The Duchess Alone
Wallis returned to a home filled with reminders of their life together. She may have strained at his devotion and her lack of freedom, but he had given purpose and structure to her life. Now at seventy-six, she was a widow with no immediate family and a dwindling circle of friends. ‘I think that the Duke was more in love with the Duchess than the Duchess with him,’ the Countess of Romanones later claimed, ‘but by the time he was dying, she had begun to realise how much in love with him she was. He meant more to her than anyone.’1
The house became a shrine with everything left as it had been. ‘His suits still hang in his dressing-room cupboards. His shirts are stacked in their drawers, his toilet articles spread in his bathroom, his desk ready for instant use, with supplies of pipe cleaners and assorted stationery, all as during his lifetime.’2
She was terrified that she would not have enough money and that the French Government would end the agreement over the house. The Mill, which had been on the market for two years, was sold to a Swiss millionaire for £350,000, together with the 3.5 acres in Marbella for £82,000.3
In fact, Wallis inherited everything – nothing was left to charity, friends, godchildren or staff.4 She received $19,500 from the United Kingdom and $2.5 million of French assets, the Queen continued the annual allowance, now reduced to £5,000, the French did not impose death duties, and she remained immune from tax during her lifetime, but the Paris staff was still reduced from twenty-five to fourteen.5
One of those to go was Sydney, the butler, who had been with the Windsors since the Bahamas. His wife had just died, requiring him to put his three small children to bed. Having failed to engage a nurse or housekeeper, he asked if he might begin going home at five. Wallis’s response had been, ‘If you go at five, don’t come back.’ He left and did not come back.6
Later in June, the art historian Roy Strong dined with the Windsors’ friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, with Cecil Beaton amongst the guests. Strong recollected Charles Wrightsman telling him that:
The Duchess was, however, the ‘bad lot’, a chronic insomniac who needed only three hours’ sleep and demanded that people talk to her till four in the morning. She sponged off everyone and had boyfriends, in particular Jimmy Donohoe (sic), whom she had times with on her own at Palm Beach, the Duke arriving later. Charlie Wrightsman categorised her as the ‘nurse’. He was like a child of ten. The Duchess ran the whole show, embarking on memoirs and television for the money. She had invested in jewellery, which was a mistake, because on his death her income collapsed as certain revenues from Wales ceased to come any more. She had been virtually doped for his funeral and it was thought safer to take her into the Palace rather than having her freak out at Claridge’s.7
At the lunch at the funeral, Wallis had deliberately been placed between Mountbatten and Prince Philip, whose task was to persuade her to part with sensitive papers and royal heirlooms. ‘Within a day or two of her return to Paris, a truck drew up and whisked them away,’ wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary. ‘They are now in the Royal Archives at Windsor.’8
Exactly what was removed to the Royal Archives, when and whether it was all above board, has never been clear. The Duchess’s lawyer, Maître Blum, later claimed ‘that two individuals, authorised either by Lord Mountbatten, or “some other person” acting upon what she alleged to be Royal authority, had somehow obtained the keys to the Duke’s boxes and confidential filing cabinet and burgled the contents . . . The contents included the Duke’s private correspondence, the documents of divorce from Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson . . . and a certain amount of the Duchess’s personal correspondence.’9
But, according to Kenneth de Courcy, the first consignment of papers was handed to the Queen’s Librarian Sir Robin Mackworth-Young with the Duchess present on 15 June 1972. A second tranche, again collected with the Duchess’s knowledge, was picked up on 13 December.10 A third was picked up by Mackworth-Young on 22 July 1977.11
Mountbatten now found the opportunity to drop in more often, anxious to know what would happen to her wealth and possessions after her death. He suggested that some of the jewellery might be given to some of the younger female royals; that he might serve as an executor of her will; the setting up of a Duke of Windsor Foundation chaired by Prince Charles and with Rear Admiral Philip de Gaulle, son of the President, as the French trustee; and that she might support the United World Colleges, of which Mountbatten was International President. Eventually Mountbatten was told not to visit her by her doctor, Jean Thin, because it raised her blood pressure.
Initially enthusiastic, at the beginning of 1973 she decided against the foundation, dismissed her London solicitor, Sir Godfrey Morley of Allen and Overy, and appointed Suzanne Blum to act for her exclusively in future. It was to mark an important new chapter in the Duchess’s life.
