Was Wallis Simpson all woman? New evidence speculates about her sexual make-up | Daily Mail Online
Was Wallis Simpson all woman? There's been always been speculation about her sexual make-up. Now in a major reassessment her biographer uncovers new evidence
13:56 BST, 6 August 2011
The first time the future King of England met Wallis Simpson, she left little impression. After all, she was neither young nor beautiful. Her face was square-jawed and masculine, with an unfortunate mole. Her voice had an unpleasant rasp, according to many aristocrats who knew her, and her idea of wit was raucous American wisecracks. The person responsible for introducing her in January, 1931, to Edward, then the Prince of Wales, was his mistress Thelma Furness. As her husband was away, convention demanded that one married couple should be present as chaperones at her weekend house party.Having met Thelma through a mutual friend, Wallis was asked if she and her husband, Ernest, would provide the
necessary cover. You bet, they would.
Odd couple: Prince Edward with Wallis Simpson
For Ernest, an American businessman of Jewish extraction who’d taken British citizenship and revered the monarchy, meeting the king-in-waiting was close to the pinnacle of his dreams. For Wallis, the connection promised an important step up the social ladder, with the likelihood of more invitations to fashionable parties. Extremely nervous at the prospect of meeting royalty for the first time, she spent the whole of the previous day getting her hair and nails done. But whether the Prince even noticed is debatable.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share this article
As Wallis confided afterwards in a letter to her Aunt Bessie: ‘Probably we will never hear or see any of them again.’Yet, just three years later, this homely, twice-married American had displaced Thelma and become the latest mistress of the blond and blue-eyed prince who was a pin-up for millions. Not only that, but he had fallen so violently and obsessively in love that he was prepared to give up the throne in order to marry her. Those in the know shook their heads in disbelief. How on earth had a plain woman, in her late 30s managed to bewitch the most eligible bachelor in the world? What sinister hold did she have over him? And what were her secrets?Naturally, the rumour mill went into overdrive, helped along by the spurned Thelma Furness. The 5ft 7in Prince, she blabbed, was known as ‘the little man’ for another reason — and he was sexually inadequate and prone to premature ejaculation.Gradually, the word spread: between the
sheets, Wallis Simpson was in fact a femme fatale with legendary
talents. She had, according to one speculative study, ‘the ability to
make a matchstick feel like a cigar’.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrive at Southampton from New York
Charles Higham, one of her early biographers, went into greater detail, describing an ancient Chinese skill at which she was apparently adept, involving ‘a prolonged and carefully modulated hot oil massage’ and various arts to delay gratification.Indeed, it was known that Wallis had spent a good deal of time in China, where she was later to admit that her first husband had taken her out for drinks in bars of ill-repute. There was even rumoured to be a China dossier, which detailed the intimate techniques she’d perfected, variously called the Baltimore grip, Shanghai squeeze or China clinch. None of these rumours, however, has ever been conclusively proved, even if they do seem to explain why a king might forsake his birthright in order to possess her. Still, whether Wallis ever mastered the Shanghai squeeze or not, there’s no doubt that she was unusually experienced for a well-brought-up young lady in the early 20th century. Boy-mad while still at school, she’d married a U.S. Navy lieutenant at 20, and had at least one affair and countless flirtations before her second marriage, to Ernest Simpson.Indeed, the likelihood is that she knew about a variety of sexual techniques, including oral sex, which would not have been standard education for most British or American girls of the day.
Wallis Simpson, pictured in 1931, had a very active interest in the opposite sex from very early on
But Wallis almost certainly had a far deeper and darker secret. Recent research suggests that she might well have been born with what’s currently called a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or intersexuality, which affects about 4,000 babies annually in the UK. Some of its effects are so subtle that, even today, doctors delivering babies with ambiguous genitals cannot be immediately certain if they are holding a boy or a girl. This does not mean that Wallis was a man, and she was certainly not a freak. In fact, it’s unlikely that she’d have known that anything was wrong, at least for many years.Yet the diagnosis is more than wild conjecture because there’s strong circumstantial and psychosexual evidence that Wallis was not wholly female.The writer Michael Bloch, who lived and worked in Wallis’s house in Paris for years during the later years of her life, claimed that he’d discussed her sexuality with doctors. He came to the conclusion that she may have been suffering from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, which is at the milder end of the intersexuality spectrum. A girl with AIS is born genetically male as she has the XY chromosome. But because her body’s receptors are insensitive to large amounts of testosterone she produces, she develops outwardly as a woman. At puberty, however, the build-up of testosterone can result in long legs, large hands and strong muscles that aid athletic ability — all of which Wallis possessed. Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, with the internal reproductive organs of one sex and the external organs of another. Was this the case with Wallis? It certainly makes sense of an extraordinary remark she once made to a friend. She had never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands, nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below her personal ‘Mason–Dixon line’ — the name given to the border between the Southern and Northern parts of the United States. Without the benefit of a full ultrasound or scan, which hadn’t yet been invented, the condition could not have been diagnosed at her birth. So although Dr Lewis Allen, who delivered Wallis in 1898, might have noticed the baby had slightly strange-looking genitalia, he would have done his best to reassure her parents.‘She’ll grow out of it,’ he would have told them. And, indeed, until puberty, such girls easily pass as normal pre-pubescent females. After puberty, however, there can be a noticeable drift towards the external features of a male — such as a masculine bone structure, accelerated muscle development and a deep voice.
Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson were married on 3 June 1937, at Ch?teau de Candé, near Tours, France
On the face of it, at least, Wallis fits the bill. The biographer James Pope-Hennessy, who met her in 1958, commented in his journal that Wallis was ‘one of the very oddest women I have ever seen’.
‘She is, to look at, phenomenal,’ he added. ‘She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. I should be tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.’It wasn’t just her physical characteristics that had masculine tendencies. A well-known German graphologist, who was given a sample of her hand-writing but not her identity, concluded that the writer was ‘a woman with a strong male inclination in the sense of activity, vitality and initiative. She must dominate, she must have authority, and without sufficient scope for her powers can become disagreeable. She is ruled by contradictory impulses.’Few who knew Wallis would argue with the accuracy of that analysis. Of more weight is the opinion of Dr Christopher Inglefield, a plastic surgeon specialising in gender surgery today. Through his clinical practice, in which he advises patients on corrective surgery, he has considerable experience in assessing whether an individual is predisposed to survive as one sex or the other. According to him, Wallis’s known physical and behavioural characteristics clearly fit the stereotype for intersexuality.She didn't have sex with her first husbands
He points out that her angular, almost square-jawed face indicates a lack of the female hormone, oestrogen. Her masculine traits become even more obvious, he says, when you look at photographs of Wallis posing with her girlfriends — such as her best friend from school, Mary Kirk.‘Oestrogen is very softening. You can see Wallis’s condition clearly next to the very rounded face of Mary. Today, a course of oestrogen therapy can transform facial features. Had it been available in Wallis’s day, it would have dramatically changed her appearance.’It’s well-known, too, that a lack of ovaries affects body shape and breast development. Indeed, several successful models with an impossibly lean, rangy look are known to be women born with Disorders of Sexual Development. Wallis, for her part, was whippet-thin as a child. Thereafter, she became obsessed with maintaining a slim silhouette, which is of critical importance to intersexual women who want to avoid a masculine, solid appearance with no discernible waistline. There are yet more clues in Wallis’s behaviour. Dr Inglefield explains: ‘The problem for these individuals is: how do you confirm that you’re female if your biological responses are not like other girls? ‘Often, for a female lacking female organs, being boy-mad is
another is to get married as quickly as possible, thereby telling your peers you are a normal female.’ Not only is early marriage often the norm, but so is the urge to dress in a feminising way because of the need to fit into society — and Wallis, of course, first married at 20 and later became famous for her jewels and couture clothes.‘Look at me, I’m a woman,’ she was saying, in effect. ‘I’m not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but I am so elegant. I’m the epitome of womanhood.’
Wallis Simpson looking out her window during Trooping The Colour in 1972
Often, women with an intersexual condition believe that one of the most powerful ways to reaffirm their womanhood is by giving men intense sexual pleasure. Vaginal intercourse is often possible, even when the vagina is shallow. The ultimate confirmation of womanhood, of course, is to get pregnant — a clear impossibility for those born without a womb. So it seems significant that Wallis avoided the subject of reproduction entirely in her own memoirs. This is not normal. Almost all childless women writing reminiscences born more than a century ago, when birth control wasn’t readily available, manage in some way or other to refer to their deep longing for a child. Or else they insist that a decision was made not to have one. In Wallis’s case, with no career of her own during either of her first two marriages, she would certainly have been expected by her husbands, family and friends to start a family. So when she failed to become pregnant, it’s quite possible that she consulted a doctor and underwent an examination. At that point, the doctor may have been suspicious if he couldn’t see a cervix. Her inability to conceive — or difficulties she may have encountered having intercourse — were probably a contributory factor in the disintegration of her first marriage. Wallis’s mother Alice apparently said on her deathbed that her daughter could never have children. If that is the case, and if it was something Wallis always knew, she may have steeled herself very early on to the idea of being childless.At all events, she seems by her 20s to have resigned herself to the idea that she couldn’t conceive and concentrated on using her sexuality to attract men instead. 'I will marry for lots of money,' she announced Even her apparently robust self-confidence is a typical feature of certain women with gender disorders, who cope with the hidden, humiliating part of themselves by nurturing the belief that they’re special. ‘It’s not only a way of over-compensating,’ explains consultant psychiatrist Dr Domenico di Ceglie. ‘It’s also a way of managing the sense of inadequacy which would otherwise have been there. ‘If a woman knows that she possesses a secret which makes her a unique person, she can live with this by believing that she has something which makes her stand out against the rest. It’s like having a special gift.’ That gift became apparent when Wallis was still very young. Although she lived with her widowed mother in straitened circumstances in Baltimore, Maryland, she was remembered by all her schoolfriends as both exceptionally flirtatious and one of the most popular debutantes of her season.Born Bessie Wallis, she had ditched the first part of her name as fit only for cows and, according to one of her friends, brazenly announced that she wanted to marry for ‘lots of money’. At the time, this aspiration seemed wholly within her grasp, as she appeared to have a magnetic power to attract men. Many who knew her have commented on her sex appeal, her contagious laugh and — in the words of a friend — ‘beautiful dark sapphire blue eyes, full of sparkle and nice mischief’.
