Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964, edited by Sir Martin Gilbert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 415 pages, Amazon $8.95. This updated review was first published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Emery Reves, from the ground up

Admirers of Sir Martin Gilbert were pleased and touched to see his chronicle appear, now over twenty years ago. But few expected it would amount to much more than a useful research tool. We were wrong, and quickly realized why Sir Martin and Wendy Reves were so keen to get it published.

The Churchill-Reves Correspondence is marvelous reading for students of Churchill. It shows how an unknown Hungarian came to be the great man’s literary “diffuser.” (Reves himself eschewed the title of “agent.” He described himself as “Sales Department for the Production Chief.”)

Reves used Churchill’s screed like a palimpsest, spreading it to the far reaches of Europe, the Empire-Commonwealth and North America. Then, as Hitler’s influence spread, his outlets began to close: neutral countries dreaded the Führer’s wrath. Twice Reves escaped Nazi clutches. Operating from abroad, he earned Churchill millions for his war memoirs, his History of the English Speaking Peoples, and older titles as far back as Savrola. Later on, Emery and Wendy became Sir Winston’s hosts when kindly breezes brought him to the Riviera.

Reves started on a shoestring, selling Churchill’s 1930s articles (most of them readable today in Step by Step) around Europe. He charged as little as £1 to newspapers in poorer nations. By 1939 he’d built an impressive business, producing £50,000 a year in today’s money.

Churchill in those days was politically very incorrect. Reves got him on the front pages of thirty newspapers, 750 different outlets per year, with fifteen to twenty million readers in twenty-five languages. (I soon learned that Sapnis, the Latvian edition of Churchill’s short story The Dream, which I presented to Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis, was not the first Latvian translation. Reves was publishing Churchill articles in Latvian as early as 1937.)

Cooperation Publishing

Imre Révész (his father had adapted the surname from Rosenbaum) was born in Hungary in 1904, studied in Berlin and earned a degree in economics from Zurich University. In Berlin in the late Twenties he organized Cooperation Publishing, a unique organization. His goal was to publish works of European statesmen in other countries: Britons in Germany, Frenchmen in Italy, and so on.

Shunning Nazis, Fascists and Communists, Révész promoted writers who stood for liberty and freedom. After Hitler came to power, he was drummed out of Germany with only the clothes on his back. He moved to Paris, where he represented Britain’s leading statesmen: Churchill, Eden, Attlee and Herbert Samuel.

When France fell in 1940 Révész fled to London, losing his fortune but not his determination. Anglicizing his name to Reves, he soon set up shop in New York where Churchill and Eden helped him to emigrate. After the war, he was instrumental in placing Churchill’s writings to the widest possible audience.

“Gentlemen and players”

A tenacious salesman and negotiator, Reves was gentle and generous toward the statesman he respected more than anyone. In the Thirties he waived commissions to place articles with foreign publishers Churchill had contacted earlier. He was never put off by the “gentlemen and players” relationship that marked their early encounters, when Churchill kept him at arm’s length. During the war, the PM refused to grant Reves favors, thinking it might set a bad precedent. He denied Reves’s offers to help distribute Britain’s message of defiance in neutral countries. Though he passed the proposals to Duff Cooper at the Propaganda Ministry, Churchill carefully noted that he was “not wedded” to them.

In their early letters WSC is always “Mr. Churchill” and the Hungarian “My dear Reves.” Sir Winston didn’t call him “Emery” until he began to holiday at Reves’s Villa La Pausa in 1956. Yet in a 1946 meeting, when Reves told him how his mother had been cruelly murdered by the Nazis, Churchill wept in bitter grief.

Their business relationship reflected the experience of many around Churchill. The boss expected his “familiars” to be on call constantly, whether convenient or not. They repaid him with devotion.

Churchill’s summons

The most dramatic account in this book, in fact, starts with a perplexed Reves trying desperately to meet Churchill’s order; on one day’s notice, he dropped everything and sailed with Lord Camrose to America. The mission: to negotiate book and serial rights to Churchill’s memoirs, The Second World War.

