Fashion @ the Met

Runs to 19 August
Schiaparelli and Prada Show Begins 10 May

Schiaparelli's outre Lobster Dress, worn by the Duchess of Windsor

Photos: Writers Clearinghouse News Service

New York
'Impossible Conversations' is a presentation of the museum's Costume Institute.

Royalty

The Duke of Windsor,
the former Edward VIII

No Nazi!
Long-Time Friend Says
Duke of Windsor was
Simply Misunderstood

By The Countess of Romanones

[Special to Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
These days following the glamorous international acclaim for William and Kate's wedding in England, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, there has emerged again in the press smears and lies about the Duke of Winsdor who for eight months was King of England in 1936.

These writers and journalists tend to be people who never knew neither the Duke of Windsor nor his time. For this reason I encourage you to tell what they know first hand because the Duke and his wife, the former Wallis Simpson, have been people who formed an important part of my life for many years.

Shortly after he was proclaimed King Edward VIII in 1936, he made public that wished to marry, was deeply in love, and convinced that he could not properly take his important position without the woman who loved him. But in those years it was inconceivable that a King of England could marry a woman of a middle class American background and also divorcee. Anyway, the King thought he could convince his subjects that such a marriage was good for the country.

He knew then that I had a lot of popularity among young people and believed that many English people would accept this wedding. In addition, the public knew that his girlfriend, Wallis Simpson, did not require actual treatment and could accept any situation that would make it possible that the King could continue in his post.

But Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was violently against the wedding, and wanted to get rid of this new King so popular with new ideas. So the King took the desire to marry, against the formalization of the wedding, to Parliament. Baldwin was not happy with the political ideas of the new King and realized that probably would not get the votes needed for re-election at the next election if the young King stood at his post. He forced the King to abdicate to marry. I knew that the King was desperately in love and struggling to meet his and Wallis' desire to marry.

Although the King had a true and deep love for his country, his attempts to resist the attacks of Baldwin finally forced him to leave.


I met the Duke of Windsor ten years later in 1947 in New York during my own honeymoon. Since then, we met several more times in New York, and soon the Duke invited us to spend time at home in Paris. The arrival was the same.

Martin was waiting at the airport and took us in the old Packard of the Duchess' by the usual route across Paris to the rue de Champs de'Entrainment in the Bois de Boulogne. When Martin arrived at the house, the car stopped and he rang the bell, and moments later a huge iron gate opened and the car ran  passed a row of plane trees and some clumps of dahlias that the Duke had planted up to a classic small palace from the late 19th century that the Duke had rented the Paris government.


So, for over thirty years I had come to know them well. Always struck us how much they worried about spending money. During one of our visits Luis, my husband, told the Duke we were building a house on the beach in Marbella -- a site that had a lovely view of the coast of Morocco and Gibraltar. Then the Duke inquired,

"Luis, do you mind telling me how much ground there is and about your spending in the construction of the house. In this so sad climate in Paris, the Duchess would find it suitable a home for certain periods where there is sun. Bu I do not know if we could afford it."


The Duke bought the land next to ours Ignacio Coca, but took so long to raise money for the construction of the house that he died without having done so three years later. The Windsors did not have unlimited amounts of money, but are now accused of spending British taxpayer money on frivolities.


Even the Duchess is said to have spent much on her wardrobe. I knew that the major fashion houses of Paris competed to offer her free couture; she spent little money on their clothes, mainly because since her marriage to the Duke, she had been elected each year as the world's smartest woman in the international charts, which served as advertising for the any clothing she wore.


As the couple for years was most popular and photographed the world, some journalists were also using his travels to criticize as another frivolous spending. The truth was that they were always guests of friends in Palm Beach and New York and, everywhere you traveled, they were invited.


But the most serious allegation and utterly false, was and still is to declare that the Duke as being pro-Nazi. This was mainly based on a photo of Hitler saluting the Chancellor's residence in Alpine their honeymoon in 1937. After the wedding, when they began their honeymoon, between different countries toured, they visited Germany.

The Duke had told me several times that German was the only foreign language that he and his brothers knew. From kids they were watched over by a German governess, and also his grandfather was German. The Duke could not avoid visiting the Chancellor of Germany. The photo with Hitler was nothing more than a courtesy, and three years later when World War II broke out it served some journalists to accuse him of being pro-Nazi.


Inside the file from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs there is evidence of his anti-Hitlerism -- Schellenberg's official letters of the Nazi government to the Spanish government for help to catch the Duke to take him to Germany. Even Eduardo Rojas, the Montarco Count, in 1940, Serrano's assistant minister and the Minister personally have told me many years later and a British writer of the Duke's persecution in Spain. Monitoring of the Duke by the Germans was planned for months in Spain and Portugal. Among the plans of the Germans was an attempt to convince the Count of Montarco to invite the Duke to go hunting on his farm near the border with Portugal and capture him. After being appointed the Governor-General of The Bahamas, by Winston Churchill, the Duke saved his life at the last minute of the German agents who were pursuing him in Portugal.


After their marriage, the Duke wanted to work and tried to get permission from his brother. King George V had forbidden him to fight in the war as a soldier against the Germans, as the Duke had asked. I think his brother would not allow him to accept the many jobs that provided good pay. His brother considered it unseemly for a former King of England to work for any company or individual.


But all nice and important and compensation that I have known of the life of former King Edward VIII was that he enjoyed a happy marriage and true and intense love until the day he died. Few couples have known a life together with such a love that seemed to increase with time. They shared a great sense of humour and always had fun together.

I remember so many tests over the years when I visited at his home in Paris. As an example, I mention one night when Luis and I returned late from a party, heard talk and laughter through the wall of our bedroom which was just above that of the Duchess. The next morning when the Duchess and I had lunch together -- the Duke and Luis were out playing golf, I said I knew she had gone to sleep very late the night before because I had heard the noise of the radio in their room at two in the morning.


She laughed, "No, Aline, it was not the radio. David comes to my room every night and we had fun talking until the wee hours. He is the most wonderful man I have ever met in my life; we have fun together and alone. You know how smart he is and how he makes me laugh."


It was true -- also the Duke often told me, "My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world."


The Duchess was no beauty, but she captivated the ex-King Edward VIII of England, and the two enjoyed a wonderful love.


The Dukes of Windsor were a couple in love until the end of his days, and they never stopped feeling, too, a love for their nation which for many years he served as the Prince of Wales. He was the most popular and beloved Prince in the history of the United Kingdom, and later King for eight months.

(Aline, The Countess of Romanones, was born in 1923 in New York. She was born was a fashion model, a World War II spy, and the wife of the Count of Romanones of Spain).

From Literary Review

Behind Clothes, Hors d'oeuvres

By Jane Ridley

Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor
By Hugo Vickers (Hutchinson 462pp £25)

The English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of twelve, when most children his age were in thrall to the Beatles, Hugo was a fan of the Duchess of Windsor. His researches have convinced him that Wallis has been unfairly treated, and that she was not a villain but a victim. This was true throughout her life, but never more so than at the end.

Wallis, the widowed Duchess of Windsor, spent her last years incarcerated in a living grave in her villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Barely able to speak, mentally confused and paralysed by rheumatism and strokes, she had almost ceased to exist as a person. She lay all day in bed in a vegetative state, fed through a tube in her nose and attached to a life-support machine. Her lawyer, the sinister Maître Suzanne Blum, kept her under close surveillance. Blum could be charming, but (according to Vickers) she was a ruthless, wicked crook. Claiming to act as the Duchess's devoted friend and protector, she fired her respectable English lawyer, sacked the Duchess's loyal servants and banished her old friends, such as Diana Mosley. The royal family was kept away. The big question concerned what was to happen to the Windsor loot. Lord Mountbatten tried to wheedle his way in as an executor, but Blum saw him off. There were tales of bonfires of papers. While the Duchess lay unconscious upstairs, the dishonest butler filched her love letters, which he found stored in a shoebox, and handed them over to Blum (at a price) for safekeeping. Jewels and furniture mysteriously disappeared.

