CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Ice Runs Through Their Veins”

The letter was very un-Wallislike. It was hesitant, apologetic, and nervous, with the tremulous tone of an errant lover asking for forgiveness.

She was lost and she needed help. As ever, she turned to the man to whom she had always reached out in times of trouble and doubt—Herman Rogers.

Since the farrago of their wedding and honeymoon, he and his new bride, Lucy, had kept a deliberate distance from the duke and duchess. She acknowledged as much in her letter of August 18, 1955, sent from the Gritti Palace hotel in Venice.

I find it very hard to write this letter, but here goes. Though as far as I know nothing has come between us, we have not seen each other when we have come to the Riviera. I felt, and I may be wrong, that the time you and Lucy dined with us at the Bonne Auberge you had completely withdrawn your friendship from us, something I need not tell you that I have prized very highly, and it has caused me great distress, and if you can think me capable of this emotion—shyness—therefore I have not communicated with you on recent visits.

Then she went on to explain why she was now in touch after so long.

However, I am on the advice of George Allen [her lawyer] writing my memoirs. I personally detest this task as again the flare of publicity will be mine. George’s idea is that if I write my own memoirs the books so inaccurately written about us will after my death not be used as reference in whatever way the future may depict me.

She added that the duke’s ghostwriter, Charles Murphy, who had originally assisted Wallis, had been replaced by Boston-born humorist Cleveland Amory, whose touch she felt was much lighter and more in tune with her own thinking and style.

I am telling a simple story—no bitterness or reproach etc. I have no diaries, nothing in fact but my memory to fall back on, and that is why I am writing to ask you if you could spare a few hours for Amory. It would be to check a few dates of the China days—a short picture of the life there—Peking as it was then—I seem so stupid about conveying the real atmosphere to him.

As Herman had learned long before, nothing was as it seemed in Wallis’s world. While she genuinely wanted to set the record straight for posterity, it was only one part of the puzzle. For some years the Windsors had been concerned about two issues: their image and their bank balance.

At an earlier brainstorming session about improving their public profile, their friend Clare Boothe Luce suggested they adopt a British war orphan and call him David. This, she argued, would help soften their image as leaders of café society and make them seem more sympathetic and compassionate. Even the Windsors realized that this was a non-starter. Not only would it be inconvenient for their own lifestyle, it would doom the boy’s life. He would be forever compared to Prince Charles, the young heir to the throne. Their action would be dismissed as cynical opportunism. Instead the duke suggested inaugurating the Windsor awards, which would sponsor travel for young artists. Not that they took much interest in the art world—on one occasion the duke, who preferred traditional to modern art, deliberately hung an abstract bought by Wallis upside down in their sitting room. She never noticed. Unsurprisingly, the awards lasted for only a couple of years before they were abandoned.

The duke and duchess had a more pressing concern. For the clock was ticking on the release of official German Foreign Office telegrams and other correspondence which, while not depicting the duke as a traitor to his country, revealed the embarrassing rift between him and his family, his empathy towards Hitler, and his defeatist wartime attitude. Without careful public relations handling, the documents could be a damning indictment of his wartime record. The duke was duly agitated, concerned about the possible effect on his reputation.

If Wallis were to publish her own story before the documents’ scheduled release in 1957, this would help them defuse and deflect any judgement about their links to the Nazis. Of course, there were financial considerations, too.

The Windsors, like many rich people, constantly complained that they were living in virtual penury, even though their coffers at the Morgan Bank in New York were regularly replenished with inside stock tips from top businessmen like Robert Young, as well as the Mellons, the Dillons, and the Paleys. Their belief that the wolf was howling at their door conditioned their behaviour. With avenues for official work consistently blocked by the royal family and the British government, they cast around in the private sector.

During a visit to Los Angeles the duchess approached Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn for some kind of job for her husband. She came away empty-handed, Goldwyn remarking, somewhat gnomically: “I liked the duchess’s frankness. But frankness and honesty aren’t the same thing.”

