Haunting the pages of My Early Life (published in 1930), Winston Churchill’s frank and lively memoir of his upbringing, is a figure of remote but intense longing: the future prime minister’s mother.
In London society, Lady Randolph Churchill, the American socialite born in Brooklyn as Jennie Jerome, was a beguiling, scandal-tinged beauty, perpetually at the center of everything. People talked about her striking looks—“more of the panther than of the woman,” it was said. They discussed, too, her tiresome husband, Lord Randolph, the seventh Duke of Marlborough’s brawling, spendthrift, syphilitic younger son. And they dwelled on her romantic entanglements with powerful men including Charles Kinsky, a sexy Austrian count, as well as, perhaps, Queen Victoria’s son Bertie, the future King Edward VII.
