"Mrs. Simpson"

In Scotland, where optimism is unfashionable, able editors were dourly convinced last week that the Press has not seen the last of the non-gossip features of the Edward & Mrs. Simpson story. Its gossip aspects last week were just bursting into brightest bloom.

In the Glasgow and Edinburgh view, history will soon begin to record that altogether too many subjects of King George VI are altogether too unsatisfied with what little they know about how Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin secured the abdication and departure of King Edward (TIME, Dec. 21). The fact that Edward VIII had apparently quit, and was even being called contemptuously a "quitter" last week, failed to appease the patient resolve of Scotsmen to know all, sooner or later. The adjournment of the House of Commons in London last week was welcomed by Scottish constituents as an opportunity to get their Scottish M. P.'s on the carpets of their homes during the Christmas holidays and make them come clean. About results of this discreet procedure the Scottish Press will speak in its own time, tersely.

The bulk of U. S. newsorgans meanwhile were off in full cry after they knew not what. They expected to find it by sniffing around Mrs. Simpson in Cannes and around the Rothschild Castle in Austria. To many U. S. editors, dispatches from their regular Vienna correspondents were a revelation last week, and soon some of these correspondents will be fired. For many years they have in Vienna performed with the dexterity of long practice the service of inventing daily over coffee and whipped cream what is happening simultaneously in Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Athens, Bucharest, Prague and even Warsaw.

This was not to say that no correspondent had succeeded last week in establishing sound news pipelines into the Rothschild Castle, but it was to say that as yet 95% of stories printed about the Duke of Windsor were obvious, blatant fakes. They unmasked to some hitherto naive editors the whole Vienna school of whipped-cream journalism, and (which will prove much more expensive) they unmasked it to the world public as well. Hereafter money is going to be spent getting much nearer to the facts of life in each royal Balkan sty and snuggery.

The name which chiefly emerged from the Windsor & Simpson Story-of-the-Year with credit was the name of William Randolph Hearst. There have been only two real Simpson scoops and Mr, Hearst personally scored Scoop No. i when he learned in England from King Edward that His Majesty was not just fooling around but was firm in his resolve to marry (TIME, Nov. 2). Scoop No. 2 is under stood to have been secured for Mr. Hearst by Miss Marion Davies in transatlantic conversation with her friend Mrs. Ernest Simpson. This scoop was the information that, while Edward VIII was firmly resolved to marry, it was a morganatic marriage which the King contemplated and not a marriage which would create a Queen. Both Scoop No. i and Scoop No. 2 were played by all Hearst papers in dignified, unequivocal language and both proved absolutely right.

Scoop No. 3 came last week from news-writing Newbold Noyes, a second cousin by marriage of Mrs. Simpson, a son of sedate President Frank Brett Noyes of the Associated Press, and a part-owner and associate editor of the Washington Star. About a month ago he cabled Cousin Wallis, asking if he could be of service to King Edward and herself. She cabled Cousin Newbold to come on over. He dined in Mrs. Simpson's London house on the night of his arrival with her chaperon Aunt Bessie. Cousin Wallis was spending the weekend in the country with King Edward. After dinner, conscientious Aunt Bessie left Mr. Noyes in London and drove out to stay Monday night under the same roof as the King & Mrs. Simpson.

On Tuesday, Cousin Newbold was in vited to dinner at Fort Belvedere by the King. They dined about 8 o'clock in the evening and that afternoon the Bishop of Bradford had just uttered the fatal words about His Majesty's lack of church-going which brought Mrs. Simpson into British newspapers as the King's intended wife and occasioned His Majesty's abdication ten days later. Cousin Newbold found Cousin Wallis "still as gay, still as witty, but now she smiles more often than she laughs . . . diamonds and rubies . . . two orchids . . . bruised and sick at heart . . . ripened and matured. . . . She is 39 years old, other reports to the contrary. . . . She hates cats and flying and sham and winter sports (although she has tried them in company with the ex-King).

The King as he then still was, entered in the kilt, refused the old-fashioneds prepared by Mrs. Simpson and addressed her Aunt Bessie as "Aunt Bessie," Mrs. Simpson addressed the King as "Sir," according to Cousin Newbold who presently gave King Edward his "professional opinion" that 70% of all U. S. newspaper stories about Mrs. Simpson had been favorable.

Cried the red-liveried butler: "His Majesty's dinner is served!"

The King directly and gravely told Cousin Newbold of the "impossibility of contracting a morganatic marriage in England, of his resolve at any cost to marry Mrs. Simpson, and by implication of the impossibility that she should be Queen. The only remaining course was abdication and His Majesty's intention was made perfectly clear.

In very much lighter vein--and this cousin Newbold reserved for the fourth daily installment of his account, tucking it away unobtrusively--King Edward later evinced what seemed to be the part-owner of the Star a sense of humor "American" rather than "English." His Majesty was graciously pleased to utter to Mrs. Simpson's second cousin by marriage these words, related by Cousin Newbold as a merry royal jest:

"I understand that in your country there are certain marriages where the bridegroom has to be--shall we say, cajoled. You didn't by any chance bring a shotgun with you, did you?"

A shotgun was no part of cousin Newbold's equipment and in the most positive manner he affirmed over each dispatch which he wrote and syndicated and on landing in the U.S. last week that "both the King and Mrs. Simpson have authorized this series." It was Scoop No. 3.

In the field such of pure speculation, frankly offered as much Hayelock Ellis, Britain's foremost learned commentator on sex, was the following limited press interview: "I have always had the opinion, due to Edwards's quite boyish appearance, that he is in some way different from most other men, but not in any way known to me. But to me it is obvious. A man slightly different from most men--and I think that is a reasonable assumption in his case--has difficulty in finding a woman to his taste." Mr. Ellis said he spoke to Edward VIII "not necessarily in a pathological sense or anything like that"--appeared to consider him simply as The Boy Who Didn't Grow Up and Mrs. Simpson as the Mother.

In Austria, press cameramen assigned to the Boy addressed him as such in the following note, according to Associated Press: "Eddie, we want to be with our wives and children by Christmas, but we cannot leave until you come out of your hole." This ruse brought the Boy out of his hole to pose briefly. From London, the horrified Government took telephonic steps to persuade the Boy not to be so Christmas-minded as to agree to issue daily bulletins about himself, an idea the Boy had broached, according to correspondents, so that they could all lgo to their wives & children.

The attitude of His Majesty's Government, and of a few correspondents who said they would have to stay anyhow, apparently condemned the Duke of Windsor to remain through the holidays clam mouthed and encircled by a whole corps of journalistic clamdiggers.

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