In February 1997, an American president sent Air Force One to bring a coffin home from Paris. Inside lay the United States ambassador to France. The woman in that coffin had been born the daughter of an obscure English baron with more land than money. She had married the only son of Winston Churchill at nineteen, and she had buried the two husbands who came after him.
Barely a year before that state funeral, the family of the last of them had taken her to court and accused her of draining thirty million dollars from the family fortune. This is the story of Pamela Harriman. She began as a round-faced Dorset girl whom nobody thought beautiful. Born Pamela Beryl Digby on March 20, 1920, she was the eldest daughter of Edward Kenelm Digby, the eleventh Baron Digby.
The Digbys were old. Their seat was Minterne Magna in Dorset, a great house in green country their family had held for centuries. They had blood, they had acres, and they had the deep confidence of people who have never had to explain who they are. What they did not have was money.
Her childhood was the ordinary childhood of the interwar rural aristocracy, governesses in the schoolroom, horses in the stable, and a finishing school in Paris and Munich that left her fluent in French. In 1938, she curtsied before King George VI at her presentation at court. The photographs from that season show a young woman the columns politely called pretty. Honest witnesses never called her a beauty.
She was pleasant and unremarkable to look at, and that gap turned her whole life. What she had was a single extraordinary talent. She could make the man in front of her feel that he was the most fascinating and important person alive. She listened as though nothing had ever mattered more than the sentence he was speaking.
She remembered what he cared about, the horse, the deal, the grievance, and she asked about it again warmly months later. She flattered without seeming to flatter. Men as different as the photographer Cecil Beaton and, decades later, the statesman Henry Kissinger reached for the same words to describe the sensation of being for an hour the only person she could see in a crowded room. She grasped a truth most of her contemporaries never did.
The person who can hold a powerful man’s attention holds a small piece of his power, and small pieces gathered patiently over a lifetime add up to real power of one’s own. She met the only son of Winston Churchill at a dinner in the first days of the war and agreed to marry him before she knew him at all. It was early September 1939. Britain had declared war on Germany days before.
Randolph Churchill, twenty-eight, clever, loud, and looking for a wife before he went to the front, wanted an heir at once in case the war took him. They had met barely three weeks before. On October 4, 1939, they married at St. John’s Church in Smith Square, Westminster.
She was nineteen. He was the only son of the man who within the year would walk into Downing Street as prime minister. Neither of them was in love, and both of them knew it. It was a transaction dressed up as a romance, struck in the panic of a country going to war.
The name was worth more than the man, and the name was the thing she kept. The marriage made her the daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. When her son, Winston Spencer Churchill, was born on October 10, 1940, she became the mother of Churchill’s grandson. She lived within the Churchill orbit at Downing Street and at Chequers through the worst of the Blitz, at the center of the most famous household in Britain during its most desperate year.
What the public did not see was that the marriage was already a private wreck. Randolph was a heavy drinker and a compulsive gambler. He quarreled, he lectured, and above all he gambled, running up debts with a speed that frightened everyone near him and leaving them for Pamela to answer. He gave her almost nothing she could depend on except two priceless things: a son who was Churchill’s grandson and the surname Churchill.
She understood its value immediately and never once let it go. Through two later husbands and decades in Paris, New York, and Virginia, she remained Pamela Churchill. Into that gap in the spring of 1941 walked the richest and most important American in Britain. He was forty-nine, married, and had been sent by the president of the United States to keep Britain from falling.
His name was Averell Harriman, and Pamela was about to make the acquaintance that would shape the next fifty years of her life. Harriman arrived in London in March 1941, charged by Roosevelt with running Lend-Lease, the enormous American program that shipped weapons, food, and fuel to a Britain fighting alone. Winston Churchill needed him courted and kept close, because the friendship of the United States was the difference between survival and defeat. Pamela met him at a Churchill family gathering that spring.
