Book Review: The Woman He Loved

Title: The Woman He Loved

Author: Ralph G. Martin

Date: 1973

Publisher: Signet / Simon & Schuster

ISBN: none

Length: 471 pages plus bibliography, endnotes, and index

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “The marvel of any woman is that the men in her life speak well of her after she has left them.”

Seven months after his wedding day, T. Wallis Warfield became the father of a child he called Bessie Wallis Warfield. That was June 19, 1896. In November, 1896, he died, age twenty-seven. Little B. Wallis was accepted as a remarkably well grown preemie; friends claimed that someone actually said she looked “fit for a king.”

She was not, however, a world-class beauty. She was probably biracial, her mother's family being one of those old Virginia families whose English ancestors did marry Native Americans whom they perceived as high-ranking, but who can't prove direct descent from Pocahontas. It's hard to say whether the portrait of B. Wallis on the cover of this book looks like Pocahontas or whether we all grew up seeing artists' conceptions of Pocahontas that (pre-Disney) looked like B. Wallis Warfield. At any rate the resemblance includes not only bone structure and complexion but the “plainness” associated with a culture that didn't teach young people to try to improve, or call attention to, their faces. The woman who officially dropped “Bessie” and answered to “Wallis” or “Wally,” when she grew up, did try to dress well, but in a modest way that suited her small size and private personality.

She was married, and amicably divorced, twice when she met Edward, Prince of Wales, soon to be crowned King of England. All the world heard that their mutual attraction was an outrage, felt as an insult by all the hopeful (richer, prettier, more English) young ladies in the United Kingdom and its colonies...but, apart from the disappointment of the young ladies, why was the outrage so great? Why did the Queen Mother just not warm up to Wallis? There hadn't always been a rule, still wasn't a formal law, against bigamous marriages in England, although there was some feeling that a clearer distinction ought to be made between civil unions (which could involve divorcees) and proper Christian marriages. There had never been all that much mutual dislike between the U.S. and U.K.; in fact several British aristocrats had married Americans, and Lady Astor, one of Wally's leading critics, was born in the U.S.A. too. People around the world debated whether the prejudice against Wallis was more against divorcees or against Americans, but in fact it was hard to prove that a great deal of prejudice against either had even existed.

Martin finds ample evidence...he doesn't even argue, but he presents the evidence...that there were political reasons for keeping Edward from reigning as King in the 1930s. From the U.S. point of view they were good ones. Fascism seemed like a good straightforward efficient form of government to many people in the democracies, during the 1930s. Edward was one of them. Naturally he and Wallis were approached by foreign heads of state on their very best behavior, including Hitler, who in the 1930s tried very hard to be charming. For a while Edward seemed to find Hitler more congenial than he found Churchill. Any excuse for keeping Edward from being King, therefore...just might have been vital for the whole world, and certainly worked for the interests of the United States, if not for those of Wallis Warfield Windsor. It was therefore useful to the interests of all the democracies that Edward was besotted with a foreign divorcee. Had it not been for Wallis, who knows what harm Edward might have done to England, or England might have found necessary to do to him.

There were inevitably some costs for the world's poster couple for do-overs in the game of love. Wallis could not officially be called “Her Royal Highness,” as Edward wanted her to be. Edward was buried beside his brother George, as a prince who had never been a king, although Edward had been...By and large the Duke and Duchess accepted England's gift to them of a very comfortable life for the thirty-five years they were married. The fact that Wallis was denied a proper title could hardly be expunged from her story. Interviewers formed their own opinion of the extent to which she was offended, sorry not to have a warmer relationship with her final set of in-laws, or bemused, by being “Untitled.”

There were also the endlessly publicized catfights. In the 1930s, as women were claiming their civil rights, huge amounts of attention were fed to stereotypes about why it was just better not to promote women, or better yet not to hire women at all. Freud had suggested that the normal human reaction to strangers is to classify them as prospective mates and prospective predators, thereby suggesting that normal people don't want friends. Certain people wanted to claim that, although men might be able to bond through working or playing sports in teams, women would always clash. Movie stars got more publicity, and professional women were hailed as “witty” rather than treated like a hostile alien species, if they said snarky things to and about one another. Lady Astor probably really did disapprove of Wallis for good and sufficient reasons, but an empathetic reader gets the feeling that Clare Boothe Luce, Elsa Maxwell, Marlene Dietrich, and other famous women the Duke and Duchess knew, were followed around and prodded until they finally said one snippy thing about Wallis, and no matter how many other things they might have said about her that were nice...and Wallis got the same treatment.

(Martin, to his credit, does not place Wallis in any version of the famous story about two female celebrities of the same age—which two? Any two!--approaching a door: “After you, dear. Age before beauty,” said one. “Yes, dear, and pearls before swine,” said the other. It's not impossible that some pair of women, somewhere, actually said that. The misogynist spirit of the 1930s repeated it endlessly as a norm for the relationship supposed to exist between any two women who had ventured outside The Home enough to have met.)

Edward and Wallis, Duke and Duchess of Windsor, were born celebrities and remained celebrities for more than seventy years, during a period of massive manufactured interest in published celebrity gossip. There is, consequently, a lot of information about them. Martin has obviously exercised editorial restraint in cutting down what he found to only 471 pages. This book could easily have been ten times the size it is. Still, if you're interested in twentieth century celebrity gossip, what you won't like about this book is likely to be that it's long.

Or, if you take a page or two of light nonfiction before bed each night...it's a real bargain.

Ralph Martin no longer needs the $1 he'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book. At least this web site can offer it on our usual terms: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; you could get at least three more books of this size into the package, at which point our prices become competitive with what you'd pay directly to Amazon. Feel free to browse this site for Fair Trade Books to add to the package, or suggest older books by deserving living writers of your choice.