The charmed lives of Pamela Harriman
Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman Sally Beddell Smith Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996 559pp. Rp 142,200
JAKARTA (JP): At the time of her death earlier this year, Pamela Harriman had acquired the mantle of respectability that comes with old age and spectacular wealth.
Her plummy English accent and blue-blood background helped, too. In television and newspaper interviews, the naturalized U.S. citizen would drone on wistfully about her charmed childhood at a rural Dorset estate, as well as her brief stint as Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law. Americans, always suckers for the affectations of the English aristocracy, lapped up the tales and benevolently ignored the speaker's choice embellishments.
She was anointed the grand dowager of the Democratic Party in her final years. A prodigious fund-raiser, Pamela Harriman could work her wiles on the most miserly of executives, bringing in the hefty donations which revived the moribund party from the doldrums of the 1980s. She took kindly to Bill Clinton in his days as Arkansas governor and her political endorsement set him off on the road to the presidency.
She was essentially a creature of her own invention, as Sally Bedell Smith reveals in this meticulously researched and engrossing biography. This extended to striving valiantly to excise the more colorful chapters in her life. At the time of her appointment as the U.S. Ambassador to France (a token of thanks from Clinton), Harriman's notorious past as the lover of some of this century's most important men had been carefully sanitized.
"I knew him," was her standard terse response to inquiries about her relationships with men such as automaker Gianni Agnelli, banker Elie de Rotschild, shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, broadcaster William Murrow and Aly Khan. The irony was no doubt lost on Harriman, but savage wits would pounce on the admission and guffaw about her "knowing" them in the Biblical sense.
Her revisionist view of her life was understandable, part of the grand master plan to remove herself from a stifling noble family of impecunious means. She succeeded famously, ultimately gaining the affluence and social acceptance she craved.
The transformation from dumpy English teenager to the charming socialite of the international jet set is shown in two sets of photographs taken just two years apart. In the first photo, from the outbreak of World War II, a moon-faced and sullen Pamela traipses across a muddy field, her rotund figure blanketed in an unbecoming faux leopard-skin coat.
By 1941, married to Randolph Churchill and the mother of an infant son, Pamela had slimmed down and wizened up to making the best of her charms. Photographed by Cecil Beaton at 10 Downing Street, she stares out at the viewer in a gaze which is at once imperious and inviting. She had shed the puppy fat of her youth, developing a voluptuous attractiveness which skirted perilously close to the matronly.
Pamela soon dropped the dissolute Churchill (her father-in-law apparently commiserated with her) and moved on to more important conquests. She befriended Kathleen Harriman and used her as a segue into a relationship with her father, immensely wealthy American diplomat Averell Harriman, who was more than twice Pamela's age. He set up Pamela and her son in a London apartment, and continued to bankroll her living expenses long after he had returned to his wife in the U.S.
Practical and resourceful to the core, Pamela clung on to the prominent Churchill surname and took an extended sojourn in Europe. She then embarked on successive relationships with Agnelli, Niarchos and de Rotschild, who kept her as his mistress in a Paris apartment.
Smith describes the almost identical pattern to these affairs, in which Pamela would play on the men's need to be mothered. She would take over the running of their lives, organizing dinner parties, putting the households in order, making sure fresh-cut flowers adorned the homes.
No great beauty, she shrewdly ascertained that her knowledge of social graces and decorum was invaluable to her lovers in the hectic swirl of their lives. To the manor born, she took the end of relationships in her stride. There were no emotional scenes or melodramatic ultimatums because Pamela's aristocratic disdain for confrontation let her lovers off lightly.
The end of her affair with de Rotschild brought her to America and marriage to power agent Leland Hayward. The union was brief, marked by Pamela's increasingly heavy spending and Hayward's poor health. Hayward's daughter, Brooke, etched a scathing portrait of her stepmother as callous and rapacious in Haywire. Brooke seemed unable to grasp that the apparent selfishness had developed from years of struggling to survive.
Hayward's death left Pamela free to resume her relationship with Harriman, himself recently widowed. They were married within six months and Pamela finally had the financial security to do what she wished. They were, Smith believes, the great loves of each other's lives.
Pamela came easily to the role of the patron of political and cultural causes. She assumed a more prominent place on the Washington scene with Harriman's death in 1986, a merry widow feted for her lavish political gatherings.
Her final years were tarnished by an ugly tussle over alleged misuse of inheritance funds. In Smith's telling, Pamela was undoubtedly at fault for making unwise investments, but Harriman's daughters and grandchildren are revealed as a grasping and ungrateful bunch.
Although Pamela Harriman lived much of her life in the reflected glory of others, by the end she had staked out her very own claim to fame. Smith's evenhandedly pares away the myth to reveal a woman who sought and found her place in history. She weathered the challenges of life and emerged as the ultimate survivor.
-- Bruce Emond