NOW THAT HE had retired as an author and was not allowed to produce any new work, Churchill could only earn extra money by selling the rights to his old books or speeches for use in conjunction with modern technologies such as television, film or sound recording. These were industries in which both Churchill and his advisers lacked commercial expertise.
My Early Life’s progress towards the big screen had already been stalled for almost a year, waiting for a face-to-face meeting between Churchill and Jack Warner. Just before that was due to take place in September 1957, internal opposition to the project within Warner Brothers forced Warner to call off the meeting and offer to sell back the film rights to Churchill for £15,000.
Throughout the delay, Churchill’s team had kept in touch with Marjorie Thorson at Metro Goldwyn Meyer. Late in October she agreed to revive the project at MGM, but at the expense of cutting back Churchill’s guaranteed advance and switching his share of proceeds from ‘net profits’ to ‘distributor’s gross receipts’, which, she claimed, would pay more quickly, although not as much.1
Churchill’s advisers’ priority was that all his payments should escape tax by qualifying as capital receipts, even though they would not be fixed and would depend on box-office takings. Churchill was equally concerned himself to have some say over the screenplay and over the studio’s choice of director or the actor who would play him. MGM undertook to avoid any known ‘alcoholic or sex deviant or communist or man scandalously involved with women or having a criminal record’.2 In the end, after much negotiation the only immediate payment that Churchill received from MGM on signature of the contract was $750; the rest of his guaranteed $150,000 would only be paid after he had approved the screenplay, written by the British dramatist Terence Rattigan. By agreeing to these terms, Churchill’s still inexperienced team had unwittingly provided MGM with unlimited scope for delay.
The same innocence had allowed the television rights to A History of the English-Speaking People to lie dormant in M & P Investments for almost a year after the programme failed to sell in the American market. Early in 1958, however, a Harry Towers of Towers Films offered $100,000, the price that M & P’s co-owner Sir David Cunynghame had always considered realistic.3 Towers lined up Laurence Olivier as narrator and William Walton as composer, but nobody asked whether he had a buyer, or could afford to pay on his own if he did not.4 The first payment from Towers arrived nine months late and only one of the four more due in 1959 was made before Churchill authorized the start of legal proceedings. Montague Browne began again the search for a new buyer.5
It had been a disappointing year for Churchill’s film projects, and on the personal front 1958 proved no happier. Brendan Bracken died of throat cancer in August at the age of only fifty-seven;6 Churchill’s daughter Sarah had been arrested on charges of drunkenness in California after the break-up of her second marriage; and Churchill caught bronchial pneumonia while staying at La Pausa, thereafter needing care from two full-time nurses, which took his expenditure up to £50,000 a year.7 The only bright spot was his golden wedding anniversary in September, which he marked by a gift to Clementine of £5,0008 and by a joint celebratory cruise in the Mediterranean.
A year earlier the couple had been lent the use of the motor yacht Aronia*1 in Monte Carlo, an experience that brought back fond memories of cruises on HMS Enchantress. The Aronia, however, was on the small side and smelt of fumes, so on their return to harbour one day the much larger and newer yacht Christina caught Churchill’s eye. Christina belonged to none other than Aristotle Onassis, the Greek ship owner he had met previously and who had invited him to visit to the yacht.
Onassis readily agreed to host an anniversary cruise, during which the Churchills enjoyed the lavish hospitality of one of the world’s richest men. Their bodyguard later catalogued Christina’s ‘lapis lazuli baths, huge hand-carved images of jade, onyx tables, numerous valuable pictures, gold icons, and a bar with models of ships sailing around beneath a glass-topped counter’;9 equally she boasted a cinema, an operating theatre and eleven launches to carry her passengers on shore excursions.
