Windsor Wallis Warfield - The Last of the Duchess

Caroline Blackwood, who began her writing career as a journalist, is the author of nine books, which include novels, collections of short stories, and a cookbook. She was awarded the David Higham Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Stepdaughter, and her novel Great Granny Webster was recommended for the Booker Prize shortlist in 1977. She died in 1996.

Also by Caroline Blackwood

For All That I Found There

The Stepdaughter

Great Granny Webster

Darling, you shouldnt have gone
to so much trouble

The Fate of Mary Rose

Goodnight Sweet Ladies

Corrigan

On the Perimeter

In the Pink

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2012

Copyright 1995 by Caroline Blackwood
Introduction copyright 2012 by James Fox

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Cleveland Amory: Excerpt from Who Killed Society? by Cleveland Amory. Reprinted by permission of Cleveland Amory.

Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.: Excerpt from I Want to Be a Bee in Your Boudoir by Richard Whiting and George Marion. Copyright 1930 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

David McKay Co.: Excerpts from The Heart Has Its Reasons by the Duchess of Windsor. Copyright 1956 by the Duchess of Windsor. Reprinted by permission of David McKay Co., a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

Enoch Pratt Free Library: Excerpt from The American Mercury, June 1944. Reprinted courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, in accordance with the terms of the will of H. L. Mencken.

Hugo Vickers: Excerpt from Laughter from a Cloud by Laura, Duchess of Marlborough. Reprinted by permission of Hugo Vickers, literary executor to the late Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, 2012.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Blackwood, Caroline.
The Last of the Duchess / Caroline Blackwood.
p. cm.
1. Windsor, Wallis Warfield, Duchess of, 18961986. 2. NobilityGreat BritainBiography. I. Title.
DA581.W5B59 1995
941.084092dc20 94-19641
[B]

eISBN: 978-0-345-80264-4

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For Evgenia, Ivana, Sheridan, and Hugo Vickers

T his examination of the bizarre fate that befell the Duchess of Windsor first interested me as a story about the rich and famous, so many of whom at the end find themselves at the mercy of those in their employ. This account was written in 1980. For obvious reasons, its publication was delayed until the death of the Duchesss necrophiliac lawyer Matre Blum. When I was first sent by the British Sunday Times to interview Matre Blum (who at that point claimed, although this has been disputed, to hold the Duchesss power of attorney and had seized the right to act as her spokesperson), I had no idea that I was going to be given so many contradictory statements as to the Duchesss current condition. The Duchess was old. I took for granted that like that of countless aged people, her physical state of being was unlikely to be perfect. It was only when her lawyer started to tell me blatant, joyful lies about the life of the Duchess, both past and present, that I became interested in trying to discover the reasons why these seemingly pointless lies were being fed to the world press. As her lawyer had cast a total cordon sanitaire of silence around the true situation of her distinguished protege, I entered into arenas of speculation. For me this story became a real study in the fatal effects of myth. A dark fairy tale, it seems a lesson for those who are vulnerable to being overprotected. That is not to say the Duchesss friends and those looking after her were not doing their best to see that she was properly cared for. Maybe only time will elucidate the pure and total truth.

C aroline Blackwood wrote ten books of fiction and nonfiction, one of which, Great Granny Webster, was nominated for the Booker Prize. But the dark fairy tale that obsessed her for the longest timeindeed for fifteen yearsstarred Matre Suzanne Blum, the wily, confrontational, necrophiliac lawyer who presided over the last decade of the almost lifeless Duchess of Windsor, locked away, bedridden behind the shutters of her villa in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, under the Matres jealous and sinister control.

The story touched some nerves in Caroline. She was old enough to have witnessed the tail end of the Abdication Crisis of 1936. The English loathing of Wallis Simpson for stealing King Edward VIII was particularly strong, for largely snobbish reasons, among the upper class into which Caroline was born as daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and Maureen Guinness, the brewing heiress. Maureen was a close friend of the Queen Mother. [The abdication] was something so obscene and shocking that it had to be hidden from the children, Caroline writes here. Only its denouement forty-four years later was properly shocking to Caroline and also compulsively fascinating. Too awful, even for us was one of her frequent phrases. She had a fearful view of real or impending disaster or horrorall irresistibly funny in the telling, including the telling of the dramas of her own life. Her daughter Ivana recalls in her memoir her mother walking the night, catastrophising, rehearsing aloud her worst nightmares. When you see the light at the end of the tunnel, she warned, it could be a train coming towards you. Here was a story that therefore greatly appealed to herthe macabre image of the Duchess as a shriveled, desiccated prune that rumors and paparazzi shots suggestedimprisoned and kept alive through feeding tubes for the vanity of venal Matre Blum who was not only selling her jewels but had taken away her vodka. And there was nothing, apparently, the Duchesss friends could do.

As a writer Caroline was gifted with a charged, ironic, often savagely observant prose. Her writing was close to her style of speechpassionate, brilliantly comic, obsessed, outlandish, and inventive in her speculations. Describing Matre Blum and her attempt at rejuvenating plastic surgery she wrote, Her face did not match her wizened little hands which were those of a crone, and her age was also betrayed by the discoloration of pigment, the brown flowers of death that discolored her arms her slanting, blinking eyes had a snakelike malevolence. Her reporting was less roman-reportagea genre invented by a famous French journalist-philosopher to elevate a shortness on reliable factsthan a more literary Gonzo journalism, a gothic treatment of the events, enhanced with outlandish speculation, which unloosed a very rich flow of comic narrative. She was skeptical and perceptive. Most of her darkest speculations about Matre Blum turned out to be correct.