophies, drums of the Grenadier and Welsh Guards used as occasional tables, 1937 coronation mugs, a frame with a sample of every button used by the British Army during the First World War, commemorative medals, and the Chippendale table on which he had signed the Instrument of Abdication.
The garden designer, Russell Page, was commissioned to design a traditional English country garden with herbaceous borders, a rock garden and various water features, and the Duke was to spend most of his weekends creating in this ‘corner of a foreign field’ the England he had left behind, with its walled garden, ‘phlox and lupines, chrysanthemums and asters and roses of a dozen colours. His prize was the Duke of Windsor rose, which an English gardener had created and named for him.’6
Here the couple would entertain most weekends following a strict ritual. First the invitation by phone, followed by an engraved card emblazoned with the ducal crown in green and crimson, which read: ‘This is to remind you that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor expect you on Saturday . . . for the weekend at teatime.’ Enclosed would be a note with directions. The Duke would be driven down in his Daimler, the Duchess following in a Cadillac with her maids.
After tea, the guests would retire to bathe and dress for dinner, which was always black tie, though the Duke often wore one of his kilts. Guests would find their cases unpacked, clothes pressed and shoes polished. After drinks in the hall with hot savouries served in silver dishes, at 9 p.m. the Duchess led the ladies into dinner. The finest food and wine would be served by the Windsors’ liveried staff. The meal would finish with a savoury, a practice they introduced to the French, who claimed it ‘impossible to eat scrambled eggs after chocolate ice’. The Duke and the men might remain drinking port.
The next morning, breakfast, which had to be ordered the night before on a menu card by their bed, was served in each room. There would then be pre-luncheon drinks on the terrace and lunch in the barn at two tables, which each Windsor hosted. The guests were then encouraged to leave.
It was at the Mill that they entertained Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and Cecil Beaton, as well as old friends such as Eric Dudley, Gray Phillips, Alastair Mackintosh, the Marquesa de Portago, Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, and a series of friends from deposed royal lines and obscure European dynasties.
* * *
In the spring of 1953, the Duke was back in London after his mother Queen Mary became ill and then died. Here was another reminder of the past that he had left behind. Theirs had been a powerful relationship. Though he could never forgive her for the way she had treated Wallis, he had sought his mother’s love and approval all his life, which is why her rejection of his wife had been so painful.
The Duke had mixed feelings about her death, telling his wife, ‘My sadness was mixed with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years, and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap. I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy-cold as they now are in death.’7
The funeral took place on 30 March, but again the Duke played little part in the organisation, or even the service. The next day Queen Mary was buried at Windsor. ‘What a smug, stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy, worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become,’ wrote the Duke to Wallis. ‘I’ve been boiling mad the whole time that you haven’t been here in your rightful place as a daughter-in-law at my side.’8
His mother’s death did not bring the family together. There was to be no invitation to the Coronation in May, on the grounds that there was no protocol for a former sovereign to attend a coronation. Instead, the Duke watched it in Paris at the home of a friend, Margaret Biddle, providing a commentary to the other guests, and in return for a large fee from United Press for the exclusive right to photograph him.
Meanwhile, in his absence at the funeral, Jimmy and Wallis continued their affair with dinners at the Colony and dancing at the El Morocco.
In June, the Windsors signed the lease on 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement, a house on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne, which was to be their main residence for the rest of their lives. Built in the style of Louis XVI, it was owned by the City of Paris and had previously been occupied by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the planner of modern Paris, and Charles de Gaulle.
The Windsors paid a nominal rent and free security was added to the diplomatic status negotiated by Walter Monckton. It meant that they paid no income tax, their foreign purchases were duty free, and the profits from their investments were free of tax. The Duke’s personal fortune at the time was at least £3 million.9
The mansion stood in two acres, guarded by a lodge and enormous iron gates, crowned with gilded spikes, and approached by a long sweeping gravel drive, flanked by lawns, oak and chestnut trees, and with a tall black lamppost topped by a gilded crown. A colonnaded portico led into a dimly lit grand marble hall, dominated by a silken banner emblazoned with the Prince of Wales’s coat of arms, which had originally hung above his stall in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Above was a sky-blue vault with fluffy clouds, flying geese, and framed by a trompe-l’oeil balustrade. The room, which was adapted at night for dances, was furnished with a sedan chair, an outsize globe of the earth, five-foot-high octagonal mirrors, and one of the red boxes he had used as King. A marble stairway climbed along the left wall to an open gallery.
