The upholsterer’s letter arrived in June of 1922, addressed to Winston Churchill, about a bill his mother had never paid. The sum was £872, and the writer had already had trouble collecting it from her executors. Lady Randolph Churchill had been dead for almost a year, but she was only one of many still writing. A firm in Cheapside had asked for the £3,000 she owed Sir Arthur Ducross.
Her younger son, Jack, had sat down with a pen and added up her debts by hand. She was the daughter of the man they called the king of Wall Street. She had married into the family of Blenheim Palace on a settlement of £50,000. How does a woman born to that much money end her life owing her upholsterer?
And who was left to pay? The answer begins with her father. In 1865, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, a speculator named Leonard Jerome finished a house he had been building for six years. It rose six stories above Madison Square, with a theater seating 600, a breakfast room that served 70 people at once, and a ballroom in white and gold.
At his parties, the fountains ran with champagne and cologne. Wall Street called him its king. He ran a financial firm with William Travers and his own brothers, held large stakes in railroads, and often stood beside Cornelius Vanderbilt in his deals. He held a significant share of the New York Times, though never the controlling one people sometimes gave him.
He made fortunes and lost them on the same scale. When he died, the New York Times described his career as “remarkable alike for its alternation of enormous gains and losses and its success as a whole. ” During the draft riots, he helped defend the Times building with a Gatling gun. The money went where his pleasures went, and a great deal of it went into horses.
In 1866, he bought a 230-acre estate in Westchester and turned it into a racetrack with August Belmont. Jerome Park opened on September 25, 1866. That same year, Leonard paid $40,000 for a single horse called Kentucky, a record price at the time, and Kentucky won twenty races in a row. The Times called the opening “a success unprecedented in the annals of the American turf.
” The first Belmont Stakes was run at Jerome Park in 1867 and stayed there until 1890. In 1888, his futurity stakes offered the richest purse American racing had ever seen, $41,675 to the winner at a time when the Kentucky Derby winner took home $4,740. Leonard Jerome did not simply enjoy money. He liked to be seen setting the price of things.
When he died, he was president of two racetracks at once. Some accounts put his fortune at its height near $10 million. His second daughter was born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1854, on Amity Street, probably in a house on Henry Street that belonged to her uncle Addison. Her name was Janette, called Jenny.
There were three daughters who lived: Clara, born three years before Jenny, and Leonie, in 1859. A fourth sister, Camille, died when she was eight and Jenny was nine. In the 1860s, the Jeromes moved to Paris, where Jenny studied piano with Stephen Heller, a friend of Chopin who believed she could reach concert standard. She never made music her living.
Nobody in her world expected a girl like Jenny to need one. In 1870, after the German invasion of France, the Jeromes left Paris for London. The great house on Madison Square had already ceased to be a family home. From 1868 to 1881, it housed the Union League Club, then the University Club and the Turf Club, and from 1899 the Manhattan Club.
The mansion built to show off a fortune was turned into rent to keep that fortune going. What Jenny took from her father was a way of thinking about money: it came in great waves and went out in great waves, and between the waves you spent as if the next one were already on its way. In August of 1873, at a ball during Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight, the Prince of Wales introduced the nineteen-year-old American to a duke’s younger son. His name was Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, whose family seat was Blenheim Palace and whose lands ran to about 23,000 acres.
Randolph had the name, the manner, and the connections. What he did not have was money of his own. Within three days, Jenny and Randolph were engaged. Both families objected.
The Duke worried about the bride’s father, an American speculator who made and lost fortunes on the stock market. For months, the wedding was delayed while the two sets of parents argued over the settlement. In March of 1874, Randolph wrote to Jenny that he hoped to learn her father’s wishes about the settlement, and in the same letter he talked about buying a house in Charles Street. He was already planning how to spend money that had not yet been agreed.
When the terms came, Leonard Jerome put up a capital sum of £50,000, which invested would bring in about £2,000 a year. In American terms, the settlement was reported as $250,000. Half of the income was to go to Randolph. The other half was to be Jenny’s own.
The Duke paid off Randolph’s debts and settled £1,100 a year on his son. Leonard Jerome had spent his life watching fortunes appear and vanish, and he wanted at least part of his daughter’s money to stay within her reach. In the England of 1874, a wife’s money usually became her husband’s to manage. It would be eight more years before Parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882.
There is a letter Randolph wrote to his father during those months trying to reassure him about the bride. Jenny, he said, had “a sacred, and I should almost say insane, horror of buying anything she cannot pay for. ” The historian David Lough called it “a monumental misjudgment. ” Jenny’s trousseau held 25 gowns from the finest dressmakers in Paris.
