Jeanette Jerome, known from childhood as Jenny, was born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1854, the second of three surviving daughters of Leonard Jerome, a Wall Street speculator the newspapers called the King of Wall Street. He made and lost fortunes the way other men changed their coats, and his daughters grew up learning that grandeur could arrive and vanish on the turn of a market.
Her mother, Clara, ambitious for her girls and impatient with New York society, took the three daughters to Europe in the late 1860s. They lived first in Paris during the last glittering years of the Second Empire, where Jenny absorbed the manners, the French, and the music that would mark her for life. She became a serious pianist, trained to a level that astonished professionals who later heard her play.
When the empire fell in 1870 and the Prussians closed on Paris, the family crossed to London. It was there, on the edges of a society that prized blood above money and reticence above brilliance, that Jenny came of age.
What people remembered first was the way she looked. Dark hair, a vivid coloring her contemporaries attributed to her mother's part-French ancestry, eyes that seemed to hold a private joke. The diplomat Lord D'Abernon left the most famous account, written after he watched her enter a room years later: "There was more of the panther than of the woman in her look. More of the cat than of the lady in the way she moved."
There was also the detail the drawing rooms whispered about. On her right wrist, just where a bracelet might sit, Jenny wore a tattoo of a coiled snake. In an age when respectable women did not mark their bodies at all, it was an extraordinary thing for the daughter of an ambitious family to carry. She covered it with a band of diamonds and let people wonder.
London society in the 1870s was a closed system, a few thousand families who knew one another's grandparents and regarded an American, however rich, as a bright and slightly alarming import. Into this Jenny came with no title, no ancient name, and a father whose fortune might evaporate before the wedding breakfast was cleared.
What she had instead was beauty, nerve, intelligence, and an absolute refusal to apologize for any of the three. It was not enough to make her safe. It was more than enough to make her dangerous.
By the summer of 1873, she was 19 years old, fluent in three languages, a musician of near-professional gift, and the most striking young woman in any room she entered. She was also three days away from the decision that would shape the rest of her life.
They met at a summer ball by the sea at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in the first week of August 1873, during the regatta week that drew fashionable England to the water. Across the room was a slight, intense young man with prominent eyes and an enormous mustache, the second son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. His name was Lord Randolph Churchill, and he was 24 years old.
Within a day or two, Randolph had told a friend that he meant to marry the dark one, the second Miss Jerome. Within three days of meeting, he had proposed and Jenny had accepted. It was not a courtship in any sense the age recognized. It was a collision.
Both families were appalled, for mirror-image reasons. The Duke of Marlborough looked at the Jeromes and saw loud American money with no pedigree behind it. Leonard Jerome was no more pleased to be condescended to by a Duke who needed his money more than he admitted.
The result was nearly a year of hard, unromantic negotiation conducted by lawyers over how much an American father would pay to place his daughter inside a British aristocratic family that did not want her. An aristocratic marriage in Victorian England was a property transaction dressed in white, and under the law as it then stood, a wife owned almost nothing once she married.
Leonard Jerome eventually agreed to settle 50,000 pounds, a sum worth something close to 5 million in the money of today, yielding about 2,000 pounds a year. But he attached a condition that scandalized the Marlborough lawyers. One thousand of that 2,000 a year, he insisted, must be settled on Jenny herself as her own money to do with as she pleased.
In England in 1874, that simply was not done. A wife with independent income of her own was a near-revolutionary idea. Leonard Jerome forced the principle into the contract through sheer stubbornness, reaching across the Atlantic to press a sliver of freedom into his daughter's hand before the door of the marriage closed behind her.
Jenny was at the leading edge of a wave. In the decades on either side of her wedding, a steady traffic ran across the Atlantic as the daughters of newly rich American families exchanged for the titles of cash-poor English ones. Beauty and dollars on one side, blood and acres on the other.
Randolph stood for Parliament to prove his seriousness, winning the family seat of Woodstock in the general election of 1874. At last the settlements were signed, the families gave their grudging blessing, and the wedding was fixed. It would not be at Blenheim, nor in a great London church. The Duke and Duchess would not attend at all.
On April 15, 1874, Jenny Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill at the chapel of the British Embassy in Paris, the city of her girlhood. She was 20 years old. The great Marlborough dynasty stayed pointedly away, marking its disapproval to the last.
