Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  One of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters described Jennie in her prime as a “flashing beauty. . . . Her eyes were large and dark, her mouth mobile with delicious, almost mischievous curves, her hair blue-black and glossy.” Margot Asquith recalled being struck with wonder at her first sight of Lady Randolph: “She had a forehead like a panther’s and great wild eyes that looked through you; she was so arresting that I followed her about till I found someone who could tell me who she was.” Men and women were bewitched by this exotic quality in her appearance—one admirer called her “tropically handsome”—and she accentuated this effect by wearing shiny bracelets and a diamond star in her hair that sparkled whenever she tossed her head.14

  On one wrist she had a “dainty tattoo” in the form of a serpent. It was the work of Tom Riley, the finest tattoo artist of the time, and occasionally drew stares of shocked disbelief. But it wasn’t easy to spot. As the New York Times said of Jennie on September 30, 1906, “An elaborate tattoo mark on her left wrist is concealed by a broad bracelet that she always wears when in evening dress, and few know of its presence.”15

  She liked to shock and knew that some people had come to expect her to do and say unconventional things. As an American, she felt entitled to take certain liberties with old-world customs and to speak her mind when the proper thing might have been to hold her tongue. British prejudices against her foreign upbringing annoyed her at first, but she learned to make light of them and, occasionally, to turn them to her advantage. Of her early married life, she recalled, “In England, as on the Continent, the American woman was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature, with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl. Anything of an outlandish nature might be expected of her. If she talked, dressed, and conducted herself as any well-bred woman would, much astonishment was invariably evinced, and she was usually saluted with the tactful remark, ‘I should never have thought you were an American.’ ”

  She was not easily intimidated. Once, when she tried to improve her acquaintance with George Bernard Shaw by asking him to lunch, he sent an intemperate response, vaguely referring to his unwillingness as a vegetarian to eat with what he called elsewhere “carnivorous people.” His telegram began bluntly, “Certainly not!” and then demanded, “What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habit?” Jennie quickly put him in his place, replying, “Know nothing of your habits; hope they are not as bad as your manners.”16

  The abstemious Shaw was less to her liking than his notoriously self-indulgent rival in the theatrical world—Oscar Wilde. She had a favorite line from one of his plays, and once argued with some male friends when she quoted it and couldn’t persuade them that Wilde was the source. She bet them she was right and promptly sent the playwright a note asking him to confirm it. He replied, “How dull men are! They should listen to brilliant women, and look at beautiful ones, and when, as in the present case, a woman is both brilliant and beautiful, they might have the ordinary common sense to admit that she is verbally inspired.” And yes, he wrote, she had quoted him correctly when she had told her friends, “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future!”17

  Though in her early years her social life kept her too busy to be an attentive mother to Winston and her second son, Jack (an unassuming, but dutiful Churchill), she was such an affectionate and exuberant character that her sons couldn’t help but admire her. As boys, they were frustrated by her impulsive ways, never knowing when or where she might turn up. She missed birthdays and left letters unanswered, and breezed in and out of their lives so quickly that she seemed at times more a passing vision than a real person. Winston resented the neglect but tried consoling himself with the idea that she was “a fairy princess”—elusive and ethereal.

  Little boys didn’t interest her, but young men did, and when Winston came of age, he suddenly found in her an ardent ally on whom he could depend. He came to appreciate her passion for society life—as he discovered its immense usefulness to him—and to admire her willingness on occasion to defy its conventions. He liked her boldness, her loyalty, her impish smile, and easy laughter. The independent streak in her character he attributed to her freewheeling father, whose adventures in the cutthroat world of Wall Street finance always fascinated him. While examining late in life a photograph of his New York grandfather, Leonard Jerome, Churchill remarked, “Very fierce. I’m the only tame one they’ve produced.”18

  * * *

  Forty-seven at the time of her son’s maiden speech, Jennie was the envy of her close women friends not only because she retained so much of her youthful good looks, but because—five years after Lord Randolph died—she had married one of the handsomest bachelors in England, who was a good twenty years her junior. An avid sportsman and debonair man about town, George Cornwallis-West was none too bright, but Jennie found his athletic figure, military mustache, strong jaw, and bright eyes irresistible. He looked more mature than his years—he was only two weeks older than Winston—and when he fell in love with the widowed Jennie in the late 1890s, he thought “she did not look a day more than thirty, and her charm and vivacity were on a par with her youthful appearance.”

  He came from a good family but had no fortune to call his own, and his parents were livid that he wanted to throw away his chance at a lucrative match in order to marry a pretty widow of limited means who was almost twice his age. They made such a fuss that, according to one press report, “a social war” nearly broke out between Lady Randolph and George’s mother. Most of Jennie’s friends and family loyally attended the wedding in July 1900, but the pews reserved for the bridegroom’s relations were empty. Normally, a marriage of this kind would have caused a scandal so great that Jennie would have found herself ostracized from much of society. Even the Prince of Wales warned her against marrying young George. But it is a measure of her extraordinary standing in the highest circles that the prince and many others eventually accepted her decision and either attended the ceremony or sent elaborate gifts.

  She knew that she was taking a great risk, and that her second marriage might turn out to be a short one. But she was determined to have her romance while she could. As handsome George later said of her, “If something of beauty attracted her, she just had to have it; it never entered her head to stop and think how she was going to pay for it.” He didn’t seem to realize that he was also one of those things of beauty she craved, and that neither of them ever gave much thought to how they would make their marriage work. “Of course, the glamour won’t last forever,” she told a friend, “but why not take what you can, and not make yourself or anyone else unhappy when the next stage arrives?”19

  American papers reported that the wedding ceremony at St. Paul’s in Knightsbridge was dignified but “depressing.” At the altar George “seemed somewhat nervous,” while “Lady Randolph was perfectly self-possessed and looked pleased with herself.” In fact, Jennie “appeared to be the only cheery person.” Sunny gave the bride away, and Winston did his best to show his support by greeting his mother in the vestry with “a tremendous hug.” He wasn’t enthusiastic about the marriage, but he didn’t want to disappoint her and had declared earlier that he wouldn’t try to influence her decision. It was only necessary, he wrote her, “for you to consult your own happiness.”20

  As Winston and others feared, Jennie would come to regret her decision. But in the first year or two of the marriage she was happy, proudly accepting her new identity as plain “Mrs. George Cornwallis-West” instead of “Lady Randolph Churchill.” In the short term the only cost of her decision may have been to Winston. Her sensational wedding of July was followed less than three months later by his proposal to Pamela Plowden. There were many reasons for Pamela to say no, but Jennie’s marriage was sure to give any young woman doubts about becoming the daughter-in-law of such an audacious and controversial figure. Agreeing to be Winston’s wife meant accepting many burdens—not merely those
of his ambitious career and demanding personality, but also those that came with joining a family that included such imposing women as Jennie and Consuelo, and the other grand Churchill ladies who sat in the dark gallery in February and watched their young relation shine for the first time in the House of Commons.

  So Winston can’t have been surprised when he saw Pamela in London a few weeks later and found that her view of their relationship remained unchanged. She was happy to regard him as a friend, but nothing more. There was only one thing that had changed since he had seen her last. She was, he wrote forlornly to his mother, “more lovely than ever.”21

  III

  BORN FOR OPPOSITION

  A few years before he won election to Parliament, Churchill was invited to lunch with an old Victorian statesman whose career was nearing its end. A “Falstaffian figure” nicknamed Jumbo, Sir William Vernon Harcourt loved to peer over his gold-rimmed glasses and “whisper the secrets of Parliament” to impressionable young men courting his favor. Every bit of his huge frame—he stood six feet, three inches tall—would shake as he chuckled over his own jokes, most of which he had been telling for years. But young Churchill was in an earnest mood and wanted to know what the future held. What big events might happen next? he asked the old man.

  “My dear Winston,” answered Sir William, “the experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens.”

  He was only partly teasing. Having enjoyed a long and prosperous life in a century dominated by British economic and military power, Sir William inhabited in his twilight years a comfortable world not unlike that of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Dickens’s Bleak House—“a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, [which] cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.” More than most young men of his generation, Churchill had his eye on those larger worlds rushing toward the well-ordered one in which he had been brought up, and he was already bracing himself for the inevitable collisions.

  When, in the 1920s, he recalled Harcourt’s remark, Churchill observed, “Since that moment, as it seems to me, nothing has ever ceased happening. . . . The smooth river with its eddies and ripples along which we then sailed, seems inconceivably remote from the cataract down which we have been hurled and the rapids in whose turbulence we are now struggling.”1

  To the impatient young Winston of 1901, the future was clouded by the fact that far too many old Victorians were still running the country. The upper ranks of his own party were filled with graybeards, beginning with the Olympian figure of the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, whose family—the legendary Cecils of Hatfield House—had been part of the ruling establishment since Elizabethan times. A shrewd statesman in his best years, Salisbury had grown so ponderous and decrepit that he had become increasingly detached from the daily business of governing. He found breathing difficult, which forced him to sleep sitting up in a chair. (After his death in 1903 it was said that he had fallen from the chair and developed “blood poisoning from an ulcerated leg.”) For years the only exercise he had taken was to ride a large “prehistoric tricycle” slowly on an asphalt path around his estate, with a servant trailing behind to push him up hills.

  “He thoroughly enjoys his exercise,” a visitor to Hatfield had noted of the prime minister, but “is always in terror lest he be ambushed by some of the numerous grandchildren who all think him fair game.” (Two had recently been spotted by their mother on a wall near the path awaiting Salisbury’s arrival with “huge jugs of water.”)2

  Failing eyesight and forgetfulness plagued the prime minister’s last years. He had a habit of dozing off in the House of Lords, his massive beard covering his chest. A Punch satire suggested that the only public event guaranteed to keep him awake was “a Brass-band Competition.” During one long official ceremony he was drowsily surveying the room with his dark, hooded eyes when he dimly perceived that a man standing nearby was smiling at him. He turned to another man and whispered, “Who is my young friend?” The answer came back, “Your eldest son.”

  Salisbury’s ambitious former private secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn’t understand why the old statesman refused to retire, and privately criticized him as “that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top.” One evening early in his parliamentary career, Churchill dined with Salisbury in the company of some other young politicians and recalled afterward that, on the way home, one of them had wondered aloud how it must feel to occupy such a high office, “and to be just about to die.”3

  It was widely assumed that whenever Salisbury left office, his place would be filled by Arthur Balfour, his dutiful but haughty nephew. (Told on a visit to New York that a big new skyscraper was fireproof, Balfour regarded it disdainfully and said, “What a pity.”) To make sure that the Cecil clan continued to influence public affairs long after his death, the prime minister had filled his administration with so many of his relatives—including a son-in-law as First Lord of the Admiralty—that the political press started calling the government the “Hotel Cecil, Unlimited.” Balfour was one of three nephews in important positions, which prompted a critic to remark acidly, “The Spartan woman gave all her sons to her country. The Marquis of Salisbury, not to be outdone in patriotism, adds his nephews.”4

  * * *

  Even before he won his seat in Parliament, Churchill took pains to cultivate Salisbury’s goodwill. He sent him respectful notes and dedicated The River War to him, praising the leader as one “under whose wise direction the Conservative Party have long enjoyed power and the nation prosperity.” More important, in his first year in the House of Commons, he wasted no time establishing a close friendship with Salisbury’s youngest son, Lord Hugh Cecil. Given the family’s hold on the party, it was reasonable for Winston to seek a strong bond with Hugh before the next reorganization of the “Hotel Cecil,” positioning himself as a kind of honorary member of the family.

