CHAPTER TWO

I Married a Sadist

Captain Henry Mustin looked over the chaotic scene confronting him and shook his head in despair. “Scandalous,” he muttered to himself as he reviewed the piles of driftwood choking the wide beach and the abandoned Navy buildings, some damaged during the Civil War, others wrecked by the great tidal wave and hurricane of 1906. Mustin, now forty but still trim and lean as befitting a one-time world record–holding athlete, had been given the unenviable task of turning this ramshackle spot outside Pensacola on the Florida coast into the US Navy’s first air station.

“The whole place is in a scandalous condition, I surely have a job on my hands,” he wrote to his wife and Wallis’s cousin, Corinne Montague, on January 21, 1914, a couple of days after landing in the teeth of a raging storm. “It looks as if it had been abandoned for 50 years and since then had been used as a dump.”

But Naval Aviator No. 11 was made of the right stuff. Only a few days later, Mustin, who first flew in 1911, and his command of nine aviators and twenty-three enlisted men had cleared the beach sufficiently to house their allocation of seven aircraft. By February 2, 1914, the runway was built and graded so the inaugural flight could take place.

Within two weeks of the Navy’s first aeronautical school opening, the deadly perils daily facing those magnificent men in their flying machines became tragically evident when Mustin’s friend Lieutenant James Murray, Naval Aviator No. 10, drowned after his Burgess D-1 flying boat crashed into the sea from a height of 200 feet. There would be many more tragedies as men tried to master these fickle and frail machines. Mustin led from the front in this perpetually risky business, in November 1915 becoming the first pilot to be successfully launched from a ship by a catapult. For this feat of daring he was awarded the Legion of Merit.

Once the air school was on a firm footing, Mustin sent for Corinne and their two sons and installed them in Quarter A, a historic military building said to be haunted by the ghosts of a previous commandant and his mistress, who perished during a yellow fever epidemic. For a time the Mustins took their meals at the Old Mill Inn for $25 a month.

With her famous Montague charm and gaiety, coupled with a deserved reputation as a Baltimore beauty, Wallis’s older cousin soon established a warm and welcoming atmosphere for base personnel. While her adoring if taciturn husband ensured the new Navy aviation school was run in a shipshape fashion, she gave it the feminine touch, regularly hosting dinners for the men who put their lives on the line every day—the sound of the crash gong signifying that a pilot had crash-landed was a regular and chilling occurrence. Wallis knew nothing of these daily dangers when she received a letter from Corinne inviting “Skinny,” Corinne’s nickname for her, to spend a few weeks with the Mustin family on the base.

The invitation came at an opportune time. It had been a hard winter—her beloved grandmother Anna Warfield died in December following a fall, and she had been wearing the black of mourning ever since. During this time she had declined every party, turned down every dinner invitation. Her mother had taken the opportunity to write to Wallis’s love-struck beau Carter Osburn, asking him to give her daughter time and space in his headlong pursuit of her hand in marriage. It was the prelude to their eventual parting. Alice was not the only family member who felt that Wallis, still only nineteen, was racing to the altar in order to beat her rivals rather than because she was with a suitable man.

Years later, Wallis put a brave face on this teenage romance. “There was no question of deciding anything. I was too young to be thinking of getting married. It was all for the fun of the thing. In those days girls were really very moral.” At a time when only three women in a hundred went to college, and marriage was the only sure-fire route for a woman to win power, status, and stability, Wallis was skirting around the limited choices facing women.

Following a family conference in April 1916, it was agreed, albeit reluctantly, that Wallis could break her mourning, pack her party dresses, and take the train south. She would be accompanied by a family friend who would be her chaperone for the journey. The family thought that a few weeks spent in quiet seclusion under the improving wing of Corinne and Henry Mustin, away from the romantic distractions of Carter Osburn and other Baltimore beaux, would bring her down to earth.

She would be in the Florida sunshine on a military base in the company of dozens of daring young men in crisp dress uniforms. What could possibly go wrong? Alice realized the moment she received Wallis’s first letter that her strategy had badly backfired. Letters from Wallis, who hated putting pen to paper, were perfunctory and peppered with a list of gripes. This time it was different, Wallis telling her mother that she had met “the most fascinating aviator” in the world at a lunch in the Mustins’ home. At a time when World War One air aces like the Red Baron, Albert Ball, and William Bishop were household names, military aviators were the astronauts of their day.

