The new baby soon captivated her adoring parents. She had her mother’s piercing blue eyes and fine features, crowned with her father’s dark hair. They called her Bessie, after her mother’s older sister, and Wallis in honor of her father. Both names were run together, according to southern custom, and as she grew older, the child soon came to despise the name. “So many cows are called Bessie,” she once complained, somewhat undiplomatically, to her aunt of the same name.
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Eventually, the Bessie would be dropped and the child referred to simply as Wallis.
The birth of his only child brought a welcome joy to T. Wallis’s otherwise bleak existence. By the time he took his new family back to Baltimore at the end of summer, he was becoming increasingly ill. He and Alice moved from his old bachelor apartment to a slightly run-down establishment called the Brexton Residential Hotel, located on Baltimore’s Park Avenue. This shabby hotel, with its worn carpet, faded paint, and rooms that inevitably smelled of food, was to become T. Wallis’s last home.
As summer faded into autumn, even the ever-cheerful and optimistic Alice must have realized that the end was near. Her husband’s painful coughs and gasps for breath filled their dingy rooms; in his condition it became dangerous to expose the baby to her father, and little Wallis remained carefully cloistered in an adjoining room.
By the beginning of November, T. Wallis realized that he was dying. Although the family physician was called in, he could do nothing; T. Wallis was in far too delicate a state to be moved to a more healthful climate. Anticipating the inevitable, he summoned his wife to his bedside and asked her to have their baby daughter photographed for the first time; he had been forbidden any contact for fear of passing on his illness, and he wished to see her one last time. Alice duly complied. When she presented the photographs to her dying husband, T. Wallis gazed at them thoughtfully. Alice would later tell Wallis that her father’s only comment had been a sad one: “I’m afraid, Alice, she has the Warfield look. Let us hope that in spirit she’ll be like you—a Montague.”
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On November 15, 1896, only four days short of his first wedding anniversary, T. Wallis Warfield was dead.
2
Childhood
A
T TWENTY-FIVE
, Alice Montague Warfield found herself a penniless, widowed single mother. Her prospects were bleak. As the fourth son, T. Wallis had had little opportunity to either acquire inherited wealth or devote his life to amassing it through his own devices. No matter what feelings she had expressed in the past, it must have come as an immense relief when Anna Emory Warfield invited her bereaved daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter to live with her. Whatever Alice’s own inclinations, she was in no position to refuse. She duly packed her few belongings and vacated her rooms at the Brexton Residential Hotel for the more dignified surroundings of her husband’s family home.
The Warfield home, at 34 East Preston Street, stood in a quiet, solidly upper middle class neighborhood near the old center of Baltimore. It was one of more than a dozen identical narrow, red-brick town houses along the tree-shaded streets, with a simple four-story façade enlivened by generous white-stone cornices. There was no garden or lawn before the house; a set of white marble steps led from the sidewalk straight to the heavy front door.
Here, in this rather unremarkable house, the future Duchess of Windsor—renowned for her skills in interior arrangement—was first exposed to domestic decoration. Her grandmother’s taste ran to massive, ornately carved mahogany pieces, marble-topped tables, and a forest of potted palms. Fringed lamps, Oriental rugs draped over consoles, marble busts, and dozens of framed photographs added to the Victorian clutter. Candlesticks, urns, a tea set, and serving dishes from Baltimore’s famous Kirk Silverworks lined the sideboard in the dining room, bearing witness to the Warfields’ prosperity. It was all very rich and comfortable, redolent of the upper-middle-class values espoused by Mrs. Warfield.
Sixty years old when Alice and Wallis first came to stay, Anna was tall and thin, with refined features and a thick head of gray hair, which she wore parted in the middle and pulled tightly back. Her stature and manner were both impeccable: When she sat, according to her granddaughter, she was “so erect that her back never seemed to touch the chair,” a posture Wallis carefully copied.
1
Anna habitually dressed in black, and even after a decade had passed, she refused to forgo what she considered proper mourning for her late husband. Her stiff black-satin dresses, with high collars of white lace, were austere, and Anna refused to enliven them with any jewels beyond a small pearl brooch and black-enamel mourning bracelet.
2
The other imposing presence in the house was Anna’s eldest son, Solomon Davies Warfield, an older, heavier, and less handsome version of Wallis’s father, with a receding hairline, narrow eyes, and carefully groomed mustache. Solomon was in his thirties when Alice and Wallis took up residence at East Preston Street. Unlike his brothers and sisters, Solomon had never married; although he possessed several large country estates just outside Baltimore, he preferred to reside with his mother when in the city. Their relationship was exceptionally close, and Anna depended on her eldest son to look after her financial interests.