The wedding was set for April 15, 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris, and then it waited. Until the settlement money arrived, there could be no marriage. It came at last the day before. Jenny Jerome was married the day after her father’s money cleared.
On November 30, 1874, at the palace, Jenny gave birth to her first son, Winston, about seven and a half months after the wedding. Asked about it as an old man, he said only: “Although present on the occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it. ” She was twenty, with a husband whose family had a famous name and no fortune, a seat in Parliament that paid nothing, and a share of an income that sounded large and would prove small. The new Lady Randolph Churchill wrote home to her mother: “Money is such a hateful subject to me just now.
Don’t let us talk about it. ” In her house, money did not run itself. Randolph had his allowance from the Duke and his half of the settlement income. Members of Parliament were not paid.
They had expensive tastes, and they had married into a society where the cost of simply being present at the right houses in the right clothes was immense. They were, as one account puts it, a “profligate, irresponsible pair” who lived beyond their income and were frequently in debt. In December of 1877, Randolph wrote to Jenny of his annoyance with her father over their financial arrangements. A week later, he sent her a check for wages and wrote about the need to secure a loan.
Three days after that came another letter, whose subject the archive describes in two words: financial worries. By then they were living in Ireland, where Randolph’s father had been appointed Lord Lieutenant. In January of 1879, Randolph wrote that he had made satisfactory arrangements for a loan, having managed it while avoiding an approach to his father. The next day he wrote again: the loan was arranged, a bank account was to be opened in Jenny’s name, and he urged her to economize.
In February, he sent instructions for paying their bills, wrote that some American shares had been sold and the money must be reinvested quickly. Those four letters, written in the space of a month, are the shape of the next twenty years. In 1880, Jenny gave birth to a second son, John, called Jack. The boys were raised largely by their nanny, Elizabeth Everest, whom they called Wom.
As a schoolboy, Winston wrote his mother letter after letter begging her to come and see him. He would later write that she “shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearly, but at a distance. ” In October of 1884, when he was nine and away at school, he wrote to her that he had been very extravagant on stamps and a stamp book, and asked her for money.
In 1888 he asked again for school subscriptions, and that autumn promised that he would not borrow money in future. Within three years he was writing home about money he owed. In January of 1883, Randolph wrote to Jenny from Monte Carlo about their financial difficulties and then about his relief that they had been resolved. Nobody seems to have recorded how.
In July of that year, his father died at his house in Berkeley Square at sixty-one. Still Randolph rose. He led a small band of rebels in the Commons called the Fourth Party, preached what he called Tory democracy, and became secretary of state for India. Jenny worked the drawing rooms, wrote and polished his speeches.
In 1885 she canvassed Woodstock for him: “I surpassed the fondest hopes of the suffragettes,” she wrote, “and thought I was duly elected. ” In 1886 she spoke in public for the Primrose League at a meeting in Manchester. That same year it all paid off. Lord Randolph Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons at thirty-seven.
He held the post for six months. In December of 1886, he resigned over the budget for the army, offering to go in the belief that the prime minister could not do without him. Salisbury could, and accepted the resignation. Randolph never held office again, and the salary went with it.
The letters he wrote her over the next four years survive in the family archive, and their subjects read like the pages of a household ledger. In September of 1888, Randolph calculated when he could afford a portrait costing 200 guineas. Three weeks later he advised her not to spend money on a new brougham. Five days after that, his mood had lifted: he had been to the races and cleared a monkey, the old racing slang for £500.
In February of 1889, he wrote about their finances and his lack of success at gambling. In September of that year he was £300 down on the races and thinking of selling his own racehorse for £3,000. In the same letter he enclosed a bill for Winston. In February of 1890, he wrote about their financial difficulties and the trouble with the servants.
In August, he asked her once again to be more careful with money. There was another man in Jenny’s life. Count Charles Kinsky was an Austrian, an attaché to Britain for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, four years younger than she was. He owned a mare called Zoedone, which had come third in the Grand National of 1882 and which he rode himself to win the race the following year.
Two years later, on the day of another race, Zoedone was poisoned. Kinsky was, by one account, completely infatuated with Lady Randolph. On March 3, 1891, her father died in Brighton at seventy-three, of heart failure. He was buried first at Kensal Green in London and later taken home to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
That same year, a sick Lord Randolph left for southern Africa to look for gold. The journey was made, by one account, in search of health and relaxation, and he sent home letters to a London newspaper later published as a book, Men, Mines, and Animals in South Africa. But the journey was also about money. He was leading an expedition to prospect for gold, with capital raised from a syndicate of investors backed by the Rothschild Bank.
