Espil, a rising young diplomat, also had
entrée
to the capital’s most exclusive functions. He escorted Wallis to elaborate diplomatic receptions and balls where, clad in expensive, sleek gowns, she whirled across the parquet floors of embassy ballrooms doing the foxtrot, cocktail in hand. Often, she would not return home until two in the morning. Such a ceaseless pursuit of pleasure troubled Alice, who made no secret of her disapproval. Eventually, Wallis moved into the Georgetown house of Dorothy McNamee, the wife of another naval officer stationed abroad; now, for the first time, she had money, a house in which to entertain, a happy relationship, and above all, her independence.
But Wallis, plunged headlong into her own version of a schoolgirl fantasy, was too unrealistic to recognize that Espil’s affections were transitory in nature. She managed to delude herself into believing that Espil would one day, when she was free of Win, marry her. Espil, however, was not as captivated. That he was genuinely fond of her is certain; but he was also keenly aware of his diplomatic career, and in the most frank terms, Wallis was a liability rather than an asset. He was Roman Catholic; she was Protestant. She had no fortune in her own right or any prospect of inheriting wealth; and perhaps most important, she was married. For a rising young Catholic diplomat, a divorced Protestant wife would never do.
The liaison might have lasted comfortably for several years were it not for Wallis’s sheer determination to marry Espil. In his position, Espil had to spend time at embassy receptions with important women, and Wallis grew intensely jealous. Her attentions soon became too much for Espil’s tastes. Ironically, as had Win with her, she found herself believing the worst of Espil, accusing him of flirting behind her back. Heated arguments, followed by romantic reconciliations, proved a considerable nightmare for the young diplomat, and he brought the affair to an end. Ironically, he eventually married a twice-divorced woman, a move which apparently did little to harm his career. He served as Argentine ambassador to the United States from 1931 to 1943 and died in his native land in 1972.
Wallis was inconsolable. She had been utterly convinced that Espil shared her feelings. Now, for the first time, she was confronted with an ugly truth: Just as her family had warned, she would forever be viewed as tarnished. The realization that she herself could do nothing to alter such perceptions preyed on her mind. She had given her heart, and in the end, those feelings had been rejected. In her mind, she had become a victim—of circumstances and, above all, of the men in her life. She had wanted love from these men—acceptance, protection, friendship—and instead found that somehow she was unable to meet their needs. From this point on, she carefully guarded her emotions. Her relationships with men would never again be outwardly warm ones, and even her friendships would possess more than a note of distance and formality. The passion which she might have felt was tempered with practicality, and she was more than a little reluctant to ever let herself fall in love again or reveal her true feelings except in the most intimate of circumstances.
In 1923, Henry Mustin died unexpectedly. After a suitable period of mourning had passed, Corinne, still young and vibrant, cast aside her widow’s weeds and asked Wallis to accompany her on a trip to Paris. Wallis herself did not have enough money to go, so, bracing herself, she decided to visit her uncle Solomon and ask for a grant. Solomon Davies Warfield kept an apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City; Wallis had never before been there, but it was widely whispered within the family that it was to this enclave that he brought numerous actresses and singers for discreet romantic trysts. Wallis was shocked at the suggestive photographs which lined the apartment walls, but they gave her the emotional and moral ammunition she needed to press her request. Her uncle, mortified that a relative was staring at evidence of his other life, did not even bother to put up a fight and gave her five hundred dollars for the trip.
33
Wallis and her cousin left the United States in January 1924. They crossed the Atlantic on a small American ocean liner that pitched and rolled in the heavy seas. The seemingly endless movement left Corinne sick and confined to their cabin for most of the voyage, but the two women still managed to work themselves into a state of excitement by planning their itinerary in their stateroom.
34
On their first night in Paris, the two cousins, traveling without reservations, ended up in a small, decrepit hotel in an unfashionable section of the city. A few days later, they managed to book better accommodations at a hotel on the rue Pierre Charron. They spent their days sight-seeing, sitting along the sidewalk cafés sipping coffee, weekending in the Loire Valley and visiting the old châteaus, and exploring the twisting alleys and ancient churches of Paris. Wallis came to love the city, with its thrilling sounds and smells, its cosmopolitan sophistication, and its studied elegance.
35
When Corinne returned to America, Wallis remained behind, sharing a flat with two friends for several months before reluctantly abandoning her European idyll.
36
When Wallis returned home, she found a stack of letters from her estranged husband, all begging her to reconsider their arrangement and come live with him in China. He was lonely, unhappy, and missing her. Wallis, too, began to view the past nostalgically, glossing over the abuse she had suffered. She and Win were separated, but their emotions were still woven together in, as she later wrote, “a tangled skein of threads too stubborn to be broken.”
37
With the relationship with Espil over and her money gone, there was little to tie her to America. Eventually, Wallis was worn down. On July 17, 1924 she boarded the USS
Chaumont
at Norfolk, Virginia, and, along with a dozen other navy wives, set off for the Orient.
6
China
A
CCORDING TO WALLIS
, the USS
Chaumont
was “the original slow boat to China.”
1
The voyage, down the east coast of the United States, through the Panama Canal, and across the Pacific Ocean, seemed to take forever. Wallis became ill early on and suffered throughout the voyage from a terrible cold.
The trip was apparently uneventful. Author Charles Higham alleges that Wallis provided sexual favors to members of the ship’s crew in the presence of several children and their mother, with whom she shared her cabin. This is fairly typical of the sort of unsubstantiated gossip which has been repeated about Wallis; Higham declares that his information comes from a nephew of the ship’s captain, who in turn is said to have drawn on the reminiscences of the captain himself, who presumably learned details from his crew. (An odd source, surely, for what crew member would inform his captain that he had copulated in front of other passengers?) No evidence for this story, third-hand at best, has ever surfaced. Needless to say, Wallis would have had to have been not only a woman of exceptionally loose morals but also an incredibly stupid one to have behaved in the manner alleged. The evidence clearly suggests she was neither and that the story is just another rumor, like the infamous “China Dossier” (discussed later in this chapter), which has managed to work itself into her story.
2
After six weeks and stops along the way in Hawaii and Guam, the ship finally reached Manila. Here Wallis boarded the
Empress of Canada
for the voyage to Hong Kong. At the end of the second day, September 8, Wallis stood on deck, watching as Hong Kong came into view, its harbor filled with hundreds of bobbing junks and sampans, the sloping hillsides above littered with wooden huts and the mansions of British officials. Win waited at the crowded dock to greet her, nearly lost amid the cacophony of vendors and shouted welcomes. “He looked better than I had ever seen him since our first meeting in Pensacola—tanned, clear eyed, and charming,” Wallis later recalled. As they drove to his small apartment in Kowloon, on the Chinese mainland, he declared that he had not taken a drink since receiving word that Wallis was to rejoin him.
3
Wallis arrived at a dangerous time. China was poised on the verge of chaos. Indeed, the very week that the
Empress of Canada
docked at the Royal Naval Anchorage, civil war finally erupted on the Chinese mainland. Hong Kong itself, although a British crown colony under the protection of the Royal Navy and other British forces, had a similiarly volatile atmosphere. There was much resentment over colonial imperialism and foreign domination, not only English but European and American, and street demonstrations, assassinations, and other violent outbursts were common. The natural beauty of the city was lost on Wallis, who suffered in the intense heat as well as from having to avoid an outbreak of typhoid ravaging the city. The humid apartment always smelled of food; opening the windows brought the odor of raw sewage. This was not the exotic Orient she had expected but a gritty collection of diverse nationalities existing side by side in the most cramped quarters imaginable.
For a few weeks, all was well, and Wallis was convinced that she had made the correct decision. Then, one evening, the inevitable happened. Win had agreed to join Wallis for a prearranged dinner after his workday ended. When he failed to appear, she became worried. It was after midnight when he finally staggered home, dead drunk. He said nothing, and Wallis, without comment, put him to bed. The next morning, he was off to work without any explanation.
