The Duchess Of Windsor, page 71
The formidable quality was not imagined; whether she was challenging British television or suing reporters and photographers for invasion of the Duchess’s privacy, few who came into contact with Maitre Blum were left with any doubt as to her strength of will. Many of those who knew the Duchess well have nothing but praise for Blum. According to Dr. Jean Thin, she has been made into “a grotesque character” by writers. “I got on perfectly well with Madame Blum.”7 And the Countess of Romanones says: “She was a marvelous woman, very badly treated by writers and other people. She protected the Duchess and never resisted my attempts to see the Duchess.”8
Others, however, found her less pleasant. Mrs. Linda Mortimer dealt with Blum on several occasions, trying to win permission to visit the Duchess. “I think she was a perfectly dreadful woman,” she says. She recalls that during the few times she was allowed to visit the Windsor Villa, many valuable objects—the Duchess’s collection of gold boxes, pieces of Fabergé, important paintings, and even the wedding present from Linda’s parents to the Windsors—were missing. Because Blum was firmly in control of the villa, Mortimer has little doubt that she was responsible for the disposal of the items.9 In fact, as Michael Bloch has confirmed, Blum found such sales a financial necessity. Although the Duchess’s estate was substantial, there was not much in the way of liquid assets, and the medical expenses for Wallis’s care as well as the maintenance of the villa and its staff required currency which could not otherwise be obtained.10
More than one writer has commented on the similarities between the Duchess of Windsor and her French lawyer: Both were strong women, of independent spirit, who have been largely overshadowed by negative publicity. In truth, Blum appears to have been genuinely devoted to the Windsors, especially the Duchess. “She was very forceful,” admits Michael Bloch, “and perhaps became a little too adamant in her protection, but she was only doing what she thought to be the proper thing.”11 Unfortunately, many of the painful incidents involving friends of the Duchess being denied visits seem to have come about at the hands of Johanna Schutz rather than Blum. For a time after Schutz’s firing, the lawyer did indeed allow the Duchess’s friends to visit; Wallis’s illness in 1979, however, effectively put an end to these occasions, as Dr. Thin advised Blum that it was unwise to excite the Duchess in any way.12
By 1980, Wallis had deteriorated to a pitiable state. Shortly after the Duke’s death, she had spoken with the Countess of Romanones, reminding her that her own aunt Bessie had lived to be a hundred years old. “Do you suppose I’ll live that long, Aline?” she asked sadly. “I hope not.”13 Now, midway through her ninth decade of life, she found herself scarcely able to move. Circulatory problems meant she could no longer use her hands or feet, and she had to be carried through the house. She was still awakened each morning, bathed, and dressed by the nurse on duty; her long hair was carefully combed out and styled into a bun at the rear of her head. Once the most celebrated hostess of her age, Wallis—who had planned and presided over elegant dinner parties—was now spoon-fed by her nurse.14 She spent most of her days in a wheelchair, alone. Occasionally, she might ask the nurse to take her to the window and open it so that she could hear the birds singing in the garden beyond.15
Although her periods of lucidity were fewer now, she had not completely lost her sense of reason. “She was not in a coma,” recalls Dr. Thin, “and had moments of awareness which to anyone of her vitality and love of life must have been unendurable.”16 Once, as a little girl, she had been terrified of being left alone, abandoned to the dark night; now she was condemned to this twilight existence, carefully nursed and provided with the best medical care. Having expressed her dread of living to an old age, Wallis now endured the tragic, inescapable fate that she was powerless to prevent.