Seven and a half months after the wedding, a child arrived at Blenheim Palace and the counting started at once. On November 30, 1874, in a small room off the great hall, Jenny gave birth to a son. They named him Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
The official account was that the baby came early, brought on by a fall and a jolting carriage ride, and that may well be the simple truth. But seven and a half months was close enough to full term to set every calculating mind in society to work, and the whispers that the child had been conceived before the wedding followed Jenny quietly for years.
The boy who arrived that November night would become the most important Englishman of the 20th century, but that was 70 years away and unimaginable. For now he was a baby handed almost at once to a nurse, as aristocratic babies were, and Jenny returned to the thing she had been built for, which was society.
Motherhood in her world was conducted at a distance, through nannies and governesses and the occasional gracious appearance. His letters from school would beg her to visit, to write, to notice him. She loved him in her fashion, but her fashion kept its distance.
An aristocratic mother of the 1870s was not expected to raise her own children in any hands-on sense. The nursery had its nurse, the schoolroom its governess, and the boys were sent away to school at seven or eight years old. Jenny did not invent the coldness. She inherited it and practiced it as her world expected.
What drew her away was the set that gathered around Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, the heir to Queen Victoria's throne. The Prince liked beautiful women, clever talk, and people who could amuse him, and Jenny was all three at a level few could match. She could play the piano until grown men fell silent.
The Marlborough House set, named for the Prince's London residence, was a few hundred people who had quietly agreed to live by rules different from the ones the rest of Victorian England preached. Below the surface of respectability, the set conducted its affairs, its gambling, its enormous debts, and its discreet adulteries, protected by a code of silence.
A married woman might take a lover, provided she was discreet, had first given her husband an heir, and never caused a public scene. It was a world made for someone like Jenny, and she moved into the heart of it with the confidence of a woman who had found her natural element at last.
Jennie, with her thousand a year of her own and her husband's income on top, was never as rich as the women she dined with, and she spent as though she were. Debt would shadow her entire life, the quiet undertow beneath the glittering surface, and it began here.
Then, in the spring of 1876, Randolph did something so reckless that it slammed every door shut at once and sent the whole family into exile. The trouble began with his elder brother, the Marquess of Blandford, who had embarked on an open affair with a married woman, Lady Aylesford, while her husband was away in India with the Prince of Wales.
When Lord Aylesford learned of it and threatened divorce, the scandal threatened to drag the prince himself into a public courtroom. Randolph, fiercely loyal to his brother and never able to resist a fight, had got hold of letters the Prince of Wales had written to Lady Aylesford, letters indiscreet enough that their publication would have humiliated the heir to the throne.
Randolph took them to the Princess of Wales and made the threat plain. If the Aylesford divorce went ahead and his brother was named, those letters would be made public. It was, in effect, an attempt to blackmail the future king of England.
The prince's response was total. He let it be known that he would not enter any house that received Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill. In a society organized entirely around who dined with whom, this was annihilation. Invitations stopped. Doors that had stood open swung shut.
Jenny, who had done nothing whatever to cause the quarrel, found herself frozen out of the only world she wanted to live in, punished for her husband's recklessness. To be dropped by the Prince of Wales was a kind of civic death, a removal from the only arena that counted.
The family's solution was a kind of honorable banishment. The seventh Duke of Marlborough was persuaded to accept the post of Viceroy of Ireland, and he took Randolph with him as his private secretary. In the winter of 1876, the young Churchills left London under a cloud and went to Ireland, where they would remain for the better part of three years.
Cut off from the distractions of London, Jenny threw herself into the life around her, hunting hard across the Irish countryside, an audacious and fearless rider who took fences that frightened the men. She watched her father-in-law govern and began for the first time to take a serious interest in politics and the machinery of power.
In 1880, Jenny gave birth to a second son, John, always called Jack. He was a quieter, gentler boy than his fierce older brother. But Jack arrived with a shadow over him that the gossips never quite let go. By the time of his birth, the marriage had cooled into something more like a partnership of convenience, and tongues murmured that Jack's father might not be Randolph at all. Not a shred of it was ever proved.
By the end of the 1870s, the exile was ending. The prince's anger had cooled enough for a careful, negotiated reconciliation, and the Churchills were allowed back into the world that had cast them out. Jenny returned to London older, harder, cleverer, and more determined than the girl who had left it.
