Read The Duchess Of Windsor Online
Authors: Greg King
The Duchess Of Windsor (76 page)
There had apparently been some talk within the Windsor household of firing Utter from his post. Wallis herself told Janine Metz that the Duke had considered letting Utter go because he knew that his behavior upset her.
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Even Linda Mortimer, who liked Utter and recalls him as “absolutely charming,” admits that “the Duchess used to say some rather spikey things about John.”
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Even Linda Mortimer, who liked Utter and recalls him as “absolutely charming,” admits that “the Duchess used to say some rather spikey things about John.”
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Johanna Schutz, on the other hand, apparently behaved imperiously before Wallis. Shortly after the Duke’s death, Wallis expressed her displeasure to the Countess of Romanones, saying that she had every intention of dismissing her secretary.
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But other matters intervened, and Wallis found that she was not, in the words of Janine Metz, “mistress in her own house.”
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But other matters intervened, and Wallis found that she was not, in the words of Janine Metz, “mistress in her own house.”
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It is impossible to know precisely what role Schutz played in the deteriorating relations between Wallis and several members of her staff or if she had a hand in the controversial firing of Sydney Johnson. Johnson, the Bahamian native who had served the Windsors with loyalty and devotion since the age of fourteen, had recently lost his wife, and it fell to him to look after their three children. At the end of his regular shift in the Windsor Villa, he returned to his home to care for his children. One day, he apparently asked if he might leave early, as he had been unable to find anyone to watch them that afternoon. According to Johnson, Wallis declared that if he left early, he should not come back again.
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Johnson had no choice: he left, and his thirty-two years of employment came to an abrupt end.
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Johnson had no choice: he left, and his thirty-two years of employment came to an abrupt end.
The story of Johnson’s termination has been repeated often, but several circumstances which might have led to this disagreeable outcome have been overlooked. The Duchess had never approved of Johnson’s marriage to a white woman, and he was rather hurt that his wife had failed to find a place at his side in the Windsor household. “I cannot tell you how devoted and loyal Sydney was,” says Janine Metz, “but he was very unhappy with the Duchess’s attitudes about his marriage. ” Thereafter, Johnson occasionally spoke bitterly of the Duchess, and it is possible that this was used against him.
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Wallis, increasingly forgetful of her actions and reliant on others for correct information, seems to have acted in haste, with unfortunate results. Erractic behavior of this sort was to gradually overtake the Duchess as the years passed.
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Wallis, increasingly forgetful of her actions and reliant on others for correct information, seems to have acted in haste, with unfortunate results. Erractic behavior of this sort was to gradually overtake the Duchess as the years passed.
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In April 1974, Wallis made her first visit to the United States since the Duke’s death. She traveled aboard the Italian ocean liner
Rafaello
with Johanna Schutz, arriving in New York City on April 9 to a flood of curious reporters. “I don’t go out as much and I’m much lonelier,” she told them. She said that she had no plans to return to England; the Royal Family “made a fuss at the time of the abdication, but I don’t think they would make a fuss now. I get on well with the Royal Family.”
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She returned to the Waldorf Towers; but in her widowhood she had exchanged the lavish suite she and the Duke had once occupied for a much smaller set of rooms. Wallis was reunited with friends, went out to dinner in the city, and took in several plays on Broadway, her arrivals and departures always greeted with much interest and enthusiasm.
Rafaello
with Johanna Schutz, arriving in New York City on April 9 to a flood of curious reporters. “I don’t go out as much and I’m much lonelier,” she told them. She said that she had no plans to return to England; the Royal Family “made a fuss at the time of the abdication, but I don’t think they would make a fuss now. I get on well with the Royal Family.”
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She returned to the Waldorf Towers; but in her widowhood she had exchanged the lavish suite she and the Duke had once occupied for a much smaller set of rooms. Wallis was reunited with friends, went out to dinner in the city, and took in several plays on Broadway, her arrivals and departures always greeted with much interest and enthusiasm.
“When the Duchess was in New York,” recalls Janine Metz, “I rang to speak with her, but Schutz had left orders at the Waldorf to transfer no calls at all to the suite. I asked the operator to put me through, but she said, ‘I’m sorry Mrs. Metz, it breaks my heart, but if I connect you with the apartment and Miss Schutz hears of it, I run the risk of losing my job.’” Eventually, Madame Metz managed to visit the Duchess, but she found Schutz an unwelcome presence. “She was not nice to the Duchess,” she says. “She spoke to the Duchess in a way that would have blown your ears off! Schutz would tell the Duchess, ‘You sit on this little stool and don’t move,’ and the Duchess would comply, completely lost.”
