CHAPTER NINE

A Bounder, a Libertine, and a Spy

Wallis and Ernest celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary in July 1934 by going their separate ways; he sailed for New York on business, she travelled to Biarritz. The departure signalled the beginning of the end of their marriage, the period when Wallis fell in love with another man.

For the next two months, she spent every day as guest, companion, and confidante of the Prince of Wales, sunbathing, eating, talking, getting to know one another. He had taken a spacious villa in the hills above Biarritz, the resort where he had entertained various mistresses, including Lady Furness and her twin, Gloria Vanderbilt. None, though, ever spent quite as long with the future king as Mrs. Simpson. Since Thelma’s dramatic exit, Wallis had slipped seamlessly into her role as hostess and entertainer in chief of the Prince of Wales. She had kept the prince at bay sexually by ensuring that she never was with him in a situation that would encourage greater intimacy. Their holiday would test that resolve to the limit—and beyond. It seems she succeeded in remaining chaste, both Wallis and the prince declaring that they never had carnal relations before they eventually married.

Ostensibly her aunt Bessie was her chaperone, although she left the small royal party to go on a motoring tour when the prince and his guests joined Lord Moyne on his yacht Rosaura, a converted channel steamer, for a cruise along the Portuguese and Spanish coast.

After weathering a fierce storm, they eventually reached Formentor on the island of Majorca, where they spent the days swimming and daydreaming on the beach, the evenings watching flamenco dancers or dancing themselves on the beautiful lantern-lit terraces overlooking the sea. For both of them it was a special five days, the time when, as Wallis described it, they “crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.” They had reached a point of no return in their relationship.

As she later confessed: “I had indeed met a man. David and I were falling in love. There was nothing either of us could do about it—like all true love stories it had to be. It took us a while to realize what was happening, and we did not quite know what to do. There was no long-range or short-range plan. I was still married and that was that.”

The prince marked this romantic interlude by composing a slow melody for the bagpipes, which he called “Majorca,” and quietly handing her a diamond-and-emerald charm for her bracelet, purchased when they reached the seaside town of Cannes in the South of France.

Within hours of their docking, Wallis was reunited with the other man in her life, Herman Rogers. He and Katherine had only just returned from a month-long cruise on their yacht, the Angélique, when Wallis and the prince came a-calling. That night they entertained the couple and the other two in the party—Posy Guinness, the beautiful cousin of Lord Moyne, and the prince’s equerry, Major Jack Aird—at their villa. After Herman showed them his films of Peking and Bali, the sextet went out on the town until five in the morning. The next day they sailed to Saint-Tropez, the prince having such a good time that he invited Herman and Katherine to join them on a trip to Lake Como in Italy.

In a breathless and hitherto unpublished six-page letter to his sister, Anne, Herman described the events of the holiday. Typically, the ever-discreet friend never once hinted at a relationship between the prince and the woman he and Katherine hosted for four months in Peking. Of the trip he wrote: “Wallis is quicker on the trigger than anyone I know, and we always had something to laugh at. It couldn’t have been more informal or more fun.” They swam, played golf, hired sculling boats, dined late, and woke at noon. Herman got on famously with the prince, something of a shipboard bromance developing between the two men. “He couldn’t be more generous, or simple or more fun to be with. I have never met anyone with so much charm. All the stories you hear of his drinking and foolishness are wrong. No one could be more thoughtful of others.”

The Rogerses returned to their Cannes home to find themselves the centre of gossip and a “terrible jealousy” among the local community. Herman wrote to his sister Anne telling her that one so-called friend had remarked: “Of course the Rogers would never see anything of the prince normally—he’s just slumming now.” That was but a fraction of the rumour and hearsay that began to erupt around Wallis. When Aunt Bessie, who had been reunited with the party at Villa d’Este by Lake Como, managed to see her alone before she sailed for New York, she voiced her concern to a resolutely unconcerned niece.

Tentatively she broached the subject of the Prince of Wales’s fondness for Wallis, but Wallis airily brushed her observations aside. For once, Aunt Bessie continued her questioning. “Isn’t this all very dangerous for you? If you let yourself enjoy this kind of life, it will make you very restless and dissatisfied with everything you have known before.”

Wallis wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s all great fun. You don’t have to worry about me—I know what I am doing.” Grimly her aunt told her that she could see “no happy outcome” to this situation.

