Relationships
‘The Duchess rather baffled me,’ remembered her wartime PR spokesman, René MacColl. ‘I was never at my ease with her. What causes one human being to fall madly in love with another is occasionally clear to third persons. More often it remains a mystery to the onlooker. So far as I was concerned, it was emphatically a mystery in this case.’1
It is a question that has continued to intrigue. Was the Windsors’ relationship totally harmonious or did the couple feel they had to pretend to live out the love story that everyone wanted, even if it was not true?
‘I am well aware that there are still some people in the world who go on hoping our marriage will break up. And to them I say, Give up hope, because David and I are happy and have been happy for twenty-four years, and that’s the way it will continue to be,’ Wallis told McCall’s magazine in 1961:
For my part, I have given my husband every ounce of my affection, something he never had a great deal of in his bachelor’s life. Notice, I use the word ‘affection’. I believe it is an element apart from love, the deep bond one assumes as a part of marriage. You may know the phrase ‘tender loving care’; it means much the same thing. It means doing the things that uphold a man’s confidence in himself, creating an atmosphere of warmth and interest, of taking his mind off his worries.2
Is that true? Certainly the Duke remained besotted with her all his life. Lord Birkenhead was later to write:
No one will ever really understand the story of the King’s life . . . who does not appreciate . . . the intensity and depth of his devotion to Mrs Simpson. To him she was the perfect woman. She insisted that he be at his best and do his best at all times, and he regarded her as his inspiration. It is a great mistake to imagine that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship, and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual comradeship . . . He felt that he and Mrs Simpson were made for each other and that there was no other honest way of meeting the situation than marrying her.3
Winston Churchill noticed how:
He delighted in her company, and found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who knew him well and watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul. This experience which happens to a great many people in the flower of youth came late in life to him, and was all the more precious and compulsive for that fact.4
The evidence for her affection for him is less apparent. Wallis had enjoyed the status and social contact that her relationship with the Prince of Wales brought, but it is doubtful that she was ever in love with him, or she fully considered the implications of the relationship. After George V died, she suddenly found herself involved in events she could not control. This included a relationship with a man so obsessed with her that he was prepared to commit suicide if she would not stay with him, and even to forsake the throne. By the time she wished to extricate herself from the relationship, she was stuck.
As far back as the cruise on the Nahlin in August 1936, Diana Cooper had noticed that Wallis did not want to be left alone with the King. She wrote in her diary: ‘The truth is she’s bored stiff with him, and her picking on him and her coldness towards him far from policy are irritation and boredom.’5
One area of hurt throughout their relationship was her status and how she was treated. It began as soon as he abdicated, with long telephone calls to Austria about finances and status, and continued throughout the thirty-five years they were married, much of her venom directed against his family.
‘But of course her great mischief was that she went at him morning, noon and night and right up to one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning, steaming up against his family,’ remembered Kenneth de Courcy. ‘She went on and on and on and on.’6
‘The duchess was a complicated person – cold, mean-spirited, a bully and a sadist,’ observed Dr Gaea Leinhardt, stepdaughter of Wallis’s ghost writer, Cleveland Amory. ‘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.’7
Yet it some ways it was Wallis’s very dominant manner that most appealed to the Duke. Writing to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward in January 1920, he had told her:
You know you ought to be really foul to me sometimes swerties & curse & be cruel; it would do me worlds of good & bring me to my right senses!! I think I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt & soft. I feel that’s what’s the matter with me.8
There was certainly a strong masochist and Dom/sub aspect to the couple’s relationship, both sexually and in everyday life. ‘She was harsh, dominating, often abominably rude,’ wrote Philip Ziegler in the official life. ‘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.’9 ‘She dominated the Duke but he did not just put up with it, he actually liked it,’ remembered Cleveland Amory.10
Mona Eldridge, who met the Windsors on numerous occasions whilst working for the Woolworth heiress and socialite Barbara Hutton, later wrote:
Barbara also believed that Wallis had a sense of having been cheated by life. At times she would sound bitter and implied that her husband had failed her, that he had not kept his promise. She had a way of denigrating him by reminding him that he had let her down again. People on her staff told me how she would reprimand the Duke like a harsh mother with a naughty child, not infrequently reducing him to tears. Paradoxically, this only caused him to cling more tightly to her.11
Charles Murphy remembered on one occasion a journalist called on their Paris home to collect a manuscript from the Duke:
to hear the Duchess rant at him for littering the dinner table with his papers: ‘I’ve got twenty guests dining here in two hours! Why didn’t you make this mess somewhere else?’ The dining room was his only office and he had no other choice, replying, and the journalist never forgot his exact words, ‘Darling, are you going to send me to bed in tears again tonight?’12
‘He was like a child in her hands,’ Lady Alexandra Metcalfe told Cleveland Amory. ‘Poor little man, he was given hell; it was a stranglehold she had over him.’13 ‘He never had any real mothering, she never had any children,’ remembered Kenneth de Courcy. ‘Both needed each other.’14
Weak and below average intelligence, the Duke needed a woman to dominate him with that abjectness which former girlfriends had found so disconcerting. The result was that he was completely dependent on his wife.