4
Wallis was convinced that she had done something wrong. But when she tearfully asked Win, he denied that she had been to blame. Little more was said about the incident, and in the middle of October, Win left for Canton. This was a dangerous assignment, for the city lay at the very heart of the burgeoning civil war. The Red Army, composed of disenfranchised workers as well as professional mercenaries, had invaded the city, murdering, raping, and burning their way through the streets. Over a thousand people had been killed in heavy fighting, many of them women and children.
Win was dispatched as master of the
Pampanga,
an old gunboat whose hull was shattered with holes from shells fired at it from the Chinese mainland. This vessel was an ex-Spanish gunboat, commissioned in 1888, stretching 121 feet and armed with 4 three-pound and 2 one-pound guns to defend herself. She was the only ship in the South China patrol able to regularly cruise the estuaries of the Canton Delta.
5
Win’s job was an important one, for river patrols were a regular and visible feature of the navy presence, an immense asset in the preservation of Western interests.
6
Wallis, unwilling to lose whatever chance she might have at saving her marriage, followed him a few days later. The harbor was filled with gunboats when she arrived, their guns trained on the docks in case of trouble. Above the city, the acrid stench of burning buildings and bodies still hung in the air. She and Win moved into quarters in the Foreign Concession, which was at least regularly patrolled and protected. It was now that the Spencer marriage began to completely unravel.
Win began drinking again and accused Wallis of having affairs with his fellow officers. Wallis never knew if pressure from his job, dislike of his position, depression, or merely her presence pushed him once again to the bottle. But when it occurred, all of the ferocity of Washington, D.C., was again unleashed.
In her memoirs, Wallis wrote that doctors had diagnosed a kidney infection at this time.
7
But according to one intimate friend, the Duchess confessed that her first husband had beaten and kicked her so severely in the stomach that she had bled internally. Battered and bruised, Wallis became violently ill, and Win, fearful, begged for her forgiveness. He accompanied her back to Hong Kong, where she received further treatment.
Win continued to express guilt and regret over his actions and declared that he loved Wallis as he had no other woman; but Wallis had been through this cycle before: the violence followed by repentance, which lasted only as long as Win’s ability to steer clear of his flask. Previously, she had remained with Win out of fear: She had nowhere to go, no money and little hope that she would be able to succeed in life if she broke her marital bonds. But her time in Washington, D.C., her trip to Europe, and her romance with Espil had taught her perhaps the most valuable lesson she would ever learn, that of independence. When her stubborn determination set in, Wallis knew that she could be surprisingly strong and take care of herself. Now she made up her mind.
As soon as she had recovered, Wallis told her husband that she no longer wished to live with him and would seek a divorce. Something snapped within Win; previously, he had at least kept his abuse a private matter, or so he thought; now, however, he seemed intent on deliberately humiliating his wife and subjecting her to his abuse in public. His sadistic streak increased; he forcibly dragged Wallis along with him on excursions to local brothels, openly flirting with whores, kissing and caressing them, while he made his wife watch. If she protested, he warned, he would kill her.
8
The malicious rumors that Wallis was somehow connected with these infamous Chinese brothels undoubtedly stem from these forced visits. In 1935 a dossier is said to have been compiled at the request of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin charged the British Intelligence Service, known as MI6, with the task of investigating Wallis, who was then at the height of her relationship with Edward, Prince of Wales. The result, the so-called China Dossier, supposedly made its way into Buckingham Palace, where it was read with horror by King George V and Queen Mary.
The dossier supposedly claimed that she not only visited these Chinese brothels with her husband but that she was trained in certain sexual practices within their walls. According to these stories, Wallis was said to have learned various lesbian techniques as well as a form of erotic massage said to be particularly helpful with men suffering from premature ejaculation and, her most famous secret, the “Chinese grip,” which allegedly enabled her during intercourse to contract the walls of her vagina to an extraordinary degree. Not only did Wallis allegedly learn these techniques, but according to this dossier, she quickly and enthusiastically put them into practice not only on Win but on any number of men who frequented the brothels. In effect, according to the dossier, she became a prostitute.
9
Much has been made of these unsavory allegations. The simple truth is that the document never existed: There is not one shred of reputable evidence to support it. “Absolutely preposterous, absolutely no truth in that whatsoever,” Wallis’s friend Aline, Countess of Romanones, declared, having discussed the stories with her.
