When Mary left for London Sarah went back to work, and celebrated her thirty-second birthday on the set. On the same day Vic married his third wife, Natalie. To her father Sarah wrote, ‘Remember Chequers – when we knew all was finished finally and legally with Vic? You called me across the room and whispered in my ear: “Free!” I had no answer – for already I knew, already I was not.’11 But the Winant affair, too, was now finally over – and although she does not say so in her memoirs, she must have written to tell him so. Sinfonia fatale, the film in which Sarah starred, won an Italian prize at the Lugano Festival, and she felt she could return to England. There she met Pam and Averell Harriman who were visiting Chartwell. Their relationship was now causing harmful gossip, and in September Max Beaverbrook took Pam aside and strongly recommended she part from Averell in order not to damage his career. He more or less ordered her to fly out to Jamaica and spend some time at his estate there.
In February 1947, Mary married Christopher Soames at the same church in Westminster where her parents had married almost forty years earlier. Although Clementine had been apprehensive about the proposed marriage, she had soon realised that Mary was not prepared to give Christopher up as she had with her previous relationships. Clementine and Winston soon took to him, indeed he quickly became a favourite with them both, his common sense and his good humour providing a mutually rewarding father–son relationship that had long been lacking in Churchill’s life. Despite all that had happened over the years, Churchill had what he called ‘a deep animal love’ for Randolph, but by now even he was forced to acknowledge his son’s many faults. ‘Every time we meet we seem to have a bloody row,’ he reflected.12 Randolph once told his cousin Anita that he could not help his rages; the anger seemed to rise from his feet and take him over. If he could stop the process by total concentration, before this tide reached his knees, he told her, he could control himself, otherwise not. Alcohol, of course, destroyed any chance of self-control and also fuelled his sense of thwarted destiny. Christopher, by contrast, was uncomplicated; he admired his father-in-law unreservedly, without ever being too overawed to speak his mind.
While on honeymoon Christopher became ill with a duodenal ulcer, and Clementine flew out to help Mary care for him and bring him home. There were lots of jokes about mothers-in-law on honey-moons, but the episode helped to seal the relationship between Christopher and Clementine. His condition eventually necessitated his resignation from his regiment, and it was decided that he and Mary would move to the farm at Chartwell and run it, and that Christopher should enter politics. He and Winston would become very close friends and political allies. Jock Colville wrote that, without any malice or intrigue, or indeed any intention on Christopher’s part, he stepped into the shoes ‘so long destined for Randolph’.13
It was Christopher who encouraged a new passion in Winston’s life: horse-racing. Winston would become a highly successful racehorse owner, and from 1949 he always had horses in training, racing under his father’s old colours of pink and chocolate. It was a sport that he followed with enormous interest until the last year of his life. However, it was with the first horse he ever purchased, Colonist II, that Winston achieved his most spectacular successes. Colonist was a real stayer, and became one of the most popular horses in the country, every housewife following ‘Winnie’s horse’. The bighearted grey powered his way to thirteen wins, including the prestigious Jockey Club Cup, the Winston Churchill Stakes and the Ribblesdale Cup at Royal Ascot; he was entered and placed twice in the Ascot Gold Cup. When, after the 1951 flat season, Colonist’s trainer Walter Nightingale suggested that it was time to retire the horse and send him to stud, Winston is said to have replied: ‘[What?]…and have it said that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is living on the immoral earnings of a horse?’14 Colonist was sold at auction in December that year and became a successful sire. When Churchill was once asked whether Colonist was still racing, he replied: ‘No, he has given up racing. He is now rogering.’15 One of Winston’s greatest treats was to be invited to watch the racing from the Royal Box, which became a frequent occurrence.
