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Book: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba
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Authors: Anne Sebba
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because she knew she was the one who needed it more.
There followed another short period of calm for Wallis to reflect as Win, undertaking river patrol duties, was sent away. Wallis set off to join him in Canton, but as soon as she arrived there she came down with a high temperature. She described it as a kidney infection and said that while she was ill he was solicitous. Drinking the polluted water was renowned for causing illness. But it is also possible that the infection was the result of Win kicking her in the stomach and assaulting her, as one biographer claims he was told by a friend of Wallis in her latter years, which would explain his unusual contrition subsequently. His anger presumably derived from jealousy, fed by his accusations, later recounted by Wallis herself, that she had ‘carried on’ with officers aboard the Chaumont and flirted with men in Hong Kong during his absence. He now started opening her letters to find evidence of this.
Wallis described what happened next: ‘To his already formidable repertory of taunts and humiliations he now added some oriental variations. I gathered that during our long absence he had spent a considerable amount of his time ashore in the local sing-song houses. In any event, he now insisted on my accompanying him to his favourite haunts where he would ostentatiously make a fuss over the girls.’ It may seem strange that Wallis chose to refer to such activities at all in her memoirs. But, from her perspective, it was vital to prove that her first husband was the betrayer and abuser, even if she was the one who walked out of the marriage – a factor of critical importance at a time when all she was hoping for was special permission to be presented at Court. It’s a paragraph that has given rise to much insidious comment and blighted any subsequent serious discussion of Wallis’s life in China, what she later called ‘her lotus year’. The sing-song houses were places of entertainment where clients were usually entertained with erotic songs and some music and dancing as a prelude to sex. If she admitted to frequenting such places, which usually offered opium and gambling as well and were only slightly more respectable than ordinary brothels, as a threesome, perhaps she also visited brothels without Win and perhaps she learned from Chinese prostitutes some ancient oriental techniques for pleasuring men – it is an impossible scenario to verify or disprove. But what is clear is that a woman with Wallis’s energy and gusto for life travelling alone in the orient at this time was inevitably going to be a target for gossip.
At all events, when Wallis took the decision to ss decisiotell Win that their attempt at a reunion had failed and that she was leaving him for good, he put up no resistance. He quietly offered to resume his monthly payments to her. But instead of going directly home to the US, where she would have to admit to friends and family this new failure in her private life, she went first to Shanghai, perhaps, as she maintained, because someone had told her there was an American court there where it might be possible to get a divorce. Or perhaps she was simply not ready to return and, having come all this way, decided it would be a shame to leave without seeing such an exciting place. However, while still in Washington she had been given letters of introduction to single men living there, so it was clearly always a backstop on her personal horizon, a place to visit if things did not work out with Win.
Nineteen-twenties Shanghai was a legend: a free city, sometimes described as a freak city, where new arrivals required neither visa nor passport to enter, so it was home to myriad adventurers, gangsters and foreign traders. This diverse society with a criminal underbelly and overt sexual frisson included American conmen, White Russian tarts, Japanese jazz players, Korean tram conductors and many others on the make or fleeing repressive systems, not least some
There followed another short period of calm for Wallis to reflect as Win, undertaking river patrol duties, was sent away. Wallis set off to join him in Canton, but as soon as she arrived there she came down with a high temperature. She described it as a kidney infection and said that while she was ill he was solicitous. Drinking the polluted water was renowned for causing illness. But it is also possible that the infection was the result of Win kicking her in the stomach and assaulting her, as one biographer claims he was told by a friend of Wallis in her latter years, which would explain his unusual contrition subsequently. His anger presumably derived from jealousy, fed by his accusations, later recounted by Wallis herself, that she had ‘carried on’ with officers aboard the Chaumont and flirted with men in Hong Kong during his absence. He now started opening her letters to find evidence of this.
Wallis described what happened next: ‘To his already formidable repertory of taunts and humiliations he now added some oriental variations. I gathered that during our long absence he had spent a considerable amount of his time ashore in the local sing-song houses. In any event, he now insisted on my accompanying him to his favourite haunts where he would ostentatiously make a fuss over the girls.’ It may seem strange that Wallis chose to refer to such activities at all in her memoirs. But, from her perspective, it was vital to prove that her first husband was the betrayer and abuser, even if she was the one who walked out of the marriage – a factor of critical importance at a time when all she was hoping for was special permission to be presented at Court. It’s a paragraph that has given rise to much insidious comment and blighted any subsequent serious discussion of Wallis’s life in China, what she later called ‘her lotus year’. The sing-song houses were places of entertainment where clients were usually entertained with erotic songs and some music and dancing as a prelude to sex. If she admitted to frequenting such places, which usually offered opium and gambling as well and were only slightly more respectable than ordinary brothels, as a threesome, perhaps she also visited brothels without Win and perhaps she learned from Chinese prostitutes some ancient oriental techniques for pleasuring men – it is an impossible scenario to verify or disprove. But what is clear is that a woman with Wallis’s energy and gusto for life travelling alone in the orient at this time was inevitably going to be a target for gossip.
At all events, when Wallis took the decision to ss decisiotell Win that their attempt at a reunion had failed and that she was leaving him for good, he put up no resistance. He quietly offered to resume his monthly payments to her. But instead of going directly home to the US, where she would have to admit to friends and family this new failure in her private life, she went first to Shanghai, perhaps, as she maintained, because someone had told her there was an American court there where it might be possible to get a divorce. Or perhaps she was simply not ready to return and, having come all this way, decided it would be a shame to leave without seeing such an exciting place. However, while still in Washington she had been given letters of introduction to single men living there, so it was clearly always a backstop on her personal horizon, a place to visit if things did not work out with Win.
Nineteen-twenties Shanghai was a legend: a free city, sometimes described as a freak city, where new arrivals required neither visa nor passport to enter, so it was home to myriad adventurers, gangsters and foreign traders. This diverse society with a criminal underbelly and overt sexual frisson included American conmen, White Russian tarts, Japanese jazz players, Korean tram conductors and many others on the make or fleeing repressive systems, not least some
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