Her concern was entirely for Wallis who had, following her failed marriage to Win Spencer, found stability and contentment with Ernest. She knew that her niece was at last enjoying married life and that her husband, an educated, witty fellow, clearly adored her. “He had a marvellous mind for history and dates,” she recalled. Wallis could do worse, much worse. Now she was risking being left high and dry because of a summer infatuation with the Prince of Wales. It was bound to end in tears once the prince’s attention was captured by another bright, shiny object.

Never for a moment did Aunt Bessie imagine that it would be Ernest who was left maritally marooned. As she recalled: “She would have stayed with Ernest, but she was hit by this avalanche. On the other hand, I suppose it is quite a compliment to be picked out.”

As far as Wallis was concerned she was a woman of the world enjoying her time in the royal sun but knowing that soon enough the sun would set. She was now thirty-eight and realized that she had only a few years left before she was firmly placed on the shelf. As she recalled: “I had on my return no illusions about my future or rather the future of David and myself. No girl in her right mind would have ever thought that a king would abdicate over her.”

Her Montague side enjoyed living the dream, her Warfield half realized it would come to an end soon enough. All the evidence from the prince’s life pointed in that direction. As she later recalled: “There were at least a dozen girls who had lasted one summer with David, but when the next year rolled around they were forgotten.” For the moment, she was happy being Wallis in Wonderland, and her husband seemed content to indulge her as she lived this enchanted lifestyle.

In her mind she was simply playing the prince’s game like those who had come before her. When the prince gave Wallis a dog, a cairn terrier he called Slipper, for Christmas, she smiled inwardly, knowing that he had also given a dog to Thelma, a Pekinese called Puff, at a similar stage in their relationship.

Then there was the diamond-and-emerald charm he handed her in Cannes. It was not too personal and would not raise too many questions from an inquisitive husband—rather like the black-and-white pearl earrings and cabochon emerald ring he had given Thelma. As Thelma remarked: “How can you give a married woman a lot of expensive presents without her husband knowing about it?”

Ernest knew all about what the prince was giving his wife—before Christmas 1934 she had added two bracelets and a diamond hairpin to the charm. Typically, he complained about the cost of insurance rather than what it said about his wife’s relationship with the future king. As Thelma described him: “Ernest was the dog tray type—faithful come what may. Royalty could do no wrong.”

From what Wallis had gleaned from her earlier conversations with Thelma, she would not have expected much more from the prince. Thelma had discovered that, what with paying for receptions and dinners at her Grosvenor Square home, it was an expensive business being the Prince of Wales’s mistress. In the early months of her attachment, Wallis had the same complaint, albeit on a lesser scale. As royalty never carries money, she was the one dipping into her handbag to tip waiters, hatcheck girls, and the like.

Once back in London after her two-month holiday with the prince, there was no stopping the very merry go-round for Wallis. She and Ernest were weekend fixtures at the Fort, and the prince became such a regular at Bryanston Court that it was he, rather than Ernest, who fixed the drinks and handed around the canapés.

“Keeping up with two men is making me move all the time,” she wrote to her aunt, emphasizing that everything was “just grand” between the threesome. She returned to Burrough Court in Melton Mowbray, the place where apparently she first met the prince, for several weekends, though Thelma was now no longer in residence. Staff recall that after one late-night party, the prince was pushed around the grounds in a baby’s pram by Wallis. It was perhaps symbolic.

Edward was so very different from the other men in her life. They were sensible and centred, placing career above affairs of the heart. There was an emotional flywheel that modulated the behaviour of Felipe, Herman, and Ernest. They were mature men of proportion, quiet calm, and imperturbability. The prince was such a contrast to the men she had known that Wallis found him hard to read. He was childlike in the way his feelings lurched from undying devotion to cold indifference, brooding on suicide one moment, savouring ecstasy the next. His love letters reflected his all-or-nothing behaviour, the prince falling in love hard and fast. “I love you so so madly & desparately I worship and adore you my sweetheart and cannot bear being away from you.” The note could be to one of any number of his lovers, though this was written to Freda Dudley Ward.

Simpering, self-pitying, and spoiled, he is revealed in his correspondence as a man whose character was in complete contrast to the traditional royal stiff upper lip and the informal royal motto: “Never complain, never explain.” Years later his mistress of six years and more, Freda Dudley Ward, was asked if she ever loved the man who signed himself her “little slave” or “little parpee” (puppy). “Oh no,” she replied crisply, “he was much too abject.”

