her, sassy rather than sexy: her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive. ‘Wallis wasn’t obsessed by sex,’ says Haslam. ‘If anything, she was rigidly undressable in that she was prudish. Everybody made such a thing of her going to brothels in China but everyone did that in those days. It was the fashionable thing to do. To have a good look.’
‘It was just the sort of thing that the press would say, that she was a twice-divorced American adventuress out for what she could get,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Everything was a bid to discredit her but she was the furthest thing from kinky. You never got the feeling that she was particularly sexually motivated. She was a perfectly normal American woman but not in the least bit depraved. And there was nothing more normal than Ernest Simpson and he fell in love with her.’
Winston Churchill summed up the controversial couple’s mutual attraction: ‘the association was psychical rather than sexual, and certainly not sensual except incidentally’. Churchill always believed that Wallis was good for Edward; he defended the couple to the last. ‘Although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness,’ he said.
***
Wallis met Ernest Simpson through Mary Kirk, who had now become Madame Raffray, on her marriage to the Frenchman, Jacques Raffray. Raffray, a veteran of the Great War, had originally come to America to train US troops to fight in France. Wallis, then living in Washington, enjoyed staying with the Raffrays at their New York apartment. She spent Christmas of 1926 with them awaiting her divorce from Win. Ernest, who was also in the process of getting divorced, from his American wife Dorothea, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, was frequently asked for dinner or to make up a fourth for bridge. A friendship developed and when both were granted divorces, Ernest asked Wallis to marry him.
A graduate of Harvard, Ernest had been born in New York of an American mother and a British father. After brief service as a captain in the British Army, he began work in the family shipping business, Simpson, Spence & Young. Tall, with blue eyes and a neat moustache, he was a fastidious dresser. In the early 1920s he was much in demand on the London scene and a regular dance partner of Barbara Cartland. (She later described him as a ‘handsome young bachelor, who was to figure dramatically in the history of England seventeen years later’.) The letter Wallis wrote to her mother on 15 July 1928 regarding Ernest’s marriage proposal is revealing: ‘I’ve decided that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast … I can’t go wandering the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Also 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall settle down to a fairly comfortable old age.’ After her peripatetic childhood, and abusive marriage to Win, Ernest represented financial and emotional stability, comfort and respectability. Wallis worried briefly that his wholesome ponderousness was the polar opposite to her Southern emotionalism. She was fun, spontaneous and extravagant. He was methodical and cautious. Later, he was dismissed amid the upper-class circles into which the Simpsons were propelled as ‘crashingly middle class’ and a bore.
Ernest was transferred to run the British offices of his shipping firm, and in May 1928, Wallis followed him to London. They married on 21 July at Chelsea Register Office. Wallis wore a yellow dress and blue coat that she had bought in Paris the previous summer. Although they considered the clinical nature of the register office ceremony ‘a cold little job’, she found their honeymoon ‘a blissful experience’. Driving through France, Wallis discovered that her husband was cultured, considerate and spoke French fluently. Ernest may not have been the most exciting or diverting company but he was a thoroughly decent gentleman. His great-nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley, remembers: ‘Ernest was just a nice person. He was an extremely nice uncle. He was almost like our fairy godfather.’
After the harrowing uncertainties of the previous decade, Wallis, aged thirty-two, could finally relax. Looking forward to a new life in London, she ‘felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood’. Her domestic equilibrium was to prove short-lived. Three years later, the dull conformity of her marriage was shattered by the arrival in their steady realm of the dazzling Prince of Wales.
* Fulco di Verdura was an influential Italian jeweller who designed for the duchess. His career took off when he was introduced to Coco Chanel by Cole Porter.
† The Mason–Dixon line was the American Civil War partition between the slave states of the South and free states of the North.
2
After their honeymoon, Wallis and Ernest moved into a small hotel in London while they searched for a suitable home. Ernest’s sister, Maud, helped them to find a furnished house in Upper Berkeley Street, which they rented for a year. Wallis, a natural and dedicated homemaker, was keen to secure an unfurnished property on which she could put her decorative stamp.
Initially, Mrs Simpson was lonely in London, knowing no other Americans. Unaccustomed and resistant to the formality of English mores, she felt like ‘a stranger in a strange land’. Her sense of isolation heightened in October 1929 when she learned that her mother was seriously ill. Alice had been diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain. As Ernest could not leave his business, Wallis crossed the Atlantic alone. She spent three weeks with her ailing mother, who died shortly after Wallis returned to London. The ‘sadness’ that Wallis carried inside was ‘a long time lifting’. She grieved bitterly for her adored mother, whom she felt was the only person who truly understood her.
Soon a welcome distraction presented itself. That winter, Wallis found a first-floor flat that both she and Ernest liked in a mansion block on George Street, near Marble Arch. She set about decorating the flat at Bryanston Court with her inimitable flair. She was influenced by two design legends: Syrie Maugham, wife of novelist Somerset Maugham, and her good friend Elsie de Wolfe. Professional rivalry simmered between these two eccentrics as to who was the greater visionary. Both were ‘ultra chic’, creating light avant-garde rooms – the antithesis of heavy, dark Victoriana. Wallis enlisted Syrie Maugham’s talents at Bryanston Court, while de Wolfe helped shape her later homes in France. Maugham, who pioneered white furniture and white walls against which were showcased Provençal antiques, stripped and painted everything with her secret craquelure technique. From Maugham’s workshops Wallis commissioned a dozen dining-room chairs with tall backs, upholstered in white leather and studded with nails. This was considered daringly modern. An Italian dining table, Adam sideboard and console received the Maugham treatment; they were painted blue-green and white. According to Wallis, ‘when the table was laid for the first time and the candles lighted, the effect was soft and charming’. Wallis always chose a mirror-topped table, the centre decorated with glass fruits and a silver candelabra at each end. The table service was pink china; one of her most prized possessions was the dinner service inherited from her grandmother. Unconventionally, she served her consommé piping hot in small cups of black Chinese lacquer, with tiny lids. To Wallis, design and presentation was nothing less than a moral issue. She adopted both Elsie de Wolfe’s streamlined aesthetic and her credo: ‘What surer guarantee can there be of a person’s character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste?’
Ernest, proud of his wife’s exceptional talents as a hostess, was pleased with both the style of their home and Wallis’s eye for detail. She was always moving furniture