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Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, happened to be staying at the Waldorf Towers when the Duchess arrived. This was an unforeseen embarrassment; Margaret, like her sister the Queen, had been raised by her mother to despise the woman they all held responsible for George VI’s premature death. The press, on learning of the two royal guests, wondered if they would meet, speculation which may have forced the issue, for Margaret and Snowdon duly called upon Wallis in her suite, where they spent fifteen minutes asking after her health and her life. Wallis, according to what Margaret would later say, seemed depressed and lonely. Back in her own suite, however, she decided to sign a photograph of herself and dispatch it to her lonely aunt. “Just to cheer her up,” she declared later.
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Such “hollow gestures,” in the words of one of the Duchess’s American friends, brought little comfort.
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It is true that Wallis had become increasingly depressed, a condition no doubt accelerated not only by her loneliness for the Duke but by her deteriorating health. Her arteriosclerosis made her forgetful, which frustrated the once-vibrant Duchess, and this frustration, along with the sudden changes in mood which sometimes accompanied the forgetting, made her seem volatile on occasion. Her greatest worry, however, was her physical health, which, in the years immediately following David’s death, steadily declined.
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It is true that Wallis had become increasingly depressed, a condition no doubt accelerated not only by her loneliness for the Duke but by her deteriorating health. Her arteriosclerosis made her forgetful, which frustrated the once-vibrant Duchess, and this frustration, along with the sudden changes in mood which sometimes accompanied the forgetting, made her seem volatile on occasion. Her greatest worry, however, was her physical health, which, in the years immediately following David’s death, steadily declined.
At the end of 1972, while walking across the drawing room floor in the villa in Paris, Wallis accidentally caught the heel of her shoe at the edge of the carpet and took a nasty spill, breaking her hip. Dr. Thin placed her in the American Hospital in Paris so that she could be properly cared for. There the nurses reportedly found her “very senile.” One nurse recalled: “She was very confused. She would ask the same question forty times and still not seem to understand the answer. We attached a button to her nightdress to turn off the light but she just couldn’t find it, as hard as she tried. They had to put sideboards on her bed because she kept trying to climb out at night. I remember her saying once that if it wasn’t for her, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been Queen.”
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Her recovery was slow, and just on the point of being mobile, she suffered a setback which left little doubt that her state of mind was rapidly failing. One day, she asked the nurse attending her, “Can you do the Charleston?”
“No, Ma’am,” the nurse replied. “I never learned.”
“You should,” Wallis answered. “It’s fun and it’s easy. Watch!” She then climbed out of her bed, and before the nurse could stop her, tried to demonstrate the dance; in the process, she fell and rebroke her hip, lengthening her stay in the hospital.
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She had scarcely been out of the hospital for more than a few months when, in August 1973, she suffered another setback. Lady Grace Dudley had invited her friend to join her on holiday at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz. One evening, as Wallis prepared to take her bath, she tripped on the raised edge of the sunken bathtub and fell hard against it, cracking several ribs. Once again, she was back in the hospital for a month while doctors made certain she was properly healed.
These physical ailments, coupled with her loneliness and illness, only worsened Wallis’s emotional state. She rarely ate and even then had to force her food down. She had never been much of a drinker; but Wallis had always been able to handle her alcohol well. Now, however, her friends worried that she was perhaps drinking a bit too much, a concern refuted by her physician, Jean Thin. Because she was more forgetful, however, she often drank on an empty stomach, and this, coupled with her illness and interaction with medications (the Duchess was given regular doses of Valium), undoubtedly heightened the effect on her. Thin, worried greatly about these difficulties and how the alcohol was affecting Wallis’s high blood pressure, finally advised that all alcohol be removed from the villa.
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Her friend Diana Vreeland was startled, during a visit she made to the Duchess in Paris, to find her once-vibrant friend confused and unsteady. She recalled: “The Duchess looked too beautiful, standing in the garden, dressed in a turquoise djellaba embroidered in black pearls and white pearls—marvelous—and wearing all her sapphires. She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend—very rare, you know.... So we were talking after dinner, the two of us. And then suddenly she took hold of my wrist, gazed off into the distance, and said, ‘Diana, I keep telling him he must not abdicate.
He must not abdicate.
No, no, no! No, no, no, I say!’ Then, suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked back at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.”
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He must not abdicate.
No, no, no! No, no, no, I say!’ Then, suddenly, after this little mental journey back more than thirty-five years, her mind snapped back to the present; she looked back at me, and we went on talking as we had been before.”
