The glamorous diplomat Pamela Harriman was so cathected to men, men, men that she wouldn’t even tell her own story without one.
It was 1991, late in Harriman’s fascinating career, which began as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law and confidante after a brief stint in London’s Foreign Office, brought her close to presidents of both parties and ended with the U.S. ambassadorship to France. Hers was a powder-puff version of soft power, liberally applied.
Doris Kearns Goodwin was angling to do her biography. Sally Bedell Smith was also pursuing the project. Instead Harriman chose to collaborate with Christopher Ogden, a Yalie and Time magazine stalwart who’d written a previous book on Margaret Thatcher, one of her heroines.
She sat for 50 hours of interviews, the journalist Sonia Purnell reports in a rigorous but rollicking new book, “Kingmaker,” and gave Ogden a key to her house on N Street in Georgetown. There she had regularly swum in the nude, and hung a famous Cecil Beaton portrait of herself along with works by Degas, Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh.
Then Harriman got cold feet, eventually paying John F. Kennedy’s lawyer some $3 million to kill the project — instead of the $300,000 Ogden had requested. (Money was never her strong suit.) He proceeded anyway, with the unauthorized “Life of the Party,” as did Smith with “Reflected Glory,” and neither too kindly.
Ogden died two years ago, and along with the massive Harriman archive at the Library of Congress, which took until 2018 to process fully, Purnell got access to all the material her predecessor had agreed not to use.
This rich trove would be reason alone to revisit the woman variously called Spam, “that redheaded tart” and — by Leland Hayward, her second husband — La Bouche, for her skill at fellatio.
But new mores have also occasioned a fresh perspective. It might be said now that this woman with many high-profile lovers was “slut-shamed,” and that her high “body count” is, while relevant to her accomplishments, no more deserving of negative judgment than that of her prominent male partners.
Harriman was born Pamela Beryl Digby in 1920 to a cash-strapped English baron, Kenny Digby, and his wife, Pansy. Sailing back to London from Melbourne, Australia, where her father had taken a job as military secretary, small Pamela went for “walkies” with the ship’s mustachioed captain, winning a silver napkin ring for “best baby on board” even though she flung other children’s toys into the sea.
Her education was mostly in domestic science, and her debut in 1938 marred by cruelty about her weight — Kennedy’s sister Kick, who became a friend, called her “a fat, stupid little butter ball” in a letter to him — and a paucity of sequins. The historical backdrop was nothing less than Hitler’s Anschluss. Some doubted that Pamela had actually met the Nazi dictator for tea through their mutual friend, Unity Mitford, during a visit to Munich, but she dined out on being underwhelmed by him for decades.
The greater villain of Harriman’s story is her first husband, Randolph Churchill, a violent boozer and gambler who wed her explicitly to bear him a son and was in bed with another woman while she fulfilled that promise. (When she went outside the marriage, he called her a “whore.”)
His statesman father, however, adored her: admiring her discretion and eagerness to learn, admitting her to his innermost “padlock” circle of trust. He and a deputy, Max Beaverbrook, enlisted her to charm Charles de Gaulle and most fatefully the married, almost-30-years-older W. Averell Harriman, then a special envoy overseeing the Lend-Lease program that preceded America’s entrance into World War II. She quickly tumbled into his arms during an air raid.
They were not both free to marry each other until 1971, and Harriman was hardly Miss Havisham during that time, as has been documented ad titillationem. Her famous lovers included the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (who “smoked throughout,” Purnell writes); Prince Aly Khan (who taught her the “Egyptian wave,” which involved flexing her “intimate muscles” during intercourse); and the Fiat playboy Gianni Agnelli, who bought her jewels so big they caused bruises.
Her union with Hayward, the Hollywood macher and producer of “The Sound of Music,” maddened his children, especially his daughter Brooke, who vilified her in the memoir “Haywire” and seemed to celebrate Harriman’s death in 1997: “She … tortured me for 37 years. Thank God I outlive her.”
But Purnell seeks nobly to highlight Harriman’s involvement in public as well as private affairs. “The auburn alluring Pam Churchill,” as one society columnist called her, was instrumental in building the Special Relationship between England and the United States during the Cold War. Kept at arm’s length by the Kennedy boys’ club, she roared back — despite ambivalence about feminism — to support Bella Abzug over Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and become a major player in the Democratic Party, with her PamPAC and Issues Evenings, held in the elegant environs joked to be “Pamelot.”
The majority of biographies lose steam as the subject ages; “Kingmaker” gets a strong second wind with Harriman’s early talent spotting of Bill Clinton, among the many muckety-mucks interviewed for “Kingmaker.” She “lived as a permanent self-improvement project,” he tells Purnell. Or as the journalist and P.R. man Tex McCrary once put it: “a catalyst on a hot tin roof.”
If Purnell’s prose sometimes lapses into breathlessness, who can blame her? Like her beloved horses, Harriman went through her days at full gallop, and it would be hard for even the most devoted stable mistress to keep up.
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