In Wallis’s eyes they were “godlike creatures who had descended to earth from a strange and adventurous realm.” Her Adonis was Aviator No. 20 (though he was the eighteenth qualified Navy air pilot), a slim yet rugged young man with flashing eyes and wit to match. Wallis was instantly beguiled by Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., who, despite holding only the lowly rank of lieutenant, was the base’s senior instructor. “Every generation has its own set of heroes and mine were fliers,” she recalled.

From a family of seven, with an English mother and an American stockbroker father, “Win” was raised in leafy Highland Park, then a tiny community north of Chicago. He enrolled in the Naval Academy in July 1906 when he was seventeen. His records indicate he was a decent student, though he certainly seems to have played the class clown, accumulating numerous demerits for “talking in the section,” “sky larking in the college corridor,” and “smiling in the ranks.” He had such a good singing voice that he earned the nickname Carus, after the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

When he graduated in June 1910, the student yearbook, the Lucky Bag, described him as “brimming with high spirits, a merry devil and a good comrade. There could not be a better shipmate.” He first served on board the USS Nebraska before trying his hand at the newfangled art of flying, much to the consternation of his superior officers.

In Wallis’s eyes he was a real man, a “strong, assured, sophisticated” fellow who was in a different league to the teenage boys back home. Impatient in love as she was in life, it took Wallis a mere forty-eight hours to be hopelessly smitten. “I knew I was in love—in love at first sight, yes, but nonetheless completely, totally and helplessly.”

She didn’t even care that he only drove a Ford. For the next eight delirious weeks Lieutenant Spencer squired her to the movies, to Saturday-night dances at the San Carlos Hotel, and even, unsuccessfully, attempted to teach her to play golf. All the while, her cousin Corinne was their chaperone, discreetly making herself scarce when they went shell hunting along the beach so they could have time alone.

In true Hollywood style, Win proposed as the lights came up at the end of a silent movie. His real-life screen queen was flattered but asked for time so that she could break the news to her mother, her aunt Bessie, and the rest of the clan. When her mother gingerly mentioned the time-honoured difficulties of marriage to a military man—poor pay, long absences, and frequent moves—starry-eyed Wallis saw the hardships as part of a great adventure. Usually when she ignored her mother, Wallis was prepared to listen to her aunt Bessie. Not this time. Wallis’s mind was made up. She was determined to snare a trophy husband who would impress her friends—and enemies. As Mrs. Merryman recalled: “I told her to stop and think but she wouldn’t. There was no thinking done. She was beguiled by the moonlight, the white uniform, Florida and flying.”

Her aunt Lelia was equally pithy. “You just married him out of curiosity.”

That fateful summer, when Win arrived in Baltimore for a formal family “viewing,” he charmed the ladies and impressed the menfolk. Even Uncle Sol acknowledged the flier’s down-to-earth manner. The engagement was announced on September 19, Wallis showing off her diamond ring to as many of her school friends as she could find. Not only was she the first of her year to announce her engagement, but the fellow in question was one of the most glamorous and exotic members of the male species. Later the competitive Ms. Warfield recognized that her forthcoming nuptials had more to do with the chase than the capture. “To be the first was not only a great honour, it was also regarded as very smart and chic. With my ring on my finger I went all over Baltimore, waving my hand at every opportunity.” She had little time to consider the character of the man she was going to marry, his occasional brooding silences, his flashes of jealousy and unpredictable moods. She was too busy organizing her big day.

For an anxious few days, though, it looked like the Montague curse would blight Wallis’s moment of triumph. The wedding, arranged for November 8, 1916, in Christ Episcopal Church, where Wallis was confirmed, looked certain to be cancelled. Just a few days before Win was due to head north to Baltimore, his Pensacola naval base was devastated by a hurricane, which flattened hangars and beach workshops, wrecked planes, and battered the control tower. It was such a ferocious storm that offshore a ship sank, drowning twenty passengers and crew. In total the October 18 hurricane caused more than a million dollars’ worth of damage, crippling the base. With the prospect of America entering World War One growing closer every day, all hands, including Win’s, were needed in the clean-up operation.