Such was their reputation that it was said they asked for appearance fees when they honoured an event with their presence. The 1951 Kentucky Derby was the most notorious example, rumours swirling that they had been paid for their attendance, a story that the duke’s biographer Charles Murphy always heartily denied. Yet at the time, this widespread belief informed the behaviour of Louisville high society who were scheduled to entertain the ducal couple. Well-to-do Louisville matriarch Standiford Danforth Gorin wrote to her son, Standiford, also known as Tank, informing him of the local gossip.

We do not know if they are paid a set sum to make their appearance at the Derby and if their hosts have to pay them so much for the privilege of entertaining them. The story goes that [the wife of] the President of Churchill Downs, Mrs. Corum, called up Mrs. Benning Chambers and asked her if she would like to give a cocktail party for the Windsors. She said: “H NO!!!” Even though she was to be reimbursed for their outlay.

In the end the couple returned to the tried and tested and decided that the duchess should follow in her husband’s footsteps and write her own book. The duke had done very well out of his ghosted autobiography, A King’s Story, making more than $1 million in book sales and serialization. Could lightning strike twice? Even though Life magazine and the Express newspaper group had seen record rises in circulation as a result of their serialization of the duke’s story, Life chairman Daniel Longwell did not think the duchess’s story worth publishing. He noted that the duchess wanted “quite a lot of money” and did not think the book was worth the risk. “There’s no enthusiasm here for the project,” he cabled Charles Murphy. Murphy, along with feminist writer and critic Dame Rebecca West and, somewhat improbably, Ernest Hemingway, who had met Wallis in Cuba in 1950 when he created a local sensation after meeting them in his trademark shorts, were the names in the frame to ghostwrite the tome.

When Life dropped out, McCall’s magazine stepped in in America, the British rights staying with the Express group. As a first advance Wallis was handed a $500,000 cheque by Kennett Rawson of the David McKay publishing house in New York. In Britain, Express publisher Max Aitken wanted the same winning formula that had propelled the duke’s memoirs to bestselling status. Murphy, somewhat reluctantly, was once more dragooned into service. He struggled with the project, the duchess, like the duke, difficult to pin down for the rigorous timetable needed for literary reminiscence. Moreover he discovered that the duchess had only a passing acquaintance with the truth, adapting or removing inconvenient facts from her story and, in tape-recorded interviews, changing her story at whim.

The duchess described it differently, telling Herman: “I felt Charlie, though excellent for the Duke, was not for me—his writing combined with mine was not a natural melange, therefore I changed writers in mid-stream, I switched to Cleveland Amory.”

During the 1950s, Boston-born Cleveland “Clip” Amory was one of America’s best-known humorous writers, his two bestsellers, The Proper Bostonians and The Last Resorts, gently poking fun at the pretensions of American high society. When he was first approached by the Windsors he was sympathetic and enthusiastic, feeling that the Duchess of Windsor had been traduced by the British Establishment. As an unapologetic Francophile, he was also eager to spend a few weeks working in Paris with his actress wife, Martha, along for company. The $25,000 advance was not to be sneezed at, either. The duke was equally impressed, telling a friend: “That’s a very self-assured young man. If I had his assurance when I was King of England my life might have been very different.”

As his stepdaughter, Dr. Gaea Leinhardt, recalls: “They entered the project thinking that the snooty British were disdainful of the duchess because of her sexual activity and numerous marriages. They initially believed that she had been misrepresented but soon came to realize that that wasn’t so.”

The six months Amory spent talking to the duke, duchess, their friends and family gave him a unique window into Wallis’s world and her fractious relationship with her husband. His wife, Martha, watching from the wings, found herself “appalled” by their personal interaction, her meanness, his cowardice.

Though sophisticated and worldly, Clip showed his naivety in all matters royal family with his first suggestion of a title for the proposed autobiography. He called it Untitled, a clever play on the book title and the duchess’s own lack of the appellation Her Royal Highness. It was a proposal met with “dead silence” by the duke and duchess, Clip not for a moment aware how deep a wound that lack had caused in their lives. He soldiered on, keen to amuse them with his cleverness and wry humour. So he was further bemused when Wallis, with her reputation as a wit, never once laughed at one of his mots. In desperation he asked Noël Coward how she had earned such a standing. “In those circles, old boy, it was not that difficult,” Coward deadpanned.

The scales were rapidly falling from Clip’s eyes. On their first day of working together he had a clear sense of who ruled the roost. He never forgot it. Clip and the duchess were having tea and talking about the book when the duke wandered in, teacup in hand. He started to talk about how he and Colonel Murphy had worked on his book. Wallis snapped: “We’re not talking about your book, we’re talking about my book. Take your tea in the other room.”

He duly went, leaving Clip wondering that if she treated him like that in the presence of a relative stranger, how did she talk to him when they were alone? Soon he and Martha began to appreciate how gratuitously vicious she was towards the duke, exhibiting a consistent cruelty that left him, if not crying openly, certainly in tears. She would, for example, allow her pug dogs into the sitting room, but keep his out, much to his distress. “My mother was appalled by Wallis’s behaviour towards a man who, after all, had been the king,” recalls Dr. Leinhardt.

She was like the Joan Crawford character in the movie Mommie Dearest, switching from siren to saint to sadist. Martha described their fights as ducal “duelling,” this domestic description endorsed by a former private secretary who recalled that in the evening, when drink had been taken, “the sound of their drunken bickering was unbearable.”

As the duke’s biographer Philip Ziegler succinctly observed: “She was harsh, dominating, often abominably rude. She treated the Prince at the best like a child who needed keeping in order, at the worst with contempt. But he invited it and begged for more.”

As with so many fading marriages, it was the little things about the duke that would send her into a frenzy of irritation. She hated his incessant singing of jingles from adverts he had seen on television and his use of Americanisms such as “I guess” or “making a buck.” As Wallis admitted: “It made me simply furious.”

“The duchess was a complicated person—cold, mean-spirited, a bully and a sadist,” observed Dr. Leinhardt. “My parents found the duke not very bright, a wimp, and basically a very sad man. He had made an appalling choice and knew that he had taken the wrong path and now had to live with the consequences. They found him pathetic.”

Every day he would appear in the duchess’s quarters at precisely 11:30 to receive his daily marching orders. When the duchess called, he came running, on one occasion leaving his barber mid-haircut to attend to his wife. Yet however mean she was to him, he was always considerate of her. He refused, for example, to allow her to handle old francs, so each day he gave her a wad of freshly minted notes.

“He was like a child in her hands,” Lady Alexandra Metcalfe told Clip. “Poor little man, he was given hell; it was a stranglehold she had over him.”

Their empathy towards him was, though, tempered by his anti-Semitism and continued sympathy for Hitler. Clip, a World War Two vet, had little time for his views, especially as he began to see that the duke’s support for Hitler was much more comprehensive than he had ever imagined. “My parents were horrified by their dinner table talk, where they made it perfectly clear that the world would have been a better place if Jews were exterminated,” recalls Dr. Leinhardt. Clip recounted two stories to illustrate the duke’s views. On one occasion he “amazed” an English friend when the subject of Hitler came up. “I have never thought Hitler was such a bad chap,” said the duke.

At another dinner party, admittedly after the duke had been drinking heavily, he took hold of the hands of a lady guest, intertwining his fingers in hers to illustrate the point that before the war the Jews had their tentacles around German society. “All Hitler tried to do was free the tentacles,” he told her as the other guests looked on in horrified silence. Finally, New York advertising executive Milton Biow interjected. “Sir,” he said. “With all due respect, I never believed I would ever hear, at a civilized dinner table, a defence of Adolf Hitler.” Even the duke had the grace to blush.

The Amorys were given a window not only into the beliefs of the duke and duchess but also into their extravagant, if vacuous, lifestyle. As sophisticated as they were, even the Amorys were impressed. In an excited letter she sent to Clip’s parents in July 1955, Martha recalled a “fabulous” weekend at the newly renovated mill near the village of Gif-sur-Yvette:

It has to be seen to be believed. I think she has done a brilliant job of combining bold colours and various styles, which result oddly enough in a comfortable conservative effect. The Fort Belvedere furniture looks lofty and relaxed in its new setting. The grounds around are like a Corot painting come to life. The duke spends every waking hour in his garden and the results are breathtaking.… There was monumental excitement when we arrived, as the duke had cut his finger weeding.