Blum had been born in north-west France in 1898 and had graduated from the University of Poitiers in 1921. In the same year she had married Paul Weill, later the Paris representative of Allen and Overy. She had built a successful and high-profile practice, representing Rita Hayworth in her divorce from the Aly Khan in 1958, and her Hollywood clients included Charlie Chaplin, Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, Walt Disney, Douglas Fairbanks and Merle Oberon. One of her first briefs had been successfully defending Warner Brothers against an action brought by the composer Igor Stravinsky for misuse of his music.
She had first been introduced to the Windsors in 1937, through the US ambassador William Bullitt, but had only started acting for the Windsors shortly after the Second World War. From 1973 her influence over the Duchess would be absolute. In March 1973, partly as a thank you for their generosity, Wallis signed an agreement to give the French government almost 140 pieces of furniture worth £750,000 and works of art.12 Her gold boxes, some costing £25,000 each, were donated to the Louvre, a Stubbs picture went to Versailles, and some porcelain to the National Ceramics Museum at Sèvres.13
Writing to Joe Bryan that month, Charles Murphy related how:
Biddy Mokcton (sic), now back in London, has called me here in great distress. A classical situation seems to have taken shape. Morley has been fired. Utter has taken over the management of the household. An English nurse from the staff of the American Hospital, who brought the Duchess home and has been with her four weeks or so, says that his (Utter’s) office is maneuvering (sic) to take over the possessions. Most correspondence he throws into the waste basket. She has seen him do it. He allows few calls to go through to the Duchess. The effect is to persuade her that she is quite alone except for him. Even Biddy Monckton, who gave up her own comfort to be with the Duchess, was required by Utter, until the last visit, to stay in a hotel.
It seems that Utter has made an art of cultivating the affection of rich elderly ladies who leave their possessions to him. I shall tell you this: the other day as I left the gate, Boyer, the English chauffeur, was standing outside. ‘I must see you, Mr Murphy. You can’t believe what is going on in that house. It will shock you.’ Later, I told him. Think of the value of the jewels, the jewelry, the little bibelots and Meissen, that today are no longer under surveillance . . .14
Wallis became increasingly obsessed with security. Beside the spiked fence and guarded gate and alarm system, she kept a pistol on her night table – unknown to her it was a fake – and hired a former French paratrooper to patrol the grounds. She began to drink more heavily – preferably vodka in a silver cup – and to become more reclusive.
She still sat on the boards of the American Hospital and the Animal Society, but contributed little in time or money. When her secretary John Utter tried to persuade her to visit hospital patients ‘to redeem her image’, she refused.15 She turned down a suggestion from Jackie Onassis, now a publisher, to write another volume of memoirs, but in March 1975 she put many of her documents in the care of Maître Blum, with instructions that they be turned into a book. She had always been interested in cancer research, and as a means of thanking the French for years of low rent, she now wrote a new will making the Pasteur Medical Institute her main beneficiary.
She still saw some friends and travelled. In May 1973, the businesswoman Francine Farkas lent Wallis her villa at Cap Ferrat – as a thank you, Wallis gave her a silver urn with the royal crest. Farkas had met the Windsors through her husband, Alexander Farkas, who ran the department store Alexanders. The couples had met whenever the Windsors were in New York or the Farkas’s in France.
‘Her life was devoted to him and his needs,’ recollected Ms Farkas:
She would even check if there were bones in his sole filet at a restaurant. Her conversation was animated and she could talk engagingly about business, politics and especially food about which she knew more about than anyone I knew. Everything was done to perfection and when entertaining she’d have a small string quartet playing in the dining room gallery. He was the most charming person with real presence. Though a small man physically, people parted in front of him. He loved gardening and I remember how he showed me how to cut roses correctly, always the fifth rose down. People liked being with them. She always held court. She was like an older sister to me, someone who one valued being around.16
The following year, Wallis stayed at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz with another old friend, ‘Foxy’ Sefton. She visited New York, where she had another face-lift, and stayed at the Waldorf Towers where a friend, Nathan Cummings, the founder of Consolidated Foods, had lent her some Renoirs and a Sisley to furnish the suite, and according to one biographer, ‘the hotel staff talked for weeks about her abusive treatment of servants, waiters, bell-boys, and the drivers of her cars.’17
She continued to socialise, attending occasional dinner parties with a 26-year-old companion, Claude Roland. In 1974, it was rumoured she would marry Prince Borromeo, the ageing ruler of the Borromean Islands and an old friend, but she was becoming increasingly aggressive and forgetful. At one dinner party that year, gesturing towards John Utter, she asked, ‘Who’s he? . . . I never saw him before in my life.’18
The Vogue editor-in-chief, Diana Vreeland, found her confused when she visited:
She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend – very rare, you know . . . So we were talking after dinner, the two of us. And then suddenly she took hold of my wrist, gazed off into the distance, and said, ‘Diana, I keep telling him he must not abdicate. He must not abdicate . . .’ Then, suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked back at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.19
The friends began to stop coming or being invited.