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John Utter, whom Wallis had never liked, was fired in the fall of 1975. Wallis discovered that he had apparently worked out some sort of private arrangement with Lord Mountbatten on behalf of the British Royal Family and had secretly been handing over the Duke’s papers and other objects for return to England.
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Utter received no pension for his years of service, a circumstance which undoubtedly contributed to the bitter attitude he adopted toward his time with the Duke and Duchess and tainted the inflammatory interviews he often gave before his death in 1980.
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Utter received no pension for his years of service, a circumstance which undoubtedly contributed to the bitter attitude he adopted toward his time with the Duke and Duchess and tainted the inflammatory interviews he often gave before his death in 1980.
Throughout the fall of 1975, Wallis was increasingly unwell; her old stomach ulcers, which had long bothered her, began bleeding, and Dr. Thin ordered her into the American Hospital once again. During the course of this hospital stay, Thin also discovered that Wallis was suffering from Crohn’s disease, a debilitating illness which caused intense intestinal discomfort and frequent vomiting.
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“From then on,” recalled her friend Lady Mosley, “[she] was never quite well again. At times she seemed to be on the point of recovery, but it always eluded her, and her many friends could do little to help.”
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“From then on,” recalled her friend Lady Mosley, “[she] was never quite well again. At times she seemed to be on the point of recovery, but it always eluded her, and her many friends could do little to help.”
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Wallis was indeed unwell when she was released. Her senility increased dramatically; although there were often periods when she was perfectly well, her outbursts of temper and lapses of memory became more frequent. Physically, Crohn’s disease left her unable to leave her bed for long periods of time; when she did venture out, inevitably her weakness caused her to stumble and fall. She refused to eat and consequently became dangerously thin. In February 1976 she was back in the American Hospital, suffering from a near-total physical collapse.
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For a time after her release from the hospital that spring, Wallis seemed to improve. She occasionally dined out in Paris with a friend and gave a few dinner parties at the villa. In May two newspaper photographers with telephoto lenses managed to climb the walls of the villa and photograph Wallis as she was carried onto the terrace wearing a dark print dress, a white shawl, and a string of pearls. Unaware of their presence, she sat in the sunshine, reading. The next day, the photographs appeared, and Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s French lawyer, sued for invasion of privacy, litigation which eventually forced the defendants to pay Wallis damages of 80,000 francs.
In 1976, former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had taken a position as an editor of the American publishing house Viking, wrote to Wallis asking if she would be willing to collaborate on a second volume of her memoirs. She even offered to fly to Paris to meet Wallis and discuss the idea. Wallis was still capable of determining her own future, and Onassis received a reply stating that the Duchess had no desire to discuss her life with any publisher.
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That fall, Wallis’s condition deteriorated once again. In October 1976, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother visited Paris. There had been some discussion that she might call on her sister-in-law; but the visit, if ever planned, failed to take place. It has been said that Dr. Thin, worried about his patient‘s condition, had Johanna Schutz ring the British embassy and cancel the meeting; instead, the Queen Mother sent a bouquet of white and red roses, along with a card which read: “In Friendship. Elizabeth.”
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Thin, however, contradicts this story, saying that he was never consulted over the Duchess’s condition, nor did he or Schutz advise that such a visit be canceled.
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Thin, however, contradicts this story, saying that he was never consulted over the Duchess’s condition, nor did he or Schutz advise that such a visit be canceled.
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As Wallis continued her deterioration, Johanna Schutz prevented the Duchess’s friends from calling on her. She was now in almost total control of Wallis’s day-to-day life. “Everyone thought Johanna Schutz very difficult,” says Linda Mortimer. “She got rather too big for her breeches, and the Duchess always used to say that she didn’t like her at all.” Mortimer’s repeated calls to the Windsor Villa were not put through to the Duchess: Schutz told her that the Duchess was unwell; that she was out; that she could not speak at the moment. When she finally did manage to reach the Duchess, Wallis asked, “Linda, why don’t you come to see me? I heard you were in Paris. Have you forgotten me also?”
“No, Duchess,” Mortimer replied, “I haven’t forgotten you, but it is impossible to get through to you.”
“Well,” Wallis said in a rather hushed, almost conspiratorial tone of voice, “if you happen to ring between one and two on Tuesdays, you might get put through to me.”
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One day, the Countess of Romanones received a telephone call from the Duchess asking her to come visit her in Paris. She made the arrangements to fly to France and rang the Windsor villa to ask if a car would, as was customary, meet her at the airport. The Countess was told, however, that she should not come, as the Duchess was unwell and unable to receive visitors. For the next year, although she tried to reach Wallis by telephone numerous times, the Countess could never get her calls put through.
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