Randolph raised £16,000 in all, £4,000 of it lent by the Rothschilds themselves. When the syndicate’s final accounts were drawn up, its investors had lost every penny. In August, he wrote to Jenny about his investments in Rhodesia. On September 1st, he complained about the lack of opportunity for speculating in gold.
On September 18th, he reported success. The expedition’s spare money had been put into gold shares in Johannesburg, and those shares made a profit of about £1,000. The Rothschilds lent him another £6,500 to hold on to the London shares for longer. But in 1891, a man named Alfred Beit had made Randolph a separate offer.
The company was called Deep Levels, later Rand Mines. Beit offered shares at five shillings each. Randolph did not have the money. He borrowed £1,250 and bought 5,000 shares.
In October of 1893 he sold 500 of the Rand Mines shares at £4 each. In February of 1894, he sold 200 more, but 2,300 of those shares bought at five shillings would still be in his name when he died. Five shillings was a quarter of a pound. By the time anyone came to sell the 2,300 still in his name at his death, each one would be worth more than a hundred times what he had paid.
One of the best decisions Lord Randolph Churchill ever made about money was made with borrowed money, in the same year as a journey that lost most of what it touched. Randolph’s health did not mend. The first palpitations of his heart were recorded in 1890, then deafness and dizziness. In February of 1893, when he rose to speak in the House of Commons, members were horrified by his white and prematurely aged face, his shaking hands, and his dreadful articulation.
In 1894, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill set out to go around the world. It would be their last journey together. In the summer of 1894, the Duchess of Marlborough, Randolph’s mother, wrote to Jenny about the high expense of their travels and suggested they cut the number of servants. A doctor named George Keith traveled with them.
His reports home describe a patient coming apart: speech growing thicker, a tendency to use the wrong words, a staggering walk, paralysis affecting the lower part of his face and his left hand, moods swinging wildly through the day. At times he grew violent enough that he had to be stopped from attacking his own valet. Jenny wrote to her sister: “He gets like that 20 times a day. You can imagine my life is not a very easy one.
” In November, the Duchess wrote again about their financial affairs, about a bill from the Marlborough Club, and about a servant called Healey, who had absconded, by the catalog’s account, with money. In the space of seventeen days, Jenny lost two men. On January 7, 1895, at Herdringen, Count Charles Kinsky married Countess Elizabeth Wolff-Metternich, born in 1874. He was thirty-six.
Whatever he had felt for Jenny, he had married someone else, by one account, because he needed an heir and a fortune that Jenny could not give him. On January 24th, in Westminster, Lord Randolph Churchill died. He was forty-five. The death certificate gave the cause as bronchial pneumonia from paralysis of the brain.
The doctors of the day believed the true cause was syphilis, and most historians have agreed with them. Three weeks before he died, Lord Randolph owed the Rothschild bank £12,758 across four accounts. The surprise was on the other side of the ledger. Winston would later write in his memoir of his early life that his father “died at the moment when his new fortune almost exactly equaled his debts.
” The bank’s own records say something quite different. Randolph still held 2,300 of the Rand Mines shares bought at five shillings. Within weeks of his death, the executors sold them through the Rothschilds. On March 8, 1895, 1,000 shares were sold at £26 each.
On March 11th, the remaining 1,300 were sold at £29 15s each. The gold of the Witwatersrand, whose great rush had begun in 1886, had done it. The Rothschilds paid the executors an interim check of £2,000, then in April, after all his debts had been subtracted, a second check for £52,237. The gross value of the estate was entered in the probate registry at £75,971.
Nine-tenths of it came from the sale of those shares. The money went into his will. He left his wife £500 in cash. Everything else went into a trust called the Lord Randolph Churchill Will Trust, whose capital was just over £50,000, almost all of it from the Rand Mines sales.
There were three trustees: Jenny herself, the Duke of Marlborough, and a man named George Howe. Jenny was to receive the income for the rest of her life, and when she died, the income would pass in equal shares to Winston and Jack. But there was a clause. The trustees could, if they chose, divert half of her income to the two sons after her second marriage.
