American Girl: The Wallis Simpson story, told differently
Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII.
11:35 am Feb. 17, 20127
The story of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, the man who was known, for the latter part of his life, as Edward, Duke of Windsor, is one of those tales that, even though it took place in the public eye, sifts down through generations not always accurately.
We remember it because it seems like a great love story: Edward gave up the throne of England for the love of a woman that the monarchy would not make a queen. And we remember in part because it reinforces American values; in a country whose founders deliberately rejected the entrenched formality of the monarchy, the belief in social mobility is sacred, as is the belief in second starts. We like to think a woman twice-divorced would not be shamed for it, could still do anything and be whoever she wanted to be.
So the story survives this way, with one character as the lovestruck would-be king, and the other a woman so bewitching—though not because of her beauty—that she was able to coax him off the throne.
If the story author Anne Sebba tells in her new book, That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, is true, then the narrative of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that has been passed down is very much a myth. The story Sebba tells is more like this: an emotionally and morally stunted prince who never wanted to be king becomes obsessed with a woman who—although she enjoys his attention, the jewelry, and the lifestyle—he essentially has to corner into marriage.
The trouble with writing about this particular story and this cast of characters is that much of the work that goes into it is purely interpretation of documents written or letters sent by people who knew they were on the historical record, and had an interest in curating their legacies even as they were inventing them. Still, Sebba’s interpretation is credible, and unusual.
The title of the book comes from what the royal family, their advisers, and their close circle of friends came to call Wallis Simpson, derogatorily. But throughout her life she was, in the circles she was closest to, often a form of “that woman,” someone remarkable yet always apart. She was the sort of person who always had the material—the past, the personality—to be a legend, going back to the circumstances of her birth.
Wallis had no birth certificate, nor was there a newspaper announcement of her birth, although it probably took place on June 19, 1896. She was born in a cottage at a fashionable resort that happened to sprawl across the meeting of four counties, two in Maryland, two in Pennsylvania, such that she literally came into the world on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Wallis' parents both came from distinguished families, and both had supported the Confederacy, but neither family approved of their marriage; her mother’s Warfields looked down on her father’s Montagues, who they believed to be below them. Wallis’s father died five months after she was born. She grew up in Baltimore, with her mother always dependent on the Warfield fortune, which was meted out in small, irregular amounts by Wallis' controlling uncle Sol. She went to the most prestigious preparatory school in Maryland, Oldfield’s, where she got a reputation for smoking, sneaking out, and having boyfriends. While she displayed a strong and outgoing personality that made her magnetic to some of the girls—in particular her best friend, Mary Kirk—that same disposition offended most adults, including Mary’s family.
“Some of the parents at the time believed that there was something extraordinary about Wallis and that her influence was malign,” Sebba writes.
It is a description that, if one were to substitute any number of social groups for “parents,” would accurately describe the reputation Simpson established in many places throughout her life. Just after graduation Wallis went to live in Pensacola, Florida, with her cousin Corrine, whose husband, a U.S. Navy captain, had just been appointed head of the then-new Pensacola Air Base. This sort of excitement suited Wallis, and she almost immediately fell in love with an officer at the base, Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer—known as Win—and married him.
The way Sebba tells the story is somewhat remarkable, because the book is extraordinarily detailed, yet reads easily. Quotes from any number of sources are in almost every paragraph, which makes her interpretation of the evidence all the more convincing. Yet since this is a work of popular nonfiction—certainly approachable for any reader—rather than a scholarly work, hunting down the sources and original texts does not always reward the reader. (There are footnotes and a bibliography.)
The brisk pace of Sebba's narrative, however, is rather jarringly interrupted along the way with a half dozen or so moments where she leaves aside the story and attempts to analyze the tale's main characters from a formal psychiatric perspective. It's a bizarre, though ultimately compelling strategy, even if the writing in these sections becomes somewhat clinical.
In the first she devotes a chapter to the possible sexual abnormalities that may have contributed to the ways in which Wallis approached others, and the choices she made in her life. Among these theories, the most dependable seems to be the one that originated from her biographer, Michael Bloch, who lived in her house in Paris while she was still alive and consulted with her doctors. Bloch thought she may have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which means she would have been born with an XY chromosome—genetically male—but with receptors that were insensitive to testosterone, so that she developed as female. People who have this condition are considered female by doctors, but they do not have ovaries or a uterus, and therefore cannot have children.
If true, the condition may have contributed to the development of her angular features, and Wallis’s lifelong obsession with being thin, lest it become obvious she didn’t have a waistline, and of course, that through three marriages she never had children. According to one biographer, she told her good friend Herman Rogers, who gave her away at her wedding to the Duke of Windsor, that she had never had sex with her first two husbands, nor had anyone been allowed to touch her below her “personal Mason-Dixon line.”
Nevertheless, Wallis was a talented and notorious flirt, lit up by men in a way she never was with women, so much so that Win Spencer’s sister said of her, “she could no more keep from flirting than breathing.”
Because Win was in the military the couple moved frequently; he drank heavily and was at times abusive, and it’s likely that Wallis’s flirting and failure to produce children (or perhaps have a sexual relationship of any kind) contributed to the disintegration of their marriage, but Wallis dropped the idea of pursuing a legal divorce when Win was posted to China.
