The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak
Council of Social Service in the newspapers, was genuinely keen to know more about it.
Wallis recalled this to be a turning point in their relationship: ‘He began to talk about his work, the things he hoped to do, and the creative role he thought the Monarchy could play in this new age, and also dropped a hint of the frustration he was experiencing,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I was fascinated. It was as if a door had opened on the inner fastness of his character. What I now saw in his keenness for his job, in his ambition to make a success of it, was not dissimilar to the attitude of many American businessmen I had known. I can not claim that I instantly understood him but I sensed in him something that few around him could have been aware of – a deep loneliness, an overtone of spiritual isolation.’
Edward was captivated. As the dancing guests returned to the table, he said to Wallis: ‘You’re the only woman who’s ever been interested in my job.’ He later wrote: ‘She began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps understand. For a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.’
Yet the point had come when Wallis could no longer remain oblivious to the prince’s attentions. He took to turning up at Bryanston Court for pot-luck suppers which he, Wallis and Ernest would enjoy à trois. According to Wallis, Ernest then ‘developed the art of tactfully excusing himself and retiring to his room with his papers’. The work demands were genuine, thankfully Ernest’s shipping business was picking up.
The Prince of Wales would sometimes pop in and stay for a quick drink, at other times he would appear twice a week and stay all evening. On 18 February, Wallis reassured her aunt in her regular correspondence: ‘P.S. It’s all gossip about the prince. I’m not in the habit of taking my friends’ beaux. We are around together a lot and of course people are going to say it. I think I do amuse him. I’m the comedy relief and we like to dance together – but I always have Ernest hanging around my neck so all is safe.’
A few days later, Wallis wrote once more to her aunt: ‘I am feeling very well but am quite thin not in the face but in the figure. Naturally worry over finances is not fat-making. I weigh 8 stone undressed but eat and drink as usual.’ Juggling the attentions of Ernest, as well as the prince, who was proving to be a most determined suitor, similarly took its toll on Wallis’s nervous disposition. Admirably, she did not ‘junk old friends’ when the prince came into her life, making efforts to keep up her acquaintances in her spare evenings. She told Bessie: ‘I’m a bit worn – never a restful moment as it requires great tact to manage both.’ She and Ernest had even been asked by the prince to invite their own friends to the Fort for weekends. A tremendous honour. She asked Bessie to send her a pale-blue summer dress for $20, explaining: ‘The royalty stuff very demanding on clothes.’
Wallis was now playing the coveted hostess role. Unwittingly, Thelma provided the prince the perfect excuse to transfer affection when she returned from America on 22 March. In New York and on the crossing home, she had enjoyed the attentions of Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan. Only twenty-three, he had a reputation as a polished seducer. According to Elsa Maxwell, Aly Khan was ‘un homme fatal’. Word of their association reached Edward.
‘The prince arrived at my house in Regent’s Park that night,’ Thelma recalled. ‘He seemed a little distrait, as if something were bothering him. Suddenly he said: “I hear Aly Khan has been very attentive to you.” I thought he was joking. “Are you jealous, darling?” I asked. But the prince did not answer me.’ When Thelma asked Wallis why the prince was distant to her at the Fort the following weekend, Wallis replied somewhat disingenuously: ‘Darling, you know the little man loves you very much. The little man was just lost without you.’
‘Empty as these sentences were, they were a kind of emotional bulwark,’ recalled Thelma. Reassured, she invited Wallis and Ernest to the Fort for Easter weekend. However, ‘that weekend was negatively memorable’, said Thelma. ‘I do not remember who was there, other than the Simpsons, there were about eight of us in all. I had a bad cold when we arrived … Most of Saturday passed without incident. At dinner, however, I noticed that the prince and Wallis seemed to have little private jokes. Once he picked up a piece of salad with his fingers; Wallis playfully slapped his hand.’ Thelma caught Wallis’s eye and shook her head at her. ‘She knew as well as everybody else that the prince could be very friendly, but no matter how friendly, he never permitted familiarity. His image of himself, shy, genial and democratic, was always framed by the royal three feathers … Wallis looked straight at me. And then and there I knew. That one cold, defiant glance had told the entire story.’
Thelma left the Fort, and the prince’s life, the following morning. Wallis confirmed that her reign was over in a letter to her aunt on 15 April 1934, sent tellingly from the Fort; she writes: ‘Thelma is still in Paris. I’m afraid her rule is over and I’m trying to keep an even keel with my relations with him by avoiding seeing him alone as he is very attentive at the moment. And of course I’m flattered.’
Wallis took to her new role as chatelaine of Fort Belvedere with verve. A footman brought in by Thelma Furness was quickly dismissed, the cook soon followed. Osborne, the butler, was more threatened by Wallis’s presence than those of her predecessors, Lady Furness or Mrs Dudley Ward. When Wallis presented the prince with a small tray on a folding stand, which she thought would simplify the serving of tea, Osborne was reluctant to use it. When the prince insisted that he bring it in for the afternoon tea, the butler snapped the tray into position with a vicious jerk and announced contemptuously: ‘Your Royal Highness, this thing won’t last twenty-four hours.’
Wallis’s status was further sealed when the prince arrived at Bryanston Court with a cairn terrier pup under his arm. He presented the dog to Wallis, announcing that it was called Slipper and was now hers. In her letters, Wallis tried to reassure Aunt Bessie that Ernest was fully aware of what was happening and, in fact, colluded with the new order. ‘Ernest is flattered with it all and lets me dine once or twice a week with him alone,’ she wrote, adding: ‘If Ernest raises any objections to the situation I shall give the prince up at once.’
Even at the height of the prince’s affair with Thelma Furness, Freda Dudley Ward was in the background as the maternal figure the prince could always rely on. On 25 April, when Wallis wrote to Bessie that the royal affair with Thelma was ‘very much on the wane’, she continued: ‘I shall doubtless be blamed as for the moment he is rather attentive though sees equally as much of Mrs Dudley Ward his old flame.’
This is the only mention Wallis ever makes of Freda in her correspondence, yet ever since the prince’s affair with Freda cooled in 1924, and Thelma came on the scene, he had continued to visit the Dudley Ward family. That month, her elder daughter, Penelope, suffered complications after an operation for appendicitis. Freda, who spent anxious days beside her daughter’s bedside, was too distraught to realise that all was suspiciously quiet from royal quarters. As soon as her daughter recovered, she rang York House to speak to the prince. The telephone operator, whom she had known for years, made a strange choking sound when he discovered Mrs Dudley Ward was on the line. ‘He didn’t seem able to speak. I suddenly realised to my horror that he was crying,’ said Freda. ‘“Everybody seems to have gone mad around here,” he said. The prince had given orders that none of my phone calls be put through. I never heard from him again.’
In that one act of cowardice, the prince coldly dispensed with Mrs Freda Dudley Ward. From that moment on, Wallis was to be his ‘one and only’.
* Cain was Wallis’s maid.
† The Prince of Wales’s brother, Albert (Bertie) and his wife, Elizabeth.
‡ King George VI, her father-in-law.
§ Wallis Simpson.