If Mr Onassis invited you & a party, you could have a little Easter cruise with Mr Reves and Wendy & Mary & Christopher etc. But somehow I don’t want to be beholden to this rich powerful man & for the news to be blazoned. Similarly, tho’ to a lesser degree, I don’t want to stay at La Pausa, though one day I should like to meet Wendy…please forgive me; but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – But I am happy that you should be there in the sunshine.10
That summer Winston paid another solo visit to La Pausa. He was there on 9 June when Noël Coward was one of the many guests, along with Edward Molyneux the couturier and Somerset Maugham (invited so as to keep Winston amused and stimulated). Coward wrote in his diary: ‘To Roquebrune to lunch with Emery Reves, Wendy Russell, the most fascinating lady, Winston Churchill, Sarah [Churchill] and Winston’s secretary’. Winston, he noted, was ‘absolutely obsessed with Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace…I doubt if…Churchill has ever been physically unfaithful to Lady Churchill but, oh, what has gone on inside that dynamic mind?’11
Churchill liked nothing better than to sit under an umbrella in the garden painting while Wendy sat chattering brightly by his side and dispensing champagne. And it was true, as Wendy observed some years later, that ‘Winston never had a Black Dog day at La Pausa’.12 But what is the truth about Winston’s relationship with Wendy? Did he fall in love with her, as Noël Coward suggested?
Something similar had happened several years earlier, when at the end of the war Winston had lunched one day with the Duff Coopers at the Paris Embassy and was introduced to the attractive widow Odette Pol-Roger.* Her late husband Jacques had been head of the famous champagne-producing company, and Pol Roger was Winston’s favourite champagne.* (‘In defeat I need it,’ he said, misquoting Napoleon, ‘and in victory I deserve it’.) Cases of it travelled with him, even during the war years. ‘What a beautiful name’ were his first words on meeting her. Thereafter, he developed a fondness for Odette, saw her often and entertained her in England whenever she visited. But it was a perfectly innocent relationship, accepted by Clementine, and all the family knew that Winston adored Odette. From the date of their meeting, every year until his death, on Winston’s birthday in November Odette never forgot to send him a case of his favourite vintage.† In return, he sent her a set of his war memoirs with the inscription: ‘Mise en bouteille Chateau Chartwell’.‡ Odette became a great friend to all the Churchills.
But his relationship with Wendy was somehow different. When she finally visited La Pausa, Clementine could not help but see that Winston was drawn to the fragile, long-legged beauty of Wendy. She was not jealous, exactly – she knew Winston would not be unfaithful to her at this stage in his life – and he had never been a womaniser, even when young and virile. Still, she was disconcerted and uneasy to see how he relied on Wendy, who petted and mildly flirted with him. Nothing was too good for him; nothing was too much trouble, and in fact the entire palatial edifice revolved around him. Winston’s last Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, who always enjoyed the lotus-eating visits to La Pausa, suggested that Noël Coward’s assertion that Winston was ‘absolutely obsessed with a senile passion for Wendy’13 was no more than bitchiness because Coward believed Winston had played a part in his omission from the honours list. Or he might have heard Winston’s off-the-cuff remark about another homosexual, that ‘buggers can’t be choosers’.14 Montague Browne agreed that there was a form of affection between Winston and Wendy but that it owed nothing to the prurient insinuations of Coward. However, Diana and Nancy Mitford, Beaverbrook and others in their circle believed that Winston was infatuated with Wendy, and even Winston’s doctor noted in his records ‘the uplift’ in Winston’s spirits whenever he visited La Pausa. So the answer is probably that Winston did fall in love with Wendy in a way, and his feelings were reciprocated. But it was never a sexual relationship and it never affected Wendy’s relationship with Emery, or Winston’s deep visceral love for Clementine. It did, though, keep the Churchills apart for a while, because he so enjoyed himself at La Pausa where he was spoiled and never corrected. Winston was experiencing the octogenarian equivalent of a teenage crush; and Wendy, idol worship.
There is an incident that allegedly took place in the same year as the Coward meeting. As Winston was leaving the men’s room at the Carlton Club it was pointed out to him that his flies were undone. Winston glanced down, made the appropriate adjustment, and commented with a sigh: ‘Dead birds don’t fall out of trees.’*
It was also about this time that Clementine quietly disposed of the Sutherland portrait. Probably, she burned it. Winston loathed the fact that it depicted him as a querulous old man; his opinion was that its ‘force and candour…made me look half-witted, which I am not’, and there is no doubt that in a photograph of him at the unveiling of the portrait he appears far more youthful and vital than the Sutherland image propped on an easel behind him. A few years later the portrait would have been a more defining image of a great man in old age, but this peep into his future haunted Churchill, and it was certainly not the way he wished to be remembered by posterity. When he worried about it, Clementine made him a promise that the portrait ‘would never see the light of day’, and she was as good as her word: it was never seen again. She mentioned it once in a letter to Max Beaverbrook: ‘This gift which was meant as the expression of the affection and devotion of the House of Commons caused him great pain & it all but ruined his 80th birthday – It wounded him deeply that this brilliant…painter with whom he had made friends while sitting for him should see him as a gross & cruel monster.’15 It was not the first occasion that a portrait of Winston of which Clementine did not approve went missing: in 1927 a sketch by her old friend Walter Sickert was given away,* and in 1944 a cartoon for a portrait by Paul Maze mysteriously disappeared.
For Consuelo, 1956 was a dreadful year. In the late summer her younger son Ivor was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. He had helped her three years earlier with the various phases of publication of her memoir The Glitter and the Gold. The book sold well, though so much of it had been edited out by members of the family in order not to hurt tender feelings that it is curiously flat – apart from the section where Consuelo vividly described how she was hectored into marriage by Alva. Even then, Winston was concerned at some of the things Consuelo had written about Sunny – he had loved them both – but most British reviewers thought the book would have been improved had Consuelo been less discreet about the Duke.
Randolph reviewed the book in Punch: ‘Madam Balsan indulges herself in many criticisms of a man who has been dead for twenty years, and who was the father of her two sons; and it is painful to record that after a lapse of sixty years she finds it decent to criticise even his table manners.’ Consuelo had never liked Randolph and the animosity over the book did not improve the relationship; but after Winston read it he wrote to her from Blenheim to congratulate her, saying that the book had brought back many happy memories of a golden age now long forgotten.
Ivor had married Elizabeth Cunningham after the war and eight years later, in 1954, they had a son, Robert. In the two years since then Consuelo had seen little of Ivor because he hated flying, while her ageing husband Jacques had developed Alzheimer’s disease and she could not bear to leave him. Perhaps she thought Ivor had longer to live than he had; she kept hoping he would come to her because Jacques was now so frail, but Ivor died in September, and was buried at Bladon. A few weeks later Jacques, aged eighty-eight, was discovered on a golf course in a state of collapse. He died on 4 November; his body was flown to Paris to be interred in the family tomb in Montmartre.
Relations between Britain and Egypt had been deteriorating throughout 1955–6. Affairs came to a head with the Suez crisis in October 1956. Some months earlier, Britain and the USA had withdrawn an offer to fund the Aswan Dam following Egypt’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China at a time of great tension between Chi
na and Taiwan. When Nasser then announced his intention to nationalise the Suez Canal, Britain and France supported Israel – dependent on the Canal for the shipping of goods – and sent a tripartite military force to invade Egypt. Winston watched critically from afar, writing to Clementine from La Pausa, ‘I am very glad the burden does not rest on me.’16
The burden rested very much with Anthony Eden, who had more experience in high-level foreign affairs than any man alive, yet he was dogged by ill-health, and probably lacked the robustness needed to deal with his many critics and political opponents, as well as his advisers, who refused to accept the decline of Britain’s influence in the Middle East. ‘I listened to Anthony last night,’ Winston wrote to Clementine at one point. ‘It was hard to hear but I’m afraid I was disappointed by what I did hear – There was no inspiration.’17 Eden overestimated the support for him in Washington, and he was eventually forced to withdraw troops from Egypt when the Americans applied pressure. Apart from Britain’s loss of face, the result was public fury and a 40 per cent increase in fuel prices. Eden’s reputation as a statesman was in shreds. On medical advice, he took a short holiday in November at Ian Fleming’s house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica, in an attempt to regain his health and soldier on as Prime Minister. Noël Coward, in contact with Anthony and Clarissa there (she was an old friend of his), wrote that he had been told that Eden ‘has wakened in the night screaming several times and sent for the Guard’.18 In fact Eden was desperately ill. He was subsequently told by doctors that if he did not retire from the stress of his office, he would soon die. While all this was occurring, in Eden’s absence, Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler were busy working on a palace coup, and Eden found himself outmanoeuvred. He resigned in January 1957, in Macmillan’s favour, but it was a case of did he fall or was he pushed? Clarissa was left to pick up the pieces and to try to nurse her shattered husband to health.
Winston spent most of 1957 with the Reveses at La Pausa. At various times he had members of his ‘court’ with him: one or other of his children, his butler, his detective, his Private Secretary Anthony Montague Browne, two secretaries and – always – his budgie Toby. He returned to London in April to celebrate Clementine’s seventy-second birthday at a party at Hyde Park Gate, but a month later on 21 May he was back in the South of France accompanied by Sarah and Montague Browne. ‘Darling,’ he wrote to Clementine, ‘We arrived today and all is well…the skies are without a cloud…Your visit to me the night before I left was vy precious…Wendy was obviously disappointed to learn that you wd not come, but would see you at Capponcina [Beaverbrook’s villa] in September.’19 A visit to Beaverbrook’s villa in the coming September was the only way he could persuade Clementine to join him in the South of France, for by now she had resolutely set her face against Wendy. It was awkward for him, but Winston promised Wendy that after Clementine returned to London he would return to La Pausa, which was what he did.
In mid-June he went home to attend the annual Garter ceremony at Windsor. His short time in England was punctuated by unwelcome news. He had been home only a few weeks when word came that the Prof – Professor Lindemann – his trusted friend for thirty years, had died in his sleep on 3 July. On 7 August, Sarah arrived in England from America. She and Antony had been virtually separated for two years, and she had decided to tell him that she felt it was no longer worth trying to make their marriage work. Having arranged to see Antony the next day to discuss the matter, she spent the night anxiously pacing up and down a friend’s apartment, going over what she should say. At seven the next morning the phone rang. It was Clementine. ‘We never beat about the bush in our family,’ Sarah recalled. ‘I heard my mother’s crisp voice…“Sarah, you should know – Antony Beauchamp has committed suicide.”’20 He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
The news hit Sarah very hard: it was, of course, reminiscent of Gil Winant’s suicide. Sarah had to identify the body, attend the inquest and make the funeral arrangements, helped by Diana, the only member of the Churchill family to attend the funeral. Directly after the service Sarah flew to California, where she had a TV film to make in Hollywood. She rented a small cabin for herself at Malibu – then an isolated beach village – which was the last thing she ought to have done. Desperately unhappy, after filming she would return each evening to the beach and seek oblivion in alcohol.
In September Winston and Clementine departed for Beaverbrook’s La Capponcina, as planned. Two years earlier Christopher Soames had been offered a ministerial post under Anthony Eden, and was subsequently appointed Secretary of State for War. Consequently, he and Mary felt they could no longer run the two farms, Chartwell and Bardogs. So the farms had been sold and Mary and Christopher moved to Hamsell Manor near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, leaving just the original estate around Chartwell itself.
The Churchills were at home for Christmas 1957. The family gathered at Chartwell as usual, but Winston left again for La Pausa on 12 January. Two days later, headlines announced that Sarah had been arrested at Malibu, charged with being drunk. Winston and Clementine were stunned and shocked: Clementine, especially, hated the headlines and the photographs. Randolph was dispatched to his sister’s aid and Clementine tried to forget about it all by taking her grandchildren to pantomimes in London and lunching with Pamela and young Winston (now seventeen).
Winston’s solution was to invite Sarah to come to him at La Pausa, and she flew there to spend a week on 18 February, deeply grateful for the reticence and understanding he showed.21 Towards the end of her visit – before she departed for England and what would prove to be the first of many drying-out sessions – Clementine was to fly out to join them; Winston had arranged to meet her in the Reveses’ car at Nice airport.
