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First Lady

Page 31

by Sonia Purnell


  Hopkins would return to England just a few months later, but in the meantime he did not forget his hostess. He sent Clementine parcels of cheese, lipstick, ham, chocolate, bacon, a satin nightdress and nail polish, knowing how rare all of these were in Britain. ‘Oh boy,’ she wrote in her thank-you letter, using a signature Americanism in tribute. ‘You are a good fairy.’ She and Mary, she said, had wept with joy when they opened the parcel and she asked him when he would be coming back, reminding him to bring plenty of warm clothes when he did so.7

  Enlisting Hopkins’ support – even devotion – in Washington was a decisive coup, but he was not the first influential American to be won over by the Churchills’ joint efforts. On his first night in London Hopkins had dined with Ed Murrow, the resident CBS correspondent, who was then beaming the horror of the Blitz directly into American homes every night under the radio call-sign ‘This is London’. Winston had long since identified the debonair Murrow as the conduit to the hearts and minds of US popular opinion and, through Clementine’s initiative, he had set about drawing the American into the Churchill fold. As a result, Murrow was not only well-informed – as Hopkins discovered – but also a fervent advocate of Britain’s cause.

  Although usually reticent in forming new friendships, it had been Clementine who had spotted in Murrow’s wife Janet the opportunity to cultivate the journalist. A quiet Connecticut Yankee with a dislike of the English class system, Janet was a great influence on her husband but was largely ignored by the men who dominated the powerful circles in which he moved. She was known to feel lonely in London, and Clementine had gone to work alongside her distributing American ‘Bundles for Britain’ aid parcels to bombed-out families, during which time she had openly sympathised with many of Janet’s radical views. Mrs Murrow in turn had been surprised and flattered by the attention, writing to her parents in December 1940 that Clementine was ‘charming, vivacious and attractive’.8

  Clementine rarely issued invitations to Downing Street on her own account, but she made a notable exception for Janet. And when Murrow arrived to collect his wife following one of her earliest lunches with Clementine, Winston seized his moment. Scuttling out from his study right on cue, he waved the American inside with the words, ‘Good to see you. Have you time for several whiskies?’9 It was an invitation the ambitious son of an impoverished dirt farmer could hardly refuse. Thereafter the Murrows had joined the select and trusted small band regularly summoned for Downing Street dinners – an intimate circle that excluded many people the Churchills had known for years, including most of the Cabinet.

  British journalists could only look on with envy at the access granted to the couple, knowing full well that the Americans were ‘treated as tin gods because they were so useful’.10 Although he greatly admired Roosevelt, Murrow’s new understanding of Britain’s position had made him, by the time Hopkins arrived, increasingly impatient with America’s vacillation in coming to her aid. As Winston admitted, Britain was struggling with an acute shortage of virtually every kind of military hardware, and was ‘naked before its foes’; only US firepower could save her. ‘I hope that life goes well for you in America,’ Murrow wrote in a private letter home at one point, ‘and that your nostrils are not assailed by the odor of death . . . that permeates the atmosphere over here.’11 His message on air was more tactful but was nevertheless pointed about Britain’s refusal to surrender. ‘I saw many flags flying from staffs,’ he reported after one night of heavy bombing. ‘No flag up there was white.’

  Murrow was also close friends with the new American ambassador, Gil Winant. An Abraham Lincoln lookalike with the ‘rapt gaze of a monk’12 Winant’s sense of urgency (no doubt fostered by Murrow even before his arrival in London) was a welcome reversal of the hostile defeatism of his predecessor, Joseph Kennedy. Winant arrived at Bristol on a blustery afternoon in March 1941 to discover a Britain enduring massive casualties from relentless air raids, devastating losses in the fighting overseas, and the imminent threat of starvation as Germany’s U-boats strangled the naval supply lines. After nine months of standing alone, it was evident that the United Kingdom was physically, emotionally and financially bankrupt. ‘We were hanging on by our eyelids,’ recalled Alan Brooke, who was shortly to head the British Army.13 Winant himself would write later that ‘you could not live in London in those early years and not realise how narrow was the margin of survival’.14

  The possibility of defeat was, of course, not to be admitted, but even Clementine allowed herself at one point to wonder aloud to Winston’s private secretary, ‘Jock, do you think we are going to win?’ Colville had been well trained and replied ‘truthfully and unhesitatingly “Yes.”’15 All depended, however, on persuading America to intervene.

