The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (210 page)

In all events, the Chumbolly—his
petit nom
in childhood—had become a problem. So had “Mule,” Sarah, now in her early twenties, green-eyed and stunning, with titian hair and milk-white skin. Her mother wrote a friend: “Sometimes she looks absolutely lovely—but on the other hand she can look like a moping raven.” She moped when she didn’t have her way. In the end she always had it; she was her father’s favorite; he could deny her nothing. She decided on a theatrical career and got it, beginning in the chorus line of C. B. Cochran’s “Young Ladies,” which, according to Pamela, was “a London revue of girls who danced fairly naked—as naked as you could get in those days. That was not really what her parents had in mind for their daughter.” Then, while playing in
Follow the Sun
, she fell in love with a music hall comedian, Vic Oliver, a thirty-three-year-old Viennese, thought to be Jewish, who had already been married twice. The response of her parents was a vehement
No
. They wouldn’t budge; neither would she. After a year of quarreling she bolted to New York, where Vic was working. Winston sent Randolph after her and engaged American lawyers to stop the marriage, but since she was legally of age, they were helpless. On Christmas Eve, 1936, two weeks after Edward’s abdication, Sarah became Mrs. Victor Oliver. The newspapers made a carnival of the affair, and Randolph’s public denunciation of them made everything worse. Hankey wrote Chartwell, “We both sympathise with you two,” and even Baldwin wrote that he wanted Churchill “to know that I felt with you from my heart when I read in the papers of certain domestic anxieties that must have caused you pain. I know you well enough to realize how closely these things touch you.” In the end, a family friend says, “Sarah broke Winston’s heart, and he hers.”
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That left Mary, the Chartwell child—unlike the others, she could remember no other home—with the companionship of an astonishing array of pets: lambs, bantams, a Blenheim spaniel, a beige-colored pug dog, and a marmalade cat, two fox cubs, and three goats, one of whom produced twins while the other gave birth to triplets, and all of whom ate the cherry trees, to Clementine’s indignation. Sarah had learned French in a Paris finishing school from Georges Bidault, then obscure but later foreign minister of France; Mary was taught at Chartwell during school holidays by Madame Gabrielle l’Honoré, a discovery of Clemmie’s. A nearby riding school provided Mary with mounts. Her relationship with her mother, she now recalls, was “respectful and admiring rather than close,” though Clementine had taken her skiing in the Arlberg mountains. After ten days, Winston received a report on their first Zürs expedition: “Mary fell down 19 times…. Today I am going in a sleigh as I am really bored with tumbling down!” The letter was signed: “Your bruised & struggling but undaunted Clemmie.”
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Sometimes husband and wife spent holidays together. They were welcomed at Blenheim and Lou Sueil by the Marlboroughs; at Taplow by Lord and Lady Desborough; at Trent Park by Sir Philip Sassoon; and the Duke of Westminster (known as Bendor to his friends) was their host at his several homes in England, France, and Scotland. But these were relatives or very old friends. Other patricians felt awkward with them. Winston’s criticism of the new Germany was considered bad form—even disloyal to His Majesty’s Government. And his manners were odd. How could you entertain a man who wouldn’t laugh at anti-Semitic jokes? His wife was almost as bad, and in some ways worse. She would even walk out on her own guests at Chartwell, something one didn’t
do
. Mary recalls that “her victims were never the timid, however tedious, but the brash and powerful,” and her “basic and undying radicalism also made high Tories and most very rich people potential targets for her scorn.” Twice at Chartwell she humbled a British general. Leaving her guests to bathe before dinner, she told his aide-de-camp that she looked forward to seeing him in a half hour. The general said that his ADC didn’t dine with him. Clementine turned on him and said: “In my house, General, I invite whom I wish and I don’t require your advice.” The ADC dined. The second time, the general muttered the threadbare old military myth that all politicians are dishonest. She rose starchily and said: “If that is your view, General, you should leave Chartwell at once. I shall arrange to have your bags packed.” He stammered his apologies.
⁴⁰