The first cruise was such a success that Onassis offered a second early in 1959, this time from Morocco to the winter sun of the Canary Islands and back to Tangier. In advance of joining the Christina on the Moroccan coast, the Churchill party flew out to Marrakech on a plane provided by Onassis’s Olympic Airways. There the local governor’s car was put at their disposal to carry painting gear, food and the accompanying cases of Pol Roger champagne for picnics in the Atlas Mountains.
Churchill spent a month at La Pausa on his return from the Canary Islands, before a third voyage on Christina followed. This time the party sailed down the Italian coast and through the Greek islands to the city Churchill still called Constantinople, but which was now officially Istanbul.
At home Churchill’s staff continued to search for ways to exploit his past work, without undue risk to his reputation. The Second World War appeared in an abridged version, the preface carefully dated prior to Churchill’s retirement and noting for the benefit of the tax authorities that Denis Kelly had edited the book, rather than the author. This one-volume edition was accompanied by a recording of Churchill’s wartime speeches, which earned him a separate £20,000 payment from Decca Records.10
Meanwhile, the film version of My Early Life suffered another delay. Terence Rattigan had pulled out of writing the screenplay and MGM’s chosen replacement, Nigel Balchin, had been so overawed by his subject that the studio withdrew from the project after judging Balchin’s script beyond rescue. Montague Browne tried to find a replacement from the British film industry, but The Dam Busters, its greatest post-war success, had earned only just over £500,000 from box-office takings and government subsidies combined, so it was far too small to match Hollywood.11 Without any other avenue at hand, Montague Browne turned to a British-born agent in Beverly Hills, Hugh French. Although he had never produced a film in his life, French saw in the Churchill project a chance of breaking into Hollywood’s charmed circle.
While My Early Life floundered, Montague Browne decided to revisit screen rights to The Second World War, for which an American, Jack Le Vien, had made an approach in August 1958. One of Eisenhower’s press officers during the war, Le Vien had met Churchill on several occasions while arranging news conferences at the front. After the war he had headed Pathé News until its collapse in 1956. Now he planned to make a television series about the war using the old newsreel material with which he was familiar. This idea conveniently by-passed any need for a personal appearance by Churchill (which his retirement ruled out for tax reasons), or for an actor to play his part, but Churchill cut short these discussions when his wartime American broadcasting friend Ed Murrow spoke disparagingly of Le Vien.12
In May 1959, when Churchill was invited to America by President Eisenhower, Montague Browne decided to make up his own mind on Le Vien by meeting him in New York. He found that Le Vien had a detailed plan for thirty-nine thirty-minute episodes and had already raised the funding for production costs of up to $750,000 from Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Once Le Vien raised Churchill’s guarantee to $75,000 and promised him an extra 10 per cent of receipts once the series grossed $1 million, Churchill was persuaded to sign.13
Six months later a producer for America’s ABC network (to whom Screen Gems had sold most of its stake) earned a rebuke from Montague Browne for saying to a British newspaper that Churchill was not appearing ‘live’ for tax reasons.14 ‘Sir Winston was disturbed that the tax question should have been made public,’ Montague Browne wrote. ‘Sir Winston not unnaturally does not want his personal financial position to be discussed in the Press.’15
Le Vien’s television series The Valiant Years proved a financial and critical success when it appeared at the end of 1959. In contrast, Hugh French could still find no backer for My Early Life. Then, in the summer of 1960, a rival agent, Robert Morrell, put together a syndicate of American businessmen, including Fulbrights and Rockefellers, and won the backing of a prominent Hollywood producer, David O. Selznick. Morrell offered Montague Browne £3,000 to secure an option in July. He thought his offer had been accepted, but in fact his radio message had gone astray somewhere between Arkansas and the radio room of the Christina, on which Churchill was cruising at the time.16
Meanwhile Montague Browne had used the interest of Morrell’s syndicate to present Hugh French with an ultimatum: he demanded from French a cash payment of £2,000 for his own option if he wanted to remain in the driving seat. French decided to pay himself and act as the film’s producer, securing Churchill’s signature in return for the promise of an advance of $175,000 on a 5 per cent share of receipts.17 Annoyed at his syndicate’s last-minute loss of its prize, Morrell wheeled out Senator Fulbright to protest, but Montague Browne stood his ground.
