SHE was the brash, flirtatious US socialite who scandalised English society in
the 1930s.
Wallis Simpson has become one of the most demonised women in British history
after King Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry her in 1936 – but
she is also one of the most fascinating.
Seventy-five years on, Wallis has cropped up in The King’s Speech and now
Madonna has written and directed new movie W.E. about her.
And a new book by biographer Anne Sebba sheds fresh light on the Duchess of
Windsor.
Here, Anne explains why it might be time for us to reconsider our opinion of
the King’s mistress.
IT’S hard to imagine a more hated woman in the 20th Century than Wallis
Simpson.
She has been accused of being a Nazi spy, gold-digging adventuress and a
prostitute who learned exotic skills in the sing-song houses and brothels of
China.
Schoolchildren in the late 1930s chanted a playground rhyme: “Hark the herald
angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King,” without a clue as to what the
words meant.
And that’s the view that has lasted until today.
Wallis Simpson was vilified as an evil seductress, a Yankee harlot who had
been through two husbands already yet who nonetheless set her sights on
luring a third – the handsome young King of England – away
from his throne.
Since she was not very beautiful and, at almost 40, no longer young, she must
have bewitched him with some extraordinary sexual techniques she learnt
while travelling, alone, in China in the 1920s. It is rumoured she perfected
a skill called the Shanghai Squeeze.
This version of the story assumes Edward was an inexperienced bachelor who had
never had a girlfriend.
In fact, by the time he hit 40, he had had dozens of girlfriends –
often older married women.
When he was on world tours his staff often despaired of getting him to arrive
at meetings on time if he could not drag himself away from the woman he had
been enjoying the night before. This year has seen an explosion of interest
in the story, partly because it’s the 75th year since the abdication –
a good time to look back before all the participants are dead.
But also there have been several radio and television programmes about Wallis,
mostly not kind.
Any Human Heart – a fictional portrayal – saw her as truly
evil while the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech has only one scene with
Wallis, but it says everything there is to know.
Wallis is wearing a sexy, backless dress and bossing Edward around –
behaviour he seems to have loved.
I think he longed for the moment of forgiveness, which probably happened later
in the bedroom.
It’s clear in that film that Wallis – the brash American who
always had a wisecrack at the ready – represented danger for other
women.
In Britain in 1936, a woman could only get a divorce by proving her
husband’s adultery. If she was an adulterer, too, the divorce would not be
allowed.
Yet women were terrified that if divorce laws were relaxed, husbands all over
the country would abandon their ill-prepared wives, very few of whom had
jobs or money.
So they resented the idea of Wallis being allowed to ditch two husbands so
easily. Not surprisingly, the Duke and Duchess of York – Edward’s
younger brother Bertie and his wife Elizabeth (our future Queen Mother),
with their perfectly dressed little girls – represented the perfect
family in contrast to Wallis, the sexually liberated, independent and
childless woman, who spent money on clothes not curtains. A home wrecker not
a home maker.
So when the frumpy Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the
stammering Bertie, George VI, it was more important than ever to insist that
Wallis must not be given royal initials – HRH.
Without them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were effectively exiled because
the Duke refused to return home and face the insult of nobody curtseying to
his non-royal wife.
In this way the new King and Queen were not threatened with constant
comparisons between a glamorous couple where the husband had charm, charisma
and a dashing smile and the wife wore impeccable couture clothes.
After the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, documents were released which revealed
not only that she loathed Wallis but how all the Royal Family thought her
“the lowest of the low” – so common that they could not
call her by her name, simply “That Woman”.
But now, that image of a cold, hard, calculating woman who schemed at being
queen until her hopes were dashed, can finally be demolished. It is clear
the reality was dramatically different and she did not want to marry Edward
at all but was trapped, unable to escape as the King threatened suicide if
she did.
According to one version, Edward slept with a loaded pistol under his
pillow while another courtier reported that he had warned he might slit his
throat if Wallis left him.
During the research for my book, I have discovered an extraordinary cache of
never-before-seen letters between Wallis and the man she was divorcing –
her second husband Ernest Simpson, a US-born shipping executive who later
became a naturalised Brit – in which it is clear he was the man she
really loved.
While waiting in Felixstowe to appear at Ipswich Assizes for the first part of
her divorce hearing she wrote to Ernest: “Give me courage… I am so lonely.”
She blamed “stuffy British minds” for the situation she was in but also told
Ernest: “I can never forgive my own country for what they have done to the
King and myself.”
It was the US Press that broke the story and Wallis received poison pen
letters and bomb threats and found herself a prisoner in her own home.
Far from being the confident woman pushing for marriage, Wallis was
terrified for her life but could not find a way out.
She missed Ernest desperately and while waiting for the second part of her
divorce to come through wrote: “I wake up in the night sometimes and think I
must be lying on that strange chaise longue and hear your footsteps coming
down the passage of the flat…
“I can’t believe that such a thing could have happened to two people who got
along so well. At least it never should have.”
Ernest offered her a deep, companionable kind of love and security which she
realised too late was what she really craved in life.
In these letters Ernest and Wallis poke fun at Edward, calling him Peter Pan
or the boy who would never grow up. Wallis calls some of his ideas “Peter
Pan plans”.
Edward was like a troublesome son for Wallis and she treated him as a bossy
mother would.
It is now clear Edward was underdeveloped – and not only physically.
Previous girlfriends had called him “the little man” implying that one
crucial part of his anatomy was small.
Wallis, it has always been said, applied the tricks she had picked up in
China to help him achieve sexual satisfaction.
As part of the recent, more sympathetic interpretation of Wallis, one theory
suggests she may have been born with some degree of disorder of sexual
development (DSD), an umbrella term which embraces a wide range of
conditions including chromosomal abnormality or perhaps having no womb. If
this is the case – and there is no proof – it would account
for her ability to lead a sexually liberated life without fear of getting
pregnant.
It also means her typical DSD personality required her to be flirtatious to
confirm that, even though she could not conceive, she was still attractive
to men.
But now there is evidence that Edward was emotionally undeveloped too and
probably not fit to be king, especially in the late 1930s when Europe faced
a battle to survive against Hitler.
The new letters reveal that Wallis not only recognised this but, far from
pushing to marry this man, she desperately tried to avoid what began to
appear a life sentence.
To the outside world, Wallis had got her man. But she was in fact weak, lonely
and terrified.
“I am very sad,” she admitted to Ernest in December 1936. And, as the handful
of guests could see, she looked anything but triumphant on her wedding day
and continued to write to Ernest.
I have yet to see the film W.E. but it will be interesting to see how Madonna,
as director, portrays Wallis, who is played by Andrea Riseborough.
Will she be a strong figure in control of her destiny? Or a vulnerable
woman who played with fire – and got burned.