Little wonder that Wallis struggled to divine the real man behind the public image. Few could, as he did not fit the template of what the public expected from royalty. Though he exuded an air of quiet authority and endearing natural charm, the prince was the least tranquil of men, lonely, restless, and somehow empty. Socially ambitious, Wallis was drawn to him as much for his image as his personality, for what he could conjure as what he had to say for himself. As for her own attractions to him, she ticked off her humour, sense of fun, and independent American spirit. That, though, got her only so far. Perhaps her curiosity about his world and her appreciation of his isolated life and position counted for more than she knew. Then she was stumped. After all, as she acknowledged, there were many others who were prettier and better dressed.

These deeper considerations were laid aside in the affairs of the moment. Much of that fall of 1934 was spent “babysitting” another royal, ensuring that Prince George kept out of mischief before his glamorous November wedding to Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark at Westminster Abbey. Before the big day there were numerous receptions and dinners, culminating in a state reception hosted by the king and queen at Buckingham Palace. First he introduced Wallis to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, who realized from his demeanour that the prince was in love again, with yet another American. Then he took her and Ernest to meet the king and queen. As she made her way through the throng she was watched, as she later recalled, by “all those cold, jealous English eyes.” Though the meeting was brief and the conversation merely banal platitudes, the Simpsons had at last planted the Stars and Stripes on the social equivalent of Mount Everest—meeting the king and queen of England at Buckingham Palace.

After joining the prince to greet the New Year at a London nightclub, Wallis had real mountains to climb a few weeks later when, much to Ernest’s irritation, she joined the prince’s skiing party in Kitzbühel, Austria. For a woman whose life had been geared towards control, the idea of flying down a slope with two pieces of wood strapped to her ankles was her idea of hell. She described the two-week vacation in the winter of 1935 as “one long horror.”

Even when she was relegated to what the Austrians call “slopes for idiots,” she fell constantly, finishing the day frozen and bad tempered. The only respite was when the prince decided to return via Vienna, allowing for three days of shopping and dancing to the tunes of the “waltz king,” Johann Strauss.

Socially she was now dancing with the stars of the aristocracy. Once news had seeped through London society that Wally was the new squeeze of the Prince of Wales, her life took a decidedly upward turn. Doors opened, invitations landed, and gifts showered, so much so that she installed a second phone line and considered hiring a social secretary to deal with all the stiff white cards. When she entered a restaurant, heads would turn, knowing looks would be exchanged, and voices would be lowered as whispered confidences were shared.

Wallis was not only a social celebrity but also a perplexing conundrum. What did the Prince of Wales see in the angular wife of a struggling shipping agent as opposed to the younger and decidedly more beautiful Lady Furness? Or the pick of European royalty and nobility for that matter?

It was a question that would exercise powerful minds for many years to come. Social London wanted to know more about the lady from Baltimore. Theories abounded. She was a low-born sorceress who used her sexual abilities to seduce the prince, the future king in thrall to an obsession rather than love. Queen Mary, like many others, believed that her son was under some kind of malign spell that would, in time, be broken.

The result was that while she and Ernest were invited to as many smart dinners as they could digest, Wallis was well aware that she was the main course, the social equivalent of the bearded lady. “I know that many people only invited me out of curiosity and looked forward to criticizing me as soon as I had left the room.”

Occasionally she enjoyed wielding the knife. Out of the blue, a so-called friend from Baltimore, who had been in London for many months, called her on the telephone. “It never occurred to me that you were the Mrs. Simpson everyone is talking about,” she said. Wallis replied, “But it never occurred to you to call me as Mrs. Simpson,” and promptly put the phone down.

For the brilliant but intensely competitive society hostesses who stalked the ballrooms and dining rooms of Knightsbridge, Mayfair, and Belgravia, Wallis was fresh meat to throw before the social lions who dined at their tables. At that time the quirky queen of social London was Lady Emerald Cunard, a tiny, twittering canary of a woman who cheeped and chirruped around her guests, encouraging them to preen and parade. She soon swooped on Wallis, just as she had a few years before when Thelma Furness was the latest attractive addition to the prince’s aviary.

On that occasion, Lady Cunard linked arms with Thelma as they were leaving the dining table. She told her much younger companion: “Now Thelma, you are new here. You must let me sponsor you and show you the ropes.”

