The Duchess Of Windsor, page 62
The Windsors’ favored first destination was Palm Beach, where, in the warm tropical climate, they could relax and forget the harsh weather they had left behind in Europe. They often stayed at the Everglades Club, in a special suite set aside for their use. Inevitably, upon their arrival, they were greeted with large, cheering crowds, and Wallis and Edward would make appearances on their balcony and wave to the sea of faces that greeted them with rounds of applause. Their arrival usually marked the start of the Palm Beach social season, during which the Duke and Duchess were guests of honor at the massive balls given in the extravagant Biltmore Hotel and the Breakers.5
In the afternoon, Wallis often disappeared to shop, while David played golf with friends. Occasionally, there were less expected adventures. Wallis was forever curious about life in the country she had left behind and tried to keep abreast of the latest changes. In Florida, she often ventured into supermarkets—an exotic discovery which was unknown in Paris. After exploring the aisles, she would purchase slices of meat, salami, smoked cheese, and crackers from the startled attendants, return with her prizes to the Duke, and share an impromptu picnic in their car alongside the ocean.6
After Palm Beach it was off to New York, where the Duke and Duchess moved into their regular suite, 28H, in the Waldorf Towers. In 1948 they had shipped many of their own furnishings, pictures, souvenirs, and housewares to the hotel, and these helped fill the drawing room, dining room, bedrooms, study, and guest rooms that constituted the apartment. The Waldorf Towers, atop the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel but with its own, discrete entrance and aristocratic patrons was the ideal base for the Windsors in the city.
One of the most persistent allegations made against the Windsors is that they avoided paying their bills, sought out discounts, accepted questionable gifts, and never tipped. The Duke and Duchess, living on investments and on the annual allowance of £21,000 David received from the Royal Family, were never as wealthy as many imagined. The Duke had never had to deal with money; as Prince of Wales and as king, he had had an equerry to take care of his financial concerns. He therefore had little practical experience and constantly worried over his economic affairs. Wallis, too, having been raised in genteel poverty and reminded at nearly every turn of the importance of money, was careful with her expenditures.
But, these factors aside, the Windsors never avoided their financial obligations. In New York, for example, bills were regularly sent to their suite in the Waldorf Towers, where the Duke himself would carefully make out the checks and send them off to his creditors.7 They occasionally accepted special rates, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. “I would like to state here once and for all time: the Duke and I pay our bills!” Wallis wrote in February 1961. “Oddly enough, the slanderous gossip that we do not has only recently reached my ears, and I was completely bowled over by it.”8
The arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in New York would be cause for immediate excitement in the society columns as hostesses vied with each other for the couple’s presence at their parties. Wallis and David themselves took the lead at least once or twice; with the assistance of society lion Elsa Maxwell, Wallis managed to found a permanent event, the Windsor Ball, which was designed to raise money for a number of charities under the Duchess’s patronage.
