[News/Books/People] [UK/USA] Was Wallis Simpson all woman? There's been always been speculation about her sexual make-up. Now in a major reassessment her biographer uncovers new evidence
Stephanie Stevens
Was Wallis Simpson all woman? There's been always been speculation
about her sexual make-up. Now in a major reassessment her biographer
uncovers new evidence
By Anne Sebba
Last updated at 1:56 PM on 6th August 2011
The first time the future King of England met Wallis Simpson, she left
little impression. After all, she was neither young nor beautiful.
Her face was square-jawed and masculine, with an unfortunate mole.
Her voice had an unpleasant rasp, according to many aristocrats who
knew her, and her idea of wit was raucous American wisecracks.
The person responsible for introducing her in January, 1931, to
Edward, then the Prince of Wales, was his mistress Thelma Furness.
As her husband was away, convention demanded that one married couple
should be present as chaperones at her weekend house party.
Having met Thelma through a mutual friend, Wallis was asked if she and
her husband, Ernest, would provide the necessary cover. You bet, they
would.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/mWI8zX> Odd couple: Prince Edward with Wallis Simpson]
For Ernest, an American businessman of Jewish extraction who’d taken
British citizenship and revered the monarchy, meeting the
king-in-waiting was close to the pinnacle of his dreams.
For Wallis, the connection promised an important step up the social
ladder, with the likelihood of more invitations to fashionable
parties.
Extremely nervous at the prospect of meeting royalty for the first
time, she spent the whole of the previous day getting her hair and
nails done. But whether the Prince even noticed is debatable.
As Wallis confided afterwards in a letter to her Aunt Bessie:
‘Probably we will never hear or see any of them again.’
Yet, just three years later, this homely, twice-married American had
displaced Thelma and become the latest mistress of the blond and
blue-eyed prince who was a pin-up for millions.
Not only that, but he had fallen so violently and obsessively in love
that he was prepared to give up the throne in order to marry her.
Those in the know shook their heads in disbelief. How on earth had a
plain woman, in her late 30s managed to bewitch the most eligible
bachelor in the world? What sinister hold did she have over him? And
what were her secrets?
Naturally, the rumour mill went into overdrive, helped along by the
spurned Thelma Furness. The 5ft 7in Prince, she blabbed, was known as
‘the little man’ for another reason — and he was sexually inadequate
and prone to premature ejaculation.
Gradually, the word spread: between the sheets, Wallis Simpson was in
fact a femme fatale with legendary talents. She had, according to one
speculative study, ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a
cigar’.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/qB9fPn> The Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrive
at Southampton from New York]
Charles Higham, one of her early biographers, went into greater
detail, describing an ancient Chinese skill at which she was
apparently adept, involving ‘a prolonged and carefully modulated hot
oil massage’ and various arts to delay gratification.
Indeed, it was known that Wallis had spent a good deal of time in
China, where she was later to admit that her first husband had taken
her out for drinks in bars of ill-repute.
There was even rumoured to be a China dossier, which detailed the
intimate techniques she’d perfected, variously called the Baltimore
grip, Shanghai squeeze or China clinch.
None of these rumours, however, has ever been conclusively proved,
even if they do seem to explain why a king might forsake his
birthright in order to possess her.
Still, whether Wallis ever mastered the Shanghai squeeze or not,
there’s no doubt that she was unusually experienced for a
well-brought-up young lady in the early 20th century.
Boy-mad while still at school, she’d married a U.S. Navy lieutenant at
20, and had at least one affair and countless flirtations before her
second marriage, to Ernest Simpson.
Indeed, the likelihood is that she knew about a variety of sexual
techniques, including oral sex, which would not have been standard
education for most British or American girls of the day.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/oLpk4e> Wallis Simpson, pictured in 1931, had a
very active interest in the opposite sex from very early on]
But Wallis almost certainly had a far deeper and darker secret.
Recent research suggests that she might well have been born with
what’s currently called a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or
intersexuality, which affects about 4,000 babies annually in the UK.
Some of its effects 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.
This does not mean that Wallis was a man, and she was certainly not a
freak. In fact, it’s unlikely that she’d have known that anything was
wrong, at least for many years.
Yet the diagnosis is more than wild conjecture because there’s strong
circumstantial and psychosexual evidence that Wallis was not wholly
female.
The writer Michael Bloch, who lived and worked in Wallis’s house in
Paris for years during the later years of her life, claimed that he’d
discussed her sexuality with doctors.
He came to the conclusion that she may have been suffering from
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, which is at the milder end of
the intersexuality spectrum.
A girl with AIS is born genetically male as she has the XY chromosome.
But because her body’s receptors are insensitive to large amounts of
testosterone she produces, she develops outwardly as a woman.
At puberty, however, the build-up of testosterone can result in long
legs, large hands and strong muscles that aid athletic ability — all
of which Wallis possessed.
Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, with
the internal reproductive organs of one sex and the external organs of
another.
Was this the case with Wallis? It certainly makes sense of an
extraordinary remark she once made to a friend.
She had never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two
husbands, she confided; nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch
her below her personal ‘Mason–Dixon line’ — the name given to the
border between the Southern and Northern parts of the United States.
Without the benefit of a full ultrasound or scan, which hadn’t yet
been invented, the condition could not have been diagnosed at her
birth.
So although Dr Lewis Allen, who delivered Wallis in 1898, might have
noticed the baby had slightly strange-looking genitalia, he would have
done his best to reassure her parents.
‘She’ll grow out of it,’ he would have told them.
And, indeed, until puberty, such girls easily pass as normal
pre-pubescent females. After puberty, however, there can be a
noticeable drift towards the external features of a male — such as a
masculine bone structure, accelerated muscle development and a deep
voice.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/nDy2Sb> Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson were
married on 3 June 1937, at Château de Candé, near Tours, France]
On the face of it, at least, Wallis fits the bill. The biographer
James Pope-Hennessy, who met her in 1958, commented in his journal
that Wallis was ‘one of the very oddest women I have ever seen’.
‘She is, to look at, phenomenal,’ he added. ‘She is flat and angular
and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. I should be
tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence were it
not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.’
It wasn’t just her physical characteristics that had masculine tendencies.
A well-known German graphologist, who was given a sample of her
hand-writing but not her identity, concluded that the writer 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. She is ruled by
contradictory impulses.’
Few who knew Wallis would argue with the accuracy of that analysis.
Of more weight is the opinion of Dr Christopher Inglefield, a plastic
surgeon specialising in gender surgery today.
Through his clinical practice, in which he advises patients on
corrective surgery, he has considerable experience in assessing
whether an individual is predisposed to survive as one sex or the
other.
According to him, Wallis’s known physical and behavioural
characteristics clearly fit the stereotype for intersexuality.
He points out that her angular, almost square-jawed face indicates a
lack of the female hormone, oestrogen.
Her masculine traits become even more obvious, he says, when you look
at photographs of Wallis posing with her girlfriends — such as her
best friend from school, Mary Kirk.
‘Oestrogen is very softening. You can see Wallis’s condition clearly
next to the very rounded face of Mary. Today, a course of oestrogen
therapy can transform facial features. Had it been available in
Wallis’s day, it would have dramatically changed her appearance.’
It’s well-known, too, that a lack of ovaries affects body shape and
breast development.
Indeed, several successful models with an impossibly lean, rangy look
are known to be women born with Disorders of Sexual Development.
Wallis, for her part, was whippet-thin as a child.
Thereafter, she became obsessed with maintaining a slim silhouette,
which is of critical importance to intersexual women who want to avoid
a masculine, solid appearance with no discernible waistline.
There are yet more clues in Wallis’s behaviour. Dr Inglefield
explains: ‘The problem for these individuals is: how do you confirm
that you’re female if your biological responses are not like other
girls?
‘Often, 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.’
Not only is early marriage often the norm, but so is the urge to dress
in a feminising way because of the need to fit into society — and
Wallis, of course, first married at 20 and later became famous for her
jewels and couture clothes.
‘Look at me, I’m a woman,’ she was saying, in effect. ‘I’m not the
prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but I am so elegant. I’m the epitome
of womanhood.’
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/qBjFqY> Wallis Simpson looking out her window
during Trooping The Colour in 1972]
Often, women with an intersexual condition believe that one of the
most powerful ways to reaffirm their womanhood is by giving men
intense sexual pleasure. Vaginal intercourse is often possible, even
when the vagina is shallow.
The ultimate confirmation of womanhood, of course, is to get pregnant
— a clear impossibility for those born without a womb. So it seems
significant that Wallis avoided the subject of reproduction entirely
in her own memoirs.
This is not normal. Almost all childless women writing reminiscences
born more than a century ago, when birth control wasn’t readily
available, manage in some way or other to refer to their deep longing
for a child.
Or else they insist that a decision was made not to have one.
In Wallis’s case, with no career of her own during either of her first
two marriages, she would certainly have been expected by her husbands,
family and friends to start a family.
So when she failed to become pregnant, it’s quite possible that she
consulted a doctor and underwent an examination.
At that point, the doctor may have been suspicious if he couldn’t see a cervix.
Her inability to conceive — or difficulties she may have encountered
having intercourse — were probably a contributory factor in the
disintegration of her first marriage.
Wallis’s mother Alice apparently said on her deathbed that her
daughter could never have children. If that is the case, and if it was
something Wallis always knew, she may have steeled herself very early
on to the idea of being childless.
At all events, she seems by her 20s to have resigned herself to the
idea that she couldn’t conceive and concentrated on using her
sexuality to attract men instead.
Even her apparently robust self-confidence is a typical feature of
certain women with gender disorders, who cope with the hidden,
humiliating part of themselves by nurturing the belief that they’re
special.
‘It’s not only a way of over-compensating,’ explains consultant
psychiatrist Dr Domenico di Ceglie. ‘It’s also a way of managing the
sense of inadequacy which would otherwise have been there.
