That Woman Part 1

That Woman.

The Life of Wallis.

Anne Sebba.

Preface.

In 1973 I was invited to spend a weekend as the guest of a minor Austrian aristocrat at a magnificent castle just outside Vienna Schloss Enzesfeld.

The name was resonant but I was twenty-one and unprepared for how deeply the emotional history of the castle would seep into me. I was greeted on arrival by an array of liveried servants who, over the next three days, provided for my every demand, as well as several I could never have antic.i.p.ated. Dinner was elaborately and terrifyingly formal, served in a baronial dining hall for a handful of guests, who included the ageing German actor Kurt Jurgens. The waiters stood stiffly in the corners of the room as I played with my foie gras. The rest of the meal pa.s.sed in a haze. Then I was led along a cold stone pa.s.sageway to my bedroom, a ten-minute walk away. The next morning the man who had invited me, my own small-scale Princeling, drove me around the estate and gave me a detailed history. I had entered an unknown and hitherto unknowable world. Although I had just started working as a journalist for Reuters, this was not a story for the wires. I could not find words to write about what I had seen and was experiencing. I lacked both the context and the emotional maturity. But I knew instinctively that I was playing with fire, how smoothly such luxury and we are talking here about Hermes scarves not Cartier jewels could permeate the pores of my life. I have thought about those three days many times since and never once regretted my decision not to see my Prince Charming again.

Less than forty years before, this castle had been the refuge for a former British monarch, henceforth known as the Duke of Windsor, immediately after his abdication from the British throne. Eugene de Rothschild and his wife Kitty had offered it to him as he waited, bored and with mounting nervous tension, for the woman he loved to become his wife.

He had left his country plunged into a deep const.i.tutional crisis. No one knew what the outcome would be as Europe bristled with threats of war. Yet his concern, as he paced the corridors of the castle at Enzesfeld, was to fill his bedroom with dozens of photographs of this woman. He telephoned her several times a day, at considerable expense, to the chateau in France where she was similarly imprisoned. Phone lines were primitive, so they had to shout at each other, and many people were close enough to be listening, as well as some who were paid to listen in. Lawyers insisted they must not meet or the divorce might be jeopardized. He pa.s.sed the hours knitting a sweater for his love. She, in turn, sent him dozens of letters lamenting the situation in which she found herself and longing for the time when she had the protection of his name. This was, unquestionably, not a scenario she had foreseen. Christmas came and went and the Duke, the increasingly heavy bags under his eyes telling the world that he was hardly sleeping, morosely attended church in the village of Enzesfeld. When his hostess, Kitty de Rothschild, left the castle the Duke failed even to say goodbye. He was still without the woman he had told the world he loved, the woman for whom he had given up a kingdom, the woman who still had two living husbands, the woman for whom he had sent himself into this h.e.l.lish exile.

Forty years later the scenery of the castle remains as sharply engraved in my brain as ever. Those who know only one thing about British history in the 1930s know about the king who abdicated because he could not continue without t loAhe help and support of 'the woman I love'. Yet many people cannot imagine who such a woman could be, one who could exert such a powerful magnetic force on a man groomed from birth to do his duty as head not just of Britain but of a great empire that stretched from India to Canada and Australia the Dominions, as they were then known.

Because they cannot imagine such a woman they have invented an image of her, a process which began in 1936 and which gathered pace in the ensuing half-century. In the pages that follow I want to examine whether that picture is still valid in the twenty-first century. I want to let her own voice speak wherever possible, however 'rasping', as her detractors insist it was. It may not always be a sympathetic voice but it will, I hope, help readers understand what it was in her background or make-up that caused her to act or speak as she did. I hope to humanize rather than demonize the woman known as Wallis Simpson, to see her within her own social, historical and geographical context. Very simply, I want to start by understanding what sort of woman she was and then look at the crisis in which she was embroiled.

Money is often an important part of this story, but in the text I have always quoted the actual, contemporary amounts. As a very rough guide these figures can be multiplied by fifty to give an idea of the value today.

1.

Becoming Wallis.

'She has the Warfield look'

Choosing your own name is the supreme act of self-creation. Wallis, the androgynous and unusual name she insisted on for herself, is a bold statement of ident.i.ty. 'Wallis' is saying not only this is who I am but you will know no one else like me. Take me on my own terms. It was a credo she lived by.

From the start this woman fas.h.i.+oned herself as something strong, intriguing, distinctive. In taking such a name she was constructing an ident.i.ty, giving herself from a young age freedom that women of her era could not take for granted. She was displaying a contempt for tradition and the ordinary which would be so crucial to her destiny. Having chosen her own name she had to work hard to live up to it, to create a strong relations.h.i.+p with it. Although her surname changed many times, this name was one of the few constants in her life. 'Hi, I'm Wallis,' she would say when she entered a room.

The name her parents chose for her was 'Bessiewallis', to honour both her mother's beloved sister Bessie and her grandfather's ill.u.s.trious friend Severn Teackle Wallis, an author and legislator and, in Baltimore, an important man. The latter had been imprisoned for a time during the Civil War, along with Wallis's grandfather, for supporting a call for secession from the Union, but was later appointed provost at the University of Maryland. Her own father, too, bore this man's name. His statue stands today at one end of Mount Vernon Square, the city's main plaza, overshadowed though it is by the imposing 178-foot-high monument of George Was.h.i.+ngton in the centre, the first erected in the first President's honour. But she soon jettisoned 'Bessie'ss, describing it as a name fit only for cows. 'Wallis', however, was a man's name for a woman who could hold her own with men.

Wallis was never a woman's woman. She wanted to be something out of the ordinary for a woman. She was funny, clever, smart in both the English and American uses of the term. She wanted to pit her wits not against other women but against men in a man's world. With her sharp understanding of appearances, she always knew the importance of a name. Of course she had seen her mother change from 'Alys' to 'Alice'. But that was subtle, gentle, barely noticeable. Choosing Wallis in her youth was as much part of her armour as the carefully selected designer clothes and decor of her middle years. When inviting friends to her third wedding, her husband-to-be, the ex-King, a man with even more names to accommodate, suddenly started referring to her as 'Mrs Warfield'. This was a name she had never owned, nor could claim any right to. She encouraged it to s.h.i.+eld the man she had dragged along in her wake.

Defining herself by her name was one of the first acts of a young girl intent on controlling a cold and often unfriendly world. Whenever Wallis succeeded, she felt most at peace. But for much of her life she was dependent on the charity of others and this led to long bouts of unhappiness to which she responded in a variety of ways.