Usually, however, the Churchills took separate vacations. Winston’s painting was his release, his escape valve, and he found the “paintatious” Riviera, as he called it, irresistible. “I paint all day, and so far as my means go, gamble after dark,” he happily wrote the former Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, in the early spring of 1937. He was seeing a lot of Edward and Wallis. To Clemmie he wrote from Maxine Elliott’s Château de l’Horizon:

British expatriates on the Mediterranean liked to think of their society as neo-Edwardian, and those who could afford it were as idle as only the idle rich can be. But Churchill was a working man. Typically, he wrote his wife: “I have stayed in bed every morning and made great progress with the book. We have averaged fifteen hundred words a day, though nominally on vacation. I shall have a lot for you to read when you come home.” His occasional forays into Riviera diversion were, almost without exception, disappointing. He was taking lessons in what he called a “very pretty dance. We take three steps and give a hop.” He added ruefully: “I always hop at the wrong time, which, I am afraid, provokes small minded people to laugh.”
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Nevertheless, the creature comforts of the expatriate society appealed to the hedonistic streak in him; if he was well supplied with Pol Roger, fed by a great chef, and offered his choice of the best cigars, the identity of his suppliers was of little interest to him. As a statesman he was fiercely incorrupt, but on holiday he could be had—for a stiff price, to be sure—by women like Maxine Elliott and “Daisy,” the daughter of the Duc de Decacazes, known in newspaper columns as “Mrs. Reginald Fellowes,” though Mr. Fellowes was invisible. Daisy spent a great deal of her valueless time trying to seduce Winston, but between his paint box, printers’ galleys, losing money on the green baize of the Riviera’s gaming tables, monologues over brandy, and the pleasures of the table, he had no time for the pleasures she had in mind and may indeed have been unaware of her intentions. He would always find women mysterious. He had Clementine; that was enough for him.

It was not always enough for her, however. Late in life she told Mary, “It took all my time and strength just to keep up with him.” This was hyperbole. Certainly, being Mrs. Winston Churchill required rare stamina. Fortunately, Clemmie had it. Indeed, she had enough to pursue her own pleasures, which were very unlike his. She didn’t write, paint, gamble, or enjoy the company of
gens du monde
; she didn’t like Maxine and wouldn’t speak to Daisy. “Her favorite holiday,” her youngest daughter recalls, “was to stay in a modest but comfortable hotel in some beautiful or interesting place,” where, in the company of congenial people, she would “spend a week or two sightseeing and gallery visiting in an unhurried fashion.” Winston disliked sightseeing, and he loathed being part of a tour group which would pause, in this gallery or that museum, while a guide explained what the tourists should appreciate and why. If so trapped, Churchill would stand on the outer fringe of the party, seething with frustration because he wasn’t talking, couldn’t even interrupt, and therefore wasn’t the center of attention.
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Ambitious politicians try to project an image of radiant health, and to his admirers Churchill was the robust personification of John Bull. But he had been prey to ills since childhood. Some of his vacations were taken on doctor’s orders; others were interrupted by bouts of influenza or infectious fevers. Once, when en route to Venice—where he expected to holiday with Clemmie, Randolph, Sarah, and the Prof—he had been stricken by paratyphoid in Bavaria. His condition was grave; a return to England was out of the question; he lay in a Salzburg sanitarium for two weeks, unable even to raise his head. His confinement continued through a third week, and he abandoned all hope of reaching Italy. He could write, however, and his bank balance, which was always in and out of the red, made work essential. Still in the sanitarium, he began a series of twelve articles on “The World’s Great Stories,” commissioned by Lord Riddell for
News of the World
. Back at Chartwell he wrote his cousin the Duke of Marlborough that he was “rather battered, but in another week I shall be alright. It was an English bug which I took abroad with me, and no blame rests on the otherwise misguided continent of Europe.”
⁴⁴

