CHAPTER SIX

“This Weird Royal Obsession”

It was undoubtedly the worst year of her life. Wallis Simpson hated England and loathed the English. She detested their quaint customs, their ridiculously tiny counties, and their crumbling castles. Especially their crumbling castles, which Ernest loved to visit, spending hours poring over inscriptions on tombstones, inspecting wall hangings and flags, admiring the stone masonry. Newlywed Wallis would sit shivering in the car, bored, irritated, wondering what on earth she was doing. “I’m sick of seeing old things. I want to see something young,” she wailed.

She had no time for English people, didn’t get to the pitch of their humour, their strange adoration for the monarchy, their militaristic history, their quiet pride for the flag, and their ludicrous love of dogs and horses. They were a continuing mystery. Long before royalty entered her life, she had decided that the English were not worth a dime. Or a threepenny bit. Or a half crown. Or a ten bob note. Or whatever name these people called their ridiculously complicated currency.

Not that she understood more than one word in five. Half the time she had no idea what these odd people with their blank faces and mouthfuls of bad teeth were saying. With all the pointing and gesticulating, she could have been back in Peking. They certainly didn’t understand her.

And London. What on earth did Ernest see in the place? Drab, grey, depressing, like the weather. When it was not cloudy it was raining and when it was not raining it was foggy. Gloomy Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. Not that she could see the sky from the basement kitchen of her rented house. It was like a prison, dark, tiny, and damp.

And then there was her sister-in-law, Maud Kerr-Smiley. Nothing smiley about a woman twenty years older—and light-years away in attitude. She was all careful condescension and snooty superiority. Who on earth does she think she is, telling me what Ernest wants for his supper, calling me every day with her “suggestions” about where I should buy the meat, the fish, even my underwear.

All that “little brother” this and “little brother” that. “There developed between us a subtle struggle over who would manage Ernest’s life,” Wallis tactfully recalled. It was like trying to join a secret society where she didn’t know the rules. So hard to know what these people were thinking as they sipped their cups of tea and nibbled their tiny cucumber sandwiches.

When she said the word “okay” Maud gave her a freezing look. It was as though she had just goosed the archbishop of Canterbury. So if “okay” is not okay, what was? She realized that this was not a club she wanted to join.

As she later recalled: “I began by not liking London at all… the most unfriendly community I had ever known. All cold, gray stone and dingy brick, ancient dampness and drabness and a purposeful hurry and push in the streets. It evoked in me a bone-deep dislike. There was about the city a pervading indifference, a remoteness and withdrawal that seemed alien to the human spirit.”

She felt that English women, too, were an alien race, especially Maud’s social circle. Wallis considered them suppressed and inhibited, their opinions safely submerged in a sea of small talk. She was determined to be a Yankee, standing up for the Stars and Stripes whatever the social consequences. Accustomed to saying what was on her mind, she seemed to startle or amuse Maud’s circle with her outspokenness. “I was by no means prepared to accept the British advertisement that British goods were best.” Nor was she prepared to repudiate her own country as she had seen other Americans do—not least her husband.

When Maud gave luncheon parties to introduce Wallis into her circle and teach her the niceties of English etiquette, she discovered to her horror that this young lady wasn’t for learning. Romantic novelist Barbara Cartland was a young society hostess invited to meet Maud’s American sister-in-law. She remembered her as “badly dressed and aggressively American.” The queen of romantic fiction sniffed: “She also told us rather vulgar stories and I was shocked to the core.” She hadn’t changed much, if at all, when Cecil Beaton saw her for the first time. “Her voice had a high nasal twang. She was loud and brash, terribly so—and rowdy and raucous. Her squawks of laughter were like a parrot’s.”

Reflecting on Wallis’s early days in London, Ernest Simpson recalled her “loathing” of his adopted country. She made the error of over-protesting her Americanism. “I had to quiet her down and persuade her that not everything American was best,” he recalled. “It was the old adage: when in Rome…”

Alienated from her social world, Wallis withdrew into herself, her brashness replaced by silence. Her response to questions was monosyllabic, her demeanour subdued. Even her sister-in-law was concerned, telephoning her brother to see if there was something amiss between the newly married couple. Over supper one evening Ernest asked her what was going on. Wallis haltingly explained that she felt like she was treated as an anthropological curiosity by Maud’s circle of friends.

As her impulsive American ways were embarrassing his sister and their friends, she was trying to be more like the English, quiet and reserved. Ernest told her that he had married her for her American naturalness and ordered her to end the experiment in trying to be British. That evening he took her dancing to the Savoy. “We had a lovely time,” she recalled.

Yet her sense of isolation gnawed at her spirit. With Ernest spending long days in the office, Wallis spent her days wandering the shivering streets or visiting the sooty sights. “I had many a miserable hour wondering what would become of me.” She had no intimate friend, no one to chat with or take to lunch. Above all she had no one to share gossip with.

