Wallis in Love by Andrew Morton - review: Did she ever love the Duke of Windsor?

Andrew Morton is the author of one masterpiece, Diana: Her True Story, his first book, published in 1992. His subject truly gave him the story, we now know, but he nonetheless told it remarkably well, using a wonderfully sly form of style indirect libre. It’s a classic and the royalties are still rolling in.

Since then Morton has published not entirely reliable biographies of Monica Lewinsky, Posh & Becks, Madonna, Tom Cruise, Angelina, and William & Catherine. Now he has turned his hand to re-telling the story of Wallis Simpson, the already twice-married American for whom Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936.

It’s a tale that’s been told before often enough — notably by Michael Bloch, who treated it as one of the great tragic romances of all time, while at the same time suggesting that the duchess may have been sexually indeterminate, incapable of full intercourse and in fact died a virgin, never allowing any of her husbands below her “Mason-Dixon line”, even the duke.

Morton has a different thesis to flog. Having, at so late a date — the duke died in 1972, the duchess, long demented, in 1986 — few fresh sources to uncover, he has come up instead with a total re-interpretation of the familiar story, as announced in the subtitle. He believes Simpson only ever loved one man and it was not the Duke of Windsor. Rather, it was the man who gave her away to the duke at their marriage, Herman Rogers, a sporty, wealthy New Englander whose first wife, Katherine, Wallis knew.

What’s the evidence? Not much. It has long been known, or rumoured, that Simpson told Rogers she had not slept with her first two husbands. “Wallis told Herman everything, even her sexual desires and preferences. Even in today’s more liberated times it is unusual for a single woman to discuss these matters with a married man, however close their friendship,” says man of the world Morton.

His clincher, though, is a conversation he reports between Simpson and Rogers’s second wife Lucy at their wedding in 1950. Claims Morton: “Wallis seized Lucy by the hands and told her: ‘I’ll hold you responsible if anything ever happens to Herman. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.’ Lucy let those final seven words linger long enough for the enormity of what Wallis had said to sink in. Then she replied: ‘How nice for the duke,’ looking hard into Wallis’s eyes.”

Cat-fight! It reads almost as if he was there in between them, taking notes, doesn’t it? Morton gives a cryptic “source note” for his great coup, “author interview, February 2016”, confirming to me by email what’s not clarified in the book, that this was an interview with Lucy’s daughter-in-law Kitty Blair. So, at one remove at least, and 66 years later.

If he doesn’t prove his main case, Morton nonetheless builds up a convincing picture of the horrific relationship that developed between the dim, infatuated duke and the disappointed, domineering duchess. As time passed she no longer liked, let alone loved, him. “Will I be going to bed in tears tonight?” he would ask pathetically, when tormented by her. “Buzz off, mosquito,” she rudely told him at nightclubs. In restaurants, with nothing to say to each other, “the duchess insisted that they recite the alphabet to one another so that other diners would see their animation”.

Here Morton has discovered one sadly revealing new source. Julie Chatard Alexander — then 26, from Baltimore as it happened, just like Wallis — was the night nurse on call for the duke in his last days in the royal apartment in the Bois de Boulogne. She has recently told Morton that the duchess never visited the duke in his last two weeks, as he lay dying of throat cancer.

“She never came to see him or kiss him goodnight or see how he was. Not once. Poor fellow. He would call her name over and over: ‘Wallis, Wallis, Wallis, Wallis’. Or ‘darling, darling, darling’. It was pitiful and pathetic. Just so sad, like a lamb calling for its mother.” Pitiful rather than tragic, perhaps. The duchess claimed the duke died in her arms. Julie Chatard Alexander says it was, alone, in hers. “Right city, wrong woman.”

Andrew Morton is now writing a book, due for publication in April, about another American divorcee marrying into the Royal Family. Meghan Markle has definitely studied Diana: Her True Story, he believes.

Wallis in Love: The Untold True Passion of the Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Morton (Michael O’Mara Books, £20) buy it here.