How does a journalist who has never written a book before and was previously best known for his features in The Palm Beach Post end up finishing a bestselling biography series of the most commanding British statesman of modern times? Ask Paul Reid. He wrote the lion’s share of The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, after William Manchester, the author who started the book, passed away. The third and final volume of the biography of Sir Winston S. Churchill begins shortly after he was elected prime minister and guides readers through the war and its aftermath, up until his death in 1965.TIME talked to Reid about Churchill’s quirks, Manchester’s writing process and finishing a book more than 20 years in the making.
The Last Lion starts off with colorful details about Churchill’s style — such as his habit of sitting in bed, wearing a pink robe, and drinking a bottle of wine for breakfast.
The preamble is meant to introduce Churchill to people who may not have met him before. It was meant to give you a skim coat of his character so that when you find him in the story, laying in bed with a bottle of wine, you’re not surprised. You don’t want to meet the character yelling at a young typist and not know if that’s abnormal behavior. And wow, what a character.
You write that Gone with the Wind was one of Churchill’s favorite films — and also one of Adolf Hitler’s. So that’s one thing they had in common?
They also had in common a hatred of whistling. Churchill banned whistling in the government building. One day, with his bodyguard, he was walking through Whitehall toward Parliament. A little boy was whistling, and Churchill went out of his way to cross the street and yell at him, “Stop that!” And the little boy answered back (I’m paraphrasing wildly), “Who are you old man?” Churchill harrumphed, and the little boy went off and probably started whistling again. But Churchill hated whistling, and he hated cowbells. And telephones ringing. And clocks ticking. And anything that would upset his equilibrium.
But somehow, all the drinking didn’t throw him off.
Well, he had a miracle metabolism. He was who he was. Anyone who tried to drink like that would be in big trouble. I put the drinking out there, but I’m careful to say he could do it without any effect, and Eleanor Roosevelt recognized that. Yet even after he had a few brandies, you didn’t want to have an argument with the guy or discuss tactics.
And then there was that time President Franklin D. Roosevelt wandered in while Churchill
was naked.
Churchill was all soldier. He didn’t look it as a round, balding fellow of 65 pushing 70, but he was once a young, dashing soldier. Out in the field, there’s no modesty. So he thought nothing of walking naked out of his bathroom and calling out to a private secretary, “Bring me the latest report!” It didn’t matter who was in the room or the hallway. I’m sure a lot of people walked in on him lots of times when he was stark naked. Didn’t bother him. Didn’t bother Roosevelt either.
Churchill also did not know who Frank Sinatra was. When the singer ran up to him and shook his hand, Churchill asked his private secretary, “Who the hell was that?”
There’s a lot to that scene. First, Churchill simply didn’t like to be touched, except maybe his wife would put her hand on his. Second, this stranger is the most famous singer in the world, and Churchill doesn’t know it. He was not narcissistic, but he was inward-looking, and his doctor and other sources say the same thing. He didn’t really care what you think and didn’t care at all what you feel, even up to and including his own family. In that one little scene, you’ve got his aversion to being touched and his self-centered worldview: there’s Winston Churchill, and then there’s everybody else — including this world-famous singer, and he doesn’t even know who he is. And more importantly, he doesn’t even care.
But he also read everything: the complete Shakespeare, the Bible — for nuance in his speechifying — historians, the ancient Greeks, medieval philosophers, scientific studies, psychology books, geopolitical analysis, newspapers, novelists, like the Hornblower novels, which we would call beach-reading now. So yes, he had these funny quirks, but meanwhile, he’s reading everything — and singing Gilbert and Sullivan all the time that he’s reading.
How did you react when William Manchester asked you to finish writing The Last Lion?
I’ve told people I was flabbergasted, which is true. It was late in the evening, and I remember stepping out to his deck and thinking, “What the heck? Where am I going here?” And the next morning, I woke up and thought, “I better go verify this.” So I was surprised. I never saw it coming. We had been friends for five years, and I had been encouraging him to find someone.
What do you want people to remember about Churchill from reading this book?
He saved Western civilization. I like my Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Schubert and Einstein, and the whole legacy of the Renaissance in the classical time would have been bulldozed by the Nazis. And that’s what Churchill fought for. Freedom.