Throughout, the Duchess’s friends continued to phone the villa and beg to be allowed to visit. Inevitably, however, Georges would sadly report that the Duchess was unwell and unable to receive callers. He kept her friends at bay by order of Blum. “Maître Blum,” says Dr. Thin, “knew better than to expose her friend the Duchess in her decline, to the curiosity of visitors who had no other motivation than gossip. Maître Blum knew how the Duchess was keen of preserving her ‘look,’ and how much she would have hated to be exposed unwillingly when she was no more her real self. I believe that, especially at the end of her life, the Duchess preferred being protected from unwanted visits. Maître Blum protected the Duchess, and as long as the Duchess expressed her feelings, she relied gratefully on Maître Blum‘s protection.”17
Thin himself had warned that visits were not advisable. “The sudden increase of the Duchess’s blood pressure after being exposed to emotional stress was a fact that became more and more threatening,” Thin says. “Some visitors caused these variations more than others.”18 Wallis’s friends, however, were not so easily put off. Diana, Lady Mosley; Madame Janine Metz; Princess Ghislaine de Polignac; Aline, Countess of Romanones; and Mrs. Linda Mortimer all repeatedly phoned the villa, begging to be connected with the Duchess, only to be told that she was unwell.19 Eventually, however, Blum relented and allowed the Countess of Romanones to pay several visits. “I rather suspect,” says Linda Mortimer, “that Maitre Blum let Aline visit in an attempt to placate the rest of us.”20
It had been several years since Aline Romanones had visited Wallis in Paris; the first thing the Countess noticed was the overwhelming silence of the villa. Previously, the yapping of the dogs had echoed through the rooms; now the pugs had all gone. She found Wallis sitting in a wheelchair in the boudoir, dressed in a vividly embroidered blue silk brocade dressing gown, clear-eyed and coherent. Her hair had been arranged, makeup applied to her features, and she wore a favorite sapphire necklace to match the color of the dressing gown.21
A few months later, the Countess returned to the villa. She was shocked by Wallis’s appearance. Her hair, which had formerly been dyed and set, was now completely white; unbound, it fell around her shoulders. She wore no makeup and no jewels. “Who are you, my dear?” Wallis asked when she entered the room. The Duchess turned her head toward the window. “Look at the way the sun is lighting the trees,” she said softly. “You can see so many different colors. Tell David to come in. He wouldn’t want to miss this.”22
Wallis’s decline from this point on was rapid. By the time the Countess next visited, the Duchess had gone completely blind. She lay in her bed, her long white hair now brushed into a neat ponytail. The Countess thought her skin looked “surprisingly fresh.” She held out her hand in greeting, but Wallis could not see it, nor could she communicate with her friend.23
Janine Metz was one of the last of these women to visit the Duchess. Through sheer determination and repeated telephone calls and letters, she won permission to come within the carefully guarded doors of the villa. Wallis lay in bed. “She was like a little bird,” Metz recalls, “all shrivelled up. I came up very close to the bed, bent down, and kissed her. She seemed to have no idea who I was, or even that I was in the room.” Metz leaned over her, reached out and took one of Wallis’s hands in hers, and whispered, “I am Janine. I am here with you.” She pressed the Duchess’s hand, and Wallis pressed back, her only way of communicating.24
By the beginning of 1984, Wallis was completely paralyzed. Her inability to swallow meant that the daily feedings by the nurses had stopped, replaced with an intravaneous drip which would sustain the Duchess for the last two years of her life. Dr. Thin regularly visited the villa to examine the Duchess. Daily, the nurses changed her drip, cleaned and washed Wallis, swabbed her gums, ears, and nose, massaged her arms and legs, and turned her to prevent bedsores. Contrary to some reports, Thin says, “her colour remained normal. She was not cyanosed, nor sun-tanned, nor pigmented by Addison’s disease.”25
Only one man outside the narrow circle controlled by Maitre Blum managed to penetrate the thick veil of secrecy covering the Duchess’s last years. Once each week, the iron gates to the Windsor villa parted to allow Rev. Jim Leo, of the American Cathedral in Paris, entrance. In the cool, brooding house, he would ascend the marble staircase to the second floor, walk through the boudoir, still piled with books and papers, and quietly open the door to the Duchess’s bedroom. The once-vibrant blue silk on the walls had faded, washed by the sunlight that spilled through the windows. Here, surrounded by photographs of the Windsors from their happier days, Leo prayed before the silent, curled figure that lay on the bed before him, the centerpiece of the twentieth century’s most famous romance, unable to speak to, see, or comprehend the world which had passed her by.