There is no birth certificate for Wallis. It was not a legal requirement at the time to have one in Pennsylvania, where she was born amid some secrecy and scandal probably on 19 June 1896. Nor was there a newspaper announcement of her birth. The place where she was born, however, is not in doubt: a small wooden building known as Square Cottage at the back of the Monterey Inn in the summer resort of Blue Ridge Summit. The Blue Ridge Summit community, at the top of the South Mountain at Monterey Pa.s.s, was in its heyday as a fas.h.i.+onable spa and holiday area at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the introduction of the railroad in 1872. Blue Ridge Summit strays into four counties two on the Pennsylvania side of the line and two on the Maryland side and straddles the historic Mason Dixon line, significantly giving Wallis aspects of both the South and North of the United States in her make-up. This was something she was to make much of later.

Her parents had gone there ostensibly to escape the heat of a Baltimore summer and in the hope of improving her father's health, but also because they were in flight from disapproving families. In her memoirs, Wallis is vague about the marriage of her parents, the consumptive Teackle Wallis Warfield and the spirited if flighty Alice Montague, a marriage neither family wanted.

'Without taking their families into their confidence, they slipped away and were married, according to one story in a church in Was.h.i.+ngton, according to another in a church in Baltimore,' Wallis wrote sixty years later. She would have us believe that Teackle and Alice were married in June 1895 when both were twenty-six years old. But, more likely, the marriage had been solemnized just seven months before her birth, on 19 November 1895, as a monograph on the Church of St Michael and All Angels in Baltimore states. According to this account, Dr C. Ernest Smith, the Rector, was called upon to officiate at a quiet marriage which attracted little attention at the time. 'On that day Teackle Wallis Warfield took as his bride Miss Alice M. Montague, a communicant of the parish. The ceremony took place not in the main church itself but in the rectory at 1929 St Paul Street in the presence of several friends.'

This version makn W versioes it seem that the marriage was arranged as soon as Alice realized she was pregnant, that the first and only child of the union was most probably conceived out of wedlock and that neither family attended. Perhaps, more significantly, it also indicates there was never a time in Wallis's life when she did not have to harbour secrets.

Wallis, with an attempt at insouciance, wrote later in her own account of how she once asked her mother for the date and time of her birth 'and she answered impatiently that she had been far too busy at the time to consult the calendar let alone the clock'. But the child may also have arrived prematurely, as the family doctor was not available and the twenty-two-year-old, newly qualified Dr Lewis Miles Allen received an emergency call from the Monterey Inn and delivered the baby in Alice's hotel bedroom.

The Warfields and the Montagues, although both shared impeccable Southern credentials and both were supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War, did not get on. Both came from ancient and respected stock and traced their arrival in America to the seventeenth century. There is a much trumpeted mention of the Warfields in the Domesday Book and one of Wallis's ancestors, Pagan de Warfield, is said to have accompanied William the Conqueror from France and fought in the Battle of Hastings. The Montagues, similarly, hailed from an old English aristocratic family that arrived in America in 1621 when one Peter Montague left Buckinghams.h.i.+re and settled on land in Virginia granted him by King Charles I. Wallis always felt proud of her ancestry and had reason to. 'For those who are prepared to accept that there can be cla.s.s distinctions of any kind in the United States,' wrote the social commentator Alastair Forbes in the mid-1970s, 'she can be said to come from a far higher stratum than say Princess Grace of Monaco, Jacqueline Bouvier or the Jerome or Vanderbilt ladies of the nineteenth century. By present English standards of birth she might rank rather below two recent royal d.u.c.h.esses and rather above two others.' But the Montagues, whatever their past prosperity as landowners, were no longer prosperous. They were much livelier than the politically and commercially active Warfields, whom they considered to be nouveau. They believed that their beautiful and vivacious Alice could have held out for a much better match than marriage to Teackle Wallis. The solemn Warfield clan in their turn not only looked down on the Montagues, they worried that Teackle Wallis would never be strong enough to support a wife and therefore should not seek one.

T. Wallis, as he styled himself, was the youngest of four brothers (the first, Daniel, had died young) and two daughters born to Henry Mactier Warfield and his wife Anna Emory. The Emorys were physicians and, like so many upper-cla.s.s Marylanders, slave owners whose sympathies were Southern. Dr Emory joined the Confederate army as a surgeon and was stationed in Richmond, Virginia until the end of the war. The eldest surviving son, Solomon Davies Warfield, was a successful and prominent banker, president of the Continental Trust company (the premier investment company in Baltimore in that era), and a millionaire bachelor who kept an apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue where he was said to entertain his mistresses. The second son, Richard Emory Warfield, lived in Philadelphia and was thriving in the insurance business, while the fourth, Henry Warfield, had a farm at Timonium in Baltimore County.

Teackle was always frail but at eighteen, when he fell ill with consumption (tuberculosis), it was decided that, instead of sending him to recuperate at a sanatorium or in a more favourable climate, he should work as a lowly clerk in his uncle's Continental Trust in Baltimore, an unaltimor environment not chosen to a.s.suage his illness but which the family presumably hoped would draw attention away from such embarra.s.sing debility. Little was known in the nineteenth century about cures for or reasons for contracting consumption, although its bacterial cause was eventually isolated in 1882. There was no definitive treatment for the disease until the mid-twentieth century. At the time of Wallis's birth, it was not only widespread but considered shameful, partly since it was thought to be a disease of poverty. Death was the likely outcome for at least 80 per cent of patients. Usually, after a horrific period of night sweats, chills and paroxysmal coughing, the disease spread to other organs of the body, leading to the wasting away which gave the disease its name. It was not surprising therefore that Teackle Wallis, a charmingly sensitive but melancholy consumptive, should have appeared a disastrous prospect for the Montague parents William, who worked in insurance, and his wife, Mary Anne. Indeed medical advice at the time, which must surely have been offered by the Warfield doctor, was to avoid cohabiting with women for fear of spreading the disease. Those around TB patients were exposed to danger with each breath, as the bacillus is spread by droplet infection, mainly by coughing and sneezing, and inhaled droplets lodge in and infect the lungs.