In spite of the turmoil in Florida, Lieutenant Spencer and several fellow officers who were ushers were given leave. It helped that Wallis’s cousin Henry Mustin was the base commandant. The Baltimore Sun described the evening wedding as “one of the most important of the season.” Win’s best man was his brother Dumaresq, a Yale graduate, while Wallis was given away by Uncle Sol, watched by her maid of honour, Ellen Yuille, and chief bridesmaid, Mary Kirk, who, to Wallis’s delight, caught her bridal bouquet. It would be another eighteen months before Mary Kirk walked down the aisle. Like her best friend, she fell for a military man, Captain Jacques Raffray, a French liaison officer who was assigned to Washington when America entered the war in 1917.

After all the excitement of her big day, Wallis now found herself alone with her flier husband. She and Win sat in the back seat of Aunt Bessie’s car as they were driven to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, where they spent the first night of their honeymoon. As Bessie prepared to make her farewells, Wallis whispered plaintively: “Are you going to leave me with this strange man?” Her aunt replied: “Yes, my dear. The rest is up to you.”

She faced her first night as a married woman, traditionally a moment of nervous trepidation, knowing little about “the facts of life.” It is ironic that a woman who would become the swirling centre of conjecture about her sexual orientation, exotic bedtime techniques, and brazen sexuality was at the time utterly ignorant of the mechanics of sexual congress. In that, she was no different from the majority of her contemporaries. For all her fascination with the opposite sex, she recoiled in a fluster when Win kissed her on the mouth shortly after asking her to marry him and looked on in disapproval when he pulled out a bottle of gin from his suitcase when they arrived at one hotel room in the dry state of West Virginia during their two-week honeymoon.

Wallis, who was teetotal for the first years of her marriage, pinpointed his heavy drinking as the root cause of the eventual collapse of their union. Yet she admits that she was unduly intolerant of drinking—following in the censorious footsteps of her grandmother. Even her mother found her too rigid, telling guests to hide their drinks when she entered the room unexpectedly. “Here comes Carrie Nation,” she would whisper, comparing her daughter to a radical member of the temperance movement.

Nonetheless, the first few months at the Pensacola base were a happy time, Wallis fitting easily into the life of a Navy wife. For a girl who had never boiled an egg it was helpful that Win’s salary enabled them to pay for a maid and a cook. She learned to play poker, he played the fool, entertaining fellow officers and their wives with his impersonations of vaudeville stars. What amused other midshipmen during his days at naval college did not find favour with his wife, somewhat prissily frowning on his remorselessly extrovert behaviour, his pranks and practical jokes.

As her aunt Bessie later recalled: “He was a showman, an exhibitionist. He would put on a funny hat and expect you to laugh at him. Well, you could laugh one evening but you couldn’t for life.”

The laughter died in April 1917 with America’s entry into the war. In short order Win was ordered to Squantum, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, to set up a new naval air station to train pilots. While he worked around the clock, Wallis, friendless and with time to kill, wandered the streets, visiting exhibitions and museums. She even watched the unfolding drama of real-life court cases, the juicier the better. Her mother’s warning that military life was punctuated with frequent absences and constant upheaval was rapidly coming true. No sooner had Win got the pilot production line underway in Boston than he was sent to Canada to report on pilot education programs. Then, in the fall of 1917, he was ordered to California to set up a huge new air base on North Island near San Diego. Though it was a signal acknowledgment of his organizational ability and leadership, Win was bitterly disappointed. All the time he was on the East Coast he had lobbied for a berth on the front line in Europe—he envied his younger brother Dumaresq who sailed to France in June and was now combat flying as part of the Lafayette Escadrille squadron.

In spite of his pleading, his superiors consistently declined his requests, informing him that they needed his experience on the home front. As a result the newlyweds spent their first wedding anniversary shuttling across country to their new berth. They stopped first in Washington, then saw his family in Chicago before spending a night at the Grand Canyon on their way west. On their first wedding anniversary, as they stood on the rim of this magnificent natural wonder, Win earnestly reaffirmed his love and devotion to Wallis, his simple words affecting her deeply. She later recalled: “He was neither a poet or philosopher but there was something touching about the simplicity of his promise that nothing would come between us.”

