Read Online That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba - Free Book Online
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Authors: Anne Sebba
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particular; then she listened and flattered. This was a skill Wallis was determined to master if she was to move up the social scale.
A favourite event was a weekly meeting of a group known as the Soixante Gourmets. Each of the sixty young men in this exclusive club brought a female companion to lunch at the Hotel Hamilton and it was here that Wallis was introduced to the most stimulating group of men she was ever to meet. They included the witty and opinionated journalist Willmott (Bill) Lewis of The Times , who was to marry her friend Ethel Noyes; Prince Gelasio Caetani, the Italian Ambassador, fierce nationalist and First World War veteran, a brilliant and handsome man who planted the seeds of Wallis’s interest in the Italian political scene.
She may have written off her marriage with Win, but she insisted she still believed in marriage and was keen to marry again:
In my mind I had the picture of the sort of man I wanted. Ideally he would be a young man who was making his mark in business, diplomacy or one of the professions. He would like and understand people and above all appreciate me. I wanted someone who would make me a part of his life and whom I could help in his career. I wanted a man who would draw me into the full circle of his existence in all its aspects.
The description, although written by Wallis years after her marriage to the ex-King, is probably a fair account of what she hoped, indeed was working, to achieve at this time, while still in her twenties. Apparently she met several men in this enticing milieu who measured up to her ideal, but only one of them ‘stirred her heart’. She described him as a young diplomat of great promise attached to the Embassy of a Latin American country, ‘both teacher and model in the art of living … in many respects, the most fascinating man I have ever met with principles of steel and a spirit that bubbled like champagne’. Her use of ‘ever’ can hardly have been an accident.
Don Felipe Espil, at thirty-five, was eight years older than Wallis and a man of experience of women and the world. He was slim, dark and tall and spoke with an attractively marked South American accent. A qualified lawyer, his interests were extraordinarily wide ranging and included music, economics, bridge, baseball, golf and riding, at all of which he excelled. Many a Washington matron hoped to catch him for her daughter. When he met Wallis he was first secretary at the Argentine Embassy, but no one was in any doubt of his ambition to be ambassador, a position that would require considerable funds. He indulged in a brief relationship with Wallis, which caused some scandal in Washington, presumably because she was considered unsuitable, and it may have been this affair in particular that Alice Rasin so objected to. Espil clearly enjoyed Wallis’s company – for a while – and perhaps especially while he thought she was safely married. But she, as she confided in friends, was passionately in love wf gly in lith him and was prepared to do anything to keep him, including converting to Catholicism if necessary. Then he fell in love with Courtney Louise Letts, one of the quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby . Letts was wealthy, beautiful and, as the daughter of a US senator, socially desirable. Although younger than Wallis, she too had already been once married – to the well-connected Wellesley H. Stillwell. But she divorced him in 1924 and married and divorced a second time before eventually marrying Espil in 1933, by which time he had finally been promoted to ambassador to the US. Wallis, the mere wife of a naval lieutenant, with neither money nor social standing, could not compete.
Wallis, furious to learn that Espil was
A favourite event was a weekly meeting of a group known as the Soixante Gourmets. Each of the sixty young men in this exclusive club brought a female companion to lunch at the Hotel Hamilton and it was here that Wallis was introduced to the most stimulating group of men she was ever to meet. They included the witty and opinionated journalist Willmott (Bill) Lewis of The Times , who was to marry her friend Ethel Noyes; Prince Gelasio Caetani, the Italian Ambassador, fierce nationalist and First World War veteran, a brilliant and handsome man who planted the seeds of Wallis’s interest in the Italian political scene.
She may have written off her marriage with Win, but she insisted she still believed in marriage and was keen to marry again:
In my mind I had the picture of the sort of man I wanted. Ideally he would be a young man who was making his mark in business, diplomacy or one of the professions. He would like and understand people and above all appreciate me. I wanted someone who would make me a part of his life and whom I could help in his career. I wanted a man who would draw me into the full circle of his existence in all its aspects.
The description, although written by Wallis years after her marriage to the ex-King, is probably a fair account of what she hoped, indeed was working, to achieve at this time, while still in her twenties. Apparently she met several men in this enticing milieu who measured up to her ideal, but only one of them ‘stirred her heart’. She described him as a young diplomat of great promise attached to the Embassy of a Latin American country, ‘both teacher and model in the art of living … in many respects, the most fascinating man I have ever met with principles of steel and a spirit that bubbled like champagne’. Her use of ‘ever’ can hardly have been an accident.
Don Felipe Espil, at thirty-five, was eight years older than Wallis and a man of experience of women and the world. He was slim, dark and tall and spoke with an attractively marked South American accent. A qualified lawyer, his interests were extraordinarily wide ranging and included music, economics, bridge, baseball, golf and riding, at all of which he excelled. Many a Washington matron hoped to catch him for her daughter. When he met Wallis he was first secretary at the Argentine Embassy, but no one was in any doubt of his ambition to be ambassador, a position that would require considerable funds. He indulged in a brief relationship with Wallis, which caused some scandal in Washington, presumably because she was considered unsuitable, and it may have been this affair in particular that Alice Rasin so objected to. Espil clearly enjoyed Wallis’s company – for a while – and perhaps especially while he thought she was safely married. But she, as she confided in friends, was passionately in love wf gly in lith him and was prepared to do anything to keep him, including converting to Catholicism if necessary. Then he fell in love with Courtney Louise Letts, one of the quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby . Letts was wealthy, beautiful and, as the daughter of a US senator, socially desirable. Although younger than Wallis, she too had already been once married – to the well-connected Wellesley H. Stillwell. But she divorced him in 1924 and married and divorced a second time before eventually marrying Espil in 1933, by which time he had finally been promoted to ambassador to the US. Wallis, the mere wife of a naval lieutenant, with neither money nor social standing, could not compete.
Wallis, furious to learn that Espil was
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