CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Wallis, Wallis, Wallis, Wallis”

Tucked away in a concrete storage facility at the rear of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore is a painting that gives an unexpected insight into the interior life of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

While they had been photographed together endlessly, this work was the first commissioned painting of the two of them since their marriage. The commission, undertaken by local artist Trafford Klots, in part to commemorate their twenty-fifth year of married life, is unique.

Klots, a society artist who had also painted the Queen Mother, the widow of King George VI, set the couple in the lush Palm Beach garden of Arthur Gardner, the former American ambassador to Cuba. The duke was seated on a padded garden chair looking out into the middle distance, the spiritual home, as they like to say, of the English intellectual. The duchess, in a canary-yellow day dress, was perched, somewhat uncomfortably, on the arm of a garden sofa. Significantly, she occupied a position higher than that of the former king.

While she is looking in his direction, she is not looking at him. Her whole demeanour is blank, expressionless, her bored gaze reflecting perhaps the tedium she felt at the whole artistic exercise. Or her marriage. For what Klots depicts, either deliberately or unconsciously, is a married couple without an ounce of personal interaction. The two people at the centre of a great royal romance inhabit two separate universes, lost in their own thoughts. Neither gives the other a hint of acknowledgment or recognition. As Mark Letzer, president of the Maryland Historical Society, observes: “As a couple that epitomized the love story of the century they seem somewhat disengaged and posed. Interesting, too, is that they look into space and not at one another nor at the viewer. The palate is fresh and verdant but it belies the bored countenance of the sitters.”

If Klots was trying to make a shrewd statement about the state of their union, he never admitted as much. His private correspondence about his 1961 work focussed on his interesting conversations with the duke about World War One and the difficulty of getting the duke’s pug dog, Mr. Chou, to sit still. Yet Klots, perhaps in spite of himself, succeeded in capturing the sense of emptiness, estrangement, and distance that existed between them, a state of affairs familiar to those who knew them at that time.

It is as if the ghost of Gertrude Stein was hovering over the portrait; there is no there there. Appropriate, too, as, by a curious quirk of geography, the duchess had artistically come full circle. During the war, Stein, her one-time neighbour on Biddle Street, had written a book, Ida, about a woman, modelled on Wallis Simpson, who was famous for being famous. Twenty years later Klots put the finishing touches on his portrait of the ducal couple at his studio in Branch Alley, Mount Vernon, just four blocks away from Wallis’s former Baltimore home.

Neither work, though, found favour with the duchess. She sent Stein a somewhat baffled note of thanks when she received a copy of Ida, while she and the duke smiled politely at Klots’s efforts—and moved on, gracefully distancing themselves from a portrait that was a touch too close to home.

During the time Klots was working with them, the Windsors were generally viewed as a couple killing time, their lives one of entertainment, dancing from one party to another. The duke had become such a bore that guests would inwardly shudder if they were seated next to him at dinner. His increasing deafness did not help. “Morning glory” was how Churchill dismissively described the man he became, his extraordinary promise bleeding into vacuity. “It was a really empty life but it was what they enjoyed,” noted a former private secretary. “She loved anything to do with a party. They were wretched personalities, completely egocentric.”

Their rigid daily routine was effectively the third wheel in their marriage; their 11:30 morning meeting, her lunch with friends, his afternoon golf, his 7:00 p.m. date with a bottle of twenty-five-year-old malt, her 7:30 hairdresser appointment, their dinner party at 9:00.

They were always aware that they were under scrutiny, whether in public or private, and acted accordingly. If they went to a restaurant and their conversation faltered, the duchess insisted that they recite the alphabet to one another so that other diners would see their animation. On one occasion, they were in the same restaurant as Hollywood actor Clark Gable and his new wife, Kay Williams. They noticed that the couple were looking silently at each other, and they started to discuss the state of the Gables’ marriage based on their lack of conversation. Then they burst into laughter, realizing they were guilty of doing to the Gables what so many others had done to them. If anything, that incident made them more determined to keep up the happy façade. At home, as Martha Amory observed: “Even if there was an audience of one around, you could guarantee a lovey-dovey scene to silence any doubters. I have seen it scores of times.” At the same time, as Clip experienced during one of his first meetings with the duchess, she was capable of casual cruelty towards her whimpering but ever-grateful husband.