“It was easier for unhappy naval wives like Wallis to keep up appearances of still being married while living alone,” Sebba writes. “Wallis was 25, and she now discovered freedom.” From this point until nearly the end of the book Wallis' life appears as a waterfall of parties and lunches and lists of names and who was having an affair with whom and where. Wallis was, for example, passed over by a man she had fallen in love with—Don Felipe Espril, first secretary at the Argentine Embassy and later ambassador—for “one of a quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby.”
Anne Sebba's book is rubbish; it is based on third hand speculation and none of Wallis or Edward's relatives have ever been interviewed for the compilation of Sebba's book and as a result it is riddled with inaccuracies, innuendo and downright fiction.
Wallis was a lifelong Democrat and a cousin of President Harry S Truman via her mother's side of the family, the Merrymans; her father was a Native American who was adopted by the Warfield family after his mother died in childbirth.
Wallis' mannish looks were 100% Native American and as anybody who ever really knew her well will tell you she had the most extraordinary deep violet eyes. Letters between her and that other violet-eyed diva Elizabeth Taylor often refer to the 'Violet Club' that the women sometimes joked about belonging to - as does Edward's private correspondence to her.
It's simply not true that she had no birth certificate, it's just one of the private documents that Sebba has not been able to gain sight of along with all the other intellectual property left by the Duke and Duchess to their heir and sole legatee - like passports, marriage licences, health documents, legal papers etc.
As for her health she suffered a lifetime of Crohn's Disease which meant she could only eat sparingly and from a limited menu; the sexual references to some sort of rogue chromosome are also rubbish and Wallis's many miscarriages are a matter of record.
Had Sebba bothered to do some proper research she would have been able to find out who formed the trust that bought and still maintains to this day the Blue Ridge Mountains, Pennsylvania house where Wallis was born along with much personal information that is glaringly missing from her speculative and tacky fictionalised account.
Sebba is also completely off the rails is about the Duke and Duchess' political affiliations; they were sent by the British Prime Minister in 1937 as official UK government envoys to talk to Adolf Hitler as part of an official British government strategy of appeasement.
The Duke was a fluent German speaker and agreed to the trip after much lobbying by the British PM; of course the trip was a disaster and their disgust of the Fuhrer is well documented in personal diaries which are the property of their sole legal heir.
This is not the French lawyer Maitre Blum, as Sebba claims, the Duke and Duchess' respective wills were filed with their life long London lawyers and never published for security reasons.
Then there are at least two documented two assassination attempts on the Duke and Duchess' lives by Hitler's hired hitmen in Spain and in France, something that has been conveniently glossed over as part of the Nazism jibe at the couple.
As for the antagonism of the British royal family to the marriage, that was pure anti-Americanism at its worst; the Duke's mother Queen Mary was convinced a solution to the Hitler problem 'lay with the crowned heads of various European royal houses' - who in the end were futile to act despite the huge groundswell of optimism over stark reality.
Edward wanted a full British-American treaty against the Nazis but was thwarted by the British Establishment whose prejudice against the 'Yanks' was rooted in misguided feeling of superiority over the former 'colonists'.
The British political classes viewed such a pact with the US as unthinkable and this was further compounded by various House of Windsor members who were appalled that a 'red Indian gal' had the gall to fancy herself as the consort of the King and Emperor; this too is well documented in private papers that Sebba has not been privileged to see.
That racism eventually came to a painful head when Wallis and her husband sued US Senator Strom Thurmond - the racist/segregationist who stood against President Truman in the 1948 Presidential election and famously lost! - for racist defamation, libel and harassment.
The couple won a substantial seven figure damages payout which took several years to collect from the old skinflint.
After the Duke's death Wallis lived mainly in London, New York and in Washington with the person who inherited both Edward's and her estate; she spent a certain amount of time in her Paris home but 99% of her remaining 14 years of widowhood saw her in London and New York. Indeed, the royal bank Coutts & Co had to specially open a branch in North London's exclusive Hampstead neighborhood when the Duchess moved there in 1983, to cater for all her spending!
She most certainly did not die alone and the identity of the person who gave doctors permission to switch off her life support is the same as the couple's sole legal heir. (again not Maitre Blum, the French shyster lawyer convicted of stealing from Wallis).
It is also worth mentioning that Madonna recently referred to being unable to get the copyright to a book about Wallis for her movie W.E.; the copyright holder of that biography has inherited all of Wallis and Edward's (so far) unpublished intellectual property and will be publishing the only authorised biography of Wallis' life later this year.
A brief comparison to that book's contents to Anne Sebba's book is like likening a beautiful, genuine diamond necklace to a tacky bit of costume paste, ditto all the other so-called Wallis books that have trumped the same rehashed tired nonsense.
I trust the above clarifies the situation and puts into perspective points missing in your book review.
Thank you so much Blue Ridge Mountains Gal, for the informative and insightful above comments.
Sandra L.
Thank you Blue Ridge Mountains Gal, I refuse to read authors that feel it is literary privilege to "fill in the blanks".
Thank you Blue Ridge Mountains Gal, I refuse to read authors that feel it is literary privilege to "fill in the blanks".
All I can say that Edward was and considered himself more German than Englis and would of loved if Hitler won the War. Wallis would have been his Queen. He should have been tried for treason for all of the secrets he gave to Hitler. This would include where they should entered France which caused Dunkirk. Read up on your world history. Take a course. Travel a bit out of the USA!!!!
Well written review.
Reviewer did a fine job.