And say to all the world, `This was a man'
Craig Brown
THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR by Michael Bloch Weidenfeld, £18.99, pp. 239 Was the Duchess of Windsor a man? This was the question posed on the front page of the Daily Mail when they serialised this book a month or so ago. I bought my copy at once and read it in the street as I raced home. To my disappointment, the final answer to the question was, 'No, she was a woman'. It is worth remembering never to buy a newspaper with a question mark in its headline. Was Edward Heath a Woman?' Was Nancy Reagan a Man?' Was Norman Lamont a Pekinese?' Answering this last question, Michael Bloch would doubtless produce evidence that Lamont was sometimes to be seen furtively munching biscuits in a corner, that his trousers were sufficiently voluminous to contain a wagging tail, and that he had been trained at a top-secret location to be Chancellor (`Fetch!') by Mrs Barbara Woodhouse, whose sudden death before their sessions were over spelt economic dis- aster for the nation.
Now on his sixth book about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — The Secret File of The Intimate Correspondence of The Reign and Abdication of, and so on Michael Bloch should not be blamed for clutching at straws. He was commissioned to write a new biography of the Duchess to coincide with a handful of anniversaries, including ten years since her death and 100 since her birth. When this biography was first handed in to his publishers, I suspect they felt it lacked a certain zip. He now provides that zip, but when the zip is undone, the cupboard, as it were, is bare.
Having served his apprenticeship as the dutiful assistant to the Duchess's lawyer, the sabre-toothed Maitre Blum, Bloch has spent many a long year as the Duchess of Windsor's trumpet-blower-in-chief. His latest book once again calls to mind the story of Cinderella (`she was a work of art in herself), but it is now topped and tailed with hints that, after a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing, the Handsome Prince ended up happily ever after (`He's behind you!') with Buttons.
The evidence for her manhood is at best sketchy. She wore a monocle as a teenager. Her first husband beat her up (`as to whether this might have been due to some physiological defect on her part one can only speculate'). Her parents christened her Bessie Wallis, immediately shortening it to Wallis, 'a name giving few clues as to its sex'. She once told Herman Rogers that she had never gone the whole hog with either of her previous husbands. She had a `somewhat masculine appearance and per- sonality'. And, er, that's about it.
Most of Bloch's biography is written as though the author were entirely unaware of the controversial new claims he has made at the beginning and end. 'As one surveys the current scene, how respectable they seem! . . And how innocent now appear the things for which they were criticised!', he coos. Yet even his heavily bowdlerised account of the life and times of the Wind- sors (`there can be no doubt that the Duke was blissfully happy throughout their marriage') cannot disguise the overriding oddity of this increasingly bizarre couple. The book is full of fascinating photographs of their life together. One of them, cap- tioned simply 'The pug lovers' shows the two of them in their fifties sitting in profile in a photographer's studio beaming loving- ly at a pug in the centre. The pug stares out towards the camera with a baffled expres- sion on his face. The Windsors look like nothing so much as a pair of oddball children's entertainers of the sort nervy parents might feel uneasy about leaving unmonitored.
In many ways, the photographs tell a truer story than the accompanying text. As the years roll by, the Duke looks first shifty, then careworn, then haunted. Over the same period the Duchess — face to the camera, hair to bounce balls off, chin fresh- ly sharpened, barely ageing at all — looks confident, confident, and ever more confi- dent. A photograph of the pair of them walking with Richard Nixon, circa 1970, finds the Duke, eyes down, head bowed, all wrinkles and eyelids, the devoted bag- handler, and the Duchess steaming ahead, eyes to the front, jaw to the fore, like the figurehead on a profitable pirate ship. Inci- dentally, Nixon displays many of the Duchess's facial characteristics — their noses, in particular, could have come from off the peg at the same nasal outfitters. If only things had been different, what a cou- ple they might have made!
History has the habit of embalming its inhabitants in the same wax, so that they all look in some way inevitable and intended. But with time the Duke and Duchess grow ever more out-of-place, as if they have just poked their heads through two holes in an historical tableau at a fairground. In retelling their story as a fairytale, Bloch has a fearful lot of skating over to do: he skates over the Duke's admiration for Hitler's social reforms (`nothing particularly sinister'), he skates over the Duchess's full- blooded affair with the revolting Jimmy Donahue (`No doubt the Duchess some- times behaved foolishly with her flamboy- ant escort'), he skates over the piteous hollowness of their life in exile. He obvi- ously feels on more solid ground when praising his heroine's taste in clothes, food, decor and jewellery. 'She proved herself a considerable artist, noted for her imagina- tion, perfectionism and organising ability', he gushes, and again, 'By any standards, she must be judged one of the great domestic organisers of her time'. But to me her jewellery, in particular, looks comically vulgar, the sort of thing Mr Adnan Kashog- gi might give to the lovely lady of a high- powered business associate, all overlarge Cartier flamingoes, gold frogs and lockets inscribed 'Hello!' One of Wallis's first pre- sents to the then King, in 1935, was a cigarette case decorated with a map of the Mediterranean, the places they had holi- dayed together highlighted in diamonds. Presumably poor old Ernest Simpson picked up the bill.
The blurbs informs us that Mr Bloch is now writing a life of Jeremy Thorpe. I can't wait to see how his sunny view of life sits with such characters as Norman and Rinka, Bessell and Holmes. My bet is that Andrew `Gino' Newton may well find himself the Duchess of Windsor's chief rival as one of the great domestic organisers of all time.
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