Martin Gilbert’s connecting editorial contributions explain. Emery Reves is in Paris when the command arrives out of the blue. Sail with Camrose from Southampton at 1pm tomorrow on the Queen Elizabeth. Before you go, stop at Chartwell for a briefing. Now, please!

Fog surrounds Le Bourget airport—no commercial flights. “Can’t you get a private plane?” Churchill says impatiently. Reves finds a rickety two-seater. He sits in dread for twenty minutes, until the pilot is denied take-off “because my motor gives off sparks.” Tenaciously, he gets to Croydon the next morning, too late to stop at Chartwell. Churchill sends a car that speeds him to Southampton. He thinks he’ll miss the ship! But he has gained a vital hour because Britain has just set its clocks back. The old Churchill luck.

Reves is the last passenger on the sold-out Queen’s maiden voyage. Churchill has procured his cabin by importuning Cunard’s chairman. Reves looks up Lord Camrose—who has no idea why Emery is there! Reves cables Churchill to please explain. Churchill replies: “I am sure you will do an excellent job, but you must be very confidential and you must realize that you do not actually represent me.” Such confusion would flummox lesser men. But by the end of the voyage, Emery has made friends with Lord Camrose, and they divide the workload.

“Please wake Harry”

They decide that Camrose will deal with newspapers, Reves (“unofficially”) with magazines. Reves helps steer negotiations away from the bad deals and toward the best. The best is Henry Luce of Life, whom Camrose doesn’t wish to see. Luce, he sniffs, “hasn’t replied to my letter.”

Learning that Luce is in New York, Emery rings his friend, the redoubtable Claire Boothe, Luce’s wife. “Harry” is in bed, exhausted after a two-night flight from China. Reves tells her his mission is urgent. He  rushes to a cab, presents himself at the Waldorf Towers and asks Claire: “Please wake Harry.”

Sleepy and angry, Luce appears in his dressing gown: “You are the fifth or sixth or seventh agent who comes to me saying he represents Churchill,” he grumbled. “Now who is his representative?”

“All I can tell you,” Reves says, “is that in forty-eight hours [the war memoirs serialization] will be decided. You can talk to me today or tomorrow, but after tomorrow you won’t get it.”

Luce gets it. Reves sends Camrose, to sign the deal as “official” representative. Camrose reports: “They made a very good offer….$1,400,000 for the American serial and book rights….”

Reves replies, “Lord Camrose—No! The  American serial rights—yes—but not the book rights! You must stop it.” Reves has friends at Houghton Mifflin—and they are good for a quarter million for the book rights in addition to Luce’s $1.4 million for serialization.

Neither Camrose nor Reves charge Churchill for their services. “He did it to get the British [serial] rights for the Daily Telegraph,” Emery says. “I did it to get the foreign rights for me. But we both acted on principle.” Reves prospered on the usufruct he had earned. But he might have done it for nothing for his hero, the Chief of Production.

Precious lessons

We can learn much from this book, guided by the perceptive and sensitive Martin Gilbert, who always provides just the right supporting commentary. Example: Sarah Churchill’s note when her father is beset by critics of his memoirs. These are words every writer should heed: “Darling Papa…Don’t listen to too many critics—Each critic criticises from a personal angle. The work is yours—from deep within you—and its success depends on it flowing from you in an uninterrupted stream.”

From Emery Reves himself, after the unexpected end of his brief intimacy with Churchill, comes another piece of wisdom for anyone who, lied about, is tempted to deal in lies:

During my long life I developed the capacity to end a big cry in laughter and today I can only smile at the past two years. How childish and unnecessary all those intrigues were, how easy it would have been to maintain our beautiful relationship and to add to it anything that might have attracted you…. Should we not be able to defeat the intrigues that so unnecessarily separated us, then I am anxious to preserve the memories of our association during the years 1955-58. After all, what does one keep in life as time passes? A certain number of memories…. I do not know what memories you have of those years, but mine are unforgettable.

It is a tribute to this book, and those who saw it into print, that a memory of two unforgettable spirits is so eloquently presented.

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”