She offered to give Thelma a party and encouraged her to start a salon on the lines of Madame de Maintenon, the influential second wife of French king Louis XIV. The goal would be to bring Queen Mary into her orbit and give Lady Cunard further influence. A somewhat bewildered Thelma responded: “I wouldn’t know what to do with Queen Mary even if I had her here.”

Four years later Thelma was sardonically amused to learn that Lady Cunard had used the same bait in an attempt to lure Wallis Simpson into her lair. “Now my dear, I will launch you,” Emerald told her. “Remember our goal is the queen.” As Wallis came to appreciate, it was Lady Cunard’s lifelong ambition to bring Queen Mary under her artistic influence, a testament to her relentless drive and unquenchable spirit. In order to do so, she publicly professed to adore the sparky American. Of the woman who never willingly read a book, she said, without irony: “Little Mrs. Simpson is a woman of character and reads Balzac.”

Born Maud Alice Burke in San Francisco, Emerald was raised in modest circumstances, but marriage to a shipping heir, Sir Bache Cunard, changed her fortune and gave her the opportunity to indulge her passion for the arts, sponsoring operas and other orchestral works conducted by her lover, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

She made her name, though, as a hostess, with literary tyros, political heavyweights, and beautiful women the staple of her legendary parties. Lady Cunard was uncaring of the conventional dinner party pairings, saying that she brought people together for conversation and not mating.

The table talk was often sparkling, eclectic, and provocative, former prime minister Lloyd George considering her the most dangerous woman in London because she encouraged indiscretions from even the most strait-laced of politicians. She was challenging, mischievous, and whimsical, her speciality the throwaway line such as “Christ had a very unpleasant face, and John the Baptist’s was little better.” Early on in their friendship, she disconcerted Wallis when she informed her that, unlike her new friend, she no longer liked her home country. “You see, dear, I don’t play golf, bridge, and I don’t drink.”

The prince would often arrive unexpectedly at her Grosvenor Square home, at first with both Ernest and Wallis in tow, later just with Wallis. While others would be nonplussed, Lady Cunard, who thought nothing of organizing a lunch for twenty-four, a dinner for fifty, and a supper party for sixty on the same day, simply joined them for another supper at the Kit-Cat club.

Lady Cunard was not the only society hostess inviting Wallis to her parties. Her great rival, Lady Sibyl Colefax, tall, distinguished, and dark-haired, sat her next to Winston Churchill during one luncheon, at which the future world leader engaged in a running battle with American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, who had just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union with favourable views of the Communist system.

Though Wallis was entertained by such society luminaries as Lady Portarlington, Helen Fitz-Gerald, and the razor-sharp Lady Oxford, who counselled her to be careful, as her views would be construed as the prince’s thinking, her undoubted favourite was the irrepressible interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl.

Born in 1858 to a New York doctor, Elsie de Wolfe became a well-known actress who was celebrated more for her fashion flair than her ability as a thespian. In the 1880s she became intimate with theatrical producer and literary agent Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury, the lesbian couple coyly nicknamed “the Bachelors.” They travelled frequently to Paris, where the climate was more tolerant for gay and lesbian lifestyles. Here Elsie made a name for herself as a talented interior designer, in 1913 publishing a bestselling book on the subject. By the mid-1920s she was a self-made millionairess, her name a brand on everything from cars to cigarettes, an international personality celebrated in song by the likes of Noël Coward and Cole Porter.

She shocked everyone, but especially her longtime lover, Bessie, when in 1926 she married the British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl. Though they lived separately, this unusual arrangement allowed the acquisitive interior designer, now a diplomat’s wife, to live in Paris tax-free and to sport an aristocratic title.

It was her close friend John “Johnnie” McMullin, social columnist for Vogue magazine and confirmed bachelor, who first introduced her to Wallis, and Wallis soon became her eager protégée in all matters of interior decoration, entertainment, health fads, and fashion. She was responsible for Wallis’s signature Windsor style, a look that could be characterized as neat elegance. She lived by the genteel credo: “Be pretty if you can, witty if you must, and be gracious if it kills you.”

More practically, Elsie and John helped Wallis purchase haute couture at a discount, Wallis making frequent shopping forays to Paris for the latest offerings of Elsa Schiaparelli and the American designer Mainbocher. It was crucial to have such social backers as the Simpsons, who had long lived beyond their means, climbed ever higher up London’s social ladder.