‘If a woman knows that she possesses a secret which makes her a unique
person, she can live with this by believing that she has something
which makes her stand out against the rest. It’s like having a special
gift.’
That gift became apparent when Wallis was still very young.
Although she lived with her widowed mother in straitened circumstances
in Baltimore, Maryland, she was remembered by all her schoolfriends as
both exceptionally flirtatious and one of the most popular debutantes
of her season.
Born Bessie Wallis, she had ditched the first part of her name as fit
only for cows and, according to one of her friends, brazenly announced
that she wanted to marry for ‘lots of money’.
At the time, this aspiration seemed wholly within her grasp, as she
appeared to have a magnetic power to attract men.
Many who knew her have commented on her sex appeal, her contagious
laugh and — in the words of a friend — ‘beautiful dark sapphire blue
eyes, full of sparkle and nice mischief’.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/qWTqyZ> The story of Wallis Simpson is due to
be the subject of a film directed by Madonna, out later this year]
A bridesmaid at Wallis’s first wedding described her later as a
typical Southern belle, who could no more keep from flirting than from
breathing.
‘She could come into a room full of women and you wouldn’t pay any
attention to her — but the minute a man came in, she’d sparkle and
turn on the charm.’
It was certainly a matter of pride to Wallis that she was one of the
first of her friends to marry. But her good-looking husband, a naval
aviator called Win Spencer, turned out to be a drunk with a violent
temper.
She struggled to make the marriage work, staying with him for eight years.
But when he locked her up once for hours in the bathroom, it was the
last straw and she demanded a divorce — to the horror of her extended
family, who prided themselves on their respectability.
After an affair with an Argentinian diplomat, who ditched her for
another woman, she spent what she described as a ‘lotus year’,
visiting friends in China. There, according to her friend Diana
Angulo, Wallis was ‘infamous for arousing bouts of passion among
adoring males’.
But none of her flirtations with the bedazzled expats resulted in a
proposal, and she was horribly aware that she was approaching 30 and
could not live forever on the charity of friends.
Just in time, through her schoolfriend Mary Kirk, she met a
businessman called Ernest Simpson.
Despite being married with a child, he started falling for Wallis over
games of bridge and was soon taking her out to lunches, dinners and
art galleries.
Wallis, naturally, always insisted that the four-year Simpson marriage
was on the rocks long before she met Ernest. But Dorothea Simpson
suggested otherwise.
‘From the moment I met her I never liked her at all,’ she said later.
‘I’ve never been around anybody like that — she moved in and helped
herself to my house and my clothes and, finally, to everything.’
Ernest, who worked in shipping, was moderately well-off and not
bad-looking. Having enlisted in the Coldstream Guards during World War
I, he had remained in love with everything British and was now keen to
move to London.
[Photo: <http://bit.ly/rpbMS2> Wallis Warfield, pictured aged just ten
years old]
Along with his air of dependability, this was a key attraction for
30-year-old Wallis. Still bruised by the shame of her divorce, she was
just as eager to make a fresh start in a city where she wasn’t known.
At first, all went to plan. They found a temporary house in the West
End, and Ernest’s much older sister Maud, who’d also settled in
Britain, threw luncheon parties to introduce Wallis to her friends.
Among them was the young Barbara Cartland, then a society hostess and
fledgling novelist, who recalled that Wallis was not only ‘badly
dressed but aggressively American.
She also told us rather vulgar stories and I was shocked to the core’.
But Maud’s friends were mostly respectable elderly aristocrats who did
good works, and Wallis quickly grew bored.
A new flat where she could entertain proved to be the answer, and she
started collecting a circle of her own — most of them rich Americans,
such as Benjamin Thaw, newly-appointed First Secretary of the U.S.
Embassy, and his glamorous wife Consuelo.
Quickly, Wallis established a reputation as a successful and unusual
hostess who could mix a mean cocktail — or KT, as she called it. Her
parties were small, but her attention to detail was second to none.
‘Wallis’s parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave,’
commented one guest. It was Consuelo who introduced Wallis to her
sister, Thelma Furness, the much-gossiped-about lover of the Prince of
Wales.
Then 37, he was one of the most famous men in the world, adored for
his boyish good looks and radiant charm.
But like Wallis, he had dark secrets of his own.
Several of those closest to him had already expressed the opinion that
Edward was mentally unbalanced. Not only that, but it was even
whispered that the future king was actually insane.
Intriguingly, as we shall find out on Monday, there is indeed evidence
to support this.
Did Wallis sense this? Contrary to popular opinion, it now appears
that his androgynous American mistress was not keen to marry him.
She was far from being the instigator of the 1936 Abdication crisis,
but had to learn, slowly, to live with the consequences.
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Extracted from THAT WOMAN: The Life Of Wallis Simpson, Duchess Of
Windsor by Anne Sebba, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on
August 31 at £20. © 2011 Anne Sebba. To order a copy for £16.99 (incl
p&p) call 0843 382 0000.
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