The affair began within weeks. She was twenty-one. He was forty-nine and married to his second wife. It was an open secret at the very top of the British government, known to the people around Churchill, and it was allowed to run.
Neither Winston nor Clementine Churchill ever spoke against it. They wanted above everything good relations with the Americans, and here was a warm and useful bridge between Number 10 Downing Street and the most powerful American in London. The arithmetic of survival said do not interfere. Harriman would not stay.
In time he was moved onward into the wider machinery of the war, and the affair cooled into the long careful friendship of two people who had shared a dangerous secret. Pamela had learned in those months that closeness to a powerful man was a currency, and that she was better at earning it than almost anyone alive. When a cable arrived demanding that she cover twelve thousand dollars of her husband’s gambling losses, she did not go to her famous in-laws. She did not ask the Churchills to rescue her.
She took a paid job at the Ministry of Supply for about twelve pounds a week and began discreetly selling wedding presents and jewelry to cover a gambler’s losses while the outside world went on admiring a fairy tale. The marriage itself was finished in everything but law. Into the space where a husband should have been came a stream of the most powerful men in wartime London. There was Harriman, of course.
There was Edward R. Murrow, the great American broadcaster, who grew serious enough that he is said to have weighed leaving his wife for her. There was William Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS. There were senior American officers, envoys, and correspondents.
She was not collecting lovers. She was collecting the future, one important man at a time. When the war ended and London emptied of its glamorous strangers, the money and the glamour had gone to Paris. So she went to Paris, where the richest men in Europe were waiting.
She divorced Randolph in the years just after the war. He contested little, slid into the alcoholism that would define the rest of his life, and died in 1968. Pamela kept the name and crossed to Paris. The first of the great loves was Gianni Agnelli, the heir to Fiat, the most charming and most photographed man in Europe.
Their relationship ran for about five years, and Pamela later called it the happiest time of her whole life. In 1953, Agnelli married someone else, a settled pedigree Pamela could never offer. After Agnelli came Baron Élie de Rothschild, a partner in the family bank and the master of Château Lafite. From him she took a connoisseur’s education in wine, art, and the deep culture of old European money.
He too would not marry her. He was already married, and he stayed married. For the better part of a decade, she was the woman the greatest men in Europe adored, kept, and would not wed. The gossip of two continents began to call her the courtesan of the century.
She was approaching forty, famous in the particular way a certain kind of woman is famous, and no more secure than she had been at twenty-one. The lesson was simple and hard. From this point on, she would arrange her own position rather than wait to be granted it. In 1959, she met the American who could carry her there.
Leland Hayward was one of the most successful showmen in America, a legendary talent agent turned Broadway producer whose productions included South Pacific and The Sound of Music. On May 4, 1960, she married him at Carson City, Nevada. She was forty and performed once again the trick that defined her: the complete and convincing reinvention of herself for a new stage. The European companion of Agnelli and Rothschild vanished.
In her place appeared a New York hostess, mistress of one of the most sought-after tables in the city. The gift that had disarmed powerful men one at a time in wartime London now operated on a whole society at once. The public saw a triumphant marriage. What the private accounts describe is a marriage that grew strained as Hayward aged and his health began to fail, and an estate far less solid than the shining surface suggested.
The pattern of her whole life had not changed, only its address and its accent. She was still a woman whose security lived entirely inside a man. Hayward died on March 18, 1971. Pamela was a widow for the first time at fifty.
The estate was a disappointment dressed as a treasure, encumbered and tangled, worth far less in clear money than the life it had funded. She sold what Hayward left to settle what he owed and came out with her standing intact and her fortune once again thin. She reached back thirty years into the blackout of wartime London. Averell Harriman was a widower now.
He was nearly eighty, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party, a former governor of New York, and the heir to the Harriman railroad fortune and the private banking house of Brown Brothers Harriman. On September 27, 1971, roughly six months after Hayward’s funeral, Pamela married him. Thirty years separated the affair from the marriage. In between lay two other husbands, a decade in Europe, two great loves that came to nothing, and an entire second life on another continent.