  As they had for Hopkins, the Churchills ensured that Winant’s welcome was spectacular. In an unprecedented honour, George VI himself was waiting outside Winant’s carriage door when his train stopped at Windsor, and the King even invited the ambassador to stay the night at the castle. The royal offer was refused, though. Having already witnessed so much suffering, Winant was impatient to get on to London to start work; he told a BBC reporter: ‘There is no place I’d rather be at this time than in England.’ Two days later he too was treated to an intimate dinner with Winston, and thus was made another recruit to the greater Churchill ‘family’.

  Winant became a familiar and reassuring figure on the Churchills’ visits to bomb-damaged cities, where he was struck not only by the people’s courage but by Clementine’s unsung contribution. ‘The most marked determination and enthusiasm were among middle-aged women,’ he noted to Roosevelt, observing that such women all showed ‘great appreciation of Mrs Churchill’s coming’.16 Like Hopkins, Winant was a solitary figure, partly estranged from his society wife Constance who stayed behind in America. His growing closeness to the Churchills – nurtured by a now familiar round of dinners, weekends and bombsite tours – gave him a welcome sense of belonging in a foreign land. He became a fixture of their world, joyfully discovering that even in war it was never dull or drab, but forever ‘shot through with colour’.

  Clementine especially loved it when Winant came to visit. Although admired and respected by Winston, he was too much of an idealist for the Prime Minister’s buccaneering taste. By contrast, Winant and Clementine were kindred spirits. Both were shy and reserved; each was quietly radical, believing in a duty to help the less fortunate. According to Mary, Winant ‘understood intuitively’ her mother’s complex nature and her demanding life and, as a result, she confided in him – something she rarely did with anyone else.17 Clementine also comforted Winant when his pilot son John went missing for five weeks in October 1943.

  Going on walks together alone at Chequers or Ditchley, they became instinctive allies. She esteemed his selflessness; he recognised her quiet achievements. He wrote on one occasion to ask her to congratulate Winston on ‘one of the greatest [speeches] of its kind ever made’. He knew that she had played a part in its success: ‘I especially liked the references to de Gaulle and France and felt that, perhaps you had had something to do with it.’18 Winant held Clementine’s courage, resourcefulness, determination and devotion to the British people in the highest regard. Indeed, he could not have admired her more. But it was another Churchill who was to capture his heart.

  Glamorous, entertaining and alluring in her WAAF uniform, Sarah was enjoying her contribution to the war effort now that her relationship with Vic Oliver was effectively over. Although strong-willed like her father, at twenty-seven she was nevertheless feeling emotionally vulnerable and worried about losing her looks. Some elusive quality about her mesmerised the fifty-two-year-old Winant, who relished her rebellious side. His intimate status with her parents – allied to the fact that her London flat in Park Lane was just a five-minute walk from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square – meant that he was frequently thrown into her company, and towards the end of the year they began an affair. As both were still married they kept up appea
rances, but the relationship was an open secret in Churchill circles.

  Years later Sarah, never one to reveal much of herself, would write coyly about a ‘love affair which my father suspected but about which we did not speak’.19 In truth, this belies her parents’ acquiescence: the fraught situation of 1941 meant that almost any consolidation of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with America could be considered an act of patriotism. Though the Churchills may not have talked about it openly, they not only tolerated the affair but gave it plenty of opportunities to flourish. Sarah was, after all, not alone in conducting a ‘patriotic’ relationship. Emotions were heightened by the dangers of war and, as one writer put it, ‘sex’ in those early war years ‘hung in the air like fog’.

