Interlude
Since returning from honeymoon, the Windsors had been living in a suite of rooms at the Hotel Meurice, overlooking the Tuileries, where they had agreed a reduced rate of $30 a day, on the basis that they were a good advertisement for the hotel.1 Given they would not be allowed to return to Britain – their concern was as much taxation, now payable as private citizens, as any stipulations from the Royal Family – and their financial future was secure, they now decided to put down roots in France.
On 26 January 1938, Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie:
We have decided not to go to Havana this year as we feel we really must have a home before we travel any more. This life of trunks and hotels is very unsatisfactory. I have looked at a number of places in different directions outside of Paris, furnished and unfurnished. The former are hopeless and the unfurnished ones either palaces or too small, the wrong direction or too far from golf, etc, etc, so just to get out of this hotel we have taken a furnished house at Versailles with a small garden and tennis court, belonging to Mrs Paul Depuy. It is comfortable, no charm but dignity, and we have taken it from February 7 to June 7 – appalling rent as everyone is out to do the Windsors . . .2
This was the Château de La Maye in Versailles, which sat in a large private garden with swimming pool, tennis court and a nine-hole private golf course.3 This was a compromise as Wallis wanted to be in Paris and the Duke to have a country house, where he could indulge his love of gardening. One of its advantages was that it was near the Villa Trianon, the home of their close friends, Sir Charles and Elsie, Lady Mendl.
Elsie de Wolfe, a tiny woman whose party trick was standing on her head, was thirty years older than the Windsors. She had single-handedly invented the profession of interior decorating and with her lover, Elisabeth Marbury, a literary agent representing Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, had come to Paris at the turn of the century. She and Marbury, who died in 1933, had bought the eighteenth-century Villa Trianon, which had been built by Louis XV as a retreat from the main palace but was then a wreck, and restored it.
In 1926, de Wolfe had surprised her friends by marrying the bisexual Sir Charles Mendl, the press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. It was an arrangement that worked well as he needed her money and she wanted a title – Mendl had been knighted in 1924 for reputedly retrieving letters from a gigolo blackmailing the Duke’s brother George, but more likely for his espionage activities.
Constance Coolidge, an old friend of Wallis, often dined at Château de La Maye. On 22 March, she noted in her diary:
Well the dinner was a great success . . . Wallis looked lovely in a blue sequin dress. It wasn’t a bit formal and everyone talked all the time. Wallis did interrupt the duke rather but then he stayed in the dining room a long time afterwards and talked politics very well. He said Czechoslovakia was a ridiculous country – just look at it – how could anyone go to war for that. It isn’t a country at all, just an idea of the Wilsons.4
Coolidge’s diary gives a glimpse of a strange episode in the Windsors’ life that appears in little other documentation. The next day, Coolidge recorded how she was invited to meet a woman called Maroni at a third-floor flat at 36 Boulevard Emile Augier in the 16th arrondissement:
a butler in white coat opened the door – very queer apartment – white satin sofa & curtains . . . a queer woman, light hair died (sic), dark eyes, a long nose – Italian – certainly an adventuress . . . she was the intermediary for a friend . . . also a duchess . . . This woman has papers, letters, photographs . . . proofs of something very harmful to the royal family & the duke. She wants to see the duke alone . . . you can’t believe the papers & if he asks her to she will burn the papers but she must see him. She has followed him around Austria . . . She will offer me a very large sum. ‘What is your price?’ to arrange this. There is a man who will buy these papers to print them in America.5
Two days later, Coolidge lunched with a police inspector, who told her there was already a dossier on Maroni, that the woman was a former maid of the Duke and ‘the papers had to do with the Prince of Hesse’.6
The Prince of Hesse was most likely Philipp of Hesse and, like the Duke of Windsor, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. An architect and bisexual – one of his relationships was with the poet Siegfried Sassoon – he had married Princess Mafalda, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel in 1925. In October 1930, Hesse had joined the Nazi Party and by June 1933 was an Oberpräsident or regional party leader in Prussia. He was close to both Goering and Hitler, who was godfather to one of his sons, and, being fluent in English, French and Italian, had served as a special envoy for the Nazis. In that capacity he had had dealings with the Duke and had accompanied him on his October 1937 German tour.
