But in mid-June, about a week after Ethel had left London, Winston wrote Cockran to say that he couldn’t come. His decision was abrupt, and he blamed it on the need to continue fighting “Chamberlain & his Merrie Men.” What seems more likely is that between the end of May and the middle of June, he realized that it wasn’t worth the time or money to chase reluctant Ethel, especially after her last-minute decision to go to San Francisco.8
Instead he did the sensible thing. His ever-generous friend Sir Ernest Cassel invited him to stay at the enormous gingerbread villa he owned high in the Swiss Alps, and Winston accepted. He spent a good part of August there, devoting his mornings to writing the biography of his father, spending the afternoons hiking, and reading in the evenings or playing bridge. The weather was perfect, he slept well at night with the windows wide open, and dinners were prepared by a French cook. As a holiday, it was much easier on him than pursuing Ethel across the American continent, and much more productive.
A shrewd judge of character, Cassel always believed that Winston had the talent and the will to succeed in British politics. As a man with great wealth to employ and protect, he was careful to cultivate the friendship of those in high places—even when, as in Winston’s case, the heights had yet to be reached. But their close relationship was based on much more than money and influence. They genuinely liked each other and enjoyed spending time together. After Cassel’s death in 1921 Winston would tell the banker’s granddaughter, Edwina, Lady Mountbatten, “I had the knowledge that he was very fond of me & believed in me at all times—especially in bad times. I had a real & deep affection for him.”9
He made such good progress on the biography that he was feeling unusually confident when he returned home. So confident, in fact, that he did something stunningly audacious, even for him. On September 22 he visited Joe Chamberlain at his Birmingham mansion and stayed overnight. Afterward, Churchill could hardly believe what he had done, and he told a few friends about it only after asking them to keep it a secret.
His excuse for the visit was that he wanted information from Joe about Lord Randolph. Bravely, he had written him asking for letters that might be useful for the biography. With even greater bravery, Joe had invited him to come to Highbury and spend the night. It is rare that such bitter foes would be able to meet in this way, especially since they were still very much at each other’s throats in the political arena. But they couldn’t resist the chance to size each other up before the final battles began. Despite all the bad blood that had flowed between them, they had a steely respect for each other.
As in earlier, friendlier days, Joe brought out the expensive port and they stayed up late into the night talking about the past, and a little about the future. It was almost as if nothing had happened over the past few years to change their relationship, for here they were again in the sprawling mansion that was still the same, with its rows of hothouses sheltering the treasured orchids. And here again was the young man closely observing while the older one looked back on life and dispensed wisdom with his stiff smile and dry laugh.
Joe conceded that Winston had done the right thing for his own career by joining the Liberals, but he warned that the Conservatives would never forgive his decision, and that he would have to endure abuse from them for a long time. Having switched parties himself almost twenty years ago, Chamberlain knew the cost of being labeled a turncoat. But he had learned a valuable lesson, and probably suspected that Winston had learned it too—the ordeal made you stronger. “If a man is sure of himself,” he said in his soft voice, “it only sharpens him and makes him more effective.”
When they parted the next day, they did so on polite terms, but each knew that in a year or so only one of them would stand triumphant. Joe tried to make light of the fact that the government could fall sooner rather than later. As he wished Churchill success with the biography of Lord Randolph, he expressed the hope that the book would appear before any major political change in the country. “The public cannot stand two sensations at the same time,” he joked.
Despite all the smiles and pleasantries, Winston went away thinking that he had sensed vulnerability in his opponent. He concluded a little later that Joe and Balfour would, in the end, “cut their own throats and bring their party to utter destruction.” He was so sure of this that he thought the Liberals would win the next election in a landslide. It was as if the meeting at Highbury had been Joe’s way of tipping his hat to the victor before the blade fell.10
So, after a tumultuous spring and summer, Churchill was looking forward to enjoying the fruits of his hard work—money and more fame from the publication of the biography, and a place in the new government after the defeat of Joe.
* * *
Something was missing, however. As he approached his thirtieth birthday he was still searching for a wife. The press was beginning to speculate whether he would ever marry and settle down or simply drift into middle age as a “confirmed bachelor,” which is the very phrase a society magazine applied to him at the end of the year. It was the last thing he wanted to be. But, after two failed proposals, he was beginning to have his doubts. Then, again, he wasn’t the kind to give up.11
Perhaps because he didn’t think he had anything to lose, he set his sights on another woman who seemed beyond his reach. She was Muriel Wilson, whom he had known for years. They were the same age and had always liked each other. Their names had been linked romantically once or twice when they were younger, but this had been mostly idle gossip. For much of their friendship, she had refused in a good-natured way to take him seriously as a potential mate. Other men always seemed to have a stronger claim on her attention. Yet they all went away disappointed. For the past ten years some of the handsomest and best-connected men in the kingdom had tried and failed to win her hand. Now, as she was nearing thirty herself, Winston dared to hope that she was ready to contemplate a future with him.
She loved her freedom and didn’t need to rush into anything. She lived like a princess and never wanted for money. Her father, Arthur Wilson, ran the world’s largest privately owned steamship company, with a fleet of almost a hundred ships. At his death in 1909, he was one of Britain’s richest men, worth an estimated £4 million (an astounding sum at a time when the prime minister’s pay was £5,000 a year). The family had a mansion near Buckingham Palace, a sprawling villa in the south of France, and a country house in Yorkshire—Tranby Croft (scene of a notorious incident in the early 1890s involving a guest who cheated the Prince of Wales at cards).
The family fortune was not Muriel’s only attraction. She was a strikingly lovely woman. Ethel Barrymore’s brother, Lionel, said Muriel was one of the “most beautiful women I ever saw in my life.” In her early twenties the American press called her “Great Britain’s most beautiful girl.” She bore some resemblance to the young Jennie Churchill, with dark features, a small, delicate mouth, large eyes, and a rich mass of wavy hair. Her dresses were legendary, cut from the finest materials to accentuate her tall, willowy form. “Singularly handsome,” said the London Journal, “she could nowhere pass unnoticed.”
Fluent in French, possessed with a good sense of humor, and popular with both sexes, she seemed to do everything well. “She skates, cycles, and dances to perfection,” one society magazine gushed. She even had a career of sorts, routinely acting in amateur theatricals. Not wanting a salary, she performed only for friends at country house parties or onstage in London and elsewhere for charity. She was celebrated for the memorable costumes she wore in historical pageants, where she would walk onstage like a goddess, personifying some epic moment. In a flimsy white gown she would appear as “Peace” or in a heavy Wagnerian robe as “War.” She could not have failed to excite Winston’s deepest passions when she played the “Muse of History,” her eyes soulfully fixed on the heavens while waving a sword. Photographs of her posing in costume for these parts were reproduced in the Edwardian society magazines, where she was hailed as “the finest of our lady amateurs on the stage.
”12
How could Winston Churchill have resisted the chance to court the “Muse of History”? When Muriel gave him a photograph of her playing one of these allegorical figures, he was thrilled and vowed to keep it with him always. In this way and others, she gave him enough encouragement in the autumn of 1904 to make him think a proposal might be met with success. He believed their long friendship was suddenly ripening into something more serious. But he had misread the signals. When he asked the all-important question, she gave him such a firm rejection that he went away crushed.
He begged her to reconsider, and told her in a letter written in the heat of his distress that he was willing to wait for her to change her mind. “Perhaps I shall improve with waiting,” he wrote, sounding desperate. “Why shouldn’t you care about me someday?” Trying to think of something convincing to say, he offered her both a promise and a prophecy. If she would trust him to prove that he was worthy of her, she wouldn’t be disappointed. No matter how long it took, he would make her proud. And then came the prophecy. “Time and circumstance,” he said, “will work for me.” Then he told her that he loved her and couldn’t bear to go forward without her.
She seems to have been touched by the letter, but not enough to change her mind. For the rest of 1904, and well into the next year, he kept writing to her, and they continued to see each other. He recited poetry to her, then recommended that for an insight into his feelings she should read Robert Burns’s lyric “Mary Morison,” which includes the question, “Canst thou break that heart of his, / [Whose] only fault is loving thee?” He praised every hair on her head, told her he could be happy just to be near her, and kept reminding her that she had completely captured his heart. Every now and then, she allowed him to take her to a dance or to accompany her on a long walk at sunset. Yet there was a “key” to her own heart, he told her, that he couldn’t seem to find. “You dwell apart,” he wrote, “as lofty, as shining & alas as cold as a snow clad peak.”13
She wasn’t so cold to others, however, and Winston couldn’t understand how she could spend time with his rivals, none of whom impressed him as having better claims to her affection than his own. The problem was that, for the time being, marriage simply wasn’t in Muriel’s plans. She was having far too much fun to settle down. Instead of devoting herself to Winston, she preferred the company of such easygoing playboys as Luis de Soveral, the Portuguese ambassador and one of King Edward’s closest friends.
Referred to by one social historian as the “greatest ladies’ man” of his time, Soveral may have earned his nickname—the “Blue Monkey”—as a result of some long-forgotten episode in a boudoir. Many decades after his death a flirtatious letter from Muriel was found among his papers—along with love notes from other Edwardian beauties—and it includes her provocative suggestion that he spend the afternoon at the family’s London mansion. “Are you too busy to lunch with me tomorrow?” she wrote. “I am quite alone, but the butler and the parrot are excellent chaperones.”14
It was her casual willingness to share private afternoons with unscrupulous characters like Soveral that drove Winston to distraction. One of her few surviving letters to him is a note saying she would rather not meet him for lunch because “it is a meal I dislike intensely.” Such rebuffs were difficult for Winston to accept. Her failure to settle down and marry was, he told her, “a sad pity & a scattering of treasure.”15
Muriel was content to play with Winston’s emotions for as long as he kept coming to her door. She didn’t resent his attentions, for he always fascinated her. She just didn’t want his life to become hers. Politics didn’t interest her that much, and she didn’t want to be stuck in London if she suddenly felt the urge to enjoy a few weeks of sunny warmth at the Villa Maryland, the family home on Cap Ferrat.
The fact that he refused to give up on her, and continued pressing his claims over the next year, became a subject of considerable gossip in London and even in America. Some assumed that he was interested in her only because she was rich. “Winston must marry money,” an anonymous “friend” told a society magazine. No one could ignore the Wilson fortune, but Winston had fallen in love with Muriel after a long friendship and wasn’t suddenly drawn to her simply because she came from a wealthy family. He was working hard to make money from his pen and would always want to earn his living. He would have been happy to marry Ethel if she had said yes, even though she lived from one play to the next, and had no fortune to speak of.16
In Muriel he found many of the same qualities he admired in Ethel Barrymore. In his romantic concept of his life it was easy for him to think that the kind of woman who belonged at his side was a glamorous, theatrical personality with an air of mystery and remoteness. There were predictions in the press that Winston would prevail this time, and that Muriel would marry him in the end. He was teased in one American newspaper for having three consuming ambitions: to achieve a great success with his biography of Lord Randolph, to marry Muriel Wilson, and “to grow a moustache.” But, the reporter deadpanned, “The last is generally regarded as the most difficult achievement of the three.”17
IX
FORTUNATE SON
In his imagination Churchill had no trouble staging the perfect courtship. Around the time that he was so desperate to marry Muriel Wilson, he wrote a novelistic scene in which a couple become engaged. The man is a handsome aristocrat in his twenties, the woman “a singular beauty” of nineteen. They meet at a ball in an old seaside resort and fall madly in love in the course of just three days.
Churchill wrote, “That night—the third of their acquaintance—was a beautiful night, warm and still, with the lights of the yachts shining on the water and the sky bright with stars. After dinner they found themselves alone together in the garden, and—brief courtship notwithstanding—he proposed and was accepted.”1
In fiction love could seem so easy. Except this wasn’t fiction, though it sounds like it. This was simply Winston the biographer describing the night his parents were engaged. His mother had told him the story, and he cast it in romantic prose that enhanced the past and reflected his own current frustrations. If Lord Randolph could meet and win Jennie so effortlessly in three days, why couldn’t Winston—after three years—find the right woman to marry him?
The biography was meant to honor Randolph’s memory, but writing it was also a way for Winston to understand his own life. He had never established a close connection with Randolph, though he had yearned for one. His father was a tragic figure—an ambitious and outspoken politician, but a failure as a statesman; a restless man always searching for attention, but never getting enough to please him; the proud son of a great family, but a difficult husband and father. Living in Randolph’s shadow for much of his life, Winston couldn’t help wondering if his father’s legacy was a blessing or a curse.
It was too early in his life to answer the question, but he could craft a plausible answer in his book. He tried to enhance Randolph’s story by turning his father into a version of himself. They had much in common, but the Winston-Randolph composite in the biography comes across as nobler and steadier, and much more determined and farseeing, than the real Randolph. In several passages Winston could easily have been describing himself rather than his father. “He seemed an intruder, an upstart,” he wrote of Lord Randolph, “a mutineer who flouted venerable leaders and mocked at constituted authority with a mixture of aristocratic insolence and democratic brutality.”2
The Randolph who emerges from Winston’s book is a misunderstood hero who tries to inspire his party and his country to achieve great things, but who is defeated by the forces of reaction and selfish interests. Too soon, his wings are clipped and he slowly falls to earth; another aristocratic dreamer like Lord Byron, he lives large and dies young, scorned by the unimaginative but mourned by all those with understanding hearts. A thousand pages long, the biography is a towering, gleaming monument that was meant to be a kind of manifesto, with the son gathering up the disordered pieces of his father’
s life to construct a romantic vision that might guide his own career.
One day, while Winston was working on the biography, he was visited at home by the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an old friend of Randolph. Tall, eccentric, and outspoken, Blunt had been drawn to the unconventional side of Lord Randolph’s character and had always taken an indulgent view of his friend’s faults. Like Winston, he was inclined to see a touch of the Byronic hero in the charming, erratic Randolph. But, in truth, Blunt was obsessed with Lord Byron, so much so that he married the poet’s granddaughter—Lady Annabella Noel—and liked to think of “himself as Byron reborn.”3
Listening to Winston discuss the biography, Blunt was struck by how much of the father he could see in the son. The physical resemblance wasn’t strong, but he thought Winston embodied in an uncanny way some essential element of his father’s spirit. “He is astonishingly like his father in manners and ways, and the whole attitude of his mind,” Blunt wrote in his journal in August 1904. “He has just come in from playing polo, a short, sturdy little man with a twinkle in his eye, reminding me especially of the Randolph of twenty years ago. He took out his father’s letters which I had left with him six weeks ago, from a tin box, and read them to me aloud while I explained the allusions in them, and gave him a short account of the political adventures of the early eighties in which Randolph and I had been connected. There is something touching about the fidelity with which he continues to espouse his father’s cause and his father’s quarrels.”4
Young Titan Page 13
