Churchill's Connections

Emery Reves

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1904-1981
UK publisher

  1. Introduction
  2. Stories
  3. Biographical summary
  4. See also
  5. Further reading
  6. References

1. Introduction

Hungarian-born Emery Reves (pronounced ‘Reevz’; original name Imre Révész, pronounced ‘IM-ray REV-esh) began publishing in the 1930s with the innovative concept at the time of syndicating political leaders’ views across multiple countries and languages. He was a literary agent for Churchill from 1937, negotiating international deals and publishing his works overseas. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his work in support of a world government. Churchill spent a total of around 13 months from 1956 to 1959 at Reves’s villa on the French Riviera before a rupture in their friendship.

2. Stories

  • Emery Reves was a Hungarian Jew who lost nearly all he had, twice, when fleeing from the Nazis.
  • Reves became Churchill’s literary agent from 1937, although he preferred to describe himself as the ‘Sales Department’ and Churchill as the ‘Production Chief’.
  • Reves was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the same year as Churchill, but neither was awarded it.
  • Reves’s partner from 1948 was Wendy Russell, a Texan model whom Winston adored.
  • Churchill and his entourage stayed more than 13 months in 11 visits to Reves’s villa near Monaco in the 1950s.
  • The Churchill-Reves relationship became very strained after the Reves were ‘uninvited’ from a cruise on Onassis’s yacht.
  • Some of La Pausa has been recreated at the Dallas Museum of Art to display the Reves’s art collection.

Emery Reves was a Hungarian Jew who lost nearly all he had, twice, when fleeing from the Nazis.

Imre Révész was born in a small village in Austro-Hungary (now in Serbia), the son of a wood and grain merchant who had changed his Jewish surname from Rosenbaum to avoid being discriminated against in the business world. Imre later anglicised his name to Emery Reves.

He was an excellent pianist at a young age and his parents wanted him to become a concert performer, but he opposed this. After doing well at school in Budapest, he undertook university studies in Berlin and Paris, then completed a doctorate in political economy in Zurich, writing articles to pay for his studies including one about an interview with Lenin’s former landlord. He worked in Berlin as a corporate speech writer and in 1930 began his own publishing company and art collection. He fled to Paris in 1933 when his office was raided as part of growing anti-Jewish sentiment.

He developed his Cooperation Press Service with a distinctive angle of publishing political leaders’ and thinkers’ views across different countries and in different languages, with the subtitle ‘Press Service for International Understanding’. With an innovative approach and strong powers of persuasion, he managed to procure articles from people such as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, English philosopher Bertrand Russell, French politician Paul Reynaud and Italian statesman Count Carlo Sforza.

When German troops entered Paris in 1940, he fled again, this time to the UK, losing his second art collection, including seventeenth century furniture. Churchill helped him to gain British citizenship, and then asked him to move to New York to assist with UK wartime propaganda efforts there, which he did from 1941 (see also Alexander Korda).

His publishing enterprise thrived, as did the sales of his own publication Anatomy of Peace (1945) (see below). He established a mutually lucrative business relationship with Churchill for international sales of his books. Their personal friendship developed particularly in the late 1950s, when Churchill spent much time at Reves’s villa in southern France. Reves built up a substantial art collection for the third time, which is now in the Dallas Museum of Art.

Reves became Churchill’s literary agent from 1937, although he preferred to describe himself as the ‘Sales Department’ and Churchill as the ‘Production Chief’.

Reves’s contact with Churchill began with a tempting offer that was perhaps too good to be true: additional revenue for no extra work. He proposed syndicating Churchill’s weekly Evening Standard articles in various European countries, translating them into local languages. Churchill checked Reves’s credentials with Lord Beaverbrook, who vouched for him. After a four-month delay, Churchill accepted the offer, beginning their long association.

Reves’s and Churchill’s extensive correspondence over 27 years was published by Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert in 1997. It indicates that they addressed each other as ‘Mr Churchill’ and ‘My dear Reves’ until Churchill started staying at Reves’s villa in France in 1956, when they moved onto first name terms and became close friends.

In 1946, Churchill gave Reves a day’s notice to sail from Southampton to the USA to help negotiate the American rights to Churchill’s forthcoming memoirs, The Second World War. Reves was in Paris and was delayed by the weather, arriving the next morning at Croydon airport at what he thought was 11.10 am. He was convinced he would miss the 1.30 pm sailing from Southampton, more than a two-hour drive away in lingering fog. He saw a clock which gave the time as an hour earlier than expected and discovered that UK time had gone back for daylight saving the night before. After a frantic drive, he was welcomed on board with the words, ‘You are the last passenger on the first voyage of the Queen Elizabeth.’1

Also on board was Lord Camrose, owner of the Telegraph and other papers, who had been asked to negotiate book rights as Churchill’s official representative but had not been told about Reves’s involvement. After initial confusion and reluctance, Camrose found that Reves’s salesmanship added to his own negotiating skills, with Reves’s swashbuckling style complementing his own polite reserve. They agreed that Camrose would negotiate with newspapers while Reves dealt with magazine and book publishers. Together they secured around £600,000 (equivalent to £23 million today) from American and other international contracts, the largest ever non-fiction publishing deal at the time.

Reves was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the same year as Churchill, but neither was awarded it.

Reves received four out of 77 nominations for his work on establishing a world government, particularly through his book Anatomy of Peace (1945). However, the prize was awarded to Ralph Bunche who had recently negotiated a Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire after the previous UN negotiator Folke Bernadotte had been assassinated (see Zionist paramilitary groups). Churchill was also nominated for the Peace prize that year, as well as in 1945, when it was awarded to Cordell Hull, former US Democrat secretary of state, sometimes called the ‘Father of the United Nations’.2

Anatomy of Peace argued for world federalism, a movement that gained momentum in the late 1940s after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. A world government was proposed instead of the United Nations which was seen by some as a weak association of nation-states which was potentially as ineffective as the prior League of Nations. Other notable advocates of world federalism were H.G. Wells and Albert Einstein, with the latter describing Anatomy of Peace as ‘the political answer to the atomic bomb’.3 It became a bestseller, selling 800,000 copies in 30 languages.

Another well-known publication associated with Reves was I Paid Hitler (1941) by Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist. Thyssen helped to fund the Nazi party in the 1930s but became disillusioned with it. He dictated his memoirs shortly before being arrested in Vichy France in 1940 and was imprisoned in Germany until the end of the war. Reves wrote these up in book form. Thyssen was tried after the war by an Allied tribunal and received a fine as a lesser offender.

Reves deserves some credit for Churchill’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 by making him so widely read internationally (unusually, Churchill’s award was for his overall literary and oratorical contribution,* not for an individual publication). Before World War II, Reves syndicated Churchill’s writings to over 300 newspapers in 70 countries. In 1947, he purchased the rights to market Churchill’s memoirs in non-English languages for £80,000 (equivalent to £3.2 million today), which he did successfully around the world. This provided Reves with some of the funding for his French Riviera villa La Pausa, where Churchill enjoyed generous hospitality.

* The citation was ‘for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’: Nobel Prize, ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953’, The Nobel Prize

Reves’s partner from 1948 was Wendy Russell, a Texan model whom Winston adored.

Wyn-Nelle (later ‘Wendy’) Russell was 12 years younger than Reves, born in north-eastern Texas. Her first marriage was at age 17, her second at 23 and third (to Reves) at 47, although they had been together since she was 31. Her first marriage produced her only child, Arnold Schroeder. She was a well-known model during the 1940s in New York and Paris and dated actor Cary Grant, businessman Howard Hughes and actor Errol Flynn.

Although Clementine stayed at La Pausa very occasionally, she did her best to avoid it. She was not fond of Wendy (or ‘Windy’, as she apparently referred to her), at least partly because of Winston’s fascination with her. He loved her vibrancy and attention. ‘I’d call him “sweetheart” or “darling”’, she said in a BBC interview. ‘I could grab his head and hold it close to me when he was unhappy and say: “Don’t be sad, baby.”’4

In around 1959, socialite Daisy Fellowes had lunch with Churchill and others at a Monaco villa. Daisy was an heiress of some of the Singer sewing machine fortune and married Reginald Fellowes, Churchill’s first cousin once removed. She had once tried to seduce Churchill (see Maxine Elliott). During the meal, Churchill seemed to doze off at the table and Daisy said, ‘What a pity that so great a man should end his life in the company of Onassis and Wendy Reves’. One of Churchill’s eyes opened and he said, ‘Daisy, Wendy Reves is something that you will never be. She is young, she is beautiful and she is kind.’5 Then his eye closed again. 

Noël Coward, who visited La Pausa in the 1950s, asserted that Churchill was ‘absolutely obsessed with a senile passion’6 for Wendy, wobbling around after her. This was dismissed as ‘spiteful’7 by Churchill’s assistant Anthony Montague Browne and was perhaps the result of Churchill’s blocking of Coward’s knighthood in 1942, although the opposition may have come from his cabinet rather than himself. Also, Churchill may have restricted Coward’s intelligence role during World War II (his handler in the USA was seemingly Cary Grant) in favour of entertaining the public and troops. Coward was eventually knighted in 1969.

Churchill and his entourage stayed more than 13 months in 11 visits to Reves’s villa near Monaco in the 1950s.

La Pausa was designed and built by Coco Chanel in 1929-30 on a plot of land bought for her by Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. Emery Reves purchased it in 1953, together with many of its contents, including Chanel’s library. Churchill spent around a third of each year in 1956 to 1958 there, where he wrote some of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58). Other visitors included former monarch the Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII), statesmen General Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, Prince Rainier III of Monaco and actress Greta Garbo.

The Reves put a floor of La Pausa at Churchill’s disposal when he visited and ensured that all his social, business and culinary wishes were met. One of Churchill’s entourage was Toby, a blue budgie, who would hop and fly around the room while Churchill was working. In the Reves’s collection at the Dallas Museum of Art is a first edition of Churchill’s English-Speaking Peoples with peck-marks on it. It is signed ‘To Wendy from Winston and Toby’.8

Churchill delighted in the relaxed atmosphere, calling it ‘Pausaland’. He enjoyed painting local vistas and Reves took it upon himself to try, with some success, to broaden Churchill’s musical interests from military marches and music hall songs to classical music, particularly Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven.

The social invitations and even some of the accoutrements were customised for Churchill, including two drinking glasses inscribed ‘WSC at Pausaland’, a Limoges china breakfast set inscribed ‘WSC’, and a cigar case by Van Cleef and Arpels with miniature replicas of the covers of his six-volume Second World War.

One of the Second World War titles was inspired by Reves, a trusted reviewer of Churchill’s drafts. Churchill called his first volume The Downward Path, which Reves said was discouraging and instead proposed Gathering Clouds, The Gathering Story, or The Brooding Storm. Churchill created a blend, The Gathering Storm, now also the title of a 2002 television movie featuring Albert Finney as Churchill.

The Churchill-Reves relationship became very strained after the Reves were ‘uninvited’ from a cruise on Onassis’s yacht.

Aristotle Onassis invited Winston and Clementine on a Caribbean cruise in September 1958, leaving from Monaco. He asked Churchill for a guest list but Churchill gave him free rein and Onassis invited the Reves. Knowing that Clementine would therefore refuse to join, Churchill asked Onassis to withdraw the invitation, which he did.

After staying at Onassis’s Hôtel de Paris in Monaco in January 1960, instead of at La Pausa, Churchill telegraphed Reves in the summer, asking to stay with him in the autumn. He received a long, pained reply from Reves who said he could not invite Churchill, partly because of a trip to New York, but more pointedly: ‘You cannot imagine how shocked we were when two years ago we suddenly remarked that all kinds of intrigues started destroying this friendship’.9 He referred to the onset of severe depression for Wendy, saying, ‘I am fully aware that all this was not intended, and that you were a victim, perhaps even more than we were.’10

Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins speculates that the ‘intrigues’ may have included Clementine’s suspicion that the Reves were using Churchill for their own publicity, and her dislike of the Riviera gossip about Churchill’s obsession with Wendy, spread particularly by Daisy Fellowes. Reves may also have been hurt by Churchill’s change of host, later saying, ‘I never liked Onassis’.11

Churchill decided not to reply but Clementine wrote to Wendy a month later, saying she did not think it would help to debate Emery’s words and assuring her of the absence of intrigues and thanking her for her hospitality.

There was no proper reconciliation, even though Winston and Emery stayed in touch and met occasionally. Two years after the falling out, Emery wrote to Winston, saying, ‘How childish and unnecessary all those intrigues were, how easy it would have been to maintain our beautiful relationship.’12

The Reves were not invited to Winston’s funeral service in 1965, which added to Wendy’s lingering resentment, later saying that ‘We were in London on the day Sir Winston was buried. We had to watch the funeral on TV at our hotel room.’13

Some of La Pausa has been recreated at the Dallas Museum of Art to display the Reves’s art collection.

Emery died in 1981 and Wendy devoted herself to philanthropy, including bequeathing their art collection in 1985 to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it is displayed in a re-creation of six La Pausa rooms. It consists of 1400 objects including eight paintings by Renoir, four by Cézanne and three by van Gogh. There are also four by Churchill: three landscapes of the Riviera and a still life.

