Promptly after she was appointed ambassador to France in 1993 by grateful former protégé President Bill Clinton, Pamela Harriman was the subject of not one, but two censorious biographies. The gist of both: The grande dame of the Democratic Party had—heaven forfend—a past. She married her first husband at age 19 to get ahead, her second to establish a foothold in America, and her third (and final) to guarantee herself fabulous wealth and influence. Along the way, she had affairs with (this is just a sampling) Edward R. Murrow, Jock Whitney, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and Élie de Rothschild.
Thirty years have passed—an excellent cooling-off period—and a new life of Harriman has been published, free of the disdainful spirit of both previous efforts. It’s a pleasure to turn to Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Sonia Purnell, author previously of a stellar biography of Harriman’s first mother-in-law, Clementine Churchill, traces Harriman’s evolution as a power player without skimping on juicy details. Casting Harriman as neither villain nor victim, Purnell proposes that for a jolly, pudgy, uneducated teenage daughter of a cash-poor English baron to ascend as Pamela did is nothing short of astounding—and evidence of a steel will, a keen intelligence, and unflagging ambition. It goes without saying that a man with similar traits would be celebrated.
Purnell is at pains to point out—and produces the receipts—that Harriman did much good with the access she garnered from chronic bed-hopping. Her influence was especially useful during the grim months Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and Prime Minister Winston Churchill scrambled furiously to secure America’s aid. The former Pamela Digby entered Churchill’s circle in October 1939, marrying his only son, Randolph. A serial philanderer, a drunk, a braggart whom fellow officers disdained, Randolph felt compelled to sire a male heir before going off to war. But prospective brides steered clear of him. For her part, Pamela was not engaged after the conclusion of her debut London season and was aching to escape the drafty family pile in remotest Dorset. Her marriage to Randolph, undertaken after a two-week acquaintanceship, was never happy, although a baby boy, Winston, entered the world a year later. On that night, Randolph couldn’t be found; he was in bed with another woman. Soon afterward, he left for Egypt to join the fight against Rommel. Meanwhile, the Blitz raged in London, and the prime minister and his wife discovered their daughter-in-law to be not only cheerful and energetic, but catnip to older men. Pamela was, with her puppy fat burned off, a “luscious little piece,” one Churchill cousin remembered. She exerted power “through a rare cocktail of flattering attention, smoldering sex appeal, and an impressive grasp of geopolitics,” Purnell writes. (Living with the Churchills provided a crash course in history and world affairs—her scant schooling had ended at age 16 with a diploma in domestic science.)
When Union Pacific railroad scion W. Averell Harriman arrived in London without his wife to head up America’s Lend-Lease military-aid program, all the Churchills rolled out the red carpet. His affair with the curvaceous, milky skinned Pamela commenced soon afterward, at the Dorchester Hotel, on a night of the worst Luftwaffe raid to date, “while the building quivered…and shrapnel rattled down onto the streets,” Purnell writes. The next morning, the lovers were spotted hand in hand crossing Horse Guards Parade, touring the destruction. Game on.
For the rest of Averell’s life, Pamela, who became his third wife decades later, remained reluctant to acknowledge how their wartime romance had a transactional dimension. But scholarly work done since her death backs up Purnell’s contention that Mrs. Randolph Churchill, then 20, played a key role in converting the 49-year-old Harriman into a zealous pro-Britain advocate. She not only helped her lover convey to the White House Churchill’s urgent needs, including allowing British warships to be repaired in American ports, but she also simultaneously trawled for useful information to pass on to her father-in-law. Never had pillow talk meant so much to so many.
Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war on the Allied side, and Harriman was appointed American ambassador to Russia. Upon leaving for Moscow, he made clear to Pamela that he never intended to divorce his wife. But Pamela had new opportunities to console her. Randolph, back from the Middle East, was enraged after hearing of her adultery and his parents’ complicity. The couple agreed to split, a choice the prime minister acceded to graciously, as he continued to benefit from Pamela’s amorous entanglements. When CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow took to the airwaves to explain Britain to the American public, she was on hand to help shape the message. She seduced Major General Fred Anderson, commander of the American bombing force, and was at the same time involved with British Air Staff chief Charles Portal. Those liaisons enabled her to act as a go-between for both airmen and Downing Street as the conflict over daylight bombing of Germany (the American preference) versus nighttime raids (the British strategy) was hashed out.
