The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (19 page)

Lord Randolph Churchill in his prime

Randolph vividly recalled that she had “one long yellow tooth in her top jaw that waggled as she spoke.” Obviously, she expected to be paid—this was the ultimate master-servant relationship. Emptying his pockets, he threw all the money he had on the bed. Her leer grew. Speechless, he struggled into his waistcoat and coat and bolted. As he slammed the door he heard her call, “Lovie, you’re not kind!” Then, said Randolph, “Downstairs I fled in livid terror.”
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He knew his peril; he made for the nearest doctor’s office. There he was treated with a strong disinfectant, but three weeks later a venereal sore appeared on his genitals, followed by lesions elsewhere. He returned to the physician, who treated him with mercury, warned him to abstain from alcohol, and told him he had nothing to worry about. It was a lie. Victorian medicine, confronted with such symptoms, was helpless. Thus it was that at the height of the 1873 Season, even before his entrance into public life, the elegant twenty-four-year-old bachelor son of a duke, the cynosure of aspiring debutantes and their ambitious mothers, was a doomed syphilitic.
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On this deckle-edged invitation—it still exists; the Churchills, the biographer ardently notes, saved everything—a feminine hand later wrote, below “To meet,” the name “Randolph.” Certainly Clarissa (“Clara”) Jerome hoped that she and her three daughters would meet
someone
interesting. Lately Europe had been a disappointment to them. Clara had begun to long for Newport, or even the Jeromes’ New York mansion on Madison Square. She took the Franco-Prussian War as a personal affront. She and her daughters—Clarita, Leonie, and Jeanette (“Jennie”)—had adored the Paris of the Second Empire. Beginning in 1858 they had lived in a palatial apartment on the Champs-Elysées. Clarita had made her debut at the Tuileries and had been the guest of Napoleon III and Eugénie at Compiègne. Jennie had been scheduled to come out in 1870. She had already been fitted for her gown when Louis Napoleon sent Wilhelm a rude note. Wilhelm of Prussia replied—at Bismarck’s urging—with the ruder Ems telegram, and suddenly the two armies were lunging at each other. In the beginning Clara saw no need for alarm. French confidence was boundless. And neutral observers thought it fully justified. The
Pall Mall Gazette
of July 29, 1870, predicted that the first Napoleon’s triumphs were about to be repeated.
The Times
felt an Englishman would be justified in laying his “last shilling on Casquette against Pumpernickel.” The élan of Louis Napoleon’s soldiery could scarcely have been higher. They pored over the maps of Prussia which had been issued to them, studied German phrase books, and eagerly looked forward to heroic attacks gallantly carried out by them and their comrades crying
“En avant! A la baïonnette! A Berlin!”
to the strains of “La Marseillaise.”
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It was “unthinkable,” the
London Standard
said, for the Prussians “to take the offensive.”
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General Helmuth von Moltke and his general staff disagreed. They had built their railroad grid with war in mind, had profited by William T. Sherman’s brilliant use of railways in Tennessee, and had mastered the coordination of telegraph lines and troop trains. Three weeks after war had been declared, Moltke had efficiently mobilized 1,183,000 Germans, backed by more than 1,440 Krupp cast-steel cannon. The French, who regarded efficiency as a pedestrian virtue, weren’t ready. They collided with massed battalions wearing spiked helmets and uniforms of Prussian blue singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and “Deutschland über Alles” and chanting
“Nach Paris!”
While their deadly artillery, outranging Louis Napoleon’s obsolete bronze guns, flung shattering barrages ahead of them, they blazed a trail which would be followed by their grandsons in 1914 and their great-grandsons in 1940. Suddenly news reached the Champs-Elysées that half the French army was bottled up in the mighty fortress of Metz. At Sedan the other half, led by Louis Napoleon himself, laid down their arms and accepted humiliating surrender terms. Paris lay open to the invader.

Clara and her daughters fled to Cowes, the fashionable British seaside resort on the Isle of Wight. They moved back to Paris the following spring, taking a house in the boulevard Haussman, but the city had been devastated by the Commune, the leftist regime which had defied the Prussians and their own countrymen until starved into submission. Returning to Cowes, the Jeromes leased what Clara called a “sweet little cottage” and were frequently seen there and in London, attending balls, recitals, receptions, and musicales, and other highlights of the Season. Most weekends found them on the great country estates. Unlike the Frenchwoman whose naiveté spoiled a perfectly good English breakfast, they were not shocked by careless interpretations of the marriage sacrament. Clara’s husband slept with many women in New York; she knew it, knew that he had sired several illegitimate children, and was indifferent. Her grandson Winston relished telling of a meeting between Clara and one of Leonard Jerome’s mistresses; Clara said: “My dear, I understand how you feel. He is
so
irresistible.” But a lady’s sexual emancipation was possible only after matrimony. As long as the Misses Jerome remained single, they must also be maidens. At least one of them was straining at the leash. A photograph of the mother and her daughters, taken at about this time, shows her seated, facing left, regarding the world with a resolute jaw and eyes like raisins. Clarita, also seated, is holding her mother’s hand and searching her face, as though for guidance. Leonie, standing, leans on her mother’s shoulder for support. Jennie, however, doesn’t seem even to be a part of the group. She was already known as “a great showoff.” Here the show is well worth watching. Dark, vivacious, and magnificent, she stands alone, staring boldly at the photographer, her left arm outflung, the hand atop a furled umbrella, her hips cocked saucily. It is almost a wanton pose, the posture of a virgin who can hardly wait to assume another position.
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Mrs. Jerome and her daughters (from left): Leonie, Clara, and Jennie