The writer Michael Bloch appeared on the scene, acting as Blum's assistant. It was his job to write the story of the Windsors, using the letters that Blum had removed from the villa. Blum claimed that the Duchess had signed a document giving her authority to publish her papers. This was dated 1975, when the Duchess was still in possession of her mind - but it only appeared ten years later. Vickers is convinced that the document is a fake, and Blum did not own the copyright on the Duchess's letters. Under French law she didn't have power of attorney over Wallis, but no one intervened from England to challenge her iron grip over the Duchess.

Wallis died in 1986, aged eighty-nine. Bloch's edition of Wallis and Edward's letters was serialised in the Daily Mail to coincide with Wallis's funeral, and Bloch and Blum netted a seven-figure sum. Two more books by Bloch followed, each more far-fetched than the last. The final volume claimed that the Duchess was really a man. No one ever saw the Duchess's will. Blum sold her jewels through Sotheby's for a staggering £31 million, which she gave to the Institut Pasteur: a generous gift, but there's no telling whether this was what the Duchess had intended.

Vickers's account of the Duchess's long, horrific death and Blum's machinations is a page-turner, piling on detail after grisly detail. Since he first visited the Windsors at the age of twenty as a researcher for Burke's Peerage, Vickers made it his business to keep a watchful eye on the villa in the Bois de Boulogne, occasionally stopping outside to observe the light burning in the upstairs window; he got to know the Duchess's secretary and the Duke's private secretary, two of the more decent characters in the story. He had the foresight to keep a diary, and this allows him to tell the story in the first person, a device that gives the book a gripping sense of urgency.

The story of her death, which forms the greater part of the book, Wallis's life comes as something of an anticlimax. Vickers insists throughout that Wallis was someone to whom things happened - she was no adventuress, merely a drifter. She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield near Baltimore. It's a surprise to learn that the Warfields were a posh Maryland family descended twice over from Henry III and that Wallis came from a higher stratum of American society than Jackie Kennedy or Princess Grace. But she was a poor relation, and a difficult childhood had left her financially insecure and with a need to dominate. After the collapse of her first, brief marriage to an alcoholic airman, she spent a year in China. Vickers dismisses the theory that it was here that Wallis learned exotic sexual techniques - though he does quote Lady Gladwyn, the wife of the British ambassador to France, who told him that the Duke of Windsor was unable to perform and that the Duchess knew how to cope with the problem. 'There was nothing Chinese about it. It was what they call oral sex,' she said.

Husband No. 2, Ernest Simpson, was an Anglo-American businessman. The couple lived in a flat in Bryanston Court, and she socialised with the American colony in London. Simpson's sister was a friend of the American Thelma Furness, then mistress of the Prince of Wales, which was how the meeting that changed Wallis's life was arranged. Few could explain the attraction Wallis exerted on the Prince. She had a raucous voice and an overlarge chin, and she was uneducated, with no interest in music or art.

It is well attested that Wallis tried to stop Edward from abdicating. She wasn't in love with him, didn't want to be queen and was horrified when she realised how much he was giving up. Although she allowed herself to be persuaded to divorce Simpson, she apparently failed to see what was coming. Vickers argues that Edward alone brought about the abdication, and there was no Establishment plot to get rid of him. Marriage condemned Wallis to a lifetime dedicated to entertaining the spoiled and childlike Duke. By all accounts he remained devoted to her. She dominated him, and she was fortunate that an empty life of socialising, fashion and jet-setting suited her far more than it did him. It was the Duke, not Wallis, who cared that she wasn't styled HRH - this meant that women were not expected to curtsey to her - and who nursed her in-laws' petty slights.

The Queen allegedly once remarked: 'The two people who have caused me most trouble in my life are Wallis Simpson and Hitler.' Hugo Vickers's compelling account makes one feel that Wallis did the Queen a favour. She made a success of a marriage she had never really wanted, and kept the restless Duke of Windsor safely anchored for thirty-five years. She certainly didn't deserve the ghastly death so hauntingly described here.

Jane Ridley's biography of Edward VII will be published by Chatto & Windus next year.

(@philabooks|booksellers carries all books by and about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or at least endeavours to do so. Unfortunately, this title is not yet in its catalog via http://www.philabooks.webs.com/). 

