Bessiewallis

THE HEART HAS ITS REASONS (372 pp.)--The Duchess of Windsor--McKay ($5).

The Duchess of Windsor, to many a most enviable woman, believes that she has an "appalling" place in history. This account of how she got there, according to her loyal publishers, was written by her alone, but ghostly fingers may nevertheless be detected at work with the familiar cheesecloth. The life of Wallis Warfield of Baltimore is well-known--perhaps too well. But this retelling carries the great interest of being her own first official version of how she played finders-keepers, losers-weepers with a king and his kingdom.

The Duchess insists that hers is no Cinderella story; she and her editorial assistants have dusted off an impressive number of highborn Maryland and Virginia kin--Montagues and Warfields so snootily Southern that they called the Union Army "Mr. Lincoln's men." This family tree spreads its shadow over the artless stories told by Bessiewallis* about grandmother's "victoria," her first sausage curls, her posh uncles like S. Davies Warfield, who grandly inserted a notice in the newspapers that because of "the appalling catastrophe now devastating Europe" (it was 1915), he would "forgo the ball that he might otherwise be expected to give for his niece Wallis Warfield."

The Family Tree. Despite this setback the debutante did well (three corsages to wear on Easter Sunday), and she married "strong, assured, sophisticated" Lieut, (j.g.) Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., with whom she lived the life of a Navy wife from Peking to Pensacola. Alas, came the terrible time when Lieut. Spencer, who had begun to hit the bottle with naval thoroughness, locked her in the bathroom. Despite family pleas--"the Montague women do not get divorced"--Wallis felt it was time to set a precedent.

Between marriages she felt forlorn. She wrote an essay on hats for a fashion competition (the industry, she observes with justifiable satisfaction, lost a servant but gained a customer) and once thought of selling tubular steel. Instead, in 1928, she married Ernest Simpson, a sometime member of the Coldstream Guards. The Simpsons had a modest but assured London social position, and at Melton Mowbray (in the hunting country, where the Prince of Wales was to establish his talent for falling off horses) Mrs. Simpson fatally met the Prince.

As the gauzy, chatty narrative tells of the months during which Mrs. Simpson became the great and good friend of the Prince of Wales, the reader's heart will go out to Mr. Simpson. From the moment of Wallis' fateful speech to the Prince at the Simpsons' flat in Bryanston Court--"Sir, would you care to take pot-luck with us?"--Mr. Simpson recedes into vagueness. The Prince returned for more and more of Wallis' beef stew--she used a recipe from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Came the day when she simply could not refuse the Prince's invitation to ski at Kitzbuehl. That evening for the first time she heard her husband's "door bang." Later he went off to sleep at the Guards' Club.

Loneliness of. The fateful pace of the story is best seen in the brisk index: Wales, Prince of, becomes interested in Mrs. Simpson, 204, 205; dependence on the Simpsons, 205-6; does needlepoint, 171; gives dinner party for Mrs. Simpson at Quaglino's, 179; invites Mr. and Mrs. Simpson to State Ball, 207; joins father and mother at launching of Queen Mary, 190; loneliness of, 182-183 . . .

But that loneliness did not last. David--who at first had seemed so "wistful"--cheered up wonderfully in Mrs. Simpson's company. Of course, there were un-American things about him. At a dinner party he reached across a lady who had left the top parts of her snipe on the plate. "Best part," said David as he munched the bite-size snipe brains. He was crazy about jazz, and even the least royalist of readers will feel sympathy for old George V when he told his son, who was playing a composition of his own on the bagpipes, to stop the infernal noise.

Wallis battled bravely with these odd matters and introduced three-decker sandwiches at Balmoral Castle. But by now an Anglo-American comedy of manners had become serious--at least to the British. Mrs. Simpson had become "that woman."

With the old King's death a new era seemed to come to England. Poet John Betjeman evokes the mood in his lines about old men in country houses who heard clocks ticking as "a young man lands hatless from the air." David had flown to London to accept the Crown, but his "hatlessness," as a symbol of his lack of concern for tradition, still worried much of the country. Neither David nor Wallis seemed to understand--and judging from her book they still don't--the changes in the British monarchy since grandfather Edward VII's day. The old aristocracy might have stood for an official mistress or a morganatic marriage, but not the new rulers of Britain, The People--nor Stanley Baldwin, that "self-appointed embodiment of John Bull."

The Question. How the King abdicated rather than face life "without the help and support of the woman I love" is told again in the Duchess' story. It is sad enough. She had been smuggled to France by loyal friends of the throne, pursued by mobs of newspapermen loyal to their newspapers, and listened to the abdication speech in tears on a couch in a villa in Cannes.

And so the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went off together into that tarnished sunset of exiled royalty--the aimless travels, the unimportant posts, the reign not over a people but only over "society." Today the couple lives part of the year in a converted mill just outside Paris--the very picture of something from House and Garden--where the Duchess arranges historic china and the Duke prunes English roses. She may not have succeeded in reforming the monarchy, but every woman will warm to her confident claim to have reformed the monarch. With a husband always at home yet always "busy" (though what an ex-king can find to be busy about baffles the imagination), Bessiewallis should not feel so bitter about having been conned by history out of the arduous duties of a queen.

Despite the story's carefully hidden sordid blotches--only a romantic musical 100 years hence will entirely erase them--and despite the determinedly sentimental tone ("any woman who has been loved as I have been loved"), a touch of dignity, be it of Windsor or of Baltimore, still shines through. But many a reader may linger longest over the remarkably gentle, paternal letters written to Wallis by Ernest Simpson after the King's abdication. They contain a question Author Windsor must sometimes ask herself: "And would your life have ever been the same if you had broken it off?"

* The family always ran together Bessie (for an aunt) and Wallis (for her father). She eventually made it just Wallis, a name she always preferred because "so many cows are called Bessie."

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