At about the time of Mary’s marriage Jack’s health deteriorated dramatically. His doctor – the same who had treated Jennie in her final illness – was seventy-six years old, and Johnny unsuccessfully tried to persuade his father to call in a younger man. But Jack had great faith in the old physician, and would not have it. The fact was that although the family knew of Jack’s heart condition, no one knew how ill he had been over the last decade, and it was a shock to them all when the doctor told them that Jack had suffered an aneurysm which could only be managed for a short time, and that his imminent death was inevitable. Three weeks after Mary’s wedding, Johnny and Winston were with Jack as he lay dying one Sunday night – all three were in tears as they said goodbye. At the last, Johnny left his father and uncle together. For Winston, his brother’s death was one of the great emotional blows of his life, and it is remarkable that he was able to perform his duties that week. He told Johnny that when his own father died he had been ‘prostrate for a whole day and night’. And then, seeing his nephew’s distress he said, ‘Johnny, I will take your father’s place. Come to me if you are in trouble. I will be your father.’16
In September that year Pam spent a holiday at Lismore, County Waterford, at the romantic Irish castle that had once belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh and now formed part of the Duke of Devonshire’s estate. Among the fellow guests were Kick and Jack Kennedy, Hugh Fraser (who had once proposed to Pam) and Sir Anthony Eden. Kick, the widowed Marchioness of Hartington, was now living in England and had fallen in love with the multimillionaire Peter Fitzwilliam (the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam). A former SOE hero who had been awarded the DSO, Fitzwilliam also had an estate in Ireland. He was married, albeit by that time unhappily, for his wife was an alcoholic, but this was not considered sufficient grounds for divorce. Jack was the only member of the Kennedy family who knew about the relationship. Pam, having enjoyed an amusing flirtation with David Niven – to whom she always playfully referred as ‘Niv the Spiv’17 – was now involved in a casual affair with the devastatingly handsome Prince Aly Khan. She was a welcome and supportive confidante to Kick throughout that winter – and Kick needed a friend after she told her family that she was going to marry Fitzwilliam as soon as he could obtain a divorce. She met with a stony resistance. With the exception of her brother Jack and her father Joseph, who conceived a plan to ask the Pope for a dispensation, most of the family were appalled that Kick, who had already married out of the Catholic Church when she married Billy Cavendish, was now proposing to marry a divorced man – which was just as bad. Her mother turned her face from her and the two were never reconciled.
It was at Whitsun in mid-May 1948 that Pam drove Kick and Peter Fitzwilliam to Croydon Airport, where he had chartered an eight-seat, twin-engined De Havilland Dove. He and Kick had arranged to fly down to Cannes for the long weekend, and they pressed Pam to accompany them – at least as far as Paris, where they were meeting Beaverbrook’s son Max and his wife Jane for lunch while the plane was serviced. But Pam had made other engagements for the holiday and had to decline the invitation. The following day, she heard on the radio that Peter and Kick had been killed instantly when their plane, en route from Le Bourget to Cannes, had crashed in low cloud during a storm in the Rhône valley. Peter, who was piloting the plane, had been advised by radio to turn back, but having flown in far worse conditions during the war he had evidently decided to press on to the good weather that was forecast not far ahead of their position. It was assumed at the inquest that he became disoriented and had flown into the side of a mountain (near the town of Privas).18 Kick’s mother’s shocking remark on hearing of her death was that the fatal crash was ‘God’s way of pointing His finger at Kick and saying No!’ The Devonshires, who had come to love Kick dearly, recovered her body and organised her burial in Edensor churchyard at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The Duchess decided on the movingly brief epitaph: ‘Joy
she gave, Joy she had found’.
Pam attended the funeral, deeply distressed. It seemed somehow worse that Kick had managed to survive the war only to be cut down when she had found a new life. Randolph was there too, and when the mourners repaired to Chatsworth he tried to persuade Pam ‘to give him a second chance’. Perhaps because she was distressed, Pam made the unlikely decision to do so. Her love affair with Aly Khan was coming to a natural conclusion by then; it had always been clear to the realist Pam that it would not last for ever, and Randolph found Pam wrong-footed. One short weekend at the country home of friends was enough to bring her rapidly to her senses; she returned to London, to collect little Winston and take him to his Digby grandparents before flying to Château de l’Horizon.* She was still there in late summer, after Aly Khan had been introduced to the stunning movie star Rita Hayworth and fallen headlong in love with her. Pam felt no jealousy; she continued to visit the villa from time to time, and it was there that she met a new man, Giovanni (‘Gianni’) Agnelli, grandson of the founder of the Fiat motor empire.
