That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (7 page)

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

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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 Jews and Chinese revolutionaries. She might as well seize the chance to sample what was often described as ‘a narrow layer of heaven on a thick slice of hell’ without being watched by any Warfields, Washington hostesses or other tutting Baltimore matrons. Win saw her off on a steamer to Shanghai, and they were to meet only once again.

There were several navy wives on the boat and Wallis was pleased to find Mary Sadler, already a Washington acquaintance and wife of the now Admiral F. H. Sadler, commanding officer of the USS
Saratoga
. As the pair sailed up the Huangpu River into the Soochow Creek to the accompaniment of foghorns booming on the river and the rattle of a tram on the nearby Nanking Road she would have been struck by signs illuminated by gas lamps, electric lights not yet having been installed in the city, adding to its air of mystery and half-lit gloom or decadence. Passing the often dilapidated junks anchored four deep, she would have smelled the unique mixture of sewage, seaweed and sulphurous steam that permeated the city, a reminder of its origins as a muddy swamp.

All China in 1924 was in a febrile state after the collapse of the ruling dynasties in 1911 while various warlords fought for control. Many of these power struggles were centred on Shanghai, where in 1921 the Communist Party of China was founded. Shanghai was one of the major treaty ports awarded to the British in 1842 following the Opium War, with leases which were now causing increasing resentment among the restive Chinese. The British and the American settlements had joined to form the International Settlement, run by the Shanghai Municipal Council but ruled by a British police force and judiciary. The French opted out and instead maintained their own French Concession, located to the south of the International Settlement and largely governed by French laws. It was here, in the Rue Molière, that Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary and political leader largely responsible for the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty, chose to live. Many of the White Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks made their homes close by. There was also a Chinese-administered part of the city where the largely impoverished native populations were subject to Chinese law overseen by the so-called Mixed Courts in the Settlement and this left many of them at the mercy of the warlords.

From the end of the nineteenth century, the treaties forced the opening up of all of China but especialhe but esply Shanghai and other ports to Western culture and influence through trade. By the early twentieth century, the city was poised to reap the rewards of having avoided any involvement in the First World War and swiftly became a booming economic centre, the commercial hub of East Asia attracting banks from all over the world as well as economic migrants and many shady types. It was a fashionable centre of prosperity with British emporia where staples such as marmalade could be found and French boutiques with high-fashion clothes and accessories. The city was also the centre of national and international opium smuggling during the 1920s. The notorious Green Gang became a major influence in the International Settlement with the Commissioner of the Shanghai Municipal Police reporting that corruption associated with the trade had affected a large proportion of his force. An extensive crackdown in 1925 simply displaced the focus of the trade to the neighbouring French Concession.

Prostitution flourished in Shanghai as nowhere else. In 1920 the Municipal Council calculated that there were more than 70,000 prostitutes in the foreign concession, among them 8,000 White Russians. By 1930, Shanghai had more prostitutes – or ‘flowers’ – per capita than any other city in the world, and they had a defined hierarchy listed in guidebooks. At the top, able to command most money, were male opera singers, then first-class courtesans followed by ordinary courtesans, prostitutes in tea houses, street walkers, prostitutes in opium dens, prostitutes in nail sheds, who offered sex standing up, and prostitutes at wharves, sometimes called Saltwater Sisters, who as their name suggests catered to sailors and were on the bottom rung. There were, as in any city, special streets including the enticingly named Love Lane with both tea houses and sing-song establishments; and there were courtyard bordellos, which offered not only sex but places for Chinese men to socialize, and to smoke opium, gamble or play mah-jong, and permanently moored or cruising ‘flower boats’ which could be hired for the whole evening. In other words there were few tastes that were not catered to.

Later, when Wallis became involved with the Prince of Wales, rumours arose that a ‘China Dossier’ had been compiled by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on orders from Queen Mary detailing her lewd or undercover activities. But such a dossier has never been identified, even though spies abounded in Shanghai’s International Settlement and even though the Special Branch there apparently kept files on all important people in the city. Britain’s National Archives in Kew have several leather-bound marbled volumes from the country’s various consular posts in China indicating that the British government was very worried about the increasing anti-British resentment which burst forth during strike-related riots in the summer of 1924 and which it feared could be exploited by Bolshevik propagandists and spread to the whole of China. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) received reports in August 1924 that Soviet consuls in Shanghai were openly supplying funds to Chinese students in the guise of relief.

Another file headed ‘Bad Hats or Sundry Suspects’ contains some extraordinary material, including notes about Irish missionary priests shown to be members of Sinn Fein, arms smugglers, Bolshevik agitators and petty criminals, with or without a limp, who tried to get new passports and new identities. Gerve Baronet, wife of an Italian politician, comes under attack in a note headed ‘Peking Gossip’, while the maverick former member of the British House of Commons turned Buddhist monk Trebitsch Lincoln was being watched by Harry Steptoe, the SIS representative in Shanghai and Peking. But even at such a time of feverish activity and suspicion there is no mention of an Americaappf an Amn woman called Mrs Spencer acting in any unusual way.

Nonetheless, in spite of numerous attempts, the worst that can be pinned on Wallis is a rumour that she appeared in a series of naughty postcards, posing in nothing more than a lifebuoy. There is even a whole book written about the story. But although serious authors insist that these images exist and Harriet Sergeant, author of a scholarly tome on Shanghai, writes of having interviewed a responsible ex-policeman who had seen them – ‘a former member of the International Settlement’s Special Branch told me that he had confiscated a number as pornographic material’ – no one today can provide the postcards themselves.

The Astor House Hotel, something of a rabbit warren comprising at least four different buildings, but a favourite haunt of most naval wives and celebrities stopping off in Shanghai, is where Wallis and Mary Sadler appear to have stayed. Its faded grandeur still evident today, the Astor House Hotel was close by the Garden Bridge and a short walk from the main street, the Bund. The Bund was home to the grand banks, trading companies and newspaper offices, their magnificent neo-classical edifices graced with marble entrance halls on one side and overlooking the river with its constantly loading and unloading cargo ships and wharves on the other. Number 3 The Bund was the most exclusive place of all: the British, male-only Shanghai Club with its famous Long Bar. The Bund was also where the Palace Hotel was to be found. Wallis wrote that she stayed here, and she may have done on other occasions when she visited Shanghai; there are a number of discrepancies and ellipses in her account of her year in China.

Wallis wasted little time in contacting the Englishman to whom she had been given an introduction. ‘His name does not matter. I came to know him as “Robbie”,’ she wrote, insisting rather bizarrely that she got in touch only at the urging of a woman she did not know in the next-door hotel room. She describes him as young, handsome, beautifully dressed with an attractive voice. For as soon as she sent him an introductory note he responded, first with a basket of exotic fruit and then with a telephone call inviting her to join him for a cocktail in the bar later that afternoon. Wallis, wearing a single red camellia, was clearly an attractive prospect as the drink turned into dinner, which proved ‘even more pleasant’.

Who was this man and why was Wallis so coy about naming him? Others have named him as Harold Robinson, a British diplomat, but there was no British diplomat of that name in the city. He was probably Harold Graham Fector Robinson, a British architect born in Hampstead in north London who went (or was sent) to Shanghai as a young man, returning to the UK briefly around 1910 to qualify for election as an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). According to Kelly’s Street Directory for 1924 Shanghai, Harold Robinson had a residence at 27 Great Western Road, a good address in the west end of town, close to the Kadoorie Marble Hall mansion. There is neither wife nor children listed for that address. As Wallis remarked, Robbie lived in a large house with his (male) business partner, ‘where they entertained the more amusing members of the foreign colony then predominantly British’. Robbie knew everyone in Shanghai, and he swiftly drew Wallis into the sort of world she thrived on – garden parties and race meetings at the Shanghai Race Club, which was at the centre of all social life. In the 1930s, when the clubhouse was rebuilt, he was the architect responsible for the rebuilding the 66-acre racecourse, where polo and bowling also took place. Yet Wallis described continuing the warm friendship with him as ‘purposeless’, even though sem"ven thohe clearly relished his company.

Robbie also escorted Wallis to dinners at the Majestic Hotel on Bubbling Well Road where:

in a bower of flowers one danced in a sunken courtyard by the light of coloured lanterns. It was here in the company of Robbie that I first heard Vincent Youmans’
Tea for Two
and the combination of that melody, the moonlight, the perfume of jasmine, not to mention the Shangri-la illusion of the courtyard, made me feel that I had really entered the Celestial Kingdom. No doubt about it, life in Shanghai in 1924 was good, very good and in fact almost too good for a woman under a dangerous illusion of quasi-independence.

Wallis, like any woman of her class, could not be expected to know about the desperate conditions of poor factory workers or rickshaw pullers sleeping in alleyways or sampans. But she was clearly oblivious to the deep political unrest and frequent dangerous skirmishes in the city. The Shanghai Wallis is referring to in 1924 was one of dinner parties and tea dances – although according to one commentator more whisky than tea was often drunk at both – as well as boutiques selling fine silks, jade and choice pieces of chinoiserie. Several luxury hotels employed top American jazz bands to entertain the hundreds of couples who twirled around the magnificent sprung floors. But her account is interesting because, although she refers to being in the city in 1924, she obviously returned at least once more the following year as there exists a Shanghai Race Club complimentary member’s badge in the name of Mrs Spencer for the spring 1925 meeting.

Robbie tried to help her with a divorce by introducing her to a lawyer in Shanghai, but this attempt too was abandoned once she discovered the cost. Instead she decided, rather than return to the US and her disapproving mother, that she would visit Peking. As she was not yet thirty, there was an element of now or never about it for her. In 1925 there was no direct rail link between the two cities, so getting to the capital involved a journey of at least a thousand miles, taking a coastal steamer to Tientsin and then transferring by train, the famous ‘blue express’. The warlords were renowned for stopping trains in remote places, boarding them and arousing fear and havoc among the passengers. Wallis, having persuaded Mary Sadler to travel with her, was warned when she arrived at Tientsin that trains were experiencing daily raids. Both women were firmly advised by the American Consul not to proceed to Peking, and Mary Sadler, taken ill at this point, returned to Shanghai. Yet Wallis insisted on her right to proceed. ‘Having come so far, I did not propose to be stopped by a mere Civil War and accordingly informed the Consul that I was sure my husband would have no objections to my going on and there could be no question of the government being held responsible for me.’

Wallis disobeyed the Consul’s advice and continued on what became a thirty-eight-hour train journey, interrupted by brigands with rifles boarding the train several times. But although they looked menacing, nothing disastrous happened to her and she arrived in Peking several hours late to be met on the platform by Colonel Louis Little, the officer commanding the US Legation Guard at Peking and a man she had known slightly in Washington through Corinne. The Consul, snubbed by Wallis, had wired forward about this brazen American subject. Wallis’s ability to use to her advantage contacts she barely knew was an art form enabling her to leap around the world. The Colonel forgave her and helped her on her way to the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, located close to tlerd closehe US Legation and just across the road from the old Imperial City and Palace.

Staying here was a luxury which for the two weeks she had in mind would have used up all of Win’s $225-a-month allowance. But one evening, escorted by a man she had met once or twice in Paris through Corinne, a minor diplomat called Gerry Green who had invited her to a dance at the hotel, Wallis spotted yet another friend on the other side of the ballroom. Katherine Bigelow was a stunningly beautiful friend from Coronado days whose first husband had been killed early on in the First World War and who was now married to an American would-be writer and dilettante, Herman Rogers. Pleased to see an old friend, Katherine introduced Wallis to Herman: ‘an unusually attractive man with a lean handsome face, brown wavy hair and the bearing and look of an athlete’.

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