For many of her final years, the Duchess of Windsor – the glamorous divorcee for whom a king abandoned his throne – lived a pathetic existence with few, if any, moments of pleasure or happiness.
Bedridden, her spinal cord was said to have been damaged by excessive alcohol and her muscles were slowly becoming paralysed.
A photograph taken at her 14-bedroomed mansion outside Paris by her loyal night nurse Elvire Gozin showed the Duchess’s tiny head just visible over the sheets, a feeding tube attached to her nose. Her grey hair was drawn back, her eyes and mouth were slightly open; her arms were crossed and appeared swollen.
The nurse gave the photo to a magazine after the Duchess’s death because she wanted the world to know that the widow of Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936, had died in ‘slum’ conditions as a result of appalling treatment by those who were meant to care for her – a dishonest lawyer, an avaricious banker, a sly butler and a doctor acting on the lawyer’s instructions.
Nurse Gozin went to London twice in a quixotic attempt to inform Queen Elizabeth of the plight of her uncle’s widow.
Nurses wheel 84-year-old Wallis around in the grounds of her Paris mansion
Wallis’s mansion at Bois de Boulogne near Paris
As she explained: ‘I thought that if only the Queen knew the conditions in which the Duchess was living, something would be done to ease her suffering.’
On her first visit in 1980, Gozin was refused entry at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She tried again in 1983, by which time the Duchess’s condition had ‘degenerated’. She was sent to see Michael Mann, the then Dean of Windsor, who said he would pass her message to the Queen and come back with a response.
He never did. Five years later, he admitted he recalled the nurse’s visit but said he could not remember why she had come and then said he was unable to consult his files ‘because they are now in the Royal Archives. They are privileged information‘.
The truth is that the Duchess of Windsor, following Edward’s death aged 77 in 1972, had become a prisoner in her own home – the villa which was visited by Princess Diana with Dodi Fayed on the last day of her life.
As the nurse said, this was due to ‘her own penny-pinching regime’ which became ‘over-zealously enforced’ by her powerful and sinister French lawyer Suzanne Blum.
This was the sad final chapter of a story described as one of history’s great romances, with Edward VIII famously abdicating the throne because he said he could not rule ‘without the help and support of the woman I love’. It was, in fact, one of the great tragedies.
Wallis and Edward smile at each other
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret with their father King George VI and mother Elizabeth
Wallis Simpson was to become one of the most maligned women of the 20th century. In many quarters, she was held responsible for causing the Abdication – blamed as ‘the woman who stole the King’ and portrayed as a Mata Hari figure, a gold-digging adventuress or an agent sent to Britain by an alien power to hypnotise the future King.
In addition, she was rumoured to be illegitimate, a lesbian and a nymphomaniac, a spy for both the KGB and the Nazis (being the mistress of Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop) and to have learnt special sexual techniques in the brothels of Shanghai.
Mata Hari was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted as a spy in the First World War
There is no doubt that before the Abdication, Wallis enjoyed being the ‘friend’ of the Prince of Wales but she was not in love with him. She always considered the Abdication a terrible mistake that should have been avoided. She never forgave the Duke for relinquishing the Crown – an act which condemned her to a life of self-imposed exile, looking after a man for 35 years who had nothing to do other than inspect his stocks and shares, play golf, travel, enjoy delicious meals and ruminate endlessly over the past.
Though the Abdication was a personal tragedy for those involved, for Britain, it was the opposite. The country acquired a dedicated King and Queen in George VI and his wife, who soon won the hearts of the people. The British public preferred the kind of monarchy represented by the new royal couple: Sunday lunch, a walk in the park and a cup of tea, as opposed to the brittle nightclub and cocktail-shaker life represented by Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson.
To this day, there are those who jest that the Duchess of Windsor should be allocated a statue on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square for taking Edward VIII away.
The story of the Windsors still fascinates. My new book coincides with the anticipated release of the film, My Duchess, starring Joan Collins as the ailing Wallis Simpson and Isabella Rossellini as her sinister lawyer, Suzanne Blum.
No one is happier than me to see this story brought to the big screen and to have the iniquities of Blum brought to a wide audience.
The Duchess of Windsor and Suzanne Blum were two of the most unlikely people to have been thrown together. They had nothing in common, whether in background, temperament, style, mutual interest or anything else.
The Duchess lived her life at the height of fashion, supremely elegant and with excellent taste. Blum was the opposite. She dressed badly and wore an ill-fitting wig, which caused the Duchess quiet mirth. Blum wore dowdy dresses. The Duchess was light and social. Blum was austere and ruthless.
Yet, from the 1970s on, their lives became inexorably entwined.
Blum’s first connection with the Windsors was as the wife of their legal representative in Paris. Yet she rose to describe herself as the ‘Defender of the moral rights and interests of the Duchess of Windsor’.
This role sounded important. But it was meaningless. Though she was one of the executors of the Duke of Windsor’s will, it contained stipulations that were never fulfilled. As to Blum’s role as defender, it was self-adopted.