She increasingly suffered ill health with broken legs and cracked ribs. In February 1976, she was admitted to the American Hospital with an intestinal haemorrhage – arriving with her own maid and linen, the latter changed daily. To fund medical treatment, Blum had quietly begun to sell possessions, some on the open market, others to friends – Nathan Cummings bought a dining-room table, some silver, and a Meissen Tiger dinner service.
In May 1976, France Soir published pictures of her in a chaise longue on the terrace at Route du Champ d’Entraînement. ‘The Duchess looked pitiful. Her tiny shrunken body was being lifted by a nurse. Her legs were cigarette-thin and they dangled uselessly. Her hair was tied tightly back in a knot. Her head lolled helplessly on her chest. There was a close-up of her face and she looked a little like a Chinese mandarin, but more like a dead monkey.’20 Blum sued for ‘wrongful intrusion on her privacy’ and was awarded 80,000 francs damages from each photographer.
Later that month, Wallis was admitted to the American Hospital with a bacterial infection, remaining until September. The photograph of her leaving would be the last glimpse the public would have of her. The following month, the Queen Mother arranged to see the Duchess on a visit to Paris, but Wallis was too ill to receive her. Instead she sent roses with the message ‘In Friendship, Elizabeth’. The feud was over.
The Duchess was lonely, depressed and longed to die. Two nurses took care of her, working in shifts of three around the clock. Circulatory problems meant she could no longer use her hands or feet and she had to be carried everywhere. She spent most of the time in a wheelchair and was now spoon-fed by a nurse; her weight dropped to eighty-five pounds. Soon she would lose the power of speech, be blind and on an intravenous drip. To keep her entertained, a pianist was brought in to play medleys of her favourite songs, such as ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’.
Blum had dismissed most of her staff, including her secretary, Joanna Schultz – John Utter had left in the autumn of 1975 with neither pension nor severance pay, after she accused him of colluding with Mountbatten for the return of the Duke’s papers. By 1980, the thirty-two staff had been reduced to the butler, Georges Sanègre, his wife Ophelia the housekeeper, Martin the gardener-cum-chauffeur, the laundress, and the Duchess’s Portuguese maid Maria. The pugs had also gone – given away after the Duchess could no longer bear their barking.
Aline, Countess of Romanones, one of the few allowed past the gatekeepers, Maître Blum and Doctor Jean Thin, was shocked by the change in her friend when visiting her in 1984:
This time Georges directed me through the boudoir to her bedroom, where she was seated in the wheelchair, with her back to the door, looking out at the trees and garden. A nurse was with her. Her hearing was excellent, and she turned her head and smiled. Our eyes held for a moment before she turned back for want of something to say, and I was choked by the great difference in her. The hair around her face was white, due to not having been dyed in a long time. The hair was still long and thick, done in a braid pulled down and folded under at the nape of her neck.
She wore a blue wool jacket, and on the sofa behind her were her favourite pillows, one stitched with the words ‘You can never be too rich or too thin’, the other with ‘Don’t worry. It never happens’. Her bed had been replaced with an adjustable hospital one. Although she looked neat and seemed not to be in pain or unhappy, I could see that this fastidious woman would certainly not want to receive her friends any longer. No fancy dress, no makeup, no nail polish – and grey hair!
I pulled up the chair she used at her dressing table and sat down beside her. She was looking at me, and her face had a sweet, almost timid expression. Placing her hand on mine, she asked, ‘Who are you, my dear?’
I saw that it embarrassed her that she did not know. I said, ‘I’m Aline.’