The reconciliation with the Prince of Wales, once achieved, was complete, and it carried Jenny to a height she had not reached before. To be sought out by him, invited to the intimate dinners and country house parties of the inner circle, was another matter entirely. Jenny was now among the small number of women the Prince genuinely wanted at his table.
That they were close over many years is beyond dispute. That she was one of his intimates, a fixture of his private circle, is documented and certain. That the friendship became a love affair, that Jenny was for a time the mistress of the future Edward VII, is the firm and near-universal belief of her biographers. But it rests on the testimony of a world that prized discretion above everything, and it cannot be proved in the way a date or a settlement can be proved.
The favor of the prince was the single most valuable asset a woman in that society could hold. It meant protection, position, the assurance that no hostess would dare to slight her. She had turned the very quarrel that ruined them into the foundation of her recovery, and she had done it through her own charm.
Jenny lived by exactly the rules the men around her lived by, the rules the Prince of Wales himself had written. She took lovers as the set permitted, discreetly, after she had given her husband two sons. But she was a woman and an American and beautiful, and so the same conduct that made a man a charming rogue made her a scandal.
Through the early 1880s, Randolph Churchill underwent a transformation as sudden and dazzling as his courtship had been. He gathered a small band of allies on the conservative benches, a guerrilla group the press christened the Fourth Party, and tormented the leaders of both sides with a wit and daring that made him impossible to ignore.
He coined a slogan, Tory democracy, the idea that the Conservative Party could be the party of the ordinary working man as well as the aristocrat. Jenny was not a spectator in this. Her drawing room became one of the most important political salons in London, the place where alliances were made and her husband's career was advanced.
She campaigned for him in the constituencies, a glamorous and tireless presence on the platform at a time when wives did not do such things. She read the papers, mastered the issues, judged the men, and gave Randolph the one thing a rising politician most needs, a clever and trusted ally who wanted nothing for herself but his success.
In the summer of 1886, after the Conservatives returned to power, Randolph Churchill was given two of the greatest offices in the state at once. At the age of 37, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. He was, in effect, the second most powerful man in the country.
The obvious next step, the step everyone in politics assumed would come in time, was the office of Prime Minister itself. Jenny, the daughter of a Brooklyn speculator who had been frozen out of London a decade before, stood at the side of the man who seemed certain to lead Britain.
Of all the names the gossips attached to her, only one belonged to a man she seems to have genuinely loved. His name was Count Carl Kinsky, an Austrian aristocrat of ancient family, a diplomat posted to the embassy in London, and one of the great horsemen of his generation. In 1883, he rode his own horse, Zoedone, to victory in the Grand National, the first amateur rider and the first foreign gentleman ever to win it.
When they came together, somewhere in the early 1880s, it became the central love of her life. The relationship with Kinsky stands apart from everything else the world said about her. The 200 lovers of the legend comes from a single source, set down by Anita Leslie, Jenny's own great niece, in a biography published in 1969. It was an estimate of a long and amorous life, not a counted list.
With Kinsky, Jenny seems to have wanted what her marriage could no longer give her. The accounts of those who knew her speak of a depth of feeling she showed for no one else, a hope that one day she might be free to be with him. For years the relationship ran alongside her marriage, conducted with the discretion the set demanded.
By the middle of the 1880s, Randolph and Jenny had become, in private, something closer to political partners than husband and wife. The passion of the three-day courtship had long since burned out. She advanced his career with everything she had, and she gave her heart elsewhere.
In December 1886, only months into his great offices, Randolph gambled his whole career on a single threat. As Chancellor, he was drawing up his first budget and wanted deep cuts in spending, including cuts to the army and navy estimates that the service ministers refused to accept. Rather than negotiate, he threatened to resign, certain that the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, could not afford to lose him.
Salisbury accepted the resignation. There was no bluff to call, because Salisbury had quietly decided that the brilliant, ungovernable young Chancellor was more trouble inside the government than out of it. In a single exchange of letters over the Christmas of 1886, Randolph resigned the second most powerful position in the British government, and he never held office again.
He was 37 years old, and his career, to all intents, was over the moment it should have been beginning. The suddenness of it stunned everyone, Jenny above all. One season she was the wife of the coming Prime Minister. The next she was married to a man who had thrown his future away in a fit of miscalculation.
For a while, Randolph tried to behave as though a return were possible. It was not. The party had taken his measure, and the men he had tormented on his way up were in no hurry to help him back. And those closest to him began to notice that the change in him was not only a matter of disappointment or temper. Something else was happening to Randolph Churchill.