Yet something powerfully attractive about T. Wallis Warfield must have appealed to the courageous and headstrong young Alice Montague. According to their only daughter, the deep-set staring eyes suggested a handsome poet, but they may instead have been indicative of the far-gone ravages of his disease. By the end of the summer of 1896, Teackle was a deeply sick and weak man. But he decided to move his family back to the centre of Baltimore and installed them in a residential hotel, the Brexton,1 where he hoped if the worst happened they might be able to fend for themselves. This red-brick building containing eight small apartments was the only home Wallis ever shared with her father and mother.

As a frail, wheelchair invalid Teackle was allowed one photograph with his child. He died five months after her birth on 15 November 1896. According to family lore his last words were 'I'm afraid, Alice, she has the Warfield look. Let us hope that in spirit she'll be like you.' Her penetrating blue eyes, always said to be her best feature, came from her mother, and perhaps her spirit did too. From her father she inherited dark hair but no capital and an embedded fear of insecurity.

Baltimore at the time of Wallis's childhood was one of the fastest-growing, most economically vibrant cities in the United States. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, northern Baltimore attracted many wealthy families who lived in substantial three- or even four-storey houses that were being built around Mount Vernon when this was still a relatively rural fas.h.i.+onable residential district. As a port city, located on the northern Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore was well positioned to make a rapid recovery from the physical and economic damage inflicted by the Civil War, embarking during the reconstruction era on the period of its greatest prosperity. The city, attractive to both immigrants and investors between the 1880s and 1914, was home to large and complex populations of Italian, Polish, German, Irish and Chinese immigrants, as well as many thousands of East European Jews fleeing pogroms, political turmoil and poverty. Most Jews settled in East Baltimore, especially the Lombard Street area, and remained economically marginalized for at least one generation. Here, among the dozens of chicken coops with live chickens on the street, the aroma of pickling spices and the noise of clanking buckets, Yas g buckeiddish greetings and kosher butchers, the Warfields and Montagues would have been most unlikely to venture.

But living in a city where at least one-third of the residents are foreign born reinforces notions of separation, especially among those who see themselves as poor relations, which Wallis and her mother clearly were. In addition during Wallis's childhood, forty or so years after the abolition of slavery, racial segregation was still practised in Baltimore, as it was in many Southern American cities. So deciding where young Wallis Warfield would live and would go to school was a matter of deep concern to her wider family.

Within a few weeks Anna Emory Warfield, the sixty-year-old matriarch of the family, invited her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to live with her at 34 East Preston Street, a large and solid four-storey brownstone in the centre of the old part of the city, near the Monument. This staid and peaceful house of adults became home for the next four or five years. Wallis recognized later what a disturbing influence she must have been there. Her grandmother, whom she loved, took her shopping every Sat.u.r.day to Richmond Market, 'as exciting as a trip to the moon'. Going to market was an important outing for the rich matrons of Baltimore. They dressed up for it and wore white gloves after all they would not be touching anything. The servants who walked a discreet distance behind them carried out the purchasing.

Her grandmother 'a solitary figure in a vast, awesomely darkened room, rocking evenly to and fro ... and so erect that her back never seemed to touch the chair' was, as Wallis recalled, in mourning and wore black dresses with high collars and a tiny white linen cap on which were st.i.tched three small bows of black ribbon. '"Bessiewallis," my grandmother would say severely, "how will you ever grow up to be a lady unless you learn to keep your back straight?" Or "Bessiewallis, can't you be still for just a minute?"'

But her uncle Sol, a more terrifying presence for the young and not so young child, lived there too. Solomon Davies Warfield, the financier and politician whose hopes to become mayor of Baltimore were not realized, had to make do with the locally prestigious but lesser position as postmaster. He funded Wallis's childhood but in a cruelly controlling manner, the lessons of which cannot have been lost on this young girl given that she took the trouble to report his behaviour in her memoirs. Every month he deposited a sum of money in his sister-in-law's account at his bank. 'The trouble was that the amount was almost never the same. One month it might be quite enough to take care of the important bills, the next month barely enough to cover the rent.'

Uncle Sol's bedroom was at the back of the third floor with a private bath. Alice had a room on the same floor at the front, and connecting with it was a small room for Wallis. The arrangement was awkward for Alice and her daughter, who had to use her grandmother's bathroom on the floor below. But the idyll, if idyll it was, did not last. 'A subtly disturbing situation seems to have helped precipitate the separation,' Wallis wrote. She speculates that her uncle fell in love with her mother. 'She was young and attractive, living under the same roof, and she and uncle Sol were inevitably thrown much together.' At all events he must have made overtures that either Alice or old Mrs Warfield considered inappropriate.

So the pair returned to the Brexton residential hotel. There followed a deeply unhappy period for Wallis of meals alone with her mother 'and rather forlorn afternoon excur thernoon sions to the house on Preston Street about which had so suddenly descended a mysterious and disturbing barrier'. Funds were now sometimes so low that her mother sold embroidery at the local Women's Exchange shop. But her mother's newly widowed sister, Aunt Bessie Merryman, then stepped in and invited the pair to live with her. Her own husband, Uncle Buck, had also died young and, childless herself, it suited her to have company. Wallis grew to love Aunt Bessie as a mother. Yet, although the sisters got on, Alice was determined to make one last stab at independence. She moved into the Preston Apartment House, a less than sumptuous set of rooms in the shadow of her Warfield family, and this time tried to make money inviting the other tenants in the block to become paying dinner guests. It was a disastrous experiment in every way. The prime sirloin steak, soft-sh.e.l.l crabs and elaborate pastries were never costed, but the damage this venture did to the reputation of mother and daughter, now branded as boarding-house keepers, was incalculable. These years of struggle and insecurity, when 'mother had the cafe and was forever working herself to death to give me things', were implanted so deeply in Wallis's psyche that she never entirely shed her worry and fear of what might lie around the corner. Once again it was her aunt Bessie who came to the rescue by insisting on disbanding the dubious operation.

Wallis went to her first school while living with Aunt Bessie. It was called Miss O'Donnell's after its founder, Miss Ada O'Donnell. Next, aged ten, she attended Arundell Girls School on nearby St Paul Street, neither the most exclusive nor the most expensive educational establishment, but a place of calm routine for girls of good backgrounds. There she would have learned, as every Baltimore school girl learned, the story of Elizabeth (Betsy) Patterson, a local girl from a wealthy family who married her prince but was not allowed to remain married to him. On a visit to America in 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, met and married Betsy. But Jerome was a minor and his brother refused to recognize the marriage. When Jerome returned to France in 1805, his wife was forbidden to land and went first to England, where her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, known as 'Bo', was born. In 1806 Napoleon issued a state decree of annulment to end his brother's marriage, and Betsy was given a large annual pension but, rather than return to 'what I hated most on earth my Baltimore obscurity', she lived unhappily in exile in Paris for the rest of her life. Wallis never referred to the story in her memoirs.

Wallis had to take her monthly school reports to Uncle Sol for inspection a further reminder that her dependence on his charity was not to be taken for granted. However, he did oblige with her next important request that she be allowed to go to Oldfields for her final two years of education, the most expensive school in Maryland. Oldfields, just beyond the Gunpowder River in Glencoe County, was founded in 1867 in the hills beyond Timonium where Wallis had already spent many happy summers with her Warfield cousins. Although she had been parcelled out to all her cousins at various times, Pot Spring, the home of her uncle Emory and her aunt Betty Warfield, not far from Oldfields, was a favourite summer refuge. The school's 200-acre site was beautiful and today remains largely undeveloped countryside. For many years, a handsome coach and horses took students back and forth from Glencoe station, past the ante bellum white clapboard mansions and large plantation houses which had once housed hundreds of slaves.

The legendary co-princ.i.p.al of Oldfields was Anna McCulloh, called Miss Nan by all the pupils, a woman not unlike Grandmother Warfield who rigidly upheld her nty upheldnotion of the correct way to behave. Wallis had become a keen and athletic basketball player in her teens, encouraged by a young teacher, Charlotte Noland, who offered afternoon basketball session three times a week in a rented Baltimore garage. Miss Noland was, for the young Wallis, an ideal woman, 'a mixture of gay, deft teasing and a drill sergeant's sternness ... cultivated of manner, a marvellous horsewoman and a das.h.i.+ng figure in every setting'. Miss Noland's sister, Rosalie Noland, also taught at Oldfields, which was noted for its sporting and equestrian facilities, and Wallis, like Charlotte Noland, was a skilled horsewoman not afraid to tackle jumps nor to challenge others with whom she was riding. At Oldfields, basketball was deeply compet.i.tive, the girls keen to go out before breakfast to practise. Yet in these sports, as in everything else at the school, the compet.i.tive spirit was to some extent reined in by the simple expedient of dividing the girls into two teams, one named 'Gentleness' and the other 'Courtesy'. 'Gentleness and Courtesy' was the first rule in the Oldfields handbook, as the sign on the door of each child's room proclaimed. Wallis represented 'Gentleness', who flourished a white banner with green lettering; 'Courtesy' had a green banner with white lettering. In addition to sport and etiquette, acting and drama was encouraged and in one surviving photograph Wallis is dressed as a New Jersey mosquito, alongside a cla.s.smate impersonating Governor Woodrow Wilson, echoing a hot political issue of the day.2 The school fostered an aura of old-fas.h.i.+oned calm anch.o.r.ed by a set of old-fas.h.i.+oned rules. These rules were concerned with how to stand as well as how to behave. There was a Bible-reading group, and the school imposed an honour system on the sixty or so girls whereby each was meant to report her own misdeeds, such as talking or visiting each other's rooms after lights out or communicating by letter with a boy.

Wallis is said to have misbehaved by smoking, which was seriously frowned upon, and by jumping from a balcony to meet a boy. Such misdeeds are not recorded in the school annals and it just may be that rumours arose through what she later became. However, at the time she was clearly audacious, a daredevil ringleader never afraid to set the pace, a tomboy. She had at least one boyfriend by the time she went to Oldfields. He was Carter Osburn, son of a Baltimore bank president, who later gave an account that may have been the source of the rumours. His father owned a car which he was allowed to borrow. 'At a certain point in the road I'd stop, she spotted it. She'd slip out. I don't know yet how she managed it but as far as I know she never got caught; she not only got out [of Oldfields] but she also got back in without being observed. She was very independent in spirit, adhering to the conventions only for what they were worth and not for their own sake. Those dates were all the more exciting for being forbidden.' At the same time Wallis was writing to another boy telling him she hoped to go into town from time to time but how lovely it would be if he could come and visit. This was striking behaviour for a refined young lady with aspirations to enter society in the early part of the twentieth century. For a teenager at an elite establishment like Oldfields it was shocking. Some parents at the time believed that there was something extraordinary about Wallis Warfield and that her influence was malign.

By contrast, another student of that era described a rather more typical day as one that involved: Getting up as late as possible ... starting our dressing modll dressinestly under both nighties and kimonos. Then we dashed out of our rooms to wash, crowds of us all trying to use the basins ... invariably the water stopped running completely whereupon we banged loudly on the pipes to notify the bold souls who had descended to the first floor and were getting all the water that they must stop. Then back to our rooms where we continued dressing still under cover of the kimonos.

Such rampant modesty is hardly a surprise in a girls' boarding school of the time. But the desire to be thin is more surprising and Miss Nan thought it dangerously unnecessary. She told the girls she knew they were taking doses of cod-liver oil in order to lose weight and ordered all those who had some in their possession to turn it over immediately to the infirmary. (This is according to a book Wallis later accused her best friend of having written under a pseudonym.) Going to Oldfields in 1912 was especially important for Wallis. In the first place her mother had recently remarried and now lived part of the time in Atlanta. Alice Warfield's second husband was John Freeman Rasin, the wealthy but somewhat indolent son of the Democratic Party leader of Baltimore. The thirty-seven-year-old Rasin, who had not been married before, was already suffering from a variety of alcohol-induced ailments. Although he delivered financial security at last to mother and daughter, he could never replace the lost father figure that Wallis permanently mourned. And for a girl who had hitherto been the centre of a small adult world her mother, grandmother and aunt to find that someone else had replaced her in her mother's affections was a bitter blow. Aunt Bessie, always a more suitable figure as far as Baltimore society was concerned, now became her closest adviser.

Secondly, Oldfields was where her best friend Mary Kirk, a girl she had just met at Burrland, an exclusive summer camp near Middleburg, Virginia, was already a pupil. Mary's parents, Edith and Henry Child Kirk, were well born if not exactly rich, with a house full of servants. Samuel Kirk and Son were the oldest silversmiths in the United States, established in 1817, descendants of English silversmiths in Derbys.h.i.+re and also of Sir Francis Child, Lord Mayor of London, who in 1669 founded the Child Banking House. The firm was known for its ornate repousse silverware and a set of its heavily embossed flatware was, by the late nineteenth century, to be found in most well-to-do Baltimore families. Kirk and Son dominated the compet.i.tion and set the style for decoration on fine silver throughout the nation.

Mary was the extremely pretty middle daughter, born the same year as Wallis and sandwiched in between an elder sister Edith Buckner, always known as 'Buckie', and a younger, Anne, born in 1901. The girls' grandfather had paid a release fee in order not to have to fight during the Civil War. This was a not uncommon practice but according to Anne, 'all my life I have been ashamed of this act of my grandfather's ... I am sure that our social status was greatly reduced by my grandfather's act which might be construed as bribery or (even worse in those days) cowardice.'

Mary and Wallis, just a few months apart in age, became close friends immediately. Buckie, being three years older, took a more measured view of her sister's new friend and remembered her as 'the amusing, vivacious girl who so often made us laugh and was always on tiptoe for any gaiety that might be forthcoming. She had a special talent for describing a person or an incident with a twist or a wisecrack that almost invariably made it entertaining.' She added, 'Both girls were boy-crazy, and both were far more interwasr more ested in clothes than in school. Also, each girl had discovered at teenage parties that she had only to enter a room to be instantly surrounded by boys in droves.' Wallis, aged fifteen, was already aware of her magnetic power to attract boys and her first real beau was Lloyd Tabb, a boy she had met at summer camp who drove an exciting red Lagonda sports car. For him, she forced herself to be interested in football and he never forgot the effect. Her ability to make others feel how talented they were was a technique she honed over the years. Helpfully, Lloyd was always accompanied by his slightly older brother, Prosser Tabb, which meant that Wallis and Mary could go out on double dates, a practice that may have been intended to calm the adults and that set a pattern for the future.

The Kirk parents, far from being calmed, were from the first wary of this intense new friends.h.i.+p. Wallis was in and out of the Kirk house as if she were a member of the family, as even the extended Kirk family could not fail to notice. She took to telephoning her new friend constantly the telephone still something of a novelty and using it regularly a daring activity for a teenager. Wallis used it so recklessly that, as Anne recalled, her parents would mutter whenever she called that her motives were suspect. Mary's family clearly saw Wallis as an instigator of trouble, even if they could not quite pinpoint what sort of trouble. 'Sometimes when "old black John" announced to "Miss Mary" that "Miss Wallis" was on the phone he would grin and steal a sympathetic look at the frustrated expressions on the faces of our parents,' wrote Anne. Father would then say in a helpless kind of way to Mary, 'Won't you tell John to tell her that we are eating dinner?' John, a loyal servant in the Kirk family for generations so loyal that he did not live with the Kirk household but walked twelve miles a day to arrive in time to serve breakfast did what he could to pacify Miss Wallis and the Kirk parents. But the calls usually went ahead and the Kirk dinner hour was deprived of its serenity. 'As my parents discussed the problems of Wallis Warfield it always seemed that you (Mary) were in the midst of some plot with Wallis. She was a problem and no fun for anyone except YOU!'

Wallis had undertaken a campaign of persuasion begging her uncle Sol to pay for her to go to Oldfields. In doing so she was already making a clear choice without necessarily understanding the consequences: she would depend for the rest of her life on a man for security rather than pursuing a career for herself that would earn her money. She said later that she did not give a moment's thought to further education 'as not a single girl from my cla.s.s at Oldfields went to college'. That was not exactly true. Oldfields did prepare some girls for careers and for limited independence and from its earliest days prided itself on its curriculum almost as much as on the social standing of its pupils. Miss Nan's school was one of the first to offer a high school degree to women. Nor is it exactly true to say that no one in her social circle went to college. Both Mary Kirk's sisters did: Anne to the Peabody Conservatory, graduating with a teacher's certificate in piano, Buckie to the prestigious Bryn Mawr, afterwards becoming an art editor and published writer who worked all her life as well as bringing up a family.

But Uncle Sol may have needed little persuasion. The Warfield clan no doubt hoped that a spell at this prestigious boarding school, which attracted daughters of wealthy industrialists as well as those descended from a select group of early Dutch settlers such as Julia Douw, daughter of John Douw, Mayor of Annapolis, Maryland at the time, might quell some of the young girl's more rebellious and dangerous attributes. Julia became a friend ol me a frof Wallis and, like her, was to marry a naval officer. But Wallis's best friend remained Mary Kirk. Mary and Wallis were room mates 'and at school we swore eternal friends.h.i.+p ... in contrast to the usual boarding school loyalties ours did indeed continue'. That is Wallis's later version for public consumption. Mary, in private, was to have a dramatically different story to tell. What is not in doubt is that the two teenage girls did everything together, especially gossiping everyone commented on that. Buckie recalled that even then the girls' main topic of conversation was 'the absorbing subject of marriage. On this score I remember very well a remark that Wallis made a number of times, even I think at our family dinner table it was memorable because so unconventional. She would announce that the man she married would have to have lots of money the kind of thing that "nice girls" did not say.'

In the spring of 1914, Mary and Wallis graduated from Oldfields following a traditional May Day ceremony which included a maypole dance on the vast Oldfields lawns presided over by a May queen a role filled that year by their friend, Renee du Pont, heiress of the famous chemical family whose wealth, princ.i.p.ally derived from the manufacture of gunpowder, had expanded dramatically during the Civil War years.

When Wallis signed the Oldfields leavers' book she wrote auspiciously 'All is Love' against her name. The remark jumps off the page. Other girls scribbled: 'It's the little things that count,' 'Three cheers for Oldfields,' or similarly prosaic p.r.o.nouncements. But, whatever they wrote, the graduation cla.s.s of 1914 was largely oblivious to the looming war in Europe, preferring to concentrate on matters closer to home: their high hopes for an exciting future with a handsome man.

Mary and Wallis both became debutantes, an essential prerequisite in the hunt for a suitable husband from the right social background. But by December 1914, when they made their official debut into Baltimore high society at the first Monday German the name for the coming-out b.a.l.l.s given by the exclusive Bachelors' Cotillion Club the war in Europe was impossible to ignore. Baltimore's debutantes that year were asked to sign a public pledge that they would abstain for the duration of the war from 'rivalry in elegance in respective [sic] social functions'. Such a pledge almost suited Wallis since by this time she and her mother were living together once again in somewhat straitened circ.u.mstances in a small apartment near Preston Street following the sudden death in 1913 of Alice's husband John Rasin. He and Alice had been married for just five years. Released from school to attend the funeral, Wallis was pained to see her mother reduced to 'a dark shadow': 'enveloped in a black crepe veil that fell to her knees she looked so tiny and pathetic that my heart broke'. Now it meant looking once more to her Warfield relations if she was to be launched with any style at all and, although Uncle Sol pressed $20 into her hand two crumpled ten-dollar bills, as she graphically recounted for a dress, many of her clothes were made by her mother or by a local seamstress called Ellen according to Wallis's own designs.

