Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  She had charmed her father-in-law with the same warmly flirtatious manner and, in doing so, had become one of his favorite companions. With her husband, Randolph, in the Middle East, and her six-month-old son, Winston, tended by a nanny in the country, she spent much of her free time at Downing Street and Chequers, playing cards with Churchill, listening to his stories, and comforting him whenever he was worried or depressed.

  Indeed, virtually from the beginning of her marriage, Pamela had a far better relationship with Winston and Clementine than with her twenty-seven-year-old husband. The daughter of Lord Digby, an impoverished Dorset aristocrat, she had met Randolph Churchill a few days after the war began. Afraid that “I would get trapped in Dorset for the rest of my life,” she was desperate, she later said, for “new horizons and challenges…. I wanted to experience whatever there was to experience.” Randolph proposed to her the night after they met, and the marriage took place two weeks later. For both, the union was “as cold and calculated as a business deal,” Sally Bedell Smith, one of Pamela’s biographers, wrote. “He wanted an heir and she wanted a name and position.” They each got what they were after, but, not surprisingly, the relationship was an emotional disaster from the start.

  Spoiled and indulged by his father, Randolph was a lively speaker and gifted writer who could be charming and witty when in the mood. More often, however, he was a blustering bully whose drinking, gambling, and womanizing were a constant source of embarrassment for his parents. Randolph, said Mary Churchill, “could be quite alarming—very noisy and quarrelsome. If he was in the right mood, he’d pick a quarrel with a chair.” Considerably more scalding in his assessment of Randolph, John Colville wrote in his diary: “One of the most objectionable people I had ever met; noisy, self-assertive, whining and frankly unpleasant…. At dinner he was anything but kind to Winston, who adores him.” In February 1941, to Pamela’s great relief, Randolph’s regiment was packed off to Egypt, and she was finally free to enjoy the erotic frenzy of wartime London.

  The saying “Live today, for tomorrow we die” might be a war movie cliché, but it resonated all the same throughout the British capital in 1941—in hotels and nightclubs, pubs and palaces, situation rooms and bedrooms. “There was a diffused gallantry in the air, an unmarriedness,” observed one British writer. “It came to be rumoured about the country that everybody in London was in love.” Such romantic fatalism and hedonism was intoxicating to a good many Americans who encountered it during the war. For them, as for numerous Britons and exiled Europeans who spent time in the capital, conventional morality was laid to rest for the duration. “The normal barriers to having an affair with somebody were thrown to the winds,” recalled CBS head William Paley, who was in London for several months during the war. “If it looked pretty good, you felt good, well, what in hell was the difference?”

  Adding to this uninhibited atmosphere was the heady new sense of freedom and independence experienced by young British women. Having grown up in a society in which few women worked outside the home or went to college, they had been expected to remain primly in life’s background and to demand little more than the satisfaction of having served their husbands and raised their children. That staid and predictable existence was shattered, however, when Britain declared war on Germany. Hundreds of thousands of women, even debutantes like Pamela who had never so much as boiled an egg, signed up for jobs in defense industries or enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and other military units. As one former deb recalled, “It was a liberation, it set me free.” Women began wearing slacks. They appeared in public without stockings. They smoked, they drank, and they had sex outside marriage—more often and with fewer qualms and less guilt than their mothers and grandmothers. The few American women in the capital were infected with a similar sense of freedom. “London was a Garden of Eden for women in those years,” recalled Time-Life correspondent Mary Welsh, “a serpent dangling from every tree and street lamp, offering tempting gifts, companionship, warm if temporary affections.”

  Pamela Churchill was in the vanguard of this early women’s liberation movement, securing a job at the Ministry of Supply and a room at the Dorchester Hotel. Years later, she remembered walking down a Dorchester corridor, thinking, “Here I am, 20 years old, totally free [and] wondering who will walk into my life.” When she met Averell Harriman, she immediately set her sights for him. It was a spectacularly easy conquest. Harriman had been a hedonist long before coming to London, and he didn’t need the city’s carpe diem mentality to convince him he ought to be enjoying himself. In the 1920s, he had carried on a long liaison with Teddy Gerard, an actress and nightclub singer who had appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies. There were a number of other women over the years; shortly before leaving for London, he had indulged in a fling with the ballerina Vera Zorina, then married to George Balanchine.

  His affair with Pamela likely began in the midst of the devastating April 16 Luftwaffe raid on London, little more than two weeks after they met. They both had been guests at a dinner party at the Dorchester in honor of Adele Astaire Cavendish, the sister of Fred Astaire and wife of Lord Charles Cavendish, son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire. While Gil Winant walked the streets of west London and Ed Murrow witnessed the destruction of his office and favorite pub that night, Harriman and his fellow dinner guests watched the fireworks from an eighth-floor room at the Dorchester, then retreated to the comparative safety of Harriman’s suite on the ground floor.

  When the others left, Pamela apparently remained behind. Early the next morning, John Colville saw Harriman and his boss’s daughter-in-law walking arm in arm through the Horse Guards Parade, examining the devastation from the night before. Later that day, Harriman wrote his wife: “Last night was a real ‘Blitz’—perhaps the most widespread bombing of the war…. Bombs dropped all around. Needless to say, my sleep was intermittent.” He included chatty details about the dinner party and listed the names of those who had been there, with one prominent exception—Pamela Churchill.

  Initially, at least, the pair tried to keep their relationship as quiet as possible. They were circumspect toward each other and “acted like friends” when with other people, said an acquaintance. Nonetheless, people began to notice—and talk. Duncan Sandys, the husband of the Churchills’ eldest daughter, Diana, “intercepted glances and felt vibrations” between the two, and there was gossip that Harriman had been spotted tiptoeing down a hall at Chequers late at night.

  Among those who deduced the truth was Lord Beaverbrook, who encouraged the liaison from the start. The owner of three major daily newspapers, Max Beaverbrook had been an outspoken appeaser of Hitler until May 1940. Once Britain was directly threatened by Germany, however, he threw himself into the war effort with the same energy with which he had opposed it before.

  Clementine Churchill detested Beaverbrook, calling him a “microbe” and a “bottle imp” and begging her husband not to see so much of him. “Some thought him evil,” recalled Drew Middleton, then a London correspondent for the Associated Press. “I found him amoral [and] coldly calculating. He was a man of great energy, callous mental brutality, a passion for intrigue (sometimes, it seemed, for intrigue’s sake) and a vast generosity.” Once, when Bill Paley was invited to Beaverbrook’s house for dinner, Ed Murrow warned him that the press magnate “took particular pleasure in extracting indiscreet information from his guests by getting them as drunk as possible.”

  Beaverbrook—who, as Churchill’s minister of supply, was in charge of most of Britain’s war production—was particularly well known for his munificence to a wide circle of women friends, including Pamela, to whom he became a patron of sorts. He gave her advice, lent her money to pay off Randolph’s gambling debts, and housed her baby son and his nanny at Cherkley, his country estate in Surrey. Knowing only too well how much Britain needed American aid and how important Harriman was in getting it, he championed her affair with the American. Like Churchill, the newspaper mogul was determined to drag the United St
ates into the war, and he strongly believed that the liaison between Harriman and Pamela could be used as a tool in that effort. A man who equated information with power, he was desperate to find out more about what the Americans were thinking and planning—something he could do, he thought, with Pamela’s help. Soon the lovers were frequent guests at Cherkley, and Churchill’s daughter-in-law became a back channel to Beaverbrook for news of the goings-on at Grosvenor Square. “She passed everything she knew about anybody to Beaverbrook,” said the American journalist Tex McCrary. The affair was professionally beneficial to Harriman as well. “It was very helpful to him … to have an in like that,” Pamela later said. “It made an enormous difference.”

  In the attempt to keep their relationship under wraps, Harriman and Pamela were aided by the arrival in June of Harriman’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Kathleen, who had come to keep her father company for a few months. A recent graduate of Bennington College, she had landed a temporary job, with Harriman’s help, as a reporter in the London bureau of William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service. Unaware of the affair at first, she formed a close friendship with Pamela, and when the Harrimans moved into a larger suite at the Dorchester, Pamela moved in with them. Later that summer, the two young women, with Harriman’s money, rented a cottage together in Surrey for use on the weekends. Harriman often joined them there.

  Kathleen was a perceptive young woman, and it didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on between her father and new best friend. Having been raised in a worldly, sophisticated milieu where such extramarital trysts were common, she kept the secret to herself. She was not close to her stepmother and seemed to regard Harriman more as a generous friend than a father. Having discovered the affair, she decided to stay in London indefinitely, to keep an eye on her father and to act as camouflage.

  Nonetheless, despite everyone’s best efforts, the relationship eventually became common knowledge in both London and Washington. Harry Hopkins passed on the news to President Roosevelt, who, according to Hopkins, “got a big kick out of it.” Hopkins himself was disturbed, “fearing stories to the effect that the President’s envoy was breaking up the Prime Minister’s son’s marriage,” Pamela later told historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

  Both Pamela and Harriman knew they were playing with fire. The affair, she noted, “could have gone the other way,” igniting a public scandal that would have caused great damage to all concerned. It still remains unclear whether either Winston or Clementine Churchill knew what was occurring under their roof at Chequers in the weeks and months after the relationship began. According to their middle daughter, Sarah, the Churchills and their children placed a high premium on personal privacy. “We do not ask questions of each other or pry into each other’s affairs,” Sarah Churchill said. “We believe passionately in the privacy of our lives and other people’s.”

  At the same time, it’s hard to believe that neither of the Churchills had an inkling early on of what was happening. For Clementine, who had a tortured relationship with her wayward son, the knowledge might not have been that difficult to accept. But Churchill doted on Randolph despite his boorishness, and the news of his son’s cuckoldry would certainly have come as a rude shock. Yet, whatever his feelings, he needed Harriman and the Americans, and he had no intention of letting personal matters interfere with the national interest. Besides, Pamela had proved to be a useful conduit for him and Harriman, passing on to each man information and insights she had gleaned from the other.

  Pamela, for her part, believed that the Churchills were well aware of what was going on. She noted, however, that neither directly confronted her. At one point in the war, Churchill casually commented to her: “You know, they’re saying a lot of things about Averell in relation to you.” She replied: “Well, a lot of people have nothing else to do in wartime but indulge in gossip.” “I quite agree,” Churchill said—and never raised the subject again.

  WHILE HARRIMAN WAS becoming involved with Pamela, Gil Winant was developing close personal relationships of his own with several members of the Churchill family. The ambassador had the ability, as his friend Felix Frankfurter put it, to make everyone he met “feel as if they were the most important individuals on earth”—a quality that endeared him to the Churchills. “A man of quiet, intensely concentrated charm, Gil had very quickly become a dear friend of us all,” Mary Churchill Soames later wrote, “entering into our joys and sorrows, jokes and rows (in these last always as a peacemaker).”

  For all his shyness and occasional awkwardness, Winant had that same effect on others who met him on his official rounds. John Colville described him as a “gentle, dreamy idealist, whom most men and all women loved”—a characterization supported by comments about the ambassador in the diaries and letters of many prominent Britons of the time. “When Winant enters the room,” remarked one woman who knew him, “everyone somehow feels better.” Another acquaintance said: “There was something … magnetic about him.” Tory MP Chips Channon noted how the young and beautiful Duchess of Kent, seated next to Winant at a luncheon at Chequers, “quite lost her heart” to him. Harold Nicolson called Winant “one of the most charming men I have ever met,” adding that “the superb character of the man pierces through.” Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, mused in his diary: “Other men have to win the confidence of those they meet; Winant is allowed to skip that stage. Before he utters a syllable, people want to see more of him.”

