Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Anthony Lejeune

WHETHER a biography is regarded as hostile or merely candid largely depends, no doubt, on the reader's view of its subject. Sally Bedell Smith's exhaustive biography of Pamela Harriman will not please Mrs. Harriman, we may be sure: but it simply unfolds an extraordinary life, making no moral judgments -- unless you consider it judgmental to describe someone as a courtesan and say that she continually "embroiders" the truth about her past.

Mrs. Harriman -- Pamela Churchill Harriman, as she likes to call herself, holding onto the echo of a long-ago first marriage -- had trouble, quite recently, with another biographer, Christopher Ogden, with whom she was supposed to be collaborating on her memoirs, but who, when she pulled out, went ahead and published material over which she had no control. She has had even less influence over Mrs. Smith's much deeper-delving work. There is a distinctly humorous side to this whole affair. But Pamela Harriman is not noted for her sense of humor, particularly about herself. She has taken her career, if "career" is the word, very seriously; a lifelong endeavor crowned by her appointment, during the first Clinton Administration, as United States Ambassador in Paris -- not bad for a fairly untalented (in more orthodox skills) English girl from the shires.

This is an excellently written, highly readable, hugely researched, big book. The source notes alone run to 99 pages. Sally Smith interviewed more than four hundred people. Does she, perhaps, tell us more about Mrs. Harriman than we wish to know? Considered as a sideways glance at the political history of our time, this book may indeed seem excessive; but as the carefully studied picture of a unique personality, surrounded by, and drawing power from, an astonishing array of celebrated men, it repays every moment of our attention.

Pamela Harriman's father was the 11th Baron Digby; she was born, that is, into an ancient line of worthy but unspectacular English aristocrats, country landowners. Unspectacular with one spectacular exception -- the beautiful Jane Digby, who, in the early nineteenth century, ran off with an Austrian diplomat, became the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, married a Greek, and eventually found happiness as the wife of a Bedouin sheik; there had, of course, been plenty of other lovers on the way. It may not be unfair, or even unkind, to suggest that Pamela Harriman takes after Jane Digby. She is, frankly, a grande horizontale, whose undoubted admirers -- apart from her three husbands: Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward, and Averell Harriman -- included Jock Whitney, Ed Murrow, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Elie de Rothschild, and Stavros Niarchos.

Neither as a child nor as a debutante did she sparkle particularly. She felt hindered by her parents' unstylish "provincialism," says Sally Smith, making a rare mistake about a rather subtle English usage; an upper-class family, such as the Digbys, cannot by definition be "provincial," which is as much a social as a topographical term. A precipitate wartime marriage to Winston Churchill's son Randolph, who thought he might be killed and wanted an heir, projected her into a different world.

An heir was duly produced -- "Young Winston," who has had a low-flying political career of his own and is uncharitably described here as "more Digby than Churchill"; but the marriage was not a success. Marriage to Randolph scarcely could have been. He was explosively turbulent, though not without charm when sober, equally and embarrassingly rude to waitresses and duchesses. I was once sitting in a hotel room with him when a sub-editor on the London Evening Standard, for which he often wrote, called to complain that something in his article was obscure. "To the obscure all things are obscure," Randolph thundered and slammed the telephone down; which was typical both in its brutality and in its wit. His attempts to educate his young wife by reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall to her in bed were not well received. But he educated her, nevertheless, by introducing her into his father's circle of movers and shakers, and conveying his own assumption that such people are always accessible and usable.

The Prime Minister was much taken with his pretty daughter-in-law. While Randolph was away at the war, Pamela started a passionate affair with Harriman. Sally Smith reveals that this affair was almost certainly condoned, if not encouraged, by Winston as a clandestine source of intelligence about American policy. Randolph, returning from Cairo (where he had himself been unfaithful), furiously berated his parents for siding with his wife.

She came to detest Randolph, who, almost alone among her men, proved quite beyond taming. For some she was too obvious, but many she twisted round her little finger by the exercise of increasingly practiced charms. She ran their dinner parties, flattered them, helped the clever ones to feel clever, and provided care for those who needed care. In return, they subsidized her lifestyle. She spent a great deal of money. She converted to Catholicism in the vain hope (but, who knows, she may have felt a spiritual urge) of marrying Agnelli. When, thirty years after their first meeting, she was reunited with Harriman and married him, she being 51 and he 79, she gave good value, making his old age happy. When he died, she was left, for the first time, a rich woman in her own right, and, no less important to her now, also a political figure in her own right.