The Real Wallis Simpson by Anna Pasternak

Author:Anna Pasternak [Pasternak, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501198441
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

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I. The Duchess of York had come down with influenza, so was in bed while the instrument of abdication was being signed. This was an additional stress for the Duke of York, who was deprived of her comforting presence and was compelled to suffer the biggest ordeal of his life alone.

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As the new king, George VI, would be crowned on May 12, Wallis and Edward decided that they would marry after this date, in June. The week before the duke’s arrival at Candé, Cecil Beaton turned up to take fresh photographs of Wallis prior to her wedding. Beaton arrived to find the bride-to-be’s already “incredibly narrow figure, narrower since the abdication.” After “cocktails, chatter” and a lively dinner with a “superb variety of wines,” followed by billiards and conversation, Katherine and Herman Rogers retired to bed at midnight, leaving Wallis and Beaton to talk “in full earnest” until dawn.1

Beaton was “struck by the clarity and vitality” of Wallis’s mind. “I got the impression that she has been taken as much by surprise by recent events as anyone else,” he later wrote. “Though her divorce proceedings had already begun, I don’t believe she had any clear intentions of marriage. Of the abdication, she told me she had known less than anybody. It had been impossible to talk freely with the ex-King on the telephone as the wires were constantly tapped.”2

“It wasn’t just tactfulness, I am sure,” Beaton considered, “that prevented Wallis from airing any grievance she might have against Mr. Baldwin or the so-called friends who ‘welched’ on her when the situation altered.” Wallis told the esteemed photographer that the events had “only shown me who among my friends are my friends.” She told Beaton that she had been tempted to hang herself from the antlers adorning the château walls. Cecil Beaton concluded the evening impressed that Wallis “is bitter towards no one.”3

The following day, a manicurist and hairdresser arrived from Paris. Wallis bravely agreed to be photographed in the thick grass, even though, after Slipper’s death, she was terrified of treading on a viper. In her bedroom, where she changed her clothes, “jewellery was produced in unostentatious driblets.” Beaton was impressed by some of the historic stones, “including a pair of diamond pear-shaped clips the size of pigeons’ eggs.”4

The next morning, with the butler and footmen lined up to salute Mr. Beaton’s departure, he concluded that: “for Mrs. Simpson, events might have been worse. If she has not been fated to wear a crown, she is still loved by an abdicated king and will soon be married to him. It won’t be so bad to be called the Duchess of Windsor.”5

Before the duke’s arrival, friends from Paris regularly dropped in to see Wallis, who wrote to Edward that she was “running a hotel.” Mrs. Rex Benson, an American living in London, later recalled that during a long talk, Wallis told her: “You know, I never wanted this marriage.”6 Wallis certainly did not want the abdication on which the marriage was predicated.

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