EP 01 - 2 May 1937 — History Café

2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

- Episode 01 -

That Dress!

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That Dress!

Wednesday 20 April 2022

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Commissioned for a special Coronation issue by Illustrated London News, this portrait by Albert Collings never made it to the news stands. Edward VIII abdicated before he was crowned. This is a copy. Original was lost in the war.

Choose the right moment and they say you can explain the whole of history.

Well, maybe. But there are some moments when a whole lot of things do seem to come together. Here’s one of them.

In the first weekend of May 1937 Wallis Simpson commissioned the young English fashion and society photographer Cecil Beaton to take a series of photographs before her wedding in June. Simpson was a twice-divorced American and King Edward VIII’s determination to marry her had caused a constitutional crisis. Early in December he had been forced to abdicate the throne. So here she is, waiting for him at a French chateau, clutching a bunch of pussy willow, with a large silk lobster down her skirt.

Now, although this starts out as a bit of fun, it soon turns into a pretty dark story.

Once the news broke in England in December 1936 that the King might abdicate his throne, Wallis Simpson had slipped away to France to escape the relentless press. In March 1937 Charles Bedaux invited her to live at his Chateau Candé in the Loire Valley.

Bedaux was a Franco-American entrepreneur who’d made his millions with a system of time and motion management – a way of measuring how much work each employee got through and making them work harder. Bedaux’s system was so successful it had become a worldwide business empire and the basis for much of modern management consultancy. It was also so fabulously unpopular with workforces that it provoked bitter strikes in the United States, Britain and Italy.

The chateau had enormous grounds which kept the press at a distance (until they started hiring planes to film overhead.) There was a private 18-hole golf course, and it had been decorated in the smartest art-deco style. More important, it had a telephone. In fact it had its own telephone exchange so that Edward and Wallis could speak several times every day.

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Episode 01 - That Dress!

A very public honeymoon for Wallis Simpson and 'David'- a tour of Nazi Germany, October 1937

Dr Goebbels, the fanatic head of Nazi propaganda, concludes that the Duke is eine Personlichkeit – a great man.

There was a darker side to the new Duchess of Windsor’s management consultant friend. Five months after the Beaton photograph (below) was taken, M. Bedaux organised a honeymoon for the newly married couple.

In October of 1937, he got together with Hitler’s personal adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, and then with Robert Ley, the Head of Hitler’s Arbeitsfront, Labour front. And together they organised a very public honeymoon tour for the couple – a tour of Nazi Germany.

Bedaux apparently paid Ley $50 000. Bedaux, the time and motion expert, we can assume, smelled a glorious business opportunity. Getting Ley to take him on as management consultant to the Third Reich, as German factories worked round the clock to arm the country for war, was perhaps all too tempting an idea.

So Wallis and Edward were paraded around Hitler’s Reich, to the complete horror of the British government. They went to political meetings. They visited Krupps factories making German tanks and U-boats.

They were met by enthusiastic crowds. They called Wallis ‘her Royal Highness’, which delighted her since the British had refused to give her any such title. Hermann Göring, who was not only head of the German airforce, but also in charge of Germany’s Four-Year rearmament Plan, took them on a tour of his hunting estate.

Dr Goebbels, the fanatic head of Nazi propaganda, concluded that the Duke was eine Personlichkeit – a great man. And of course, the Duke took tea with Hitler in his mountain retreat, where the world’s press took pictures and the Windsors gave Nazi salutes.

As a result of the tour, Bedaux's business assets in Germany were unfrozen and he was able to resume trade. More to the point, when two and a half years later the Germans invaded France, Bedaux signed up to the new Nazi regime and took a job organising the factories that the Germans seized from French Jews.

In December 1942 the French caught up with him and handed him over to the Americans. He committed suicide before he could be tried.

Cecil Beaton, Salvador Dali and the suggestive surrealism of lobsters

Photograph by Cecil Beaton, of Wallis Simpson in a flowerbed at Chateau Candé, 2 Mary 1937

That dress - it became a fashion icon of the 1930s

The dress had in fact been designed by Elsa Schiaparelli for her 1937 Spring collection. Wallis Simpson chose it as one of 17 dresses she bought from Schiaparelli for what, at the time, they called her trousseau. In other words, dresses for her honeymoon.

Elsa Schiaparelli was one of the top couturiers in the world. It shows just how much of Edward's money Wallis Simpson was spending. When he abdicated he not only demanded an annual pension of £25 000, but took with him something like £1m from the Duchy of Cornwall. He even made his brother (who became king) buy him out of his life interests in Sandringham and Balmoral.

Historian Claire Eldred has shown that the dress had first appeared the month before in the April 1937 edition of French Vogue. It was, reported Vogue, a ‘waltz dress’, intended for the latest Parisian craze, which was a revival of the waltz. So it was cut above the ankle with a full skirt, very sheer, intended to be worn over petticoats. Vogue thought the lobster was a playful joke, adorning the dress ‘like a pink bouquet.’ The dress was such a hit that Vogue ran a second feature on it on May, describing it as ‘organza, printed with a fun motif.’

And there’s more! Listen to the podcast!

More info and photos here.

Salvador Dali 'Aphrodisiac Telephone' designed for collector and poet Edward James

Salvador Dali and lobsters

In fact it was Salvador Dali who had designed that lobster on Wallis Simpson’s dress. He’d been collaborating with Elsa Schiaparelli since 1934 on a series of outfits inspired by surrealism. But the lobster wasn’t just any arthropod. The point is that, for Dali, the lobster was a symbol of sex.

In 1936 he had designed a series of surreal objets for the home of the English poet and collector Edward James. Among them were four working telephones. They were typical 1936 telephones, with a square, black, bakelite base. But where the mouthpiece and earpiece should be was a large lobster. You held it with its claws to your ear and its tail to your mouth. Dali called it not only the Lobster Telephone but also the Aphrodisiac Telephone. The fact that the male lobster’s sexual organs are in its tail gives you the message.

Now Dali’s lobster dress in fact has two lobsters. One at the back has its pincers resting on Wallis Simpson’s bottom. The one at the front has its tail resting in another suggestive place.

The symbolism would certainly not have been lost on the photographer - Cecil Beaton - the man who held an enormous party at his Somerset house in July 1937 and turned up in a costume covered in hardboiled eggs - and it’s no wonder it was the pictures of Wallis in this dress, out of all the hundreds he took, that ended up in print. Safe in the knowledge that few others would ever get the joke.

But all this opens up yet another layer in this extraordinary photograph. The trail it leads to just seems to get darker and darker. Because Salvador Dali was yet another an admirer of Hitler. In 1938 Beaton would lose his job at American Vogue after the insertion of some tiny-but-still-legible phrases (including the word 'kike') into the border of an illustration about New York society. The issue was recalled and reprinted at vast expense, and Beaton was fired.

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Images top and l to r: H enry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French/ Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?/ The Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-18/ Slavery - did money not morality end British enslavement? / Who won the Battle of Britain?

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