THE HEART HAS ITS REASONS (372 pp.)—The Duchess of Windsor—McKay ($5).
The Duchess of Windsor, to many a most enviable woman, believes that she has an "appalling" place in history. This account of how she got there, according to her loyal publishers, was written by her alone, but ghostly fingers may nevertheless be detected at work with the familiar cheesecloth. The life of Wallis Warfield of Baltimore is well-known—perhaps too well. But this retelling carries the great interest of being her own first official version of how she played finders-keepers, losers-weepers with a king and his kingdom.
The Duchess insists that hers is no Cinderella story; she and her editorial assistants have dusted off an impressive number of highborn Maryland and Virginia kin—Montagues and Warfields so snootily Southern that they called the Union Army "Mr. Lincoln's men." This family tree spreads its shadow over the artless stories told by Bessiewallis* about grandmother's "victoria," her first sausage curls, her posh uncles like S. Davies Warfield, who grandly inserted a notice in the newspapers that because of "the appalling catastrophe now devastating Europe" (it was 1915), he would "forgo the ball that he might otherwise be expected to give for his niece Wallis Warfield."
The Family Tree. Despite this setback the debutante did well (three corsages to wear on Easter Sunday), and she married "strong, assured, sophisticated" Lieut, (j.g.) Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., with whom she lived the life of a Navy wife from Peking to Pensacola. Alas, came the terrible time when Lieut. Spencer, who had begun to hit the bottle with naval thoroughness, locked her in the bathroom. Despite family pleas—"the Montague women do not get divorced"—Wallis felt it was time to set a precedent.
Between marriages she felt forlorn. She wrote an essay on hats for a fashion competition (the industry, she observes with justifiable satisfaction, lost a servant but gained a customer) and once thought of selling tubular steel. Instead, in 1928, she married Ernest Simpson, a sometime member of the Coldstream Guards. The Simpsons had a modest but assured London social position, and at Melton Mowbray (in the hunting country, where the Prince of Wales was to establish his talent for falling off horses) Mrs. Simpson fatally met the Prince.
As the gauzy, chatty narrative tells of the months during which Mrs. Simpson became the great and good friend of the Prince of Wales, the reader's heart will go out to Mr. Simpson. From the moment of Wallis' fateful speech to the Prince at the Simpsons' flat in Bryanston Court—"Sir, would you care to take pot-luck with us?"—Mr. Simpson recedes into vagueness. The Prince returned for more and more of Wallis' beef stew—she used a recipe from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Came the day when she simply could not refuse the Prince's invitation to ski at Kitzbühl. That evening for the first time she heard her husband's "door bang." Later he went off to sleep at the Guards' Club.