None of those with whom I spoke recognised the wicked Wallis of the history books. Repeatedly, I heard of her kindliness, sense of fun and depth of friendship, which contradicted the public image of a hard-nosed, shallow woman. The closer I got to Wallis’s true character, the greater my incredulity and mounting fury that the world has judged her unfairly and unkindly. She certainly was no saint, but she was far from the sinister manipulator depicted in many accounts. Her friends noted in their diaries and memoirs their warmth and respect for Wallis, yet these tender recollections never seemed to gain sufficient attention. ‘She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend – very rare you know,’ wrote Diana Vreeland. ‘Women are rarely that sort of friend to each other.’ Wallis was similarly loyal to male friends, too. The Conservative MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon said: ‘She has always shown me friendship, understanding and even affection, and I have known her to do a hundred kindnesses and never a mean act.’
Wallis was viciously derided at the time of Edward’s abdication and then kept at a distance, denied the opportunity to change public mistrust and misgivings about her. When the scandal broke in the press, she was, understandably, devastated. ‘The enormity of the hatred I had aroused and the distorted image of me that seemed to be forming in minds everywhere went far beyond anything I had anticipated even in my most depressed moments,’ she later wrote. ‘I became obsessed by the notion that, in a manner impossible for me to comprehend, a calculated and organized effort to discredit me had been set afoot.’
She was right. So sensational were the press reports and fevered gossip in 1936 – Mrs Simpson was ‘gold digger’, ‘a whore’, ‘a sorceress’, ‘a Nazi spy’ – that many of the British and European aristocracy, meeting her for the first time, were taken aback. The woman they encountered was nothing like her vulgar fictional persona. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted when I first met the duchess,’ recalled Count Rudolf Graf von Schönburg. ‘She was the complete opposite of everything we had heard about her.’
Count Rudi became a close friend of the Windsors, after meeting them in the early sixties in Marbella, where he ran a fashionable club. ‘The story of the abdication was so shocking,’ he recalled, ‘but the duchess was so much more ladylike than anything we had been led to believe. It was all “this loud, twice-divorced, American” … yet here was this charming, dignified woman, always well-dressed but never overdoing it. Maybe sometimes she laughed too loudly but that was it. I liked her very much and we spent many days and evenings with the couple, so had the opportunity to be treated like close friends and almost family. I have always considered that her position in history is factually incorrect and very unfair.’
The Duke of Fragnito had similar preconceptions when he met the duchess in Palm Beach in the early 1960s. ‘I didn’t want to like her because of everything I had heard about her,’ he admitted. ‘But I was taken aback by her grace and impeccable manners. To my great surprise she behaved like a real royal. She was just as captivating as the duke. They both had this ability to produce an electric charm which I have never forgotten.’
Vogue editor Diana Vreeland noted of Wallis: ‘There was something about her that made you look twice.’ The duchess’s private secretary, Joanna Schutz, accompanied Wallis to New York by boat shortly after the duke died. The duchess did not put her name on the passenger list and usually ate in her room. Occasionally, she would enter the dining room to keep Miss Schutz company. ‘Some people recognised her, others didn’t, but they knew she was special,’ said Hugo Vickers. ‘She was somebody. She had a hypnotic effect.’
‘I can’t say that she was sexy but she was sassy,’ remembered Nicky Haslam. ‘She walked into the room and it took off. The only other person I knew who had that quality was Frank Sinatra.’ Haslam, an interior designer who met Wallis in New York in 1962, said: ‘Wallis had innate American style. But to be an American was against her then, almost more than the divorce.’ Wallis described the archaic snobbery she encountered when living in London: ‘The British seemed to cherish a sentiment of settled disapproval towards things American.’
I was sitting with Nicholas Haslam in a Chelsea restaurant, when he produced an envelope, saying that he had something special to show me. It was a handwritten letter from Wallis to her friend, Elsie de Wolfe. Elsie, who became Lady Mendl in 1926 on her marriage to Sir Charles Mendl, a press attaché to the British embassy in Paris, was an eccentric who practised yoga and underwent plastic surgeries, years before both became de rigueur. Credited with inventing the profession of interior decorating, she was famed for her elaborate parties, and in particular the Circus Ball at the Villa Trianon, in Versailles in 1939. Attended by over 700 guests, including the duke and duchess, the ball was held in a green and white dance pavilion, and featured a fabulously jewelled elephant. Circumstances would force Wallis to adopt Elsie’s favourite motto, embroidered on taffeta cushions strewn throughout the Villa Trianon: ‘Never Complain, Never Explain’.
Turning the letter over in my hand, I admired Wallis’s chic stationery, the thick envelope lined with forest green tissue paper and the simple address on crisp cream paper, ‘La Croë, Cap D’Antibes’, the duke and duchess’s villa in the south of France. The letter, written in 1948, and dated Friday 24 September, reveals Wallis’s loose, looping handwriting in black ink: open and hurried in style and pace, there are endearing crossings out and insertions as her thoughts race across the page with barely any punctuation. She asks Elsie if she and Edward can come to stay with her at the Villa Trianon on their way back to Paris, and shares details of her day-to-day life: ‘I swam this A.M and tonight I go to Cap d’ail to play Oklahoma [a card game] with Winston Churchill who is stopping with Max Beaverbrook – we are great rivals and play every other night …’
The letter is full of warmth and love. Wallis reveals herself to be a genuine, open friend. She tells Elsie how difficult it is packing up and leaving La Croë, which she and the duke had leased for the previous decade. Her loneliness and tension is tangible; she details her desire to be alone, relaxing with Elsie, whom she misses: ‘I long to see your elephant again and sit in the tent with the blackamoors, look at you and the things you have created,’ Wallis wrote. ‘I do wish I could come sooner to do all this. My great and deep affection, as always, Wallis.’
When I contemplated the duke and duchess’s empty, peripatetic life after abdication and exile, I felt a profound sadness. What was their purpose from that point on? To live a life together to prove that it had not all been for nought? To be happy? To appear to be happy? There must have been an element of continuous silent strain for them both, a seam of guilt they dared not plunder. ‘I have a theory that when men let women down, they feel awful,’ Hugo Vickers told me. ‘The duke turned Wallis into the most hated woman in the world, then he couldn’t get her what he promised her: the HRH title, or his family to accept her. So he must have spent his whole life feeling guilty. I saw him once at Princess Marina’s* funeral and I have never seen a man with sadder eyes.’
Over three decades into their post-abdication existence, just a few years before the duke’s death, the Windsors were interviewed on live television, on the BBC, by the broadcaster, Kenneth Harris. The programme was watched by 12 million viewers. Wallis comes across effortlessly, she is witty and warm. The duke, with his hangdog eyes, appears less comfortable in his own skin, constantly looking down at his hands, studying his nails, fidgeting. The interviewer asks the couple if they have any regrets. The duchess, elegant in cream silk with a pale blue scarf, laughs nervously: ‘About certain