As the decades ticked by, however, no one really cared any more. With the sixties in full swing, the Windsors were left behind, international society turning to new darlings like Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Aristotle and Jacqueline Onassis. When President Nixon invited them to the White House in 1970, they were no longer as socially active as they once had been. “We’re just too old,” said the duchess. “We even spent Easter in bed.”

When their ghostwriter Charles Murphy visited them at their Paris home in April 1972, shortly before the duke’s death, he was shocked and dismayed by their lifestyle. In a letter to his collaborator Joe Bryan, he wrote: “How pitiable it all is. Now at the end, except for the black Sidney [their butler], a late imperial acquisition from the Bahamas, they are quite alone among comparative strangers. The lady made it so. Whatever Court there was, she was determined to rule. And now it is made up mostly of shadows—and the worst of the collaborationists and the robber barons.”

Age brought the ailing couple some compensations. By then there had been a slight thaw in relations with Buckingham Palace, the duke’s receipt of a telegram from the queen congratulating him on his seventieth birthday a prelude to visits to their Paris home by various junior members of the royal family, including Prince William of Gloucester and the Duke and Duchess of Kent. It was all rather too little too late—after all, Emperor Hirohito of Japan had paid a courtesy call some years before. Nonetheless this modest rapprochement was crowned by a visit from the duke’s niece, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip, just before his seventy-eighth birthday in May 1972.

The ailing duke, who was suffering from cancer of the throat, insisted on getting out of bed and disconnecting what he called the “damned rigging”—his various tubes delivering morphine and other palliative care—before dressing in a suit and tie to meet his sovereign. Even though this was a courtesy call during the queen’s official visit to France, the duke could not help raising, for what proved to be the last time, the possibility of his wife being given the appellation “Her Royal Highness.” Once again he was denied, the queen leaving open the family wound.

At this critical time in his life, the duke made the acquaintance of another girl from Baltimore, Julie Chatard Alexander, a feisty twenty-six-year-old feminist who was earning money to pay for a trip of a lifetime to India with her fiancé. During the day she ran an art gallery, at night she worked a twelve-hour shift as the night nurse on call for the Duke of Windsor at their final residence in Paris, 4 route du Champ d’Entraînement in the Bois de Boulogne.

By now there was no pretence that he was a patient under constant medical monitoring; it was a question of ensuring that he was made comfortable for his last remaining days and hours. The duke had sacked several nurses but seemed to like Julie, as she hailed from his wife’s hometown.

For her part, she was not altogether sure how to talk to him. “As a women’s lib American I was determined not to be intimidated by his title and position,” she recalls, speaking for the first time about her experience. So she called him “Duke,” as in “Hey, Duke, how you doing tonight?” As his favourite film that year was a John Wayne Western, The Cowboys, he seemed to like that. They chatted about her upcoming visit to India, the duke recommending a book in his library on that subject by the journalist and adventurer Lowell Thomas.

There was one moment of excitement during her stay. The quiet of the evening was rudely shattered when the duke’s second-floor bedroom window was shoved open and a man peered in. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I am a policeman. Someone has pushed the panic button.” Julie ran down the hall to alert the sleeping duchess. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said. “I’ve pushed the button before when I’m bored.”

Apart from his night nurse, the duke had no other company in the evening apart from his pug dog, Black Diamond. During the two weeks Julie was with the ex-king, he was never once visited by his wife, whose quarters were on the same floor of their home but separated by what Wallis liked to call “the boudoir.” At the time, she had an American female guest and spent the evenings with her. Julie recalled: “She never came to see him or kiss him good night or see how he was. Not once. Poor fellow. He would call her name over and over: ‘Wallis, Wallis, Wallis, Wallis.’ Or ‘darling, darling, darling.’ It was pitiful and pathetic. Just so sad, like a lamb calling for its mother.”

On the night he died, Julie sensed that his life was drawing peacefully to a close. What the French call les corbeaux (black ravens) had chosen that evening to roost in the trees outside his bedroom window. These birds, traditionally seen as harbingers of death, had come for him. They were not to be denied.

His breathing became more agitated, Julie holding his hand to calm him. As he became increasingly restless she cradled him in her arms, holding and soothing him. At 2:20 in the morning of Sunday, May 28, 1972, the once king and emperor died in the arms of a woman from Baltimore. “Right city, wrong woman,” recalled Julie. So ended the royal romance of the century.

The doctor, Jean Thin, was summoned and pronounced him dead, after which the duchess was woken and she sat with him, holding his hand and whispering sweet nothings. No tears, no cries of anguish, just a gentle goodbye. Her own memory was, typically, rather different. She told her friend Aline, Countess of Romanones, that shortly after two in the morning she was awakened by doctors and summoned to the duke’s bedside. As he breathed his last she took him in her arms, his blue eyes gazing tenderly into hers. He uttered one word, “Darling,” and then he was gone. Her butler, Sydney Johnson, suggested that he actually said “Mama, mama, mama, mama.”

Given that all are agreed that the duke died in the early hours of the morning when night nurse Julie Chatard Alexander was on duty, her recollection, especially given the duchess’s waning faculties and her lifelong habit of altering the actualité, seems the most authentic.

When the news was announced in the media, one of the first to send a note of condolence was her old adversary Lucy Rogers. Since her visit to the mill in December 1957, she had seen little, if anything, of the Windsors. As she knew all too well, Wallis was interested in Herman and not her. After all, the only reason they invited her to stay with them was so that Wallis could soak up news of the only man she had ever loved. Lucy’s note, which attempted to put aside decades of rivalry, ended with the words “I shall always remain your friend, in memory of Herman and the Duke.” To her dismay, Lucy, who now lived in an apartment in Monte Carlo, received merely a regulation engraved card of acknowledgment.

In fairness, the duchess was somewhat overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection for the lost king. When the duchess arrived in London for the duke’s funeral, she was gratified to learn that more than sixty thousand mourners had filed past the bier inside Windsor Castle. No longer the forgotten man, he was buried in Frogmore in the castle grounds, the duchess telling her remaining friends that she hoped that one day in the not-too-distant future she would be by his side, the first commoner allowed into the royal burial ground.

That day was a very long time coming, the duchess lingering on and on, becoming progressively more and more physically and mentally debilitated. Her home in the Bois de Boulogne became something of a “living tomb,” Wallis’s circle shrinking to an ever-changing parade of hired nurses.

In the first months after the duke’s death she was simply forgetful. That quickly changed. Her descent into dementia was rapid, Wallis displaying alarming mood swings, one moment charming, the next aggressive and rude. During her slide, her indomitable lawyer Maître Suzanne Blum, who had represented Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and Darryl Zanuck, hovered over her, an avenging angel towards those who attempted to get too close. She crossed swords with Mountbatten, who was eager to reclaim the duke’s correspondence and historical artifacts for the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Blum complained that he was persistently on the telephone to her. “There are,” she said pointedly, “nothing but vultures crowding around the garbage cans.”

When photographers flagrantly intruded upon the duchess in 1976, taking pictures of nurses placing her limp form onto a sunbed, Blum, under strict French privacy laws, took legal action, winning the duchess heavy damages.

Not that the duchess knew about the efforts on her behalf. Now beyond looking after herself, she had withdrawn into her own world, her mind wandering further and further back in time. Her friend the Countess de Romanones described the gradual decline of the duchess, the woman who had dreamed of becoming queen now living in a dream world of her own making. She recalled: “Visiting was no longer like paying respects to a dying friend. It was like watching someone who had gradually, slowly reached a new life, where memories could keep her alive forever.”

Once her memory wandered all the way back to February 1935, and she began humming a sentimental waltz that once meant so much to her and the duke. As she danced and glided in her mind, perhaps she remembered the shadowy figures who had spun her around the dance floor; the diplomats, the businessmen, salesmen, and others who had tried to win her heart. Here comes the ardent Carter Osburn, the jovial Win Spencer, and the urbane Felipe Espil. Then there is Gerry Greene, Ernest Simpson, Guy Trundle, and of course “dear Herman, dear, dear Herman,” eager to fill up the rest of her dance card only for the Duke of Windsor to cut in.

When she finally died on April 24, 1986, aged eighty-nine, the royal family stuck to their side of the bargain and allowed her to rest next to her late husband at Frogmore. At the funeral service, held at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and attended by the royal family, the duke would have been pleased to see that her coffin was carried by eight soldiers from one of his former regiments, the Welsh Guards.

There was, though, a bitter and immutable irony in her send-off. For in this final act of damnation she found herself lying next to a man she barely tolerated, in the private cemetery of a family she loathed, covered by the earth of a country she hated. Even in death she would never be in peace. As her mother so often predicted.

But for the decisions and revisions made in a moment, the girl from Baltimore could have been lying with Herman Rogers, the man she loved, in the quiet corner of a graveyard in the South of France that is forever America.