The upcoming film My Duchess starring Joan Collins as Wallis Simpson uncovers the shocking truth that her controlling attorney Suzanne Blum, played by Isabella Rossellini, spied for the CIA for decades.
Joan Collins , at 92, is set to portray Wallis Simpson , the Duchess of Windsor, in the upcoming biopic 'My Duchess.
' This role may be the most challenging in her seven-decade career, as it depicts the final, miserable years of the Duchess's life under the iron grip of her attorney, Suzanne Blum, played by Isabella Rossellini. But Collins likely did not know that Blum, who controlled every aspect of Wallis's existence, had been a CIA spy for nearly 40 years until the Duchess's death in 1986.
Recently uncovered documents from the Daily Mail reveal that in the summer of 1942, Blum, stranded in New York after France fell and desperate for money, approached the OSS, the CIA's predecessor, for employment. She was recommended by William Bullitt, the wealthy US Ambassador to France, who was rumored to have been the Duchess's lover and a close friend of Blum.
Blum was hired for the modern-day equivalent of 50,000 pounds and, once peace returned, went back to Paris where her husband acted as the Duke and Duchess's lawyer. For decades, she spied on the royal couple for the Americans, and after the Duke's death in 1972, she took complete control of the Duchess's affairs. Described as a small, ferocious woman, Blum was universally disliked.
Writer Caroline Blackwood, who was sent with Lord Snowdon to interview the Duchess, immediately loathed Blum, noting the murderous look in her eyes.
'If you do not write a favorable article about the Duchess,' Blum hissed at Blackwood, 'I will kill you! ' In the film, Collins and Rossellini depict Wallis's swift decline and her loss of autonomy to the rapacious Blum, but they do not show Blum's secret telephone calls and letters to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, to whom she reported every detail of the Windsors' life from 1945 onward.
During World War II and the years after, the Windsors were more famous in America than the British royal family itself. The Duke's abdication for the woman he loved, his frequent wartime trips to the US, and their celebrated social life in New York during the 1950s and 1960s turned them into superstars. Their fame overshadowed the reigns of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.
But because of the Windsors' apparent endorsement of Adolf Hitler before the war, US intelligence was determined to keep watch. When the Duke died in 1972, Wallis retreated and deteriorated rapidly. Her memory began to fail, and she forgot names and faces. She became obsessed with a fear of burglars, keeping a revolver on her bedside table, unaware it was a replica.
She would rise at night and peer out windows for intruders. She fell and broke her hip, and later some ribs. She insisted on maintaining her mansion in the Bois de Boulogne exactly as it had been during the Duke's life, preserving his clothes, pipes, and cigars. Blum, who had been a trusted friend before the war, now controlled all access to the Duchess.
Many CIA files on the Windsors remain heavily redacted, but one file uncovered by the Daily Mail directly implicates Blum as an informant, a woman eager to serve US intelligence and maintain her connections after the war ended. The film 'My Duchess' may not reveal this spy story, but the truth is now public: the Duchess's jailer was also a CIA asset, watching over her charge until the very end
Joan Collins Wallis Simpson Duchess Of Windsor CIA Spy Suzanne Blum
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