The Heart Has Its Reasons
The financial, if not critical, success of A King’s Story had persuaded Wallis that she, too, should write her memoirs. The deciding factor was the cost of doing up the Paris house. Contracts were signed in November 1954 for $500,000, with McCall’s magazine paying $250,000 for serial rights alone and delivery promised for the following October.1
The ghost writer was to be Charles Murphy, who had ghosted A King’s Story.2 He stipulated three conditions – ‘that her account of her divorce from Ernest Simpson would be straightforward; second, that the Duke’s dealings with the Nazis would not be glossed over; and third, that she would not use the book as a rostrum from which to beat or ridicule the Royal Family.’3
By May 1955, two-thirds of the book was written, but relations with Murphy had broken down and he was fired. Murphy was later to write that: ‘She saw herself as the ingenue star of a perpetual light opera.’4 He was replaced by Cleveland Amory, who specialised in writing about the jet set, at a fee of £8,000 and Amory spent several months interviewing Ernest Simpson, Fruity Metcalfe, Perry Brownlow, Herman Rogers, and even the Queen. ‘We loved them and learned so much from them,’ wrote Cleveland’s wife, Martha, to her in-laws, adding, ‘So much that we can’t use, but it was exhausting and fascinating.’5
Many of the interviews were arranged by the Windsors’ lawyer, now Sir George Allen. ‘He was wonderful to us in London, but we felt he didn’t think much of either of them and had done his best to give us the TRUE story through others,’ wrote Martha to her parents.6
The relationship with Amory also soured and he withdrew in September 1955, saying he could not be associated with such a ‘dishonest’ book in which she portrayed herself as ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.’7 He later claimed that everything she told him about Ernest, his first wife, and the divorce was untrue.
‘It is all coolly amicable,’ wrote Martha Amory to her in-laws. ‘The casual way they can be dishonest makes you know that ice runs through their veins. Sir George Allen looked at Clip [Cleveland] this morning as though he’d wished he had the guts to do what Clip was doing twenty years ago.’8 Murphy was then re-hired at the insistence of the publishers.
The book, titled The Heart Has Its Reasons – the phrase comes from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal – eventually came out in February 1956.9 It differed in many respects from the Duke’s version of events and sold less well – 26,000 copies compared to his 120,000 in America.10 The reviews ranged from the gently mocking to bad. The Times felt it could only say: ‘The Heart Has Its Reasons carries the memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor from her childhood in Baltimore to the present day.’ It was overshadowed by a review of a book on alpine flowers.
In September, the couple agreed to an interview on CBS with Ed Murrow to help promote the book. ‘Do you two ever have occasion to discuss what might have been?’ he asked them. They shifted awkwardly, looked at each other, and the Duke replied, ‘No. We both feel that there is no more wasteful or foolish or frustrating exercise than trying to penetrate the fiction of what might have been.’11
On the advice of PR experts and as part of the book promotion, they tried to improve their public image. In April 1956, Wallis had set up a clinic for the rehabilitation of the handicapped in New York and the following September they announced the Windsor Awards, an attempt to present themselves as patrons of the arts. The plan was each year to finance a French or American artist selected by jury. One award was given – $1,500 for a year’s study in Paris – but the scheme was quickly abandoned through their lack of interest.
Cynthia Gladwyn, at her annual dinner with the Windsors in July 1956, reflected back on the Donahue affair, which had done so much to damage Wallis’s reputation, and remembered how she had become ‘rude, odious and strange. One had the impression that she was either drugged or drunk. She spent all her time with the effeminate young man, staying in nightclubs till dawn and sending the Duke home early: “Buzz off, mosquito” – what a way to address the once King of England!’12
Her version of the end of the affair differs from other accounts. ‘Finally Donahue’s boyfriend is alleged to have told him, “It’s either her or me”, and so he chucked the Duchess. Since this extraordinary and unnatural affair, she has become quite normal, but always hard.’13
Frank Giles, who had not seen the couple since 1940 and was now The Times correspondent in Paris, dining with them:
found very little change in him, he was extremely youthful looking, he always was I think to the day of his death, almost like a boy more than a man, and when he was not making remarks about the Jews could exert considerable charm in the way, I believe, he always could . . . She, on the other hand, whom I had admired so much twenty years earlier had become, to my way of thinking, rather coarse and raucous – her voice, instead of being a nice, soft Baltimore voice, had become a sort of twangy Yankee voice. Her opinions and her sort of cackling laughter were very unattractive . . .14
After dinner the Duke chatted to Giles, who was not drawn to his opinions either. ‘There’d have been no war if Eden hadn’t mishandled Mussolini,’ he said. ‘It was all his fault.’ He added, as an afterthought, ‘Together of course with Roosevelt and the Jews.’15 Giles found him ‘an object of pity as of despisement’16 and ‘his views would generally lie somewhere between the naïve and the silly.’17
‘He chatters and chatters. He pretends to be very busy and happy, but I feel this is false and that he is unoccupied and miserable,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary after dining with the Duke in November 1956. ‘He is as nervous as ever. He has a vast cigar, which he chews and wets but does not even light and then lays aside. Although he must have talked to me for three-quarters of an hour without stopping, there was nothing of any interest at all that he had to say but his memory is acute.’18
* * *
The following year, at the end of July 1957, Volume 10 of the German Documents, covering the Duke’s stay in Spain and Portugal in July and August 1940 was published. A few weeks earlier, the Cabinet had agreed the wording of a statement at the time of publication and ‘steps had already been taken to inform the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Windsor and Sir Winston Churchill of the impending publication of this volume’.19 Samuel Hoare, now Lord Templewood, was brought in to write a supportive article in the Daily Express.
With regard to the suggestion that the Duke did not plan to take up his appointment in the Bahamas, the Duke was adamant in a statement, carefully drawn up by Sir George Allen, that ‘At no time did I ever entertain any thought of complying with such a suggestion, which I treated with the contempt which it deserved.’20 This was reinforced by a press briefing note, carefully coordinated between the State Department and the Foreign Office, which called the documents ‘a tainted source’.
This surprised the historians who had fought so hard to ensure the historical documents had seen the light of day, given that the Germans could have had no expectations that the documents would be discovered, that they had been assembled by world-class historians, some had been used as evidence in the various Nazi war trials, and there was no logic in several, respected and experienced German ambassadors having separately misled their own Foreign Ministry. The press release continued, ‘His Royal Highness (the Duke) never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause or in his determination to take up his official post as Governor of the Bahamas on the date agreed.’21
The truth, as Whitehall and Buckingham Palace knew, was very different. Tommy Lascelles confirmed a few days before the publication that the Duke had in August 1940 applied for a code to keep in touch with the Germans. ‘He will deny it all, of course, but I am afraid it is all true.22
* * *
In December 1958, James Pope-Hennessy stayed at the Mill to interview the Duke for his life of Queen Mary. He found him:
exceedingly intelligent, original, liberal-minded and quite capable of either leading a conversation or taking a constructive part in one. He is also one of the most considerate men I have ever met of his generation. Like the Duchess, he is perhaps too open and trusting towards others; or else he was determined to be especially helpful to me.23
Pope-Hennessy was less impressed with Wallis:
this is one of the very oddest women I have ever seen. It is impossible to assess what makes her function or why. I should say she was on the whole a stupid woman, with a small petty brain, immense goodwill and a stern power of concentration . . . suspicion that she is not a woman at all. She is, to look at, phenomenal. She is flat and angular, and could have been designed for a medieval playing card . . . Her jawbone is alarming, and from the back you can plainly see it jutting beyond the neck on each side.24
Their lifestyle at the Mill staggered him. ‘Every conceivable luxury and creature comfort is brought, called on, conscripted, to produce a perfection of sybaritic living. It is, of course, intensely American, but I would think consciously aimed. The Queen Mother at Clarence House is leading a lodging-house existence compared to this.’25
Shown to his room, Pope-Hennessy discovered ‘there was nothing on earth that you might conceivably want that wasn’t there – every kind of writing paper, nail-file, brush, fruit, ice-water; the bathroom loaded with scent-bottles like a counter at a bazaar – a delicious sense of self-indulgence.’26
His observations of the couple and their home during his weekend stay are acute and amusing – he was surprised to see the Duke at dinner ‘wearing red trousers, a fur coat, and a peaked flying cap with fur ear-flaps’27 – but he persuaded his host to open up to him about his upbringing. ‘My father had a most horrible temper. He was foully rude to my mother. Why, I’ve often seen her leave the table because he was so rude to her, and we children would all follow her out.’28
The Duke continued arguing that because his mother had never been in love herself, she could not understand his own strong feelings towards Wallis. ‘My mother was a cold woman, a cold woman.’29 The result was that Queen Mary would never discuss the Abdication:
I’m afraid my mother was a moral coward. She would never, NEVER, talk to me about it. Right up to the end, if I said anything to her, she’d just cough slightly, hm, hm, like that and that was all. She evaded all discussion.30
At the end of 1958, the Duke discovered that his secretary, Victor Waddilove, had been defrauding him on the French currency transactions that the Duke had been conducting on the black market. Waddilove blamed an innocent secretary, Anne Seagrim, who was sacked, but further investigations revealed the extent of the fraud. The Duke contacted his new lawyer Alan Philpotts, who advised a full audit and then either to sack Waddilove or ask him to resign with a year’s salary.