There was little time for fine words. From the moment they took possession of a sweet, two-bedroom apartment in Coronado, Win was working eighteen-hour days, as he and a skeleton crew raced to turn a barren slice of land into an operating Navy air base. In just seventy-two hours he and the men under his command built barracks, washrooms, five classrooms, and installed a water and sewage system. Whatever else Wallis may have complained about, there was no faulting Win’s absolute commitment to the war effort.

No sooner was he seeing solid progress in the construction and organization of the base than he was devastated by news from the front line. In January 1918 his adored younger brother Dumaresq was killed. Early reports indicated that Dumaresq, who had already been awarded the Croix de Guerre and Medalle Militaire for his bravery, had been shot down while returning from patrol over German lines. Later it was revealed that he had been practising aerobatics and had pulled out of a turn too late. Win mourned his brother’s death long and hard, the bottle helping to dull the pain.

With drink came a barrage of insults and a volley of innuendo about his wife’s failings, mainly focussing on her inadequacies in the kitchen. In public he was jaunty and jovial, in private brooding, introspective, and morose. It was something of a relief that he left her to her own devices for much of the time, setting off for the base at dawn and not arriving home until long after nightfall.

His frustration at being prevented from serving abroad like his brother was palpable, Win writing pleading letters to his Navy friends as well as making a formal transfer request to his line commander, Captain Edward Irwin. “I came to San Diego under protest,” he wrote. “I wanted foreign service… and have always hoped for an opportunity to fight.” Referring to the “heartbreaking” jobs he had been given, Win pointed out that the results of his labours were only apparent when the next fellow came along. Even though Captain Irwin was sympathetic and appreciative of his “hard work,” sadly there was no suitable replacement available.

While Win stewed, Wallis enjoyed the perks that came with marriage to a commanding officer. He had his own Navy barge to ferry him from the mainland to North Island, as well as a chauffeur-driven Packard car. This was more like it. As befitting their station, they were invited to numerous prestigious social events, notably dinner with President and First Lady Wilson at the US Grant Hotel and a ball in honour of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and his wife, Addie, at the Hotel del Coronado.

Wallis made a coterie of new friends who would stay with her for the rest of her life. They included Marianna and Rhoda Fullam, the daughters of Rear Admiral Fullam; Rita Chase, the wife of New Jersey businessman Ralph; and later Katherine Moore Bigelow, a Red Cross nurse who served in France and was widowed just after the end of the war. At that time she was walking out with William Thaw, the brother of diplomat Ben Thaw. In time Katherine would play a central role in Wallis’s life.

As her social life became more varied and sophisticated, she would attend dances at the Cuyamaca Club, bridge or poker nights and barbecues at the dirigible hangar on North Island. Sometimes Win was with her, sometimes not, in which case she would join a party of fellow officers and their wives.

When they appeared together as a couple, Win and Wallis were showstoppers. Socialite Mrs. E. Clarence Moore was part of a small convivial group sitting in the Hotel del Coronado when Wallis and Win walked into the lobby. “Our gay conversation was suddenly silenced by the arrival of an unusually good-looking couple who were passing through the casino,” she recalled. It was the new base commandant and his wife. “After that evening Wallis and Win were frequently in our group, sometimes playing golf, sometimes enjoying informal parties.”

Even her mother, who came to visit, was impressed with the social life led by the commanding officer’s wife. Instinctively, Wallis always put on the smiling mask, the impervious façade that revealed nothing of her inner turmoil and hurt. Though there were opportunities, she said nothing to her mother about her issues with Win. As a young girl she had learned to keep her own counsel. Nothing in her adult life had changed that.

