She was 21, living in a bombed London hotel, and married to Winston Churchill's son. By the time she died in Paris in 1997 as the American ambassador to France, she had been called many things: a courtesan, a first lady of the Democratic Party, and a great public servant.
Pamela Harriman’s life moved from the center of one war to the center of American politics, with several wealthy marriages in between was born Pamela Digby in England in 1920, the eldest of four children. Her father was the 11th Baron Digby, a decorated officer in the First World War. The family had a large house in Dorset and a title, but not much ready cash.
At 19, she met Randolph Churchill on a blind date. He was loud, clever, and a heavy drinker. He proposed that first evening, and they were married in October 1939. On their wedding night, he read aloud to her from Gibbons’s history of the fall of Rome.
Her son, named Winston after his grandfather, was born at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, in October 1940. Her husband was often away, and by 1941 he was in the Middle East. A gambling debt of £3,000 from a troop ship voyage came back to her to handle-word she sold her wedding presents and jewelry, took a job at the Ministry of Supply, and moved into a small, cheap room at the Dorchester Hotel.
The Dorchester was built of reinforced concrete serious people reckoned it was safer than most of London. That spring, an American named Averell Harriman arrived. He was 49, rich from his father’s railroads, handsome, and married. Roosevelt had sent him to London to keep American supplies moving under Lend-Lease. He also took rooms at the Dorchester.
Her biographers place the start of their affair there on a night of heavy bombing in April 1941. Her husband was away, and she was still paying off his gambling. She would eventually marry Harriman, but it took 30 years and another husband in between.
In the summer of 1941, Randolph wrote to her from Cairo, joking that he feared he had a serious rival. He had no idea. Harriman’s wife was in New York, but his daughter Kathleen was in London. She and Pamela became close friends, spending weekends together at Chequers. Harriman reportedly paid for a flat for Pamela and gave her an allowance, all handled quietly.
Some later accounts claimed she was a close adviser to Churchill on wartime strategy. That seems unlikely. What she did was quieter. She was the young woman in the room when the Americans came, making sure the important ones had somewhere pleasant to be on a Saturday night and somebody who was glad to see them.
On December 7th, 1941, she was at Chequers for dinner. Clementine Churchill was unwell, and the only women at the table were Pamela and Kathleen Harriman. The prime minister was tired and depressed, saying little. Just before 9, a portable radio was brought in. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Churchill slammed the radio shut and got up, heading for the door to declare war on Japan. The American ambassador told him he couldn’t do that on the strength of a radio bulletin. Churchill called the White House instead. The next day, Britain declared war on Japan a few hours ahead of the United States.
For Pamela, the attack changed everything. The Americans stopped being guests and became allies. Harriman mattered more than ever, and so, by extension, did the young woman he was sleeping with.
Randolph came home injured in the summer of 1942 and found out about the affair. It had been an open secret for more than a year. Everybody knew, including his own parents, and that seemed to hurt him most. He blamed his father for letting an affair run under his own roof because the man was useful to the war.
By November 1942, Randolph had moved out for good. The marriage had lasted three years. She kept her son and she kept the Churchill name, which opened more doors in wartime London than anything her husband could have given her.
In the autumn of 1943, Harriman was made ambassador to Moscow, and he left it to his daughter Kathleen to end things with Pamela. It was quite a thing to hand your child. The affair ran on and off until 1946.
Pamela, meanwhile, had found the first job she was obviously made for. She was running the Churchill Club, a house in the grounds of Westminster School where American officers came to meet British writers, scholars, and politicians over a drink and a talk. It was hosting, but hosting with a purpose, and she was good at it.
In the last two years of the war, she fell for Edward R. Murrow, the radio reporter who opened his broadcasts from the Blitz with “This is London.” It came close to marriage, but in November 1945, Murrow’s wife gave birth to their only son, and he ended the affair. A man chose his wife and his newborn son.
Pamela filed for divorce from Randolph in December 1945 on the grounds of desertion. The decree came through in 1946. The war that had made her useful was over, and the Americans she’d entertained were going home.
She spent the late 1940s on the other side of the Channel. In 1948, she met Gianni Agnelli, the heir to Fiat. He was 27, rich, good-looking, and restless. She learned Italian and became a Catholic. The story goes that it was serious, at least on her side.
It fell apart in August 1952 when Agnelli crashed his car and badly broke his leg. The story told in her circle was that she’d caught him with another woman earlier that night. In November 1953, Agnelli married a young Italian princess. Capote said he gave Pamela a very handsome settlement, including an apartment in Paris.
There was a spell with Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping magnate. There was a brief encounter with Baron Guy de Rothschildaren’t was the marriage she was up against, and by most accounts his wife saw her off fairly quickly.
The list of names grew long enough to be used against her. In the spring of 1957, the British ambassador’s wife refused to put her on a guest list for the Queen’s first state visit to France. “I will not have that tart in this embassy,” she said. The line got around.
By 1959, she was nearly 40, with an apartment, a wardrobe, and a great many friends, but no fortune of her own. She kept going out. That year, Babe Paley, a famous beauty, returned a favor and asked one of her closest friends whether she could borrow the friend’s husband for an evening to take Pamela Churchill to the theater.
The friend was Slim. The husband was Leland Hayward. He was 56, a Broadway producer behind *South Pacific* and *The Sound of Music*, and he’d been married four times. Slim had been his wife for about 10 years. Somebody spotted them first. Truman Capote saw Leland and Pamela in a restaurant with their heads close, and he knew what he was looking at.