Shortly after their first meeting in London, Lady Mendl invited Wallis to stay at her home in Paris. It was a memorable and also uncomfortable visit. When she arrived at the apartment on the avenue d’Iéna she was received, as was Elsie’s custom, in her bathroom, where she was lying on a sofa surrounded by soft leopard-skin pillows. It was not until later that she met Sir Charles Mendl, who immediately disconcerted her by saying: “My dear, you must change your hair. You look as if you are going out riding.” At that time she was sporting her signature look, hair parted down the middle with a large chignon at the back. Dinner did little for her confidence. She later recalled: “Sir Charles was obviously unable to understand for the life of him why the Prince of Wales should be attracted to me.”

Though Wallis cultivated and was cultivated by titled hostesses, unlike the previous mistresses of the Prince of Wales, her elevation divided London society. While there were many who tried to bask in the royal glow, there was perhaps a majority, particularly among those closer in age and social proximity to the king and queen, who found Wallis and her husband simply below the salt. Her fellow American Nancy Astor, Virginia born and the first woman member of Parliament, was horrified by the prince’s latest obsession.

It was her firm conviction that only well-born Virginian families should have access to the royal family, and Wallis was neither. She was appalled when fellow spectators lined up to pay court to Wallis when she accompanied the prince into the show ring during Ascot race week. “I don’t see how they could. I would swim home rather than queue to shake hands with the king’s mistress.” She pointed the finger of blame at her rival hostess, accusing Lady Cunard of being a “disintegrating influence” for promoting Mrs. Simpson and encouraging her in her belief that she and her husband were accepted in such exalted society.

Nor did Lady Astor, who had occasion to play golf with the Prince of Wales, approve of the moral behaviour of the future king. She accused him of acting like a “libertine,” a stinging remark that infuriated him. His private secretary, Alan Lascelles, recalled that the Prince of Wales resolved to have nothing more to do with Lady Astor. “Kind friends repeated this, as kind friends so often do, and he never forgave her.” The feeling was mutual. Years later, the Windsors and Lady Astor were sailing to New York on the same liner and the prince proffered an olive branch, inviting Nancy to meet his wife. She refused.

At first those in royal circles had welcomed Mrs. Simpson’s sobering presence in the prince’s life. Unlike Thelma Furness, she was not a heavy drinker and had managed to curb the prince’s excesses. She had also improved his notorious timekeeping, scolding him for bad manners if he kept people waiting. Her predecessor had been taught from birth that little people didn’t matter, so her puppy-dog prince followed her lead. However, as the months passed and the prince became more rather than less smitten with the lady from Baltimore, consternation mounted at Court.

It was Wallis’s ill luck to have entered his life when the marital clock was officially ticking. In June 1934 the prince turned forty. That same month Wallis celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday. Everyone from Queen Mary down wanted to see a dynastic marriage of some kind to someone in the rapidly evaporating pool of suitable candidates. “Oh, Mama, don’t bother me with that now,” he would tell the queen when she raised the subject. Even Hitler was concerned, ordering his diplomatic envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to find a suitable German princess for the royal bachelor. The royal houses of Sweden, Greece, and Italy all strived to offer a candidate as a bride for the Prince of Wales. And there were, of course, the well-born mothers who tried to push their entirely suitable offspring into the prince’s path. He ignored them all.

Wallis came to realize that, through no fault of hers, the prince had developed a complex about single women, however eligible and pretty. She concluded that her biggest weakness, that she was married, was also her greatest strength. Wallis intended to keep it that way. Years of knocking around the globe and dealing with the amorous male had taught her the value of being occasionally elusive and mysterious.

On one occasion when the prince was on an official visit to the Channel Islands, he called her at Bryanston Court and asked the maid to tell Wallis to call him back urgently. She never returned the call, even though he delayed his return from the islands in the hope of hearing her voice. Once back in London, he raced over to Bryanston Court in a state of great agitation, as he wondered if she had been taken ill. She recalled: “I took his hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all except, you see, I have a rule. I never call men.’”

Wallis’s hold over the future king was not only inspiring intrigued tittle-tattle among London society; it soon came to alarm the British Establishment. Within days of returning from her skiing trip to Austria in the early spring of 1935, Wallis and Ernest found themselves under the gimlet gaze of Scotland Yard, home to London’s top detectives.

