Book Review : ‘Windsor Style’ : Life of Couple Was Both Sophisticated and Vacuous : Windsor Style, by Suzy Menkes (Salem House: $34.95).

The Duchess of Windsor died only two years ago, widowed and all but senile in the Paris mansion where she had lived with a man who was once a king.

Even in 1986, she seemed already a creature of another age, a woman long consigned to history, where she had blazed for a few months as Mrs. Simpson, the notorious American divorcee for whom King Edward VIII walked away from a throne and an empire.

In the 35 years thereafter, the news the couple made was on the social pages, not the front pages. Their plunge into the elegancies of “the minor arts of exquisite living, dressing, cooking and entertaining” was done to perfection.

But perfection itself can be a form of hubris. And “Windsor Style,” by Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the Independent of London, delivers both the sophisticated taste and the hollow vanity of the Windsors’ life style.

In the cafe society that presaged the Jet Set, the ex-king and his lady reigned supreme. Wallis--on the best-dressed list for 40 years--exalted severe, soignee dressing in an age of furbelows, and was confident enough of her taste to demand changes on her gowns from the House of Dior.

The cut of a skirt could obsess her: “If I make the skirt any smaller, you won’t be able to sit down,” Mainbocher told her during a fitting. “Then I won’t sit down in it,” she said. “She was a computer of elegance,” said Edouard, one of her hairdressers.

As a poor but genteel Southern girl, she strove to be different because she could not afford to compete. And as a duchess, she did the same thing--but at last she could afford it: a white organza couture ball gown was painted with a huge red lobster. A trompe l’oeil zipper-shaped necklace was made of platinum and diamonds.

While Wallis made simplicity chic, the boyish duke restored brighter plumage to the male. Rebelling against a stickler of a father who yelled at his son and heir for wearing cuffed pants, the duke, as Prince of Wales, popularized Fair Isle sweaters, bright sport clothes, soft hats, Windsor knots, argyle socks.

He tended to eccentricity in his old age, winning praise for an ensemble of plaid shorts, gingham shirt and paisley cravat that no mere mortal would have dared.

But it was in Wallis’ jewels, “objects of desire,” Menkes calls them, that the Windsor style is most enduring. It was a 40-year Niagara of gems, majestic and whimsical by turns, a voluptuous contrast to her rigid clothes--so many jewels from the king that one Englishwoman of rank mistook her gobs of rubies for costume jewelry.

Their auction in 1987, to clients such as Elizabeth Taylor, dispersed one of the richest--and certainly the most flamboyant--jewel collections outside of royal palaces.

They were the crown jewels Edward could not give her as king. Three fabled pieces alone--the flamingo-shaped brooch in rubies, emeralds and sapphires; the Cartier panther bracelet, the bib of amethysts and turquoises, and a gold compact paved with precious stones--brought nearly $3 million.

What kind of lives produced this treasure? One of the duchess’s maxims, worked into a throw pillow, was: “You can never be too rich or too thin.” Their lives were, in a sense, both--almost overwhelmingly opulent and too thin on substance.

No charity, no sport, no occupation engrossed the abdicated Windsors, and that left only themselves and a self-absorption that created a flawlessly machined existence. Of the flowers sent after Wallis’ death, noted the Duchess of Marlborough, most were from her dressmakers, her jewelers, her coiffeurs. “Those people were her life.”

Wallis set herself the task of reinterpreting the trappings of sovereignty for her ex-king. Denied the title of “Her Royal Highness,” Wallis took another tack. If she could not be queen, or even royal, she would make a new kingdom.

It would be gorgeous. And enviable and chic, a back-of-the-hand flip at the frumpiness she saw in the Royal Family that turned its back on her. Was it whimsical style alone, or revenge, that led Wallis to use a diamond medal of the duke’s royal parents to enliven a gold notebook cover?

In France

As the book shows, the Windsors in France ended up living far more lavishly than the Windsors in Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth II once sent young Prince Charles back outdoors to find a dog leash he had lost. “Dog leads cost money,” she said. In Paris, the Windsors’ pug dogs ate from solid silver bowls.

In the book’s scan of 50 years of photographs, beginning with the butler standing at the open front door of their mansion, Menkes compiles layer upon rich layer.

In rooms that look voluptuously cluttered to the modern eye, the Windsor homes overflow with Louis furniture that wound up in Versailles; the Order of the Garter emblem was embroidered into the ex-king’s bedspread; tables were covered with Faberge and Cartier bibelots from the three queens who were Edward’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, Victoria. “The duchess was not one for an empty space,” said a friend of the suffocatingly silken clutter.

This was a household which--like its mistress--never relaxed and never operated at less than perfect. At dinners, even lettuce leaves were matched for size. “After a while I longed to escape,” said the Duchess of Marlborough. “I didn’t want any more flowers and perfume and jewels. It was too claustrophobic.”

Menkes’ book does not gloss over the Windsors’ pettiness, petulance and vanity; it even shows before-and-after photos that the pair insisted needed retouching.

Wallis’ fabled wit, like her famous souffles, does not always survive the test of time. Neither does the couple’s life style, a sad fling of privilege created by unique circumstance and unfettered by a sense of obligation. The Windsor style was exquisitely wrought, but the shadowy “what ifs” of a onetime king somehow rendered even the refined superbness of their lives of minor consequence compared to the vaster stage of history they had once occupied.

As Menkes’ book so clearly limns, their lives were as much about what wealth and rank cannot do, as what they can.