On the 20th of January 1936, King George V of the United Kingdom, the British Dominions and Emperor of India (as he liked to be known by his friends) died.
His eldest son, the Prince of Wales (known to his mates as Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor) became King and called himself Edward VIII. A pretty normal and standard succession by UK standards.
Except… Wallis Simpson – technically Baltimore gal Bessie Wallis Warfield, then Wallis Spencer (husband #1), then Wallis Simpson (husband #2), and for a few years the mistress of the Prince of Wales.
‘Mistress of the King’ Wallis Simpson
All fine – but her elevation to ‘Mistress of the King,’ not so much. Perhaps ‘mistress’ might have been okay, except…
1) Wallis wanted to divorce Ernest Simpson
2) The King wanted to marry her, meaning…
3) She would become Queen Wallis
BIG problem. Wallis was everything the British Establishment disliked – basically twice divorced and American.
But the King was insistent – he loved her, he was going to marry her, and who was going to stop him. He was THE KING, after all?
Well, it turned out that England’s unholy trinity of The Church of England, the Tory Party, and the ‘Establishment’ (the British elite social class) were determined to put an end to any ideas of Queen Wallis.
Their way of doing it?
Pernicious gossip and rumor, unfounded allegations and prurient assertions, from the year Wallis had spent in China – 1924/1925.
Wallis Simpson’s Year in China
It was quite a year – Wallis fled an abusive husband in Hong Kong, was stuck in a riot-torn Guangzhou, hung out for a while in Shanghai, passed through typhoid-ridden Tianjin, and spent six months of so in warlord besieged Beijing, living on a hutong and riding ponies on the Tartar Wall.
READ MORE: ‘Destination Peking’ and Beijing’s Original Hutong Hipsters
But none of these adventures were mentioned when the British Intelligence Services compiled a ‘China Dossier,’ supposedly detailing Wallis exploits in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing.
It made compelling reading, or rather Mayfair ladies-who-lunch gossip – no copy has ever surfaced and nobody really claims to have ever seen an actual paper version.
It was a smear campaign – designed to turn the upper echelons of UK society against Wallis, deter the King from marrying her, and end any idea of Queen Wallis once and for all.
READ MORE: Sex, Lies & Saucy Postcards: Wallis Simpson in China
Hearing of the rumors, Wallis screamed ‘Venom, venom, VENOM!’ The King stuck by her, married her on the French Riviera, and famously abdicated, giving up a throne, a kingdom and an empire for the woman he loved.
The pair became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and went into exile for the rest of their lives.
The rumors in the supposed ‘China Dossier,’ though, still persist – right down to today when they are often recycled in bad biographies and Britain’s famously pugnacious right wing press.
So is there anything to them?
The short answer is NO. But the clever thing (and remember, they’re not called the ‘intelligence’ service for nothing) was that all the gossip was true of others, and in an era lacking the internet or Google searches, the rumors sounded all too plausible to those who wanted to believe them.
So, here are three of the biggest allegations against Wallis about her time in China…
1) The Shanghai Grip
The most famous rumor in the China Dossier is the ‘Shanghai Grip’ allegation, which still resurfaces regularly and with just as much titillation today as in 1936.
The gist is that Wallis spent time in a Shanghai bordello in 1924 where she learned this supposed sexual technique, the skill of tightening and relaxing the vaginal muscles at will (“Makes a matchstick feel like a cigar,” someone infamously said, damning both Wallis and Edward!)
But sorry – never happened.
Wallis was, despite the legends, only in Shanghai a fortnight or so, and nobody else ever records learning this technique. It’s innuendo mixed with a dash of good old-fashioned Sinophobic stereotyping.
It also wasn’t very original – around the same time there was a vogue for European women being portrayed as sexually attracted to Egyptian and Arab men – think Rudolph Valentino and The Sheik, the hit film of 1921 – rumors of ‘Cleopatra’s Grip’ and the ‘Cairo Grip’ were rife.
Seems British intelligence just decided to add a ‘Shanghai Grip’ to the list too…
2) Nude Photos
Another long-lived and oft-resurrected tale of Wallis’ Shanghai sojourn is that, strapped for cash, she posed for naked and pornographic photos.
Just to add some spice to the tale it was said that Sir Victor Sassoon took the photos at his Cathay Hotel on the Bund.
READ MORE: Sir Victor Sassoon: Shanghai’s Playboy of the Eastern World
Sir Victor Sassoon in his element
But these photos have never surfaced – you’d definitely know if they had!