It seemed that the whiff of blackmail was in the air, or at least the suspicion of blackmail. In a society defined by class, rank, and snobbery, why else would the future sovereign spend so much time with a struggling shipping agent who, somewhat oddly, spent a lot of time in Europe, particularly Norway and the port of Hamburg in northern Nazi Germany? As for the compelling allure of his rather plain wife, her abilities excited the darkest sexual speculation.

The Yard’s best detective, Special Branch superintendent Albert Canning, who specialized in monitoring Communists and trade unionists, was put on the case. On March 25, 1935, a brief report landed on the desk of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Philip Game, and was doubtless discussed with the home secretary, Sir John Simon.

It was the first of a number of reports that continued up to the abdication. At first Canning focussed on the personality and business interests of Ernest Simpson, describing the sophisticated businessman with a penchant for poetry as a man of the “bounder type,” who hoped to make capital out of his wife’s association with the Prince of Wales. Later reports suggested that when the prince became king, Simpson was hoping for high honours such as a baronetcy or even a diplomatic post, possibly in China. Canning’s reports, laced with racism, snobbery, and rumour, accused the Simpsons of being Jews who hosted any number of undesirables, including drug addicts, at their supper parties.

As if this were not enough to whet the appetites of the powers that be, Canning, who was promoted for his efforts, suggested that besides her affair with the Prince of Wales, Wallis had another secret lover. It took him some weeks to find out his name, but by July 1935 he was able to report that Wallis was seeing a Ford used car salesman, Guy Marcus Trundle. According to Canning he was “a very charming adventurer, very good-looking, well bred and an excellent dancer. He is said to boast that every woman falls for him.”

It seems that most of this information was supplied by the garrulous Mr. Trundle himself, the Mayfair-based salesman telling Canning that he received expensive presents and money from the besotted American. He met her at social gatherings but intimate relations took place at secret rendezvous. For a woman who complained about keeping two men happy, a third would have left her exhausted.

There was more. At the same time that the home secretary was hearing about Guy Trundle, London society was abuzz with gossip about Wallis and no less a personage than Adolf Hitler’s diplomatic envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The couple, who first met at Lady Cunard’s Grosvenor Square home, were said to be enjoying a torrid affair, von Ribbentrop regularly sending to her London home bouquets of seventeen carnations, some say roses, the number signifying the number of times they had slept together. In this febrile climate, the wildfire rumours soon circulated in Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, and the German embassy in London. The story even reached the ears of the Nazi leader, who quizzed the former sparkling-wine salesman turned diplomat about his fizzy private life.

Naturally her former friend Thelma Furness helpfully fanned the flames of speculation by cattily—and falsely—suggesting that Wallis was earning pin money as an informal sales agent for von Ribbentrop’s sparkling-wine company. In her languidly dismissive way, Thelma recalled her own encounters with the German diplomat. “Ribbentrop was stocky, stout, and genial. He could easily have been a head waiter. That type. Rather shiny. Wallis didn’t particularly care about the Germans but was great friends with Ribbentrop, and she had a good excuse because she was selling champagne.”

She was not the only one to comment. At the time, Courtney Espil, now the wife of Wallis’s diplomat lover, noted in her diary: “We all know she was a great friend of Ribbentrop when he was the ambassador in England.” In short order the story reached the ears of President Roosevelt’s intimates. Mathilde Welles, wife of Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, told Courtney that the real reason why Queen Mary would not receive Wallis was not because of her divorce or being a low-born American but because she was an intimate of von Ribbentrop.

It was but a small step from selling champagne on behalf of a leading Nazi to passing on high-level gossip during pillow talk. Though few ever considered her a spy, there was concern that the American’s lack of understanding of what was and was not a secret could have led her to being unwittingly indiscreet around unfriendly ears. Though Wallis resolutely denied any impropriety, saying that she had met von Ribbentrop only twice, her ghostwriter Cleveland Amory is not so sure. In the six months that he spent with her, Amory teased out the fact that she had met von Ribbentrop frequently. On one occasion, she and the pompous diplomat were spotted together in the German embassy in London. They were both on their knees, looking over a map of Europe. So was Wallis a German spy? Helpful as ever, Lady Furness shrugged and said: “One couldn’t possibly say yes or no, because she wouldn’t tell her pillow.”