Gianni turned up at Château de l’Horizon one day in a speedboat, found Pam alone, sunbathing, and the attraction was mutual and explosive. Unusually, for a woman who generally preferred older men, Gianni was slightly younger – twenty-seven to her twenty-eight – but Pam’s relationship with the good-looking Italian playboy would last for over five years, longer than the time she had been married to Randolph. ‘Pam adored Gianni’, her brother Eddie told me, and despite agreeing to terminate a pregnancy by him in the first year of their relationship she believed they would eventually marry. Indeed, she converted to Catholicism and obtained an annulment of her marriage to Randolph, pleading the same mitigation as Consuelo: that she had been very young at the time of the marriage and that her unease about Randolph beforehand (confirmed by witness statements) had been overcome by his persuasion. Coincidentally, Gianni made a large donation to the Church at about the same time as the annulment was granted. However, he would never marry Pam: he was an orphaned Italian with four possessive sisters, the eldest of whom regarded Pam as a sort of she-devil, and they made it clear to him that, given Pam’s reputation, she was not marriageable material.
For those five years Pam was Gianni’s wife in all but name. She did not merely live with him as a mistress; she ran his homes, furnished them and presided over them as chatelaine, filling them with designer furnishings, works of art and banks of fresh flowers, and she entertained their guests. She knew almost everyone worth knowing throughout Europe, and she spoke fluent and accentless French. Many of those she invited to stay would never have met Gianni in the ordinary course of events, but would later prove to be invaluable contacts for him. He and Pam were seen everywhere together, and everywhere they were regarded as a couple. Although Pam was not accepted by Gianni’s family, the Digbys liked and befriended him. Pam’s two biographers were at pains to point out that everything she did during these years was financed by Gianni, that she ‘got out of him’ the money for the fabulous homes, the designer clothes, the jewels. In fact, it seems evident that he behaved exactly as any rich husband would have done, footing the bills for a wife who ran his homes beautifully and whom he wanted to see dressed and adorned in a manner that reflected his wealth and status.
Pam’s brother would reflect that her education, like most girls of her class, focused entirely on how to look after and entertain men.19 Pam was supreme at creating an impressive home that was also comfortable and welcoming. Gianni loved this. Entertaining was so natural to Pam that she could cater for a room full of people at an hour’s notice and appear beautifully coiffed, gowned and totally unruffled. The pair did not spend their time exclusively in each other’s company; Gianni had the family business to run in Turin, where his family made Pam feel very unwelcome. Pam, too, had her own commitments, not least to little Winston;* and she had a social life in Paris, where Gianni had bought an apartment. During these separations Gianni was not entirely faithful, but if she was aware of this Pam had decided not to notice. Her brother insisted, however, that whatever her two biographers suggested, ‘while she was actually in a relationship Pam was never unfaithful to her lovers – in most cases it was the man who strayed while Pam was entirely focused on that man’. Towards the end of his life Gianni told Eddie that the years he spent with Pam were probably the happiest and most carefree of his life,20 but because of his family’s disapproval he never regarded her as marriageable.
