Coasters, 1924

Shanghai street scene, 1920s

When the book by Paul French, Her Lotus Year, came out last year, I was excited to finally get the inside details on the messy affair between Wallis Simpson (the Duchess of Windsor) and Count Galeazzo Ciano which occurred simultaneously between that of Ciano’s wife, Edda Mussolini (the daughter of Benito), and the warlord, Zhang Xueliang. Unfortunately, I found out that the affair between Ciano and Simpson was impossible, and it was laid to rest in the biography – Simpson was in Shanghai and Beijing in 1924, and Ciano was there in 1931, so their paths never crossed. (However, they did become acquainted later on in Europe.)

              Her Lotus Year describes a year in the life of Wallis Simpson (then Wallis Spencer), the notorious American divorcee who the King of England would abdicate his throne for, while she was just ending her first marriage. Although she is now typically described as a “socialite” (a term generally reserved for trust fund kids of prior generations) she was actually born and raised in mainly middle class, even straitened, circumstances in Baltimore. She married young to a naval officer, Win Spencer, and spent years living on military bases in unfashionable parts of the United States with him. When she was 28, she ended up in Hong Kong because he was stationed there, and when his drinking and violence got out of control, she left him, started traveling up the coast of China, stopping by in Shanghai and then spending months in Beijing. At that time, foreign women did make a living traveling up and down the coast of China (“coasters”), a stereotype later romanticized in the film Shanghai Express. Because of this association, rumors that she became a prostitute, a paid mistress who had a botched abortion, and posed nude for money, dogged Wallis Simpson for the rest of her life.

              However, her main activities in Shanghai and Beijing were not that dark, and mainly involved going to dances, watching horse races, eating at restaurants, shopping for antiques, playing cards, riding horses, and going for walks. She lived as a houseguest of friends in Beijing and spent several months playing bridge and poker for money and re-selling antiques to support herself there. One surprising part of French's account was the description of the activities of the foreign community in Beijing and Shanghai, and how similar those activities remain to this day. In the 1920s, several foreigners who were in China for reasons unknown and were not particularly rich or prominent in their home countries, would do things like rent out old temples in the mountains outside of Beijing and convert them into art studios or summer houses. The constant carousel of hedonism and the leveling of the social playing field abroad among foreigners, who upped their social class simply by changing their geographic location, seems like it could describe the scene today. I was surprised by how unoriginal living abroad is, with that style of living having remained the same for Euro-Americans for more than a century.

While in Beijing, living among others in the legation quarter, Simpson also had a short affair with an Italian officer. She wasn’t part of a high-flying set while she was there, so her activities, though cosmopolitan, were not extravagant. She was still very much a middle-class woman whose decision to leave her husband while abroad led to her having to develop some level of sophistication by necessity. It led to her transformation from a sheltered good middle class girl into a resourceful adult.

Eventually, her divorce was granted, and she left China around the time of the Shanghai Massacre of 1925. Afterwards, she married again. Much later, while still married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, she met Prince Edward, who became king. She eventually divorced her second husband in order to be with Edward, who abdicated his throne in order to marry her.

The rumor that she had an affair with Count Ciano in China as well as other more lurid details of the "China Dossier" (a legendary but fake collection of evidence of Simpson's debauchery abroad) was fuel for a broader rumor that her and Prince Edward were Nazi sympathizers. She was targeted by the British tabloids ever since becoming involved with Edward and remained a target of theirs for the rest of her life.

Looking back at her life, and her China experience 100 years later, I would evaluate her more as an ordinary woman who won the lottery, which put her under a lot of scrutiny for ordinary decisions that she made. Her background (middle class girl then military wife) made it highly unlikely for her to end up with the glamorous life she had later, meeting Prince Edward at age 35 and embarking on an affair with him that led to marriage at age 42. What she got out of life seems to have very little to do with any personal moral quality, – even to her, many parts of her life must have seemed unbelievable and unexpected, even absurd – so I find little need to label her actions as “good” or “bad,” though she definitely made many bad calls throughout her life.

Based on things she reportedly said and photo evidence of her meeting Hitler, she was likely a Nazi sympathizer early on or at least someone who downplayed their atrocities, or was comfortable in the company of people associated with such atrocities. Reading her own memoir and French's biography, it doesn't seem like she put much thought into her life or actions, where they would lead her or how they would look to others, but simply had exceptional reflexes. Since she spent years honing her skills in poker and other competitive card games, she was well acquainted with acting on luck. Her essence is that of a gambler who ended up with a jackpot. Viewed in this way, the criticism of her just reads as jealousy more than anything else.

Biographies tend to sympathize with their subject, and though I enjoyed Her Lotus Year, I just don't have the same attachment to Wallis Simpson as its author. While it would be difficult for anyone to wake up everyday and face the derision of an entire nation, and a media invested in digging out every sordid and embarrassing detail of your past life, the fantastic wealth must have been a nice compensation, so I can't fully get behind the attempt to portray her as a victim in that respect. As much as the author did attempt to show what made her special, her best quality is her commonness. The fact that a fairly typical, middle class woman with two bad marriages under her belt ended up marrying the king of England in her forties, well, no more needs to be said. Portraying her as special in an attempt to logically explain how she snared a king is needless. Its her essential mediocrity that makes the story of her life so compelling.

References:

French, Paul. (2024). Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Moseley, Ray. (1999). Mussolini’s Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Windsor, Wallis. (1957). The Heart has its Reasons: The Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor. New York: Crest Books.