She discovered in those early months that the one topic of gossip that united all classes of society, from duke to doorman, was the British royal family. Initially she found the fascination with the royal family baffling. “That a whole nation should preoccupy itself with a single family’s comings and goings—and not too exciting ones at that—seemed to me incomprehensible,” she observed.

In time, though, she became intrigued by the ornate and stately language employed in the Court Circular, the official record of royal events, which stood in stark contrast to the scurrilous chatter about the royal family that passed across dinner and bridge tables.

The focus of most of the table talk was on the Prince of Wales. He was Town Topic number one, and in the fall of 1928 constantly in the news, what with his planned safari in Africa with his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, his visit to Egypt, and a trip to Ypres to join war veterans remembering their fallen comrades. There would soon be wild gossip about the Duke of Gloucester and his open affair with the married aviatrix Beryl Markham, whom he met in Nairobi. It amused his elder brother that for once he was not the focus of wagging tongues.

Yet everyone had a story about the Prince of Wales, even Maud Kerr-Smiley. She never tired of telling of the day at the end of the First World War when she hosted a ball at her house in Belgrave Square, where the Prince of Wales, who was on leave from his Army unit, met his first long-term lover, Freda Dudley Ward. The lacemaker’s daughter, who was married to a Liberal member of Parliament, was the prince’s wife in all but name, encouraging, consoling, and supporting the future king. Given future events, Mrs. Kerr-Smiley may have regretted encouraging Wallis’s interest in the royal family.

Soon Wallis would have a story of her own to tell friends over cups of tea—or something stronger. In fact she would have several tales about her encounters with the future king, real or imagined. The little girl who pointed at pictures of glamorous models in magazines and then made up stories about them now focussed her vivid imagination on the Prince of Wales.

During Wallis’s first bitterly cold winter in London in 1928, the capital and the rest of the country were on tenterhooks about the health of King George V, who had succumbed to a serious lung infection. Such was the concern that the Prince of Wales, on safari in Africa, was summoned home to undertake his father’s duties. Like everyone else, Wallis read and discussed the daily bulletins about the king’s medical progress.

In her memoir she tells of the day she was being driven past St. James’s Palace in central London on her way to pick up Ernest from his office in the City. She saw the scarlet-coated sentries stiffen as a black Daimler limousine raced into the street from inside the palace walls. Craning her head, Wallis caught a “glimpse” of a “delicate, boyish face staring straight ahead.” Her chauffeur turned and said in awed tones: “Madam, that was the Prince of Wales.”

Besides the somewhat pedantic fact that the direct route from Upper Berkeley Street, where the Simpsons had a rented house, to Ernest’s office at St. Mary Axe in the City does not go anywhere near St. James’s Palace, Wallis conjured up a second version of the story. She told her ghostwriter Cleveland Amory that she was out walking one day when she saw the prince pass by in a coach adorned with what looked like the royal coat of arms and drawn by two black horses. It seems that he was making the short journey from Buckingham Palace to St. James’s Palace. As it was a closed coach, she did not get a good look at the prince. If the incident did occur, it may have been when the prince stood in for his sick father and represented him at a levee, a ceremony involving the presentation of male dignitaries and held at St. James’s Palace.

So two stories. One or the other may be true. Or they both may be figments of her fevered imagination. Long before she had even met the prince, it is clear that she was fascinated by him, if not infatuated. She enjoyed a much more memorable, albeit long-distance, encounter in June 1929 when she and Ernest attended the Trooping of the Colour, the time-honoured exercise in pomp and pageantry to celebrate the king’s official birthday. She observed him carefully as he rode on horseback from Buckingham Palace behind his father, George V.

During the various military drills on Horse Guards Parade, she focussed her attention exclusively on the Prince of Wales. She dreamily described the event: “He sat on his horse with perfect military bearing and what seemed like the complacent calm of the whole British Empire. I found myself wondering about him not as a future king but as a human being. I thought he had a wistful face.”

As the ceremony came to a close and the royal party made their way back to Buckingham Palace, Wallis thought that there must be something more, that fate would take a hand in pushing them together. She had even told Aunt Bessie that she intended to meet the Prince of Wales.

Her behaviour was not unlike that of other women who projected themselves into the life of the prince, some becoming so obsessed that they came to the attention of the Metropolitan Police and its plainclothes detective division, the Special Branch.

In those first months, when Wallis was lonely, friendless, and had time on her hands, daydreaming about the Prince of Wales was but a pleasant diversion in a dull, cheerless round. She filled out her days with household chores and shopping, she and Ernest setting aside an evening a week to go over the accounts, carefully examining the paper ledgers supplied by the greengrocer, butcher, or fishmonger.

