and saw the contents of the Palace being auctioned off on the lawn outside. She bid on Napolean’ s porcelain dinner service with the prominent golden“ N” displayed beneath the imperial crown and had the service wheeled home. The service later ended up in Winston Churchill’ s dining room, to the considerable surprise of some of Mr. Churchill’ s French guests.
Leonard was pulled back to Wall Street, but not with the drive he once felt. Now it was strictly to make money to support his family in the style to which they had become accustomed. It was difficult. The market did not cooperate. The Panic of 1873 found him on the long side— the wrong side. Leonard was entertaining friends at dinner when he was handed a telegram which he read and laid aside. When the dinner was over, he stood and asked his guests to allow him to read the telegram, telling them,“ It is a message in which you are all interested. The bottom has fallen out of stocks and I am a ruined man. But your dinner is paid for, and I did not want to disturb you while you were eating it.”
It wasn’ t quite as bad as that. Leonard had already settled a good-sized fortune upon his wife, but his Wall Street reputation would never really recover. Such is the fickleness of a Wall Street reputation for prescience, even today.
Leonard received a letter from his wife shortly thereafter, and in his distracted state the meaning conveyed by her hurried handwriting was difficult for Leonard to ascertain. It seems their second daughter, Jennie, had become engaged to a young Englishman, one Randolph Churchill, a mere three days after having met him! Worse yet, Randolph’ s family— especially Randolph’ s father, the Duke of Marlborough— was aghast at his son’ s attachment to an American of whose family he knew and understood little. Clara was in turn furious at the thought that her daughter was unacceptable, and initially Leonard tried to calm her down via the post. When fully apprised of the duke’ s opposition, however, Leonard refused to consent as well.
Clara took her daughters to Paris, and at a distance, cooler heads prevailed. Randoph Churchill and Jennie Jerome were married in April 1874. Their first child, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, was born prematurely in November.
Leonard Jerome was no longer an influential Wall Street multimillionaire, but he was still the delightful companion he
Library of Congress HABS Collection
The Leonard W. Jerome Mansion( built 1859), located at 26th Street and Madison Avenue, New York City.
had always been. Future son-in-law Moreton Frewen— another British aristocrat— remembers visiting New York, and“ my predestined father-in-law … one of the kindliest of men, was the center of a brilliant coterie … witty Bill Travers … equally witty Senator Evarts … and travelled men blew in from the uttermost ends of the earth.”
Leonard Jerome’ s magnetic personality was in sharp contrast to that of his young grandson. Winston impressed nobody in his early years. He inherited none of his mother’ s beauty, and his schoolmasters labeled him“ backward except for complicated games with toy soldiers,” adding that it was“ very difficult to tell what goes on in his mind.” His maternal grandfather liked the little chap, however, and he was unconcerned.“ Let him be,” Leonard counseled.“ Boys get good at what they find they shine at.”
Leonard’ s last days were spent in England with his wife and daughters and their families. On his deathbed, thinking perhaps of more than money, he told his tearful wife and daughters,“ I’ ve given you all I have. Pass it on.”
It was a decade after Leonard Jerome’ s death in 1891 that grandson Winston began to shine with brilliant reporting on the Boer War in South Africa. Fellow correspondent George W. Steevens explained,“ From his father Winston derives the hereditary aptitude for affairs,” and from his mother“ came the shrewdness, keenness, personal ambition and sense of humor.” Churchill biographer Paul Johnson agreed, writing that“ it was … from his mother that Winston derived his salient
characteristics: energy, a love of adventure, ambition, a sinuous intellect, warm feelings, courage and resilience, and a huge passion for life in all its aspects.”
The Jerome family history suggests that Winston Churchill’ s sense of humor, if such a trait can be traced genetically, was his grandfather Leonard’ s gift. A short summary of the life of that grandfather should therefore end not with yet another Winston Churchill anecdote, but with one of his grandfather’ s minting.
Leonard Jerome was lunching with fellow financier August Belmont in the 1880s when an eavesdropper heard the conversation turn to one Fanny Ronalds, a celebrated singer and beauty who had captivated both Jerome and Belmont some 20 years earlier.
“ August, do you remember Fanny’ s celebrated ball?” Leonard asked.
“ Indeed, I ought to,” answered Belmont,“ I paid for it.”
“ Why, how very strange,” Leonard responded slowly, wistfully.“ So did I.”
Daniel C. Munson is the author of the new book Fiscal Follies: A Little Fun with Economics( and Economists).
Sources
Black, David. The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont. New York: Dial Press. 1981.
Fiske, Stephen. Offhand Portraits of Prominent New Yorkers. New York. 1884.
Johnson, Paul. Churchill. New York: Viking. 2009.
Leslie, Anita. The Remarkable Mr. Jerome. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1954.
Lough, David. No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money. London: Picador. 2015.
Morris, Lloyd. Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950. New York. 1951.
Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Knopf. 2009.
Wilson, Ben. Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age. New York: Basic Books. 2016.
Young, G. M. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. Oxford: Reading Essentials. 1936.
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