The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Monday 29 November 2004

In Defense of the Duchess, Round Three

Hermaphrodite Sticks and Nazi Stones

When Wallis Simpson was presented at court on June 10^th, 1931, she made her curtsey to King George V and Queen Mary as the “injured party” of a divorce. Had the royal family and others known just how “injured” Wallis had been in her first marriage, they might have had more compassion for her and a greater understanding of her in later years. But few could know that Wallis might have stayed married to Win Spencer had it not been for his escalating brutality. In The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson, author Greg King cites an incident in China where Spencer beat Wallis “so severely in the stomach that she had bled internally” and had to be hospitalized. At this point, Wallis chose preservation of her life over preservation of social convention. 

But, as it stood in 1931, she was still a divorced woman and not even her respectable second marriage to Ernest Simpson could change that. Her past aside, the marriage did change Wallis’ life in a multitude of other ways. For one thing, she wasn’t being mistreated or abused by her husband. For another, she had something she always craved – stability. Although her husband wasn’t rich, he was able to provide his wife with all the advantages, including a maid, a cook and a chauffer. And, between his relations and business contacts and her friends and gregarious personality, the couple very effectively carved a niche for themselves in a certain part of British society. All said, she was the respectable American wife of a successful English businessman with the right connections, and that – divorce aside – made her a perfectly acceptable candidate for presentation at court. It also made her a far cry from the woman who would later be accused of being, among other things, a hermaphrodite and Nazi spy. 

Truly, it’s a matter of pure personal opinion whether or not the Duchess of Windsor was an attractive woman, although I’ve always been of the belief that she was more attractive than unattractive until she started tampering with plastic surgery. On the other hand, if you consider the expectations the British public must have had for the spouse of their “Prince Charming” – which, I imagine, was something akin to a real-life Cinderella – it’s easy to see how Wallis’ looks fell short. After all, she was “past her prime” at the time of the abdication. In any case, that is certainly a reasonable debate and, interestingly, is one that has been echoed in modern times with Camilla Parker Bowles.  

Of course, nothing about the Duchess of Windsor could ever be that easy. The matter of her appearance has long gone beyond the simple and into the extreme. And what’s the most extreme thing that could be said of a woman? That she is not a “real” woman at all – she’s a hermaphrodite (gasp, horror). Obviously, this accusation was meant to not only explain why she had a “boxy” figure and “manlike hands,” but also reinforce the idea that she was sexually deviant and explain how she had secured the “sexually challenged” Edward VIII under her control. Ironically, many of the materials that claim Wallis was a hermaphrodite include some sort of statement that the condition was “not well understood” in Wallis’ time. The fact is, while the condition – technically called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) – is understood by science, it was/is probably not well understood by the individuals who made the original claims or those who continue to perpetuate it.  

For starters, if judging whether Wallis was a hermaphrodite simply by her appearance, the evidence would seem to point that she was not, as studies have found that women with AIS tend to be above average in height and “voluptuously feminine.” Wallis was neither. Of course, Wallis’ large hands could certainly have been a characteristic of AIS. On the other hand (no pun intended), we all know that big hands do not always mean… well, you get the idea.  

Similarly, some authors have claimed that there’s little doubt that Wallis was a hermaphrodite because people had seen her “deformed sexual organs.” This sounds terribly suspect to me for a number of reasons. First, given how – as all those other writers have so graciously mentioned – “misunderstood” AIS was during much of Wallis’ lifetime, I seriously doubt she would have been as popular and well-liked a person in all stages of her pre-abdication life had such a revelation been widely known, never mind seen. Second, I find it highly unlikely that Wallis could have had three husbands and a number of lovers who were each “okay,” for whatever reason, with the fact that his wife/lover was a hermaphrodite.  

Finally, if the rumors that Wallis was a hermaphrodite are true, then the rumors that she became pregnant by Count Ciano in 1925 and had an abortion could not be true, as it’s physically impossible for women with AIS to become pregnant. So, if you’re going by rumor alone, one or the other had to be the case, although – miraculously – both rumors seem to happily coexist in most biographies of the Duchess. In my opinion, since there’s no real evidence to support either theory, I say they’re both untrue until proven otherwise. In any case, this is just one of many excellent examples of how Wallis’ life as we’ve been told it is defined one way or the other by speculation and rumor.   

