The Duchess Of Windsor, page 70
“When the Duchess was in New York,” recalls Janine Metz, “I rang to speak with her, but Schutz had left orders at the Waldorf to transfer no calls at all to the suite. I asked the operator to put me through, but she said, ‘I’m sorry Mrs. Metz, it breaks my heart, but if I connect you with the apartment and Miss Schutz hears of it, I run the risk of losing my job.’” Eventually, Madame Metz managed to visit the Duchess, but she found Schutz an unwelcome presence. “She was not nice to the Duchess,” she says. “She spoke to the Duchess in a way that would have blown your ears off! Schutz would tell the Duchess, ‘You sit on this little stool and don’t move,’ and the Duchess would comply, completely lost.”29
Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, happened to be staying at the Waldorf Towers when the Duchess arrived. This was an unforeseen embarrassment; Margaret, like her sister the Queen, had been raised by her mother to despise the woman they all held responsible for George VI’s premature death. The press, on learning of the two royal guests, wondered if they would meet, speculation which may have forced the issue, for Margaret and Snowdon duly called upon Wallis in her suite, where they spent fifteen minutes asking after her health and her life. Wallis, according to what Margaret would later say, seemed depressed and lonely. Back in her own suite, however, she decided to sign a photograph of herself and dispatch it to her lonely aunt. “Just to cheer her up,” she declared later.30
Such “hollow gestures,” in the words of one of the Duchess’s American friends, brought little comfort.31 It is true that Wallis had become increasingly depressed, a condition no doubt accelerated not only by her loneliness for the Duke but by her deteriorating health. Her arteriosclerosis made her forgetful, which frustrated the once-vibrant Duchess, and this frustration, along with the sudden changes in mood which sometimes accompanied the forgetting, made her seem volatile on occasion. Her greatest worry, however, was her physical health, which, in the years immediately following David’s death, steadily declined.
At the end of 1972, while walking across the drawing room floor in the villa in Paris, Wallis accidentally caught the heel of her shoe at the edge of the carpet and took a nasty spill, breaking her hip. Dr. Thin placed her in the American Hospital in Paris so that she could be properly cared for. There the nurses reportedly found her “very senile.” One nurse recalled: “She was very confused. She would ask the same question forty times and still not seem to understand the answer. We attached a button to her nightdress to turn off the light but she just couldn’t find it, as hard as she tried. They had to put sideboards on her bed because she kept trying to climb out at night. I remember her saying once that if it wasn’t for her, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been Queen.”32
Her recovery was slow, and just on the point of being mobile, she suffered a setback which left little doubt that her state of mind was rapidly failing. One day, she asked the nurse attending her, “Can you do the Charleston?”
“No, Ma’am,” the nurse replied. “I never learned.”
“You should,” Wallis answered. “It’s fun and it’s easy. Watch!” She then climbed out of her bed, and before the nurse could stop her, tried to demonstrate the dance; in the process, she fell and rebroke her hip, lengthening her stay in the hospital.33
She had scarcely been out of the hospital for more than a few months when, in August 1973, she suffered another setback. Lady Grace Dudley had invited her friend to join her on holiday at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz. One evening, as Wallis prepared to take her bath, she tripped on the raised edge of the sunken bathtub and fell hard against it, cracking several ribs. Once again, she was back in the hospital for a month while doctors made certain she was properly healed.