10
Not only has no one ever been able to produce the China Dossier, but in the twenty years in which the document has been widely discussed, not one single person has actually ever claimed to have seen it. Kenneth de Courcy, the Duc de Grantmesnil, heard contemporary rumors about the dossier and once asked Major the Honorable Sir John Coke, an equerry to Queen Mary, if it indeed existed. Coke, although he had not seen the document himself, apparently told de Courcy that he had heard it did, in fact, exist.
11
On such slender allegations have the tales of the China Dossier been built. There is no record of its having been passed to King George V and no reference to its existence in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Nor do official government records contain any mention of the document. The most reliable expert on the subject, Edward VIII’s official biographer Philip Ziegler, has gone as far as to declare what must be accepted as the final word: that it was the figment of several vindictive imaginations.
12
Nor does there appear to be any evidence that Wallis was acting as an intelligence agent on behalf of the U.S. government during this time period. Charles Higham makes much of the fact that, while in Washington, D.C., Wallis apparently was friendly with the wife of the head of naval intelligence and surmises that Wallis was dispatched to the Far East as some form of special courier.
13
But the fact that Wallis associated with men who were either in navy intelligence or in diplomatic circles is scarcely surprising. She was still a navy wife, her friends came from these same ranks, and her husband, after all, had been a fairly important member of various naval circles as well.
Higham also recounts tales that Wallis may have acted as a Soviet spy during her time in China, that she fronted drugs on behalf of illegal Chinese gangs, and that she participated in illicit gambling practices. “It is all a fascinating subject of conjecture,” he writes, “impossible to authenticate at this stage.”
14
Nor has any evidence ever come to light to support any of these allegations.
Wallis had come to China hoping to salvage her marriage. Now it was painfully obvious that nothing remained to be saved. Win’s brutality finally drove her to leave him, this time for good. “There was no scene,” Wallis wrote; “the final unraveling was singularly without emotion; not even the capacity for anger remained.”
15
According to what the Duchess later told a friend, however, there had been no scene for a simple reason: One day, when Win was at work, she quickly packed her things, wrote him a letter saying she was going to divorce him, and left before he could return to confront her again.
16
Given Win’s unpredictable nature and brutish behavior, this indeed seems to have been the sensible choice.
Mary Sadler, a friend from Washington, D.C., happened to be traveling from Hong Kong to Shanghai. With nothing to keep her in the city and no plans for the future, Wallis decided to accompany her. The two women took a small overnight liner, arriving in the port city on November 22.
Fifty thousand foreigners lived in the international settlement in Shanghai, protected by stone walls and a police force culled from various national militias.
17
The Palace Hotel, where Wallis and her friend took rooms, lay just inside these encircling walls; from her windows Wallis could gaze out upon the ancient, decaying remnants of the Imperial Palace. The panoply of sights, smells, and sounds filled her senses: animals wandered loose in the streets, rickshas clattered across the uneven cobblestones, and garbage rotted in forgotten doorways. The city pulsed with refugees: not only Chinese but Russians as well, caught in a permanent, uneasy exile after the civil war in their homeland. Thieves and murderers wandered about, seeking victims; prostitution and drugs flourished, and venturing into the streets beyond dusk was considered extremely dangerous.
But Shanghai was also a cosmopolitan, sophisticated place. Wallis looked up a British diplomat, Harold Robinson, to whom she had been given a letter of introduction while still in Washington, D.C. He recognized her loneliness and quickly swept Wallis away from her troubles, giving her flowers and baskets of exotic fruit, escorting her to cocktail parties, and taking her to horse races at the Shanghai Race Club. One suspects that his efforts were not necessarily humanitarian, and he seems to have been quite taken with Wallis. They spent evenings dancing in the sunken courtyard of the Majestic Hotel amid bowers of exotic flowers, the sounds of chirping birds, and the scent of jasmine in the air, the entire scene illuminated by the soft lights of the hanging Chinese lanterns.
18
But beyond the hotel walls the distant sounds of machine-gun fire could be heard as street gangs strolled past brothels and opium dens.