CONTENTS
Praise for Dark Lady by Charles Higham
Dark Lady, like all of Charles Highams biographies, is vivacious, sensational and revelatory. Jennie Churchill emerges as an intensely individual and passionate figure, and the book is indispensable reading for a full and proper understanding of her great son, Winston.
Simon Callow
A fascinating biography, told with panache.
YOU Magazine, Mail on Sunday
A vibrant look at the life of society beauty Jennie Jerome covering murder, espionage, love affairs and political machinations.
Daily Express
Charles Highams biography of Mr Churchills irrepressible mama should come with a health warning this may induce repetitive bouts of jaw-dropping... Unmissable stuff so long as you take sensible precautions for your chin.
Scottish Daily Record
Highams colourful tale is the stuff of fiction, featuring espionage and political manoeuvres of breathtaking audacity.
Good Book Guide
A fascinating story about a neglected historical figure.
Glasgow Evening Times
Charles Highams book offers a portrait of a remarkable woman and of the society and its dramas, in which the young Winston Churchill grew up.
Leicester Mercury
This book talks about the remarkable, tempestuous life of controversial American society girl and mother of Winston Churchill, Jennie Jerome feminist, advocate of Irish independence, and, above all, notoriously promiscuous. It charts her luxurious New York upbringing, eyebrow-raising entry into the British aristocracy through marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill, her endless line of liaisons with much younger men and a very different sort of affair in the highest of places with the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII (one of many kings and princes to win her affection). Finally, Higham reveals the woman for whom advancing age was never an obstacle to pursuing her wildest passions while retaining the favour of the Establishment. Her death in a household accident came at the dawn of the Swinging Twenties a period that could have been written for her.
Scottish Parliament/Politicos Bookstore
DARK LADY
Winston Churchills Mother and Her World
Charles Higham
ABOUT THE BOOK
Jennie Jerome was a controversial American society girl and mother of Britains most revered statesman, Winston Churchill. A single-minded and dynamic woman, she was an early feminist, advocate of Irish independence, and, above all, was notorious for her promiscuity.
In Dark Lady: Winston Churchills Mother and Her World Charles Higham draws from previously overlooked sources to provide much that is startlingly new about the remarkable and tempestuous life of Jennie Jerome. The book charts her luxurious New York upbringing, her eyebrow-raising entry into the British aristocracy through marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough, her endless line of liaisons with men of vastly inferior years, and a very different sort of affair with the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
Passionately in love with life, expressive of her sexuality when women were supposed to hide it, beautiful and independent minded, Jennie Churchill was decades ahead of her time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Higham, a former New York Times feature writer, is the author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, one of the sources for the film The Aviator. His Mrs Simpson: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor, has been a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and he has written bestselling biographies of Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Orson Welles.
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faiths transcendent dower
We feel that we are greater than we know.
WORDSWORTH
To Richard V Palafox and Dorris Halsey
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9780753528013
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London
SW1V 2SA
This edition published in Great Britain in 2007 by
Virgin Books Ltd
Thames Wharf Studios
Rainville Road
London
W6 9HA
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2006 by
Virgin Books Ltd
Copyright Charles Higham 2006
The right of Charles Higham to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780753512005
CHAPTER ONE
IN SEVERE WINTER weather, on 9 January 1854, Jeanette Jerome was born in a modest, three-storey red-brick Greek Revival house at 8 Amity Street, Brooklyn, in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn Heights, NY.
The America of that time still had aspects of the frontier. Children were taught at a mothers knee or in schools where they used slates for writing; they were required to follow the religious and patriotic precepts of the ubiquitous McGuffeys Readers that taught literature in even the most remote communities, as well as the virtues of simple living, thrift, chastity before marriage and, above all, Americanism. Geography was taught in song, as each child memorised lyrics set to music, referring to every capital city and state in the nation. At graduation, children were expected to deliver speeches extolling the school, parents, the town, and God.
The horse-drawn plough was paramount, and wheat was still scythed; it was an age without any of the physical comforts taken for granted in the twenty-first century. There were no refrigerators, no electric light or heat, no antibiotics, and countless infant deaths. There was not much proper surgery, and amputations were often carried out without chloroform. Cities were dirty and overcrowded, with great, teeming tenements for the poor. Clothing was heavy and encumbering, in order to conceal the human body and prevent feelings of desire; in summer, the woollen suits and dresses proved painful, and no man, even at home, and no matter how poor, would think of coming to meals without jacket and tie. Even swimming costumes concealed their owners physiques.
It would not be until three years after Jennies death in 1921 that radio would be a reality; television lay much further in the future. In the mid-1850s, more than ninety years ahead of that mediums wide popular use, and forty years before the cinema was even thought of, a telephone was something that could not be imagined. The theatre was largely restricted to the rich, and opera an extreme luxury; for the vast majority of Americans, evening entertainment consisted of families gathered around pianos and singing, or, if the religious rules were not too tight, innocent games of cards. Prayers were said every morning, attendance at church was at least twice a week, and no meal could begin without grace being said. When young men left home there was the neighbourhood saloon after a hard days work, and for women of means, sewing bees or charity work.