Through the late 1880s and into the 1890s, the decline became impossible to ignore and impossible to discuss. His speech began to slur. His moods swung from black depression to wild grandiose excitement. He grew paranoid, suspicious of friends, certain of insults that had not been given. His hands trembled. His walk became unsteady.
In the House of Commons, where he had once held the whole chamber spellbound, he now rose to deliver speeches that rambled and faltered, and members who had cheered him looked away in embarrassment and pity. The most brilliant talker of his generation was losing the use of the one instrument that had made him, his own mind.
The diagnosis his doctors recorded was general paralysis of the insane, the medical name of the period for the final stage of a disease that everyone understood and no one would name in polite company. The disease was syphilis in its last neurological phase, attacking the brain after lying dormant for years.
It was the secret plague of the Victorian governing class, contracted in youth and carried silently for decades, and it could not be spoken of, least of all in connection with the husband of Lady Randolph Churchill and the father of a rising young man named Winston. The family knew. The doctors knew, and the word was never said aloud.
A strand of modern medical opinion has challenged the diagnosis, suggesting that the pattern of his symptoms might fit a deep tumor of the brain rather than syphilis. The mainstream of historical opinion still holds to the original diagnosis. What is not in doubt, on any reading, is that Randolph Churchill was dying by inches of something that destroyed his mind before it took his body.
There is no evidence whatever that Jenny infected Randolph. The standard account is that he carried the disease from before or near the beginning of the marriage, contracted in his own youth. The terrible irony the story leans on is just that, an irony, the spectacle of a woman counted by her lovers nursing a husband killed by a disease of the flesh.
In the middle of 1894, with Randolph visibly failing, his doctors and family settled on a desperate plan. He would undertake a long voyage around the world, a journey of many months through Asia and the Americas, in the hope that travel and rest might slow the disease. Jenny would go with him.
The voyage was an ordeal that the surviving letters only partly capture. Randolph's condition worsened steadily as they traveled. His behavior became more erratic, the swings of mood more violent, the lucid intervals shorter. Jenny nursed him through it, managed him, covered for him, and absorbed the daily strain of caring for a man who was no longer fully himself.
It was during this voyage, while she was locked into the long duty of her husband's dying, that the other blow fell. Word reached her somewhere on the far side of the world that Count Kinsky, the man she truly loved, had become engaged to another woman, a young Austrian countess many years Jenny's junior. The engagement was real and final.
At the exact moment Jenny was chained by duty to a dying husband, unable to act, unable to return, the one door she had quietly kept open in her heart was closed for good, and by the man himself. She could do nothing but read the news and go on nursing Randolph through the next bad night.
The voyage could not save Randolph and it was never really going to. As the year turned and his condition collapsed beyond any pretense of recovery, the decision was made to bring him home to England to die. They returned at the end of 1894, Randolph by now reduced to a shadow of the man who had nearly led the country.
Randolph Churchill died on January 24, 1895, at his mother's house in London, with Jenny near him. He was 45 years old. The man who at 37 had held two of the great offices of state and seemed certain to be prime minister had spent his last years sliding into madness and silence.
For Jenny, the death was a complicated kind of liberation. She was 41 years old, a widow, still beautiful, still magnetic, and for the first time in her adult life she belonged to no one. But the freedom came stripped of the things that had made her position, the rising husband, the political partnership, the role at the center of power.
By 1895, Jenny Jerome was a legend in the worst sense. The same conduct that had passed unremarked in the Prince of Wales made Jenny a byword. The lovers, real and imagined, had been totted up. The whispers about Jack's paternity, about the favor of the Prince, had hardened into a settled story that no widowhood could soften.
Randolph left no great fortune, and the debts that had trailed the couple for 20 years did not die with him. Jenny was a widow of expensive habits and uncertain income, with two sons to launch into the world on a scale befitting their name, and no obvious means of paying for it.
The relationship between Jenny and her elder son had been through his childhood a study in distant adoration. Winston had worshipped his glamorous absent mother from the cold of his boarding schools, filling his letters with pleas for her attention. But as Winston grew into a young man of ferocious ambition, something changed between them, and the distance closed into one of the most effective partnerships of her life.
