First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  It was for this reason perhaps that Clementine, who generally baulked at asking strangers for personal favours, made an exception in May 1941. Eighteen-year-old Mary had recently announced her engagement to the son and heir of her mother’s one-time suitor, the Earl of Bessborough, despite having only just met him. Clementine told Harriman that she was convinced Mary was not in love and had simply been swept off her feet with excitement. Mary, though, had refused her mother’s pleas to reconsider and ignored her sister Sarah’s ‘frank ridicule’.29 Harriman had daughters, Clementine reminded him, and so must surely understand what young women were like. With Winston so busy running the war, could he perhaps speak to Mary instead?

  Harriman was evidently unqualified for the task. He barely knew Mary (and her suitor not at all) and his two daughters had been raised by their mother, who had divorced him while they were young. Most of his recent experiences with young women had been as bedfellows. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Clementine’s flattery and agreed. The fact that Clementine had singled him out to play father confessor to Mary was ‘a source of tremendous gratification . . . He was now at the centre of the action, just as he had always longed to be.’30 Wrapped up against the damp spring weather he took Mary for a walk around the French garden at Ditchley, where he held forth on the need to avoid making hasty decisions. Mary – probably unwittingly – played her part for the war effort. She dutifully wrote to thank Harriman for his worldly ‘kindness’ and credited him for helping her see sense.

  If Clementine seemed unconcerned that Harriman was cuckolding her son, Pamela was even less so. She had already decided that she would have to make her own way in life. Travelling by sea to a staff job at the British North African command base in Cairo earlier in the year, Randolph had taken to high-stakes gambling with a louche, moneyed crowd that included Evelyn Waugh. Thanks to his previous extravagances, money was already extremely tight, but now Randolph had cabled Pamela for hundreds of pounds she simply did not have to cover his losses. She begged Beaverbrook for help and (hoping Clementine would not find out) sold the diamond earrings she had been given as wedding gifts, but the debts would even so take years to pay off.

  She already carried the Churchill name and she had provided an heir and no longer had need of the drunken, abusive Randolph and his so-called ‘bachelor rampages’. As Clementine had feared, Pamela found him ‘impossible to be married to’ and ‘his own worst enemy’.31 Feeling herself therefore to be morally free, Pamela had moved to London and taken that top-floor room at the Dorchester while the Churchills helped her search for suitable war work. Harriman had arrived in town soon afterwards.

  When Randolph came home on leave and discovered the affair, he exploded with rage. His anger stemmed not from sexual jealousy of Pamela, friends said, but a sense of betrayal. He had befriended Harriman on his own recent visit to Cairo, made at Winston’s request, and had liked and respected him. Even worse was his bitterness towards his parents, whom he accused of condoning adultery ‘beneath their own roof’ and sacrificing his marriage and happiness in order to woo the Americans. ‘He used terrible language and created a rift that never healed,’ recalled Alastair Forbes, a friend of Randolph’s and Mary’s.32

  To lower the temperature, Pamela agreed ‘not to see too much of his parents’, as Randolph rightly suspected they preferred her company to his own. When he left London at the end of his leave, Pamela was more discreet. But otherwise her relationships with both Harriman and the Churchills resumed largely unchanged.

  Clementine was now expert at preparing official receptions with the military precision necessary to make every one as productive – and as agreeable – as possible. It was a gigantic operation. A typical weekend at Chequers, for instance, would be arranged on a grid system and could easily involve twenty constantly changing guests coming and going, staying variously for lunch, dinner, overnight, or all three. Considering the circumstances, her hospitality was legendary. Winston expected no less. The American Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau (another key target of the Churchillian charm) remembered Winston being on ‘good form’ every time they met during the war – except once: ‘The night his wife gave him a supper he did not like and so he did not talk all through supper. She said, “I am sorry, dear, I could not buy any fish. You’ll have to eat macaroni”.’33

  Clementine was not only intent on keeping Winston happily fed within the severe limits of wartime supplies. She also studied their countless visitors’ backgrounds, families, interests and tastes in food, and took great care over her seating plans to ensure everyone’s compatibility and comfort. Her ministrations were flattering and highly effective. Meals at Downing Street, Chequers or Ditchley were a much-needed, spirit-lifting spectacle, as well as a stage on which Winston could work his magic on his carefully selected guests. He managed to ‘have his way’, for instance, over various aspects of the North African campaign in part through his ‘luncheon conversations in London with General Eisenhower’, the American commander of Operation Torch.34 Having discovered Eisenhower’s love of stew, Clementine ensured he was served the finest – with plenty of onions.