The story of Wallis Simpson is due to be the subject of a film directed by Madonna, out later this year
A bridesmaid at Wallis’s first wedding described her later as a typical Southern belle, who could no more keep from flirting than from breathing. ‘She could come into a room full of women and you wouldn’t pay any attention to her — but the minute a man came in, she’d sparkle and turn on the charm.’ It was certainly a matter of pride to Wallis that she was one of the first of her friends to marry. But her good-looking husband, a naval aviator called Win Spencer, turned out to be a drunk with a violent temper. She struggled to make the marriage work, staying with him for eight years. But when he locked her up once for hours in the bathroom, it was the last straw and she demanded a divorce — to the horror of her extended family, who prided themselves on their respectability. After an affair with an Argentinian diplomat, who ditched her for another woman, she spent what she described as a ‘lotus year’, visiting friends in China. There, according to her friend Diana Angulo, Wallis was ‘infamous for arousing bouts of passion among adoring males’.But none of her flirtations with the bedazzled expats resulted in a proposal, and she was horribly aware that she was approaching 30 and could not live forever on the charity of friends.Just in time, through her schoolfriend Mary Kirk, she met a businessman called Ernest Simpson. Despite being married with a child, he started falling for Wallis over games of bridge and was soon taking her out to lunches, dinners and art galleries.Wallis, naturally, always insisted that the four-year Simpson marriage was on the rocks long before she met Ernest. But Dorothea Simpson suggested otherwise. ‘From the moment I met her I never liked her at all,’ she said later. ‘I’ve never been around anybody like that — she moved in and helped herself to my house and my clothes and, finally, to everything.’ Ernest, who worked in shipping, was moderately well-off and not bad-looking. Having enlisted in the Coldstream Guards during World War I, he had remained in love with everything British and was now keen to move to London.
Wallis Warfield, pictured aged just ten years old
Along with his air of dependability, this was a key attraction for 30-year-old Wallis. Still bruised by the shame of her divorce, she was just as eager to make a fresh start in a city where she wasn’t known. At first, all went to plan. They found a temporary house in the West End, and Ernest’s much older sister Maud, who’d also settled in Britain, threw luncheon parties to introduce Wallis to
her friends. Among them was the young Barbara Cartland, then a society hostess and fledgling novelist, who recalled that Wallis was not only ‘badly dressed but aggressively American. She also told us rather vulgar stories and I was shocked to the core’. But Maud’s friends were mostly respectable elderly aristocrats who did good works, and Wallis quickly grew bored. A new flat where she could entertain proved to be the answer, and she started collecting a circle of her own — most of them rich Americans, such as Benjamin Thaw, newly-appointed First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy, and his glamorous wife Consuelo. Quickly, Wallis established a reputation as a successful and unusual hostess who could mix a mean cocktail — or KT, as she called it. Her parties were small, but her attention to detail was second to none. ‘Wallis’s parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave,’ commented one guest. It was Consuelo who introduced Wallis to her sister, Thelma Furness, the much-gossiped-about lover of the Prince of Wales. Then 37, he was one of the most famous men in the world, adored for his boyish good looks and radiant charm. But like Wallis, he had dark secrets of his own. Several of those closest to him had already expressed the opinion that Edward was mentally unbalanced. Not only that, but it was even whispered that the future king was actually insane.Intriguingly, as we shall find out on Monday, there is indeed evidence to support this. Did Wallis sense this? Contrary to popular opinion, it now appears that his androgynous American mistress was not keen to marry him. She was far from being the instigator of the 1936 Abdication crisis, but had to learn, slowly, to live with the consequences.Extracted from THAT WOMAN: The Life Of Wallis Simpson,
Duchess Of Windsor by Anne Sebba, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on August 31 at ?20. (C) 2011 Anne Sebba. To order a copy for ?16.99 (incl p&p) call 0.
Share or comment on this article
MOST READ NEWS
No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts,
We are no longer accepting comments on this article.
DON'T MISS
MORE DON'T MISS
EDITOR'S SIX OF THE BESTEnable or Disable Windows Features Using DISM
Enable or Disable Windows Features Using DISM
Expand the table of content
This documentation is archived and is not being maintained.
Enable or Disable Windows Features Using DISM
Updated: October 20, 2013Applies To: Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2
The Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool is a command-line tool that is used to modify Windows(R) images. You can use DISM to enable or disable Windows features directly from the command prompt, or by applying an answer file to the image. You can enable or disable Windows features offline on a WIM or VHD file, or online on a running operating system.
In this topic:
Open a command prompt with administrator privileges.
To use DISM from an installation of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK), locate the Windows ADK servicing folder and navigate to this directory. By default, DISM is installed at C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\, in Windows 8.1, and C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\, in Windows 8.
DISM is available in Windows 8.1, Windows(R) 8, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server(R) 2012, Windows PE 5.0, and Windows(R) Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) 4.0. You can install DISM and other deployment and imaging tools, such as Windows System Image Manager (Windows SIM), on another supported operating system from the Windows ADK. For more information, see .
Use the /Get-ImageInfo option to retrieve the name or index number for the image that you want to modify. An index or name value is required for most operations that specify an image file.
For example, at the command prompt type:
Dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:C:\test\images\install.wim
Mount the offline Windows image. For example, type:
Dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:C:\test\images\install.wim /Name:"Base Windows Image" /MountDir:C:\test\offline
List all of the features available in the operating system. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-Features
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Get-Features
You can use &featurelist.txt to redirect the output of the command to a text file that is named featurelist.
Review the list of features to find the feature that you want to enable, disable, remove, or restore.
Use /Get-FeatureInfo to list information about the specific feature you are interested in. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:TFTP
Enable a specific feature in the image. You can use the /All argument to enable all of the parent features in the same command. For example, type:
Dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /All
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /All
Optional: Get the status of the feature you have enabled. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:TFTP
If the status is Enable Pending, you must boot the image in order to enable the feature entirely.
Enable a specific feature in the image. If you do not specify a source, DISM will look in the default location specified by group policy for the required files needed to enable the feature For more information, see .
If the files are not found in the default location, DISM will contact Windows Update (WU) for the required files. You can use the /LimitAccess argument to prevent DISM from contacting WU.
If you specify multiple /Source arguments, the files are gathered from the first location where they are found and the rest of the locations are ignored.
For example, type:
Dism /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /Source:Z:\sources\SxS /Source:C:\test\mount\windows /LimitAccess
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /Source:C:\test\mount\windows
Optional: Get the status of the feature you have enabled. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:TFTP
If the status is EnablePending, you must boot the image in order to enable the feature entirely.
Disable a specific feature in the image. For example, type:
Dism /online /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP
Optional: Use DISM /GetFeatureInfo to get the status of the feature you have disabled. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:TFTP
If the status is DisablePending, you must boot the image in order to disable the feature entirely.
Remove a specific feature in the image without removing the feature's manifest from the image. This option can only be used when servicing Windows 8.1, Windows(R) 8, Windows Server 2012 R2, or Windows Server(R) 2012. For more information, see .
For example, type:
Dism /online /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /Remove
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:TFTP /Remove
Optional: Use DISM /GetFeatureInfo to get the status of the feature you have disabled. For example, type:
Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:TFTP
The status is Disabled with Payload Removed.
In Windows SIM, open an existing catalog by clicking Select a Windows Image on the File menu and specifying the catalog file type (.clg) in the drop-down list, or create a new catalog by clicking Create Catalog on the Tools menu.
Expand the catalog in the Windows Image pane, and then expand Packages.
Expand Foundation, and right-click Microsoft-Windows-Foundation-Package.
Click Add to Answer File.
Click Enabled or Disabled next to the features that you intend to enable or disable. Click the arrow to select the opposite choice.
You might have to expand an item to see all its children. You must enable the parent if any one of its children are enabled.
You can't restore or remove a Windows feature for features on demand with an unattended answer file.
Click Tools on the main menu, and then click Validate Answer File.
Correct any errors that appear in the Messages pane, and save the answer file.
At the command prompt, type the following command to apply the unattended answer file to the image.
Dism /online /Apply-Unattend:C:\test\answerfiles\myunattend.xml
To service an offline image, specify the location of the mounted image directory. For example, type:
Dism /Image:C:\test\offline /Apply-Unattend:C:\test\answerfiles\myunattend.xml
For more information about Windows SIM, see .
Commit the changes and unmount the image. For example, type:
Dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:C:\test\offline /Commit
IN THIS ARTICLE
Is this page helpful?
Additional feedback?
1500 characters remaining
Thank you!
We appreciate your feedback.
(C) Microsoft 2017