And still, when the moment finally arrived, she closed it. The affair of the war became the marriage of her old age. She nursed Harriman devotedly through the long decline of his old age, and while she nursed him, she began to build the last and most respectable of her public selves. In 1981, with the Democratic Party out of office and out of ideas, she founded a political action committee called Democrats for the 80s.
The press nicknamed it PamPAC. In roughly its first twenty months it raised about 1. 1 million dollars and supported well over a hundred candidates. Across its whole life, it is credited with raising on the order of ten million dollars for Democratic campaigns.
When a rising Democrat named Bill Clinton began his run for the presidency, Pamela was an early and crucial backer. A single fundraiser at Middleburg in 1992 is reported to have brought in more than three million dollars for his campaign in one day. She helped broker the alliance that put Al Gore on the ticket beside him. She could not be the senator, so she became the woman the senators needed.
Her table at Middleburg sat senators, party chairmen, and the men who dreamed of the presidency. At the same time, in the private rooms of the same house, she was nursing a husband thirty years her senior. Pamela genuinely nursed Averell Harriman through the long twilight. By every account she did it with real devotion.
Whatever the world would later say about the money, the caretaking was not a performance. Harriman died in 1986 at ninety-four, leaving a fortune reported at more than sixty-six million dollars. Much of that money did not pass to Pamela outright. It ran through a web of family trusts, and over those trusts Pamela was given significant control as a trustee.
She had spent a lifetime turning access to men’s fortunes into position. Now she held the strings of one of the largest fortunes she had ever stood near. In 1994, the heirs of Averell Harriman’s first family sued Pamela Harriman. They claimed that roughly thirty million dollars of the family’s money had been squandered through poor investment decisions made by Pamela and by the financial advisers who managed the trusts on her behalf.
The codefendants included two of the most eminent men in Washington: her longtime adviser Clark Clifford, a former secretary of defense, and Paul Warnke, a former head of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Everything in the suit was an allegation. No finding of wrongdoing was ever made against Pamela Harriman. In June 1995, a tentative settlement worth about twenty million dollars was reached, then collapsed when the two codefendants declined to contribute an additional three million dollars.
It was finally settled in December 1995. The terms were kept confidential, described as a mutual redistribution of the family’s assets. Pamela did not admit wrongdoing, and none was ever found against her. The woman who had kept every ledger hidden for half a century had at the very end been made to show her books.
In 1993, President Clinton appointed Pamela Harriman the United States ambassador to France. She was seventy-three. The girl who had pawned her wedding presents in wartime London and whom the columns of two continents had called the greatest courtesan of the age moved into the American embassy in Paris. She took the job seriously.
Paris was one of the most demanding embassies America keeps, and she drew on the address book she had spent fifty years assembling. She served with real distinction in exactly the years when her late husband’s children were dragging her through the American courts. On February 4, 1997, Pamela Harriman collapsed while swimming in the pool of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, where she swam several times a week. She had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
She was taken to the American Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine and died there the following day. She was seventy-six. There was no long decline. She worked, she swam her laps in the morning, and she was gone inside two days.
President Jacques Chirac laid the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on her flag-draped coffin, reported to be the first time a female foreign diplomat had ever been given that honor. President Clinton sent Air Force One across the Atlantic to carry her body home. Her funeral was held on February 13, 1997, at Washington National Cathedral. She was buried on the Harriman estate at Arden in New York, in the ground of the very family that had one year earlier taken her to court.
Fourteen months before the coffin lay under the highest honor of France, that same woman had sat inside a legal settlement with her stepchildren, no wrongdoing found, the terms sealed, a fortune fought over and quietly rearranged. The honors were real. The lawsuit was real. They belonged to the same woman and to almost the same year of her life.
And the world, then and since, has chosen to remember the coffin and quietly forget the courtroom.