DORIS DELEVINGNE, VISCOUNTESS CASTLEROSSE HAS RANDOLPH CHURCHILL and WINSTON TOO?

From the article by Lyndsy Spence

...  Randolph, too fell under her spell and they began an affair. ‘I hear you’re living with my wife,’ Castlerosse bellowed down the telephone not long after they were married. ‘Yes, I am,’ answered the younger Churchill, ‘which is more than you have the courtesy to do.’ 

It appears that there is some evidence that Winston was not just having Doris come over to sit while he painted her.

THE GUARDIAN : SECRET AFFAIR - WINSTON CHURCHILL and DORIS DELEVINGNE  Good photos add to this article!  A documentary in 2018 included the information that yes, Churchill had succumbed and had an affair with Doris.

EXCERPT : Churchill spent four holidays with Castlerosse ... in the south of France during the 1930's when he was out of office.  During this time Churchill painted at least two portraits of his lover - he only ever painted one of his wife, Clementine 0 and they continued to meet at her home back in London. ... "My mother had many stories to tell about (the affair) when they stayed in my aunt's house in Berkeley Square," Doris's niece =, Caroline Delvingne, recalls in the Delevingne family's first televised interview about the affair.  "When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off. ... But when war threatened and Churchill's career revived, he ended the relationship.

According to this article, Doris went to America, New York, where she was not able to continue her lifestyle.  She was not that old, in 1942 when the War came, she was desperate to get back to England and is said to have used one of Churchill's paintings to remind him of their affair.  He arranged a rare seat on a plane to get her there.

Love letters that Doris wrote to Winston surfaced in the 1950's and were shown to Clementine.

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PAMELA and LITTLE WINSTON - HER ONLY CHILD

Pamela Churchill and son Winston Churchill II

Life Magazine, January 27, 1941.

PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL and WILLIAM AVERELL HARRIMAN - FIRST and LAST GREAT LOVE?!

William Averell Harriman, an American, grew up in privilege and had money. He was a man who married and married and married - but seemed never to have happiness.  His affair with the married Pamela Digby Churchill probably began at the Dorchester Hotel in London during a bombing raid by the Germans during World War II. Nothing like the fear of loosing your life to make you live life to the fullest.

He had a history of wrong marriages and affairs and mistresses. 

The man had a 2nd marriage with Kitty Lawrence who was ill with TB and not compatible.  He had mistresses and there were rumors of affairs.  Then in 1928 another woman, Marie Norton Whitney was his conquest.  She became his third wife in February of 1930.  She was 26 and he was 38.

Pamela was still married to Randolph unhappily.

Ave was much older than Pamela and not much to look at.  Like her husband Randolph he appeared older than his years.  But Harriman was worth multi millions and he was a courtly and debonair man if not in the best physical shape. Women liked him.

By 1941 he and his wife Marie were no longer intimate and so she didn't blame him for his affairs. 

In fact they were both having affairs.  Pamela even befriended his daughter Kathleen, who was about her age, while having an affair with him.

Pamela's reunion with Randolph, who asked for another chance, did not go well.  They both realized their marriage had been a mistake. She went over to tell her father in law, Winston, that she was getting a divorce.  He understood.

Pamela had volunteered with the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) as many houswifed did and served as a guide to visiting American dignitaries.  (put in previous post)

page 103  "PAMELA WAS A DOER, NOT A THINKER OR A RECORDER."

Though the affair had to end between she and Harriman, there was Lord Beaverbrook as an intermediary who arranged financial support for Pamela.  Randolph was not much of a financial support for her and his son. He spent his money wildly leaving them in debt.  Harriman secretly picked up the costs of her apartment by depositing money in Beaverbrook's accounts which then made it to pay the rent. The man actually forgot he was doing so perhaps because he had too many millions to keep accounting of and did so for three decades (check fact.  Sometimes it went past due but the Lord would give him a nudge.  She was also given a nice  yearly allowance.  Harriman did well by her...  with a little nudging.

At 22, she had the name, the son - heir, and a good relationship with her father in law Winston Churchill.  She was done with the husband and was supported financially, even as Harriman left town and went back to his life in America.

Years would pass, the allowance and rent continuing, but later in life Pamela and Ave would marry. 