Solomon was the most successful of the Warfield sons. He began his career as a simple clerk but in his spare time managed to develop and patent a number of inventions. By his thirtieth birthday, he had formed the Warfield Manufacturing Company to distribute them across America. He served on a number of corporate boards, and at the time Alice and her daughter moved into the house on East Preston Street, he had recently been appointed to the prestigious position of Baltimore’s postmaster general.
Solomon struck many as humorless, cold, and intolerant. Young Wallis, upon whom he was to have a formidable influence, later wrote: “For a long and impressionable period he was the nearest thing to a father in my uncertain world, but an odd kind of father—reserved, unbending, silent. Uncle Sol was destined to return again and again to my life—or, more accurately, it was my fate to be obliged to turn again and again to him, usually at some new point of crisis for me, and one seldom to his liking. I was always a little afraid of Uncle Sol.”
3
Wallis was a healthy, happy child. Warfields and Montagues alike were duly impressed with her luxuriant golden curls and deep blue, almost lilac-colored, eyes. Each morning, she was taken from the small third-floor room which served as her nursery, washed, and fed by an elderly Irish governess who had looked after several generations of Warfields. In the afternoon, she was proudly pushed in her perambulator along the tree-shaded avenues of Baltimore.
4
One of her cousins, Elizabeth Gordon, later recalled: “While rambling up Charles Street one sunny afternoon, I noticed in a go-cart a very attractive child dressed in white, with a large pink bow on her cap. When asked who she was, the nurse replied, ‘This is Wallis, Mrs. Warfield’s little girl.’ It was not that she was so pretty, but she had individuality and charm, and she possessed, even then, the most entrancing little glance out of the corner of her eye, with head tilted to one side. I had hardly gone a block when I met her mother. ‘Alice,’ I said, ‘I’ve just seen your little girl; I feel that some day she will do something wonderful; she already has so much personality.”
5
Wallis was raised without a father, living on the charity of relatives, but she lacked for nothing. She was dressed in crisp white frocks covered with lace or fashionable sailor-suit dresses; her hair was bound with silk ribbons and tied with satin bows; she played with expensive toys and was coddled and cosseted by both her Irish nurse and her fawning mother. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that she became precocious. In what may well be an apocryphal tale, her first words, according to author Cleveland Amory, were not “Mama” but “Me-Me.”
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She named her paper dolls “Mrs. Astor” and “Mrs. Vanderbilt,” after the leading society hostesses of the day, indicating an early awareness of society which would later dominate her life.
7
Young Wallis enjoyed being noticed. For her first children’s party, her mother selected a white dress with a blue sash; but when Wallis caught sight of it, she stomped her feet in an unruly fit, demanding that she be allowed to wear a red sash so that—she later wrote—the boys would notice her.
8
Daily life in the house on East Preston Street revolved around Anna Emory Warfield. “She ruled the world from a series of rocking chairs,” Wallis later declared.
9
Each morning, promptly at eight, the entire family, along with their servants—cook, maids, butler, nurse, and valet—assembled for prayers in the parlor. Following breakfast, the dowager received her servants and gave them their daily orders. At all times of the day, she held a set of keys; all closets, pantries, and cellars were kept locked, and when one of the servants wished to fetch something, they had to request permission from the mistress of the house to use the requisite key. Young Wallis watched and learned the way her grandmother maintained strict control over all aspects of the running of her household.
Occasionally, there were exciting excursions. Within the proper, cloistered confines of the Warfield household, Wallis discovered one of the friendliest faces of her childhood: her Uncle Solomon’s valet-footman, Eddie. A soft-spoken, elderly descendant of former slaves, Eddie had formerly worked for Teackle Wallis, Wallis’s father’s namesake, before joining Solomon Warfield’s household.
Baltimore remained a southern outpost, with prevailing attitudes about race, and Eddie, along with a day nurse, were the first blacks young Wallis encountered. Although she later held true to the conventions of both her day and place of birth, it is interesting that her first real friendship was formed with the elderly black man who had spent most of his life working for her family. Wallis followed him as he trod up and down the flights of stairs, clad in his frock coat, striped gray trousers, and a stiffly starched shirt with a wing collar. Occasionally, she would be allowed to visit his family, riding the trolley with him to his nearby house, where she happily sipped tea and ate sweets.