If Jenny married again, half of what she lived on could be taken away and given to her children. Winston and Jack would not learn of the clause for eighteen years. In April of 1895, three months a widow, Jenny opened a letter from her elder son asking for £100 to £120 for a polo pony. Winston was twenty and a young cavalry officer, and “very hard up,” as he told her.
His father’s will had left no immediate allowance for the children. Winston would inherit his share only when she died. Until then, he had to rely on his own talents and on whatever his mother could spare. When he was twenty-two, she wrote to him: “What an extraordinary boy you are regarding your business affairs.
”
His name was James Crookshank, and the family called him the Speck. In 1896 he defrauded Jenny. The surviving papers do not describe the scheme in detail. What survives is the aftermath.
On October 1st, 1896, writing from Mentmore House, Horwick, Jenny sent Winston a copy of a letter from Sir George Lewis, the family solicitor, about the fraud. One account drawn from the letters puts the loss at £4,000, taken by an upper-class conman. In today’s money, more than £400,000. On January 30, 1898, in Bangalore, a twenty-three-year-old cavalry officer wrote to his brother about their mother’s loan.
Winston was serving in India with the Fourth Hussars. Jack was still in his teens. Their mother needed a loan, and Winston wanted Jack to share the interest repayments with him. The amount is not recorded.
The terms are not known. What is clear is the shape of it: Jenny borrowed, and her sons took on the interest. By the end of March, Winston was writing to her from a camp at Peshawar about “my liability for a loan from my mother. ” In the same letter he told her: “You and I were equally thoughtless, spendthrift, and extravagant.
My own extravagances were a very small matter beside yours. ” Her new ball gown, he claimed, had cost twice as much as his horse. On July 2, 1897, at the fancy dress ball at Devonshire House, Jenny had gone as Theodora, the Byzantine Empress, in a dress of golden gauze thick with jeweled embroidery. The Lafayette studio photographed her in it, and the photograph survives today in the National Portrait Gallery.
In the winter of 1899, the woman who could not balance her own accounts raised $150,000 for a hospital ship. The war in South Africa had begun that autumn. Jenny chaired the fund, organized a great fundraising event at Claridge’s, and a shipping man from Baltimore, Bernard Baker of the Atlantic Transport Company, provided a transport ship called the Maine. It needed a complete refit.
Jenny’s committee raised $150,000, about $4 million today. The Maine left Portsmouth on December 23, 1899, and reached Cape Town on January 23, 1900. Jenny sailed with it, designed her own nurse’s uniform, and kept the peace between American and British staff. On February 5th, the first ambulance train arrived with sixty-seven casualties, and the newspapers reported that Lady Randolph personally superintended their reception.
On February 13th, the ship took on its first wounded officer: her own son Jack. On April 23rd, the Maine returned to Southampton carrying about 360 wounded men. At the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, she was seated in a gallery nicknamed the king’s loose box, and in October at Balmoral the new king invested her with the Royal Red Cross. On July 28, 1900, at St.
Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, she married George Cornwallis West. He was a lieutenant in the Scots Guards. His sisters had married spectacularly well, one becoming the Princess of Pless, the other the Duchess of Westminster. He was twenty-five.
Jenny was forty-six. He had been born on November 14, 1874, sixteen days older than her son Winston. He had no money. In the city, where he tried to make a living, he was, in one blunt verdict, a financial failure.
Winston was standing for Parliament at Oldham, and she cut the wedding trip short to come and help at his meetings. In 1900 he won. Members of Parliament were still unpaid, so that winter Winston set off on a lecture tour, which one account of his early life calls simply a financial necessity. The clause allowing the trustees to divert half her income was never invoked.
Her sons did not even know it existed. In 1899 she had founded the Anglo-Saxon Review, a sumptuous quarterly miscellany that she edited herself. Winston helped. It was a beautiful thing and a disaster, a drain on income.
It ran for ten issues and failed in 1901. George wrote to her about its lack of financial success, the first of many letters from her second husband about money. They set up house in the country in Hertfordshire. In August of 1903, George wrote about the payment of a bill.
On September 2, 1904, about their financial affairs. Two days later, again, and about the house books. On October 9th, he asked her directly to reduce the household accounts at Salisbury Hall, which had become too costly. On June 9, 1905, he wrote to tell her he had won £1,000 at White’s.
The very next day, he wrote again about their financial affairs and the management of household expenses. About four years into the marriage, Winston wrote to his mother that he viewed the future with very grave anxiety. He was worried about her spending. At one point, short of funds, she considered selling the house in Hertfordshire and moving into the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.