The alliance with Maxwell was a curious one. Both she and Wallis were strong, independent, stubborn women, and inevitably they clashed repeatedly when one trod on the other’s ego. If Wallis offended certain refined sensibilities with her brash charm and wit, Maxwell was something altogether different. She made the Duchess of Windsor appear to be a paragon of good breeding. Diana Vreeland called Maxwell an “enormous mountain of a woman.... Elsa wasn’t a vulgar woman. This is hard to explain to someone who never knew her, because she looked vulgar. You see pictures of her where she looks like a cook on her night out.”9
The first Windsor Ball took place in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on January 5, 1953. In addition to the work Elsa Maxwell did, Wallis asked Cecil Beaton to design the decorations, which included coral-pink ornaments, tables covered with pink satin cloths and draped with pink satin bows, and banks of pink carnations and tea roses. The ball, given to raise money for the Hospitalized Veterans Music Service, was attended by a host of famous guests: John F. Kennedy dined at a table near Salvador Dali, while Ethel Merman and Beatrice Lillie provided the entertainment. Wallis was escorted by Prince Serge Obolensky, while the Duke presided at a nearby table over a meal of channel sole, filet mignon, and pasta. After the dinner, Wallis disappeared; she changed into a $1,200 white-and-coral taffeta gown and, to the strains of the specially composed “Windsor Waltz,” led a string of society beauties, all modeling the latest Parisian fashions, onto the dance floor.10
The evening was a great success, but Wallis and Maxwell found working with each other exceedingly difficult. A year later, when Maxwell organized another charity event, she pointedly neglected to invite the Duchess of Windsor. Instead, she declared that her event would include four Duchesses—the Duchess of Argyll, the Duchess de Brissac, the Duchess of Alba, and the Duchess of Sera. When Wallis was asked about these choices, she remarked caustically to the press, “It would take four ordinary duchesses to make one Duchess of Windsor.”11
Maxwell retaliated by writing her memoirs and speaking most ungenerously of her former friend to the press: “I no longer see the Duchess of Windsor. She has become so completely engrossed in herself and in her pursuit of pleasure that she neither knows nor cares what others are thinking or feeling. Had she been more conscientious about her position in history, she would not have to search so constantly for excitement and amusement. She would have found peace within herself.... It’s my considered opinion that many of the things she has done in this search, largely because of the high-handed, selfish way in which she has done them, have contributed to her final frustration—the fact that the Windsors’ prestige is not what it was—what it used to be.”12
“Elsa was just horrible about the Duchess,” recalls a friend. “She used to delight in spreading any kind of malicious gossip she heard, and with her damn big mouth, it went a long way I don’t think she ever really wanted to hurt Wallis, but she sure didn’t help her cause, either. No one had much sympathy when she complained that the Duchess wouldn’t see her any more.”13
But Maxwell got her ultimate revenge on the Duchess in 1957. The Duke and Duchess were the guests of honor at the April in Paris Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria and as usual were the focus of everyone’s attentions. Maxwell, who arrived late, brought with her possibly the only ammunition which could detract from the glow of the Windsors: She entered the ballroom between the arms of playwright Arthur Miller and his new wife, actress Marilyn Monroe. The result could not have been greater had Maxwell herself choreographed it. The press, which had concentrated on the Windsors all evening, made a mad dash across the floor, camera bulbs flashing, to capture the arrival of the famous actress, leaving Wallis literally in the dark.14
In New York the Duke and Duchess often stayed with the Winston Guests. Guest, wealthy heir and renowned polo expert, was married to the beautiful Lucy Douglass Cochrane, known to her friends as C.Z. Like Aline, the Countess of Romanones, C. Z. Guest was to become both a confidante to Wallis and also something of a substitute daughter. Wallis and David enjoyed their time at Templeton, the Guests’ Long Island Georgian mansion, “considered to be one of the most palatial of the North Shore residences.”15
“There is so much garbage written about the Duke and Duchess,” says C. Z. Guest, “that I don’t even bother to read it any longer. It’s just god-damned nonsense, people trying to dig up scandals. But I saw them, they stayed with Winston and [me], and they were perfectly charming and gracious and easy to get along with. Just two very nice people. And they were always perfect guests.”16
Nevertheless, it was, in fact, one of these Long Island friendships which was to lead the Duchess of Windsor into one of the most sordid affairs of her later life. During the fall of 1955 the Windsors were visiting New York as usual; Edith Baker, widow of the president of the First National City Bank, had arranged to give a party in their honor at her house, Viking’s Cove, in Locust Valley, on the evening of October 29. At the last minute, however, the Duke felt ill, and C. Z. Guest suggested that a twenty-four-year-old bachelor and polo player named Michael Butler escort the Duchess in his place. Wallis, not wishing to let her hostess down, agreed and duly appeared dressed in a tight, floor-length navy blue gown.17
Also present that evening were thirty-five-year-old sportsman and racehorse owner William Woodward Jr. and his wife, Ann. Wallis had met the couple several times before, both in New York and in Paris, where she had shown Ann the villa in the Bois de Boulogne. The Woodward marriage was known to be unstable; Woodward, egged on by his imperious mother, Elsie, did little to make the less privileged Ann feel welcome in their elevated social circles and never let her forget her own humble beginnings. In Paris, Wallis had witnessed how uncomfortable Ann seemed to be and deliberately tried to compliment her in front of Woodward.18
This evening, Ann spoke pointedly of reports of a local burglar loose on Long Island. When the Baker party broke up, the Woodwards returned to their own house in Oyster Bay. What happened next has never been determined with any certainty. Just after two that morning, the local police received an emergency call from a hysterical Ann Woodward, saying that she had just killed her husband. When police arrived, they found Woodward’s naked body, facedown on the bedroom floor, shot through the temple. Above him, perched jauntily on an armchair, was a pillow which Ann Woodward had copied from one Wallis had shown to her in Paris: “Never Complain, Never Explain.”