'If you don't go to the Cotillion, you're nothing. And if you do, it's so boring,' Wallis said later. 'The thing about Maryland is ... they're the biggest sn.o.bs in the world. They never went anywhere outside of Maryland.' Yet go to the Cotillion she must, and she had to follow the rules; wearing white was de rigueur. But the dramatic style chosen by Wallis was a copy of a dress she had spotted being worn by the popular Broadway star Irene Castle white satin covered wiif n coverth a loose chiffon knee-length tunic which respectably veiled her shoulders and ended in a band of pearly embroidery. It was made by Ellen and in between the endless rounds of debutante lunches, teas and chitchat, Wallis and her mother made several visits by street car to Ellen for fittings. For her escort at the ball she safely chose a cousin. Henry Warfield, aged twenty-seven, came to collect her in her uncle Sol's Pierce Arrow, lent for the occasion, and presented her with a magnificent bouquet of American beauty roses; and after an evening being whirled around by a variety of partners she was officially 'out'. But where exactly was 'out'?

If she wanted her own party, customarily given for a debutante by her father, Uncle Sol would have to fund that. She asked. He refused, citing the war in Europe as an excuse. He told Wallis he had no spare money to spend on frivolities and that every dollar he could spare had to go to help the British and the French in their struggle against the Germans.

Devastated, she accepted whatever invitations came her way, wore whatever corsages were sent her and made a splash wherever she could, for example being the only one in the room on one occasion wearing a blue dress. Wallis, never cla.s.sically pretty but always well dressed and charming, was widely agreed to be one of the most popular debutantes of the season. But the inevitable anticlimax around the end of the year was made worse in her case by the death of her Warfield grandmother, which demanded a period of serious mourning just when Wallis intended serious party-going. So, when an invitation arrived from one of her mother's cousins, the beautiful Corinne Mustin, suggesting that Wallis come and stay with her in Pensacola, Florida, Wallis seized on the suggestion. Corinne and her sister, Lelia Montague Barnett, the latter married to the general commanding the US Marine Corps at Wakefield in Virginia, had both extended frequent invitations at critical times to Wallis to come and stay. Lelia had even hosted a debutante party for Wallis in Was.h.i.+ngton. Wallis felt warmly towards them both and vividly remembered Corinne's wedding to the then thirty-three-year-old pioneer air pilot Henry Mustin in 1907 as one of the most glamorous events of her childhood. Now the Mustins had three children of their own and Henry, a captain in the US Navy, had recently been appointed commandant of the new Pensacola Air Station. There were family conclaves to decide if Wallis could accept or if her acceptance would be perceived as typical Montague gaiety in the face of Warfield mourning. Eventually it was agreed she could go on the grounds that she needed to see more of the world than Baltimore. After all, everyone knew the place was swarming with virile young aviators.

She arrived, aged nineteen, in April 1916 and within twenty-four hours had written to her mother: 'I have just met the world's most fascinating aviator.' The day after her arrival cousin Corinne had organized a lunch with three fellow officers. Wallis got on well with Corinne, who always referred to her younger cousin as 'Skinny' a nickname she liked. Later she suspected that Corinne, herself married to a strong and silent older man, may have deliberately selected these men for her: Shortly before noon, as Corinne and I were sitting on the porch, I saw Henry Mustin rounding the corner deep in conversation with a young officer and followed closely by two more ... they were tanned and lean. But as they drew closer my eyes came to rest on the officer directly behind Henry Mustin. He was laughing yet there was a suggestion of inner force and vitality that struck me instantly.

Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Jr at twenty-seven was eight years older than Wallis. He had film-star good looks set off by a close-cropped moustache and had already spent six years in the navy after graduating from Annapolis. Wallis was instantly smitten. She wrote that over lunch the gold stripes on his shoulder-boards, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, 'acted like a magnet and drew me back to him. Above all, I gained an impression of resolution and courage. I felt here was a man you could rely on in a tight place.'

Previously Wallis had dated boys, but now she was in the company of men. Win Spencer was strong, confident, virile and experienced. He suggested they meet the next day. By the end of that day Wallis was hopelessly in love. Until Pensacola, Wallis had never seen an aeroplane the art of flying was so new that the navy had only one air station, the one at Pensacola so everything she discovered that spring was exciting and new. And there were only a handful of pilots. Win Spencer was the twentieth naval pilot to win his wings. According to a limerick in the US naval academy yearbook: On the stage, as a maid with a curl.

A perfect entrancer is Earl.

With a voice like Caruse.

It's clearly no use.

To try to beat him with a girl.

Other epithets applied to him in the yearbook included 'fiery and able' and 'a merry devil'.

Win and Wallis started seeing each other at every opportunity. He tried to teach her to play golf one of life's games at which she never succeeded. But with Win, she always pretended that at least she enjoyed the attempt. She was blind to the bitter streak in him, the jealous and brooding quality deeply embedded in his nature, let alone the cynicism that she came to know painfully well later. But on the day he asked her to marry him, within weeks of their meeting, she replied that of course she loved him and wanted to marry him but would have to ask her family. He countered: 'I never expected you to say yes right away ... but don't keep me waiting too long.' Such a response indicates a man already weary of the games lovers play, telling Wallis he has seen it all before and not to bother with such sham. She promised to let him know in the summer a decent interval when he came to Baltimore for his final leave. But he knew that her answer was never in doubt. The next stage was meeting the parents.

Earl Winfield Spencer Sr was a successful and, by the time his son met Wallis, socially prominent Chicago stockbroker. Until 1905 when the Spencers moved to the exclusive suburb of Highland Park, Chicago, the family had lived in Evanston, Illinois. In August 1916, when Wallis went to visit them just before her marriage, they were living in a large clapboard house with a veranda and front lawn at Wade Street. The family was moderately religious and in 1906 8 Spencer Sr had served as a vestryman of Trinity Episcopal Church in Highland Park, where his wife undertook various charitable commitments. They had six children four boys and two girls all of whom were by 1916 in active service. Two daughters, Gladys and Ethel, had trained for Red Cross work and Gladys went to serve at a hospital in Paris. When America entered the war Mrs Spencer was quoted in a local newspaper as saying: 'I believe I am the happiest woman in the world. I could not be happier unless I might have a few more to offer for the cause of the nation.'