Cocktails on the terrace, the duchess wore a periwinkle and large collar necklace of sapphires and aquamarines, the duke wore a kilt, which suited him. It doesn’t make him so old and shrivelled. I was terribly amused as Princess Dimitri turned to me as we were all wallowing in caviar and helping ourselves and said: “I do love pretentious picnics, don’t you?”

As for the interior, Martha described chandeliers like mushrooms, exquisite Louis XV furniture, fabulous porcelains and crystal. There was a caveat. “Although she is warm and informal to be with, the atmosphere of formality and protocol around here is nerve jangling.” Not that everyone was impressed; interior designer Billy Baldwin described the duchess’s handiwork as “awfully tacky.” “But that’s what Wallis had, tacky Southern taste, much too overdone, much too elaborate and no real charm,” he observed.

Amory could be forgiven for thinking the same about his subject. As Murphy discovered earlier, she was as tricky as mercury to pin down on facts and, like her husband, she routinely cancelled scheduled interviews. Or as Amory put it: “Here today, gone to Italy for ten days tomorrow.” When she was ready for a tape-recorded interview, she rarely allowed a chink of daylight behind her mask. Martha reported: “Clip sees duchess every other day depending on how much material we get. She loosens up a bit but no sooner does she start to give things than she clams up again.” He complained to his publisher, Kennett Rawson, about her “repetition, vagueness, and insatiable desire for change.”

Eventually he suggested to the duchess that if she was going to write a book it might be helpful if she had ever read one. Not that her husband was any better. His nervy character never allowed him to settle with a book or a magazine. “Who is the ‘Bront’ woman?” he once asked Freda Dudley Ward when she handed him a copy of Wuthering Heights. When Winston Churchill dutifully sent him the latest signed volume in his multi-volume work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the duke wrote back: “Thank you so much for sending me a copy of your latest book. I have put it on the shelf with all the others.”

Though Wallis had, as her second husband, Ernest Simpson, testified, a near-photographic memory, she was forced to admit there were large chunks of her life that were absent from her recollections. As a result Amory was sent off to London and elsewhere to interview Ernest Simpson, Fruity Metcalfe, Lord Brownlow—the hero of the flight to Cannes during the abdication—and others to help flesh out her story. It meant Amory was learning the true story rather than Wallis’s version of events.

The interviews were arranged by Wallis’s lawyer, now Sir George Allen, Martha and Clip sensing that he was eager for them to understand the real Wallis rather than the fake public image. Martha wrote: “He was wonderful to us in London, but we felt he didn’t think much of either of them and had done his best to give us the TRUE story through others.” They went right to the top of the tree, spending several hours with the queen and her young children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, at Windsor Castle. Sadly, Clip’s notes from that historic encounter have not survived. Ironically, Martha remembered that the informality of dealing with the sovereign was a refreshing change from the stiffness of the exiles’ Court in Paris.

As they insinuated themselves with Wallis’s inner circle, the Amorys discovered that there was little enthusiasm among her family and friends for an autobiography, nor any feeling that it would be a truthful account of her life. Her ever-faithful Aunt Bessie simply didn’t think she was worthy. “If she had done anything important in her life—art, literature, philanthropy—by the time she became a duchess, then all right. But these little stories of childhood don’t amount to much. If I said this to her she would take my head off, but I don’t think she holds the position in life she should—but don’t tell her any of this.”

Herman and Lucy Rogers, in the middle of building a new villa, which they named Crumwold after his family home, entertained Clip and Martha for five days, the foursome becoming fast friends. As Martha told her in-laws: “We loved them and learned so much from them. So much that we can’t use, but it was exhausting and fascinating.” Herman cast his eye over Clip’s early drafts and thought he had done a “great job.”

There were caveats, though—not about the writer but the subject herself. The Rogerses felt that Wallis should never have embarked on a project that involved a close relationship with the truth.