For a change of scene, Wallis would occasionally range north with a girlfriend, staying at friends’ homes in Santa Barbara and Pebble Beach. Whatever her private concerns, in public Wallis was the life and soul, her friend Marianna Fullam describing her as the one person she would love to spend a year with on a desert island because of her “vitality and gaiety.” Others complimented her on her poise, style, candour, and sparkle, her wit engaging the attention of silent-screen comedian Charlie Chaplin and actor John Barrymore when they stayed at the Hotel del Coronado. Harvard graduate Henry Flood Robert remembered Wallis as “darned attractive though I wouldn’t call her a beauty. I found her vivacious and fun loving. When she entered a room the focus was on her.”

Her fabled poise deserted her, however, when she took on the nerve-jangling challenge of organizing her first-ever dinner party at home. Armed with her “bible”—Fannie Farmer’s cookbook—she invited a young naval couple who lived nearby to act as guinea pigs. The menu seemed straightforward—tomato soup, roast beef, and artichoke. It was the hollandaise sauce that was to prove tricky.

As the dinner hour approached, Wallis got herself into such a state that for the first time in three years of marriage she allowed Win to mix her a cocktail. It was, she believes, a double martini. While it hit the spot, Wallis was so relaxed that the meal suffered, with most of the sauce splattered on the kitchen wall. Their guests duly arrived, Win poured them a cocktail, and Wallis asked them to be seated. Then she opened her bible and read out the menu she had tried to prepare. She recalled telling her guests: “This is what you were going to have for dinner. Everyone agreed that I had read a beautiful dinner—in fact it sounded so delicious that we all got up and proceeded to the Hotel Coronado and ordered it.”

An amusing story but also revealing about Wallis’s elusive character. She told this tale of culinary failure to her ghostwriter Cleveland Amory when she was preparing her 1956 memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons. He later quit, accusing Wallis of wanting a biography that was more make-believe than real life. Amory’s place was taken by Colonel Charles Murphy. In his version, which was eventually published, the evening was a culinary triumph, a night which set her off on her eventual career as an eminent hostess.

If this trivial story was deliberately changed to place Wallis in a flattering light, what then of more significant stories relating to her lovers, husbands, and friends? As Foxcroft headmistress Charlotte Noland, whom Wallis considered the model of an ideal woman, told Amory during his research: “I knew her from the time she was a child and I have never known anyone who could all her life so conveniently avoid the truth.” In the world of Wallis Spencer, much was lost in translation.

She is not the only one. In the royal world of the House of Windsor, truth, image, and invention are an uneasy linguistic Esperanto. For instance, when the then Prince of Wales first visited Canada in 1919, he met with a crowd in a village outside Toronto. Nine months or so later, the village teacher gave birth to a baby boy. She subsequently claimed the father was the Prince of Wales, with whom she had enjoyed a brief but amorous encounter. It was a story she told everyone until the day she died. On her gravestone it states clearly that she was the wife of the Prince of Wales. This was a potentially enticing story, except that the same teacher was equally emphatic that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

For when royalty comes to town, even the clearest memory becomes clouded. A year later, in April 1920, the Prince of Wales visited San Diego en route to a tour of New Zealand, Australia, and all points Far East. The golden-haired prince, radiating charm and charisma, held a clamorous reception on board HMS Renown to thank the locals for their overwhelming welcome and their stalwart support during World War One.

It was subsequently reported that Lieutenant Commander Win Spencer and his wife had been part of the receiving line who shook the hand of the future king. Years later Win even speculated that Wallis may have spoken to the prince. “She was with me most of the evening but as I recall she slipped away for a few moments and may have been received by the prince,” he informed reporters in 1936. Not to be outdone, the flamboyant Lord Louis Mountbatten, who joined the prince on his journey, told author Charles Murphy that not only did Wallis meet the prince but that she subsequently chided him for failing to recall their encounter, especially as she was “dressed to kill.”

In fact neither Wallis nor Win were within a hundred miles of the Prince of Wales when his battleship dropped anchor in San Diego harbour. Win was at March Field air base in Riverside, California, flying land planes and learning bombing techniques. His wife was busy being the life and soul at a polo dinner near San Francisco. On March 31, 1920, according to the local newspaper, she had boarded the Lark Southern Pacific Pullman train for Monterey, where she stayed at Del Monte Lodge as the house guest of Mrs. Jane Selby Hayne, an outstanding polo player, who had recently divorced golf champion Robin Hayne. When not out riding or playing polo, Wallis and Jane Selby Hayne attended numerous dinners and other social events to mark the end of the polo season.