Though Wallis was oblivious to the official police and palace interest in her behaviour, she got a sense that she was under the microscope at the state ball in May 1935 to celebrate King George V’s Silver Jubilee, which was held at Buckingham Palace. After the king and queen had taken their seats on the dais, the dancing began. “As David and I danced past, I thought I felt the King’s eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel that all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg… filled with an icy menace for such as me.”

Perils lay much closer to home. Ernest’s tolerance for the prince’s behaviour and his wife’s compliance was wearing thin. He had taken a dim view of his wife’s decision to go skiing with the prince in Austria and had abruptly declined the invitation to join the prince in Biarritz. At times, he considered her behaviour as simply humiliating. Harvard-educated Henry Flood Robert, whose family had known Wallis from her Coronado days, remembers a lunch party at Bryanston Court where the most memorable moment came when the butler entered the room at about four o’clock to announce that the prince’s automobile was at the door to take Wallis to Fort Belvedere. She duly excused herself, leaving Ernest Simpson to entertain their guests. “Wallis’s departure for Fort Belvedere was like a command performance,” recalled Mr. Robert. “I felt sorry for the deserted host, Ernest.”

There were, though, compensations. The prince appeased him with the gift of a bolt of brown-and-beige hound’s-tooth tweed made up by the prince’s tailor into an overcoat exactly the same as one owned by the Prince of Wales. More important, the prince agreed to sponsor him for admittance into his own lodge of the secretive Freemasons organization. Though Sir Maurice Jenks, who presided over the lodge, agreed to the prince’s request, fellow Freemasons bridled, arguing that they could not accept the admission of a candidate on the word of his wife’s lover. Before Ernest was finally admitted, Sir Maurice had the ticklish task of quizzing the future king about his sexual relationship with Mrs. Simpson, the prince angrily denying any impropriety, a position he would doggedly adhere to both before and after his marriage.

His behaviour suggested otherwise. He was a lovesick middle-aged man who could not bear to be apart from Wallis or, as he called her, his “eanum”—the prince’s word for “tiny, poor, or pathetic”—for a moment. Their relationship had graduated from frequent telephone calls to love letters, most sent by the prince to Wallis. A love note dated July 1935 set the tone for a cascade of correspondence penned by the prince, Edward using the acronym “WE” to signify Wallis and Edward.

A boy is holding a girl so very tight in his arms tonight. He will miss her more tomorrow because he will have been away from her some hours longer and cannot see her till Wed-y night. A girl knows that not anybody or anything can separate WE—not even the stars—and that WE belong to each other for ever. WE love each other more than life so God bless WE.

As he had with his previous amour, Freda Dudley Ward, the prince would bombard her with phone calls day and night, pace the Fort restlessly into the early morning before sitting down to write yet another love letter. Though he knew that Wallis and her husband were sleeping in separate bedrooms, it drove him wild with jealousy to know that she was spending time with Ernest when she could be with him. At times the prince overstepped the bounds of propriety, on at least one occasion staying on too long at Bryanston Court and then calling her late at night on the telephone. Wallis, exhausted from juggling her home and love life, then had to placate her angry husband. Practical and matter-of-fact, Wallis could be forgiven for believing that she was being swept away on an avalanche of unbridled emotion. It was disconcerting. She affectionately chided the childish prince over his behaviour: “Sometimes I think you haven’t grown up where love is concerned and perhaps it’s only a boyish passion, for surely it lacks the thought of me that a man’s love is capable of.”

Ever down-to-earth, Wallis took his heartfelt missives with a pinch of salt, enjoying her time with the prince for as long as it might last. “I might as well finish up any youth that is left to me with a flourish,” she wrote, dismissing reports in the American press that she and Ernest were on the brink of divorce and describing him as “the man of my dreams.” By July 1935, it was clear that the prince, infatuated, in love, obsessed, or a mélange of all these emotions, was tentatively hinting at marriage. It consumed his waking hours, in the middle of the night Edward writing to her from his ship, HMS Faulknor, during the naval review:

Oh! A boy does miss and want a girl here so terribly tonight.… Please, please Wallis don’t get scared of loose [sic] faith when you are away from me. I love you more every minute and no difficulties or complication can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness.