That summer, Capote wrote to Slim to ask whether she knew her husband was running around with Pam Churchill. New York divided into warring camps. Babe Paley led the side against Pamela, while her sister Betsy Whitney stood up for her.
Slim told Leland it wasn’t very original of him, but she didn’t think it would go anywhere. Nobody, she believed, marries Pam Churchill. She was wrong. On May 4th, 1960, a few hours after Leland’s divorce became final, Leland and Pamela were married in Carson City, Nevada. She was 40.
The year began with a death in his family. In January 1960, Margaret Sullavan, Leland’s former wife and the mother of his three children, died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates. In October, their daughter Bridget died of an overdose too. Leland’s elder daughter, Brooke, never warmed to her stepmotheranger she became a stepmother to three children in a year of double tragedy. Brooke later wrote a bestselling memoir, *Haywire*, which came out coldly against her stepmother, and accused Pamela of hanging on to pearls that had belonged to Margaret Sullavan.
Brooke is also the source of one of the most famous lines about Pamela. When she asked her father about Pamela, his answer, as she tells it, was that this was the greatest courtesan of the 20th century. The story comes from a biography published in 1994. It is more interesting coming from Leland than anybody else because he was married to her, and he was bragging.
Leland’s health declined and he died on March 18th, 1971 at 68. Pamela turned 51 two days later. Her biographers agree that he left her very little. She had a big house in Westchester County and not much money to run it.
She got back in touch with Averell Harriman soon after. His wife of 40 years had died the previous September. Harriman’s marriage had plenty of railroad money behind it. He was 79. They were married on September 27th, 1971. She started the process of becoming an American citizen that year.
Harriman had been Truman’s Secretary of Commerce, a two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, a governor of New York, and a negotiator of the nuclear test ban treaty. He was 94 when he died on July 26th, 1986. His will left Pamela all his real estate and the bulk of everything else.
His two daughters got very little, and he explained why in writing: because he knew them to be otherwise well provided for. They had trusts set up for them, but under management, those trusts lost money badly. In September 1994, eight members of the family sued. The complaint ran to 118 pages and put the loss at about $30 million.
It accused the trustees of breaching their fiduciary obligations. One of the daughters was Kathleen, Pamela’s friend from London in 1941. A second suit, filed in Virginia, went after the trusts set up by Harriman’s will, and on those she was a trustee. It accused her of lending trust money to herself and to companies she controlled.
In May 1995, three of her paintings went to Christie’s in New York, a Picasso, a Renoir, and a Matisse, with a total close to $19 million. In October 1995, she sued the trustees herself, arguing that if she was liable, the professional managers chosen by Harriman had failed in their duty. A settlement was announced in December of that year, with terms never published.
Long before that, she had found her true calling. In December 1980, after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory, a political action committee called Democrats for the 80s was registered. Pamela chaired it for 10 years.
Its central feature was held at her house on N Street in Georgetown. Donors paid $1,000 to hear a senator, a governor, or an economist speak over dinner. The donors were buying access. A businessman could sit across from a man who might be president one day. A young congressman could meet the people who would pay for his next campaign.
The young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, became one of her regulars. In 1983, she lent the party’s House campaign committee $400,000, interest-free, which it used to build a television studio for members. In 1984, Walter Mondale carried one state. In 1988, Michael Dukakis lost 40 states. She kept going through all of it.
In 1992, she was one of the national chairs of Bill Clinton’s campaign. A single day of fundraising at her farm in Virginia brought in about $3 million. At her funeral, Clinton would say, “Today I am here in no small measure because she was there.”
In March 1993, Clinton nominated her as ambassador to France. She was 73, with no diplomatic training at all. The French had a new president, Jacques Chirac, who was reportedly totally charmed by her.
Her home was the Hôtel de Pontalba, a mansion built for a baroness from New Orleans, owned for decades by the Rothschilds, and bought by the American government in 1948. She used lunches at the residence as working meetings, bringing in French officials from the very top down to the people who actually did the work. She fought for dull things too, like upgrading the State Department’s computers.
On the evening of Monday, February 3rd, 1997, she went swimming at the health club of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. She had a stroke at the pool. She was taken to the American Hospital and never regained consciousness. She died on Wednesday afternoon, February 5th.
About 40 minutes later, Bill Clinton spoke on the south lawn of the White House. America, he said, had lost a great public servant. Three days later, at a ceremony in Paris, Jacques Chirac raised her to the highest rank of the Legion of Honor, the Grand Cross.
Her funeral was on February 13th at Washington National Cathedral. Her grandson read from the writings of his great-grandfather, Winston Churchill. Clinton gave the eulogy. She was buried beside Averell Harriman at Arden, the family estate.
Her son and his family were left facing about $12 million in estate taxesaster and more still owed to Harriman’s heirs under the settlement. That May, Sotheby’s in New York sold her things. It took three days. More than 6,000 objects went from Georgetown and Middleburg and Paris, bringing in $8.7 million. One of Harriman’s grandsons bought his grandfather’s portrait for $15,800 and brought him home.
Her papers went to the Library of Congress, about half a million items. The State Department keeps a short page on every American ambassador. Hers gives her dates in Paris and notes that she wasn’t a career diplomat. The last line reads, “Died at post on February 5th, 1997.”