Ann Woodward declared that she had been getting ready for bed when she heard her dog barking; fearing that the burglar was trying to break in, she grabbed a loaded hunting rifle which she had previously stood next to her bed and walked toward the closed door. When it suddenly flung open, she fired, killing her husband instantly. The next day, police arrived at the Waldorf Towers to question Wallis, who had danced the previous evening with Woodward several times and also spoken to his wife. She knew very little, and at the grand-jury hearing, which was set up to investigate the shooting, her evidence, such as it was, was not even presented. Ann Woodward was cleared of any guilt in the death of her husband; but suspicion that it had not been an accident continued to linger on. In particular, author Truman Capote hinted heavily that his infamously “unwritten” book Answered Prayers would detail the truth of Ann Woodward’s guilt. It is difficult to say what effect this had on Ann Woodward, but she found herself whispered about, suspected of any number of offenses, and ostracized by many of her former friends. She eventually committed suicide. The story later became the subject of Dominick Dunne’s fictionalized treatment The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. “How sordid that business was,” Wallis commented to a friend. “And poor Ann. I know what it’s like to be ostracized for no reason.”19
June 1957 marked the Windsors’ twentieth wedding anniversary. The state of their marriage had long been fodder for international gossip columns, with rumors of imminent breakups, rifts, adultery, and other such allegations rounding out the insatiable press interest. Although friends of the Duke and Duchess would later insist that the marriage had been without any friction, this is not quite correct. The truth lies somewhere between these two extreme views.
The Duke and Duchess were both stubborn, strong-willed individuals who, each in their own way, had had to learn to adapt themselves to the other. To the Duke, this meant grateful submission to the more dominant Duchess, allowing her to take on a sort of perpetual mother-nanny role which many outsiders found startling. The Duchess, too, had learned to adapt: in many ways, her role was the more difficult, for she had to accept the Duke’s overwhelming love for her, a proposition which bound her with certain restrictions and meant the loss of much of her own personality to his.
Writing in 1961, Wallis said:
I am well aware that there are still some people in the world who go on hoping our marriage will break up. And to them I say, Give up hope, because David and I are happy and have been happy for twenty-four years, and that’s the way it will continue to be. ... For my part, I have given my husband every ounce of my affection, something he had never had a great deal of in his bachelor life. Notice, I use the word “affection.” I believe it is an element apart from love, the deep bond one assumes as a part of marriage. You may know the phrase “tender loving care;” it means much the same thing. It means doing the things that uphold a man’s confidence in himself, creating an atmosphere of warmth and interest, of taking his mind off his worries.20
This, of course, was the ideal, but occasionally the veneer of tender care cracked. In this, there was nothing unusual about the Windsors, who, like any other couple, had their share of disagreements and quarrels. Temperamentally and in practice, Wallis and David were two very different people, and inevitably there were clashes of both will and temperament. Fleur Cowles, meeting with the Duke and Duchess, recalled “how coolly she responded to his insistent attention.”21
Although Wallis had loved David, it is clear from both her letters and from what she told friends that she had never intended to marry him. Her affair with the Prince of Wales was just that—a passing infatuation which opened many otherwise closed doors. But when David became king, the rules of the game had suddenly changed. There is no denying the attraction that possibly being married to the king held for Wallis; but at the same time her goal had never been marriage. And yet throughout these months her feelings for him grew deeper and more certain. Although she was always willing to give him up for the sake of England, she wanted nonetheless to remain at his side.