*****

As I read these passages of Sally Bedell Smith's book, I had to wonder.  I had learned that Lord Beaverbrook had many house parties that Pamela had attended.  Why was he so willing to be an intermediary?  Harriman was an American.  Did he need to be told how to treat this young British woman who he had an affair with?  Could there have been a hint of blackmail or pay back involved?

PLAIN OLD PAMELA DIGBY and THE DEBUTANTE YEARS - MARRIAGE TO RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

"Reflected Glory" by Sally Bedell Smith is the primary reference for posts.

Pamela Digby was born into the peerage of Great Britain, but she spent 20 years of her life as a courtesan - mistress -  a kept woman.  She was feminine, flirtatious, and maternal to men and made them - and her select women friends - feel special.  Wives worried about their husbands around her.  She changed her man and her life many times but she loved to be surrounded by powerful people. She was highly criticized and judged from her earliest days as a society girl but if she knew it she pretended not to or didn't let it get her down.  She was a "bad girl" and yet to her funeral came those with prestige and power.

Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill of World War II fame, asked her to marry him the first date they had, an arranged date, and had asked many women before who turned him down.  She said yes and was married to him before he went off to war. She quickly became pregnant and bore him a son - an heir, named Winston. He would be her only child.

Pamela's family had an old title and prestige if not money.  Her education was not substantial.  They couldn't afford the best schools for her.  But they sent her to France to board with a family that took in girls like her and showed them around to absorb the culture.  Who knew that in her later years she would become the United States Ambassador to France after having lived as a mistress in that country.

At the age of 17 her education had ended. She was "finished."  But she went to the Coronation of King George VI, who took over the throne when his brother The King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to be married to Wallis Simpson.  Who knew that someday she and Wallis, who was a good 20 years older than she, would become good friends.

Pamela Digby made her debut in front of the Queen in 1938, wearing clothes that were not much compared to most of her more wealthy peers, clothing that embarrassed her.  But she still attended a marathon of parties, races, and entertainments designed to show off aristocratic girls ready to marry and breed with wealthy young men. More than 1000 girls debuted that year and most of them left the city and went back home to the country to wait on marriage proposals. The others stayed in the city.  Maybe a hundred girls were considered popular. Not Pam. That same year Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy and her sister Rosemary, daughters of Joseph Kennedy, the United States Ambassador to Britain, and father of the future American President John F. Kennedy, called her dumpy.  As it turned out, she and Kick would have an enduring friendship.

Pamela's father won a substantial amount of money at the horse races that allowed him to afford her a Jaguar car, if not the ability to give her a fancy dress ball like other girls. He rented a place in Mayfair, London, to put her in the right neighborhood. But she was taken under wing by her mother, who never failed to have confidence in her, and some of her mother's friends. One, Olive Baille, invited her to house parties where she had famous Hollywood stars on the guest list. Clearly she had something going for her.

Pamela did get an inheritance that would have allowed her to be independent, so long as she budgeted, but she wanted more. Fulke Warwick (ie. of Warwick Castle fame) may have been her first lover. But she claimed only a dinner while he dined out on stories of being sexual with her. Debutantes were thought to be virgins. Most of them were chaperoned.

And so she went through a second season, 1939, as did many girls still in need of a husband.  She went to a pre-war ball at Blenheim Palace - the home of Winston Churchill's family - that was given by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough for Lady Sara Spencer - Churchill. (Are the names sounding familiar?)  But she was set up on a blind date with Randolph Churchill.

On October 4, 1939 they married.  The smiling bride wore a coat with a fur collar, not the typical white wedding dress, while the smiling groom wore his military uniform. She now had the Churchill name, so respected, and would carry it all her life. Randolph, by many accounts, was obnoxious and probably alcoholic. By January 1940 she was pregnant. He was in the Fourth Hussars. She had to live alone and went from one friend's accommodations to another.  (I know, you're wondering what about the Palace?)  They were totally incompatible and unhappy but then people thought Randolph as difficult. She was 20.  He was 29.  Like many wives, Pamela got involved in the war effort and became something of a tour guide, guiding American officers in London. Her ability to organize and plan large and small events would be useful in all her relationships.

By the time Randolph returned after almost a year away, Pamela acted excited and happy to see him and introduced them to their son, Winston, for the first time. But she had already met and had an affair with another man who would figure in her life, William Averell Harriman. 

