In her incredible 75-year career, Joan Collins’ portrayal of the Duchess of Windsor is arguably the most difficult character she has ever played.
She will portray the widow of former King Edward VIII during her final, miserable years in a new movie that will be released this year.
In the movie, Wallis Windsor, under the watchful eye of her domineering lawyer Suzanne Blum, progressively approaches death while being cut off from her friends and contacts and, in a sense, imprisoned by the lawyer.
However, Ms. Collins, 92, was unaware that her French-born “jailer,” portrayed by Isabella Rossellini, had been spying on Wallis Simpson for nearly 40 years prior to her death in 1986 when she was practicing her lines for “My Duchess.”
According to documents found by the Daily Mail, Maitre Blum, as she was known, approached the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, in the summer of 1942 in search of work after becoming stranded in New York following the fall of France and without funds.
William Bullitt, the elegant US Ambassador to France who was close to Blum and rumored to have been the Duchess’s boyfriend in Paris, recommended her.
After being hired for the current equivalent of £50,000, Blum (Rossellini) returned to Paris during a period of peace, where her husband served as the Duke and Duchess’ attorney.
In the television biopic My Duchess, Joan Collins portrays Wallis Simpson, while Isabella Rosselini plays her lawyer, Suzanne Blum.
She spied on the royal couple for the Americans for the ensuing years, and following the Duke’s death in 1972, she assumed total authority over the Duchess’s affairs.
She was a fierce, little woman who was despised by everyone who encountered her.
When writer Caroline Blackwood was dispatched to meet the Duchess with Lord Snowdon as her photographer, she immediately detested Blum, describing the “murderous” expression in her eyes. “I will kill you if you don’t write a positive article about the Duchess,” Blum growled at Blackwood.”
Collins and Rossellini will depict what transpired next on screen: the once-powerful Duchess’s rapid decline and her loss of control over her affairs to the avaricious Blum. However, Blum’s covert phone conversations and letters to CIA chief Allen Dulles, to whom she had reported on every facet of the Windsors’ lives since 1945, will not be shown.
The Windsors were more well-known in America during and after World War II than the Royal Family.
The Duke’s many visits to the US during the war, his resignation of throne and kingdom for “the woman I love,” and the couple’s highly anticipated social life in New York throughout the 1950s and 1960s made them famous. For a while, King George VI’s and his daughter Queen Elizabeth II’s reigns were eclipsed by their fame.
However, the US secret service was determined to monitor the pair due to the Windsors’ apparent support of Adolf Hitler during the pre-war years.
Wallis withdrew and rapidly declined after the Duke’s death in 1972, and her memory started to deteriorate.
In the new biopic, Isabella Rossellini plays Suzanne Blum, the French lawyer and close companion of the Duchess of Windsor.
Many of the CIA files pertaining to the pair are still so heavily blacked that it is impossible to determine who was providing Washington with information regarding the former royals.
However, a dossier discovered by the Daily Mail clearly blames Suzanne Blum, a woman who was keen to join the American secret service and who actively kept up her intimate ties with them after the war ended and she returned to Paris.
In addition to being a friend of US Ambassador Bill Bullitt, who was then suspected of having an affair with the Duchess, Blum entered the Duchess’s life during the pre-war period as the wife of the Duke’s Paris lawyer Paul Weill.
She was regarded as a reliable friend by the time the Windsors returned to Paris in 1945, and she observed from the sidelines as the couple rose to prominence in the City of Light.
After the Duke’s death in 1972, Wallis withdrew and quickly declined after ruling the capital city for 25 years. It seemed as though her existence had become meaningless without an ex-king to order around. One biographer stated, “She had no inner resources, no hobbies, no pastimes, no interests except clothes, and no talents except for wearing them.”Wallis plaintively agreed, “My ship is without a captain.”
She soon started to lose her memory, forgetting faces and names. Unaware that the handgun she kept on her bedside table was a replica, she developed an obsession with the fear of robbers. At night, she would get up in fright and gaze out the window for intruders. She once fell and injured her hip, and another time she broke some ribs.
She was fixated on upholding her prestige, keeping her home in the Bois de Boulogne exactly as it had been during the Duke’s lifetime, even going so far as to preserve his clothing, pipes, and cigars.
However, by 1976—just four years after the Duke’s passing—she was emaciated, had lost her way, and was consuming silver mugfuls of vodka. According to her biographer Charles Higham, “her mind began to wander.” “She would pick up an imaginary instrument and talk into it because she couldn’t reach the telephone.”
He writes, “The house was like a morgue,” two years later. The day and night nurses, a maid, and the butler and his wife were the only people left. The duchess needed to be transferred from her bed to a hospital couch since she was unable to use her hands or feet. She needed to be fed with a spoon.
“The gates [of Villa Windsor] are locked and the sole keeper of the keys is Maitre Blum,” stated Joe Bryan and Charles Murphy in their seminal work The Windsor Story.The duchess’s close friend Lady Diana Mosley said that she had been prohibited from seeing her for the previous three years. The same was said by other friends.
The Duchess of Windsor, who had lost the use of her hands, had to be spoon-fed and was spotted being pushed in a wheelchair.
Suzanne Blum had converted the Bois de Boulogne chateau into a prison or isolation unit. The duchess’s existence continued, but for about ten years prior to her death in 1988, she merely lay in bed, receiving intravenous nourishment and living in a fantasy world. When word got out in Paris that Blum was keeping her alive for personal gain, her former private secretary John Utter was overheard yelling, “She should be allowed to die!”
Blum had swiftly taken command of Villa Windsor, brutally dismissing employees. And now everything began to disappear. Earl Mountbatten, the former king’s cousin and close friend since before Wallis, was accused by her of stealing old documents and giving himself things he claimed the Duke needed. Mountbatten refuted it.
However, as soon as Wallis passed away, Maitre Blum approved the release of three novels that included personal information about the Windsors’ lives, splitting the large earnings with the writer.
The Duchess left the Institut Pasteur, a Paris-based research organization she had no affiliation with and had never discussed, the majority of her substantial fortune, estimated at £3 million (£15 million today), for reasons that were unknown to the public. However, the transfer of funds would have paid Blum enormous legal fees.
Additionally, when her renowned jewels were put up for sale in Geneva in 1987, they raised an additional £35 million, or £100 million today, of which Maitre Blum received a staggering administration cut.
We will learn what Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini thought of these remarkable individuals and their nuanced relationship later this year. However, a hint may be found in a coincidental statement Blum made in 1943 to Carmel Offie, a CIA agent: “The best way to keep someone as a prisoner is to surround them with love, affection, and friendship.”