  The Churchills also made an impression through their eccentric attire. Winston liked to wear a siren suit at dinner – a bizarre onesie-style garment that Clementine had made up for him in a variety of colours and fabrics, including velvet. She, by contrast, presided over more intimate dinners in beautiful flowery silk housecoats with her nightdress underneath.

  Despite her hard work few visitors paused to register, let alone admire, her efforts. One rare exception was the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who said he ‘marvelled’ at how ‘you are able to think of the many things you do, to say nothing of how you manage to perform them’.35 Very few, apart from Hopkins and Winant, would take the trouble to get to know Clementine herself; in part because Winston disliked sharing her. On one trip to Plymouth, which had been badly bombed, Harriman witnessed a ‘contest of wills’ between the Prime Minister and the local MP Nancy Astor, who was trying to ‘carry off Mrs Churchill to a women’s political meeting’. ‘In war it is the Prime Minister who must make the vital decisions,’ Winston declared of his most precious asset. ‘Clemmie comes with me.’36

  Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, who joined her father in London and was also taken under Clementine’s wing, noticed how gracious she was in ‘taking a back seat’ to her husband. ‘But don’t get the idea she’s mousy, not at all. She’s got a mind of her own, only she’s a big enough person not to use it unless he wants her to,’ she wrote to her sister Mary after spending a weekend at Chequers in the summer of 1941. She went on to observe that ‘everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out, and when anyone pays any attention to her she’s overjoyed’.37 The entire family held the great man in a reverence not far short of worship, hanging on his every word and never missing his speeches. On the occasion of one of his ‘bolstering’ broadcasts to France, they all assembled around the radio, and the knobs were prepared for the right frequency. But then an aunt pressed the wrong one, ‘the feathers flew’, and in desperation Clementine grabbed the radio so hard she broke it. ‘After an hysterically chaotic scene, everyone rushed upstairs to listen to the remainder of the speech on a servant’s set.’38

  The Churchills’ outward charm and energy belied, of course, the strain two long years of war had taken on them. Moreover, their frantic dinner-table diplomacy had yet to yield the ultimate prize: despite the collective pressure from the successfully annexed Harriman, Winant and Hopkins, Roosevelt was still refusing to send American troops into combat. Again and again, the President had pulled himself up to the edge of confrontation, only to retreat again at the last minute. Even a number of skirmishes between German and American warships in the Atlantic – such as the torpedoing of the destroyer USS Kearny in October 1941 and the sinking of another destroyer, USS Reuben James, two weeks later – failed to provoke a declaration of war. What would it take, Winston and Clementine wondered, to p
ropel Roosevelt to lead his country into battle at their side? There was no question that Britain commanded the moral imperative, but while America stepped up its aid under Harriman, it would not fight. One critical historian has concluded: ‘If Munich had been Great Britain’s least glorious hour, mid-1941 was surely America’s.’39