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PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HARRIMAN - DUMPY DEBUTANTE TO AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE

PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HARRIMAN - DUMPY DEBUTANTE TO AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE

First published March 4th, 2019

Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Harriman 

20 March 1920 – 5 February 1997

Pamela Digby was born into the aristocracy of Great Britain - the lowest rung of five, she was Honorable. Though her family lacked the money that some of her peers displayed when they were introduced to society formally, and though as a debutante she was considered not successful, and her early and first marriage to Winston Churchill's son Randolph was a disaster, she became known as The Courtesan of the 20th Century. She was the mistress of several important and wealthy men, and managed to marry three times. She seemed to work hard - study - these men to please them - and it could be argued that she actually wanted to marry more than one of them but lost at love. She was known for her femininity and her nurturance of them as well as her ability to help them make the contacts they wanted for business. She had few women friends but counted The Duchess of Windsor, the ex Wallis Simpson, as a close one. She might be thought of as a reinvention-of-self artist. A chameleon. A risk taker. She was ambitious for the good life. She had one, but crisis compelled her to move on, and on. The title of Sally Bedell Smith's book REFLECTED GLORY says a lot; Pamela reflected the glory of the men she enchanted. These men could have so very many women but for a time they chose her. Being her keeper was even a way for them to claim status.

Not one to write her memoirs or even keep a diary, perhaps no one really knew what she was thinking - or plotting - at any point in her life. Often she kept a game face and did not reveal her true emotions. She liked to keep the men guessing about their status in her life. So one has to know the person by the evidence of their actions.  Was she really just after other women's husbands or had the wives of those men not cared enough for them?  Perhaps she learned the lessons of her birth status: women were not heirs. If they wanted to live in style it was though marriage - or men - that one could. Had she not been introduced to society specifically to become engaged and married within a debutante season or two?  Had she not done her duty to produce a male heir - the grandchild of Winston Churchill the World War II era statesman - by marrying his son Randolph; he proposed she marry him on their first date specifically because he feared not leaving an heir as he went off to war himself.  

For those of you who have to coax your beauty, Pamela was considered dumpy in her teens and from mid-life on. She really had to work at it. She was not considered to be all that attractive - just average - and in her early years her clothes were barely fashionable. She was even ridiculed for her looks. Yet she lived through years in which her taste in clothing and upkeep of her hair and skin allowed her to be considered a great beauty. Her personality was cheerful and flirtatious but perhaps not spontaneous. Yet she was not known for her sense of humor and tended not to air her own opinions - not until she was widowed from her third husband and began to become a fundraiser for the Democratic party in the United States. It's said she was important to the election of President William Jefferson Clinton.  She became the Ambassador to France!  She lived into her 80's.

These next two months will be devoted to Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman.  Her life included many whose names have appeared here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT in the past. 

You'll be enthralled with her story.  And you'll learn why she is thought to have achieved what no other woman of the 20th century did; being kept by a "golden string of lovers" who had wealth and power.

Missy

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COCO and HER NAZI SPY LOVER BARON HANS GUNTHER VON DINCKLAGE

Coco and the Baron, who was called "Spatz," had a liaison of a decade duration and she seems to have chosen love over politics.


In 1944 when Paris was liberated the women who were known to have slept with Nazi/German soldiers during the time in which it was occupied were dragged through the streets, had their heads shaved to embarrass them, and worse.  Chanel was brought to the FFI headquarters for questioning but was released quickly, according the author Vaughan, due to the intercession of Winston Churchill.  She and Churchill had been friends for thirty years at that point, and he saved her from trial as a German collaborator. She was 61 to Dincklages' 48, and after the questioning she went to Switzerland, a neutral country, to meet up with him.


In 1946 the French Court of Justice issued a warrant to bring Chanel back to France for questioning, but not because of her Nazi spy lover.  This time she was accused of collaboration with a French traitor to give information to Germany military intelligence.  She denied all accusations and the author states that at that time the extent of her involvement was unknown, implying that if they had known she would not have been let to go.


Was the nickname CoCo based on  the French word Cocotte, for Kept Woman?  Well, she had been.  Born in 1883 as one of six children living in peasant poverty, by 1895 when her mother died and then abandoned by her father, she was raised by nuns where she learned discipline and frugality.  Her need to survive after leaving the nunnery lead her to singing in a cabaret to becoming,at 23, the Mistress of wealthy Etienne Balsan.  For three years she lived with him without marriage, learned to ride horses and the ways of the wealthy.  Following this relationship, CoCo spent eleven years with Arthur "Boy" Chapel beginning in 1908, so from approximately age 25 to age 36.  Neither man could or would marry her.  So no doubt CoCo had been a Kept Woman.