French finally rewarded Montague Browne’s loyalty with the help of Jack Le Vien, who persuaded a senior producer friend from Paramount, Martin Rankin, to overcome his initial scepticism and take an interest in the rights to My Early Life. Rankin flew to London and, once there, he agreed to match almost every financial and editorial condition that Churchill’s team had included in French’s option. Paramount signed a contract in October 1960: My Early Life seemed to have found a new home at last.18
The Churchills had hesitated over their holiday plans at the beginning of 1960, before eventually accepting Aristotle Onassis’s invitation of another Christina cruise, this time to the Caribbean. When they were allowed to choose guests of their choice, Clementine set her mind against including any of the ‘South of France set’, which ruled out Emery and Wendy Reves. Informed of this by Onassis, Reves felt excluded.
Later in the year, when Churchill asked if he could stay with Reves and Wendy at La Pausa in September, the reply was no. ‘All kinds of intrigues’ had been at work, Reves claimed, thereby ‘destroying what was a happy and lovely companionship’.19 Clementine wrote to try to mend bridges, but the friendship had been damaged. Thereafter the Churchills stayed in a penthouse suite at the Hôtel de Paris, which was put at their disposal by Onassis.
By early 1960, the Churchills’ reserves had fallen to £150,000, including building society deposits of £35,000 and an investment portfolio of bonds and shares worth £73,000.20 Concerned that his Canadian shares were still struggling, Churchill asked his new manager at Lloyds Bank, Cedric Watkins, to obtain a second opinion. The bank’s stockbrokers, Simon & Coates, advised him to cut his losses, a painful process which took three months complete. Two of Churchill’s own choices, Van-Tor Oils and Explorations and Permo Oil & Gas, had cost £10,000, but were now practically worthless and proved impossible to sell;21 eight other shares, which had cost £46,000, fetched only £16,500. Hazlerigg’s one success, the Philip Hill Investment Trust, joined ICI as Churchill’s only remaining shareholdings of any significance.22
These losses worried Churchill. His household spending was now running at more than £55,000 a year. His film and greetings card contracts had brought in less than this, £37,500, in the previous twelve months and their income was forecast to fall to £20,000 over the coming year.23 However, help was to come from an unexpected quarter when Churchill chose this moment to anoint his son Randolph as his official biographer.
On establishing the Literary Trust in 1946, Churchill had told his trustees that he did not want anyone appointed as his biographer for five years after his death, when he hoped that they would consider Randolph for the role. No more had been said on the subject for almost a decade until he told Lord Camrose in 1953 that he thought Randolph had become ‘a more serious writer’.24 However, the real turning point was reached when Randolph undertook a biography of Lord Derby, the nineteenth-century Tory grandee, as suggested by his subject’s grandson. Even with research help, the task had taken Randolph six years. On reading the proofs early in 1960, Churchill approved the ‘remarkable’ result and and indicated that he would be happy for his son to act as his biographer.