The rise of Blum’s power coincided with the Duchess’s decline. Blum became the Duchess’s captor, spokeswoman, keeper of the flame and of the keys. She changed the Duchess’s will, lodged what I suspect to be a forged letter of authorisation with a tame notary, and abused the Duchess’s wishes in respect of what personal letters she wanted published.
It is one of the most sinister relationships ever formed between lawyer and client.
Blum was intelligent, and in later life formidable. She could inspire considerable loyalty, yet many were horrified and repelled by her.
It is unlikely that Blum would have gained her position of supremacy over the Duchess if the Duke of Windsor had outlived her. His links with the British court and his own family were always stronger than the public were led to believe. Being a man, and a former King, he would have been better protected.
After his death, the Duchess was isolated, not only as a 76-year-old widow without close blood relations, but also as a woman in weak health.
Wallis with her pugs
That made her vulnerable. In Blum, a Satanic figure was waiting and watching – narrow-eyed and dangerous, wearing the mantle of good intention to disguise her malevolence.
Blum, a merchant’s daughter, had by then acquired a reputation as one of France’s toughest lawyers.
She had represented Warner Brothers in a dispute against the composer Igor Stravinsky, reducing damages he won from the film company from $1million to one franc.
She also represented Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and Rita Hayworth and wrote detective fiction, involving themes of human passion, vanity, ambition and torture. One critic said that when Blum tired of a character, she killed them off ‘in a moment of vicious caprice’.
Wallis in her living room
Wallis outside her house with one of her pugs
Suzanne Blum and one of her clients, Barbara Warner
Queen Elizabeth II gave an annuity of £5,000 to the Duchess
The philanthropist Baroness Liliane de Rothschild, who lived at the centre of Paris life for many years, described her as ‘dangereuse’ and was horrified at the way Blum made the Duchess of Windsor her prey.
By 1975, the Duchess’s devoted secretary Johanna Schütz was intensely worried by Blum’s growing influence and thought it essential to rescue the Duchess.
Among Miss Schütz’s concerns was how the Duchess had been made anxious by Blum continually worrying her over money. Not only had Blum turned the Duchess against her honourable English lawyer, Sir Godfrey Morley, but she had also suggested she might be thrown out of her house, and pestered her about the cost of staff wages and other expenses.
In her takeover of the Duchess, Blum was motivated by many things, not least an irrational hatred of the English. According to the British diplomat Lord Nicholas Gordon-Lennox, ‘she professed profound admiration and respect for our queen, but the rest of the royal family was beyond her contempt’.
Blum was so anti-British that she even tried to persuade the Duchess to give up her annuity of £5,000 from the Queen.
Rumours of sales of the Windsors’ personal items of value began to spread around Paris. Suspecting the Duchess’s staff as the source of the rumours, Blum took umbrage and aggressively stated that the only things she had sold were orchids.
In truth, though, she was removing the Duchess’s possessions – quite a distribution of spoils, none of which the frail Duchess would have been aware of.
Blum’s policy was to sell items that the Duchess would not notice.
After the Duchess returned from one of her many hospital stays, Blum told the household staff that the old widow had to be kept in the upstairs rooms. If she ever noticed the absence of any item or piece of furniture, she was to be told that the French government had asked for it to be restored. It would be returned presently.
Needless to say, the items never came back.
In due course, after promising some of the Duchess’s furniture to the French government for Versailles palace and the Louvre art gallery, Blum was rewarded with the prestigious honour of Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur.
Joan Collins as Wallis and Isabella Rossellini as Suzanne Blum in My Duchess
Another of Blum’s tricks was to forbid anyone from visiting the Duchess. This was said to protect her health and save her from becoming flustered. However, there was another possible reason. Visitors might notice that pieces of furniture and other objects had gone.
Blum tended to sell things at low prices. But there were a lot – and by the spring of 1977, possessions to the value of three million French francs had been sold.
Miss Schütz was horrified at the ridiculously bargain prices Blum got from her antique dealers. Once, she intervened when Blum was about to dispose of a very fine Meissen Tigre dinner set for $20,000, well below its value.
All the time, as the Duchess was left to her decline, Blum refused to sanction any of the mooted suggestions for improving her. She deemed these too expensive.
The Duchess of Windsor with a nurse in 1976
Crucially, Blum used the Duchess’s butler Georges Sanègre, who ran the household’s domestic affairs, in her money-making schemes. He was a powerful figure, who listened in corridors and monitored everything that happened.
His help allowed Blum to remove all the Duchess’s possessions from the house.
I concluded that Georges was a crook – he would be paid a large sum of money for his part in producing the Windsors’ personal letters and ‘forgetting’ the Duchess’s instructions to destroy them.
On one occasion, Blum told Miss Schütz and Georges to give her a number of letters written between the Duke and Duchess at the time of the Abdication, saying she wanted to put them in a safe place.
It never occurred to Miss Schütz that Blum would later arrange for these letters to be published, nor that she might benefit financially from their publication.
Once, in 1977, the Duchess summoned up a sudden outburst of energy. She turned to the lawyer who had driven her to a state of such anxiety and illness and shouted at her: ‘I HATE YOU!’
After that, Blum was careful to avoid the Duchess – at least until she was beyond the power of speech.
The Duchess paid heavily for her ‘I hate you’ remark. After that, she was virtually under house arrest, while Blum did exactly as she pleased – and moved to secure final control by putting in place a new Power of Attorney that covered all her own past and future misdeeds.
Purporting to bear the Duchess’s initials, and dated March 17, 1975, but not lodged with a lawyer until 1985, it gave Blum the power over documents and letters concerning the Windsors.
However, not only has the deed never been verified but it was not typed on the typewriter on which all the Duchess’s communications were written at that time nor would she have been capable of signing anything then. In any case, it cannot be deemed legal since it was only initialled.
Working alongside Blum in assuming control of the Windsor legacy was the Duchess’s Swiss banker Maurice Amiguet. He claimed he was in sole charge of the Duchess’s fortune and well-being, and that she had authorised him to sell any of her assets or belongings – and that the sales should be undertaken without publicity.
While these sales continued and the Duchess languished helplessly upstairs, there were huge bonfires of her possessions in the garden.
In April 1977, Amiguet instructed Miss Schütz (before he managed to get rid of her), to burn a great number of the Duke’s financial papers.
Meanwhile, Blum was adding the role of historian to her self-appointed duties – assuming the right to present her own view of the Duchess to the world.
Blum had several theories that she wished to promulgate. For example, that the Windsors had never had sex before marriage and that the Duchess had not wanted to marry the Duke and had certainly not forced him to abdicate.
The Duchess’s friend Diana Mosley disdained Blum’s campaign, summing it up by saying: ‘She invented a new Duchess. She even gave her back her virginity.’
Blum’s crusade on the Duchess’s behalf appeared to be based on high moral principles. In fact, she was protecting the market for herself as the disposal of the Windsors’ possessions continued.
In 1982, Johanna Schütz, who kept in touch with some of the Duchess’s staff after she quit her job as her secretary, discovered that 21 of the Duke’s snuffboxes had been put on sale by Christie’s. Schutz said the collection of boxes had been bought a few years earlier by an antiques dealer friend of Blum for less than 50,000 francs but they were estimated by Christie’s to be worth 500,000 francs. ‘What a deal they made!’ Schütz told a friend. ‘You remember my telling you that they were giving the things away for practically nothing.’
The Duke holds a cigar while at the dinner table in 1960
This Louis XV gold snuff box belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and was sold at Sotheby’s in 1987
The Duchess, who had not been out of her upstairs rooms for several years, died aged 89 in April 1986.
Her funeral was overshadowed by the publication of the Duke and Duchess’s so-called love letters, serialised in the Daily Mail at the behest of Blum, who had been planning the book for many years.
Blum’s aim, she said, was to ‘prove that the Duchess did everything she could to dissuade him [the Duke] from marrying her’.
Butler Georges Sanègre and others leave the Duchess’s funeral
The Daily Mail published the Windsor love letters soon after the Duchess’s funeral in 1986
The Duchess’s cause was ill-served by the publication of the letters – particularly considering an accompanying editorial by a young English lawyer called Michael Bloch who Blum had hired.
Bloch wrote about the Duchess ‘bewitching the Prince with some kind of sexual sorcery’ and claimed she ‘exercised a great fascination on lesbians’.
A book by Bloch quickly followed: The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor. It aired every possible grievance claimed by the Windsors. We learnt that the couple called the Queen Mother ‘Cookie’ and the Queen ‘Shirley Temple’. Bloch quoted the Duke on the death of his mother: ‘I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death.’
Also, the Duke was reported saying: ‘What a smug stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.’
It is unthinkable that either the Duke or Duchess would have put this into the public domain.
It would be interesting to know where the money – of which there was a considerable amount from all the global publishing deals – went.
Given the state of the Duchess’s health over her last years, I refuse to believe that she could have authorised the publication of these letters.
For her part, Blum always insisted that the Duchess gave her the letters, documents and ‘written authorisation’ to publish them ‘to defend our memory or reply to our detractors’.
But there is not a scintilla of truth in this declaration.
Failing to abide by the terms of the Duke of Windsor’s will, exploiting his widow, reinterpreting her wishes, selling her furniture and porcelain, keeping her in her room so that she did not notice what had gone, preventing her from seeing friends, taking away her beloved pet pugs (Ginseng and Diamond) and denying her flowers in her bedroom – this was Blum’s way of ‘defending’ the Duchess.
As a journalist once said of Blum, who died in 1994, she simply ‘laughed her way to the bank, whither the money, like the Mississippi to the sea, just keeps on rolling along’.
source: https://www.dailymail.com/