Shipping News

SS United States Mothballed

Junto Photos: Richard Carreno
Once the grand dame of luxury ocean-liners -- actually the fastest passenger ship across the Atlantic -- the SS United States today languishes as a rotting hulk, moored in the Delaware River at pier off Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia. Several groups are trying to save the ship, or, like Saves Our Sites, a local preservation group, at least call attention to the ship's unfortunate state. The United States is famous as the preferred mode of transportation for the 'jet set' before there was a 'jet set.' The Duke and Duchess of Windsor used to wallow in the ship's splendour. Dem were the days....
---RDC

My Friends....

... The Duke and Duchess of Windsor

Dook and Duckess Conference

Windsor Society Updates

Conference Details

By Mark Gaulding
San Diego, California

I am very pleased to announce a number additions to our program at the upcoming Duke & Duchess of Windsor Society conference in San Diego, October 16-19 which will feature noted historian/biographer Hugo Vickers.

New programmes include:

NEW SPEAKER Corinne Mustin (Montague) grandchildren DOUG ST DENIS AND TOM MUSTIN


Doug St. Denis her brother, Tom Mustin, grandchildren of Corinne Mustin, will be speaking about their grandmother's and Wallis's lifelong friendship (they were first cousins once removed). If you'll recall, Wallis went to Pensacola to visit her cousin, Corinne, and met Winfield Spencer, the duchess' first husband. The Mustins and Spencers later all moved to Coronado to help establish a naval airbase. The Mustins remained in Coronado and have become not only a very important part of the community, but quite an important part of the naval base (which of course, we'll be visiting).

DUKE & DUCHESS OF WINDSOR EXHIBITION AT Coronado Library


October 2-November 28
The Society is also sponsoring a Duke and Duchess of Windsor exhibition at the Coronado Library and Doug St. Denis and her brother Tom Mustin, have contributed a cache of rare photos, letters, Christmas cards which are absolutely amazing. We will be visiting the exhibition during the conference. There is even a printed copy of the Montague genealogy up through Alice, Wallis's mother. So we will learn about Wallis' Montague side of the family. Corinne was, next to Aunt Bessie, Wallis' closest family member and their relationship endured throughout the Windsors lifetime (Corinne and husband were guests at the Nixon White House dinner honoring WE).

HISTORIC MENU AT WINDSOR GALA
For dinner Saturday night's Windsor Gala, we will be serving the same multi-course menu that was served to Edward, Prince of Wales in 1920 in the same room where he dined: the coronet room. So, we will truly be creating an historic evening.

SCREENING OF the Wallis documentary THE DEMONIZED DUCHESS
We'll be screening a documentary film, The Demonized Duchess, that was produced by Christine Carter who co-produced with HRH Prince Edward for the film Edward on Edward (which was about E8). The film was only shown in the UK and hasn't been shown here. It includes a number of interviews with the most amazing group of people. Truly historical.....no one outside of US has seen it.

TOUR OF THE NAVAL AIR BASE
Amazingly enough, we will be taking a tour of the naval air base on Coronado Island. This airbase was the reason that Lt. Commander Win Spencer and his wife went to live in San Diego. Win Spencer was sent to establish a new naval air base in San Diego in 1918-ish. I was flabbergasted. This tour is being arranged by Lt Commander of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

ADDITIONAL ENTERTAINMENT AT WINDSOR GALA
* As previously announced, Lena Farugia will be performing excerpts from her play UNTITLED which premiered in London this year. In addition, the Windsor Gala evening will end with performances of a few numbers a new musical play which is about the Windsors. The books, score and some lyrics were written by Society Member Erv Raible (a long time NY director, coach and the current Executive Director of the Yale University International Cabaret Seminar). Shelly Markham, a well-known LA and Broadway musical director, will be accompany and will perform a song. Chicago actress and singer Jillanne Gabrille will sing Wallis' song and an as-yet male performer will sing the duke's songs.

This will truly be a "Windsor Gala" from start to finish. And it will be an historical evening.

For more information or to make reservations visit the Society's website:
http://www.ddows.org/