The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak
when, in 1924, her cousin Corinne Mustin invited her to go on her first trip to Europe, to Paris. Win continued to write to Wallis and told her that he had been stationed in the Far East. He begged her to join him in China. Perhaps because Wallis could not afford a divorce and was uncertain of her financial and domestic future, she decided to give the marriage yet another go. Win met her in Hong Kong and soon enough, the familiar patterns recommenced. He became jealous, moody, quarrelsome and offensive. When he began drinking before breakfast, Wallis finally had had enough. She drew their eight-year marriage to a close, seeking a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai.
‘Wallis was now twenty-eight and her character was formed,’ according to Diana Mosley. ‘She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company; an addition to any party with her high-spirited gaiety.’
Wallis embarked on a year’s sojourn in Peking, staying with her good friends Katherine and Herman Rogers. She later described her Eastern sojourn as her ‘Lotus Year’. As a divorced woman travelling in the Far East on her own, she displayed a spirited independence ahead of her time. According to a friend of Duff Cooper’s in Paris, a French woman who knew Wallis as Mrs Spencer in Peking, Wallis was ‘always good-natured’. Unfortunately, when news of Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales broke in 1936, her year in China was used against her. It was said that she had visited the ‘singing houses’ of Shanghai and Peking. Unsavoury gossip tut-tutted, suggesting that she had acquired ‘sophisticated sexual techniques’ which she then used to entrap and manipulate the Prince of Wales and she became the butt of cheap jokes: ‘Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.’
Wallis nursed a secret that hit at the very heart of her femininity. She was infertile and had never menstruated. As a young girl it is unlikely that Wallis would have known that anything was wrong. Perhaps the absence of periods would have been her first sign at puberty that all was not as expected. It has been speculated that Wallis may have had a ‘disorder of sexual development’ or DSD, a modern term encompassing a wide range of rare genetic conditions. Others have claimed Wallis may have had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome – that is, she was born genetically male, with the XY chromosome. If this had been the case, the male sexual organs would have been internal and barely noticeable and she would have had an extremely shallow vagina. Yet this is unlikely as Wallis lacked other physical traits associated with the syndrome. We also know that she would go on to have a hysterectomy in middle age.
Whatever the cause of Wallis’s infertility it was a source of profound sadness for her. Over three marriages she bore no children, but not out of choice. Though she and Edward seemed to adore children, their lack of parenthood united them as outsiders to a familial club. Instead, they lavished love on their dogs which became their child replacements. Wallis later wrote that she mourned never being part of the ‘miracle of creation’ and that her ‘one continuing regret’ was never having ‘known the joy of having children’. The secret inner pain of childlessness must have made the gossip and slurs against her so much harder to bear.
One of the reasons that Wallis kept herself skeletally thin was that she worried that if she put on any weight she would ‘bulk up in a masculine way’. Diana Mosley said that Wallis ‘loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion’. Elsa Maxwell agreed that Wallis ate very little at the dinner table. When she challenged Wallis about this, she always replied defensively: ‘I’m an ice-box raider.’ Clearly any snacking was confined to minuscule amounts. Wallis and Edward were similar in this respect; they both favoured starvation diets and punishing regimes, each obsessed with retaining an almost pre-pubescent slenderness.
Wallis expressed a traditional femininity through her clothes: her sartorial perfectionism – a love of Cartier and couture – served to create an exaggeratedly feminine outline that was more elegant than sexual. Always immaculately groomed, there was a delicacy about her appearance – from her skirts and dresses cinched-in at the waist with tiny belts, to neat little pairs of heels. Adorned as he was with exquisite statement jewels, there was nothing androgynous about Wallis’s style. She certainly was no ‘sex siren’ or ‘harlot’, as many made her out to be. Although Wallis often liked to be the centre of attention socially, in other ways she came across as old-fashioned and reserved; indeed, her upbringing in Baltimore had been ladylike to the point of prudish. Astonishingly she told Herman Rogers, who eventually gave her away at her wedding to Edward in 1937, that she ‘had never had sexual intercourse with either of her two husbands’. Nor had she ‘ever allowed anyone else to touch her below’ what she described as ‘her personal Mason–Dixon line’.†
Both Wallis and Edward shared insecurities about their sexual identities. Confiding this in one another may have helped forge a strong secret bond between them. Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, whose husband was ambassador to France 1954–60, knew the Windsors in Paris and confided to Hugo Vickers that ‘the prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform’ – 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.”’ Although she could be openly flirtatious in a social setting, Wallis was, as Nicky Haslam observed of her, sassy rather than sexy: her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive. ‘Wallis wasn’t obsessed by sex,’ says Haslam. ‘If anything, she was rigidly undressable in that she was prudish. Everybody made such a thing of her going to brothels in China but everyone did that in those days. It was the fashionable thing to do. To have a good look.’
‘It was just the sort of thing that the press would say, that she was a twice-divorced American adventuress out for what she could get,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Everything was a bid to discredit her but she was the furthest thing from kinky. You never got the feeling that she was particularly sexually motivated. She was a perfectly normal American woman but not in the least bit depraved. And there was nothing more normal than Ernest Simpson and he fell in love with her.’
Winston Churchill summed up the controversial couple’s mutual attraction: ‘the association was psychical rather than sexual, and certainly not sensual except incidentally’. Churchill always believed that Wallis was good for Edward; he defended the couple to the last. ‘Although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness,’ he said.
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Wallis met Ernest Simpson through Mary Kirk, who had now become Madame Raffray, on her marriage to the Frenchman, Jacques Raffray. Raffray, a veteran of the Great War, had originally come to America to train US troops to fight in France. Wallis, then living in Washington, enjoyed staying with the Raffrays at their New York apartment. She spent Christmas of 1926 with them awaiting her divorce from Win. Ernest, who was also in the process of getting divorced, from his American wife Dorothea, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, was frequently asked for dinner or to make up a fourth for bridge. A friendship developed and when both were granted divorces, Ernest asked Wallis to marry him.
A graduate of Harvard, Ernest had been born in New York of an American mother and a British father. After brief service as a captain in the British Army, he began work in the family shipping business, Simpson, Spence & Young. Tall, with blue eyes and a neat moustache, he was a fastidious dresser. In the early 1920s he was much in demand on the London scene and a regular dance partner of Barbara Cartland. (She later described him as a ‘handsome young bachelor, who was to figure dramatically in the history of England seventeen years later’.) The letter Wallis wrote to her mother on 15 July 1928 regarding Ernest’s marriage proposal is revealing: ‘I’ve decided that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast … I can’t go wandering the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Also 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall settle down to a fairly comfortable