If anything, based on what we know today, had Wallis actually been a hermaphrodite, it certainly wouldn’t have been a reason to criticize her, as she would have had absolutely no control over the presence of her condition. Furthermore, it could hardly have been justified to use it as proof of sexual deviance since there’s no known scientific reason that individuals with AIS are more or less so than people without the condition. Personally, if I found out tomorrow that the Duchess of Windsor had been a biological hermaphrodite, I would admire her all the more for coping gracefully and stoically all her life with what must have been an incredibly emotionally and physically difficult situation. Better people have succumbed under less pressure. 

Even as a biologically complete woman, it couldn’t have been easy to cope with the realization that the opposite was a widely discussed theory. But if the claims that Wallis was a hermaphrodite were the sticks that were thrown against her in the post-abdication war of words, then the rumors that she was a Nazi sympathizer-come-spy were the stones. Like so many other theories about Wallis, I believe the basis of this one is rooted in the fact that so many incidents involving the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were either fabricated, exaggerated or have been taken out of context. In this particular case, we do know that there are many incidents that were not fabricated – most of them involving interactions between Wallis (and many others) with various German leaders both before and after the abdication – that were and are enough to raise suspicions. When placed, however, in the context of their time, they seem markedly less suspect.  

Take, for instance, the basic idea that Wallis was a Nazi sympathizer. In 1936, she would have been in good company, as a great many people of varying degrees of importance sympathized greatly with the Germans and believed the government – which just happened to be led by the Nazis – was justified in its actions up to that point. While we have the advantage of hindsight and a knowledge of history, little, if anything, was known about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime (never mind those that were to come). Instead, the focus was on the amazing turn-around of the German economy since World War I and the incredibly low unemployment rate. As a result, and perhaps more interesting to Wallis, important Germans were must-have guests at fashionable London parties that year.  

Since the parties Wallis gave and attended were nothing if not fashionable, she naturally encountered German figures like the diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop. Just as naturally, this association became the basis for at least two rumors about Wallis – that she had an affair with von Ribbentrop and that she was providing the German government with British state secrets. Once again, there is little evidence to support either scenario, unless you consider gossipy tabloid stories and books hard evidence. Following the abdication, the rumors only blossomed, turning the Duchess into a spy, especially when the Duke and Duchess visited Hitler in Germany on the eve of World War II. Controversial? Yes. Perhaps not the best choice at that moment? Very likely. But damning evidence that Wallis was a Nazi spy? Highly improbable, especially since the visit was a very public one. 

All in all, I find that the flimsiness of the whole Nazi theory can be summed up in a statement made by author Charles Higham in his book The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life: “That Wallis shared their (the German’s) views was clear from a statement made in a letter to her Aunt Bessie in which she expressed the hope that the Germans would ill-treat the French couturiers and others who were causing her problems.” I, for one, fail to see how such an innocuous statement – made most likely at a point of frustration and largely in jest – could possibly be seen as support of the political and military aims of a resentful and scheming German government led by Adolf Hitler, especially coming from a woman who was genuinely a hundred times more interested in the intricacies of her dress than in the minutiae of world politics. 

That said, I admit with deep frustration that, even if we did have concrete evidence that forcefully dispelled the worst of the rumors leveled against her, it’s likely that the general opinion of the Duchess of Windsor would be slow to change, if at all. I believe this is because even if she was not a dominatrix, a hermaphrodite or a Nazi sympathizer, people would still believe that she was an ambitious woman who wanted nothing else in life than to marry King Edward VIII and reign as his Queen Consort, even though all the facts seem to indicate otherwise. 

Next week, in the final part of “In Defense of the Duchess,” we’ll explore the circumstances of Wallis’ relationship with her husband and Edward VIII, as well as her life just before the abdication – including the recent revelations about her affair with car salesman Guy Trundle – in an attempt to draw a more accurate picture of the real Wallis and the life she wanted to lead if she had had the choice.

Until next week, 

- Tori Van Orden Mart�nez