  Averell Harriman, a rich American lothario with film star looks, was about to make London even ‘foggier’. He arrived in town around the same time as Winant, but in his case to set up Roosevelt’s new Lend-Lease military aid programme, which Hopkins had encouraged the President to implement and would involve the US ‘renting’ Britain vital equipment in return for assets rather than hard cash. Although it stopped short of a declaration of war on Germany, Lend-Lease (passed by Congress in March 1941) represented the de facto end to American neutrality, and went some way to solving Britain’s chronic shortage of currency. Harriman was tasked with delivering the essential planes, ships, weapons and equipment under the scheme that Britain needed to defend herself.

  The son of a ruthless railroad tycoon – the man who set private detectives on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – Harriman was widely considered a power groupie, intent on broadening his own influence at least as much as that of his country. His reputation had suffered after he had chosen not to fight in the First World War and instead to profit from it through his shipping interests. As a result he was desperate to play a major role in this conflict. Many in Washington thought – or rather hoped – that such a hardnosed businessman would be tougher with the Churchills than Hopkins.

  No doubt well-versed as to his character, Winston and Clementine opted for a swashbuckling reception for this US arrival. Harriman was deliberately kept in the dark about where he was going to land until he disembarked at Bristol on the afternoon of 15 March. Thereafter Roosevelt’s special representative was treated to a meticulously planned ‘special welcome’.20 ‘Whoever the President had sent,’ recalled Mary, however difficult or abrasive his personality, ‘everybody here was going to bust themselves to get on’ with him. ‘It was immensely important to us how it all went.’21 In a carefully stage-managed manoeuvre, Winston’s naval aide Commander Thompson bundled a startled Harriman swiftly past a guard of honour onto a waiting biplane to take him straight to see Winston over dinner. ‘Dear Mrs Churchill,’ Harriman wrote ten days later from his suite at the Dorchester Hotel. ‘To be kidnapped on arrival at Bristol, whisked off by plane to Chequers and there find such a warm and friendly welcome from you and Mr Churchill was indeed both a dramatic and delightful beginning of my mission.’22

  The Hollywood-style spectacle had appealed to the adventure-seeking Harriman. So too did his arrival at Chequers, redolent as it was of wood smoke, antiquarian books and the thrill of centuries of history. ‘I was very excited, feeling like a country boy plopped right into the centre of the war,’ Harriman admitted.23 He was particularly charmed by what he called Clementine’s ‘unfeigned delight’ when he gave her a bag of tangerines he had bought in Lisbon.24

  Since it was within Harriman’s remit to supply the military hardware Britain so desperately needed, Winston focused his attention on him, leaving Clementine to take care of Winant. Within days of his arrival, Harriman was ostentatiously flattered by being given an office at the Admiralty, access to secret cables and invitations to high-level meetings. ‘I am accepted practically as a member of the Cabinet,’ he crowed to a friend back home. Winston told him: ‘We accept you as a friend. Nothing will be kept from you.’ He meant, as it turned out, literally nothing.

  Harriman’s wealth, looks and, most of all, power made him London’s latest social catch; he was showered with invitations, often for several engagements a night. One he was advised not to miss was a glamorous dinner at the Dorchester in April where seated next to him in a shoulderless gold dress, was twenty-one-year-old Pamela. Her puppy fat had gone but her curves had not. Her cheekbones jutted, her jaw was sculpted and she glowed with the indefinable Churchill allure. Hopkins had already informed Harriman that she was more plugged-in ‘than anyone in England’.

  For Pamela, Harriman was the most beautiful man she had ever seen: tanned, dark-haired, six foot one tall and, unlike the overweight and spotty Randolph, thoroughly sexed-up. She had been briefed that, as Roosevelt’s special emissary, Harriman would be instrumental in deciding whether Britain won the war. So, over a lavish dinner of salmon and early season strawberries – the Dorchester was largely unaffected by rationing – she launched into what friends came to call her ‘mating dance’. She asked him questions, listened raptly to his answers, stroked his arm with her fingertips, and laughed when he attempted a joke.

  After dinner, Harriman invited Pamela back to his palatial suite where she helped him peel off her dress. They lingered under the sheets throughout the night’s heavy bombing, as his ground-floor rooms were deemed capable – thanks to the hotel’s modern steel frame and thick concrete floors – of withstanding anything except a direct hit. At the time, Pamela was living out of one of the cheap ‘bilious-coloured’ rooms on the exposed top floor of the building, where the wind whistled in the fireplaces during raids. Her neighbour, Winston’s niece Clarissa, remembers being surprised that night not to find Pamela traipsing down to the basement shelters when the bombing started. The building shook and the guns roared, but Pamela was ensconced in bed with the man who might just be able to help bring it all to an end. It was the first act of her career as the twentieth century’s most influential courtesan.

  Harriman, the ultimate adventurer, was entranced. Not only was he entwined with the most desirable woman in town but as the nerve centre of Nazi resistance, London itself was intoxicating. ‘Blacked out, bombed out, expensive and hard to get around in, it was still magnificent – the Paris of World War II,’ observed one contemporary. Wealthy, well-connected American civilians, from New York bankers to Hollywood directors, vied to be assigned to the British capital on temporary government duty.25 Life on the edge was exciting: normal inhibitions were suspended; no one wanted to be alone. Thousands of bombs rained down on London, and thousands sought comfort in copious sex. But Pamela’s seduction of Harriman went beyond consolation; it was a strategic alliance of the highest order. She knew all too well how important the affair could prove to her parents-in-law and to her country.

  Word of the relationship spread quickly. Beaverbrook was particularly delighted when he found out. After all, Harriman had only just landed at Bristol and ‘already he was compromised’.26 Beaverbrook went out of his way to encourage the affair by keeping Pamela’s baby, his godchild, at his country house in Surrey and by giving her money to spruce up her wardrobe; to do her ‘job’ she needed to be unencumbered and gorgeous. Thus liberated, Pamela quickly set to work, passing on to Beaverbrook, or directly to Winston, anything she gleaned from Harriman about what the Americans were thinking. She also became adept at sifting information in the other direction, to boost Britain’s case for more aid. In this way she fast became one of the most important intelligence-brokers in the war.

  Winston and Clementine could hardly have hoped for more from their campaign to bring Roosevelt’s special representative, the very man charged with keeping Britain free, into the ‘family’. America would remain uncommitted to the conflict until after Japan’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, eight months later – but now that the man in charge of supplying ships, guns and planes to Britain was sleeping with their daughter-in-law, the Churchills were surely nearer than ever to ‘dragging’ in more American support. Harriman did indeed become adroit at tr
anslating their most urgent needs into action, persuading Roosevelt, for example, to authorise US ports to repair British warships.

  Yet still the questions kept coming back from Washington: could Britain really last the course? Was America wasting its money on a hopeless cause? Winston’s assurances to Roosevelt went only so far; but now Harriman was also emphatic that American aid was being put to good use. He became so committed to the struggle that when he returned home he found even close friends regarded him as ‘unduly pro-British’.27

  No matter that Pamela was still married to Randolph (who was conveniently overseas with his regiment), the national interest took precedence. Far from trying to stop the affair, it appears that Clementine, who remained close to Pamela, ensured that she and Harriman were thrust together as often as possible, inviting both to Chequers or Ditchley at weekends. (One small concession to propriety was that Pamela often omitted to sign the Chequers visitors’ book if Harriman were present.) Doubt has since been cast in some quarters as to the extent of Clementine’s knowledge of the relationship. But while Pamela did not openly discuss the subject with her mother-in-law, she was always convinced that both Churchills ‘knew perfectly well’.28

  Clementine made a point of referring to Pamela’s lover as ‘our dear Averell’ but in truth she was never fond of Harriman. He lacked humour, particularly about himself, and treated his staff badly. He also flaunted his wealth and his connections, oiling his way from one grand cocktail party to another and, far from sharing Britain’s suffering, maintaining a supply of luxuries throughout his stay in London. She thought him yet another coldly ambitious businessman who might distance her from Winston. But whereas in peacetime she had had no qualms about letting self-important people know her opinion of them, now she had to bite her tongue. Harriman was just too vital to the war; his ego had to be flattered.

 

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