On the day before Clementine’s arrival Winston and Emery Reves lunched with Onassis aboard the Christina in Monte Carlo harbour, eating and drinking as usual, afterwards playing chemin de fer for high stakes. Winston had only recently recovered from a bad cold, but he seemed in good form, if a little excitable. Later that afternoon, however, he reported feeling ‘all in’ and was taken back to La Pausa to rest. The following morning his face was white and he was shivering violently. The plan for him to meet Clementine was abandoned, and by the time she arrived at the villa she could see for herself that the problem was serious. Winston had suffered three previous attacks of pneumonia, and recognising the symptoms, Clementine wasted no time in telephoning Lord Moran. Moran took the next flight out and treated Winston with massive doses of antibiotics for pneumonia and pleurisy. Clementine’s week turned into a month as Winston fought back, often bad-tempered with everyone out of frustration, and not least because of increasing deafness.
They arrived back at Chartwell on 3 April, in time for the Easter holiday. Lord Moran took his son John and daughter-in-law Shirley to Chartwell to meet Churchill. As they left, Moran heard John say to Shirley: ‘Think of it, that hand you shook today held a sabre at Omdurman.’22
From this date onward Winston always had at least one male nurse in attendance, and in retrospect Mary believes that this very serious illness marked a major turning point in her father’s health – he was never really robust again. When the Queen heard of this latest deterioration in Winston’s health, she discussed the matter with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and it was decided that when the end came he was to have a state funeral. Some writers have suggested that Winston planned much of his funeral himself, but this is not true: he said he was ‘unwilling to address my mind to the subject’ – in fact, his sole input was his request to be buried at Bladon, close to his parents, instead of at Chartwell as he had previously intended.
During January 1958, but overshadowed by Sarah’s arrest, June had quietly obtained a divorce from Randolph. Within a few weeks Randolph was also seriously ill with bronchopneumonia, and he was still convalescing at Stour House at Easter. But his life had now changed. A year earlier he had met the second great love of his life in the most unlikely circumstance. Had the incident not been detai
led by an impeccable witness, it would seem almost too fantastic to be true.
Randolph’s friend Patrick Kinross* was staying with him at Stour when they were visited by a neighbour. Natalie, wife of a naval officer, ‘Bobby’ Bevan, was an old friend of Lord Kinross, so when she heard he was in East Bergholt she drove over to see him. Kinross opened the door to her knock, and Randolph came into the hall behind him to see who the caller was. Kinross recalled that he felt he might as well not have been there, for a coup de foudre struck Randolph and Natalie. After staring at her for what seemed minutes without saying a word, Randolph took her hand and led her out into the rose garden where he told her without any preamble that he had been waiting for her ‘for so long. I love you.’ And then he kissed her – not in a flirtatious way, but gently and affectionately. He knew immediately that this was to be a great love, as great as his long, unrequited love for Laura, and so it would prove. Natalie, not least because she was married to Bobby, was not as certain about it as Randolph, but she felt the same instinctive recognition at the first sight of him; and whenever she thought about it later, she always recalled the scent of roses.23 That year, she would write in her diary, was ‘the most golden’ of her life.24 As the affair developed she told her husband about her feelings for Randolph, and rather than break up his marriage he decided to accept the situation and see where it led. A few years later, after three days of intense discussion about their relationship, Randolph begged Natalie to marry him: ‘I want you to be my wife as soon as possible,’ he wrote. ‘Whatever you decide I shall love you, now and forever. Please help me to make us both happy.’25
By then Natalie had been thoroughly accepted by the Churchill family as Randolph’s partner. She had holidayed aboard the Christina with Winston and Clementine, spent weekends at Chartwell and often dined with them at Hyde Park Gate. In short, she came to love them, and they became a significant part of her life. But she could not bring herself to divorce Bobby, who also loved her and had stood by, waiting patiently. She thought deeply about it, then told Randolph gently that he would simply have to accept – as Bobby did – that their relationship must continue as it was. He had no option but reluctantly to agree. When a friend told him that ‘after a certain age people don’t really fall in love’, he rounded on her. ‘Age has nothing to do with it,’ he retorted. ‘I am more in love now than I ever have been in my life before.’26 Many years later his first love, the former Diana Mitford, would recall: ‘Randolph changed a great deal after he met Natalie…we were all so pleased [for him].’27
The Churchills Page 59