On 19 September, five mont, wr, fivehs after Wallis and Win had met, Mrs John Freeman Rasin announced the engagement of her only daughter Wallis to Lieutenant Spencer. He might not have offered the sort of marriage to old money and ancient lineage to which the Warfields aspired, but catching a naval lieutenant was the height of excitement for many an Oldfields girl. Wallis had not only caught a handsome one but at just twenty she was one of the first of her group to be married. This was an important race for her to win. Mary Kirk, unattached and sad to see her best friend leave Baltimore, generously hosted a tea with her mother in honour of Wallis at the Baltimore Country Club. She agreed to be one of Wallis's bridesmaids.

The wedding took place on a cold autumn day, 8 November 1916, against a highly charged political background. It was the day after the US presidential election which had been fuelled by constant discussion about the war in Europe that had been raging for the last two years. Britain and France were deeply embroiled, suffering heavy casualties, but, while public sentiment in the United States leaned towards showing sympathy with the Allied forces, most American voters wanted to avoid active involvement in the war, preferring to continue a policy of neutrality. Hence Woodrow Wilson was returned to the White House on the campaign slogan 'He kept us out of war'.

The ceremony which saw Wallis marrying into a heavily involved military family, where sacrifice and duty were top priorities, took place at Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in Baltimore, the local church on St Paul Street which she had attended for so many Sunday services with her grandmother. The ushers were all naval officers and flyers in uniform. The Baltimore Sun described the evening wedding as 'one of the most important of the season ... performed in front of a large a.s.semblage of guests'. The church was decorated with palms and white chrysanthemums while lighted tapers and annunciation lilies decorated the altar. The bride entered the church on the arm of her uncle Sol, who gave her away. She had designed her own gown of white panne velvet (an unusual fabric for a wedding dress at the time) made with a court train and a pointed bodice elaborately embroidered with pearls. The skirt tumbled over a petticoat of old family lace and her veil of tulle was edged with lace arranged coronet fas.h.i.+on with sprays of orange blossoms. She carried a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley.

But with US involvement in the war felt to be imminent, the mood at the wedding was slightly sombre and there followed only a small reception for the two families and members of the wedding party held at the Stafford Hotel. The Baltimore Sun commented: 'since being presented to society two seasons ago the bride has been a great favourite and has spent much time in Was.h.i.+ngton with her aunt, Mrs D. B. Merryman, and her cousin Mrs George Barnett, wife of Major General Barnett USMC'.

The Spencer family had arrived from Chicago earlier in the week. Win's younger brother, Dumaresq Spencer, was best man and his sister Ethel one of the bridesmaids. Wallis was always a man's woman and was never close to her sisters-in-law let alone to her new mother-in-law. She was not looking for intimate friends.h.i.+ps with her new family, in fact was slightly stunned by them, and considered her place at the centre of the family she already had quite enough.

Win had just two weeks' leave, so the honeymoon was spent partly at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia and partly in New York. Win never wrote about his marriage to Wallis he found the way his subsequent life was made public as the ex-husban.

So when Win revealed a bottle of gin packed between the s.h.i.+rts in his suitcase it was clear he had known there was likely to be difficulty in finding enough alcohol to fuel his needs over the coming days. Wallis, having grown up in a household which had strong convictions about the evils of alcohol, was shocked. She must have noticed during the previous few months that drinking was a habit of many men in the navy. But, in her hurry to marry, she was blind to the consequences. Only half jokingly, Win accused her of being a prude and quite possibly the tone of their marriage was set. But Win had a redeeming sense of humour and after two weeks they moved back into government accommodation at Pensacola where Lieutenant Spencer was an instructor at the Aviation School.

Wallis spent her days painting the inside of the small bungalow white, putting up chintz curtains and enjoying the luxury of having a cook and a maid while she embarked on the ritual of socializing with navy wives. The cook was a fortunate addition to the household since Wallis knew nothing about the important art of cooking but, recognizing the need to please her husband in all ways, set about learning to master it. Cooking was easier than learning to play golf and perhaps easier than having s.e.x at this stage in her life. And so Wallis began to develop her talents as a hostess, deciding that some of the top naval bra.s.s needed to be entertained.

Four months later, in April 1917, the US joined the war and the couple moved for a short time to Boston, where Spencer was in command of the Naval Aviation School at Squantum, Ma.s.sachusetts, training other men to go overseas or undertake dangerous missions. While Win brooded over what he perceived as a demotion, perhaps even punishment for his heavy drinking, Wallis had taken to playing poker. Both were gambling with their futures.

2.

Understanding Wallis.

'I am naturally gay and flirtatious'

There is a deeply revealing line in Wallis Simpson's autobiography where she states her 'private judgment that when I was being good I generally had a bad time and when I was being bad the opposite was true'. She had an appalling time for much of the eight years that followed her marriage in 1916 and, on balance, it is probably fair to conclude that she was trying her best in these years to be good.

From the first weeks back at the base at Pensacola she saw how superficially she had known Win Spencer before plunging into marriage with him and she learned to look upon the raucous Sat.u.r.day-night parties full of drinking, dancing and carousing into the small hours as 'a kind of thanksgiving that another week was safely past'. That was hardly the language of young love, albeit written some years afterwards. But in 1916 she knew as little about life as she did about her new husband. In order to make sense of Wallis it is important to understand the horror of her marriage to Spencer. While they were courting they grabbed every opportunity to be alone. But Corinne, in loco parentis, had to make an attempt at chaperoning, so there had been few opportunities for them to be alone and talk about their hopes and ambitions for a life together, let alone about their feelings for each other. When they did manage to grab a quiet few minutes somewhere deserted, Win would immediately seize Wallis and kiss her pa.s.sionately. But, according to Wallis, that was all; 'spooning or petting' was impossible, however much either might have wished even for that. Ever keen to push the boundaries, she knew while she was being watched that she had to put the brakes on or be labelled 'fast'. She admitted later that she was ignorant of the facts of life when she married. Cousin Lelia once remarked to her only a little in jest, 'you know perfectly well you just married him out of curiosity'. Oldfields may have taught her the difference between an oyster fork and a lemon fork or the easiest way to do up an arm-length, seven-b.u.t.ton glove. But these were skills of little use to her in the bedroom with Win. All her schoolfriends remember Wallis as exceptionally flirtatious from a very young age not just charming in a typically Southern way but teasingly and unusually enticing. The Kirks, who knew her best, were profoundly concerned by her influence on their daughter.

There is now evidence to indicate there may have been sound medical and psychological reasons for Wallis behaving in this way which were not understood at the time and certainly would never have been discussed. She may have been born with what is currently labelled a Disorder of s.e.xual Development (DSD) or inters.e.xuality, a term which embraces a wide range of conditions. Some are so subtle that even today doctors delivering babies with ambiguous genitals cannot be immediately certain if they are holding a boy or a girl. Since one baby in 15,000 is born with some degree of DSD which amounts to approximately 4,000 in the UK and 400,000 globally per annum the problem can no longer be considered rare. This does not mean that Wallis was a man, in fact the reverse, and she was certainly not a freak. Wallis herself, if she were born with some degree of DSD and there is no medical proof that this is an accurate a.s.sessment of her case would not have known that anything was wrong, at least for many years, and even then might have been given confused information unless she had cause to undergo an operation. Yet the diagnosis is more than wild conjecture because there is strong circ.u.mstantial and psychos.e.xual evidence that Wallis fits into this category. Michael Bloch, Wallis's biographer, who lived and worked in her house in Paris for years while his subject lay largely comatose, came to believe after discussing her case with doctors that she may have suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, which is at the milder end of the spectrum. He reached this view based on extensive personal knowledge.

Patients with AIS are born genetically male as they have the XY chromosome and produce testosterone. Because the body's receptors in this case are insensitive to testosterone the individual develops outwardly as a woman, although at p.u.b.erty therse p.u.b.ert testosterone buildup may result in strong muscles giving her athletic prowess, long legs or large hands. Such a child to all purposes appears female and only later can it be discovered that their karyotype is XY if a DNA test is carried out, and that of course was not an option during Wallis's childhood. The first clue for Wallis that something might be different would have been at p.u.b.erty if she did not have periods. But even this might not have seemed unusual, nor would it have been an easy subject for discussion given the frequent absences of her mother at this time in her life.

Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, the term itself only coined in 1886, ten years before Wallis was born, indicating how little was known and understood about that condition. At the end of the nineteenth century there would have been very little discussion around such a risque subject, even in medical circles, least of all with the parents of the newborn baby. A patient with pseudo-hermaphroditism has the internal reproductive organs of one s.e.x while exhibiting the opposite in their external genitalia so a man has female characteristics which may include small b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a woman some form of male genitalia that are possibly barely noticeable, as well as usually a shallow v.a.g.i.n.a, but no uterus, cervix or ovaries (though this is variable). Full hermaphroditism, a term now considered offensive, where individuals carry both types of gonad, is extremely rare. For the Victorians, already confused by the Woman Question, the term used to convey the challenge to traditional notions of a woman's place, merely trying to grapple with such a concept was deeply disconcerting. 'So much of what is repulsive attaches to our ideas of the condition of an hermaphrodite that we experience a reluctance even to use the word,' wrote one doctor, Jonathan Hutchinson, in the year of Wallis's birth. Hermaphroditism challenged notions of what defined a woman or a man and the whole social order depended on these clear definitions. A person who could not be defined was a dangerously disruptive presence. For whatever reason, Wallis was certainly that.

Without a full ultrasound or scan the condition could not possibly have been detected at birth. Young Dr Lewis Allen, fresh out of medical school, who came to deliver the baby in Blue Ridge Summit, might have noticed that the baby had slightly strange-looking genitalia: the most common description is of slightly larger l.a.b.i.a than usual or slightly enlarged c.l.i.toris resembling a small p.e.n.i.s; in some cases the child would have t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es which do not descend (today they would be removed since they could pose a serious medical risk later in life). But in 1896 there was no question that such a child would have been brought up as female; there was no available means of checking chromosomal abnormality. What usually happened in such cases is that the doctor would have done his best to rea.s.sure the parents that although the baby might appear unusual, they should not worry. 'She'll grow out of it,' he would have told them, or 'Everything will be normal in a few years.' And indeed before p.u.b.erty such individuals would easily pa.s.s as normal pre-p.u.b.escent females. After p.u.b.erty there might be a noticeable drift towards the external features of a male including bone structure, muscle development and voice change, but even these features might be easily missed and obvious signs such as facial hair are usually prevented by the condition's inability to convert the testosterone.

James Pope-Hennessy, visiting the Windsors in 1958 in the course of writing the official biography of Queen Mary, commented in his journal that Wallis was 'one of the very oddest women I have ever seen. She is, to look at, phenomenal. She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing c waal playard ... I should be tempted to cla.s.sify her as an American woman par excellence ... were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.' It was not just her physical characteristics that came under scrutiny. In 1936 Nancy Dugdale, wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's Parliamentary Private Secretary, Tommy Dugdale, sent a letter written by Wallis to a well-known German graphologist, Gusti Oesterreicher. Mrs Dugdale insisted the a.n.a.lysis had been done in complete ignorance of the writer's ident.i.ty and that Oesterreicher did not speak English. Oesterreicher's report concluded that the author of the letter was: A woman with a strong male inclination in the sense of activity, vitality and initiative. She MUST dominate, she MUST have authority, and without sufficient scope for her powers can become disagreeable. In a narrow circle without big tasks to perform and the possibility for expansion her temperament would be impatient, irritable ... but not without some instincts of n.o.bility and generosity. She is ruled by contradictory impulses ... In the physical sense of the word s.a.d.i.s.tic, cold, overbearing, vain.

According Dr Christopher Inglefield, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender surgery, Wallis's known physical and behavioural characteristics clearly fit the stereotype. He explains: The problem for these individuals is how do you confirm that you are female if your biological responses are not like other girls? How do you come to terms with this strange situation? Often these individuals don't understand what or who they are so, for a female lacking female organs, being boy mad is one typical response, another is to get married as quickly as possible, thereby telling your peers you are a normal female.

Marriage, according to Dr Inglefield, is thus seen as a reaffirmation of being female.

Not only is early marriage often the norm but so is the urge to dress in the most feminizing way because of the need to fit into society. Dressing is just one way of behaving in an ultra-feminine way. Another is s.e.xual behaviour. There is a strong need to do everything in the most feminine way possible. 'Look at me, I'm a woman,' Wallis is saying. 'I'm not the prettiest thing you've ever seen but I am so elegant. I'm the epitome of womanhood.' The clothes and the s.e.x are all of a piece.