In the coming weeks Clip found himself unable to reconcile Wallis’s version of events when measured against the testimony of those, who included the queen, he had spoken with during his research. He discovered, for instance, that almost everything the duchess had told him about Ernest Simpson, his first wife, and their divorce was simply not true. Furthermore, he found the duchess’s meddling with his prose exasperating, writing to his editor, Kennett Rawson: “My worst problem aside from her desire to change ideas is that never in my experience have I seen anyone who knows so little what a paragraph is, what a chapter is, and what a book is. She has absolutely no conception of unity.”

In mid-September he severed all connections with the duchess and his publisher, Amory deciding that he was no longer able to be connected with such a “dishonest book.” Explaining why he had given up the ghost, he told the media: “I couldn’t turn the duchess into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”—that is to say, a plucky and endearing innocent at large. (Ever the journalist, it was his wife’s phrase, which he used as his own.) Even though he had thrown in the literary towel, he and Martha were invited to dine with the Windsors before they departed.

“It is all coolly amicable,” wrote Martha to her in-laws in September 1955. “The casual way they can be dishonest makes you know that ice runs through their veins. Sir George Allen looked at Clip this morning as though he’d wished he had the guts to do what Clip was doing twenty years ago.”

Wallis, who reengaged Charles Murphy to finish the tome, told quite a different story. In a letter to Herman in December, she thanked him for his “time and trouble” but then went on to describe Amory as a “vicious character” whose work had been rejected by the various publishers underwriting the project. “I never had a cross word with him and felt very badly about the whole affair. However, he turned upon me in the press like a viper.”

She was especially irked by what Herman had apparently said to him about her. “He is particularly delighted with your having, so he says, told him that I never stuck at anything that appeared in banner headlines.” As her marriage to the Duke of Windsor had made headlines around the world, it was a clear reference to her disillusion with her third husband.

Herman subsequently took issue with Clip. “Did I really say this to you? If so I don’t remember having said it and I don’t think the remark would be fair—until just recently.”

He and Lucy, though, were very much behind the Amorys, believing that Clip had made the correct move to walk away from the project. In a letter to them in January 1956, Lucy reported that Wallis had sent them a copy of Murphy’s final manuscript and asked Herman to comment on the contents. Lucy wrote:

There will be no comments on the Truth, she can’t take it so it is no good telling her and to make a hypocritical analysis Herman would never do it—it would not be him.

We think it would have been much wiser not to publish the book—qui s’excuse, s’accuse and there are at least three phrases in the chapters we are reading which are enough to make her unlikable to every decent human being; as much as one would like just for Christian brotherly spirit’s sake to point it out to her—one can’t do it. Herman says what’s the use she would not understand anyhow.

In spite of their misgivings, the serialization of the book, named The Heart Has Its Reasons, a phrase taken from the writings of the Enlightenment thinker Blaise Pascal, was launched with a lavish fanfare at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on February 20, 1956.

While specially invited guests feasted on “six pounds of the finest caviar, 300 clams casino, oysters Rockefeller, and tiny Roquefort cheese feuilletés passed in small heaters,” Wallis held court, the royal author confiding to Phyllis Battelle of the Baltimore News-Post: “To tell your heart to the world is a terribly difficult thing to do. Like sitting looking in a mirror all day long. You must be truthful, correct, and not too dull.” While it was an assured international bestseller, the critical pickings were slim, especially in England. In the Spectator Gerald Fay wrote that “the opening events of the book are commonplace and would not detain the busy reader for more than a few minutes.”

Wallis saw only the positives. Several days after the launch she wrote to Herman saying that “the press has been kind and I think it has been well received—I am glad this launch is over. I hope you’ll think the style is dignified.”

All through her correspondence about the book, Wallis extended an enthusiastic invitation for the Rogerses to join them at the mill. Lucy graciously declined on the clearly spurious grounds that they were too old to travel such a distance from the South of France to Paris.

It was perfectly plain that Lucy, though still beguiled by royalty, had no wish to repeat the competitive confrontation that marred her wedding and honeymoon. If Herman’s second marriage was the last sentence in his long love affair with Wallis, the publication of her autobiography was the full stop.

