The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak

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СКАЧАТЬ with seed pearls, it was made by ‘a local Negro seamstress called Ellen’. Wallis’s mother permitted her for the first time a brush of rouge on her cheeks, even though rouge ‘was considered a little fast’. Wallis’s love of couture would become legendary; as the Duchess of Windsor, she became an icon of style and an arbiter of meticulous taste. She regularly featured in the best dressed lists of the world. Her sharp eye for fashionable detail burgeoned early. According to Aunt Bessie, Wallis created a ‘foot-stamping scene’ at one of the first parties she ever attended as a little girl, when she wanted to substitute a blue sash her mother wanted her to wear, with a red one. ‘I remember exactly what you said,’ Aunt Bessie later told Wallis. ‘You told your mother you wanted a red sash so the boys would notice you.’ Wallis told a fashion journalist in 1966: ‘Whatever look I evolved came from working with a little dressmaker around the corner years and years ago, who used to make all my clothes. I began with my own personal ideas about style and I’ve never felt correct in anything but the severe look I developed then.’

      As the Duchess of Windsor, she created an eternal signature style, which became her personal armour. Her dedication to appearance defined her as a Southern woman, hailing from an era when a woman dressed to please her man. ‘She was chic but never casual,’ said the French aristocrat and designer Jacqueline de Ribes, who similarly topped the best dressed lists. ‘Other American society women, like Babe Paley, could be chic in blue jeans. The duchess was a different generation.’ Elsa Maxwell observed: ‘The Duchess has impeccable taste and she spends more money on her wardrobe than any woman I’ve ever known. Her clothes are beautiful and chic, but though she invests them with elegance, she wears them with such rigidity, such neatness, that she destroys the impression of ease and casualness. She is too meticulous.’ Diana Vreeland, later of Harper’s Bazaar and editor of Vogue, described Wallis’s style as ‘soignée, not degageé’ – polished but not relaxed.

      Wallis learned to distil every outfit to its essence, later asking Parisian couturiers, including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior’s Marc Bohan, to dispense with pockets. Yet in her choice of nightwear she was the essence of soft, traditionally feminine sensuality. Diana Vreeland, who had an exclusive lingerie boutique off Berkeley Square in London in the mid-1930s, recalled that when Wallis shopped, ‘she knew exactly what she wanted’. One day, in autumn 1936, just before the king’s abdication, Wallis ordered three exquisite nightgowns to be made in three weeks. ‘First, there was one in white satin copied from Vionnet, all on the bias, that you just pulled down over your head,’ said Vreeland. ‘Then there was one I’d bought the original of in Paris from a marvellous Russian woman. The whole neck of this nightgown was made of petals, which was too extraordinary, because they were put in on the bias, and when you moved they rippled. Then the third nightgown was a wonderful pale blue crêpe de Chine.’

      Years after the abdication, Elsa Maxwell asked Wallis why she devoted so much time and attention to her clothes. Was it not a frivolous pursuit when she had so many other responsibilities and her extravagance merely invited criticism? Wallis replied candidly: ‘My husband gave up everything for me. I’m not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.’

‘Wallis was a much more artistic creature than people thought,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘She liked beautiful things and had a keen eye.’ Haslam, who worked on American Vogue in the 1960s, was introduced to Wallis in New York by the magazine’s social editor, Margaret Case. ‘We were seated at a booth at the back of the Colony restaurant in New York, on the best banquette, and in walked the duchess,’ he recalled. ‘Every single head turned to look at her and cutlery literally dropped. She was wearing an impossibly wide pink angora Chanel tweed with a black grosgrain bow at her nape. At the end of a wonderful lunch, she took a discreet peek at her watch, which was tied to her bag on a delicate chain. It was Fulco Verdura* who told her that it was common for women to wear a watch.’

      Having the sartorial edge hugely increased Wallis’s confidence. Of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales at Melton Mowbray, she said her clothes would give her ‘the added assurance that came from the knowledge that in the dress was a little white satin label bearing the word Molyneux’.

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      It was her sister-in-law, Maud, who suggested that Wallis should be presented at court on 10 June 1931. Ernest Simpson’s rank as a captain with the Coldstream Guards gave him the requisite social status, but Wallis was reluctant to go. Once again, as for her debutante ball in her youth, she did not have the funds to buy the splendid clothes the occasion demanded. However, Wallis’s friends persuaded her that she would be foolish to turn down the generous offer of her girlfriend, Mildred Andersen, to present her. ‘Determined to get through the ceremony in the most economical manner,’ she wore the dress that Connie Thaw herself had worn to be presented, while Thelma Furness lent her the train, feathers and fan. She treated herself to a large aquamarine cross and white kid three-quarter-length gloves, writing to her Aunt Bessie that her aquamarine jewellery looked ‘really lovely on the white dress’.

      Of the magnificent pageantry of the event, what impressed Wallis ‘to the point of awe’ was the grandeur that invested King George V and Queen Mary, sitting side by side in full regalia on identical gilt thrones on their red dais. Standing behind the two thrones were the Prince of Wales and his great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Ernest Simpson, in his uniform of the Coldstream Guards, looked on proudly as Wallis and Mildred performed deep curtsies to the sovereign, then to the queen. The Prince of Wales later recalled of Wallis: ‘When her turn came to curtsey, first to my father and then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.’ After the ceremony, Wallis was standing with Ernest in the adjoining state apartment, in the front row, watching as the king and queen walked slowly by, followed by other members of the royal family. As the Prince of Wales passed her, Wallis overheard him say to his uncle: ‘Uncle Arthur, something ought to be done about the lights. They make all the women look ghastly.’

      That evening, at a party hosted by Thelma Furness, Wallis met the Prince of Wales again. Over a glass of champagne, he complimented Wallis on her gown. ‘“But, Sir,” she responded with a straight face, “I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly.”’ The prince ‘was startled’, Wallis noted with some satisfaction. ‘Then he smiled. “I had no idea my voice carried so far”.’

      The prince was captivated. No British woman would have dreamed of speaking to him in such a direct and provocative way. ‘In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive,’ he wrote of that encounter. ‘From the first I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.’

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      Prince Edward was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his parents, the Duke and Duchess of York. An extraordinary prophecy was made about the great-grandson and godson of Queen Victoria, the queen then aged seventy-five and in the fifty-seventh year of her reign. The socialist pioneer Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to shatter the polite rejoicing about the royal birth. Instead, he hollered: ‘This boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation … in due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’ As a predictor of Edward’s royal destiny, the Scot proved uncannily prescient.

      Baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of holy water from the River Jordan, in the presence of Queen Victoria, ‘David’, as his family always called him, would experience a strict, unhappy and largely loveless childhood. His mother showed little maternal warmth to her six children. While her husband, who in 1910 became СКАЧАТЬ