At that time those complications were, as far as the prince was concerned, awkward but reasonably straightforward. He needed to muster the courage to speak to his father, retire from the succession, and give his brother, the Duke of York, a number of years to become used to the position as the king’s successor. There were numerous historical precedents for the second son becoming king, though this was normally triggered by the death of the first in line to the throne. The most recent example was when his own father became Prince of Wales following the death in 1892 of his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence.

After all, reasoned the prince, the sky had not fallen in when, in 1917, the king had changed the family’s name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and allowed his offspring to wed English commoners rather than German royalty. Similarly, if Edward had moved aside to allow his younger brother to take his place while his father was still living, there would have been little public dismay.

As his friend and supporter Lord Mountbatten argued: “Look how easy it would have been: The old king would still be on the throne, with the Duke of York warming up on the sidelines. Then, when the time came there’d have been no violent dislocation, only a smooth painless transition. The prince would have remained in England to help his brother, if need be, and Mrs. Simpson would have become a royal duchess.”

The prince, who had held his counsel so as not to disrupt the Silver Jubilee celebrations in May, decided to speak to his father when he returned from a continental holiday that summer. From August to October, he and his party travelled through the South of France, Austria, Switzerland, and Bavaria in southern Germany. Wallis ensured that Herman and Katherine Rogers were included in the party. Not only were they familiar faces, they were guests who pulled their weight, always aware of their social obligation to keep the future king entertained.

During the long holiday the prince did his best to smooth his eventual approach to his father, in Paris taking the trouble to see the French president, Albert Lebrun, and Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Herman sat next to Wallis and acted as her translator during lunch, Wallis enjoying an animated discussion with communications minister François Piétri. Once George V heard of his eldest son’s diplomatic behaviour he sent him a note expressing his delight. Now was the time to strike. Fatally, the Prince of Wales delayed.

Meanwhile, four thousand miles away, as the prince was loading dresses from Wallis’s shopping trip to Mainbocher onto his private plane, Ernest was in Washington reassuring Aunt Bessie that all was well in their marriage. He told her that he was sufficiently confident in their marital togetherness to ask his first wife, Dorothea, if their ten-year-old daughter, Audrey, could live with them in London.

It was not a plan that found favour with the singularly unmaternal second Mrs. Simpson. She complained that it would create extra expense and discomfort having to accommodate the growing girl and a governess in their small apartment. It was most inconvenient, and Wallis breathed a sigh of relief when Dorothea eventually vetoed the plan.

During his heart-to-heart conversation with Aunt Bessie, Ernest emphasized that he still adored Wallis and that her relationship with the prince had hit them both “like an avalanche.” While he was not alarmed about their future together, Mrs. Merryman was. She left Ernest with a dire warning: “No woman can resist for long the attention the prince is paying Wallis. I’ve watched her. There is no possible outcome but unhappiness for the three of you.” Ernest’s response took her aback. “Perhaps,” he replied, “but both Wallis and I have profited from his friendship.”

Ernest was not being entirely candid. Wallis’s school friend Mary Raffray had separated from her French husband, Jacques, the previous year. During his time in New York, Ernest and Mary began an affair, the couple falling head over heels in love. Theirs was a union of hearts and minds, soul mates who loved antiques, historic buildings, London’s architecture, and the British countryside. They even planned to write a book together chronicling the out-of-the-way squares, statues, and relics of old London.

When he returned to London, Wallis not unnaturally noticed subtle and not-so-subtle changes in their relationship. He was now indifferent as to her whereabouts and the time she spent with the prince. Like Thelma before her, she was Edward’s wife in all but name, hosting his dinner parties and organizing his life. At Christmas she bought and wrapped the 165 presents for his staff—as Thelma had done before her. The price she paid was her marriage. As she noted in her memoirs: “We were going our separate ways, the core of our marriage had dissolved; only the shell remained—a façade to show the outer world.” It was to be their last Christmas together as a married couple.

That Christmas, Edward spent a “terrible” few days at Sandringham with his family, the only light relief coming when he was able to call Wallis on the telephone. Hearing her voice gave him the strength to go on. With all the family present, now was as good a time as any to raise the subject of marriage to Mrs. Simpson. Once again he stayed his hand—this time because of the king’s fading health. He waited, hoping that in time something would turn up.

On New Year’s Day he sent Wallis a brief note saying: “I know we’ll have Viel Glück [good luck] to make us one this year.”

His Glück was about to run out.