Wallis was in her element, captivating a fascinating variety of rich and occasionally available men. She and Jane socialized with Samuel Finley Brown Morse, owner of the Del Monte properties, Australian painter Francis McComas, mining heir George Maurice Heckscher, as well as a pair of dashing English majors who formed the backbone of the national polo team. Historian Benjamin Sacks suggests: “Perhaps the coquetry of Wallis with the several poloists at the Morse dinner-dance held in Pebble Beach might have discomfited Isabella [her hostess, Mrs. Luther Martin Kennett], who preferred to close the book on the trip north as a topic of conversation.”

The suggestion was that with Win out of sight, Wallis was at her most teasing. Wallis had always prided herself on her “gay and flirtatious” nature, admitting that she “was brought up to be as entertaining as one can be at a party.” She also acknowledged that her husband became an ugly drunk when he watched her behaviour at social events. He would lapse into moody silence or become loud and aggressive. Other times he would simply go off on his own into the night. While Wallis attributed the breakdown of her marriage to Win’s morose personality and the frustration he felt regarding his career, which stalled after the war ended, others suggest her own seductive behaviour played a not insignificant part. Even staunch friend Marianna Fullam, later Emory Sands, strongly believed her flirtations drove her emotionally inarticulate husband to “exasperation”—and to reach for the bottle to drown his sorrows.

It was not all tears and tantrums. In November 1920 the couple celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary with Henry and Corinne Mustin, Wallis’s mother, and assorted friends. The Mustins were now back on the West Coast, which was, as far as Wallis was concerned, a blessing. Each time Win went away on a variety of temporary new assignments, Wallis nursed the hope that when he returned to their Coronado home he would be a changed man. Those hopes were usually dashed by day two of his homecoming.

She tried to see the sunny side when in August 1921 he was permanently reassigned to Washington to take up a desk job at the Bureau of Aeronautics. His achievements at North Island had been considerable, overseeing the men under his command—at one time there were 2,000 men and officers on the base—who flew 35,000 hours without a single fatality. Not that his Navy superiors appreciated his efforts.

When he failed his navigation exam during his bid for promotion to lieutenant commander, the examining board did not consider that for the previous four years he had been an active naval aviator and hadn’t been near a ship. Fortunately, Rear Admiral William Fullam, whose daughters were Wallis’s great friends, personally intervened. Lieutenant Spencer’s war work in San Diego, he averred, had been of the greatest importance of any officer in the Navy. Moreover, his position as a junior officer had needed great tact in dealing with fellow commanding officers. “He is reserved, taciturn and abrupt but this is entirely from embarrassment and diffidence,” wrote Fullam. The recently retired commander in chief of the Pacific fleet went on to state that of all the officers he had met during his career, Spencer was among the first rank because of his “cool head, nerve and high sense of duty. I should not hesitate to assign him to command a cruiser under war conditions. It is my observation that he puts duty before pleasure at all times.”

With that ringing endorsement the board had little option but to allow Lieutenant Spencer a second chance at the navigation exam, which he duly passed. He arrived in Washington with a promotion but little appetite for the political stew that was the postwar Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, as the Army and Navy vied for control. In his heart he wanted to be back at sea or in the air.

Unhappy and demoralized, Win, according to Wallis’s account, took out his frustrations on her, becoming increasingly sadistic and bullying. On one notorious occasion he locked her in the bathroom at the Brighton Hotel on California Street, where they were staying. Ignoring her frenzied knocking, he went out, leaving her in solitary confinement for hours. She was afraid to shout for help, as the hotel management had already warned them about their noisy behaviour. Frantically she tried to pick the lock with a nail file. Taking Wallis’s story at face value—most bathrooms lock from the inside not the outside—it was an emotionally exhausting and frightening evening.

As she pondered her future she realized that her marriage was beyond repair. She wanted out. In those days divorce was unthinkable—the financial consequences unpalatable, the social stigma often unbearable. Divorce was only for the very rich or the very foolish. She was neither, but her dire circumstances forced her to think the inconceivable.

