The reappearance, in a Vintage edition, of Caroline Blackwood’s 1995 book about a celebrated old woman’s very strange old-woman lawyer, The Last of the Duchess, is a bit of a puzzle: why now? And why with an introduction by James Fox (the actor, presumably)? It seems that Fox met Blackwood when “our sons went to the same school.” It seems, also, that there has been a stage adaptation of the book, with Anna Chancellor as Blackwood — that’s a show I’d like to see. I remember when the book came out, and I sniffed disparagingly. What a pathetic story, the old duchess effectively imprisoned by her crazed-seeming attorney, Maître Suzanne Blum. In those days, I didn’t think much of the Windsors. I’d been fascinated by them as a boy, because the very idea of giving up a throne for love was too preposterous — so what was the story? Later, the life that the Windsors led struck me as shabby and meretricious — why should such nasty people be famous? That’s how I felt about them when The Last of the Duchess came out. A book about the Windsors could be no better than they themselves. (Plus, I had no idea who Caroline Blackwood was.)

My opinion of Wallis Windsor was shifted by a passage in Nicholas Haslam’s memoir, which I can’t quote because the book is in storage at the moment. Haslam recounts an evening which he spent with the duchess, in part in a linen closet at the Waldorf Tower. It was her idea: she wanted to watch her own guests arrive at the door of her flat. I can’t remember what was so funny, and laughing at your guests does seem more than a little heartless, but Haslam beautifully conveyed the duchess’ sense of fun. This was new. I had seen her as somehow managing to be both vulgar and stuffy, and always unpleasant — I thought of the servants who were charged with carrying the couple’s freshly-pressed bedlinens every day from the ironing board to the bed without folding them (an ordeal out of a fairy tale!) — but not as fun, as, well, naughty. I must confess to a life-long attraction to naughty fun, which, regrettably, isn’t always harmless. Reading about the duchess in the linen closet, I felt a certain naughty sympathy of my own.

So I was well-primed for Madonna’s W/E, which presents Wallis as stylishly insouciant and game for any amusement. That’s not, however, the point of the film. The point of the film is to propose that instead of seeing Wallis as an adventuress who schemed to become the queen of England (how unlikely that she should have wanted such a job), we regard her instead as a trophy for which her husband was willing to renounce his title. He wanted her that badly! But, did he love her? Was he really capable of loving anybody? He was certainly very foolish, not for giving up the throne, perhaps, but for mismanaging relations with his family so badly that their slight — the withholding of the “HRH” from the duchess — cast a pall over the entirety of his thirty-odd years with Wallis. It was a bad business and, worse, a boring business. W/E proposes that we regard the duchess as a prisoner. As does Caroline Blackwood, at the very end of her book.

Staring at the spikes of barbed wire fencing that encircled her house, I felt the Duchess of Windsor had always been locked up. As a child she had been imprisoned by the snobbish conventions of Baltimore. She had been shut up in the bathroom by Win Spencer, her drunken, jealous first husband. Ernest Simpson had restricted her in a different way. The boredom of her life with him had made her feel like a bottle of champagne that had been kept too long in the icebox. When the future King of England abdicated for her sake, she had no alternative but to marry him. Once he had renounced so much, it was very difficult for her ever to leave him, although he was so dependent on her, so unflaggingly besotted, that the obsessional nature of his need for her must have often seemed like a prison.

And hardly had the duke died than the duchess fell into the hands of a former Hollywood lawyer, shut up in her house and forbidden the pleasures of vodka and the company of her friends. It really must have been too Grimm.

The Last of the Duchess is not really about the Duchess of Windsor, who never makes a direct appearance. It is not even about Maître Blum, although we seen plenty of her. It’s about Caroline Blackwood herself, about her curiosity and her deadpan sense of humor. Successively married to Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell, she was something of a duchess herself. (She was in any case the daughter of a marquess.) As Lady Caroline, she had no trouble (or none reported) in getting to meet many of Wallis’s old friends, such as Diana, Lady Mosley, or Lady Diana Cooper. What began as the mere bagatelle of an assignment — accompanying Lord Snowden on a shoot to photograph the duchess — became something of a crusade, when Maître Blum put the kaibosh on the shoot and made it impossible to visit the duchess at all. Blackwood tried to work up a campaign to liberate the duchess, whom she came to feel was being kept miserably alive by the obsessed lawyer. But the duchess’s old friends invariably backed down, frightened by the lawyer’s litigious disposition and violent character. How Caroline felt about the duchess’s plight is best captured in her sympathy for another old woman, Lady Monckton, whom she visits in a “home.”

Her “home” was very comfortable and pleasant. It had once been a grand country house and it had beautiful, well-kept grounds and the leaves of its copper beaches glowed reddish purple in the sunlight, and golden pheasants were meandering in a stately fashion across impeccably well-mown lawns. Inside there had been some attempt to make the “home” seem like a cheerful and idyllic grand English country house. Fires had been lit in the fireplaces and above them were ancient portraits of somebody’s ancestors to give a feeling of continuity. Only a faint smell of antiseptic and the terrible state of the inmates ruined the imposing atmosphere. Having lost all their faculties, they sat motionless in their various chairs. Some of them looked at television with their eyes closed. Kindly nurses helped them dress and undress. Tea and biscuits were brought to them at suitable intervals. Often they took naps to while away the long, pointless hours, so their trays were left untouched. There was little evidence that the golden pheasants and the splendor of the trees in the beautiful grounds by which they were surrounded could bring them much pleasure. Their biggest moment of struggle and drama was the time when two nurses carried them limping painfully to the lavatory and then brought them back to a bed or a chair.

What a breathtaking paragraph! Observe how steadily the “comfortable and pleasant” condition announced in the opening sentence is eroded by everything that follows. “Only a faint smell of antiseptic and the terrible state of the inmates ruined the imposing atmosphere” is worthy of Waugh. (Indeed, we are very close to Whispering Glades.) To begin such a statement with “only,” and then to mention the antiseptic smell first, as if that were worse than “the terrible state of the inmates,” completely encompasses the nightmarish pretence of elder-care at its most opulent. Like the duchess, Lady Monckton is the captive of an officious nurse who declares that she mustn’t tire herself out, and that visiting hours are over, even though the poor old lady seems to be having a very jolly time chatting with Blackwood.

At the beginning of the book, Blackwood assumes the air of not knowing very much about the Duchess of Windsor. Isn’t she dead already? As the story goes on, however, she reveals item after item of tittle-tattle about the duchess, in no particular order and not even going into her past until fairly late in the book, but showing that she’s as familiar as anybody with the “Windsor story.” Indeed, she has a hoot making fun of Michael Bloch’s proposal to write a “pro-Duke” book about the couple’s wartime stint in the Bahamas. She recites all the embarrassments of this episode — the extravagant redecoration of Government House, the friendship with Axel Wenner-Gren, the unsolved murder of Sir Harry Oakes — as so many minor impediments in the way of Bloch’s project.

While I was wondering how Michael Bloch would write his “pro-Duke” book I assumed he’d have to take a position pleasing to feminists and plead from that from the very beginning of his governorship the Duke had always put the concerns of the Duchess first.

I roared with laughter.  

The only problem is the morning-after feeling. There’s nothing else to read that is nearly as much fun.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 at 1:03 pm.