New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines
a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis,
Duchess of Windsor–her one year in China.
Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis
Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy
aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave
up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who
could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in
China.
In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as
her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state
of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges,
Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in
terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime.
But that “Lotus Year” would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the
British Establishment.
The British government’s supposed “China Dossier” of
Wallis’s rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning
concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents,
and unfit to marry a king. Instead, French, an award-winning China historian,
reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have
acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover
diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.
Was
Wallis Simpson Really a Sex-Crazed Spy?
As Paul
French argues in a new biography, the future Duchess of Windsor’s year in China
was less lurid — and more interesting — than her critics knew.
Thessaly La
Force
By Thessaly
La Force
Thessaly La
Force is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times
Styles section.
HER LOTUS
YEAR: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson, by Paul
French
Much has
been written about Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whose love King
Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936. Her eccentric and expensive tastes
often demanded attention — who can forget her army of pug pillows or the
gold-plated bathtub at their French villa? — but she was also derided as quite
ordinary. Cecil Beaton once described her hands as “utilitarian-looking.”
The duchess
died in 1986, and one could be forgiven for thinking that enough time has
passed — and enough royal drama ensued — that our fascination might have waned.
But “Her Lotus Year,” by Paul French, refocuses attention on the year she spent
living in China. She was 28 years old and married to her first husband, the
American Navy officer Win Spencer.
Later, after
she began her affair with the Prince of Wales, this period would become an
endless source of lurid speculation. It was widely believed that British
intelligence had compiled a “China Dossier” on Simpson, which alleged that she
had had an abortion, posed for pornographic photographs, seduced husbands,
conducted an affair with an Italian fascist, smoked opium, gambled and worked
for Chinese gangsters.
In her 1956
memoir, Simpson wrote that “when I was being good I generally had a bad time
and when I was being bad, the opposite was true” — but that still would have
been one busy year.
One
particularly outré rumor — that Simpson learned a trick from sex workers called
the “Shanghai grip” — was happily repeated by enough lords and ladies that it
has appeared in at least two biographies.
None of this
is true, maintains French. He not only dismisses the existence of a China
Dossier, but credits the rumor to a British intelligence officer named Harry
Steptoe, who aimed to scuttle the relationship between Simpson and Edward VIII
at a time when the king’s love for an American divorcée was seen as an
existential threat to the monarchy. French’s book — beautifully told through
meticulous historical research and examination of contemporary literature and
film — gives the reader a vivid picture of what China must have been like for
an American expat in the 1920s, and in fact tells a more interesting story.
In September
1924, Simpson traveled to Hong Kong to reunite with Spencer, an abusive
alcoholic she had already threatened to divorce. Wallis had been raised as
Southern gentility, but her father had died when she was an infant, leaving her
and her mother impoverished. In her family’s eyes, divorce was disgraceful.
Spencer
promised his wife he had reformed, but within weeks of her arrival, he was back
on the sauce. Simpson eventually left him, traveling first to Shanghai (French
suggests, convincingly, that Simpson may have served as a courier for American
intelligence) and then on to Beijing, where she became reacquainted with an
American friend, Kitty Rogers. Kitty and her wealthy husband, Herman, took
Simpson into their home. Their sybaritic lifestyle appealed to Simpson; she
would later refer to this time as her “Lotus Year,” a reference to both the
“Odyssey” and a poem by Tennyson.
French, who
lives in China and has written extensively on the country, understands how to
describe the immense political and cultural change of the 1920s. He captures
the romance of Beijing and the tedium of colonial social life, and the contours
of Wallis’s quotidian days, in which she would “rise early to find her maid had
laid out slippers and a kimono along with a porcelain cup of flower tea.” In
the “brisk and invigorating chill of Peking winter mornings, Wallis, Kitty and
Herman would ride their ponies along the top of the city wall nearby.”
He also
clearly points to the Sinophobia and racism underpinning the ugly rumors, a
colonial and exoticized idea of China as a place so morally bankrupt that a
woman could be corrupted simply by breathing its air.
As Caroline
Blackwood noted in her biography of Simpson, much of the interminable scrutiny
arose because there was no “obvious clue as to why her husband adored her with
such a passion.” What powers could a woman possess to make a man renounce his
hereditary claim to the world’s largest empire? “No one has accused me of being
an intellectual,” wrote Simpson herself.
French has
an answer. It was in China that Simpson found her footing and her freedom —
supporting herself financially for the first time with her skills at poker and
honing her keen eye for Chinese curios and antiques. French suggests that
Simpson became more worldly and more insouciant among this crowd of Chinese and
expatriates, and her seasoned independence may be one of the reasons someone
like Edward VIII, too comfortable among London society and burdened by the
tedium of royal duties, may have had his head turned by her knowing mien and
independent spirit. But do we ever really understand the grand and astonishing
sacrifices people make for love?
HER LOTUS
YEAR: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson | By Paul
French | St. Martin’s | 310 pp. | $27
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