Waddilove wrote to Walter Monckton, who was dealing with the matter, seeking his advice:
I have operated on the black market on their behalf for the past ten years, against my own conscience and the advice of the late Sir George Allen. Unfortunately, I did not take that advice and in devotion to my employers continued these illegal operations to please them, and to benefit them to the extent of well over £200,000 . . . I am now very worried that with the extension to others of the knowledge of these transactions there may be a leak of information. They have totalled over one and half billion Francs and have only been known to my principals and myself.31
The two men met several times throughout January. Monckton was keen to sack him, but realised the story might then go public – Waddilove was hinting he had been offered a six-figure sum by the press. Sir Edward Peacock, former Receiver-General to the Duchy of Cornwall, and another director of Barings Bank, Lord Ashburton, were brought in and advised that a deal should be done.
Negotiations continued until May, during which the Windsors’ finances were checked by John Masters, a former Barings employee who had worked for the Duke as Prince of Wales. He reported that ‘the deals in which the Duke has been engaged in French Francs on the black market’ had been part of a wider crime ring. ‘It would appear that the sum involved is something like FF 1.5 billion, and that in the last year or two a profit of something like FF 600 million has been shown.’ One of intermediaries had been a banker called Lacazes, who was now in prison. Masters also reported that ‘on occasions he believes the Duke has done the actual work on the market himself personally.’32
There were concerns that the Windsors’ private banker, Maurice Amiguet of Swiss Bank, might go public on the transactions, that ‘the fact of the Duke’s business in the black market is known to Montreal bankers’, and that General de Gaulle was ‘probing into all these black market deals’. Ashburton had also had ‘some more or less informal talks with the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, because he feels that the position and reputation of the Crown may be affected.’33
In the end, Victor Waddilove was paid off and the scandal was hushed up.
1 Almost $5 million and $2.5 million.
2 Others in the frame had included Rebecca West and Ernest Hemingway, Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 316.
3 Bryan and Murphy, p. 516.
4 Ibid, p. 517.
5 Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 322.
6 Martha Amory, CAP Box 138, quoted Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 322.
7 Associated Press, 5 October 1955.
8 Martha Amory, September 1955, CAP, Box 138, quoted Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 323.
9 Amory had first suggested Untitled, which had been received in stony silence by the royal couple.
10 Birmingham, p. 251.
11 ‘Person to Person’, 28 September 1956, quoted King, p. 447.
12 Jebb, Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn, p. 179.
13 Jebb, p. 179.
14 Frank Giles, p. 25, Bren 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.
15 Frank Giles, Sundry Times (John Murray, 1986), p. 131.
16 Ibid, p. 131.
17 Ibid, p. 132.
18 9 November 1956, Harold Nicolson diary, Balliol College.
19 11 July 1957, CAB 128/40/31. The Royal Family had already been briefed. Norman Brook, Cabinet Secretary, to Sir Michael Adeane and Adeane’s reply, 20 July. CAB 21/3776, TNA.
20 Donaldson, King Edward VIII, p. 402.
21 The Times, 1 August 1957.
22 25 July 1957. ‘Notes of a conversation with Sir Alan Lascelles by James Pope-Hennessy’, Pope-Hennessy papers, Getty Library, quoted Vickers, p. 352.
23 Peter Quennell, A Lonely Business (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p. 210.
24 Ibid, p. 211.
25 Ibid, pp. 210–11.
26 Ibid, p. 212.
27 Ibid, p. 218.
28 Quennell, p. 214.
29 Quennell, p. 219.
30 Quennell, p. 221.
31 Waddilove to Monckton, 15 December 1958, quoted Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 280. Allen had died in 1956. £4.7 million in today’s money.
32 12 May 1959, Monckton papers (then with Monckton family and now in the Royal Archives), quoted Eminent Churchillians, p. 281.
33 Eminent Churchillians, p. 282.