  A strategic error by Hitler was, however, about to present Britain with another, rather different ally, but one that also proved decisive to its survival. In June 1941, Hitler had launched a bloody invasion of the Soviet Union, catching Stalin by surprise despite repeated warnings from the British who had been alerted to the imminent Operation Barbarossa through Bletchley Park decrypts, and marking the beginning of four years of war on the Eastern Front. Until the Panzers swept across the Soviet border, Stalin had been providing Hitler with huge material assistance under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. Yet those same Russians, who had previously stood by during Britain’s darkest hours and even negotiated with Hitler for a share of the spoils of British defeat, now demanded urgent aid and assistance. The Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, dashed down to Chequers to deliver a note to Churchill from Stalin requesting the immediate deployment of British troops in northern France to take the pressure off the Russian front where casualties were horrendous. But although he certainly welcomed the Soviet Union into the war against Hitler (which military chiefs thought likely further to delay a German invasion of home shores), Winston believed the plan to be unworkable; Britain had been fighting alone for so long and could spare neither men nor materiel. When Maisky protested at his refusal, Churchill quickly moved away, so the Russian was left alone by the fireplace with Hopkins. When the two began discussing the Soviet idea of a new front in Winston’s absence, the ever-vigilant Clementine sensed the potential danger to the British position. She quickly approached the pair with a broad smile and the offer of tea. Maisky realised that with Clementine on the prowl the occasion was ‘unsuitable’ for lobbying the Americans and left; no damage was done.40

  Exhausted by her relentless workload and family worries, and plagued by bouts of bronchitis, Clementine had not taken a break, apart from the occasional weekend, since the summer of 1939. Nor was she alone in her despair. The Prof was showing ‘signs of breaking up under the strain’, Beaverbrook’s asthma was becoming more severe, Commander Thompson had lost over two stone, and more than a smattering of military commanders and civil servants kept themselves going with an arsenal of pills and booze, while others had found themselves simply incapable of carrying on. Even the notoriously tough Alan Brooke admitted that as the war dragged on he came perilously close to a nervous breakdown. So when Winston finally received an invitation from Roosevelt to discuss the war at a secret summit in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941, Clementine was jubilant and threw herself into the preparations. By contrast, the President kept his wife Eleanor in the dark about the meeting, telling her, along with the rest of the nation, that he was going fishing.

  With Winston out of the country from 4 August, Clementine seized her chance for a respite. She checked into a ‘Nature Cure’ clinic known colloquially among England’s upper classes as the ‘mad-house’. Today, Champneys in Tring, Hertfordshire, is more of a beauty clinic and spa offering some conventional medical services, but in the 1940s, Dr Lief’s establishment had a reputation for strange ‘electrical’ appliances and putting its patients into padded cells where they were ‘starved and hosed and worse’.41 Fortunately, Clementine’s experience appears to have been quite pleasant: ‘The “mad-house” is comfortable and well run,’ she related on her fourth day. ‘I have massage, osteopathy, hot and cold showers etc etc, but nothing to eat so far but tomatoe [sic] juice and pineapple juice.’ She was looking forward to being allowed some milk the following day, and then to ‘work up’ to solid food. ‘The idea is to give the digestion a complete rest.’

  Dr Lief was undoubtedly concerned about his VIP patient, who even now never stopped monitoring events. Upon her return home, he advised her to take a day of complete rest every week, but though ‘rest days’ were duly marked in her diary for the next couple of months it became obvious the idea was unsustainable. Neither the Nazis nor her husband observed a six-day week. Even so, when she went to greet Winston at King’s Cross station on the morning of 19 August, she felt much revived, and the news from his summit gave cause for optimism. He and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter – outlining their joint hopes for the post-war world, and affirming the principles of self-determination and free trade – and they had developed what appeared to be a genuine and warm relationship. The President had resisted promising that the US would enter the war, but surely it could not now be long in coming?

  Four long months later, on the night of Sunday 7 December, the closest of the Churchills’ circle gathered for dinner at Chequers – ‘Pug’ Ismay, Winant, Harriman and his daughter Kathleen, Pamela, Winston’s private secretary John Martin and Commander Thompson. The mood was glum: news from the front was relentlessly bad and yet America was still stalling. Clementine, feeling too exhausted to join them, had taken to her bed. Winston was so down he silently held his head in his hands. Around nine, Winston’s butler Sawyers carried in a little flip-top radio and switched it on for the BBC news, just in time to catch a momentous announcement: ‘Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii.’

