The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak
emotional stability, comfort and respectability. Wallis worried briefly that his wholesome ponderousness was the polar opposite to her Southern emotionalism. She was fun, spontaneous and extravagant. He was methodical and cautious. Later, he was dismissed amid the upper-class circles into which the Simpsons were propelled as ‘crashingly middle class’ and a bore.
Ernest was transferred to run the British offices of his shipping firm, and in May 1928, Wallis followed him to London. They married on 21 July at Chelsea Register Office. Wallis wore a yellow dress and blue coat that she had bought in Paris the previous summer. Although they considered the clinical nature of the register office ceremony ‘a cold little job’, she found their honeymoon ‘a blissful experience’. Driving through France, Wallis discovered that her husband was cultured, considerate and spoke French fluently. Ernest may not have been the most exciting or diverting company but he was a thoroughly decent gentleman. His great-nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley, remembers: ‘Ernest was just a nice person. He was an extremely nice uncle. He was almost like our fairy godfather.’
After the harrowing uncertainties of the previous decade, Wallis, aged thirty-two, could finally relax. Looking forward to a new life in London, she ‘felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood’. Her domestic equilibrium was to prove short-lived. Three years later, the dull conformity of her marriage was shattered by the arrival in their steady realm of the dazzling Prince of Wales.
* Fulco di Verdura was an influential Italian jeweller who designed for the duchess. His career took off when he was introduced to Coco Chanel by Cole Porter.
† The Mason–Dixon line was the American Civil War partition between the slave states of the South and free states of the North.
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After their honeymoon, Wallis and Ernest moved into a small hotel in London while they searched for a suitable home. Ernest’s sister, Maud, helped them to find a furnished house in Upper Berkeley Street, which they rented for a year. Wallis, a natural and dedicated homemaker, was keen to secure an unfurnished property on which she could put her decorative stamp.
Initially, Mrs Simpson was lonely in London, knowing no other Americans. Unaccustomed and resistant to the formality of English mores, she felt like ‘a stranger in a strange land’. Her sense of isolation heightened in October 1929 when she learned that her mother was seriously ill. Alice had been diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain. As Ernest could not leave his business, Wallis crossed the Atlantic alone. She spent three weeks with her ailing mother, who died shortly after Wallis returned to London. The ‘sadness’ that Wallis carried inside was ‘a long time lifting’. She grieved bitterly for her adored mother, whom she felt was the only person who truly understood her.
Soon a welcome distraction presented itself. That winter, Wallis found a first-floor flat that both she and Ernest liked in a mansion block on George Street, near Marble Arch. She set about decorating the flat at Bryanston Court with her inimitable flair. She was influenced by two design legends: Syrie Maugham, wife of novelist Somerset Maugham, and her good friend Elsie de Wolfe. Professional rivalry simmered between these two eccentrics as to who was the greater visionary. Both were ‘ultra chic’, creating light avant-garde rooms – the antithesis of heavy, dark Victoriana. Wallis enlisted Syrie Maugham’s talents at Bryanston Court, while de Wolfe helped shape her later homes in France. Maugham, who pioneered white furniture and white walls against which were showcased Provençal antiques, stripped and painted everything with her secret craquelure technique. From Maugham’s workshops Wallis commissioned a dozen dining-room chairs with tall backs, upholstered in white leather and studded with nails. This was considered daringly modern. An Italian dining table, Adam sideboard and console received the Maugham treatment; they were painted blue-green and white. According to Wallis, ‘when the table was laid for the first time and the candles lighted, the effect was soft and charming’. Wallis always chose a mirror-topped table, the centre decorated with glass fruits and a silver candelabra at each end. The table service was pink china; one of her most prized possessions was the dinner service inherited from her grandmother. Unconventionally, she served her consommé piping hot in small cups of black Chinese lacquer, with tiny lids. To Wallis, design and presentation was nothing less than a moral issue. She adopted both Elsie de Wolfe’s streamlined aesthetic and her credo: ‘What surer guarantee can there be of a person’s character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste?’
Ernest, proud of his wife’s exceptional talents as a hostess, was pleased with both the style of their home and Wallis’s eye for detail. She was always moving furniture into new positions, changing things around in her efforts to perfect a room’s look. This continued throughout her life, to her last home, the regal villa she shared with the Duke of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
In her early days in London, Wallis, far from being able to exhibit largesse in her entertaining, had to budget cautiously. Most of her correspondence to her Aunt Bessie at this time focuses on the trials of trying to find the right cook and of financial concerns. Ernest was meticulous in his housekeeping. One evening a week, he demanded that Wallis show him her weekly expenditures. He would run his finger down the list, scrutinising each purchase. Wallis ran the house and bought her clothes on a weekly stipend from Ernest. Accustomed to working to a fiscal limit, she discovered that life in Britain was cheap by American standards. If she found herself under budget, she would splurge at Fortnum & Mason on a jar of caviar, brandied peaches or, as a special treat, an avocado.
Wallis shared Elsie de Wolfe’s obsession with serving guests food that was the same size, driving her butcher and fishmonger to distraction sourcing six or eight identical trout or grouse; even vegetables were laid out on the plate with military precision. Like her mother, Wallis prided herself on serving only the most delicious food. The Prince of Wales said of his first visit to her ‘small but charming flat in Bryanston Square’, that ‘everything in it was in exquisite taste and the food, in my judgement, unrivalled in London’. Wallis ‘is the best housekeeper I know’, declared Elsa Maxwell. ‘She is as skilful as a Japanese professional in arranging flowers. She has perfect taste in food as well as furniture and in those little details of forethought and care that mark an imaginative hostess. For instance, last time I lunched with her I noticed that she had found the most enchanting little round porcelain pots with covers to contain the butter and at the bottom, there was ice to keep it firm.’ According to Lady Pamela Hicks: ‘She was the most marvellous hostess. Her houses were perfection. At giving parties and serving food, she was the best.’ When she was the Duchess of Windsor and could afford it, Wallis would spray floral centre pieces with Diorissimo perfume.
Wallis’s reputation as a skilled hostess spread around the Simpsons’ London set. Naturally, she and Ernest were suitably excited when, having bumped into the Prince of Wales a few times at Thelma Furness’s, he accepted their invitation to Bryanston Court in January 1932. Wallis decided to serve a typical American dinner: black bean soup, grilled lobster, fried chicken Maryland and a cold raspberry soufflé. As a concession to her English guests, she followed it with a savoury of marrow bones. Typical of Wallis’s dignity, she was ‘bursting to tell the fishmonger and green grocer’ whom she was hosting but ‘had acquired too much British restraint’.
Ten sat down to dinner that January evening, with the prince at the head of the table and Ernest at the foot. Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie afterwards, on Sunday 24 January, thanking her for sending butter pat moulds with the Prince of Wales’s feathers on them. ‘Darling – the candles arrived and are grand. I enclose cheque. I can’t accept everything from you. We (meaning Cain* and self) loved the butter pats, especially the