She threw herself into advancing his career with the same energy she had once spent on his father, pulling strings, opening doors, pressing her contacts in politics and the press. He later wrote that in those years she was less like a mother to him than like an ally, working in the closest concert with him, more like a sister than a parent.
When the young Winston wanted a posting to a war so that he could win the reputation that opens doors, it was Jenny who worked her contacts and pulled the strings that got him there. When he came home with his dispatches and wanted them published and noticed, it was Jenny who knew the editors and pressed his cause among them.
In 1900, at the age of 45, she married again, and her choice was a scandal in itself. George Cornwallis West was a handsome young officer of the Scots Guards, 20 years her junior, born in the same year as Winston himself. The marriage was a strain almost from the start, dogged by money troubles, and it would not last.
She founded and edited a lavish literary magazine, a quarterly bound like a rare antique book, so expensive to produce that it could never pay its way, filled with writing by the leading authors of the day. She wrote her own memoirs. She tried her hand at writing plays and saw one of them staged.
During the South African War at the turn of the century, Jenny threw herself into organizing an American-funded hospital ship to carry the wounded, the vessel named the Maine, raising the money, fitting it out, and seeing it sent to the front. Years later, during the First World War, she would turn her energies to war work again.
The marriage to George Cornwallis West came apart in 1914, and they divorced. Jenny, now in her late 50s, found herself once more alone, once more short of money, and once more entirely unwilling to accept that her life of love and incident was behind her.
In 1918, at the age of 64, Jenny married for the third time. Her new husband was Montagu Porch, a member of the British Colonial Service in Nigeria, and he was 23 years younger than she was, younger even than her sons. By the accounts that survive, the late marriage was a genuinely affectionate one, a source of real happiness in her last years.
A man of 64 who married a woman of 40 would have drawn no comment at all. Reverse the ages, and the same world that shrugged at the one recoiled at the other. Jenny met it the way she had met every other version of that standard across her life. She ignored it entirely, married the man she wanted, and let the disapproving talk wash over her.
The money problems that had shadowed her from the first season in London never released their grip. She had spent her whole life beyond her means, on magazines that lost fortunes, on houses and clothes and travel, and the debts followed her into old age. She leaned on loans, on the help of her sons, on her own ceaseless schemes to raise money.
In June 1921, Jenny was staying with a friend, Lady Frances Horner, at Mells in Somerset. Coming down a staircase in new high-heeled shoes she had bought to look well for Montagu Porch, she slipped and fell, and the fall broke her leg. Gangrene set into the leg, and within a fortnight her doctors faced the only choice left to them. To save her life, the leg would have to come off.
As the surgeons prepared to amputate her gangrenous leg above the knee, she did not weep or flinch or beg. She gave the surgeon an instruction. "Make sure," she told him, "that you cut high enough." Conscious, composed, facing the loss of her own leg, she was thinking clearly about the spread of the infection and the margin of safety.
The amputation was done, and for a few days it seemed that her astonishing nerve had carried her through once more. Then, on the morning of June 29, 1921, the great artery in the stump of the amputated leg suddenly burst. She bled and fell into a coma, and before her sons could reach her, she died. She was 67 years old.
They buried her at Bladon, in the Oxfordshire churchyard where Randolph already lay, the husband she had married in three days and nursed to his death across the far side of the world. The two of them rest there still, side by side. And one day a third grave would join them in that same small churchyard, for it is at Bladon that Winston Churchill himself was buried in 1965.
The 200 lovers were an estimate set down by a loving great niece and swollen by a hundred years of repetition. They were never the truth of her. The truth of her was harder and finer than the scandal. She was a woman of real gifts, the musician, the writer, the political partner, the organizer of hospital ships, born into a world that allowed a clever woman no honest use for any of it but charm.
She lived by the rules the men around her had written, the rules of the prince's own set, and she was condemned for keeping them while the men were forgiven. She was denied a profession, denied the man she loved, and denied, at the last, even the right to be remembered for anything but the men whose names were tied to hers.
Lord D'Abernon, who had watched her cross a room a lifetime before, had written that there was more of the panther than of the woman in her, more of the cat than of the lady, a wild thing moving through a tame world. He meant it as a description of her beauty. It reads better now as a description of her whole life.
Under the diamonds on her wrist, she had worn, all her life, the small coiled snake, the private mark beneath the public jewel. The world saw the diamonds and called her a scandal. It never quite troubled to look at the woman underneath. That was always the real story, and it was the one they chose to forget.