Wallis and the man she called the “love of my life” would never see each other again. At some point during the year, Herman contracted Parkinson’s disease. He travelled to the Presbyterian Hospital in New York in a desperate attempt to find a cure. In vain. In October 1957, Lucy wrote to the duke and duchess informing them of the gravity of Herman’s illness. The duchess sent a heartfelt letter on Saturday, October 19, that expressed their affection for their ailing friend.

Dear Lucy,

We have just returned from a shooting expedition and found your note with the sad news about Herman. You can well imagine how deeply the Duke and I feel about his illness. Though we have seen little of Herman these last few years—our love and gratitude to him for his staunch friendship to me for many years and to the Duke at the most difficult time of his life [remains].

I hesitate to telephone to hear his voice once more—in case my unexpected call would make him suspicious.

I hope, Lucy, that if there is anything that we can do for you that you will feel free to call upon us in any capacity you would need us.

This has been a sad year for me, I have lost several good friends but no one could leave the gap that Herman will should his illness prove fatal.

Dear Lucy, my heart goes out to you at this distressing time—let me hear how things go—my love and understanding

Wallis.

Two days later, on October 21, 1957, Herman died in Lucy’s arms. Grieving, bewildered, and heartbroken, Lucy focussed her anger on the Windsors. She was furious that they didn’t make the effort to attend his funeral or even send flowers even though, before Herman died, Wallis had written to say how much she loved him. Of course it was all about Wallis. According to Lucy, when she finally sent a telegram of sympathy it read in part: “All my love and sympathy over your and MY loss.” Lucy wrote back saying that Herman had already been buried along with Katherine and described his “beautiful, serene, dignified” service.

Lucy vented her true feelings in a furious letter she sent to the Amorys.

What do you think of it—she did not even send a flower—not that we cared but I think in such a circumstance the Duke should have flown down from Paris and pay a last homage to their only real friend—I am afraid you can’t teach little people to be grand and grandeur comes from the heart. Herman should have left them a bit of it in his will—he had so much. He was really the most outstanding person I ever met. He had all qualities and no faults. I adored him and always will continue to do so.

For all Lucy’s anger, she had a bizarrely ambivalent attitude to the Windsors. She had enjoyed her previous proximity to the ducal couple, basking in the social cachet it had given her. In her heart and mind she wanted to be recognized by future generations as the Mrs. Rogers who was closest to the royal couple.

Shortly after Herman’s death she busily began to put that warped plan into effect. When Katherine died, Herman had the phrase “Strength and honour were her clothing” engraved on her tombstone. After his death Lucy had the words chiseled off in a frankly unhinged attempt to expunge the public record of her influence on his life.

As a further bizarre twist, Lucy took the name Catherine for herself, and when she died, on January 4, 2000, she was buried in the same plot as Katherine and Herman.

Moreover, she left instructions that she was to be interred wearing a dress once worn by Katherine. She felt that if she, Katherine, and Herman were ever exhumed from the plot they now shared, people would identify her body as that of Katherine, who was much closer to the duchess than she had ever been.

Her astonishing behaviour, this weird royal obsession, helps explain why, for all her vitriol towards the Windsors, a few weeks after Herman’s death Lucy immediately accepted an affectionate open invitation from the duchess to visit them in Paris in December. After all, when Herman was alive she and her husband regularly turned down invitations to the mill.

On her weekend stay in December the only other guest was to be Queen Mary’s official biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, who, Wallis reassured her, was “charming.” He planned to interview the duke about his late mother. During their conversation, the duke complained to Pope-Hennessy: “I played fair in 1936, but I was bloody shabbily treated.”

It must have given Lucy a satisfying sense of control to know that she was now the font of all knowledge about “dear Herman.” She could now hold court over Wallis, tantalizing her about the “only man I have ever loved.” The ultimate triumph was hers—two social climbers but only one reached the summit of Mount Herman.

As Wallis admitted: “I want so much to hear all about Herman these last years. I have never had such a sad year—so many friends gone and tragedies to others.”

Sadly, her losses would continue. A year later, on November 30, 1958, her second husband, Ernest Simpson, died. He was sixty-one.

And then there was one.