There is only one absolute certainty about the Duchess of Windsor: that she was a profoundly silly woman. However, compared with her husband, the Duke, she seems to have been a tower of intellectual authority. Both before and after his abdication in 1936, he had been regarded even by friends as quite unsuited for kingship and, apart from golf and gardening, he had few consuming interests. Harold Nicolson's diaries record a minor but telling incident when, at a party in London, the Duke showed himself visibly bored by pianist Artur Rubinstein's performance of Chopin, perking up only when Noel Coward settled down to play some show tunes. Nicolson called the Duke "that silly little man en somme" and his wife "a third-rate American" - while the latter remark reveals the diarist's snobbery, the former is certainly a fair assessment.
While the Duke got on with his outdoor pursuits, his wife allowed herself to be preoccupied with clothes and social entertainment. Prior to marrying him, Mrs Simpson (as she was then known) had been perceived as a pleasant, if none-too-bright, woman who could be relied upon to accept almost any invitation extended to her. Thereafter she grew steadily grander but not, sadly, smarter. James Pope-Hennessy, who was her guest in Paris, wrote that the Duchess "was on the whole a stupid woman, with a small petty brain, immense goodwill (une femme de bonne volonte) and a stern power of concentration."
That concentration was primarily fixed upon her appearance. "I adore to shop", she once declared: "All my friends know I'd rather shop than eat". This remark, together with her famous pronouncement about the impossibility of being either too rich or too thin, gives an inkling of her fatuous self-absorption. Almost the first person who visited her after the Duke's death was couturier Hubert de Givenchy, whom she at once requested to make her clothes for the funeral service. Appearance really was all, because in this instance there was nothing whatever behind it.
Was their vacuous life together entirely the Windsors' fault? Greg King argues that in spite of repeated requests, they were denied the opportunity to perform any useful role on behalf of the British government, victims of a vendetta fostered by the other members of the royal family, who had chosen service over self-indulgence. Regardless of the author's best efforts to show the couple in a favourable light - much is made of the Duchess's work for charity, the fallback of every wealthy-but-bored spouse - in the end this biography is no more kind than any of its (far too many) predecessors.
The problem is this: the Windsors spent their time moaning about being ill-treated by his relatives while contentedly taking large sums of money from them. They constantly complained about poverty while being pampered by dozens of servants and spending inordinate sums on constant travel to relieve their boredom. They insisted on their desire for a serious job while demonstrating a penchant for nightclubs and questionable acquaintances. Among the latter were members of the Nazi government and such truly ghastly socialites as Jimmy Donahue, a Woolworth heir whose notion of humour was to take his penis out in restaurants and request the waiters to slice it thinly.
Their want of purpose led the Windsors into some truly strange practices. The Duchess, for example, was obsessed with cleanliness. Her money, if paper, was either ordered new from a bank or, when previously used, washed and ironed by housemaids; all coins, naturally, were washed thoroughly before she could touch them. The Duke, meanwhile, lavished his devotion on a series of pugs who either fouled the floor or else the clothes of any visitors foolish enough to approach them. They were, in sum, a thoroughly worthless pair and nothing Greg King writes can make them seem otherwise.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist