Pamela Harriman

By RUSSELL BAKER ( Op-Ed ) 753 words

The life story of Pamela Harriman, who died in Paris this week, reads like one of those bad novels in which women with gumption to spare come from nowhere and make the world their private property. As fiction it is old and tired, but when a real woman really pulls it off it is quite wonderful, probably because the real world's deck is so heavily stacked against real women.

Playing against that stacked deck, Mrs. Harriman really pulled it off, and not just in spades, but also in clubs, hearts and diamonds.

Ambassador to France was the final item on her resume. Her final deed was a swim in the pool at the Ritz on Place Vendome. Of course the Ritz. She would never have made it to that most elegant of all ambassadorships by taking her daily exercise at the Y.W.C.A. At the Ritz you feel that Heaven is probably just down at the end of the corridor.

Somewhere there may be a woman who reads her obituary without envy; there are always saints among us, disapproving of the Empress Josephine, Scarlett O'Hara, Sister Carrie and all such women as Pamela Harriman. Ambition driven by grit, gall and sexual guile are still widely considered unseemly in a woman. In those bad but best-selling novels about such women they are usually portrayed as unprincipled hussies, to use the polite old-fashioned word.

By contrast, men propelling themselves upward in the same manner are usually treated as admirably ruthless and cunning go-getters. They are the romantic heroes not only of popular fiction but also of much nonfictional media baloney coming out of Wall Street and other temples of Mammon.

A summary of the Ambassador's biography suggests that she never met anybody who wasn't famous. She married three of them and bedded several of the others.

The husbands were Randolph Churchill, son of Winston; Leland Hayward, Broadway agent-producer of the postwar era, and Averell Harriman, multimillionaire, adviser to Presidents, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Governor of New York, etc.

The beddees included John Hay Whitney, Edward R. Murrow, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli and Baron Elie de Rothschild. Lot of money there.

I have all this from Marilyn Berger's splendid obituary in Thursday's Times, which has a lot more, all of it delightfully readable stuff. There was a brief career in journalism, for instance. It was offered by Lord Beaverbrook, who was immortalized, along with his Fleet Street rags, in Evelyn Waugh's satirical ''Scoop,'' the story of a nature writer accidentally sent by a Beaverbrook-like publisher to cover the Ethiopian war.

Working for ''the Beaver,'' Pamela Churchill, as she then was, filed news from London, New York, Palm Beach, Montego Bay, Paris and the Riviera. It would be hard to top that for a dream beat.

What was the secret of Mrs. Harriman's success? One may have been that she never married unwisely. The Churchills were -- well, the Churchills. Leland Hayward was well heeled. Averell Harriman was more so. He had long had a reputation for being ''tighter than a Pullman window'' until Pamela loosened him so thoroughly that he started contributing to Democratic campaigners.

After his death, the widow Harriman became a major contributor and fund-raiser for Democratic politicians, particularly Bill Clinton. Thus came the choicest of all ambassadorships -- for those who can afford to foot the bills of elegant Paris living.

How explain her extraordinary success in an era when men ruled the world? Obviously there was some quality in her that gave her immense power to charm a certain kind of man. The kind who didn't bother to read the news because he made it.

Beyond that -- well, probably you had to be there. The gossips who had sport with her life seemed to annoy her chiefly because they were always saying she may have had many men but she had trouble snaring one rich enough to be worth marrying.

''What annoys me, especially,'' she once said, ''especially in this world where women are equal with men, why do they all take the same tack, that people didn't marry me? Nobody's ever thought that I didn't want to marry.''

But of course women were not ''equal with men'' in her world. A man taking many lovers without clerical blessing was to be admired as a prince of love. For the woman who did, praise was -- still is -- scarce.

By MARILYN BERGER ( Obituary (Obit); Biography ) 3056 words

Pamela Harriman, the United States Ambassador to France, a leading figure in the Democratic Party and for decades one of the most vivacious women on the international scene, died yesterday at the American Hospital in Paris of complications of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 76.

Mrs. Harriman, who was preparing to relinquish her post and return to Washington, suffered the hemorrhage on Monday at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where she had gone for her usual swim.

She devoted her later years to helping to rebuild the Democratic Party in the 1980's, raising millions of dollars. She was appointed Ambassador by President Clinton in 1993, and was well regarded as a diplomat.

The President yesterday called her an ''extraordinary U.S. ambassador,'' adding, ''She was a source of judgment and inspiration to me, a source of constant good humor and charm and real friendship, and we will miss her very, very much.''

However great her accomplishments, she could never put to rest the legend of the captivating woman who snared some of the world's richest and most attractive men on two continents, marrying three of them.

Along the way she was trailed by a chorus of angry women who repeated tales of her escapades for decades.

Born in England in 1920 into an old aristocracy that no longer counted for much, she ultimately made her way into a new aristocracy of the wealthy and powerful that counted a great deal. She was 19 when she married Randolph Churchill. Within months he went off to war and she found herself at the center of London as a confidante and hostess for her new father-in-law, Winston Churchill. She called him Papa, and he reveled in her company.

Through Winston Churchill she met Max Beaverbrook, the press baron, who became her mentor; Harry Hopkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt's envoy, who became her friend, and W. Averell Harriman, the lend-lease administrator, who became her lover, and, 30 years later, her third husband.

With expenses underwritten by Mr. Harriman, she took up wartime residence in Grosvenor Square, a small parcel of London that became so filled with Americans that she remembered it as Eisenhowerplatz. There she brought prominent Americans and their British allies together for small dinners and raised eyebrows with her numerous liaisons. The most prominent among them were her London neighbor, John Hay (Jock) Whitney, who became the United States Ambassador to Britain, and Edward R. Murrow, the wartime voice of CBS in London.