Clementine, now moving gracefully into her fifties, shared with her husband the same peculiar mélange of exceptional energy and an unreliable constitution. As the Chamberlain government approached the end of its first year, with Halifax and the prime minister negotiating agreements with Italy—thus assuring Mussolini’s support in any future European conflict, they confidently told the House—Clemmie took the cure in the Pyrenees at Cauterets, near Lourdes. Winston celebrated the following Christmas without her; she was resting on a South Pacific beach in the French colonial archipelago Îles sous le Vent. Perhaps enforced pleasure whetted her appetite for more. A splendid horsewoman, she rode often, and she played tennis with increasing skill, often with the Prof, who had made her an exception to his misogyny. She swam, hunted boar at Bendor’s invitation, and beginning in 1936, the year of the Rhineland crisis, had improved her skiing while holidaying with her sister-in-law Lady Gwendeline (“Goonie”) Churchill and Venetia Montagu, spending long hours après-ski by firesides in Zürs or Lenzerdeide, trying to forget the troubling present with tales of the serene past.
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Her most cherished memories of those interwar years were of a spectacular voyage halfway round the world in the second winter of the Third Reich, roughly the period between the Nazis’ murder of Austrian chancellor Dollfuss and Hitler’s announcement that Germany was rearming in defiance of Versailles. Clementine was an enchanted guest aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht
Rosaura
. Moyne—who would be assassinated ten years later in Cairo by Jewish terrorists—was sailing off on one of those whimsical adventures, evocative of
King Kong
, which spiced the idle life of wealthy Englishmen between the wars. His destination was Komodo, an obscure island in what is now Indonesia, reportedly inhabited by “dragonlike monster lizards.” Moyne intended to capture some for the London zoo. These creatures actually existed—one member of the party photographed a twelve-foot lizard with a pig in its jaws, and Moyne brought back two smaller specimens—but the real purpose of the trip was to visit exotica and to escape the gloom and vulgarity of Europe. Her husband and children saw her off at Victoria Station, and in her first letter she wrote that at the moment of departure, seeing “you all collected on the platform, I thought how much I love you all, and above and more than them all
you
my darling Winston…. You all looked so sweet and beautiful standing there, and I thought how fortunate I am to have such a family. Do not be vexed with your vagabond Cat—She has gone off toward the jungle with her tail in the air, but will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably….”

Clementine on the high seas was—at least at the outset—the quintessential Clementine. As she lay in her stateroom, she wrote home, she could “contemplate the photographs of my family erected on the chest of drawers.” She had begun “an enormous piece of needlework which Venetia made me bring. I have got 144 reels of silk with which to quilt it & I calculate that even if I sew all day & never catch a butterfly or dragon I could not finish it before my return!” After thirty years of marriage her intimate letters to Churchill, and his replies, were as charming as an exchange between honeymooners. On New Year’s Day she wrote from Madras: “Oh my Darling, I’m thinking so much of you & how you have enriched my life. I have loved you very much but I wish I had been a more amusing wife to you. How nice it would be if we were young again.” He replied that she had written

Winston’s domestic stresses, during his wife’s absence, were trivial but irksome to a man trying to sway Parliament and write the opening passages of his next Marlborough volume. His eminent ancestor fascinated him, though he saw some of his warts; Marlborough had “far less pride than the average man,” he wrote Clemmie, and was in fact capable of “grovelling.” It was “only in the field and in his love for Sarah that he rises to the sublime. Still Mars and Venus are two of the most important deities in the classical heaven.” It was maddening to descend from the eminence of character analysis to cope with the fox who was devouring his geese, an astonishing explosion among Chartwell’s canine population, and feverish young Churchills who, he reasoned, ought to be too old to catch infectious childhood diseases. Discovering that every bitch on the grounds was giving birth to litters of puppies, Winston unmasked the culprit. He was Mary’s pug, a slave of lust. But Mary couldn’t be admonished; she had whooping cough. Randolph was home with a severe case of jaundice. Sarah was pale and tired, a consequence, her father wrote her mother, of “dancing practically four hours a day as well as going to balls…. I have therefore told her that she must not go to balls on any night when she practises dancing.” As to the puppies, he had “banished all dogs from our part of the house…. I really think you will have to buy a new strip of carpet outside my landings.”
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