The Duchess Of Windsor Read Free Page B

Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, another woman who could never fit in.” 2
    As they had done with Wallis Windsor, the Royal Family closed ranks against Diana. Her isolation, her troubled private life, her quest for a meaningful life of her own, had led her to this elegant stone palace. Over the last few weeks, media around the world had reported her relationship with Dodi Fayed, a sometime film producer and rather genial man who both clearly adored her and also undoubtedly relished the idea of a liaison with her. Although the relationship appears to have been little more than a summer romance, there was ample speculation that Diana might find refuge in these regal rooms. The irony that the world’s most famous divorcée might discover peace in the miniature palace created by the subject of the twentieth century’s most famous romance was not lost on the press. That same week, in fact, author Hugo Vickers, in the British magazine Hello! had written of the possible benefits Diana might enjoy were she to abandon life in England for the sheltering walls of the Windsor villa. 3
    Just before five, Diana and Dodi left the villa. Diana had looked around carefully, examining the rooms, asking questions about the kitchen and bathrooms. According to one close friend, Diana was considering the idea of dividing her time between London and Paris and the Windsor villa had been proposed as a suitable residence. It seems likely that this—and not a future relationship with Dodi Fayed—was responsible for her interest. 4 The couple left 4, route du Champ d’Entrainement. Their car carried them to Dodi Fayed’s apartment and then to his father’s Ritz Hotel, where they shared a late supper. Just after midnight, they left the Ritz in a new car, a sleek black Mercedes, chased by a contingent of paparazzi and driven by a man with over three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. Twelve hours after wandering through the hushed, tomblike villa in the Bois de Boulogne, Diana, Princess of Wales, would be dead.

“Mortality for others, immortality for oneself.”
    —Wallis, Commonplace Book
     

16
     
    The Divorce
     
    O N OCTOBER 1, THE KING’S MOTHER , Queen Mary, vacated her apartments at Buckingham Palace and moved down the Mall to Marlborough House. Four days later, Edward VIII formally took up residence at Buckingham Palace. He refused, however, to occupy the private apartments on the first floor where the sovereign normally lived; instead, he selected the ground-floor Belgian Suite, a series of rooms overlooking the terrace and gardens beyond. He managed to engage, after much negotiation by the British ambassador, Sir George Clerk, the principal chef from Maxim’s in Paris, M. Legros. David’s only other additions to the palace were a squash court and a modern innovation much more in character: television. 1
    When Wallis returned to London, she supervised the moving of her furniture and possessions into a four-story house she had let at 16 Cumberland Terrace, on Outer Circle Drive in Regent’s Park. The house formed a portion of what has been called “the grandest and most spectacular building in Regent’s Park.” 2 A long white building dominated by a massive central portico whose Ionic columns supported a pediment filled with Wedgewood-style motifs and crowned with classical statuary, Cumberland Terrace had been designed in the early nineteenth century by architect John Nash. Ironically, the property was owned by the Crown, and Wallis sublet it. When crowds of curious people would stop and stare at its black windows, policemen would say, “This is Crown property, move along, move along ... ordinary people don’t live here, y’know.” 3
    Public interest in Wallis was fanned by the incessant attention given her every move in the American press. Although her name did not appear in British papers and American publications were censored in England to remove all references to her existence, inevitably word of mouth and