The collection has one Monet, Le Pont Neuf (1871). Reves briefly owned another Monet, Pont de Londres (Charing Cross Bridge, London) (1902), as a gift for Churchill. He bought it from a Parisian private owner in 1949, then checked with Tate director John Rothenstein whether it was of sufficient standard to hang in the Tate. Rothenstein readily affirmed this, declaring it to be a masterpiece. Reves wrote to Churchill, ‘if you do not like it you can always give it to the Tate. […] Please accept it as a very small token of my gratitude for your friendship, which has been for so many years my greatest pride.’14 It is now hanging in the drawing room at Chartwell.

The collection also includes portraits of Emery and Wendy by Graham Sutherland, who lived nearby for several months a year. The Reves did not like his portrait of Emery, which had little colour, indicating what Sutherland perceived as Emery’s air of melancholy. It was allowed to survive, unlike Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill (see Paul Maze). Wendy liked her own portrait, saying, ‘I had been expecting to look like an old bag; you have made me young.’15

Wendy died in 2007. In 2011, her son Arnold Schroeder filed a lawsuit against the Dallas Museum of Art, alleging that she was a chronic alcoholic who had been duped into donating her art collection, but this was dismissed. Schroeder’s legal action in France was also rejected.

Another major donation by Wendy was for an international studies centre at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Emery and Wendy are both buried in the college cemetery. La Pausa fell into disrepair but was bought by the House of Chanel in 2015 and has been renovated (see Coco Chanel).

3. Biographical summary

OccupationWriter, publisher and literary agent
CountryHungary, UK (naturalised 1940)
CareerFounded Cooperation Publishing Service in Berlin (1930). Fled to Paris (1933) Began working relationship with Churchill (1937). Fled to England (1940). Published Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler (1941). Established publishing company in New York (1941). Wrote Anatomy of Peace (1945). Nominated for Nobel Prize for Peace (1950).
Born1904 in Bácsföldvár, Austro-Hungary (30 years younger than Churchill); birth name Imre Révész
FatherSimon Révész, wood and grain merchant; replaced his Jewish surname Rosenbaum to be able to gain government contracts
MotherGizela
Siblings–
EducationSchooling in Budapest. Universities of Berlin and Sorbonne, Paris (both incomplete); University of Zurich (political economy, 1926)
SpouseWyn-Nelle ‘Wendy’ Russell (1916-2007), m. 1964 until his death in 1981; American model, born in Hallsville, Texas; Emery was her 3rd husband after Al Schroeder, army officer, and Paul Baron, pianist and conductor
RelationshipsWendy Russell from 1948
ChildrenStepson Arnold by Wendy and first husband Al Schroeder
Died1981 in hospital, Menton, France (16 years after Churchill)
BuriedCollege of William and Mary Cemetery, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
Chartwell 
Other Club–
Nickname 
Height 

4. See also

French Riviera

Churchill’s other publishers

UK wartime propaganda in USA

Churchill controversies

  • Financial affairs

5. Further reading

Reves and Churchill

La Pausa and the French Riviera

  • de Courcy, Anne, Chanel’s Riviera: Life, Love and the Struggle for Survival on the Côte d’Azur, 1930–1944 (Orion, 2019)
  • Lovell, Mary S., The Riviera Set: 1920-1960: The Golden Years of Glamour and Excess (Little, Brown, 2016)
  • Smith, Nancy, Churchill on the Riviera: Winston Churchill, Wendy Reves and the Villa La Pausa Built by Coco Chanel (Biblio Publishing, 2017)

The Nobel Prize

Collections

Miscellaneous

6. References

1. Winston S. Churchill and Emery Reves, Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964, ed. by Martin Gilbert (University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 266.

2. Nobel Prize, ‘Cordell Hull – Facts’, The Nobel Prize.

3. Telegraph, ‘Obituaries: Wendy Reves’, Telegraph, 2007.

4. Frank Shatz, ‘Churchill and Reves: A Breach in Friendship’, The International Churchill Society, 2010.

5. Robert J.G. Boothby, Boothby: Recollections of a Rebel (Hutchinson, 1978), p. 65.

6. Telegraph.

7. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (Cassell, 1995), p. 218.

8. Telegraph.

9. Churchill and Reves, p. 385.

10. Churchill and Reves, p. 386.

11. Shatz.

12. Churchill and Reves, p. [000].

13. Shatz.

14. Martin Bailey, ‘Revealed: How a US Collector Gave Churchill a Monet the Tate Wanted’, The Art Newspaper, 2007

15. Telegraph.