These physical ailments, coupled with her loneliness and illness, only worsened Wallis’s emotional state. She rarely ate and even then had to force her food down. She had never been much of a drinker; but Wallis had always been able to handle her alcohol well. Now, however, her friends worried that she was perhaps drinking a bit too much, a concern refuted by her physician, Jean Thin. Because she was more forgetful, however, she often drank on an empty stomach, and this, coupled with her illness and interaction with medications (the Duchess was given regular doses of Valium), undoubtedly heightened the effect on her. Thin, worried greatly about these difficulties and how the alcohol was affecting Wallis’s high blood pressure, finally advised that all alcohol be removed from the villa.34
Her friend Diana Vreeland was startled, during a visit she made to the Duchess in Paris, to find her once-vibrant friend confused and unsteady. She recalled: “The Duchess looked too beautiful, standing in the garden, dressed in a turquoise djellaba embroidered in black pearls and white pearls—marvelous—and wearing all her sapphires. She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend—very rare, you know.... So we were talking after dinner, the two of us. And then suddenly she took hold of my wrist, gazed off into the distance, and said, ‘Diana, I keep telling him he must not abdicate. He must not abdicate. No, no, no! No, no, no, I say!’ Then, suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked back at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.”35
John Utter, whom Wallis had never liked, was fired in the fall of 1975. Wallis discovered that he had apparently worked out some sort of private arrangement with Lord Mountbatten on behalf of the British Royal Family and had secretly been handing over the Duke’s papers and other objects for return to England.36 Utter received no pension for his years of service, a circumstance which undoubtedly contributed to the bitter attitude he adopted toward his time with the Duke and Duchess and tainted the inflammatory interviews he often gave before his death in 1980.
Throughout the fall of 1975, Wallis was increasingly unwell; her old stomach ulcers, which had long bothered her, began bleeding, and Dr. Thin ordered her into the American Hospital once again. During the course of this hospital stay, Thin also discovered that Wallis was suffering from Crohn’s disease, a debilitating illness which caused intense intestinal discomfort and frequent vomiting.37 “From then on,” recalled her friend Lady Mosley, “[she] was never quite well again. At times she seemed to be on the point of recovery, but it always eluded her, and her many friends could do little to help.”38
Wallis was indeed unwell when she was released. Her senility increased dramatically; although there were often periods when she was perfectly well, her outbursts of temper and lapses of memory became more frequent. Physically, Crohn’s disease left her unable to leave her bed for long periods of time; when she did venture out, inevitably her weakness caused her to stumble and fall. She refused to eat and consequently became dangerously thin. In February 1976 she was back in the American Hospital, suffering from a near-total physical collapse.39
For a time after her release from the hospital that spring, Wallis seemed to improve. She occasionally dined out in Paris with a friend and gave a few dinner parties at the villa. In May two newspaper photographers with telephoto lenses managed to climb the walls of the villa and photograph Wallis as she was carried onto the terrace wearing a dark print dress, a white shawl, and a string of pearls. Unaware of their presence, she sat in the sunshine, reading. The next day, the photographs appeared, and Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s French lawyer, sued for invasion of privacy, litigation which eventually forced the defendants to pay Wallis damages of 80,000 francs.
In 1976, former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had taken a position as an editor of the American publishing house Viking, wrote to Wallis asking if she would be willing to collaborate on a second volume of her memoirs. She even offered to fly to Paris to meet Wallis and discuss the idea. Wallis was still capable of determining her own future, and Onassis received a reply stating that the Duchess had no desire to discuss her life with any publisher.40
That fall, Wallis’s condition deteriorated once again. In October 1976, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother visited Paris. There had been some discussion that she might call on her sister-in-law; but the visit, if ever planned, failed to take place. It has been said that Dr. Thin, worried about his patient‘s condition, had Johanna Schutz ring the British embassy and cancel the meeting; instead, the Queen Mother sent a bouquet of white and red roses, along with a card which read: “In Friendship. Elizabeth.”41 Thin, however, contradicts this story, saying that he was never consulted over the Duchess’s condition, nor did he or Schutz advise that such a visit be canceled.42
As Wallis continued her deterioration, Johanna Schutz prevented the Duchess’s friends from calling on her. She was now in almost total control of Wallis’s day-to-day life. “Everyone thought Johanna Schutz very difficult,” says Linda Mortimer. “She got rather too big for her breeches, and the Duchess always used to say that she didn’t like her at all.” Mortimer’s repeated calls to the Windsor Villa were not put through to the Duchess: Schutz told her that the Duchess was unwell; that she was out; that she could not speak at the moment. When she finally did manage to reach the Duchess, Wallis asked, “Linda, why don’t you come to see me? I heard you were in Paris. Have you forgotten me also?”
“No, Duchess,” Mortimer replied, “I haven’t forgotten you, but it is impossible to get through to you.”
“Well,” Wallis said in a rather hushed, almost conspiratorial tone of voice, “if you happen to ring between one and two on Tuesdays, you might get put through to me.”43
One day, the Countess of Romanones received a telephone call from the Duchess asking her to come visit her in Paris. She made the arrangements to fly to France and rang the Windsor villa to ask if a car would, as was customary, meet her at the airport. The Countess was told, however, that she should not come, as the Duchess was unwell and unable to receive visitors. For the next year, although she tried to reach Wallis by telephone numerous times, the Countess could never get her calls put through.44
Metz encountered the same difficulties in Paris as she had in New York. “I would try to ring, but not be put through to Her Royal Highness. Georges would say, with seeming great sadness, ‘It is better that you don’t see Her Royal Highness, and it is better that you remember her as she was.‘” Nevertheless, Metz, on her visits to Paris, would ring the villa and arrange to meet Georges and his wife, Ophelia. She always found the house sadly quiet. The old butler and his wife might ask her to join them in the pantry for tea but absolutely refused to let her slip up the staircase to see the Duchess. “Georges apologized to me, but said he was under orders, and that he might lose his job if he let me see Her Royal Highness.”45
The veil of secrecy about life in the Windsor villa, and the Duchess herself, drew higher and higher. In April 1978, Maître Suzanne Blum fired Schutz, and Wallis’s friends temporarily found their access to her much easier.
Janine Metz managed to reach the Duchess, and Wallis quickly asked her to come around for dinner. Just before they were to sit down, Wallis looked around the room in desperation. “Oh,” she said, “the Duke is so late. He must have been detained somewhere, but it is strange not to have him call.” She soon forgot this momentary lapse and embarked on a somewhat confused conversation. “She seemed to forget what she said two minutes after she had said it,” Metz recalls sadly.
At the end of their evening, a maid appeared to help escort Wallis to her bedroom and assist her, but the Duchess turned around and said, “You can go. Madame Metz will take care of me.” Janine Metz helped Wallis undress and change into her lingerie, then attended to her evening toilette, cleaning her face with lotion and brushing out her long hair. “Her skin was pink and fresh, and she was truly at peace,” Metz recalls. She helped Wallis into bed and found that she was “like a feather, there was nothing much left of her.” They spoke for several minutes. Finally, Wallis took Madame Metz’s hand in hers and said, “You know, Janine, you are the only one I trust totally. Please stay with me.” Madame Metz switched off the lights and sat in the darkened room, watching as the Duchess quickly fell asleep. After several hours, however, she had to leave and crept out of the room. “To this day,” she says, “I feel very remorseful that I simply didn’t stay the whole night.”46
On February 23, 1979, Wallis was back in the American Hospital for the removal of an intestinal blockage. Three months later, a bacterial infection forced her return. The situation turned out to be much more serious than first expected, and Dr. Thin was forced to keep the Duchess under hospital care for four months. On September 14, she was finally released. News reporters, camped out at the hospital entrance, caught her exit: a rather sad, frail old woman, a shawl draped around her bent shoulders, her step slow and uncertain. When she saw their cameras, Wallis stopped for a moment, smiled, and raised her hand in an unsteady wave before entering her car. This was the last glimpse the public would ever have of the Duchess of Windsor.
47
Last Years
TWO YEARS AFTER the Duke of Windsor’s death in 1974, Frances Donaldson’s much-anticipated biography Edward VIII was published to great critical acclaim. However, Maître Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s French lawyer, was greatly upset with the result; she was angry that although Donaldson had begun the book during the Duke’s lifetime, she had apparently made no attempt to consult either David or Wallis. The Windsors‘ friends were, for the most part, also neglected, and as a result, Donaldson had relied heavily on English sources. Not surprisingly, this biography thus tended to reflect the views of the Royal Family and the court.
Blum claimed that “it would take a 400 page book” to answer the inaccuracies she alleged in Donaldson’s biography.1 The situation did not improve a few years later when, in May 1978, Verity Lambert, director of drama at Thames TV, approached Blum and informed her that Simon Raven would be writing a television script based on Donaldson’s book. Blum immediately tried to intervene; if she could not halt production, she insisted that she have full script approval. Thames TV, however, was unwilling to comply with her demands, and the series, Edward and Mrs. Simpson, duly aired to large audiences that fall in England, with Cynthia Harris as Wallis, Edward Fox as Edward, and Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Mary. According to Verity Lambert, Maître Blum’s very public objections only created more interest in the series. “We could never have bought such publicity,” he declared.2
Blum, however, was not finished. On November 20, 1978—after two episodes of the series had already aired on British TV—she released a press statement which declared that the series was “largely and essentially a fable based on an incorrect or distorted interpretation of the facts.” To Blum, every hour included a “wave of calumnies.” To counter these alleged inaccuracies, she announced that a famous—but unnamed—French historian would soon publish the couples’ private papers and letters.3
“People,” Blum declared, “will be amazed to discover how seriously they have been fooled. Mrs. Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, has been portrayed as a cheap adventuress, determined to get hold of the Duke of Windsor, determined to marry the King and destroy the King. The reverse is true. She was the reluctant partner. What has particularly distressed her—and myself—has been the allegation that she was Edward’s mistress. This was quite untrue. The King did not want a mistress, and if he had, no doubt he would not have abdicated. He wanted a wife and the support of this one woman for the rest of his life.”4
The enormous publicity over the Thames TV series was the first time most people heard of Maître Suzanne Blum. As much as the Duchess of Windsor herself, Blum remains a figure of great controversy: Was she a loyal and dedicated servant to the Duchess in her failing years, devoted to preserving both Wallis’s life and her memory; or was she something far more sinister—a malevolent force in the Duchess’s life, separating her from her few remaining friends, instructing that Wallis be kept alive by any means necessary, and presiding over the questionable dispersal of the Windsor estate?
Suzanne Blumel had been born in 1898, in the tiny provincial French village of Niort. She was an unusual young woman, gifted, headstrong, and determined to overcome any prejudices attached both to her sex and to her Jewish heritage. Exceptionally intelligent, she graduated from the University of Poitiers in 1921; that same year, she married lawyer Paul Weill, who later worked as the Paris representative of the London firm of Allen and Overy, the Duke of Windsor’s solicitors.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, she had fled occupied Paris and studied law at Columbia University in New York City. In her exile, she spent much of her time and energy trying to win the release of former French premier Léon Blum, a great friend of her brother’s who had been imprisoned for alleged treachery in the fall of the Third Republic. At the end of the war, she and her husband returned to France, where, having legally changed her name to Suzanne Blum, she took on the formal legal title of maître, or master, and began her illustrious career. Her list of famous clients included Rita Hayworth, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Walt Disney. When her first husband died, Blum was married to Gen. Georges Spillmann, a distinguished soldier and noted Arabic scholar.
Blum, according to one reporter, was “a woman of incisive manner and sharp brains. Diminutive, she still dominates by her presence. Her face is unlined, her complexion excellent and her features bear evidence of her once having been a considerable beauty—and she manages to look elegant, even in her lawyer’s robes.”5
In 1979, Blum asked Michael Bloch to write several books on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. His view of the lawyer, whom he considered a dose friend, is entirely favorable: “The Maitre was an extraordinary personality, who throughout her long career had taken the causes of her clients to heart, and she felt strongly that the Windsors had been mistreated and maligned and that it was her duty to protect their interests and reputation staunchly. She was a chivalrous woman of great ability and it was easy to understand why the Duchess so valued her.”6