  Unfortunately, he was slow to realize that Linky—as Hugh was nicknamed—had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps. He was too self-absorbed to become an effective ally for anyone, spending much of his time studying obscure scholarly matters in the palatial comfort of Hatfield House, where the large family library with its priceless collection of old books and manuscripts served as a perfect postgraduate retreat after he completed his formal studies at Oxford. Though he shared Winston’s love of drama and fascination with history, he lacked ambition and wasn’t interested in the political plums his father liked to hand out to the family. A devout Anglican, he had been tempted to join the clergy but had settled instead for a seat in the House of Commons and a chance to sermonize from time to time on any issue that stirred his eccentric mind.

  He was wary of Churchill at first, finding him too impulsive and “rather sentimental, addicted to the sort of sentiment that hangs on a phrase and is not very profound.” He liked hard facts, not flights of fancy. Once, when his attention was drawn to a pretty sunset, he glanced at it, and then turned away with the dry comment, “Yes, extremely tasteful.”

  Yet it was partly Winston’s fondness for romantic sentiment that made him think an alliance with Salisbury’s son was worth having. The pedantic Linky—whom one contemporary described as having “a little puckered-up youthful old-face perched on the top of a long, thin rickety figure”—was transformed by Winston’s overactive imagination into a more exciting companion trailing clouds of aristocratic glory. He saw him as a stalwart Cavalier reborn—“a real Tory, a being out of the seventeenth century,” as he later put it, who would join him in a battle to rejuvenate the Conservative Party. (Others, less sympathetic, thought Hugh more closely resembled “an ascetic of the fourteenth century.” His own brothers nicknamed him Linky because they so often joked that he looked like the missing evolutionary link.)5

  In time Churchill’s enthusiasm and flattery won over young Cecil. Together with a handful of other MPs—including the handsome society figure Ian Malcolm, who wa
s shortly to become engaged to actress Lillie Langtry’s daughter, and a few sons of the aristocracy such as Lord Percy and the Honorable Arthur Stanley—they formed a coterie of independent-minded Tories willing to entertain new ideas and fresh approaches. Winston was eager to stir up trouble, proudly spreading the word that the new group wanted to be known as the “Hooligans.” He confided to his circle that he wanted “to develop that invaluable political quality—a desire for mischief.” In part his inspiration was the Fourth Party of the early 1880s—his father’s small band of political “skirmishers,” which Arthur Balfour had briefly joined in an outburst of youthful indiscretion.

  Mischief-making wasn’t uppermost in his friends’ minds. They seemed more interested in having endless discussions over late-night dinners. The general impression among other MPs was that the Hooligans “were really largely a supper club, and it was said in the lobbies that Mr. Malcolm’s special function was to pay for the suppers.” Usually the group gathered on Thursday nights in one of the dining rooms of the House, but they also traveled to Blenheim and other aristocratic citadels for weekend meetings. Consuelo recalled one of these Hooligan dinners at Blenheim when everyone “lingered until midnight, carried away by Winston’s eloquence.” (Unlike Churchill, Hugh Cecil was a good and patient listener. “Am I boring you, Lord Hugh?” a garrulous friend once asked. “Not yet,” he answered politely.)6

  For a time the statuesque Duchess of Sutherland—who was only a few years older than Winston—became a muse of sorts to the group. They were invited to her Scottish castle and to the lavish parties she gave at her London mansion, Stafford House. In her ballroom, with “a thousand candles sparkling in their chandeliers,” she was always the center of attention and seemed to float effortlessly across the polished floors as she moved among her guests. One recalled that she looked as “slender as a reed, golden hair simply knotted, a skin translucent as the heart of an ocean shell.” But some of her glamorous guests wondered what she saw in Winston. After one party at Stafford House, a society gossip complained that Churchill “trampled on the trains of three duchesses” and spilled champagne “into the lap of Lady Helen Stewart, a large blond heiress to whom he devoted himself the entire evening.” ( Lady Helen—or “Birdie,” as she was known in her family—was Winston’s second cousin, and a friend since childhood.)7