Clare Sheridan, Sculptor, Writer, Shocked Britons

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32315, 5 June 1970, Page 18

Clare Sheridan, Sculptor, Writer, Shocked Britons

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

LONDON, June 3.

Clare Consuelo Sheridan, sculptor, novelist and journalist and a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, died on Sunday in Sussex. She was 84 years old, the New York Times News Service reports.

Mrs Sheridan was the widow of Wilfred Sheridan, who was killed during the First World War. She is survived by a daughter, Margaret, Comtesse de Renevi lie.

Sculptor, traveller, writer and feminist, Mrs Sheridan managed to shock her proper family and many proper Britons in the 1920 s and 1930 s by her indiscretions in print and in deed.

The fetchingly beautiful granddaughter of Leonard Jerome and cousin to Winston Churchill created her first public sensation in 1920 when she travelled from London to Moscow with Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the Soviet leaders, to sculpture busts of Trotsky and Lenin. Trotsky, she recalled, urged her to tell Europe that when

he kissed her he didn’t bite. Later, after visiting the United States and writing a rather scornful account of the country, she was hired by the “New York World” as a European correspondent. In that capacity she interviewed Benito Mussolini (he bolted the door and treated her, she said, more as friend than a journalist), Mustapa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey. Primo de Riveria, dictator of Spain, James Joyce (she was among the first to grasp the significance of “Ulysses,”) Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, among others. She wrote a long article on Charlie Chaplin after camping with him in California, travelled the Sahara by pamel, did a bust of Mahatma Gandhi, wrote and extraordini arily candid autobiography ■called “Naked Truth,” joined the Roman Catholic Church, lived in an oasis in Algeria, and sculptured religious statues in wood as “ a substitute for prayer, a substitute too for tears.” Her bizarre life in the 'twenties was one of the sources of S. N. Behrman’s comedy, “Biography,” which opened in New York in 1932 and starred Ina Claire.

The daughter of Moreton Frewen and Clara Jerome, the eldest of the three celebrated Jerome sisters, was born in London on September 9, 1885. Jennie Jerome was married to Lord Randolph Churchill and was the mother of Winston, and Leonie, the youngest, was married to John Les-j lie and was the mother ofShane Leslie, the Irish writer.! In 1910 Clare Jerome married Wilfred Sheridan, the great-great-grandson of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the eighteenth century dramatist. He was killed in 1915, leaving his wife with a son, Richard (who died in 1937), and a daughter. Without much money, Mrs Sheridan studied sculpture at the South Kensington College of Art under John Tweed. Her talent was encouraged by Lord Birkenhead and by Churchill. The level of her art was considered by English critics to be quite high, and the level of her independence even higher, so she was not astonished by her invitation toMoscow in 1920. There she lived in the Kremlin for two months and was hospitably treated by her hosts. The Soviet Government acquired her busts of Lenin and Trotsky and other leaders.

Back in London, she pub-

lished her Soviet diary, which ran in five instalments in the “New York Times” in November, 1920. . Her intimate style and clarity of her pen portraits commended her to the “World” for which she covered the Irish civil war and Turco-Greek war, in adIdition to interviewing statesmen and celebrities.