The year Wallis Simpson spent as a single woman in China became the basis for a supposed dossier of scandal used by the Establishment to defame and shame her. Now, the last members of her inner circle help uncover the truth about the duchess’s ‘lotus year’.
Six years ago, on a broiling June day, I knelt before the Duchess of Windsor’s grave in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore. Thanks to the kindness of Prince Andrew, I was granted access to this sacred family space. The prince’s butler escorted me through Home Park at Windsor from the prince’s home, Royal Lodge, to nearby Frogmore. He stood discreetly at the gate as I paid homage to the woman I had come to adore while writing her biography, The American Duchess: The Real Wallis Simpson.
Wearing a silk dress and my mother’s pearls in honour of the duchess and her inimitable style, I placed a floral bouquet that I had chosen with care on her gravestone. It contained her wedding flowers: white peonies, delphiniums the colour of her blue Mainbocher wedding dress, larkspur and sprigs of wild grasses. As I rested my hand on the grave, I made a pledge to the duchess that I would spend the rest of my life striving to tear down the myriad falsehoods that have grown like bindweed around her, choking her reputation.
The story of the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 and his marriage to an American divorcee has been told so many times that it has taken on the character of a fairytale. Like fairytales, much of what we have been repeatedly told over the past 90 years is in fact make-believe. So much hateful gossip and harmful innuendo has been levelled at Wallis that it has become a Sisyphean task to change public opinion and steer detractors towards the truth. As Wallis’s society friend Herman Rogers, the erudite Yale graduate and American scion of a railroad fortune – who gave her away at her marriage to Edward in June 1937 – said: ‘Much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist.’
Among the most damaging slurs is the foul fiction that is supposedly contained in a British government file known as the China Dossier. In 1924, Wallis left her native America, aged 28, hoping to rekindle her marriage to her first husband, a violent, alcoholic US navy pilot called Earl Winfield Spencer, who was posted in Hong Kong. When it was clear he was still drinking, she fled to Shanghai, then travelled to the ancient capital of Peking (now Beijing), where she stayed with Herman and Kitty Rogers in their rented hutong courtyard house. (Wallis similarly raced to the Rogers’ protective embrace in the South of France when news of the King’s abdication broke 12 years later. There, in Lou Vieï, their Cannes villa, the future Duchess of Windsor hid from an antagonistic British press and howling public outcry. She listened to the King deliver his abdication speech weeping under a blanket on the Rogers’ drawing-room sofa.)
More than a decade later, when Wallis was entrapped by the King – again, contrary to rumour, she did not want Edward to abdicate, nor did she push to marry him – she referred to her year of freedom from her starter marriage to Spencer, travelling as a single woman in China, as her ‘lotus year’. At the time of the abdication, the British government seized on her plucky travels, twisting the narrative hard against her.
The Establishment, which did not want Edward on the throne, considering him a dilettante, saw Wallis as the perfect scapegoat. Their bid was to defame and shame her. And how they succeeded. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the British intelligence services spread vile, baseless rumours, some of which comprised the fantastical China Dossier.
It was widely circulated among the upper classes that Wallis was a ‘harlot’ who was unfaithful to the prince, and had frequented brothels in China to learn the notorious ‘Shanghai grip’ – a sexual technique that she allegedly used to gain a perverse hold over Edward. She became the butt of cheap jokes: ‘Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.’
When Wallis learnt of these allegations, she dismissed them as ‘venom, venom, VENOM’.
Researching my biography of Bessie Wallis Warfield, born to a prominent Baltimore family in June 1896, it was obvious to me that the British Establishment’s agenda was to besmirch her. Her friend, Nicky Haslam, told me that Wallis was ‘rigidly undressable in that she was prudish’. Nicky observed of her that she was sassy rather than sexy. Her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive, as her detractors maintain.
Before his death, the historian John Julius Norwich spoke to me about the agenda against Wallis. As a young man, he met the duchess in Paris when his father, Duff Cooper, was British ambassador to France in the 1940s. ‘Everything was a bid to discredit her, but she was the furthest thing from kinky,’ he said. ‘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.’
You can imagine my delight that a new book published this month by the academic Paul French, Her Lotus Year; China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson, joins my position. French, a specialist in the history of 20th-century China, refutes the veracity of the so-called China Dossier.
No China Dossier has ever been revealed,’ he writes. ‘No document discovered mouldering in the archives or an attic somewhere. Some suggest it may be hidden away, in the possession of the security services or the Royal Family, beyond public reach. It is safe to conclude that it never existed.’
French surmises that it ‘was all the lascivious fabrication of someone in Special Branch or MI5. Most probably, the former head of the British Special Intelligence outpost in Shanghai, Harry Steptoe.’ Little is known about Steptoe, who maintained diplomatic cover as a vice-consul in the British consulate. ‘The few who have remembered him describe him as an energetic, colourful, and somewhat odd person, controlling a vast number of agents,’ says French. ‘One contact remembered Steptoe operating in Peking before the First World War: “He loves to weave a veil of mystery over his doings and whisper strange warnings.”’ Steptoe certainly had the imaginative powers and the intimate knowledge of interwar Shanghai to concoct most of the tales comprising the China Dossier.
Can we now, finally, turn the page on this savage deceit, instead to fully celebrate the courageous and kind woman that Wallis was? A woman ahead of her time. Wallis’s aim on leaving China was to divorce the errant Win Spencer – a notion her conventional family firmly decried. In 1928, she married the decent but dull Ernest Simpson, with whom she moved to London, where Ernest worked in the family shipping business. She set about establishing herself as a dazzling society hostess. Three years later, when Wallis was 35, she met the Prince of Wales. Her steady domestic realm with Simpson was soon upended.
Wallis decorated her Bryanston Court home with flair. She was influenced by two design legends: Syrie Maugham, wife of novelist W Somerset Maugham, and her friend, Elsie de Wolfe. Maugham pioneered light, airy rooms with white furniture and white walls, painting everything in her signature craquelure technique – the antithesis of the heavy, dark Victoriana of the day. Wallis’s ‘lotus year’ may have indelibly defamed her reputation but it also left a more positive mark on her style and home-making. It was not just her hair – often fashioned in a sleek chignon, which Cecil Beaton described as ‘brushed so that a fly would slip off it’ and was referred to in the fashion press as ‘Chinese style’ – but also at her homes, which she imbued with chinoiserie and Chinese objets d’art.
Wallis served her dinner guests piping hot consommé in small cups of black Chinese lacquer with tiny lids, which was profoundly avant-garde in London in 1930. Her rooms were peppered with lacquered furniture and exquisitely engraved jade dishes. Among her collection was a 17th-century Coromandel lacquer table, lightly carved with waterbirds dancing amid flowering lotuses, as well as carved Chinese cinnabar-lacquer low tables bought in Peking.
French writes that after Wallis and Kitty ‘lunched in negligees in the courtyard outside [in Peking], the vermilion walls covered in century-old wisteria’, the girlfriends would venture into the city in the early evenings to shop. Of Wallis, he says, ‘the curios, lacquerwares and screens that caught her eye, couldn’t be resisted’. She developed a passion for Chinese porcelain.
Last August, my husband and I joined Johanna Schutz, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s former private secretary, for lunch at her home overlooking Lake Geneva. Schutz, who worked for the Windsors for eight years in the early 1970s, and stayed on as Wallis’s confidante and travelling companion after the duke died in1972, is the last person alive who knew the couple intimately. Over grilled salmon (served in duchess style – each fillet an identical size), I told Johanna about French’s book. We toasted the tide turning in dear Wallis’s favour.
Johanna agrees that the heinous China Dossier was merely another Establishment bid to destroy Wallis. ‘The only reason that the duchess went to China was to seek a divorce and escape her abusive husband,’ she said.
Johanna always refers to Wallis’s dignity, her compassion and stoic resilience. ‘Every time lies appeared about the duchess, she would look at me and say, “What can I do?”’ Ironically, it was Wallis who was truly regal. She adopted the late Queen’s credo: ‘Never complain, never explain.’
When I asked about the influence of China on the duchess’s entertaining style, Johanna laughed and pointed at the plates that we were dining off. I had noticed that they were pretty but had not spotted that it was Chinese porcelain, adorned with flowers and butterflies. ‘A gift from the duchess from her time in China,’ she smiled. Johanna told me that the duchess had another exceptional Chinese porcelain dinner service patterned with dragons, which was bought after her death by Nathan Cummings, the American businessman and philanthropist who had been a long-standing friend of the Windsors.
After lunch, Johanna took me to her guest bedroom, where she showed me two round, low, Chinese lacquer side tables in burnt orange that the duchess had also given her from her sojourn in the Far East. I had seen photographs of these in the Duke of Windsor’s study in Government House, Nassau, where he served as governor of the Bahamas from 1940 until 1945. It felt like I was touching history as I gently ran my hand across these delicate pieces. I imagined them accompanying Wallis through her various homes in London, Paris, the Côte d’Azur and Nassau, until they finally settled in the only home that the duke and duchess ever owned – their country house they referred to as ‘The Mill’, set in 23 acres, 30 minutes from Paris. It struck me that these Chinese artefacts had borne witness to Wallis’s life as it shockingly transformed after the long, languid days of her ‘lotus year’.
Now that the China Dossier has been exposed as fraudulent, can we detonate an even more damaging falsehood? The Duchess of Windsor was not a Nazi sympathiser. She accompanied her husband on a tour of Germany [to look at housing conditions] where they met Hitler in 1937 (as was fashionable among the aristocracy of the day). Edward, hurt that his family had rejected Wallis, refusing her the HRH title, wanted his wife to experience the prestige of a royal tour. The trip was arranged on the proviso that the duchess would be curtsied to and addressed as HRH. Wallis remained downstairs drinking tea for two hours while her husband met Hitler. She later said that ‘there was no political conversation, it was a typically social tea’. The photograph of the couple shaking hands with Hitler as they left has haunted the Windsors in perpetuity.
History is subjective, open to interpretation. If the China Dossier is fake, so-called archival documents that male historians cite to prove the Duchess of Windsor’s unsavoury credentials don’t wash with me or chime with whom Wallis was either.
Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson by Paul French is published on 14 November (Macmillan, £25)