Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (born Bessie Wallis Warfield; 19 June 1896 – 24 April 1986)

Biography

Bessie Wallis Warfield was born on 19 June 1896 in Blue Ridge Summit, a resort town on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, died of tuberculosis when she was five months old, and her widowed mother, Alice Montague, became dependent on the charity of a wealthy brother-in-law, Solomon Davies Warfield, to raise her in genteel, precarious comfort in Baltimore.

Wallis attended the Oldfields School, a prominent Maryland academy for girls, and married soon after graduating.

Her first husband, whom she wed in 1916, was Earl Winfield "Win" Spencer Jr., a U.S. Navy aviator. The marriage was marked by his heavy drinking and periods of separation, including roughly a year Wallis spent living in China on her own. The couple divorced in 1927.

In 1928, Wallis married Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an English-American shipping executive, and became a fixture of London society as its hostess.

On 10 January 1931, at a country house party at Burrough Court, Wallis was introduced to Edward, Prince of Wales, through his then-mistress, Lady Furness. Edward later recalled Mrs. Simpson had a cold that night and was not, in his words, at her best. 

The impression didn't last: over the following years , Wallis became the prince's closest and most consuming relationship, although she was still married to Simpson.

George V died on 20 January 1936, and Edward ascended the throne as Edward VIII. His determination to marry a twice-divorced American commoner, unacceptable to the Church of England and much of the political establishment, produced the abdication crisis. Wallis obtained a decree nisi against Simpson that same year.

On 11 December 1936, Edward abdicated, telling the country in a radio broadcast that he found it impossible to carry the burden of the throne without the help and support of "the woman I love." His brother and successor, George VI, created him Duke of Windsor.

Wallis and Edward married on 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé in France; no member of the British royal family attended. 

Wallis wore a Mainbocher wedding ensemble in a shade the designer created specifically for her and named "Wallis Blue," reportedly to match her eyes. It was a floor-length silk crepe gown with a fitted bolero jacket, paired with jewels from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. 

The dress cost roughly $250 at the time and inspired countless imitations; Wallis donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950, though a flaw in the original dye has since faded its famous blue to a pale khaki.

Shortly before the wedding, at the same château, the photographer Cecil Beaton captured Wallis in another dress that would become just as famous: Elsa Schiaparelli's "Lobster Dress," a plain white organza evening gown with a large lobster hand-painted across the skirt by Salvador Dalí, echoing his own earlier sculpture Lobster Telephone. Wallis bought the piece for her honeymoon.

Marriage brought Wallis the courtesy title Duchess of Windsor — but not, by explicit decision of the royal family, the style "Her Royal Highness," a slight the couple never stopped resenting.

In October 1937, the Windsors made a widely condemned twelve-day tour of Nazi Germany, funded in part by the German government, meeting Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and, at his Berghof retreat, Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler addressed Wallis as "Royal Highness," the title her own country had denied her, and reportedly remarked afterward that she "would have made a good Queen." The visit fed lasting, well-documented suspicions about the couple's sympathies that followed them for the rest of their lives.

The Windsors settled into what has often been called a life of comfortable exile, dividing their time between homes in France and elsewhere while the British establishment kept a careful, permanent distance. 

Their Paris residence in the Bois de Boulogne was decorated by Stéphane Boudin of the Paris design house Jansen — the same decorator who would go on, decades later, to help restore the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy.

Wallis remained a fixture of international best-dressed lists for decades, closely associated with Mainbocher, her favorite designer, and with jewelers including Cartier, whose charm bracelet strung with cross-shaped pendants became one of her signature pieces.

The Duke of Windsor died on 28 May 1972, ending a marriage of thirty-five years. 

Wallis, seventy-six, remained alone at their Bois de Boulogne home as her staff gradually dwindled and her health began a long, difficult decline: a broken hip in late 1972, rebroken soon after when she tried to demonstrate a dance step from her hospital bed; broken ribs in a fall the following year; a diagnosis of Crohn's disease in 1975; a near-total physical collapse in 1976; surgery for an internal blockage in 1979. She was last seen in public on 14 September 1979, giving reporters a brief wave as she left the hospital.

Her affairs in these final years were managed by her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, whose role remains genuinely controversial. As Wallis's health and memory failed, biographers have written, Blum consolidated near-total control over her affairs, limiting old friends' access to her and, by some accounts, selling off valuable possessions from the estate; a substantial portion of Wallis's eventual fortune went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, an organization she had shown no particular interest in during her lifetime.

Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, died at her Paris home on 24 April 1986, at eighty-nine. 

She was buried five days later in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, beside the Duke of Windsor — laid to rest, at last, on the grounds of the very institution that had spent fifty years holding her at arm's length.