The blackmailer appeared to have incriminating material. According to Charles Higham, the woman:
had posed as a maid at the home of the duke’s cousin, Prince Philipp of Hesse, Hitler’s favourite and a frequent emissary to the Italian dictator, in order to steal photographs and documents showing that the duke had a secret and intimate connection with the bisexual Philipp.7
The Windsors, who were in the South of France, looking at renting a villa for the summer, immediately rushed back.8 Meeting them in Paris was Sir Philip Game, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
‘The duke and two chief of police, one English & one French were there and I had to tell them everything before the Duke,’ wrote Coolidge in her diary. ‘Even that about “a man who renounced a throne & had a mistress in Austria”. It was embarrassing very!’9
Faced with police involvement, Madame Maroni disappeared and, according to Higham, ‘her documents were seized by the Sûreté and . . . sent to Moscow; when they were returned to Paris after World War II, they vanished again.’10 The hunt was now on for the letters with Hesse, which might reveal a sexual relationship with the Duke, or at least some embarrassing communication relating to politics.
Aside from the Hesse letters, there were numerous issues surrounding the Duke, not least the claims of illegitimate children he had fathered across the world. The question of the Duke’s sexuality has long intrigued. Before meeting Wallis, he was known to have had many affairs, including a long-standing one from just after the First World War until 1929 with Freda, the wife of William Dudley Ward, a Liberal Member of Parliament. As with Wallis, there was a certain mother fixation. He called her ‘Fredie-Wedie’ and their correspondence was marked by lots of baby talk (‘vewy angwy’, ‘your own little David is cwying so hard inside’) and dirty jokes.
A petite, elegant, loyal, discreet woman with a good sense of humour, she was seen by the Duke’s friends as a good influence on him. Freda only learnt that she had been dropped as a royal favourite when the Buckingham Palace switchboard refused to put calls through, but what most hurt her was the behaviour to her two daughters Penelope and Angela, as he ‘had been like a father to them’. As she later told the author Caroline Blackwood:
They adored him. But once he met the Duchess, they never heard from him again . . . The Duke did something that really shocked me. It was so petty and cruel that it really hurt me . . . He had arranged for one of my daughters who was quite small at the time to receive a pearl from a jeweller every time she had a birthday . . . The idea was that she would have a necklace by the time that she was grown up . . . The moment he met the Duchess he cancelled the order with the jeweller! I thought it was really shocking that the Duke, who had more jewellery than anyone in the world, would take away a tiny pearl necklace from a child.11
Ward’s position as royal mistress was taken by the former actress Thelma Furness, then married to the shipping magnate Viscount Furness. In 1934, she told her friend Wallis to look after ‘the little man’ and the rest is history.
Along the way there were many affairs, especially on the world tours he made after the First World War.12 There have even been claims of illegitimate children, including with a French seamstress Marie-Leonie Graftieaux (Marcelle Dormoy), which produced a son Pierre-Edouard (1916–94).13 Frederick Evans, born in 1918, claims that his concert pianist mother, Lillian Bartlett, had an affair with the Prince, that his birth was registered as the son of a Welsh miner, James Evans, and that she told the Prince of the boy and he responded with financial support.14
According to Peter Macdonald, who heard the story from his grandfather, in 1920, whilst staying at the Dunedin Club on his New Zealand tour, the Prince impregnated a servant who went on to have a son ‘who was paid a remittance from London . . . his nickname in Dunedin was King . . . the King would strut around town and he had a great resemblance to the Prince of Wales’s father, as he wore similar clothes and wore the royal beard.’15
There are also rumours that Edwina Drummond, born in April 1920, was fathered by the Prince of Wales, her godfather, who was a regular visitor to her family home Pitsford Hall, outside Northampton, where he rode with the Pytchley Hunt. Wilf Harris, then a choirboy at the village church, recalls the Prince’s visits. ‘We all knew he was fond of horses and her [Mrs Drummond].’ Many in the village, he said, believed the Prince was having an affair with Kathleen Drummond and was the father of her third daughter, Edwina. ‘No doubt about it,’ said Harris.16
Another local, a retired policeman in Northamptonshire, agrees. His mother was an employee at Pitsford Hall and he has been left in no doubt by the stories handed down to him. ‘Edwina was the prince’s daughter,’ he said. ‘Everyone knew she was different.’ Her father George Drummond is supposed to have caught his wife Kathleen with the Prince of Wales in a compromising situation in the stables and said, ‘Sir, I will share my wine and horses with any man, but I will share my wife with no man!’
Drummond’s second wife, Honora, claimed that whereas Edwina’s three sisters inherited their father’s aquiline nose, Edwina had a turned up nose like the Prince. In 1937, whilst at finishing school in Germany, she saw the Prince on his visit to Hitler. The links between the two families continued with George VI becoming godfather to Drummond’s son George from his second marriage and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret learning to ride at Pitsford. Edwina later married Eric Mirville, who had served in the French Foreign Legion, and moved to Ireland where she died in the 1980s.17
A more convincing case can be made for the actor Timothy Seely (born 10 June 1935), whose mother, Vera, was the sister of Freda Dudley Ward. The Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, had been best man at Vera’s wedding to Jimmy Seely in 1925 and was godfather to Tim’s sister Elizma. The Prince and Jimmy Seely had become friends on the hunting field and the Prince often stayed with the Seelys in Nottinghamshire. The Seely family later played down the story, which was first revealed by the author John Parker, and refused to talk to the author about it, but after the Duke’s death, Seely was contacted by the Duke’s lawyers.18
‘Over the years various authors/reporters have contacted Tim for interviews/articles, but the response was always the same, he is not interested,’ his wife Camilla said firmly. ‘He is immensely discreet . . . We would not wish to be even a small part of yet more unworthy stories concerning The Royal Family.’19
* * *
The Windsors continued to be in limbo. Chips Channon wrote in his diary in March 1938:
Disturbing news of the Windsors; they dine alone night after night, ignored, snubbed by the French, and neglected by the English. The Duke of Windsor is, of course, very pro-German; he maintains that had he been on the throne, the German coup in Austria could never have happened. ‘I should have appealed personally to Hitler,’ he said pathetically to Kitty Brownlow. He is so lonely, so bored.20
The journalist Collin Brooks, running into the couple at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo that month, provides a portrait of them at the time:
Leading a little knot of people through the bowing functionaries came a small, tight-lipped, dark-haired woman, very regal in her carriage, followed by two nondescripts and then by a miniature of a man with blond hair, a very red face, and the general demeanour of a happy grocer’s boy. It was the Duke of Windsor. To my eye he looked tanned and well and far more composed than when I last saw him. There was no fiddling with the tie, his hands were thrust in his trouser pockets. She was the focal point of the little party, not he. Her face has become palpably harder – she is the creature of hard lines altogether, the dark hair parted and smoothed down like the painted hair of a Dutch doll, the line of the mouth, hard, the eyes hard, the severe black dress cut in hard lines.21
In May 1938, the Windsors found their summer villa, taking a ten-year lease on the Château de la Croë, situated on the Cap d’Antibes peninsula, from the widow of British newspaper proprietor Sir Pomeroy Burton. Built in the early 1930s, it became known as ‘Chateau des Rois’, as it was successively occupied by the Windsors, King Leopold III of Belgium, and Queen Marie Jose of Italy.22
A three-storey, gleaming white villa with green shutters and matching awnings, behind high walls and hedges, it was set in twelve acres of garden and woodland, with fir, pine, yew, eucalyptus and cypress trees, reached by a narrow winding road from the port. It included a tennis court, servants’ quarters, greenhouses, garages, and on either side of the entrance gate was a small lodge that provided accommodation for the staff.
The house was built round a huge central hall, dominated by the Duke’s red and gold Order of Garter banner, which ran the full depth of the house, off which led large rooms with 25-foot-high ceilings and tall, mirrored doors. On the right of the hall was the dining room, which could seat twenty-four and where hung Alfred Munnings’ The Prince of Wales on Forest Witch, whilst on the left was a drawing room and panelled library.
Everything had been decorated by their friend Elsie Mendl in Buckingham Palace colours of white, red and gold. Dining chairs were of red leather with black and gold backs, the red and white library was dominated by a huge portrait of Queen Mary over the marble fireplace, and there was a Steinway grand piano at which the Duke would play – when the Duchess was absent. There were mirrors over the fireplaces and on many doors – a mark of Wallis’s style – and glass, china, furniture and linen from Fort Belvedere and York House.
A marble staircase twisted to the first-floor gallery and their bedrooms: Wallis’s bedroom decorated with trompe-l’oeil images symbolising her past – one was a pack of cards with a king of hearts falling down – in soft pink and apricot, his in scarlet and beige. Wallis’s bathroom was in scarlet and black and boasted a stone tub, gilded, and with a swan’s neck at each end.
There were two guest rooms – the Rose Room and the Venetian Room in red and gold, with two striking antique beds and a bow-fronted Venetian chest, and then four more guest rooms on the second floor – the Directoire, the Blue Room, the Wedgewood and the Toile de Jouy – each with a pair of antique beds, with rugs, curtains, bed covers, cushions, towels and even stationery in matching colours.
Atop the villa was a penthouse, reached by a lift, which the Duke called ‘The Belvedere’, a mixture of office, private sitting room and Fleet Admiral’s quarters, where a telescope allowed him to look out to sea. It was decorated with a ship’s chronometer, which had belonged to George V, ship’s brass bell and a barometer, together with golf and hunting trophies, photographs of his parents and about half a dozen pictures of Wallis.
‘Two low built-in shelves of unvarnished oak held the Duke’s collection of tiny toys and mementos – the result of a life-long hobby,’ remembered Dina Hood, who worked as the Duke’s secretary in this period:
Many of the little figures were amusing; some were rather touching, like the little set of doll’s house furniture in black and gold, which included a grandfather clock, a screen and a writing desk with a bookcase above it. There was a tiny toy tea service on a tray, a miniature table with a cocktail shaker and glasses on it, and a minute bookcase full of books. One shelf was entirely devoted to toy animals: a dog in a kennel and a dog on a chair, two funny little pigs, a small white frog and a tiny green hedgehog with pink quills.23
Outside the house was a crescent-shaped terrace with six columns facing the sea. Steps down the cliff led to the sea where a swimming pool was cut into the rocks and there were two small pavilions for changing, with large red-and-white awnings. Above them flew the Prince of Wales’s standard.
The Windsors employed sixteen servants, including two chauffeurs, a butler and a famous French chef, Pinaudier, all dressed in a personal livery designed by the Duke of scarlet coats with gold cuffs for formal occasions and black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats during the day. There were lightweight dress suits of pale grey alpaca for summer, whilst in Paris they wore black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats with silver buttons and gold-collared scarlet waistcoats for formal dinners.
WE was entwined with the Duke’s coronet on the silver buttons of the grey alpaca livery worn by the butler and footmen and on everything from the uniforms, writing paper, menu cards, bed linen to the lifebuoys hanging by the pool. Most nights they dined out of doors at a W-shaped table on the terrace overlooking the sea with elaborate meals, such as melon with tomato ice, and eggs in crab sauce. A hairdresser came daily, a manicurist twice a week.
Royal protocol was insisted on, with guests bowing or curtseying to both Windsors on first seeing them in the morning, whilst the Duke’s secretary had to stand whilst she took dictation. Wallis referred to her husband as ‘the Dook’ and she was always ‘Your Royal Highness’. This fantasy sustained their relationship. Everything, in short, was an attempt to recreate the life they had lost.
‘I sat next to the Duchess. He sat opposite. They called each other “darling” a great deal. I called him “Your Royal Highness” a great deal and “Sir” the whole time. I called her “Duchess”,’ wrote Harold Nicolson to his wife, after dining with the Windsors at Somerset Maugham’s house in August 1938:
One cannot get away from his glamour and his charm and his sadness, though, I must say, he seemed gay enough. They have a villa here and a yacht, and go round and round. He digs in the garden. But it is pathetic the way he is sensitive about her. It was quite clear to me from what she said that she hopes to get back to England. When I asked her why she didn’t get a house of her own somewhere, she said, ‘One never knows what may happen. I don’t want to spend all my life in exile.’24
There were recurrent attempts by the Palace during this period to try and give the Windsors some position. ‘Both the King and the Queen have talked to me recently about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and have mentioned the feeling of bitterness which they are understood to feel towards their majesties and the other members of the royal family,’ Lord Halifax wrote to Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, on 3 May 1938. ‘They suggested it might be a good move, and do something to remove some of this feeling, if the Duke and Duchess were to be asked to dine on some suitable occasion at the embassy.’25
But the concern remained that the Windsors might upstage the new king. In July 1938, when George VI and Elizabeth paid a state visit to France, the Windsors diplomatically chartered a 200-ton motor yacht for six weeks and cruised down the west coast of Italy with Herman and Katherine Rogers, though they were dissuaded by the Foreign Office from staying with Wallis’s friend, the architect Georges Sebastian, in Italian-dominated Tunisia.
‘You will remember how miserable I was when you informed me of your intended marriage and abdication and how I implored you not to do so for our sake and the sake of the country. You did not seem able to take any point of view but your own’, wrote Queen Mary to her son in July, adding, ‘My feelings for you as your Mother remain the same, and our being parted and the cause of it, grieve me beyond words. After all, all my life I have put my Country before everything else, and I simply cannot change now.’26
But relations within the family remained strained, not helped by the mutual antipathy between the new Queen Elizabeth, whom Wallis called ‘Cookie’, and Wallis, whom Elizabeth could never go beyond calling ‘That Woman’.
At the end of August, Monckton was summoned to Balmoral, joining Neville Chamberlain, who had succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, to discuss a possible visit of the Duke to Britain in November 1938. Chamberlain wanted him ‘to be treated as soon as possible as a younger brother of the King, who could take some of the royal functions off his brother’s hands,’ recorded Lord Birkenhead in his life of Monckton, which was based on private papers. The King ‘was not fundamentally against the Prime Minister’s view’, but the Queen was against giving him ‘any effective sphere of work’ on the grounds he was a threat to her husband, who was ‘less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please.’27
The discussions rumbled on throughout the autumn, with no change of attitude by the Royal Family and growing concerns that the Duke might become a rallying point for Mosley’s fascists and other organisations.28 ‘I have been warned in the most emphatic terms . . . that such a visit . . . would evoke strong protest and controversy,’ wrote Chamberlain to the Duke, reporting on public opinion towards a Windsor visit in spring 1938. He had received almost 200 letters and ‘of these letters, over 90 per cent, in one way or another, express opinions adverse to the proposal.’29
This was supported by a Special Branch report. ‘It is openly stated in circles connected with the Press that the Duke of Windsor has been in touch with certain newspaper proprietors with the object of starting a publicity campaign in this country, in order to create an atmosphere favourable to the return of himself and the Duchess of Windsor.’30
It was clear the Windsors were to be kept out of Britain.
1 The equivalent today would be about $550.
2 Michael Bloch, Secret File, pp. 124–5.
3 It is now a luxury private hospital. There had been rumours they would take the Château de Grosbois, which Napoleon had given to Marshal Berthier, but Wallis thought it ‘too royal’. New York Times, 20 February 1938.
4 Constance Coolidge diary, supplied by Andrea Lynn, but available at reel 5, Crowninshield-Magnus papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
5 Constance Coolidge diary, 23 March 1938. This was a different stalker from the one in chapter 5.
6 Constance Coolidge diary, 26 March 1938.
7 Charles Higham, In and Out of Hollywood (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) p. 279.
8 It was the chateau, Villa Leopolda, built for King Leopold of the Belgians and then owned by the American architect Ogden Codman. Later owners included Gianni Agnelli and Edmond and Lily Saffra. It is regarded as the most expensive property in the world.
9 Coolidge diary, 5 April 1938. The inference was that Wallis’s suspicions about Kitty Rothschild were true. The Prefect of Police was Roger Langeron.
10 In and Out, p. 279.
11 Caroline Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess (Macmillan, 1995), p. 211.
12 One was an affair with Pinna Cruger, the actress wife of a New York haberdashery millionaire, on a trip to the United States in 1924, whilst travelling as Lord Renfrew.
13 Pierre’s son makes the case in L’homme qui aurait dû être roi: L’incroyable récit du petit-fils caché d’Edouard VIII by Francois Graftieaux with Jean Siccardi, and Helen Grosso (Cherche Mido, 2016). A British version of the story is The King’s Son: The True Story of the Duke of Windsor’s Only Son by J.J. Barrie (privately published, 2020).
14 The story was optioned for film by Todd Allen.
15 Peter Macdonald to the author, 25 February 2021.
16 Sunday Times, 11 July 1999.
17 Sunday Times, 11 July 1999.
18 Anthony Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards: Fact And Fiction 1714–1936 (Society of Genealogists, 2009), p. 398, and John Parker, King of Fools (St Martins, 1988), pp. 71–2. Seely contributed a foreword to the latter. Family members have suggested that it was actually Elizma who was the Duke’s child.
19 Camilla Seely to author, 25 August 2020.
20 26 March 1938, Simon Heffer, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918–38 (Hutchinson, 2021), p. 846.
21 27 March 1938, N.J. Crowson, Fleet Street, Press Barons & Politics: The Journals of Collin Brooks (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 202–3.
22 The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis owned the chateau from 1950 to 1957, selling it after his wife, Athina Livanos, found him in bed with her friend, the socialite Jeanne Rhinelander. The house was then acquired by Onassis’s brother-in-law and business rival Stavros Niarchos, who bought it for his wife, Eugenia Livanos, Athina’s sister. Since 2001 it has been owned by the Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, who is believed to have spent £30 million restoring the chateau.
23 Dina Wells Hood, Working for the Windsors (Wingate, 1957), p. 61.
24 5 August 1938, Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Letters and Diaries 1930–1939 (William Collins, 1966), pp. 351–2.
25 F0 800/326, TNA.
26 James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary (Allen & Unwin, 1959), p. 575.
27 Birkenhead, p. 169.
28 In June 1938, Henchmen of Honour founded by a retired barrister Robert Elton had unsuccessfully tried to have the Abdication Act repealed and ‘Friends of the Duke of Windsor in America’ had begun a campaign to ‘cut short the oppression against him and restore him to rightful, useful place among the nations.’ Sunday Dispatch, 8 January 1939.
29 Monckton Trustees, Box 16, folio 214, Balliol College.
30 5 January 1939, MEPO 10/35, TNA.