The decision to accelerate the appointment was made easier when Anthony Moir advised Churchill that he could exact a capital sum for giving copyright permission for the use of quotations taken from his post-war papers which he still owned – so long as the publishing contracts for the biography were settled while Churchill was still alive. The Literary Trust therefore funded Randolph to start his work on the book with a team of researchers in 1961. It formed a joint venture with The Daily Telegraph, called C & T Publications,*2 to reuse the template of negotiation that they had successfully forged while selling the rights to Churchill’s The Second World War. The various rights fetched £535,000 worldwide when the syndicate was assembled in 1962: in Britain The Daily Telegraph paid £200,000 for newspaper extracts and William Heinemann £150,000 for the book – in each case a multiple of the sums paid for The Second World War. The American appetite was more restrained: Houghton Mifflin paid less than it had twenty years earlier for the book, while the newspaper and magazine rights went unsold.25 Nevertheless a delighted Churchill collected his copyright fee of £50,000 and the sum went untaxed as a capital receipt in the hands of a retired author.26
By then, problems had resurfaced with the film of My Early Life. Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward had both declined Paramount’s invitation to write a screenplay, so the task had fallen to one of Churchill’s favourite authors: C. S. Forester of Captain Hornblower fame. His attempt also fell flat: ‘It is like a devout Roman Catholic being asked to write the life story of the Pope,’ was Hugh French’s diagnosis.27 The film’s schedule (and Churchill’s payment) was put back a year, while two more writers tried to find a convincing angle for the cinema. Even the mild-mannered Montague Browne was driven to declare the fifth attempt ‘utterly useless, so full of impossibilities of taste, of fact and of dramatic construction that I can only regard it as a bad joke’.28
By the spring of 1961 the health and energy of both Churchill and Clementine were visibly declining. Clementine spent much of March being treated for depression in a London hospital. Churchill visited her between his own spells of sunshine in Monte Carlo and the Caribbean, where he sailed on Christina, calling on the way home at New York. He was not well enough to accept President Kennedy’s invitation to visit Washington, D.C. but returned to Britain in time for the 1961 racing season.
The prize money from Churchill’s stable had dipped in 1958 and 1959,29 then recovered to £13,000 in 1960, when an early season victory by Vienna prompted her owner to remain in England rather than travel to the south of France. ‘Owing to winning a £6,000 race yesterday I have moved into the Derby sphere which I cannot desert,’ he explained to Lord Beaverbrook. ‘Good fortune ties me by the legs.’30 There was to be no Derby victory, but Churchill’s five wins that season included one by High Hat, a newcomer to his string. High Hat went on to win £17,000 in 1961, coming first three times and rounding off the season with a fourth place at the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.31 As a result, Major Carey Foster valued High Hat alone at £80,000, and the rest of the stud and racing string at a similar amount.32 These were not fanciful sums. Another victory by High Hat brought a cash offer of exactly £80,000, with shares in the offering syndicate said to be worth an extra £5,000; Churchill, however, preferred a straight offer of £80,000 from a former aide-de-camp, Tim Rogers, who was now an Irish racehorse breeder.33
With High Hat sold, Christopher Soames made a second attempt to address the future of his Churchill’s racing interests, which he was keen to take on, if he could afford them. They had enjoyed two wonderful seasons in 1960 and 1961, winning almost £40,000, largely thanks to High Hat and Vienna, he told his father-in-law; but £8,000 a year would be a more normal figure for the eight horses they had left in training.
Together, the costs of the stud and training expenses would amount to £25,000 a year; and only four or possibly five of the mares at his stud met the grade needed to make it a success. Soames suspected that the cost of replacing the other three or four with mares of the right quality would prove too high to be acceptable. The alternative was to reduce the stud’s size, by selling the Newchapel site and the poorest mares for a combined £20,000 to £30,000; and then to transfer the good mares, with their foals and fillies, to Soames’s new home at Hamsell Manor, where he would keep an eye on them at weekends and Carey Foster could still ‘manage the set-up’. By this means, they could halve the stud’s running costs, but Churchill would still be able to enjoy his racing for several more years.34
In fact, Carey Foster opposed the idea, rather than supporting it as Soames had assumed, and neither Montague Browne nor Moir thought that there was any hurry to break up the stud, which gave Churchill genuine pleasure.35 Exercising his diplomatic talents, Montague Browne asked Carey Foster to report on the ground at Hamsell Manor, which the vet declared to be exposed, too much on a slope and requiring at least £10,000 spent on stabling and fencing. Moir finally killed off the idea by pointing out that relief from death duty on the Newchapel site would be lost if Churchill’s stud moved to Hamsell Manor,36 at which point Soames gracefully withdrew. Far from being wound down, the stud expanded and its losses increased, reaching almost £10,000 in 1962.37
Increasingly frail, the eighty-seven-year-old Churchill missed most of the 1962 racing season.38 He was in London’s Middlesex Hospital for six weeks after breaking his hip in Monaco. While he was convalescing, Montague Browne and Moir won an extra $30,000 guarantee from Le Vien for a new, full-length film of The Second World War.39 The screenplay of My Early Life, however, remained stuck with Paramount.
In June 1962 the job of writing it passed from Ernest Gann, a protégé of Noël Coward, to Bryan Forbes, a Briton of whom Montague Browne approved as ‘a rather unusual animal in the film world, holding agreeably right-wing views’.40 Churchill’s private secretary liked the result when Forbes finished it in March 1963, but Paramount did not. Exasperated, Hugh French spent the summer negotiating yet another switch of studio, this time to Columbia Pictures and to its producer Carl Foreman, who came to Churchill’s story fresh from his triumphs with The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone. Foreman insisted that Churchill’s share of profits should not be triggered until Columbia had made money on the film, but he increased Churchill’s guarantee to £100,000, all paid in cash on signature. Montague Browne resisted the temptation to ask whether Foreman had not meant dollars and immediately accepted.41
His powers clearly fading, Churchill returned to Monte Carlo for his eighth and last cruise on Christina at the end of 1963’s summer. Montague Browne’s bulletins to Lord Beaverbrook became sadder and sadder that autumn as Sarah’s third husband died suddenly and Diana took her own life at the age of fifty-four. ‘Sir Winston is depressed; Lady Churchill very depressed,’ he wrote during October.42
At least there was some good news on the film front: Foreman had finally found a cinematic angle on My Early Life, as he concentrated on the strained relationship between father and son, which he described as a story ‘of classical stature and almost biblical flavour’.43 Negotiations on the film moved quickly when Montague Browne travelled to New York to settle a separate copyright action against Colepix, a record company. It turned out to be a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, allowing the company’s president to ease the settlement of the copyright dispute by increasing Churchill’s profit share on their film from 5 to 6 per cent. Another nine years were to pass before Young Winston (1972) reached the silver screen, but Montague Browne returned from a second visit to New York in December 1963 clutching the largest single cheque that Churchill had ever earned, an occasion he recalled in his memoir, Long Sunset:
I returned to London by air, went directly to Hyde Park Gate and found WSC dining with Violet Bonham Carter. I produced the cheque for £100,000 with the pride of a retriever emerging from a turbulent river with a particularly fine duck. WSC sent for his chequebook and said that he was going to give me £25,000. My mouth watered but this was totally impossible.44
A secretary relayed Churchill’s final instructions to his bank: £30,000 was to go into his current account, £65,000 into his investment account, and £5,000 for Montague Browne.45
Le Vien’s full-length film of The Second World War had also found a strong backer in Twentieth Century-Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck, who paid Churchill an extra $35,000 for the rights.46 Montague Browne struggled to keep the peace between Twentieth Century-Fox and Columbia Pictures as Foreman demanded late cuts in The Finest Hours, which he claimed had strayed on to the territory of My Early Life. Next Le Vien caused problems by releasing a recording of his film’s soundtrack, just as Moir and Montague Browne were on the point of landing a new deal with Decca Records. The company was poised to pay £20,000 to release new recordings found of Churchill’s wartime speeches to mark his ninetieth birthday. ‘Good business,’ Churchill noted to Moir and Montague Browne when they retrieved the situation.47
Churchill’s ninetieth birthday also provided the pretext for Le Vien to propose making another documentary, this one based on Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime. Joyce Hall, who had used reproductions of Churchill’s paintings on his company’s greetings cards for more than a decade, paid $150,000 to buy the American rights for his company’s own television channel.48 Throughout, Moir and Montague Browne continued to defend Churchill’s interests: Moir warned that they should limit the number of paintings used to prevent a final attempt by the Inland Revenue to brand Churchill as a professional artist, while Montague Browne removed a reference to Churchill’s bodyguard allegedly signing his own paintings with Churchill’s initials.
