Femmes Fatales

By Gina Mallet

Winston Churchill was born 101 years ago--under something of a cloud.

Cynics noted that his parents had been married only seven months. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a flaneur.

As for Winston's mama, Jennie Jerome, she was that peculiarly erotic species, an American. Brooklyn-born Jennie had already caught the Prince of Wales' cruising eye. As Randolph reached for political power, the Prince--and other men--reached for Jennie. Yet when it became apparent that Randolph had contracted syphilis, the prodigious Jen nie abandoned her great love (an Austrian diplomat) to take her mad hus band round the world. She outlived him by 26 love-filled years and married not one but two men as young as her son Winston. When she was dying in great pain, she stopped to wonder: "Is this punishment for living life the way I wanted and not the way others wanted me to?"

Considering these biographical riches, Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (PBS, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) the seven-part series that starts this week on 200 PBS stations, should be a romp. Alas, this English production has been authorized by the family. Raciness is sacrificed to discretion. Lee Remick reduces Jennie to a bright, transparent coquette. There is no hint of Lady Randolph's unpredictable passions or the fatal allure that caused eminent Edwardians to lose their heads. The liveliest scenes are domestic:

Jennie tangling with her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Kempson), who has the family's fortune and all of its nastiness; Jennie wrangling with her disgruntled son Winston (Warren Clarke) over the accounts. Both Churchills, it seems, outdid each other in extravagance and a driving, restless ambition.

Winston gagged over his mother's unconventionality. He choked over women's suffrage. After a rowdy demonstration outside Parliament, he espied a suffragette and shouted, "Drive that woman away!" although he knew very well who she was; she had been his dinner hostess on frequent occasions. But this was a mere ungallantry. Churchill and his colleagues in the governing Liberal Party were so enraged at the suffragettes that they embarked on a vindictive antifeminist campaign. An epic struggle ensued.

Bombings and Trashings. That conflict is recounted with harrowing accuracy in Shoulder to Shoulder (PBS Masterpiece Theatre, Sunday, 9 p.m. E.S.T.), a six-part series that began this week. If there is a television aesthetic, the BBC comes close to fulfilling it in Shoulder, a show that could have easily degenerated into agitprop; instead it is made a continually probing revelation of period and character. Led by a beautiful, red-haired widow, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the suffragettes endured ridicule, torture and repeated jailings; several of them were killed. The angriest went underground, accelerating their demands with bombings and trashings. Perhaps fortunately for both sides, World War I broke out. Mrs. Pankhurst wasted no time in exchanging militancy for the more politically rewarding role as a leader of women war workers. Sure enough, by war's end in 1918, a somewhat shamefaced government gave women over 30 the vote (two years before most American women received it).

Surprisingly, the activists were not exceptional women to begin with. Mrs. Pankhurst, it is true, came from the radical city of Manchester, where, as a child, she had demonstrated against slavery. But she and her daughters were exactly the kind of high-minded, humorless people who under other circumstances would have been pillars of empire. The movement transformed them: Emmeline (Sian Phillips) revealed a gift for fiery oratory and martyrdom; Christabel (Patricia Quinn) became a genius of strategy; Sylvia (Angela Down) provided the movement's heart and integrity.

Unlike today's women's libbers, the suffragettes were an isolated elite. Idealistic socialists for the most part, they believed the vote was enough to free them from second-class citizenship.

Women now know better; a thicket of prejudice and privilege remains. Christabel, however, was a portent. As she disentangled herself from the traditional female role, her independence often appeared wayward, willful and puzzling.

It was Sylvia who discerned why: "When you're looking at Christabel, you're look ing at an emancipated woman."

It is unfair to single out one per former in what is a superlative cast.

Yet as the invalid spinster Lady Constance Lytton, Judy Parfitt provides the uncanniest sense of the past recaptured.

When Constance goes to prison under an assumed name--in order to be treated like her commoner sisters--she no longer seems a historical figure but a flesh-and-blood participant in that sad, violent, wholly romanticized period mislabeled the good old days, when men were men and women were voteless.

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