“Ernest was extremely meticulous,” she recalled. “He would run down the list, asking if I had had the weight of apples listed, the amount of spinach. I was seldom over budget. We lived frugally but well.”

For his part, Ernest remembers that Wallis, who was in his words “scarred by poverty,” would fly into a violent rage if a bill had not been paid on time. He was used to paying quarterly or biannually; she wanted accounts paid weekly. Wallis lived in terror of inheriting her mother’s spendthrift reputation.

Weekends were usually well-planned outings organized by Ernest to visit a castle, a cathedral, or some other ancient monument. His choices tested her patience and her short temper. Her indifference tested his. As a result, rather than being enjoyable excursions, they became exercises in mutual incomprehension and irritation. Their mood was hardly lightened by the country inns they often stayed in. For the most part the clientele was elderly, dinners served promptly and silence the watchword in the communal sitting rooms. Any sound above a whisper attracted a sharp look and a harrumph.

Ernest, who loved history and was a fund of abstruse knowledge, could not understand why Wallis was so bored. As Wallis had little interest in Britain, particularly its “glorious” past, she wanted to get these visits over as soon as possible. On one occasion, after Wallis had hurried through Warwick Castle and was waiting impatiently for Ernest outside, he caught up with her and said rather petulantly, “I don’t see what’s the use of doing this unless you stop to look at things. You can’t do a castle like that.”

When Wallis told him that she had seen everything, her marital didact proceeded to test her on what she should have noticed. After passing the test, she casually mentioned that she thought the interior clock was unusual. Ernest looked surprised. “What clock?” he asked. They went back inside and there indeed was the clock, as Wallis had described it. For once Ernest was impressed. “You certainly have a photographic mind,” he said. “And,” Wallis replied, “a twenty-four-hour memory.”

A welcome interregnum in these outings came courtesy of Herman and Katherine Rogers. They invited the bickering newlyweds to join them for Christmas and New Year at their Riviera home. For Wallis it was a welcome respite from the “brown fog” that greeted every winter dawn in bitterly cold London. More important, it gave her the chance to spend time with the other man in her life again. For the Yale man it was the first opportunity he had had to run the rule over Harvard-educated Ernest. As for Ernest, it was a chance to finally meet the man Wallis never seemed to stop talking about.

Wallis was summoned to a less welcome reunion a few weeks later when she received a cable saying that her mother had been taken seriously ill. She had suffered a thrombosis which had affected her sight and left her bed-bound. Wallis and Ernest sailed in May for Washington, where Wallis was shocked by the sight of the worn and helpless woman she had always considered indestructible. But the old Alice was not far from the surface. She asked if Wallis was wearing a brown dress. Wallis told her mother that she was and that she had bought it in London. “Thought so,” she commented drily. “What made you choose such an unbecoming colour?” It was easy to see where the Wallis bite came from.

For Alice it was her first encounter with her son-in-law. She made an extra effort to be cordial and charming, reminding him that her only daughter was like a box of explosives that needed careful handling. “There are times when I was afraid of having put too much of myself into her—too much heart and not enough head.”

Ernest returned to England, Wallis remaining on for a few days until the doctor and Aunt Bessie suggested that as there had been no change in her condition, Wallis should go back to London. A few months later she was summoned across the Atlantic again. This time she went alone as a passenger on board the Olympic, sister ship to the ill-fated Titanic. When she disembarked in New York in late October, Mary Raffray was there to meet her. Her mother was in a coma. Within hours of Wallis reaching her bedside, Alice died, on November 2, 1929.

At this time of grief and loss, Wallis lashed out at her husband, four thousand miles away. A day after Alice died, Ernest, who was staying at the Guards Club as the lease on their furnished house had ended, wrote a tender note to his wife.

SWEETHEART, I have been thinking all day of my poor darling, and grieving for her in her sorrow hourly. I wish I were beside you. How I miss you and long for you… the days without you are a weary succession of emptiness. This MUST be the last time that we are parted.

Her response was to accuse him of cheating on her or at the very least flirting with other women. In hurt but placatory tones he replied:

DARLING LITTLE Sweetheart, you make me very sad when you say I have bruised our love… I am decent and loyal to the core. I have not looked sideways at anyone nor felt the slightest desire to do so. At all times I have felt proud to belong to you and wanted to be wholly yours…

Surely we can have faith in each other, you and I. One in body, one in love, one in sorrow, one in joy.

It may have been the first but it would not be the last time that Wallis, insecure and jittery, would accuse her husband of betraying her trust. Years later, Ernest, who loved writing amusing verses and declaiming Latin in the original, reflected on the letters Wallis wrote to him. Wallis’s ghostwriter Cleveland Amory asked him: “Were they witty?” His choked response spoke volumes.