Perhaps they remain locked up deep in the vaults of Windsor Castle or in a safe in 10 Downing Street – but unlikely.
However, the 1920s saw all manner of weird foreigners in China talking naked photos of Chinese women, often very young Chinese women; the work of the Austrian photographer Heinz von Perckhammer in China remains highly controversial (though regularly posted on the Gram and elsewhere).
However, it is true that the man who built the Cathay Hotel (now the Fairmont Peace Hotel), Victor Sassoon, toff party boy with millions in the bank that he was, liked to take nude photos of his female acquaintances – it was his party trick.
Who knows how many agreed? One of the most likely candidates is the famous/infamous American Shanghailander socialite/journalist Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn.
READ MORE: Emily Hahn: The American Writer Who Shocked ’30s Shanghai
A portrait of Emily Hahn taken by Sir Victor Sassoon in Shanghai
But one of his subjects wasn’t Wallis Simpson – sorry.
When Wallis was in Shanghai, and indeed all the time she was in China, Sassoon was in Bombay, following his father’s death in 1924 and his subsequent elevation to become the Third Baronet of Bombay.
Rather than taking porno snaps in Shanghai of visiting American women, Sassoon was managing the family textile business and sitting in the Indian Legislative Assembly, making sure his remarks were recorded in the Bombay assembly’s minutes.
Oh, and the Cathay Hotel didn’t open till five years after Wallis left Shanghai.
The Cathay Hotel under construction, 1928
Postcard of The Cathay from the 1930s
The Cathay today, now named the Fairmont Peace Hotel
3) Wallis’ Affair with Count Ciano – Mussolini’s Son-in-Law
Wallis was in China because her first husband, Commander Earl ‘Win’ Spencer of the US Navy, who was stationed in Hong Kong.
Spencer was an abusive drunk, and she’d had enough of it. She thought maybe she could get a divorce in Shanghai (she couldn’t), and so then just kept on travelling through the country – a pretty brave and courageous thing for a single woman to do in 1924 warlord-wracked China.
Was she couriering documents for the US government? You’ll have to read my book to find out. But what she didn’t do was have an affair with Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian dictator Mussolini’s son-in-law.
Count Galeazzo Ciano (far right) with Hitler and Mussolini
Given that Ciano was a hardcore fascist, this was a damning allegation in many English eyes in 1936.
But it never happened; Ciano was an Italian diplomat and his first posting to China, to the Italian Legation in Beijing, began in May 1927, well after Wallis had left the city, never to return.
Their paths never crossed in China.
However, in the 1930s everyone knew Ciano was a skirt-chaser, even if he had (in 1930) married Edda, Mussolini’s daughter.
He was Italian Consul General to Shanghai in 1931 and 1932, and reportedly slept with as many women as he could seduce in the city.
Edda, tired of his constant philandering, had her own apparently very satisfying and fascinating affair with the dashing Shenyang warlord Zhang Xueliang, the ‘Young Marshall.’
Wallis did have an affair in Beijing – not with Ciano, but with a dashing Italian naval commander who…
A) Wasn’t married
B) Wasn’t a fascist
The Ciano tale was all British Intelligence manufactured fake news.
READ MORE: Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Man in China
Simpson and Edward, as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, meet their friend Adolph Hitler in 1937
Simpson Stitch-Up
So there you have it – Wallis was stitched up, conspired against, her China past used against her to scupper the King’s love.
It partly worked; it sullied her name and reputation for the rest of her life, and still today as the rumors are constantly brought up again and again.
Wallis Spencer, then Wallis Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor
China in the 1920s was a fascinating and stimulating place. Wallis loved it – it gave her her signature style of qipao, chignon hairstyles and obsession with jade; the Chinese-screens, ivory nick-nacks, and jade broaches she bought in Beijing’s markets stayed with her till the end of her life in Paris, over 60 years later.
And what she really did get up to in China is arguably even more fascinating that the rumors. It was, she said, “her Lotus Year,” a dreamlike time she never wanted to end. It deserves a retelling.
Her Lotus Year
China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson
New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor – her one year in China.
Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl ‘Win’ Spencer, a US Navy aviator.
From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, navy wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor?
The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China.
In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her ‘Lotus Year,’ referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home.
Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics; China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that ‘Lotus Year’ would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment.
The British government’s supposed ‘China Dossier’ of Wallis’ rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king.
Instead, French, an award-winning China historian, reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.
Her Lotus Year is an untold story in the colorful life of a woman too often maligned by history.
Paul French’s Her Lotus Year is released tomorrow, Monday, November 12, click here to purchase your copy now, or scan the QR code below:
