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.
So demanding was Jennie’s life outside the home, she largely left the care of her son to a beloved nanny, Elizabeth Everest, known to Winston as “Woom.” Jennie, Winston later wrote, was a “radiant being” who “shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.”
There was never any distance between Sara Delano Roosevelt and her only son, a future American president named Franklin. At Springwood, the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson River, Sara mistrusted nannies and governesses, keeping the young Franklin near to her at all times. When he went away to Harvard, Sara took an apartment in Boston so that nothing greater than the Charles River need keep her from her “dear, dear boy.”
Even after Franklin married his distant cousin Eleanor, in 1905, Sara found ways to keep her son close. Not long after the marriage, Sara bought a pair of adjoining Upper East Side town houses: one for the young newlyweds, and one for herself. The two households were connected by doorways on three floors.
When considering the emotional dynamics of the storied wartime partnership between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, biographers commonly, and correctly, dwell on this discrepancy in maternal presence. Forging the transatlantic alliance, Jennie Churchill’s son was the ardent, affection-starved suitor. Sara’s boy, meanwhile, was often wary and withholding, unimpressed by Winston’s doting advances because admiration and attention had been his mother’s milk.
Lady Randolph Churchill, the American socialite born in Brooklyn as Jennie Jerome, Winston later wrote, was a “radiant being” who “shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.”
But in Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, an ingeniously conceived and elegantly executed dual portrait of Jennie Churchill and Sara Roosevelt, the veteran biographer Charlotte Gray invites readers to see surprising similarities between the two great men’s moms. Both were daughters of Gilded Age American fortune-seekers who inherited dash from their fathers (if not, in Jennie’s case, substantial sums of dough).
Both women saw marriage as their calling—though Sara’s union, with the Hudson Valley squire James Roosevelt, was far happier than Jennie’s, with the wolfish Lord Randolph—and both were left temporarily unmoored by early widowhood. Most important to history, both ultimately came to see their sons as a chance to make their mark on the world.
In Gray’s comparison of the two women, Jennie the Evening Star shines surprisingly bright. Male historians often slight Churchill’s mother as insubstantial and dwell upon her supposed promiscuity, lazily repeating a contemporary’s claim that, over the course of her lifetime, she went to bed with some 200 men. But Gray’s Jennie is a figure of pluck and pragmatism, continually finding her way out of political, personal, and financial problems foisted upon her by the opposite sex. “You are the only person who lives on the crest of a wave,” her friend Lady Curzon wrote in a letter, “and is always full of vitality and success.”
Sara, who devoted much of her life to the molding of Franklin’s character, deserves more credit than Jennie for her son’s later success. But reviewing the two lives in parallel reveals all the things that made Sara’s existence easier than Jennie’s, not least a courteous, kindly husband and a comfortably large bank account. “Sara could sail through life,” Gray shrewdly observes, while “Jennie had to paddle furiously, reliant on her wit, charisma and innate optimism.”
There was never any distance between Sara Delano Roosevelt and her only son, a future American president named Franklin.
Gray’s clever biographical construct has its limitations. There is no record of the two women ever meeting, though Gray speculates that their paths may have crossed as young American expats visiting Second Empire Paris. Their sons would share a place in history, but Jennie went to the grave roughly two decades before Franklin’s and Winston’s fates were joined. Even Sara died in September 1941, three months before America entered the war that would cement the Churchill-Roosevelt bond.
Happily, Gray makes little attempt to write around these problems, instead letting each woman be the central character in her own distinct drama. Gray rightly points out that neither woman was much of a feminist and that both would have recoiled at the suggestion they were thwarted by the patriarchy. Still, it’s impossible to read their stories without wondering how history would pair these two women had they been born in a later century. Maybe they’d be friends, maybe allies, maybe enemies. What’s clear is that we would not remember them as great men’s mothers but as the great ones themselves.
Jonathan Darman is the author of Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President