CLARE SHERIDAN

by Anita Leslie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1977

Anita Leslie has written previously about her most illustrious forebears, the Leonard Jeromes of New York and their three marrying daughters. Clare Sheridan, offspring of Clara Jerome and Moreton Frewen, is presently little known, but she was a dashing person in her day. Left a widow with two small children and very little money after WW I, she determined to support herself as a sculptor. Through a friend at the Russian Embassy she managed to get herself invited to Moscow, where she executed portrait busts of both Lenin and Trotsky. On her return to London, she was surprised to find herself cut by the society she had grown up in--for associating with those murderers. Her escapade even led to a prolonged estrangement from her cousin, Winston Churchill. But it made her notorious, and when she visited America, Bernard Baruch took her under his wing and Herbert Bayard Swope commissioned her as a roving reporter for the New York World. This took her, in the 1920s, to Dublin, Constantinople, Bulgaria (and Rumania, where she had a disastrous non-interview with the equally beautiful Queen Marie). In Rome, Mussolini, whom she was attempting to model, attacked her passionately, leaving her with a badly bruised elbow, caught in the doorway as she fled. . . . Leslie's book is carefully done and its prolixness need not prove fatal, but the spirited subject deserves something better than Ladies Home Journal-style prose.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION