Date: Fri 06-Mar-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: LAURAB

Quick Words:

windsor

Full Text:

Windsor Sale

With 15 Cuts

BY LAURA BEACH

NEW YORK CITY -- Chair by chair, shoe by shoe, the nostalgic residue of the

Twentieth Century's most famous celebrity romance was dismantled over nine

days in the longest sale in American history. Between February 19 and 27,

Sotheby's swept clean the Paris home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,

selling 40,000 items for a stunning $23,355,838.

Wallis and Edward, their initials forever intertwined in their signature

cipher, "WE," were at last pried loose from the souvenirs and royal relics,

haute couture and bijouterie that filled their lives during 33 years of

glamorous exile in a Louis XVI-style villa on the fringes of the Bois de

Boulogne.

Ordered by Mohammed Al Fayed, who acquired the villa and its furnishings

following the Duchess's 1986 death, the Windsor sale aroused mixed feelings

among an American public fixated on fame but embarrassed by the lack of

privacy afforded the dead. Al Fayed's plans to donate proceeds to charity,

wrote Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt, did "not change the basic

invasive nature of these events."

Sotheby's nine-day New York preview in New York was unintentionally lurid. As

was the case with the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sale, two floors of the glass

and stone salesroom at York and 72nd Street were dedicated to the recreation

of seven rooms from the Windsors' Paris home. At a private gathering on

February 9, Sotheby's staff seemed to outnumber the sparse crowd, which

drifted through stage sets cluttered with objects but devoid of either emotion

or much artistry. Printed on gauze and oversized photo blowups, the Windsors'

spectral figures hovered in the distance.

"Owing to the silence of English newspapers, there are millions of English

people who never discuss her because they have never heard of her," London

correspondent Janet Flanner wrote of Mrs Simpson in The New Yorker magazine

shortly before Edward's 1936 abdication. From the beginning, the love story

had a peculiarly American ring. To the British, Wallis may have been a tramp

who brought down a king. For Americans, hers was the rags to riches tale of a

poor girl who married the world's most eligible bachelor, an impressive

accomplishment, even if in three tries.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the Windsor trove sold overwhelmingly to

Americans. More than 80 percent of the lots will be divided among buyers from

50 states. The remainder will be scattered among 49 countries from Australia

to Qutar.

From Sotheby's vantage, the $23.5-million celebrity sale was a success second

only to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sale, which grossed $34.5 million on

6,000 objects and attracted a record 100,000 absentee bids. The $5/7 million

Windsor estimate seems calculated to attract bidders. The firm is rumored to

have banked on gross receipts of $12 million.

Much of the couple's largess had already been spoken for. In 1987, Sotheby's

auctioned the Duchess's jewel collection, the material measure of Edward's

love, for $50 million. Valuable antique furniture was given to Versailles, and

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art got first pick of the Duchess's

celebrated wardrobe. We will never know what momentum was lost when Al Fayed

postponed the Windsor sale from September to February following the August

death of his son, Dodi, and another Windsor outcast, Diana, Princess of Wales.

Organizing the sale required help from 15 specialist departments in the United

States and abroad; conducting it absorbed Sotheby's entire New York staff.

Buyers were diverse, ranging from celebrities, curators, and collectors to

children and even a four-year-old pug named Maggie.

"We've had some amazing prices tonight," said Diana D. Brooks following

Session I, a black-tie, by-invitation-only affair attended by 1,200. To loud

applause, Sotheby's president and CEO knocked down a boxed slice of the

Windsors' wedding cake for $29,900. Its romance hadn't staled for the San

Francisco couple who described their purchase as "absolutely surreal."

More "absolutely surreal" sales followed, explainable only as the pop

obsession with the contemporary equivalent of saints' relics. British

paranormalist Uri Geller, who bends spoons with his mind, acquired an English

silver medicine spoon for $1,955 (est $1/1,500). Geller owns 5,100 spoons,

which he affixes to a 1977 Cadillac that he uses for charity fundraising. Not

to be outdone, the parent company of Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museums

acquired eight silver jacks for $12,250. The American-made boxed set was given

to the Windsors by newscaster Edward R. Murrow.

Having survived the 1970s narcotic haze of Andy Warhol's Factory, former

Warhol star Brigid Berlin bid on a porcelain pug figurine to $6,325. "I must

have the biggest collection of pugs in New York, literally hundreds of them,

but I don't have anything that's blue," explained the actress, joining a

public bout of pug mania.

Childless and estranged from family, the Windsors lavished love on a series of

pets of different names but similar appearance. Pug paintings, photographs,

collars, silver bowls, jackets, and figurines strongly appealed to American

bidders, including actor Paul Winfield and writer Tina Santi-Flaherty. Eleven

pug pillows sold for a combined total of $37,375; a needlepoint pillow fetched

$13,800; and a portrait of the Duke with pug Dizzy made $18,400.

But in the commercial world, the surreal can make uncommon sense. Franklin

Mint, a Philadelphia manufacturer of tender-hearted collectibles that are sold

through women's magazines, will presumably reproduce a circa 1936 silk

commemorative handkerchief printed with a facsimile of Edward's abdication

speech. Franklin Mint, which paid $25,300 (est $2/300) for the hanky, bought

aggressively at the Jackie and Diana sales as well.

"All my friends know I would rather shop than eat," wrote Wallis, whose days,

sadly, seem to have been occupied by little else. But what she did, she did

exceptionally well. On the international Best Dressed list for 40 years, the

Duchess, longtime Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland once said, "...had a

position and dressed to it."

"... Her tidiness is something neither she nor circumstances have ever been

able to control," Janet Flanner noted of Mrs Simpson in 1936. Her suits and

gowns were tailor-made by Dior, Mainbocher, Yves Saint Laurent, and Givenchy,

but it was her regal carriage and impeccable taste in accessories that made

her a photographer's magnet for much of her life.

As an acknowledgment of her influence and style, the Duchess's wardrobe

fetched $1,028,727 and drew representatives from the houses of Dior, Yves

Saint Laurent, Prada, Ralph Lauren, and Gucci. The top lot of the session was

the blue velvet "Lahore" gown made for the Duchess in 1948 by Christian Dior,

one of her favorite designers. The French couturier, who plans to display the

dress in a Dior museum in Normandy, purchased it for $26,450. Dior was

represented by Madame Katell le Bourhis, a vintage fashion consultant who

advises both the Met and the Louvre.

Some believe that the real fashion plate was Edward, an innovator like his

grandfather, Edward VII, who introduced the dinner jacket. Credited with

adding elastic to waists, zippers to flys, and adjustable length trousers to

safari garb, "The Duke of Windsor had style in every buckle on his kilt, every

check of his country suits," Diana Vreeland once said.

Designers bid actively on the Duke' wardrobe, which added another $773,145 to

the take. The Duke's wedding suit, a morning coat and trousers (est

$10/15,000), sold for $27,600 to Ciro Paone of Kiton, a manufacturer of

hand-tailored menswear in Naples, who plans to display it in his stores.

Another Italian firm, Brioni, currently James Bond's tailor, bought seven

lots, including a dark green double-breasted corduroy dinner jacket for

$112,500 (est $700/1,000). An English museum was the underbidder.

The Windsors' taste in decor was only slightly less stylish than their taste

in clothing. Though very little antique furnishing was offered, the auction

proved an important test for neo-traditional reproductions and a referendum on

the Windsors' decorator, Stephane Boudin and the Maison Jansen. A pair of

painted and silvered consul tables of circa 1940 fetched $244,500 (est

$20/30,000); a pair of Empire-style fauteuils, $145,000; and a Louis XV-style

bureau plat, $107,000. The latter was knocked down to American fashion

designer Tommy Hilfiger, who is furnishing a house Greenwich, Conn.

With several important exceptions, the Windsor property was not of great

artistic or historic value and therefore not of huge interest to museums. The

most significant public acquisition went to the National Portrait Gallery. In

a printed statement, the London museum said that it was the fame of the

painter and the notoriety of his subject that compelled it to bid $107,000 for

Gerald Brockhurst's 1939 "Portrait of the Duchess of Windsor," commissioned by

the Duke. The purchase was enabled by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Other museum purchases included the private diary of the Prince of Wales, made

during a tour to Australia, New Zealand and the Colonies in the Atlantic and

Pacific. It sold for $3,737 to the National Library of Australia.

Edward spent the decades after 1936 in the company of the woman he loved and

relics of the life he'd lost. For the historically minded, it was to royal

memorabilia that the greatest value attached. Session opened with a cameo

portrait of the infant Edward in Queen Mary's arms at his christening in 1894.

Inscribed by the Queen, the oval albumen print in a gilt frame fetched

$27,600. A handmade figure of a chimney sweep given to the child by the Queen

sold by telephone for $74,000. A red morocco dispatch box stamped "The King"

fetched $65,750.

Portraiture accounted for some of the highest prices of the sale. The top lot

of the series was Sir Alfred Munnings' famous 1921 Royal equestrian portrait

of the Prince of Wales at age 27 on his horse, Forest Witch. An anonymous

bidder offered $2,312,500, a record for the artist at auction. The previous

record for the sporting artist is $1.21 million paid in 1987. Cecil Beaton's

stylish watercolor portrait of Mrs Wallis Simpson, 1936, which for years hung

in the Duchess's bath, crossed the block at $134,500. A Beaton gouache of the

same year, "Wallis Simpson Serving Cocktails," was knocked down for $178,500

(est $5/7,000).

"On this table King Edward VIII signed the Instrument of Abdication," read the

brass plaque on a simple Georgian desk that remained with Edward until the end

of his days. The table sold anonymously for $415,000, eight times its pre-sale

estimate.

In later years, Prime Minister Winston Churchill clashed with the Duke over

his unorthodox wartime sympathies. But in 1923, Churchill, then First Lord of

the Admiralty, had warm words for the Prince of Wales, to whom he sent his

six-volume history of World War I. The inscribed first-edition of Churchill's

The World Crisis sold to Texas collector John McCall for $145,000, about five

times the estimate. McCall also bought an inscribed copy of John F. Kennedy's

Profiles In Courage for $41,400.

Thus ends the story of Wallis and Edward. Sixty years after Edward's stirring

pledge, we read this as a cautionary tale. For the woman he loved, Edward lost

much. For the life they lived, the Windsors paid dearly.