Oh, ick.
As with all Truly Tasteless fashion trends-indeed, as with flu epidemics, locust plagues and new forms of rock music-we should have seen it coming. Once the perpetrators of High Tack smell the meat a-cookin`, anything becomes possible and the worst possible becomes inevitable. So it is that we are now confronted with a ghastly new fashion concept labeled-hold on to your sequins-”The Duchess of Windsor Look.”
Never a monarch of Britain but ever the Queen of Social Climbers, the duchess died last year leaving a vast haul of gaudy baubles that certainly didn`t come from the profits of her mother`s Baltimore boarding house.
But they were enough to get noses twitching at teddibly British Sotheby`s auction house. After modestly estimating that the assorted rocks would bring in a mere $7 million, Sotheby`s launched a heavy-breathing hype of the sorry, sordid saga of the late King Edward VIII and his mistress-turned-duchess as something like ”THE GREATEST ROMANCE SINCE THE FORMATION OF THE UNIVERSE!!!” You`d think it rivaled those of Cleopatra and Antony, Hepburn and Tracy, Rob Lowe and Princess Stephanie-or even Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra.
Consequently, the ultimate take for said gems at last spring`s gauche gala sale in Geneva-which resembled the shah of Iran`s last birthday party, if not Marie Antoinette`s-topped $50 million.
Toques and clutches
And, with the smell of 50 million big ones in the air, now everyone`s nose is twitching. There has come forth a fashion Windsor-mania featuring everything from black cotton velveteen toque with gold swirl motif to gold-trimmed honey-colored alligator box clutch ”inspired by the Duchess of Windsor (to) add a regal touch to daytime dressing.”
They even persuaded dazzling Dianne deWitt, one of the world`s top models, to pose in the stuff in glossy fashion magazine photos. ”You, too, can look like the Duchess of Windsor with these toques and clutches,” the pix seem to say. But what they`re really saying is you, too, can look like dazzling Dianne.
Now, reeeeeallllly.
It isn`t just that Dianne has golden blond hair and the duchess` was the color of, well, the coal dust in the basement of Ma`s Baltimore boarding house. It`s that Dianne is considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, while the duchess was one of the great crones of history-from age 16 on (and I have a picture of her at a girls` camp to prove it). This is like bringing in Catherine Deneuve to pose for the Tugboat Annie Look.
This isn`t merely my opinion. Consider this observation from one of her greatest admirers, her fellow American social climber Chips Channon, upon meeting her on one of his climbs: ”She is a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large startled eyes and a huge mole.”
Fun but selfish
Her lifelong friend and benefactor Herman Rogers, who harbored her in down-and-out days in China when she was gambling and sponging for a living and provided her a sanctuary during Edward VIII`s abdication crisis, said this:
”In the old days, she could be fun, but she was always the most selfish woman I`ve ever known in my life.”
In the period before the future duchess divorced her second husband to marry Edward, another contemporary found her to be ”a very declassee American married to a fourth-rate Englishman-the Prince is sinking lower and lower in his taste in women.” Nine months later the same observer said: ”Everyone seems to have a new disease-`Simpsonitis`-and sucking up to dear Wally is the thing to do. Emerald Cunard heads the list as the biggest horse`s ass. . . . It really strikes me as being ludicrous, all this toadying, it is all so temporary; one never knows when Mrs. S. will be `out` and some new horror
`in.` ”
Biographer Stephen Birmingham described her this way: ”To begin with, she was never pretty. This was a fact that she knew early and that shadowed most of her early life. In appearance she took after her father`s Warfield side and, indeed, she would have made a good-looking boy. The nose was too long and bumpy-in photographs it invariably caught the light and appeared almost bulbous-and the jawline was hard and square. A mole on her chin, on the right, just below her lower lip, was too large to be called a beauty mark.”
As summed up by author Dominick Dunne in Vanity Fair magazine: ”In actual fact, it was not a romance that can bear very close scrutiny: the love story of a masculine woman of middle age, who was probably never called beautiful in her life, and a Peter Pan king, who resisted responsibility and composed embarrassing love letters.”
But what goes around comes around. The duchess` jewels were so big and garish that many of her contemporaries assumed they were costume fakes. Now, thanks to Windsor-mania, fake copies of the duchess` ”fabled” diamond-, ruby-and sapphire-encrusted flamingo pin are available everywhere for just 75 bucks.
Dazzling Dianne, at least, is not wearing one. –