George put it plainly: she had “no sense of proportion. ” The value of money meant nothing to her. What counted with her were the things she got for money, not the amount she had to pay. In 1908 she published The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill, though the name on the title page was Mrs.
George Cornwallis West. It was well received and went through several editions, but it failed to relieve her financial worries. The following year she wrote a play called His Borrowed Plumes, put on in the West End in 1909. It was a commercial failure that ran for only two weeks.
Winston judged that it lacked originality of plot, situation, dialogue, or characterization. George said afterwards that four matinées would have covered the whole cost of the production. On the night of June 20, 1911, two days before the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary, the Royal Albert Hall filled for a ball in Shakespeare’s name. The cause was a national theater memorial to Shakespeare in London.
The ball was Jenny’s idea: she conceived it, chaired it, and largely organized it herself, and edited the souvenir almanac that went with it. It had been meant to happen the year before, but King Edward VII died. When it finally took place, it raised about £10,000, about a million pounds today, but far short of what the appeal needed. In May of 1912 at Earl’s Court she opened an exhibition called Shakespeare’s England.
The architect Edwin Lutyens designed a whole Elizabethan town with narrow streets and half-timbered houses, built at a reduced scale to fit the site. There were orchestral concerts under Sir Henry Wood, a little harbor, and in it a replica of the Revenge. It needed about £55,000. Jenny went to her bank, Cox and Company, which agreed to back the project up to £35,000.
She negotiated for herself 10 percent of the profits and at least £500 even if the exhibition failed. Shakespeare’s England won praise for its streets and lost money overall. When the exhibition failed, George blamed the lavish spending. Then he left.
In January of 1912, George’s letter to his wife was about the household drinks bill. By the end of the year they had separated. On December 29th, 1912, he wrote to her about their divorce and about money, and pledged to provide for her according to her tastes. Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, she drafted her reply, which survives, about settling their financial difficulties and, as the archive describes it, her sacrifice in giving him up.
In August of 1913, she wrote privately to Jack about George’s mismanagement of their finances and his responsibility for paying their bills. That same year, Winston and Jack finally learned about the clause in their father’s will. Neither of them pressed for the money. They could have taken half of what their mother lived on, and they chose to leave it with her.
The divorce came in the spring of 1914. On April 6th, George Cornwallis West married the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Bernard Shaw had written the part of Eliza Doolittle. By deed poll, Jenny took back the name of her first husband.
She was Lady Randolph Churchill again. In 1913 she had tried the theater once more with a play called The Bill. It was not well received. On April 3, 1916, the family solicitor, Sir George Lewis, the same man whose letter about the Speck she had sent to Winston twenty years before, wrote to her.
He had met the lawyers acting for George Cornwallis West in connection with George’s bankruptcy, and was trying to find out whether George intended to name Lady Randolph as one of the causes of his financial troubles. Whether he ever made it, the papers do not say. Among her own papers from about this time is a single sheet in manuscript, which the archive catalog describes as a breakdown of money apparently owed, with a question mark beside her name. If the list is hers, the total comes to £13,000, £5,000 of it a mortgage.
In June of 1918, in a registry office, Lady Randolph Churchill married a forty-one-year-old colonial officer named Montagu Porch. Before that wedding came four years of war. From 1914 she chaired the hospital committee of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, helped fund and staff two hospitals, nursed, and helped establish the American Women’s Hospital for Officers. She wrote articles for Pearson’s Magazine, collected in 1916 into a book called Small Talks on Big Subjects, and edited a volume called Women’s War Work.
Her friends valued her advice on decorating their houses, which she mostly gave them for nothing. Montagu Fippen Porch had been born on March 15, 1877, at Glastonbury, making him three years younger than her son Winston. His father had been in the Bengal civil service and left an estate of £5,212. Montagu had been at Magdalen College, Oxford, served as a trooper in the South African war, and since 1906 had been a colonial officer in Nigeria.
He was a Roman Catholic and had never married. After the marriage, he resigned from the colonial service and went back to West Africa to look for business opportunities. While he was away, he sent her money: checks came regularly, £60 at a time. Her spending far exceeded them.
In her final years she ran up large debts. The archive has kept twenty-nine of her checks from the autumn of 1920 returned by her bank, the National Provincial and Union Bank of England, showing who was paid, how much, and when. Among the payees is Montagu Porch himself. There is a receipt, dated September 28, 1920, for a policy of life insurance with the Eagle Star and British Dominions Insurance Company, and a blank checkbook for an account she kept at a bank in Paris.