By the autumn of 1964 Churchill was too unwell to take any further interest in his business affairs. They were left to Clementine, guided by Moir and Montague Browne. She considered exiling a herd of Belted Galloways from Chartwell’s fields ‘in the interests of economy’, but the cattle were reprieved when she was told that replacement mowers would probably cost more.49 Clementine agreed that Christopher Soames should take over responsibility for her husband’s racehorses in 1965, paying Churchill a sliding scale of any winnings.50 Montague Browne issued a press statement explaining that the stud would carry on, but that Churchill was bringing his career as a racehorse owner to a close.51 His racing account at Weatherby & Sons was closed at the end of October, before Sun Hat recorded a last victory in Paris early in December. The winner’s purse brought Churchill’s career winnings up to £90,000 and he had sold bloodstock worth £120,000.52
Churchill’s final battle was fought with that most constant enemy of his long life: the taxman. This time he was American. The US Internal Revenue Service claimed in 1963 that for at least the four previous years (and possibly longer) Churchill should have been paying US tax on any earnings with an American connection.53
Moir had always assumed that the double tax treaty between Britain and America meant that no American tax had to be paid if none was owed in Britain. However, a successful tax avoidance scheme in one country does not automatically apply in another. In a letter running to twenty-two pages, Churchill’s American lawyers at Davis Polk Wardwell & Co. estimated that Churchill owed at least $23,000 in US tax on Le Vien’s film The Valiant Years and advised complete disclosure of all Churchill’s past and future earnings that carried any American link.
Late in 1963, while still fit enough to do so, Churchill sent his own letter to the US authorities in the hope that they might be persuaded to desist in their claims, but all he achieved was additional time for his staff to reply in greater detail. They had still not managed to do so by the autumn of 1964, when Davis Polk Wardwell suggested sending a partner over to London to help expedite matters. Appalled at the likely cost, Moir suggested that Churchill’s American lawyers should instead meet his private secretary while he was in New York on other business. Three Davis Polk Wardwell partners confronted Montague Browne to tell him that Churchill ought to disclose all his US-related earnings since 1941, including the £100,000 that he had just been paid by Columbia Pictures.
On his return to London, Montague Browne urged Moir to resist their advice, explaining that he had told the American lawyers that: ‘Sir Winston’s fortune was not on the scale that many people imagined. I felt that they might trim their sails appropriately if they were aware that they were not dealing with a millionaire.’54
Moir wrote before Christmas 1964 to tell his American colleagues that Churchill would not be disclosing the Columbia Pictures payment. He invited them to provide ‘chapter and verse’ if they disagreed with the decision.55 Before they could do so, the ninety-year-old Churchill suffered a serious stroke at the beginning of 1965 and slipped into a coma from which he never awoke. He died on 24 January 1965, seventy years to the day after his father.
TIME-LIFE honoured its most famous contributor by sending a team of forty journalists and photographers to cover his state funeral, which took place six days later beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. While Churchill was laid to rest in Bladon churchyard, just outside the walls of Blenheim Palace, the magazine’s staff was already on the way home, preparing their story in a plane especially fitted out as a flying newsroom and photographic studio. As they did so, Madame Odette Pol-Roger in France instructed that a black band of mourning be placed around the label of her family’s champagne.
*1 The 180-ton Aronia was owned by Jack Billmeir, who had built up his shipping business the Stanhope Line by blockade-running during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Aronia ran ball bearings from Sweden to Britain during the Second World War.
*2 The name reflects its two shareholders, the Chartwell Literary Trust and The Daily Telegraph.