foul to me sometimes sweetie & curse & be cruel. It would do me the world of goods and bring me to my right senses!! I think I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt & soft!! I feel that’s what’s the matter with me.’
***
Wallis Warfield was twenty years old when, in November 1916, she married her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. She had first met the US Navy pilot the previous April during a trip to Florida, when he was stationed at the Pensacola Air Station. The day after she arrived at Pensacola Wallis wrote to her mother: ‘I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.’ Ever since she left Oldfields, Wallis, like her contemporaries, aspired to marriage as the sine qua non of achievement. When ‘Win’, dark-haired with brooding looks, proposed eight weeks after their meeting, Wallis was excited to be one of the first debutantes of her coming-out year to get engaged. As much as Wallis thought that she loved Win, a man she barely knew, she later admitted: ‘There also lay in the back of my mind a realisation that my marriage would relieve my mother of the burden of my support.’
Despite her mother’s fears that a navy life, with no permanent home, constant postings, little money, as well as long and lonely waits for her husband to return from sea, would be too regulated for someone as spirited as her daughter, Alice eventually gave the union her blessing. If only she had not. Wallis discovered on her short, grim honeymoon with Win at a hotel in West Virginia that he was an alcoholic. Wallis – who had only ever had a small glass of champagne at Christmas, as her puritanical family extolled the evils of alcohol – had never tasted hard liquor. West Virginia was a dry state, which further incensed Win, who pulled a bottle of gin from his suitcase. Once inebriated he would become aggressive, cruel and violent.
Her new life as a navy wife, first in San Diego, and then when Win took a desk job in Washington DC, became unbearable. Win’s insecurity, frustration at his dwindling career and jealous rages were sadistically vented on his young bride. But when Wallis decided to leave and seek a divorce, her mother was aghast. No Montague had ever been divorced. It was unthinkable. Even her stalwart Aunt Bessie said that it was out of the question. Her Uncle Sol was apoplectic. ‘I won’t let you bring disgrace upon us,’ he shouted.
Wallis persevered with the marriage. Her mother cautioned her that ‘being a successful wife is an exercise in understanding’. Wallis retorted bitterly: ‘A point comes when one is at the end of one’s endurance. I’m at that point now.’ She moved in with her mother, who was also living in Washington. As Uncle Sol refused her any financial help towards a divorce, her prospects looked bleak. Wallis was suitably thrilled when, in 1924, her cousin Corinne Mustin invited her to go on her first trip to Europe, to Paris. Win continued to write to Wallis and told her that he had been stationed in the Far East. He begged her to join him in China. Perhaps because Wallis could not afford a divorce and was uncertain of her financial and domestic future, she decided to give the marriage yet another go. Win met her in Hong Kong and soon enough, the familiar patterns recommenced. He became jealous, moody, quarrelsome and offensive. When he began drinking before breakfast, Wallis finally had had enough. She drew their eight-year marriage to a close, seeking a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai.
‘Wallis was now twenty-eight and her character was formed,’ according to Diana Mosley. ‘She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company; an addition to any party with her high-spirited gaiety.’
Wallis embarked on a year’s sojourn in Peking, staying with her good friends Katherine and Herman Rogers. She later described her Eastern sojourn as her ‘Lotus Year’. As a divorced woman travelling in the Far East on her own, she displayed a spirited independence ahead of her time. According to a friend of Duff Cooper’s in Paris, a French woman who knew Wallis as Mrs Spencer in Peking, Wallis was ‘always good-natured’. Unfortunately, when news of Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales broke in 1936, her year in China was used against her. It was said that she had visited the ‘singing houses’ of Shanghai and Peking. Unsavoury gossip tut-tutted, suggesting that she had acquired ‘sophisticated sexual techniques’ which she then used to entrap and manipulate the Prince of Wales and she became the butt of cheap jokes: ‘Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.’
Wallis nursed a secret that hit at the very heart of her femininity. She was infertile and had never menstruated. As a young girl it is unlikely that Wallis would have known that anything was wrong. Perhaps the absence of periods would have been her first sign at puberty that all was not as expected. It has been speculated that Wallis may have had a ‘disorder of sexual development’ or DSD, a modern term encompassing a wide range of rare genetic conditions. Others have claimed Wallis may have had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome – that is, she was born genetically male, with the XY chromosome. If this had been the case, the male sexual organs would have been internal and barely noticeable and she would have had an extremely shallow vagina. Yet this is unlikely as Wallis lacked other physical traits associated with the syndrome. We also know that she would go on to have a hysterectomy in middle age.
Whatever the cause of Wallis’s infertility it was a source of profound sadness for her. Over three marriages she bore no children, but not out of choice. Though she and Edward seemed to adore children, their lack of parenthood united them as outsiders to a familial club. Instead, they lavished love on their dogs which became their child replacements. Wallis later wrote that she mourned never being part of the ‘miracle of creation’ and that her ‘one continuing regret’ was never having ‘known the joy of having children’. The secret inner pain of childlessness must have made the gossip and slurs against her so much harder to bear.
One of the reasons that Wallis kept herself skeletally thin was that she worried that if she put on any weight she would ‘bulk up in a masculine way’. Diana Mosley said that Wallis ‘loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion’. Elsa Maxwell agreed that Wallis ate very little at the dinner table. When she challenged Wallis about this, she always replied defensively: ‘I’m an ice-box raider.’ Clearly any snacking was confined to minuscule amounts. Wallis and Edward were similar in this respect; they both favoured starvation diets and punishing regimes, each obsessed with retaining an almost pre-pubescent slenderness.
Wallis expressed a traditional femininity through her clothes: her sartorial perfectionism – a love of Cartier and couture – served to create an exaggeratedly feminine outline that was more elegant than sexual. Always immaculately groomed, there was a delicacy about her appearance – from her skirts and dresses cinched-in at the waist with tiny belts, to neat little pairs of heels. Adorned as he was with exquisite statement jewels, there was nothing androgynous about Wallis’s style. She certainly was no ‘sex siren’ or ‘harlot’, as many made her out to be. Although Wallis often liked to be the centre of attention socially, in other ways she came across as old-fashioned and reserved; indeed, her upbringing in Baltimore had been ladylike to the point of prudish. Astonishingly she told Herman Rogers, who eventually gave her away at her wedding to Edward in 1937, that she ‘had never had sexual intercourse with either of her two husbands’. Nor had she ‘ever allowed anyone else to touch her below’ what she described as ‘her personal Mason–Dixon line’.†
Both Wallis and Edward shared insecurities about their sexual identities. Confiding this in one another may have helped forge a strong secret bond between them. Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, whose husband was ambassador to France 1954–60, knew the Windsors in Paris and confided to Hugo Vickers that ‘the prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform’ – she ‘called it a hairpin reaction. She said that the duchess coped with it. I commented: “She was meant to have learned special ways in China.” “There was nothing Chinese about it,” said Lady Gladwyn. “It was what they call