10
Alice Warfield made the best of her situation at East Preston Street, but it is doubtful that she was very happy. Her only joy was her young daughter, but she constantly battled with her strong-willed mother-in-law, who had her own ideas as to how the child should be raised. Each lady tried her best to imbue Wallis with her own character, inevitably leading to confusion and desperation to please on the part of the young girl. “It may seem strange to say but one of my early impressions is that I was somehow the product of two family strains so dramatically opposed in temperament and outlook as to confront each other with impenetrable mysteries,” Wallis wrote.
11
She felt as if she were composed of “two alternating sides, one grave, the other gay. If the Montagues were innately French in character and the Warfields British, then I was a new continent for which they contended.”
12
The relationship between grandmother and granddaughter was not conventionally close, for Anna was never one to display much affection or betray emotion. Instead, she drew Wallis to her, demonstrating her feeling by filling her with a sense of family pride and social obligation. Wallis was taught early to respect her heritage, behave properly, and never forget that she was a lady. If she slid and bounced around on a favorite slippery leather couch, her grandmother scolded loudly: “Bessiewallis, can’t you be still for just a minute?” And if she failed to emulate her grandmother’s impeccable posture, Anna would ask in her throaty southern drawl: “Bessiewallis, how will you ever grow up to be a lady unless you learn to keep your back straight?”
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Sitting firmly in her rosewood and mahogany rocker, her fingers constantly busy with needlework as she spoke and the black silk of her dress rustling as she moved back and forth, Anna Emory Warfield imparted to Wallis nothing short of an education in life, politics, religion, and deportment. Her grandmother raised Wallis to respect her southern roots. “I doubt whether she ever knowingly invited a Northerner into her house,” she later declared. “Never marry a Yankee,” Anna Warfield would implore young Wallis, reminding her of her grandfather’s imprisonment at the outbreak of the Civil War.
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This southern heritage was reflected in the care Wallis took with her clothes and appearance. Her concepts of hospitality and entertaining also formed around southern ideals that all should be made to feel welcome and important. Her charm and conversational wit stemmed from these talks, with her grandmother constantly reminding her that southern women should be decorative, pretty, and amusing at table. She learned that she must never be boring, that she should always watch others, listen to them, draw them into conversation, and smile as they spoke. It was her job, as a southern woman, to entertain, to pull her own weight, and to cater to the needs of her guests.
On Saturdays, Wallis accompanied her grandmother as she did the week’s shopping. At eight in the morning, a polished black victoria rolled up before the white marble steps where Wallis, carefully attired in a white dress and blue overcoat, waited impatiently at the door for her grandmother, who was garbed in her most formal widow’s weeds, complete with black bonnet and crepe veil.
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Assisted by the driver and a footman, the pair climbed into the waiting carriage and, drawn by Anna’s big mare Gadfly, set off through the streets of Baltimore to the Richmond Market, where rows of stalls spread beneath canvas awnings. At the end of the day’s shopping, if Wallis had behaved, Anna Warfield led her granddaughter to the candy stand, where she was rewarded with a bag of yellow taffy.
16
Sundays were reserved for services at Baltimore’s Episcopalian Christ Church, embellished with all the refinements of clerical robes, glistening silver, and glorious litanies. On the rare occasions when, due to illness, Anna Emory Warfield could not lead her family to their regular pew, she expected young Wallis to return to the house on East Preston Street immediately following the service and repeat the details of the day’s sermon and Bible lessons. She followed along in the leather-bound family Bible, her place marked with a purple satin ribbon; if Wallis misquoted, her grandmother would promptly correct her.
17
Eventually—and perhaps inevitably—tensions between Alice Warfield and her late husband’s family rose to a fever pitch. Each month, Alice received an allowance from her brother-in-law Solomon; this charity was humiliating enough, but Alice was often questioned about her expenditures, which were frequently extravagant, and made to feel like a naughty schoolgirl. For a proud, sensitive woman, this was unbearable. Even worse, no matter what she did, no matter whom she befriended, how she spent her days, how she dressed, or how she raised her daughter, nothing Alice did seemed to meet with the approval of her censorious relatives. When a suitable period had passed, the still-young and attractive Alice cast aside her widow’s weeds and escaped the oppressive mourning by discreetly allowing suitable young men to escort her to evening dinners and other entertainments. Anna, who had never ceased mourning her husband or worn anything other than black, was horrified at what she believed to be her daughter-in-law’s fast morals and lack of respect for the memory of her dead son.