Dark Lady

The tempestuous life of controversial American society girl and mother of Winston Churchill, Jennie Jerome

Dark Lady, like all of Charles Higham's biographies, is vivacious, sensational and revelatory. Jennie Churchill emerges as an intensely individual and passionate figure, and the book is indispensable reading for a full and proper understanding of her great son, Winston.

Simon Callow, actor, author and TV presenter

A fascinating biography, told with panache

A vibrant look at the life of society beauty Jenny Jerome covering murder, espionage, love affairs and political machinations

Charles Higham, a former New York Times feature writer, is the author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, one of the sources for the film The Aviator. His Mrs Simpson: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor, has been a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and he has written bestselling biographies of Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Orson Welles.

Jennie Jerome was a controversial American society girl and mother of Britain's most revered statesman, Winston Churchill. A single-minded and dynamic woman she was an early feminist, advocate of Irish independence, and, above all, was notorious for her promiscuity. 
 
Charles Higham draws from previously overlooked sources to provide much that is startlingly new about the remarkable and tempestuous life of Jennie Jerome. The book charts her luxurious New York upbringing, her eyebrow-raising entry into the British aristocracy through marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough, her endless line of liaisons with men of vastly inferior years, and a very different sort of affair in the highest of high places - with the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII (one of many kings and princes to win her affection). Passionately in love with life, expressive of her sexuality when women were supposed to hide it, beautiful and independent minded, Jennie Jerome was decades ahead of her time.

Charles Higham

evokes the seamy underside of American business, politics and cutlure... has a horrible fascination

Howard Hughes was America's most famous playboy and rogue operator, an outlaw eccentric millionaire and hellraiser, 'I can buy any man' he once bragged, 'and have any woman.' And it was almost true. 
He stormed from bedroom to boardroom, from corporate bribary to Capitol Hill; his affairs with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and many others were as brief as they were stormy. he was a deeply involved in Watergate and in the Cuban missile crisis. He burgled his own office records when tax authorities were after him. And, despite a mystrious illness, he wheeled and dealed to the last days of his life.

Howard Hughes

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