Thelma, Viscountess Furness (August 23, 1904 – January 29, 1970), born Thelma Morgan, was the woman who preceded Wallis Simpson in the affections of Edward VIII of the United Kingdom. Her first name was pronounced in Spanish fashion as "TEL-ma." Her niece is fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt.
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Born in Lucerne, Switzerland, she was a daughter of Harry Hayes Morgan, an American diplomat who was U.S. consul in Buenos Aires and in Brussels, and his half-Chilean, half-Irish-American wife, Laura Delphine Kilpatrick.
Her maternal grandfather was a Union general, Hugh Judson Kilpatrick (1836-1881), who was also U.S. minister to Chile, and through her maternal grandmother Luisa Fernandez de Valdivieso, who was a niece of the Archbishop of Santiago, she reportedly was a descendant of Spain's royal house of Navarre.
Thelma Morgan had two sisters: Gloria (her identical twin, the mother of Gloria Vanderbilt, the fashion designer and artist, and grandmother of news anchor Anderson Cooper) and Consuelo, who was married to Count de Maupas, a spurious French nobleman; to Benjamin Thaw, Jr. of Pittsburgh; and to Alfons B. Landa, president of Colonial Airlines and vice-chairman of the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee in 1948. She also had a brother, Harry Hays Morgan, Jr., who became a minor Hollywood actor in such films as "Abie's Irish Rose" (1946), "Joan of Arc" (1948), and others.
Her first husband was James Vail Converse, a grandson of Theodore N. Vail, former president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). They were married in Washington, D.C., on February 16, 1922 — she was 17 years old, the divorcé groom was about a decade older — and they divorced in Los Angeles, California, on April 10, 1925.
After the divorce she was rumored to be engaged to the American actor Richard Bennett, the matinée-idol father of Hollywood film stars Constance Bennett, Joan Bennett, and Barbara Bennett (the third was the mother of talk-show host Morton Downey, Jr.).
Her second husband was Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness (1883-1940), the chairman of Furness Shipping Company. She was his second wife. They were married on June 27, 1926, and divorced in 1933. They had one son, William Anthony Furness, 2nd Viscount Furness, and as the former wife of a British nobleman she was known as Thelma, Viscountess Furness.
Lady Furness first met the Prince of Wales at a ball at Londonderry House in 1926[1] but they did not meet again until the Leicestershire Agricultural Show at Leicester on 14 June 1929[2]. The Prince asked her to dine and they met regularly until she joined the Prince on safari in East Africa early in 1930, when a closer relationship developed[3]. On the Prince's return to England in April 1930 she was his regular weekend companion at the newly acquired Fort Belvedere until January 1934. On 10 January 1931 at her house Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray, she introduced the Prince to her close friend Mrs Wallis Simpson and, whilst visiting her sister Gloria in America between January and March 1934, she was supplanted in the Prince's affection by Mrs Simpson. Reacting to the Prince's coldness later that year she threw herself into a short-lived affair with Prince Aly Khan.[4]
She briefly was a motion picture producer and actress after founding Thelma Morgan Pictures at the age of 17, in 1923. As she told Time magazine, "I am incorporating the Thelma Morgan Pictures, Inc., with $100,000 capital and will produce big, sane, and sound 'specials'. I will be my own star. Hitherto my chief experience has been in Junior League shows."[5] Her first starring role, in 1923, was the lead in a film produced by her own company, "Aphrodite", which was filmed at Vitagraph Studios.
She described her leading role in Aphrodite to The New York Times as that of "an American girl, brought up under the sinister influence of an old Egyptian woman." She also had small parts in the films "Enemies of Women" (1923), a William Randolph Hearst production whose cast included Lionel Barrymore and Clara Bow, So This Is Marriage?" (1924), and "Any Woman" (1925).
She and her sister Gloria wrote a memoir called "Double Exposure" (1959) cited below as 'Vanderbilt'.
Lady Furness died in New York City. As her niece, Gloria Vanderbilt, recalled, "She dropped dead on Seventy-third and Lexington on her way to see the doctor. In her bag was this miniature teddy bear that the Prince of Wales had given her, years before, when she came to be with my mother at the custody trial, and it was worn down to the nub".[6]
She was buried next to her twin sister, Gloria, in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
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