Inevitably, peacetime was a letdown, Purnell notes, and Pamela Churchill drifted at first. Murrow promised marriage and then reneged. She considered standing for Parliament, but hobnobbing with Murrow and other liberal Americans made her doubt her Tory allegiance. Seeking a break from austere postwar London (and someone to support her and her young son), she decamped to Paris. There she frolicked first with the ur-playboy, Prince Aly Khan, but they were never exclusive. At the Prince’s home in Cap d’Ail in summer 1948, she met and fell for Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli. A former Fascist officer whose grandfather had collaborated with the German and Italian governments during the war, Agnelli “urgently needed an entrée to world leaders and to learn to operate at their level at a time when the Allies were weighing whether Fiat should be confiscated from the family permanently,” Purnell writes. Pamela, in exchange for living in splendor, smoothed out Agnelli’s rough edges and introduced this dashing and lusty young man to all the right people. She converted to Catholicism, assuming they would marry. But Gianni’s three sisters closed ranks against her—“too bossy,” they declared—and pushed him toward a vapid Italian aristocrat called Princess Marella Caracciola di Castagneto. In the end, Pamela gave up the fight, weary of Gianni’s love for partying, cocaine, and fast cars. He wept when they parted and, Purnell says, phoned her at every morning at seven for the rest of her life.
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Leland Hayward, a Broadway and Hollywood producer and agent, was an unlikely choice for husband number two, as he had nothing to do with politics, Pamela’s enduring interest. But he swept her off her feet with his American enthusiasm. Also, she recalled, “there was something very vulnerable about [him] that attracted me enormously.” At nearly 40, having just survived a bout of cancer, she wanted stability and the chance to demonstrate that she could be as good a wife as she had been a mistress.
Hayward, however, proved to be both erratic and unreliable, plus a poor earner at the end of his career. Her relationship with his children, especially his daughter Brooke, descended into acrimony after his death from a stroke in March 1971. Pamela found herself practically broke. Worst of all, as Purnell writes, “after a decade in America, she was further away from politics and power than ever.”
Enter the ghost of passion past: Averell Harriman, now 79, who had just a few months previously lost his long-suffering wife, Marie. The former lovers met again at a dinner party at Katharine Graham’s house in Washington, and by the autumn of 1971 they were engaged. Bandleader Peter Duchin, who lived at Harriman’s house over that summer, switched on the light of a screened porch late one evening, to discover the couple canoodling on the sofa, their clothes in disarray. “Jesus wept,” Averell yelled, and Duchin bolted. “Averell wasn’t bothered by her past,” a friend observed later. “He had been part of it.”
Harriman, although gradually becoming more deaf and ornery as years passed, anchored his new wife in the life she most wanted, one of luxury and high station. At Harriman’s mansion on N Street in Georgetown, she had her initials—PCH, as she now readopted the Churchill name—stamped everywhere, from matchbooks to stationery to towels and sheets. A firm Democrat like her husband, who had been a lackluster governor of New York, Pamela nonetheless cultivated movers and shakers of all stripes: Henry Kissinger had a key to the garden gate so he could swim in the Harriman pool whenever he desired.
The last third of Purnell’s book, covering the D.C.-doyenne years, hasn’t quite the same pizazz of earlier chapters. Yet the author deftly recounts the 1981 founding of the Harriman couple’s political action committee, called Democrats for the Eighties, which was immediately and forever better known as PamPAC. And Pamela Harriman’s term as ambassador in Paris, from 1993 to 1997—especially her role in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day and in the diplomatic negotiations that culminated in the NATO bombing operations against the Bosnian Serbs in September 1995—is vividly described. That she had a role in both the bombing of Hitler’s Germany and these Serbian strongholds speaks to the unparalleled and unlikely scope of PCH’s life.
And yet, despite all her success, Pamela Harriman’s last years were hard. Having trusted her husband’s chosen financial advisers, she was sued by her Harriman stepchildren for mismanagement and fraud when their huge trust funds shrank radically. Although she showered money and lavish gifts on her own son, Winston, he continued to resent her for her inattentive mothering during his childhood. The publication of the two biographies, by Sally Bedell Smith and Christopher Ogden, along with the disdain steadily dished out by journalists, especially at the Washington Post and the New Republic, distressed her. Pamela was extraordinarily proud of her granddaughter Marina, who qualified as a London barrister. Purnell writes: “When asked if she would lead an independent life like Marina if she were starting out now, the blue eyes blazed: ‘Would I? Would I?’ she responded, making it very clear she would.”
She had already told President Clinton she didn’t have the stamina to continue in the Paris job for his second term when, a month shy of her 77th birthday in 1997, Pamela died from a cerebral hemorrhage. She suffered it while swimming her daily laps in the pool at the Hotel Ritz.
Photo: Photo/Dennis Cook
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