In Wallis’s settled view, Win’s bombastic personality and his drinking had driven her five-year marriage to the brink of collapse. Her own restless, impatient personality, her flirtatiousness, and her fierce temper did little to help keep the domestic peace. Wallis recognized that unlike her mother, who had found the secret of inner peace, she was never really content with anything—or anyone—in life. Whatever Win did was a disappointment, his subdued, introspective personality merely encouraging him to go into his shell in the face of her complaints.

It irritated her that he was not blessed with her facility for being able to read people. Within minutes she could see through people, divine their hidden motives and personal qualities. Irascible and impatient, it drove Wallis wild when Win could not see or understand that some people did not like him or wished him no good. All he would do was laugh off her warnings or say she was exaggerating.

This, though, was nibbling around the edges. At the heart of their marital difficulties was their sex life, or rather lack thereof. Wallis would later confess that throughout her marriage, through the good times and the bad, they had never consummated their union. In an age of sexual ignorance and primitive birth control, her reluctance to engage in sexual congress was not unusual but still created considerable barriers to marital happiness. Coming from a large family, it was only natural that Win wanted to become a father himself. The frustrations felt on both sides can only be imagined. Watching Wallis flirt with other men and knowing he was going home to a stone-cold bed was hardly a recipe for marital accord.

It has been suggested by, among others, biographers Anne Sebba and Michael Bloch, that her reluctance to engage in sexual activity was the result of her being born, if not a man, then with ambiguous genitalia, a condition now known as a “disorder of sex development” (DSD). An early sign is a girl with strong muscles, athletic prowess, long legs, and large hands. Certainly Wallis conformed to this template. Queen Mary’s official biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, suggested that with her flat, angular body she was “not a woman at all.” Over the years it became commonplace to insinuate that she was in fact hermaphrodite, her sexuality as ambiguous as the conundrum of her eventual appeal to the king of England. She had a hysterectomy for ovarian cancer in 1951, which suggests that she was wholly female. What remains enigmatic is the secret of her sexual allure. In short, what did men see in her?

It seems, from the testimony of Herman Rogers, the central male figure in her life, that with her first husband she enjoyed an occasionally sado-masochistic but ultimately unfulfilling marital ritual. “He beat her—and she loved it,” Rogers later told Wallis’s erstwhile biographer Cleveland Amory. Though Wallis has subsequently been described as a dominatrix, with Win Spencer she adopted a different role, that of a provocative submissive. Her flirting would be the starting gun for their sexually charged dance. Matters would then escalate, Wallis goading him, a leery Win lashing out, his gin-fuelled violence perversely viewed by Wallis as a sign that he desired and felt some kind of aberrant passion for the sharp-tongued woman standing before him. “Wallis had a temper of her own and they had frequent yelling matches, and sometimes he would hit her and she would throw things,” her biographer Ralph G. Martin wrote.

But when he left her alone, when he chose not to speak to her for sometimes a day at a time, this she could not tolerate. At least violence was an acknowledgment of her existence. This was, though, a dance without consummation, frenzy without resolve. It was the last sick, hopeless dance of a doomed romance. She was learning the hard way that she had fallen in love with the glamorous image not the man, and that for a long time their union had been shored up by their brisk social life and her supportive circle of mainly female friends, and padded out with his frequent deployment on Navy business. Much as Wallis would have hated to admit it, her mother was right: There was no romance in marrying a Navy officer. She had fooled herself that she was in love. Ruefully she realized that her real motivation had been to beat her Baltimore contemporaries to the altar. In her immaturity, Wallis had made a catastrophic mistake.

Eventually she sought out her mother, then working as a hostess at the Chevy Chase country club in Maryland, and explained that she wanted a divorce. Even though she never mentioned the embarrassingly intimate details, her mother was as horrified as if she had confessed to murder. She was not appalled at her son-in-law but at her daughter for even contemplating such a step. Neither a Montague nor a Warfield had divorced in three hundred years. The very idea was preposterous. “Unthinkable” was the mot juste. Practical as ever, she also pointed out very firmly that as a divorced woman Wallis would face social disgrace and financial ruin. Not to mention the shame she would bring upon the family. Separation possibly, divorce never.