  What happened next is a little unclear; some reports suggest Winston danced a little celebratory jig with Winant. It is known, however, that he put in an urgent call to Roosevelt, who talked of being ‘in the same boat now’. News that America was at war was obviously an untrammelled relief for the British, but for the Americans present too. ‘The inevitable had finally arrived,’ Harriman recalled. ‘We all knew the grim future that it held, but at least there was a future now.’42

  Having of course discussed the news and its repercussions with Clementine, Winston retired to bed and in his own words ‘slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful’. He had long compared America to a woman who had to be wooed; now she was, as he put it, finally ‘in the harem’. Across the Atlantic, however, no one thought to inform the President’s wife. Eleanor had been her husband’s political partner during the New Deal social reforms of the thirties, but as Franklin’s attentions had shifted from welfare to weapons she had found herself increasingly excluded. Now she was left to deduce that America had joined the fighting from the frantic traffic in and out of her husband’s office.

  The next day Winston started to make plans to visit Roosevelt in Washington. Clementine wished him luck with his momentous mission – ‘May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the President’ – while excoriating, in an uncommonly bellicose tone, those ‘Nazi hogs’ and ‘yellow Japanese lice’.43 After crossing the Atlantic through a series of terrific gales, Winston stayed at the White House over Christmas, leaving her behind with her cousin Maryott Whyte, as Mary was away on active duty.

  Lacking Clementine’s experience or loving patience, the White House staff found him a trying guest and misinterpreted the glass constantly to be found by his side as an indication that he ‘drank like a fish’. (In fact, Winston disliked the President’s much-loved American martinis so much he would excuse himself and pour them down the lavatory, refilling the glass with water.) During his visit, he was given the Rose Suite within the family quarters on the second floor, only a few doors down from the President. Taking advantage of this proximity, the two leaders often talked long into the night.

  It was not just the staff who were disturbed by Winston’s nocturnal habits and supposed drinking habits. Eleanor Roosevelt, a near-teetotaller whose family was riddled with alcoholism, loathed his night-owl lifestyle and railed at the effect on the health of her husband, who had been part-paralysed by polio since 1921 and needed regular sleep. She also disliked the way Winston, in her view, romanticised war. Unwilling to play the part of adoring listener to the great man, Eleanor was instead forthright in her own opinions
; they were never likely to get on.

  Eleanor’s discovery in 1918 of Franklin’s adultery with her beautiful social secretary, Lucy Mercer, had made her fiercely independent. Roosevelt’s illness – and his desire to avoid a career-wrecking divorce – may have brought them back together, but the resulting partnership was professional rather than marital. When Franklin could not attend speeches or rallies in the 1920s because of his condition, Eleanor had stood in for him, becoming as a result one of the first great female voices of the Democratic party. She had also acted as the President’s eyes and ears during his administration’s battle to implement the daring New Deal welfare plan in response to the depression of the thirties. But their marriage, according to one of their five surviving children, remained in a state of ‘armed truce’ throughout.

  Unlike Winston, Franklin was not a one-woman man. He chose to surround himself with adoring and undemanding admirers, referred to by Eleanor as his ‘handmaidens’. During the war these included the exiled Princess Martha of Norway – who was striking, flirtatious and at his request called him ‘dear godfather’ – and also, unbeknown to his wife, a woman with a voice like seductive ‘dark velvet’, the very one whom he had promised to forsake to save his marriage: Lucy Mercer.

  Eleanor had retaliated by building her own compound at Hyde Park and forming a rival court, mostly, but not entirely, made up of lesbian admirers. But by the time America entered the war, she was fifty-seven and age had not been kind to her. Her wavy brown hair was flecked with grey; her buck teeth and receding chin detracted from her dazzling blue eyes. Nearly six foot tall, she dominated a room but did not conform to Winston’s ideas of ‘attractive’. Uninterested as she was in fripperies such as good food, décor or even her own dress, he perceived something unusually masculine in her. Yet for her devotion to the American people, the energy she expended on their behalf, and her unfailingly sharp-minded and wholesome public image, she often enjoyed higher approval ratings than her husband. Her ‘My Day’ syndicated column, highly paid lecture tours, press conferences, speeches to party conventions, and solo visits to slums, mines and factories had in time made her one of the most visible figures in American life, and a potent political force in her own right.