The Duchess Of Windsor, page 66
The Windsors’ dealings with the Royal Family were still limited and always tinged with questionable intentions and fears of humiliation. In 1969, Prince Charles was invested as Prince of Wales in a ceremony closely based on the 1911 proceedings which had been instigated by George V for David. Neither of the Windsors attended the ceremony. Shortly thereafter, the Duke declined an invitation from the Queen to join the Royal Family at the dedication of a new Order of the Garter window in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. “Although you did not include Wallis by name in the invitation . . .” he wrote, “I presume that you would have expected her to accompany me. You see, after more than thirty years of happy married life, I do not like to attend such occasions alone.”8
In January 1970 the Duke and Duchess granted an interview to the BBC’s Kenneth Harris. During the interview, which aired on British television to an audience of some 12 million, the Windsors displayed a natural understanding and empathy, finishing each other’s sentences and making jokes which helped dispel rumors that their relationship was cold and uncomfortable.
For the interview, Wallis appeared in good health, showing no sign of her illness. She declared that if she were a young woman she would like to be the head of an advertising agency; she also confided that the Duke had two bad habits—smoking, which she abhorred, and his golf, which, she complained, “keeps him away from me.” When asked about the latest trends, the Duke replied: “Now, the Duchess and I are a little past the age of being what they call with it, but don’t for one minute imagine that we weren’t with it when we were younger. In fact I was so much with it that this was one of the big criticisms that was levelled against me by the older generation.” And the Duchess spoke of loneliness: “There is no problem for a man alone, but it is different for women who are widows. Who is going to take her out to dinner? How much time is she going to spend sitting alone unless she is going to entertain a great deal; and then most of her friends are probably widows too, you see. Then the great manhunt has to go on to get someone to come to dinner and sit next to these people.”9
In April of that year the Windsors, during a visit to Washington, D.C., attended a state dinner given in their honor at the White House by President Richard Nixon. To most people, it was a visit of the stars of the century’s most romantic story, two elderly people whose marriage had survived adversity for more than three decades. To the British government, however, it was simply another occasion for worry. If anyone believed that the vendetta against the Windsors on the part of the Royal Family and the government had come to an end, they simply had to learn of the orders which the Foreign Office in London fired off to the British embassy. The Duchess, they warned, was not to be addressed as Her Royal Highness; in no instance was she to be curtsied to, and the ambassador was directed to personally inform the United States’ chief of protocol that these requests must be followed by the Nixons during the state dinner. “This heavy-handed advice did not go down well in Washington,” writes Kenneth Harris, “and even the British took exception to it. The Ambassador’s wife said afterwards, ‘I curtsied anyway—and I called the Duchess Your Royal Highness.‘”10
The dinner took place on April 4. The Windsors, who were staying down Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House, arrived in a limousine under the North Portico; President and Mrs. Nixon stood on the steps, waiting to greet them. David, dressed in white tie and tails, leaned heavily on a cane as he exited the car; Wallis, dressed in a white-silk crepe gown by Givenchy adorned with medallions and a belt of colored metallic beads, took his hand and helped him climb the stairs, where they stood side by side with the Nixons and posed for photographs. 11
One hundred and six invited guests waited within to greet the Duke and Duchess. Several of Wallis’s relatives, including the Mustins, had received invitations and greeted her warmly as they passed through the receiving line. Other guests included President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Col. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, the Winston Guests, Fred Astaire, and Arnold Palmer. According to Marie Smith, writing in the Washington Post, “the Duchess looked decades younger than her 73 years.” The Windsors sat with the Nixons at the head of an E-shaped table in the State Dining Room. The menu included Le Saumon Froid Windsor, a mousse of sole and shrimp molded in the form of a royal crest and surrounded by cold salmon; and a strawberry dessert called Le Soufflé Duchesse. Throughout the meal, observers noted that the Duke and Duchess could be seen holding hands, whispering to each other and exchanging jokes. They seemed perfectly comfortable and at ease. At the end of the meal, when toasts were being exchanged, David said, “I have had the good fortune to have a wonderful American girl consent to marry me. I have had thirty years of loving care, devotion, and companionship—something I have cherished above all else.”12
At the end of the dinners, a second group of invited guests arrived for drinks and entertainment in the East Room. Among them were George and Barbara Bush. The future first lady later recalled “being surprised by how tiny the Duke and Duchess were and how charming she was.”13 Bobby Short played piano and sang many of the Windsors’ favorite songs; David could be seen tapping his cane in time with the music. Afterward, a group of high school and college students known as the Young Saints performed traditional American hymns and Negro spirituals. At the end of the evening, the Duke and Duchess climbed to the stage and thanked each of the performers before returning to Blair House just before midnight.
In these last years, Lord Mountbatten became a frequent—if not altogether welcome—visitor to the Windsor Villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Wallis had never particularly cared for him, and even David by now was angry at the way he seemed to inspect the house, examining papers and souvenirs. “Who are you going to leave that to?” he would ask the Duke, pointing at some object. “I think that should go to Charles.” “How dare he!” David declared after one such visit. “He even tells me what he wants left to him!”14
Mountbatten, to his credit, had quietly been suggesting to Prince Charles that the time had come for a new generation of the Royal Family to make overtures toward the Windsors. This provoked the Prince’s curiosity, and he approached his grandmother the Queen Mother with the idea. Jonathan Dimbleby, in his authorized biography of the Prince, writes, however, that “it was immediately apparent to him how difficult she would find it to be reconciled with the man whom she held responsible for consigning her husband to an early grave.”15
On October 3, 1970, Prince Charles, who happened to be shooting near Paris with British ambassador Sir Christopher Soames and his son Nicholas, decided he wanted to visit the Duke and Duchess. Although Soames objected that both the Queen and the Queen Mother would strenuously object, Charles was adamant. There was a large dinner party already taking place in the house in the Bois de Boulogne when the Prince of Wales arrived, and he was immediately uncomfortable with the gathered company. “The Duchess appeared from among a host of the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen,” he later wrote. He clearly disliked Wallis, whom he described as “flitting to and fro like a strange bat. She looks incredible for her age and obviously has her face lifted every day. Consequently she can’t really speak except by clenching her teeth all the time and not moving any facial muscles. She struck me as a hard woman—totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial. Very little warmth of the true kind; only that brilliant hostess type of charm but without feeling....” He spent most of his time in a corner of the drawing room with the Duke, chatting about his role as Prince of Wales. “The whole thing,” Charles declared “seemed so tragic—the existence, the people, and the atmosphere—that I was relieved to escape it after 45 minutes and drive round Paris by night.”16
One of the last parties the Duke and Duchess attended was given by Guy de Rothschild at Château Ferrières-en-Brie on December 2, 1971. The Windsors joined Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Cecil Beaton, and a hundred other celebrities in a lavish costume ball which began at half-past ten and broke up at seven the next morning. Burton recalled that during the dinner Wallis seemed hopelessly lost. “She had an enormous feather in her hair which she got into everything, the soup, the gravy, the ice-cream, and at every vivacious turn of her head it smacked Guy sharply in the eyes or the mouth and at one time threatened to get stuck in Guy’s false mustache which was glued on.”17
A few days later, at a dinner at the villa, Burton noted sadly: “It is she who is now nearly completely ga-ga. It was a sad and painful evening and needs a long time to write about.... He is physically falling apart, his left eye completely closed and a tremendous limp and walks with a stick. Her memory has gone completely and then comes back vividly in flashes.”18
“I told him to stop smoking all those cigarettes,” the Duchess said sadly in 1972. “We had some friends who had died of throat cancer. He said he started smoking a lot when he was traveling around as Prince of Wales making so many speeches. He was always nervous about making speeches and that’s why he smoked so much. He did cut down. He started smoking half-cigarettes in a holder. But I guess it was still too much; it all added up.”19
In late summer of 1971, David began to lose his voice. That fall, doctors discovered a small tumor in his throat; a biopsy was taken on November 17, and the tumor proved not only malignant but also inoperable. He immediately began forty-one days of cobalt treatments, which left him terribly weak.20
At first, it seemed the cobalt treatments had worked and the cancer had gone into remission; then, in February 1972, David entered the American Hospital in Neuilly in Paris for a routine hernia operation, during the course of which his blood work indicated something was wrong. Dr. Jean Thin, who for several years had been treating the Duke and Duchess in cooperation with Dr. Arthur Antonucci in New York, found that the cancer had returned. Under French medical-ethics law, Thin was prevented from disclosing the terminal nature of the illness. But as his time in the hospital increased and he underwent further treatments, Thin felt that the Duke instinctively realized he was dying.21
During the Duke’s stay in the hospital, the Duchess sat with him every afternoon. Oonagh Shanley, the Irish nurse on duty, recalled that Wallis was “full of affection for HRH. They remained as lovers—hand in hand!” When she had gone, she remembered, “the Duke was lonely. He could not bear to be separated from his Wallis another night.”22
Shanley was “pleasantly surprised” at the relaxed nature of her first meeting with the Windsors.23 Above all else, they seemed to her simply two people very much in love. She was delighted, therefore, to be asked to accompany them back to their villa and act as live-in nurse to the Duke during his illness.
On the afternoon that David was released from the American Hospital and returned home, he found the entire staff of the villa lining the portico, waiting to welcome him back. Oonagh Shanley was shown to her room on the third floor—the red, gold, and black Napoleon suite. Before leaving her, Wallis invited Shanley to join her and the Duke for dinner in the evenings if she had no other plans. She was to live with the Windsors until David’s death. She later recalled: “The Duke and Duchess were in love, and their interaction was like a young couple in love. There was a real togetherness about them, and a harmony which must have been there always because such virtues don’t suddenly come into being.”24
The following day, after the Windsors had brunch in the boudoir, Shanley went to see if the Duke had eaten well. When she entered the room, the Duchess stood up and handed Shanley a small wrapped box; inside was a diamond floral brooch. “Oonagh,” she said, “we want you to have this brooch, the smallest carnation in the world, and designed by the Duke. It’s his favourite flower, and it is to thank you for bringing David home safely.”25
David was stoic. Shanley remembered that he “was so courageous and never complained, always keeping his spirits up, never wanting the Duchess to worry about him. She was not fully aware of the gravity of his illness.”26 The ravages of the illness, however, soon became more and more apparent. “He was very, very thin,” Dr. Thin remembered.27 Wallis later told the Countess of Romanones: “He pretended up to the last minute that he was in no danger, and I did the same. I think we both knew the other knew. How strange it was, trying to fool ourselves, to save the other from suffering.”28
On May 10 David suffered cardiac arrest. Oonagh Shanley had taken the evening off to dine in the Latin Quarter. Wallis had already retired when she returned to the villa near midnight. “When I took over from the nurse who replaced me,” Shanley recalled, “I found the Duke agitated (she was French and perhaps a bit shy and the Duke was not relaxed I believe the whole afternoon). And then he collapsed. I was absolutely alone and had no one to help. I raced upstairs for my nursing bag, grabbed an ampule of IV cortisone and mercifully got into a vein in his ankle—I did a very light cardiac massage and prayed quietly. What a relief when the cocktail worked, and slowly he returned to life.” She quickly telephoned Dr. Thin and returned to the Duke’s side, holding his hand and soothing him until Thin arrived. “He ordered coramine,” she remembers, “and promised to come back in the morning with Dr. [François] Jaquin to install an intravaneous drip with saline/glucose, vitamins and cardiac remedies to improve and maintain better heart function.”29
Wallis was surprised the next morning to find that her husband was now connected to a drip; no one told her what had happened, wishing to spare her any additional worry. “I knew something was wrong, terribly wrong,” she later told a friend, “but I didn’t want to upset David by asking questions.”30 It was Thin who explained—without disclosing the cardiac arrest—that the Duke’s condition was grave; according to the doctor, the Duchess quickly guessed that her husband had but a few weeks to live.31
Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh were scheduled to visit Paris in the middle of May in connection with the British government’s decision to join the Common Market. A short time before, Lady Monckton had visited the Windsors and been shocked at the Duke’s condition. Upon her return to London, she telephoned Buckingham Palace and informed Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, that the former King was dying. This news sent the palace into a frenzy: If the Duke died before the Queen’s visit to Paris, undoubtedly it would have to be postponed. If he should die during her visit, the timing would be considered most unfortunate. Charteris contacted Sir Christopher Soames, the British ambassador in Paris, and asked that he consult Dr. Thin. Thin, however, could say little. There was no indication as to whether the Duke’s condition would worsen or improve over the next few weeks.32
Presuming that the Duke would linger on for at least a few weeks, it was suggested that the Queen pay a private visit to her uncle. Apparently, this idea was received with something less than enthusiasm: Elizabeth II dreaded personal confrontations and the more unpleasant realities of life, and the thought of coming face-to-face with her dying, exiled uncle and his despised wife left her uneasy. “I think,” remembers a close relative of the Royal Family, “that there was a certain element of guilt in her reluctance as well. For years, she had bowed to the wishes of her mother and refused to grant the Windsors any concessions; now, it was too late.”33
The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Charles arrived at Orly Airport on May 15. A visit to the Duke and Duchess was announced for May 18. When the Queen’s private secretary was asked if Elizabeth II realized how ill her uncle was, Charteris replied, “You know he’s dying. I know he’s dying. But we don’t know he’s dying.”34 This rather cold, official line would unfortunately characterize the brief royal visit to the Windsor Villa.
In the three days leading up to the visit, Soames telephoned Dr. Thin each evening at six to check on the Duke’s progress. For several days David had been unable to swallow “any significant amount of fluids” and instead was on a glucose drip. On May 17, in a raspy voice, David told both Thin and Shanley that he wanted the drip unhooked for the Queen’s visit. Although both protested, he was adamant, and the drips were duly unhooked except for one painkiller that was left in place for the night. “He was not in excruciating pain, and received only small doses of sedatives,” Thin recalled.35 Contrary to several accounts, David received no blood transfusions prior to the Queen’s visit.36
On the afternoon of the eighteenth Wallis, in a short-sleeved Dior dress of deep blue crepe, stood on the steps of the villa, watching as the limousines bearing the Queen and her entourage slowly pulled up the drive. As Elizabeth II stepped out of her car, Wallis sank into a deep but rather awkward curtsy; she later confessed to a friend that her legs had almost given out beneath her.37 She repeated the honor to the Duke of Edinburgh and to the Prince of Wales before leading the Royal trio inside. The Queen, her husband, and her eldest son all seemed distinctly uncomfortable, and Wallis later recalled that Elizabeth in particular had behaved coldly toward her. “She was not at all warm to his wife of thirty-five years,” she told the Countess of Romanones.38