In the aftermath of the abdication, Wallis had faced a personal dilemma: how to reconcile her fierce independence with the Duke’s overwhelming, obsessive love. She was largely successful in this, but there were certainly times when the constant struggle became too much. Wallis had been cast into a role she had not wanted: She had no taste for public life, had not been raised to guard her every action or thought, and had not learned to hide her feelings, as had her husband. Many times, and in many ways, the Duke simply smothered his wife with his attentions, so much so that they threatened to consume her own identity completely. Petty disagreements and bursts of temper—natural in all marriages—were amplified in the case of the Windsors, much of whose lives were lived in public, and Wallis’s frustration sometimes erupted before witnesses eager to believe the very worst.
The Windsors’ occasional losses of temper or bitter words, sometimes witnessed in public, were almost gleefully seized upon by those already predisposed—either through aristocratic snobbery or political and social ambition—to expect nothing less from Wallis. But it would be wrong to characterize the Windsors’ marriage as a series of petty quarrels. The close friends of the Duke and Duchess and those who worked for them for many years contradict the popular image of a constantly bickering couple. Helen Rich, a Palm Beach friend of the Windsors, told author Denis Brian, “They were always pleasant. If she humiliated him, or told him off in public, I never was on the scene, thank God.... She was too smart for that. She was not stupid, you know. She knew perfectly well that they were being observed every minute from all directions.”22 “All of their arguments were just little things,” says another intimate. “Nothing that one wouldn’t see elsewhere a hundred other times. But because it was the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, everyone blew it out of all proportion. Theirs was the love story of the century, and any crack in that fairy tale assumed the very worst interpretation immediately.”23
The Duchess, too, suffered in comparison with the Duke’s very public, almost fawning displays of affection over his wife. Wallis had never been given to great shows of emotion, and this lack of feeling was often wrongly interpreted as both coolness and outright hostility toward her husband. But her true feelings are a bit easier to gauge in the private letters she wrote to her husband during this same period. “Darling,” she said in one, “I love you so very much and miss you every minute.”24 Leaving New York to join David after being apart several weeks, she wrote, “Never will I be away from you so long again. Can’t wait for Friday.... I love you more and more ... your Wallis.”25 “We’ve never had a real spat,” she told a reporter. “I give him most of the credit there. I think we’d laugh first anyway.”26
“She was wonderful to him,” C. Z. Guest recalled. “She adored him. They were very, very happy.”27 This deep affection came out occasionally for all to witness: during a game of gin rummy, one of her partners declared, “You’ve thrown away three kings!”
“But I kept the best one, didn’t I?” Wallis replied with a soft smile and nod toward her husband.28
Throughout the thirty-five years of the Windsors’ marriage, there was only one serious public breach between the Duke and Duchess. During a party at Delmonico’s Hotel in the late 1940s, Wallis first encountered James Paul Donahue Jr. Donahue was the son of Jessie Woolworth Donahue, daughter of billionaire Frank Woolworth and cousin of the famous heiress Barbara Hutton. Donahue’s childhood had been an unhappy one: His father committed suicide in 1931, allegedly as the result of a homosexual liaison gone wrong, and his mother Jessie was an overpowering, domineering woman. When his grandfather, Frank W. Woolworth, died in 1919, Donahue, known to his friends as Jimmy, inherited the substantial sum of $15 million in cash and Woolworth stock.