In February of 1921, Winston wrote to Clementine with good news because his mother had made a profit. The house was in Berkeley Square, number 16, the same square where her father-in-law had died almost forty years before. She sold it for £35,000. It was, Winston told his wife, a clear profit of £15,000.
She bought a smaller house, which her biographer places in Charles Street, where Randolph had wanted to buy a house in March of 1874 with money from a settlement that had not yet been agreed. Other records place her that spring at number 8 Westbourne Street. Then she went to Rome. Her biographer Anne Sebba tells the rest in a single plain sentence: she spent the profit in Rome, going into the curiosity shops and buying and buying.
Her friend the Duchess of Sermoneta described it: “Her zest in spending money was one of her charms. ”
In May of 1921, staying with friends, she came down a staircase in a pair of new high-heeled shoes and slipped. The accounts differ on exactly where it happened; one places it on the stairs of a friend’s house, another names the house as Mel’s Manor. What everyone agrees is that she broke her ankle, and the injury did not heal.
Gangrene set in. On June 10, 1921, surgeons amputated her left leg above the knee. For a fortnight she seemed to rally. Montagu Porch was not there.
He was on the Gold Coast in West Africa, writing her a letter dated across the 25th and 27th of June, about her financial affairs, his own business interests connected with a railway, and her health. He enclosed a map of the railway. Two days after he finished it, she was dead. On June 29, 1921, an artery in her thigh hemorrhaged in what was left of the leg.
She died at her home at number 8 Westbourne Street in London, sixty-seven years old. Winston reached her, and he was devastated. She had not made a will. She was buried at Bladon beside Randolph in the churchyard of St.
Martin’s, near Blenheim Palace. In June of 1921, in his own hand, Jack Churchill worked out how much his mother owed. The sheet of calculations survives in the Churchill Archives, one sheet in Jack’s writing listing the amounts owed by Lady Randolph Churchill on her death. The letters began almost at once.
On August 17, 1921, a firm called Ward, Bowie and Company of King Street in Cheapside wrote to her solicitors: Lady Randolph Churchill had owed Sir Arthur Ducross £3,000, and asked for it to be repaid. In September, Winston wrote to Jack about their mother’s American estate. In December, Winston wrote to his own bankers, Cox and Company, expecting a payment from Lady Randolph’s settlement on December 9th, with his own overdraft at £4,000. In June of 1922, almost a year after her death, a London upholsterer named W.
H. Haynes wrote to Winston about a debt of £872 owed by Lady Randolph Churchill, and about the trouble he had had collecting it from her executors. When her income ended, the trust Randolph had set up with his South African money passed at last to Winston and Jack. Winston would later borrow £12,000 of its capital before finishing his memoir of his early life in 1930, partly to pay for modernizing Chartwell.
Shares bought at five shillings on borrowed money in 1891 were still paying the Churchills’ bills almost forty years later. Charles Kinsky had died before her, in December of 1919. Montagu Porch went back to West Africa, where his investments in the end did well. He married again in 1926 and lived in Italy until his second wife died.
He went home to Glastonbury and died there in 1964 at eighty-seven. For the rest of his life, he avoided talking about his first wife. George Cornwallis West wrote a book of memoirs, suffered for many years from Parkinson’s disease, and died by his own hand in 1951, leaving £12,255. The great house on Madison Square that her father had built was named a landmark in 1965.
No buyer was found, and it was torn down in 1967 to make way for a merchandise mart. His racecourse had gone long before, taken by the city in 1894 for a reservoir. Leonard Jerome lies in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. She lies across the ocean in an Oxfordshire churchyard beside the duke’s son whose money had helped her to marry.
In the National Portrait Gallery in London there is the portrait the Lafayette studio took of her in 1897 as the Empress Theodora, in golden gauze thick with jewels. The gown that cost nobody knows what is the one thing about her that nobody ever had to pay for again. When Winston was a small boy, he remembered, his mother seemed to him like a fairy princess, a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. The International Churchill Society, writing of Randolph and Jenny, put its judgment in four words: the right parent survived.
She had launched her son’s career, used her friends for him, arranged his contracts, and she could never make her own accounts come right. Her sister Leonie saw clearly who was grieving and who was paying: “It is Winston who weeps copiously, but it is Jack, his brother, and poor Porch who are paying off her debts. ” A year after she died, a London upholsterer was still writing to her son about a bill for £872. The king of Wall Street’s daughter, who married into Blenheim on £50,000, had spent her whole life certain that there would always be more money.
In the end, there was always one more bill.