The affair ended after Pam returned to their villa on the Riviera unexpectedly one night in the early hours and discovered Gianni with another woman. There was a spectacular row, and Gianni left hurriedly to drive his companion home. The two had met at a party where they had been drinking heavily and, Pam believed, Gianni had taken cocaine. As he drove at high speed along the Lower Corniche in the darkness, he ploughed into an unlit cart near the entrance to the Cap Roux tunnel. He and his passenger, as well as the driver of the cart, were seriously injured.21
A shocked Pam stayed with Gianni in the hospital at Cannes and oversaw his treatment over the next weeks. When septicaemia and ultimately gangrene set in – a scenario reminiscent of Jennie’s final illness – he was told one of his legs must be removed. But unlike Jennie, Gianni was young and healthy; furthermore, antibiotics were now available. He refused amputation, opting instead for months of agonising treatments while the affected flesh was cut away. When he was moved to Florence, Pam was not allowed – since she was not his wife – to stay in the hospital, so she moved into a nearby hotel in order to be with him during the day. Meanwhile, his sisters did everything they could to exclude her. When Gianni was at last discharged from the hospital, his sisters collected him and took him to the family home in Turin to convalesce. Pam tried to visit but as usual was frozen out by Gianni’s family. The sisters made a point of constantly introducing him to Italian girls whom they considered more suitable; eventually he fell in love with one of them and married her.*
By then Pam had regretfully accepted that they had come to the end of their relationship, but they were, at least, able to discuss it amicably. Gianni made a generous settlement, which included the deeds to an apartment adjoining his own in Paris.† Allegations by Pam’s biographers that this arrangement was forced upon him by a weeping and desperate Pam seem to have emanated from his sisters. In fact, Pam was distressed by the break-up, but the couple were to remain affectionate friends for the remainder of her life. Later one of his sisters came to recognise that Pam was a true friend and a good influence on Gianni, and she used to stay with Pam. Gianni was a frequent guest at Pam’s various homes: after her death he continued to visit her family in Dorset until shortly before he died.22
In December 1947, when Winston wanted to finish off a book without interruption and do some painting, he longed for warm sunshine and the well-being induced by a hot climate. Clementine, however, wished to spend Christmas in England with the family, so with full blessings, each did what they wanted to. Winston and Sarah went to Marrakech and stayed at the Mamounia Hotel, while Clementine stayed at home with Mary and Christopher, taking little Winston to a pantomime and lunching with Pam. The following year, unwilling to be parted from Clementine, Winston compromised on his hatred of the English winter cold by spending the Christmas of 1948 at Chartwell, then immediately afterwards leaving with Clementine and Sarah for the Hôtel de Paris at Monte Carlo.
When Sarah had arrived at Chartwell that December she had some surprising news to impart. Soon after the war she had met the war artist and photographer Antony Beauchamp in London. While she was successfully touring in the United States with The Philadelphia Story in the leading role, she had met him again and they had fallen in love. He was invited to join them in Monte Carlo. When he arrived on 2 January 1949, Winston and Clementine disliked him on sight, feeling he was not right for Sarah. The atmosphere was so bad whenever he was with them that to save Sarah’s feelings Clementine made excuses and returned home early. Winston, Mary recalled, was ‘resolutely ho
stile’,23 and the fact that he had caused Clementine to leave early and thus spoilt the holiday was yet another black mark against Antony.
Sarah stayed on with her father after Clementine left, and after a few days Antony departed. A few days later Winston went home too, after he and Sarah quarrelled. As a result of this unfortunate affair Sarah took umbrage against her parents, and they heard little from her throughout the spring and summer. So they were stunned in the autumn of that year to read in the newspapers that Sarah and Antony had married at Sea Island, Georgia. Sarah had been their favourite daughter, but several months were allowed to drift by before Clementine wrote to attempt a rapprochement by inviting Sarah and Antony to Chartwell.
The welcome was warm according to Sarah, and both Winston and Clementine worked overtime to make Antony feel part of their family; but they never took to him, and after a while Winston could not keep up the pretence. Clementine attempted to compensate for their estrangement by arranging for the trust set up by Winston from the proceeds of his writing to buy a house in Ebury Street in London that Sarah and Antony could use whenever they visited the UK. But for the next few years most contact between the Beauchamps and the Churchills would be by letter and phone. Sarah made a few flying visits to the UK, but she was kept fully occupied by her film, stage and TV work in America.
In January 1950 Winston and Clementine were on holiday in Madeira when news broke that a dissolution of Parliament had been announced in London. He returned home at once, by flying boat, while Clementine finished her holiday and came home later. Hardly was Churchill back than he plunged into preparations for a general election. In the event the Conservative Opposition, led by Winston, slashed the Labour majority from 168 seats to 6. This was not a governing majority; it was simply a matter of time before the country was forced to go to the polls again. At the next election on 26 October 1951, the Conservatives fought under the slogan ‘A Strong Free Britain’.
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