During the World War I era she lived in a Paris apartment.  Boy married (but still kept CoCo as a lover). He was the love of her life but as a result of his death in 1920 in a traffic accident she learned by the bequests in his will that he also had an Italian countess as a Mistress.  It is unstated in the book but clearly there was thus more to his choice of bride than class if he also kept an Italian countess!


CoCo had also made a best friend of Misia, Marie Sophie Olga Zenaide Godebska, who had come to London at 18 and had a series of trysts with older men.  Misia inherited a large sum of money at age 20.  These two bonded as unconventional artists and it is implied might have enjoyed a lesbian relationship or been two cougars out looking for men.
CoCo meanwhile had diversified.  Despite all her hard work, talent, and enterprise in fashion it took hiring a perfumer to invent for her approval and her own promotion a perfume, Chanel No. 5 to become a truly wealthy woman in her own right.  It was enough that in 1918 she paid 300,000 gold francs to buy her villa at Biarritz. By 1920 she had enough money to become a patron of the arts and to buy a house in Paris.


Her meeting with the Baron was likely at her Villa or nearby.  He had German aristocracy and military officers in his heritage and was against Communism.  He is said to have become a spy by 1919, the World War I era, long before World War II.  Spatz "used men and seduced women without mercy" He was "urbane and well mannered", multilingual, had a warm personality but was not an Aryan playboy. He wore the diplomats cloak of immunity.  No one was in physical danger around him. (chapter 2 page 32 of 112+)


Meanwhile, the author characterizes CoCo in the 1920's as always on the prowl for male conquests and lists them. One of them, poet Piere Rverdy, was one she loved and provided material assistance to so that he could go on writing.  He and CoCo had a "deep friendship" of 40 years.  She also had a liaison with Russian Grand Duke Dmitre Paulovich, a contender for the Russian throne, who, like other lovers, inspired her fashion designs, in his case her "Slavic Period."  He helped her launch Chanel No. 5 perfume in 1921 when it was promoted as the luxury perfume, with its very complicated formulation that included chemicals not from natural floral sources.  It was made by the Pierre Wertheimer Company in large enough batches to meet demand.  The author contends that she was nonchalant or reckless to do business with them or acting while in depression over the end of an affair... I bring this all up because while the question of CoCo Chanel as a woman living for love and around lovers rather than an astute business woman is suggested by the author, I see that she may actually have enjoyed multiple and ongoing relationships - been poly-amorous.  Was she aggressive and canny?  Simply determined to infiltrate society, even though rejected as a potential wife due to her birth as a peasant?  Bisexual or experimental?  Was her upset at the Wertheimer's unreasonable but attributed to "ant-Semitism"?  Her perfume was a worldly success but it was not until 20 years had gone by and the World War II era that she realized she'd been screwed by them and yes, once she got mad she would not stop saying so.
And now she was also supposed to be homophobic?
And a long time user of morphine?  Doping herself up to party?  While she had 300+ employees and a business to run - and save?


As previously stated, the condemnation of CoCo in this book made me question it as an unbalanced reportage determined to condemn her as a Nazi collaborator with the only excuse for her behavioir being her need for a man in her life.  However, would Winston Churchill, the man said to have been instrumental in Britain's involvement in the War and salvation of it, really have stuck his neck out to save her just because they were friends?  Is that something you would do for a friend if you knew they were going to be outed on the world stage for behavior acceptable at one time (at least among a minority) that is now not politically correct?
Many people in the 1930's and 1940's felt that Russian Communism was to be feared.  The Russian Revolution had left Europe scared. Other countries did not want a revolution or hordes overrunning their country on the way out of Communism.  In occupied countries during World War II, and probably every war that ever was, there were diverse opinions that went unspoken because people were just too afraid.  Just like in a typical corporation.
This book has left me wondering about all the women who are liberal Democrats in love with stalwart Republican men who basically avoid political discussions and focus on happy domesticity and the home as a refuge from the world.  It has also made me wonder if the long dead Chanel's company has been currently targeted by people who don't want Jewish women to buy the clothes or the perfume.


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