  Even General Alan Brooke, the tart-tongued, irascible chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had nothing good to say about most Americans, fell under Winant’s spell. At an official gathering one night, Lord Moran watched in amazement as Brooke, a passionate birder, chatted animatedly with Winant about the value of seeking solace in nature, especially during wartime. “There was Winant talking eagerly … and Brooke—a new Brooke to me—hardly able to wait his turn,” Moran wrote in his diary. “When Winant had done, how his words cascaded.” The two men became good friends, and years after the war, Brooke, now Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, said he considered his association with Winant to be “one of those great blessings which the war occasionally provided as an antidote to all its horrors.”

  But there was one important figure who remained somewhat impervious to Winant’s diffident charm: Winston Churchill himself. Churchill was fond of the ambassador. He admired and respected him, declaring on more than one occasion, “Winant gives me fresh strength whenever I see him.” Yet the prime minister felt uncomfortable around Winant and much preferred the company of Harriman and Harry Hopkins. “The P.M. is attracted by Winant’s optimism, but … he prefers the tart cleverness of Hopkins, for the same reason that he is drawn to Max Beaverbrook,” wrote Moran. Like Beaverbrook, Churchill’s closest friends tended to be flamboyant, quick-witted men with a “touch of loucheness,” who liked to gamble, drink, and talk late into the night. As Roy Jenkins has so aptly noted, the prime minister “liked bounders.” And if there was one thing that John Gilbert Winant most emphatically was not, it was a bounder.

  Clementine Churchill, on the other hand, much preferred Winant to Harriman. While she was grateful for Harriman’s intercession with her daughter and enjoyed playing croquet with him (both were expert at the game), she generally thought of him, in the words of writer Christopher Ogden, as “one more rich businessman and icily ambitious maneuverer,” who, like many of Churchill’s rich, ambitious friends, “would isolate her more from her husband.” Winant, she felt, was actually interested in and sympathetic to her. According to Mary Soames, Winant “understood intuitively” her mother’s complicated nature and the strains and stresses of her life, and, as a result, she often confided in him—something she rarely did with anyone.

  TO THE GUESTS invited to Downing Street, Chequers, or Ditchley, Clementine Churchill was an elegant, intelligent, caring hostess who did everything in her power to make them feel at home. Many used the word “charming” to describe her: Harry Hopkins called her the “most charming an
d entertaining” of all the people he met in Britain; Janet Murrow said she was “charming, vivacious, and attractive;” and Eleanor Roosevelt used practically the same words—”very attractive, young-looking and charming.”

  Yet Mrs. Roosevelt suspected that another Clementine Churchill lay hidden beneath that calm, self-controlled exterior: “One feels that, being in public life, she has had to assume a role and that the role is now a part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.” As the wife of the president of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt knew a great deal about public roles versus reality, and her shrewd guess about her British counterpart was in fact correct. Behind the serene, poised facade that Clementine Churchill presented to the world was a passionate, emotionally fragile, lonely, and often deeply unhappy woman.

  For more than thirty years, Clementine had made her husband her life’s work, giving short shrift to everything and everyone else—her children and friends as well as her own needs and desires. She once told Pamela Churchill that “when she married Winston, she had decided to give her life totally to him…. She lived for Winston.” He, however, did not return the favor. Although he undoubtedly loved her and was heavily dependent on her, as his hundreds of tender, solicitous letters to her make clear, Churchill was, in the words of John Pearson, a Churchill family biographer, a “total egotist” who never made much time for his wife. His pursuit of political power and his own personal interests almost always took precedence over her and their children. “In his heart, he adored her, but I don’t think it ever occurred to him that she might need a little more,” Pamela noted. She added: “Churchills expect their women to understand them totally [but] they don’t spend much time trying to understand their women.”