Straight through from the hall was the high-ceilinged drawing room, with French windows leading on to a terrace and lawn. Pictures included a landscape by Degas, some flower paintings by Fantin-Latour, a Utrillo, a picture of Queen Mary, and one of the Duke as Prince of Wales in his Garter robes:
Small, low tables were everywhere: marble tables, lacquer tables, marquetry tables. Some were for cigarettes, ashtrays, flowers. Others, larger, held the gold and silver caskets, the swords of honour, the Maori greenstone war clubs, and the silver-lidded, rock-crystal inkwells that had been bestowed on the Prince of Wales during his Empire tours.10
Other tables held Wallis’s collections of china and porcelain, with one reserved for thirty-one Meissen pugs. A cushion in needlepoint displayed the Prince of Wales’s three feathers and his motto ‘Ich Dien’, and in the corner was a blue and silver grand piano.
The east end of the drawing room opened into the dining room, which had a ‘musicians gallery’ high on one wall and could seat twenty-six, whilst leading off from the west was the library, which they used as a sitting room. This was dominated by Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of the Duchess painted in 1939, whilst on an adjacent wall hung Alfred Munning’s equestrian portrait of the then Prince of Wales.
Upstairs there was an informal sitting room overlooking the garden, where they met each morning, took tea, and ate dinner on trays watching TV if they were not entertaining, and their bedrooms. At the foot of the Duchess’s bed was a chaise longue, where she had her daily massage and her assorted stuffed toy pugs were displayed. The room was scattered with pictures of the couple and their dogs, and cushions embroidered with mottoes such as ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Don’t Worry – It May Never Happen’ and ‘You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin’.
The Duchess’s bathroom was like a circus tent, with the ceiling painted trompe-l’oeil with marquee stripes and hanging tassels, and on the walls a fantastical mural of ballet dancers, ribbons and flowers, and Cecil Beaton’s picture of Wallis. His suite was much more spartan and dominated with pictures of the Duchess and their pugs or cairns. As he preferred to shower, his bath was used to store his papers and photos. Two guest rooms and a bath on the top floor completed the set-up.
* * *
In 1953, Volume 10 of the captured German documents, which related to the Duke’s entrapment in Spain and Portugal, was close to publication, and the problem of how to deal with it returned to exercise the minds of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.
On 27 June, Churchill wrote to President Eisenhower, ‘My purpose in writing this letter is to ask you to exert your power to prevent publication.’11 He followed up a few days later with a telegram marked ‘Most Secret and Personal’: ‘I am venturing to send you some papers about the Duke of Windsor which I hope you will find time to consider.’12
On 3 July, General Walter Bedell Smith, Under Secretary of State and formerly Chief of Staff to Eisenhower at SHAEF, arranged to see Bernard Noble, head of the Historical Division at the State Department. Noble later recounted the conversation to the US editor in chief, Paul Sweet:
I have instructions to tell you that the British government is going to communicate a list of the documents on the Duke of Windsor which it wishes to have left out of Volume X [10]. You are to inform the editor of the German documents that when he receives the list, he will agree to the elimination of these documents.13
On 12 August, Churchill circulated a paper to the Cabinet, ‘Publication of Captured German Documents’, writing:
Subject to the views of my colleagues, I propose to interview the British Editor-in-Chief and to propose that publication be postponed for at least ten or twenty years on the grounds that these papers, tendentious and unreliable as they should undoubtedly be regarded, would give pain to the Duke of Windsor and leave an impression on the minds of those who read them entirely disproportionate to the historical value.14
Two weeks later, the Cabinet met to discuss the publication of Volume 10, Churchill explaining that he ‘was not persuaded that there was any historical need to publish this correspondence, at any rate during the lifetime of the Duke of Windsor. Its publication would certainly be damaging to the Duke and would cause him unnecessary distress.’15 Churchill had written to Eisenhower, who ‘had promised full co-operation and the chief American historian had been instructed that, if his British colleague asked that these documents should, after all, be omitted from the forthcoming volume, he should acquiesce.’16
The problem was that the British editor Margaret Lambert did not agree and had threatened to resign if documents were omitted. The British Government were aware that the existence of the documents was widely known both in the United States and in this country; that copies of the actual documents might even be in private hands; and that intervention to prevent the inclusion of these documents in the official publication might provoke unofficial publication, at least of the substance of the documents and possibly of the actual texts.17
Supressing the documents might, it was realised, be more damaging than allowing them to appear. Eventually after pressure, Lambert agreed to delay publication of Volume 10 and instead bring out a volume on the Weimar Republic.18 Walter Monckton was sent to Paris to update the Duke.
But the problem continued to worry the Government. At the beginning of March 1954, the minister of state at the Foreign Office, Anthony Nutting, raised concerns about the former German ambassador von Hoesch’s reports that the King had actively interfered politically in the Rhineland Crisis and told the Germans that Britain would not intervene in the reoccupation.19
At the end of March 1954, the Cabinet again discussed publication of the German documents and their return to Germany, with Churchill taking the view that publication should be deferred until after the death of the Duke of Windsor and that the file relating to the Duke ‘should not be returned to the custody of the German Federal Government . . . but should be retained in British custody, at any rate during the Duke’s lifetime.’20
In November 1954, the Stationery Office published Volume 8, aware that Walter Schellenberg’s memoirs covering the subject were about to be published, but it was carefully controlled, with review copies only sent out to a limited number of dailies. The permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, reassured the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, that, ‘Publication was accompanied by a press release drawing attention to its salient features, but not to the documents referring to the Duke of Windsor.’21
The Duke had come to London, having prepared a denial. The next challenge would be Volume 10.
* * *
Wallis’s affair with Jimmy Donahue continued throughout 1953, with the Duke trailing in their wake. In July they were all in Biarritz, paid for by Jessie Donahue, and in August Jimmy chartered a yacht for a month around the Gulf of Genoa to Monte Carlo, Rapallo, San Remo and Portofino. It reached a notable humiliation on New Year’s Eve, when the couple were photographed sitting awkwardly in the El Morocco nightclub on a zebra-striped ‘throne’ and, to widespread laughter, being crowned with paper crowns by Jimmy.
In the summer of 1954, Jimmy chartered the yacht The Narcissus, with a crew of fifteen, to again cruise around the Mediterranean, visiting Rapallo, Capri (where Jimmy was robbed of $2,000 cash and his passport – probably by a casual gay pickup), Naples, Ischia, Ponsa, Livorno, and Venice, where they stayed at the Gritti Palace. They ended with a few days in Austria, driving to the magnificent Schloss Velden on Lake Wörthersee in a motorcade of five cars – the Windsors’ Rolls-Royce, Jimmy’s Cadillac, a staff car, and two others containing luggage.
But tensions were mounting. Jimmy was bored by them – not least stuck playing gin rummy with the Duke every afternoon – and annoyed at their sponging. This came to a head during a five-night stay at the Brenner’s Park hotel at Baden Baden, when Jimmy took exception to a disparaging reference by Wallis about his breath. He kicked her under the table leaving her bleeding and her stocking torn. It was the final straw for the cuckolded Duke, who told Jimmy to leave. ‘We’ve had enough of you, Jimmy. Get out!’22
There was to be no further contact between the Windsors and the Donahues and Wallis made no reference to her lover and benefactor in her memoir. Like Fruity and the Drurys before, the Donahues were airbrushed out of the Windsors’ lives.
Twelve years later, in December 1966, Jimmy was found dead by his mother in their apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue. The official explanation was ‘acute alcoholic and barbiturate intoxication’, but the suspicion was that it was suicide. In his bedroom were found thirteen framed photographs of Wallis.23
1 Ralph Martin, The Woman He Loved (WH Allen, 1974), p. 453.
2 Menkes, p. 62.
3 Ibid, p. 62.
4 Baldwin, p. 292.
5 Birmingham, p. 246.
6 Martin, p. 455.
7 Michael Bloch, Secret File, p. 277.
8 Ibid, p. 279.
9 Parker, p. 265. Today £86.6 million.
10 Bryan and Murphy, p. 486.
11 Churchill to Eisenhower, 27 June 1953, Annex B, CAB 301/179, TNA.
12 Churchill to Eisenhower, 1 July 1953, PREM 11/1074, TNA.
13 Morton, 17 Carnations, p. 300.
14 12 August 1953, CAB 301/179, TNA.
15 ‘Confidential Record of Cabinet discussion on 25 August 1953’, CAB 128/40/10, TNA.
16 CAB 128/40/10, TNA.
17 CAB 128/40/10, TNA.
18 CAB 128/40/10. Cf. FO 370/2343, TNA.
19 4 March 1954, FO 370/2371, TNA.
20 ‘Cabinet minutes, Top Secret’, 1 April 1954, CAB 128/40/13, TNA.
21 Ivone Kirkpatrick to Anthony Eden, 11 November 1954, FO 800/847, TNA.
22 Bryan and Murphy, p. 483.
23 Ibid, p. 483.