Wallis faced the same mortified refrain when she called upon her beloved aunt Bessie, now living near her sister as a paid companion to a well-to-do spinster. While Bessie would later concede that Win was a “sadist who she could not live with,” at the time she was in lockstep with her sister.

As Wallis, shaken and subdued, contemplated their reaction, she realized that they were from a generation where women had no status or rights, their lives utterly governed by the whims of men. The war, especially the introduction of millions of women to the workforce, was splintering those moral absolutes and placing a generation of mothers and daughters into conflict.

In the nineteenth century virtually every campaign, from temperance to female emancipation, was cast as a mother-daughter alliance. In the 1920s, after the war had left the world, as cartoonists frequently depicted it, “in crutches and its arm in a sling,” that alliance crumbled before a consumer-driven revolt of young women against prudish Victorian matriarchs. Life was, according to feminist writer Susan Faludi, “a celebration of a motherless girl culture of flapper dance-a-thons, petting parties and gin fests. The powerful new forces of Hollywood, national advertising, automobiles and urban jobs enlisted young women into a commercial version of emancipation.” While the Jazz Age presented an image of “beautiful people buoyed up on bootlegged champagne bubbles,” the new decade promised young women like Wallis in the “Ain’t We Got Fun” generation the freedom to shop, display their bodies, and to smoke, to drink, and drive with the boys—and throw it in the face of their mothers. Postwar America was a jittery, restless nation, a sink-or-swim democracy bobbing about in an ocean of insurrection and revolution. Living for the moment, morning, noon, and night, was the mantra of the Bright Young (wealthy) Things who could afford to buy those special candles that burned at both ends. This reckless, devil-may-care attitude was exemplified by the Roaring Twenties couple novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his beautiful wife, Zelda, who were notorious not only for their prose but also their propensity for leaping into fountains at Union Square and in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York. While the Big Apple had taken over from exhausted London as the premier city for conspicuous consumption and excess, the noise and values of the blaring Jazz Age had not spread far beyond Manhattan.

Arguments about changing social mores and the independence of modern women still cut little ice in Uncle Sol’s Baltimore bank, where Wallis was forced to swallow her moralizing medicine from the man whose good name meant everything. He railed against the very idea of divorce. “I won’t let you bring this disgrace upon us,” he thundered, before ending his peroration with a request that she give her marriage one more try.

She did as she was bid, hoping against hope that Win would be jolted to his senses. It was but a brief reprieve. After spending yet another night wondering what Win was doing when he failed to return home—drink or another woman or both—Wallis had had enough. She asked her mother if she could move into her apartment at 2301 Connecticut Avenue. Reluctantly, her mother agreed.

Win was resigned to his fate. When she told him her plans, he said: “Wallis, I’ve had it coming to me. If you ever change your mind I will still be around.” The die was cast. For Wallis, this was a brave and bold move, eschewing safety, status, and security for a very uncertain future.

Comfort came from an unexpected quarter. On October 18, 1921, she received an anguished and “heartsick” four-page letter from her mother-in-law, Agnes Spencer. While Agnes acknowledged that her son’s disposition did not make him the easiest person in the world to get along with, she recalled her visit to see them in Pensacola, where “your wishes and happiness were his first consideration.” She finished sadly: “I wish I could do something to mend matters but I fear that there is little to be said or done.”

Wallis’s husband, a gentleman to the last, added his own postscript to their marriage when he was tackled by reporters during the abdication crisis in 1936. Nursing a broken leg from a fall on ice, he told the assembled throng: “She is one of the finest women I have ever known. My work did not allow me to partake of the social life which Wallis loved so dearly. Gradually we drifted apart. I suppose that is the price we pay for a career. She was the leader of the social life at Coronado but became lonely during the times I was at sea with the fleet.”

Shortly after Wallis walked out, Win finally got his wish to return to general Navy service. Just before Christmas 1921 he was ordered to join the USS Chaumont and take this slow boat to China and join the American fleet. If Wallis was all at sea regarding her future, Win was returning to his first—and perhaps only—love: a life on the ocean waves.