Wallis died on April 24, 1986, of heart failure arising from a recent bout with pneumonia. She was just two months short of her ninetieth birthday. “Death,” Rev. Jim Leo told the press, “came round the corner as a very gentle friend, and she was content, she was happy.”26 Her body was washed and carefully laid out on her bed; as with her husband, no autopsy was performed on the Duchess.27 Georges Sanegre supervised as the frail body, clad in a simple black dress, was gently placed in the plain oak coffin when it arrived at the villa.28 Her only adornment was a jeweled belt, one of several Wallis had purchased in the 1960s from designer Kenneth Jay Lane.29
On Sunday, April 27, the lord chamberlain, on Queen Elizabeth II’s instructions, flew to Paris to collect the Duchess’s body and return with it to England for burial alongside the Duke at Frogmore. Georges and Ophelia Sanegre, along with the remaining staff, stood on the steps of the villa, watching in silence as the coffin, covered with a spray of white lilies, was carried from the house and placed in a waiting hearse. Within two hours, the plane had landed at RAF Benson, and Wallis entered, for the last time, the country which had rejected her fifty years before.
Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, waited to escort the body to Windsor. With television lenses and cameras trained on the plane, the coffin was unloaded and, carried by eight members of the Royal Air Force, placed in the hearse. A motorcycle policeman led the small motorcade as it left the base, followed by a limousine carrying the Duke of Gloucester and, finally, the hearse. Small crowds of curious onlookers had gathered around the streets in Windsor, watching in silence as the cars sped through the town and disappeared into the castle. Eight members of the Welsh Guards carried Wallis’s coffin up the steps to the west door of St. George’s Chapel, through the chapel itself, and on into the adjacent Albert Memorial Chapel, where it would lie until her funeral.
Wallis’s funeral took place at three-thirty in the afternoon on Tuesday, April 29, at St. George’s Chapel. One hundred seventy-five guests received invitations, including the Duchess’s friends Lady Mosley, the Countess of Romanones, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, and Grace, Lady Dudley. Wallis’s country of birth was represented by U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Charles Price. Each guest received a simple two-page program whose white cover bore the inscription “Funeral of the Duchess of Windsor” as well as a black cross.
The constable of Windsor Castle, marshal of the RAF Sir John Grandy, and the Military Knights of Windsor Castle formed the guard of honor that accompanied Wallis’s coffin as eight Welsh Guardsmen, attired in scarlet tunics, bore it upon their shoulders down the nave of St. George’s Chapel and into the choir aisle. Wallis’s body rested on the same catafalque before the high altar that had borne her husband’s coffin fourteen years earlier. Atop the simple coffin was a wreath of yellow and white madonna lilies from the queen.
Sixteen members of the Royal Family attended Wallis’s funeral. The Queen was accompanied by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Prince of Wales wore formal mourning clothes, while his wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, in the words of Lady Mosley, “looked too beautifully lovely” in her simple black dress, coat, and hat. The Queen Mother, who had despised her sister-in-law for half a century, appeared unusually serene.30
The service began with the choir intoning “I Am the Resurrection and the Life,” the anthem which traditionally opens all royal funerals. This was followed by Psalm 90, a blessing, and then a prayer, read by Dr. Michael Mann, the dean of Windsor. At the conclusion of the lesson, taken from 2 Corinthians, the choir sang “Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace.” A number of prayers followed, ending with the words of the dean of Windsor: ”O Father of all, we pray to Thee for those whom we love, but see no longer. Grant them Thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and in Thy loving wisdom and Almighty power work in them the good purpose of Thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen. Almighty God, Father of all mercies and giver of all comfort: Deal graciously, we pray Thee, with those who mourn; that casting every care on Thee, they may know the consolation of Thy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” The congregation sang the hymn “Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us” before the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced a final blessing and prayed for Wallis. At the conclusion of the service, to the organ music of Sir Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Wallis‘s coffin was carried out of the chapel into the bright afternoon sunlight. The service, which had lasted just twenty-eight minutes, was undoubtedly unique: Not once was the name of the deceased—in any form—mentioned during her own funeral. “It was the most impersonal funeral service I have ever been to,” says Linda Mortimer.31
The coffin was lifted into a hearse and, with the Royal Family and the few remaining members of the Duchess’s household following, driven down the hill to Frogmore, where she was to be laid to rest beside the Duke. A simple service was conducted by Rev. Jim Leo at the graveside before the coffin was lowered into the ground. The Princess of Wales was seen to wipe tears from her eyes as she mourned this outcast member of the Royal Family whom she had never met, and Prince Charles appeared deeply moved.32 At least one source reports that Queen Elizabeth herself momentarily broke down and cried.33 “If the Queen wept,” says one of the Duchess’s friends who attended the funeral, “they were tears of guilt, not grief.”34
After the funeral, as the late-April sunshine slowly faded from the sky, Lady Mosley wandered through the Horseshoe Cloister, which encircled the steps leading to the west door of St. George’s Chapel, examining the “masses” of flowers which had been arranged there.35 One wreath, from the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had a handwritten note attached reading: “Eddie and Katharine.” Another arrangement bore a card rather formally inscribed “From Her Royal Highness Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester and Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.” There were floral tributes from Wallis’s friends as well as hundreds of bouquets and arrangements, large and small, from people who had never known the Duchess but who had been moved by the story of her life. “The Heart Has Its Reasons” read one card tied to a wreath, while a second was dedicated simply “To a Gracious Lady.” Of all the wreaths, perhaps the most poignant bore a note reading “From RAF Unit III 1942–1945 Now Nassau Association.” Below the inscription was a poem that paid tribute to Wallis’s work in the Bahamas:
Gentle treasures of memories fall,
Heartfelt remembrances from us all,
rest in peace our dear Duchess....36
Epilogue
WHEN THE DUCHESS DIED IN 1986,” writes Piers Brendon, “there were curious manifestations of public grief, sternly discouraged by the Palace, which to the last had denied her the coveted title HRH, and gave her a very private funeral indeed. It was the culmination of fifty years’ vindictiveness, something which the royal image-makers had difficulty in reconciling with the saccharine benevolence they attributed to the Queen Mother. But somehow they managed to incorporate the Duchess into the beatific myth. The nation liked the notion of royal happy families.”1
That myth, however, was soon shattered. Within a week of Wallis’s death, Maître Blum authorized publication of the Windsors’ private correspondence. Consisting mainly of letters between Wallis and David written between 1934 and 1937, it would form the centerpiece of a book to be edited by author Michael Bloch, who had previously published two works on the Windsors. The private battles Wallis and David had waged with the Royal Family were exposed to public scrutiny, as were the affectionate feelings the couple had shared.
In death, as in the last years of her life, Wallis was still guarded by Blum. In 1973 the Duchess had signed over her personal power of attorney to the French lawyer.2 In 1975, before her health went into its final decline, Wallis gave most of her private papers to Blum, along with permission to publish them in an effort to present her and David’s side of their story. It is not clear if Wallis realized that her private love letters were to be included in this agreement, and her mental state at the time was already rapidly deteriorating. It is known that Blum certainly began to read through the papers, for she was able to discuss their contents at the time of the production of Edward and Mrs. Simpson.3
Wallis also made a new will, under the direction of Blum, in 1975, in which she appointed the Pasteur Institute in France her principal beneficiary. The Pasteur Institute, a respected medical-research foundation, seems a somewhat curious choice, and Michael Bloch confirms that it was chosen largely on the advice of Blum.4 The Duchess, however, had always supported cancer research, and it seems likely that her decision was reached with this thought in mind. Then, too, it was, as Michael Bloch has pointed out, a way of expressing her gratitude to France for the years of low rent on the villa in the Bois de Boulogne as well as her continued tax-free status.5
On March 30, 1973, Wallis had signed an agreement giving the French government nearly 140 important pieces of furniture and works of art from the Windsor villa. This had come about at the suggestion of her friend Gerald van der Kemp, curator at Versailles and the man who had helped craft her appreciation and knowledge of French antiques. The pieces, which were transferred to the government following her death, included all of the Louis XVI furniture, estimated in 1973 at £750,000; several of her gold boxes, estimated at £25,000 each, which are now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre; a Stubbs painting which had hung in the library, formerly in the collection of the Curzon family, which went to Versailles; and some important pieces of eighteenth-century porcelain, which were donated to the National Ceramics Museum.6