Amory noted: “There was a long pause as Ernest chose his words with care. ‘No, they weren’t, they were never fond. They were never the letters of a really happy person.’”

Then Amory asked if she was happy when she was with him. There was a slight shake of the head, a fleeting sad smile, and Ernest looked quickly away.

At this unhappy time, Wallis was not only mourning her mother, but like the rest of the world, the Simpsons were licking their wounds after the Great Crash of 1929, which wiped billions off the value of stocks and heralded the beginning of the Depression. While Ernest’s shipping business rode out the storms for a time, it was not long before the couple were scrimping and saving.

The one shaft of light in a gloomy winter was her discovery of an apartment where she could at last put down her roots. Even though money was tight, there was enough to spare so that she could redecorate and modernize number 5 Bryanston Court, a three-bedroom apartment in Marylebone in central London. It became the love of her life. Wallis enthused about making a home for herself and her husband. It marked a genuine turning point in her life, her marriage, and her time in London.

At last she felt able to give free rein to her nascent creativity. This time she and Ernest spent their leisure time scouring London for antiques, old things they both liked. “For the first time in my life I had the means and the opportunity to create the kind of setting I had always wanted, a place where good things out of the past would intermingle gracefully with good things of the present.”

With a little help from a young Dutchman called Schreiver and interior designer Syrie Maugham, the wife of novelist Somerset, she created a comfortable and welcoming apartment. While her own bedroom was a very feminine pink, suggesting that Ernest slept elsewhere, she didn’t entirely neglect Ernest’s interests. In the sitting room one wall was lined with shelves to house his treasured first editions and original manuscripts written by, among others, Charles Dickens. Taking pride of place was his favourite book, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. On the occasional tables in the sitting room Wallis placed jade, porcelain, and her own small collection of lacquer boxes which she had picked up during her travels in the Orient.

She imported the American tradition of the cocktail hour, where her growing circle of mainly American friends dropped in for drink and conversation for an hour or so in the early evening. Unlike Ernest, she recalled, she had the knack of fixing a decent cocktail for their guests. And, in a prod at the British, she made sure that her drinks were ice cold.

Word got around, and her salon attracted businessmen, journalists, politicians, lawyers, and diplomats as well as a smattering of pretty girls. For the first time since she arrived, Wallis was beginning to find her feet, her skill as a hostess gradually blossoming, her married life developing a convivial rhythm of theatre and maybe dancing, occasional suppers at the Savoy, dinner parties, and drinks interspersed with bridge or poker.

In this Wodehousian social world, she had also managed to find a gem more valuable than rubies, namely a fine Scottish cook named Mrs. Ralph, who had learned her sauces and soufflés under the watchful eye of the French chef to Lady Curzon, one of London’s most notable hostesses. Jeeves would have been satisfied.

Ernest certainly was. “Brilliant,” he called her and had nothing but praise for her ability as well as Wallis’s penchant for Southern, Chinese, and French recipes. They were unusual but highly effective in drawing sincere compliments from their dinner guests.

Just as he applauded her skill as a hostess, he marvelled at her ability to remember the names, backgrounds, and foibles of her guests or those they met at social events. She had, he realized, a photographic memory for recalling who was seeing whom, who was divorcing whom, who was cheating on whom, who was on the up, and who was on the way down. It was an essential skill for any social climber, Wallis displaying an unerring instinct for focussing exclusively on those who were important or useful.

In time, minor aristocrats and even royalty walked through her front door. The Simpsons became friendly with the 2nd Marquess and Marchioness of Milford Haven; the marquess was the brother of Lord Mountbatten who, as Wallis knew instantly, was close to the Prince of Wales.

If these guests were important acquaintances, then Major “Mike” Scanlon, at that time still a dashing bachelor who was the air attaché at the American embassy, came under the “useful” heading. He was known for giving smart parties at his small flat in Chelsea, and it was at one such gathering that Wallis and Ernest met Benjamin Thaw, who was then secretary to the embassy, and his wife, the former Consuelo Morgan.

All those hours leafing through issues of Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar had not gone to waste. She knew exactly who Morgan was: the older sister of twins Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt, one of whom was married to a shipping tycoon, the other briefly married to a scion of the legendary New York family.

Most important, Lady Furness was apparently the new squeeze of the Prince of Wales. Wallis did the only thing she could do. “Connie and I became close friends as quickly as possible,” she recalled.

While not as pretty as the twins, at least from what she had seen of them in magazines, Consuelo was vivacious, funny, and chic. Wallis knew that it was only a matter of time before she was introduced to Thelma. And then who knows?

She now knew a girl who knew a girl who danced—and more—with the Prince of Wales. It would soon be her turn to cut in.