In many ways the Duke had never properly grown up physically or emotionally. Childhood mumps may have led to a hormonal imbalance. Alan Lascelles wrote in his diary:
Wise old Dawson of Penn told me several times that he was convinced that EP’s moral development (not physical) had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence, and that wld (sic) account for this limitation. An outward symptom of such arrestation, D of P wold (sic) say, was the absence of hair on the face of the subject. EP only had to shave about once a week.15
Frank Giles, showering with the Duke in 1940 after a game of golf, noticed that ‘he had absolutely no hair on his body, even in the places where one would most expect it to be.’16
The Duke worshipped his wife, trusted her, felt secure with her and was restless when she was not there. ‘When she was present, he watched her every movement, listened to her every word and responded to every inflection in her voice,’ remembered Mona Eldridge. ‘He often said that nothing was too good for her.’17
‘His wife was constantly in his thoughts,’ later wrote Dina Hood. ‘If he went out alone he looked for her the moment he returned home. If she went out without him and remained away for any length of time, he became nervous and preoccupied.’18 She added, ‘I have seen him in the middle of a haircut in his dressing room get up and run to his wife, leaving his astonished hairdresser agape.’19 ‘If he was in a room and she came in, the moment she came in the room he became vivacious, he became happy, he became full of life, it was just amazing,’ recollected Dudley Forwood.20
‘I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage by the other to so remarkable a degree,’ Frank Giles remembered. ‘He seemed to revel in being with the Duchess, in sunning himself in her smile, in admiring her appearance, in listening to her conversation.’21
‘I have never known any person so totally possessed by the personality of another,’ wrote Kenneth de Courcy:
He seemed to me to retain no individuality at all whenever she was present and when we were alone he constantly jumps up looking for her or asking on the house telephone where she was. If she was away he was restless and unhappy. Once in the South of France, when I was staying with my mother and the Duchess was in Paris, the Duke was at a total loss and I was asked to dinner on three successive evenings . . . Did she love the Duke of Windsor? I am afraid the sad answer is that she did not. She admires him, she likes him, but it never went further and I think he knew it and it was that which made him restless and induced him to concede his very innermost person to her authority in the hope that love would come . . . She never learnt to love the Duke and, in my opinion, she never ever experienced love at all for anyone.22
Given the speculation over their relationship, what was the nature of the couple’s sex life? The FBI reported, after interviewing Father Odo, that Wallis had:
told certain individuals that the Duke is impotent and that although he had tried sexual intercourse with numerous women, they had been unsuccessful in satisfying his passions. According to the story related by Father Odo, the Duchess in her own inimitable and unique manner has been the only woman who had been able to satisfactorily gratify the Duke’s sexual desires.23
Count Edward ‘Eddie’ Bismarck told Gore Vidal ‘that Wallis’s sexual hold over the duke was that only she knew how to control his premature ejaculation.’24
‘The Prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform,’ Lady Gladwyn, wife of the former British ambassador in Paris, told Hugo Vickers:
‘It was all over before it began – she called it a hairpin reaction.’ She said that the Duchess coped with it. I commented, ‘She was meant to have learned special ways in China.’ ‘There was nothing Chinese about it,’ said Lady Gladwyn. ‘It was what they call oral sex.’25
What hung over Wallis was the supposed existence of ‘The China Dossier’ relating to her activities in China, mainly sexual but also political, one of three reports supposedly gathered by the British Intelligence Services and shown to King George V in 1935. It was said that members of the Government and Royal Household had seen it, but its details remain vague. Tommy Dugdale, then parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister Stanley Baldwin, told Kenneth de Courcy that the ‘Intelligence Service had a case against Mrs Simpson which, if we could but read it, would entirely change our attitude.’26
Kenneth de Courcy was told about it by Sir John Coke, Queen Mary’s equerry, in the 1950s. He noted in a memo that:
he has read the secret dossier on the Duchess of Windsor, some details of which he told me and said he had recommended Churchill. He says that her personal record is so shocking that no English gentleman could properly advise Queen Mary ever to receive her or in any way relent. He assures me of such facts and challenges me to say whether, having heard such facts, I could tell him that he should advise Queen Mary to relent. I replied that if the allegations were true, I could not.27
De Courcy remembered parts of the dossier including – ‘that she’d got power over Count Charlot amongst other people in that way, and had an illegitimate child by Charlot,28 and abortion . . . that’s why she had this internal problem all her life.’29
The existence of the China dossier has never been proven. Even so, Dudley Forwood told Charles Higham in 1987:
The techniques Wallis discovered in China did not entirely overcome the Prince’s extreme lack of virility. It is doubtful whether he and Wallis ever actually had sexual intercourse in the normal sense of the word. However, she did manage to give him relief. He had always been a repressed foot fetishist, and she discovered this and indulged the perversity completely. They also, at his request, became involved in elaborate erotic games. These included nanny-child scenes: he wore diapers; she was the master. She was dominant, he happily submissive.30
Nicky Haslam agrees about the infantilism. ‘I mean nappies,’ he says. ‘They were all sexually screwed up by Queen Mary. Potty Gloucester [the Duke’s brother] liked wearing Queen Mary’s clothes, though he wasn’t gay. The Duke was certainly gay. I know that for a fact.’31
Queen Mary, the last royal to believe in the divine right of kings, had never intervened in the callous bullying that George V meted out to his children. ‘Of course, none of them came up to George V for horrors,’ says Diana Mosley. ‘There’s a ghastly photograph in my book where they’re being drilled by their father and they’re all in floods. Oh, I mean, too awful.’ ‘Being treated as a little boy, given orders, and punished when naughty,’ Michael Bloch gathered from his sources, were to the Duke’s taste.32
Charles Wilson, whose mother was married to Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, was told by her that:
Edward gained pleasure from being beaten by Wallis who delivered the strokes with her own small whip . . . He needed the stimulus, I think in order to perform in the normal manner – something with which he had great difficulty in earlier relationships . . . It was at a country house party where the then Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson were guests that the Prince’s private detective came to Ulick one morning with some worrying discoveries. He produced a pair of the Prince’s underpants striped with caked blood and a small whip that he found in Mrs Simpson’s underwear drawer . . . There is no doubt that Edward loved Wallis, but he was frightened of her – this she was quick to exploit.33
In 2012, Scotty Bowers, a Hollywood barman, published his memoirs, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, in which he claimed he had sexually procured men and women for numerous Hollywood stars from 1946. Amongst his clients were Sir Cecil Beaton, who wrote of Bowers in his published diaries, Noël Coward, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Chapter Fourteen in the book, ‘A Royal Affair’, is devoted to the couple, claiming that ‘during the late forties and early fifties’ Cecil Beaton had introduced them to Bowers, saying the Duke was ‘a classic example of a bisexual man’, that ‘Wallis Simpson shared similar bisexual urges . . . but essentially, he was gay and she was a dyke’. According to Bowers, ‘he and I slipped into the guesthouse at the bottom end of the large garden, stripped off, and began making out. Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro.’34
Over the next few days, Bowers writes that he supplied ‘a nice young guy for Eddy and a pretty dark-haired girl for Wally. Each time I sent somebody different. The royal couple enjoyed variety . . .’ Bowers wrote that Wallis ‘was not in any way inhibited. She was very fond of dark-haired women, usually those with hair colour similar to her own . . . Wally really knew what she was doing. She did it in style and with intense passion.’35
Amongst those who confirmed that Bowers’ stories were true were Gore Vidal, who spoke at the book launch, film director John Schlesinger, and the novelist Dominick Dunne. The film director, Lionel Friedberg, who ghosted Full Service, spent 150 hours with Scotty over several months, constantly testing him for accuracy. ‘Not once did he deviate from what he had said before. He had a photographic memory down to remembering number plates from years before . . . I don’t think he could tell a lie . . . I don’t doubt that everything he said about the Windsors was true.’36
A documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, directed by Matt Tyrnauer, was released in 2017. Tyrnauer, who told me he interviewed Bowers on and off camera over a three-year period, confirms that his independent reporting lined up with the information in Friedburg’s earlier interviews. Additionally, Tyrnauer interviewed more than forty friends and associates of Bowers, including men who were sex workers at Bowers’ gas station in the 1950s, all of whom corroborated Bowers. Friedberg’s view about Bowers’ veracity:
Everything I put in the movie checks out – either in printed documents, books, manuscripts, diaries, newspaper clips, etc. It all matches up. Details regarding homes and home addresses and architectural features of homes he was in that he could not have possibly have known unless he was in the houses. Also sources who were with him at the time who confirmed events. Obviously I could not prove everything he told me, but that would have been beyond the scope of my project. Whenever I went to check something, it panned out, however.37
* * *
‘My husband gave up everything for me; if everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me,’ Wallis told Elsa Maxwell. ‘That’s my chief responsibility.’38 The result was that Wallis spent a fortune on her appearance and clothes.