Their Cowes home was a “cottage” in the sense that the sprawling Newport châteaux were called cottages. Leonard was seldom there, but when he crossed the Atlantic—usually at the helm of his own yacht—he expected to find his family living in style. He was an American type peculiar to his time, a vigorous, handsome man, a brokerage partner of William R. Travers and a member of the New York Stock Exchange who repeatedly amassed, and then spent, enormous portfolios of wealth. As Winston told the story, “My grandfather would devote himself to work and in a short time make a fortune. Then he would give up the life completely, disappearing for a year or two, generally to Europe. When he came back to New York he might have lost the fortune he had made, and at once set about piling up another. Money poured through his fingers. He generally had an income of about £10,000, perhaps equal to £40,000 now. My grandfather thought nothing of spending $70,000 on a party, where each lady found a gold bracelet, inset with diamonds, wrapped in her napkin.”
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In his careening career, Leonard seems to have succeeded at almost everything he tried. He founded the American Jockey Club, built a racetrack in the Bronx, supported an opera house, was for a time a part-owner of the
New York Times,
participated in politics, spent eighteen months as American consul in Trieste, gambled heavily and successfully, and was the first man to drive a team of racing horses four-in-hand down Broadway. Like many other Wall Street millionaires of that period, he held mixed feelings about the English aristocracy. He envied their power; Britain was a mightier nation than the United States, and an English peer was a great figure throughout the Empire and beyond. But Americans were also proud, especially self-made men. Having reached the top of a mobile society, they scorned those whose future had been assured at birth. After all, Britain’s patricians and New York’s financiers came from the same stock. Leonard was the great-great-grandson of a Huguenot who had arrived in what were then the American colonies in 1710. Leonard’s wife’s family had settled in Connecticut by 1650. There was one faint blemish in Clara’s otherwise pure Anglo-Saxon blood, one which later delighted Winston: her grandmother had been an Iroquois Indian. But that merely made her more colorful. Both Leonard and Clara were descended from American officers who had fought in the War of Independence. One, a major in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, had served with Washington at Valley Forge. To be sure, the Jeromes would be unlikely to place obstacles in the path of a titled British son-in-law. Palmerston had predicted: “Before the century is out, these clever and pretty women from New York will pull the strings in half the chancelleries in Europe.”
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Louisa Caton, the daughter of a Baltimore merchant, had been Lady Hervey-Bathurst and then, after her first husband’s death, Duchess of Leeds. Minnie Stevens became Lady Paget; Mrs. Arthur Post, Lady Barrymore; Mary Leiter of Chicago, Lady Curzon and vicereine of India. And Consuelo del Valle, who had been Jennie’s schoolmate, would soon be Duchess of Manchester. So a Jerome girl wouldn’t find herself in altogether unfamiliar company. Leonard and Clara might have been pleased by the thought. At the same time, they would have bridled at the suggestion that she was marrying up.

The shipboard dance at Cowes aboard the cruiser
Ariadne
was considered a major social event and even a historic occasion, for the guests of honor were the future Czar Alexander III and his czarina, Maria Feodorovna. Today they are forgotten, part of the legacy which was destroyed with the last of the Romanovs, but one question asked that evening by an acquaintance of the Jeromes, by an obscure dandy named Frank Bertie, is memorable. Although Jennie had a full dance card, she happened to be standing alone, watching the bobbing Chinese lanterns and the entwined British and Russian flags overhead and listening to the Royal Marine band, when Bertie appeared at her elbow with a pale youth. Bertie said: “Miss Jerome, may I present an old friend of mine who has just arrived in Cowes, Lord Randolph Churchill.” Jennie inclined her lovely head. Randolph stared. She was nineteen, at the height of her glory, bare-shouldered and sheathed below in a flowing white gown with flowers pinned to the bosom. After some hesitation, he invited her to dance. The quadrille proved to be beyond him; he tripped and suggested they sit this one out. They did. Her dance card notwithstanding, they sat out the next one, and then the next, talking of horses and mutual friends until Clara, wondering uneasily where her daughter might be among all these virile naval officers, sought her out. Before leaving, Jennie persuaded her mother to invite Randolph to dinner the following evening, accompanied by a British colonel for the sake of appearances. At the dinner Randolph seems to have tried hard to be clever, without much success. Afterward Jennie and Clarita played piano duets. Randolph whispered to the startled colonel: “If I can, I mean to make the dark one my wife.” They left, and Jennie asked her sister what she thought of Randolph. Clarita wasn’t impressed. She thought his manner pretentious and his mustache absurd. She doubted she could learn to like him. Jennie said: “Please try to, Clarita, because I have the strangest feeling that he’s going to ask me to marry him.” If he did, she said, “I’m going to say ‘yes.’ ” Her sister laughed, but in three days, during a stroll in the Cowes garden, the two became engaged.
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