A Lion's Constitution

On a fortnight's vacation in Monte Carlo, Sir Winston Churchill, 87, divided his time between painting and gambling, sun and sightseeing. Mornings he sat before his canvas in a ninth-floor studio of the Hotel de Paris with a superb view of the Riviera coast and the Monaco yacht basin. Afternoons, he drove up in the hills of the Alpes Maritimes. Nights, Sir Winston sat for hours at a roulette table in the Monte Carlo Casino, as oblivious of the gawping tourists as an old but uncaged lion. Walking painfully, but refusing any helping hand, Churchill invariably carried his own chips to the cashier. More often than not, he left the casino a winner.

This deeply satisfying routine was upset one morning last week. Getting out of bed at 6 a.m., Winston Churchill slipped and fell, breaking his left thighbone. Considering Churchill's age, the accident was alarming.

Brutal Beating. Hours later, he was in Monaco's Princess Grace hospital having the bone set by a French surgeon, Dr. Charles Chatelain, and his leg encased in a plaster cast. The doctor said that the operation "went very well," and hospital authorities said his constitution is "remarkable--quite Churchillian." A later report had it that the patient was "quite comfortable, but a bit crotchety." Churchill dined on cold chicken, then smoked a fat cigar with his habitual glass of brandy.

Much of Churchill's accident-prone life is a monument to the healing properties of brandy and tobacco. His disasters started as early as birth, when his U.S.-born mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, seven months pregnant, felt labor pains in the middle of a ball at Blenheim Palace. Attendants were unable to rush her to a bedroom, and Winston made a spectacular entrance in a nearby cloakroom.

As a schoolboy, he developed double pneumonia and nearly died, weakened by brutal beatings from his schoolmaster. At 18, falling from a bridge, Churchill ruptured a kidney and was unconscious for three days; six years later, he dislocated his shoulder falling down a flight of stairs in India.

In 1919, Churchill walked away from a plane crash at London's Croydon airport. At 48, he surrendered his appendix to a surgeon's knife and, nine years later in the U.S., lost a decision to a Manhattan taxicab, which knocked him down and broke some Churchillian bones. Since his 70th birthday, the ailments have come thick and fast: a hernia operation in 1947, a stroke in 1953 and, two years ago, a broken bone in his back from a fall in his London home. On that occasion, Churchill celebrated his 86th birthday with cigars and--in place of brandy--a bottle of champagne.

Famous V. From Princess Grace hospital, Churchill was carried on a stretcher to Nice airport, and he said jokingly to an R.A.F officer, "There's whisky and soda aboard that plane for me." Arriving at London about two hours later, Churchill had a smile for the cheering airport crowd, and raised his right hand in the famous "V" salute. An ambulance hustled him to Middlesex Hospital, where Churchill, scorning Britain's free National Health Service, checked into a $115-a-week room. The hospital superintendent established a new high in bureaucratic fatuity by telling newsmen that it had not been easy to find Sir Winston a room "at such short notice,'' since "there is a tremendous pressure on beds."

Shortly after arrival, Sir Winston spent two hours in the operating room while a team of surgeons opened his hip and inserted a pin in the fracture. At week's end the aged, crippled lion was reported "comfortable'' and "sleeping peacefully."

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