The Duchess was not conventionally good-looking with a prominent jaw and outsized hands, but she ate carefully – under the guidance of the nutritionist Gayelord Hauser – with the result at 5 foot 4 inches, she rarely weighed over 100 lbs, with measurements of 34 inch bust, 22 inch waist and 34 inch hips.39
Aline Romanones remembered how her shoes were always shined underneath, on the instep and inside the heel, as they could be seen when the legs were crossed, and that she always carried an extra pair of white gloves in her bag: ‘One pair to go, one pair to come back.’40
In the 1930s, her favourite designers were Mainbocher and Schiaparelli, by the 1950s she had switched to Dior, Balenciaga and Chanel, and she even experimented with pants suits in the 1950s and miniskirts in the 1960s. She made the short evening dress fashionable as well as, because of her flat chest, high-necked evening gowns.
This all came at a great cost. ‘The Duchess bought clothes from several couturiers and she would beat the prices down on the pretext that she would advertise the clothes she wore,’ remembered Mona Eldridge. ‘Both she and the Duke were notorious for their stinginess, resorting to all sorts of shameless deceits to avoid paying bills. In the case of the Duke, it was pathological.’41
During the 1950s, staff were used to increasingly angry letters and calls from unpaid suppliers, not least the jewellery houses Cartier and Van Cleef. The result was that a deal was struck that Wallis would borrow jewels for public events as long as the name of the designer was leaked to the Press and they were returned promptly.
The Windsors only kept to the first part of the bargain – they borrowed, but didn’t return. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to identify which items in the collection were paid for and which were not. A wholesale clear-out of all correspondence at the time of the Duchess’s death in 1986 ensured that we shall never know the full extent of this dishonesty. However, one former servant told me grimly: ‘Rarely was anything ever handed back.42
Courtney de Espil, married to Wallis’s former lover Felipe de Espil, had presciently written at the time of the Abdication:
Today in my humble opinion, England must feel luckier to be rid of a man so weak, this Jekyll and Hyde king of so little inner stability and yet such outward charm . . . They have ahead of them years in which to decide where to live. They will have no country and he ‘no job’. Can any love exist or be nourished on this slender fare? . . . For Edward is no longer a king. In her eyes he can only be a poor weak man who depends on her now, who has given away his all. Can they dance every night at a different cabaret to keep life gay?43
The problem for the Windsors was that they were superficial people with little sense of obligation and few interests. When pressed, a friend of Wallis’s came up with ‘gossip . . . and marvellous housekeeping’. Wallis herself said that her talent was ‘getting people to talk’.
The art historian John Richardson says of her:
She was a society rattle, straight out of Thackeray, in a way. She must have been like one of those Regency ladies around George IV, prattling away in this hideous voice. Funny. A marvellous maîtresse de maison. The food was superb, and she got it right – it wasn’t too overdone. The place always looked very attractive – wonderful flowers and modern American touches. You could be sure that cocktails were superb. But the conversation was idiotic.44
‘The Duke and Duchess led totally self-centred lives; there was no consideration for anything but the gratification of their own needs,’ according to Mona Eldridge. ‘The life they led was borne out of disappointment, frustration and unfulfilled expectations.’45
‘It was a really empty life but it was what they enjoyed,’ noted John Utter. ‘She loved anything to do with a party. They were wretched personalities, completely egocentric.’46
Their ambitions were partially satisfied by creating beautiful homes and an extensive social life with equally shallow people, but there was a restlessness as they relentlessly entertained, partied, travelled as if escaping from something – each other, the past, responsibility. Certainly both were escaping from unhappy childhoods – his emotionally barren, hers in terms of wealth and status.
Contrary to a great love story, Wallis had been emotionally blackmailed into marriage and had stuck with it because she had no other option. She had been attracted to him as Prince of Wales and King, but that attraction had waned after he had given up his throne, leading to a mixture of guilt, pity, dissatisfaction, boredom and irritation. The affairs, the constant shopping, the travel and entertaining were an attempt to provide some stimulation in a life with little meaning and with a man she did not love.
1 MacColl, pp. 123–4.
2 McCall’s magazine, June 1961.
3 Birkenhead, pp. 125–6.
4 Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston Churchill: Prophet of Truth, Vol. 5 (Heinemann, 1976), p. 810.
5 ‘The Nahlin’, p. 30, DUFC 2/17, Churchill College Archives.
6 Kenneth de Courcy, p. 6, BREN 2/2/5, Churchill College Archives.
7 Morton, Wallis in Love, pp. 318–19.
8 Rupert Godfrey, Letters from a Prince (Little, Brown, 1998), p. 245.
9 Ziegler, Shore to Shore, p. 237.
10 Amory, Best Cat Ever, p. 142
11 Eldridge, pp. 86–7.
12 Bryan and Murphy, p. 478.
13 ‘TV Tale of Two Windsors’, New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1979.
14 ‘The Windsor Papers’, Kenneth de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.
15 LASL 8/8, Churchill College Archives. Before coming to the throne, the Duke signed himself ‘Edward Princeps’, or EP. His property in Alberta was known as the EP ranch.
16 Sundry Times, p. 24, and Frank Giles, p. 26, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.
17 Eldridge, p. 89.
18 Hood, p. 35.
19 Hood, p. 36.
20 Forwood, p. 5, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.
21 Martin, p. 424.
22 ‘The Windsor Papers’, de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.
23 FBI file, HQ 65-31113.
24 Vidal, p. 208.
25 Hugo Vickers unpublished diary, 2 June 1982, Vickers, Behind Closed Doors, p. 310.
26 Kenneth de Courcy to Duke of Windsor, 27 September 1951, de Courcy Papers, Hoover Institute.
27 10 March 1951, Box 3, Folder 4, de Courcy Papers, Hoover Institute.
28 Philip Ziegler is quoted that she ‘had a child by Count Ciano (later Mussolini’s son-in-law)’, James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
29 Kenneth de Courcy, p. 56, BREN 2/2/5, Churchill College Archives.
30 Higham, Wallis (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), p. 72.
31 ‘The Oddest Couple’, James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003. Confirmed in email by Nicky Haslam to author, 11 April 2021.
32 James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
33 ‘Dark Side of the Great Love Story’, Sunday Express, January 1994, quoted Gwynne Thomas, King, Pawn or Black Knight (Mainstream, 1995), pp. 38–9.
34 Scotty Bowers, ‘A Royal Affair’, Full Service (Grove Press, 2013).
35 Bowers, ‘A Royal Affair’, Full Service.
36 Interview with Lionel Friedberg, 13 April 2021.
37 Matt Tyrnauer, emails to author, 1 and 2 May 2020.
38 Elsa Maxwell, RSVP: Elsa Maxwell’s Own Story (Little, Brown, 1954), p. 301.
39 Mosley, Duchess of Windsor, p. 188.
40 Countess of Romanones, ‘The Dear Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986.
41 Eldridge, p. 86.
42 Christopher Wilson, Daily Mail, 2 December 2010.
43 de Espil, p. 696, Box 9, Folders 1–3, Library of Congress.
44 James Fox, Vanity Fair, September 2003.
45 Eldridge, p. 87.
46 David Pryce-Jones, ‘TV Tale of Two Windsors’, New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1979.