‘Oh, Aline dear, forgive me.’ She patted my hand. ‘Look at the way the sun is lighting the trees. You can see so many different colours. Tell David to come in. He wouldn’t want to miss this.’21
On 24 April 1986 Wallis died, aged eighty-nine, of heart failure brought on by pneumonia. Three days later, the Lord Chamberlain flew to collect her body to make the same journey that her husband had made almost exactly fourteen years earlier.
From RAF Benson it was taken to St George’s Chapel at Windsor for a thirty-minute private funeral attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Baba Metcalfe, Diana Mosley, Lady Dudley and the Countess of Romanones. A bearer party of Welsh Guards carried her coffin to the quire and at the conclusion of the service it was carried out to Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.
‘The service, with much processional pageantry, is beautiful, but deliberately excludes emotion,’ wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary:
After the service, when talking to Robert Runcie in the Cloisters, I ask him when he last attended the funeral of a person whose name was nowhere mentioned from beginning to end. He says: ‘No never.’ . . . Overall it was an odd occasion: all the grandeur and pageantry of a Royal funeral, yet with a cold heartlessness. No hospitality whatever was offered to the mourners: not so much as a glass of sherry or a cup of tea.22
Laura, Duchess of Marlborough added to the invitation in her scrapbook: ‘A sad day, the Queen looked furious, the Queen Mother almost danced behind the coffin.’23
Wallis was buried beside her husband, but set apart from the other royal graves. Her gravestone simply reads: ‘Wallis, Duchess of Windsor’. She would not be designated HRH even in death.
Almost immediately Mohamed Al Fayed took over the lease of the Bois de Boulogne home at a nominal cost, on condition he restore it to its Windsor heyday.
Some jewellery was left to Princess Alexandra, the Duchess of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent and some friends, but most was sold to benefit the Pasteur Institute’s research into AIDS. Some 230 lots were sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva within a year of her death, raising seven times the estimate – $50,281,887. Amongst those who bid were Elizabeth Taylor, who bought a diamond and platinum brooch in the shape of Prince of Wales feathers for $567,000, and Calvin Klein.
In February 1998, Sotheby’s auctioned off the rest of the Windsor possessions, including a slice of their wedding cake – neatly wrapped in a white silk box with their signatures – for $29,000, his wedding morning suit for $27,000, the Brockhurst portrait of Wallis was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery for $107,000, the Munnings painting for $2,312,000, two Cecil Beaton sketches of Wallis that had hung in her bathroom for $310,000, and the abdication desk for $415,000.24 Designer Tommy Hilfiger bought many of the furnishings for a new house in Connecticut.
It was the end of an era.
1 Romanones interview, quoted King, p. 486.
2 Bryan and Murphy, p. 563.
3 £4.7 million and £1.1 million today.
4 His godchildren included: Edward Brownlow, son of Perry; Alexander Guest, son of Winston; David Metcalfe, son of Fruity; David, Marquess of Milford-Haven; David Seely, 4th Baron Mottistone; and David, Earl of Westmoreland.
5 The annual allowance was worth £67,000 today.
6 Bryan and Murphy, p. 549.
7 20 June 1972, Roy Strong, Splendours and Miseries: The Roy Strong Diaries 1967–87 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 105.
8 21 January 1983, Kenneth Rose, Vol. 2, pp. 68–9.
9 Higham, Wallis, pp. 484–5. Also Parker, pp. 297–8.
10 Kenneth de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover. This is supported by Ziegler, pp. 680–1 and Vickers, p. 10.
11 Daily Express, 23 July 1977.
12 Now £9.2 million.
13 Just over £300K.
14 Charles Murphy to Joe Bryan, 10 March 1973, Mss 5.9 B 8405:97–119, Virginia Museum of History and Culture.
15 Bryan and Murphy, p. 561.
16 Interview Francine Sears, 8 May 2020.
17 Birmingham, p. 267.
18 Bryan and Murphy, p. 566.
19 Diana Vreeland, DV (Knopf, 1984), p. 68.
20 Blackwood, p. 110.
21 ‘A Bold Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986.
22 Rose, Vol. 2, p. 138.
23 Thanks to Amy Ripley for supplying this.
24 In today’s prices, $29K is worth $47K; $27K is worth $44K; $107K is now $175K; $2,312,000 is $3,820,000; $310K is $512K and $415K is $680K.