After the war, divorced and the mother of a son, Winston Spencer Churchill, she moved to Paris where, with her customary energy and resourcefulness, and with the cachet and connections of the Churchill name, she established a glittering place for herself in international high society.

Later she moved on to America, where she charmed, and married, Leland Hayward, the renowned Broadway agent and producer. After Hayward's death Averell Harriman reappeared, and after a brief courtship they married and became the couple that helped reinvigorate the Democratic Party.

As a girl, Pamela Digby was peaches-and-cream pretty, but no great beauty. Taught, as were most girls of her class, that her goal was to marry well, she developed an exceptional ability to beguile men. She enveloped them in her attention, anticipated their every need and locked on them with adoring eyes that suggested genuine interest in their every word. When it was mentioned to one acquaintance that she was lacking a sense of humor, he shrugged and replied, ''Maybe, but she makes you feel you have the best sense of humor in the world.''

One of her biographers, Christopher Ogden, was beguiled himself when he described her on the night in November 1992 when she welcomed Bill Clinton, the new President she had helped to elect, to a dinner reception at her Georgetown house.

''She looked fabulous, almost breathtaking,'' he wrote in his book ''Life of the Party.''

''Her smile can appear too practiced but tonight it was wonderfully wise and guileless,'' he wrote. ''Her voice was low with a sexy, croacky catch.''

Not everyone agreed. Sally Bedell Smith, the author of another biography, ''Reflected Glory,'' said in 1996: ''She wanted great wealth and power. These were big ambitions for a person with little to say and no wit, but she had unflagging determination and ruthlessness.''

Mrs. Harriman was quick to deny that she had ever had an agenda. In 1996, in an interview in the Embassy residence in Paris, she said: ''My life, for me, has been free-flowing. I never thought, 'Now I'm here, I want to go there or do that.' I've taken life as it has presented itself to me.''

She bristled at the way she was characterized in the press and said she should not be faulted if the succession of men in her life happened to be rich and influential. ''Those were the people I met,'' she said. ''Everything in life, I believe, is luck and timing.''

Her first bit of luck was to be born, on March 20, 1920, to Edward Kenelm Digby, soon to become the 11th Baron Digby, and his wife, the former Constance Pamela Alice Bruce. She grew up at Minterne Magna, a 50-room stone mansion in Dorset, where despite severe financial pressures, the family's four children were tended to by maids, governesses and tutors.

She grew up in what she called ''a very small, closed society, the last of really 19th-century culture.''

The Startling Remaking Of a Country Girl

''It's almost incredible to people I work with today,'' she said last year, ''to realize I was born in a world where a woman was totally controlled by men. I mean, you got married and there was kind of no alternative. The boys were allowed to go off to school. The girls were kept home, educated by governesses. It never sort of occurred to me in the first, I suppose, 20 years of my life that a woman could move from the position that pre-World War II women like me were in.''

She received a certificate in domestic science in 1936 from the Downham School in Hertfordshire. Then she was sent to Paris and Munich for ''finishing.'' As she approached the social season of 1938, when she was presented at court, she was still considered an unfashionable country girl.

Then Winston Churchill's only son, Randolph, well educated but spoiled and trailing a reputation for brilliance, arrogance, extravagance and drunkenness, took her to dinner and proposed on their first date, having already been turned down, according to the London gossips, by a number of other women. He was going off to war, told friends he was sure he would die, and wanted to produce an heir.

They were married on Oct. 4, 1939. ''I was absolutely sincere in wanting it to work,'' she said, ''and I still believe that if it hadn't been wartime, that marriage probably would have worked. I mean there's been too much exaggeration about Randolph being a drunk and Randolph being this and Randolph being that. He was his own worst enemy and very difficult to be his father's son and all that, but he had many, many admirable qualities.''

After following her husband to a succession of army camps, Pamela Churchill was taken under her father-in-law's wing. The Prime Minister found her enchanting. She brought him the London gossip and played the card game bezique with him into the early hours of the morning when he couldn't sleep. And he was elated that she was bearing his grandchild and namesake.

''Nobody in today's generation can fully understand what it was like to be part of the last probably great war,'' she said, and years later she remembered it as the most exciting time of her life.

During bombing raids she shared the shelter under 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister and his wife, Clementine. Above ground there were dinners and weekends with world leaders at Chequers or at Lord Beaverbrook's, tea dances at Claridges and the Dorchester, officers to entertain at the Churchill Club and Roosevelt's envoy, Harry Hopkins, to look after.

A Fling With Aly Khan, And Other Romances

After the war she became a reporter for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express and Evening Standard, cabling news about politics, the arts and the social scene from London, New York, Palm Beach, Montego Bay, Paris and the south of France.

She looked back at those postwar years as a time to ''catch up on all the things that I might have done if I hadn't had those six years of war,'' she said. ''I wanted to discover a lot of things that I had not done at the age of 19.''

She had a fling with Prince Aly Khan, the playboy son of the Aga Kahn, and after the breakup of her marriage to Randolph Churchill she began her new life in Paris. There she met the Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli and fell in love, and during their five-year romance provided him with connections in England and America. She converted to Catholicism in what some said was an effort to be a more acceptable bride to the heir to the Fiat fortune. But that was not to be.

After their breakup there were five years as mistress to Baron Elie de Rothschild of the French banking family. Because he was married to one of the most well-liked women in Paris society, Mrs. Churchill made enemies. But she had admirers, too, among them Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping tycoon.

''I'm censured for having had friends,'' Mrs. Harriman said in 1996, assailing the many books and articles written about her, ''and, of course, more friends than I've ever really had. Men friends. The amount of people that I read about that I've slept with that I've never slept with -- I mean it's extraordinary!''

She insisted that she was not looking for a rich husband, saying of her biographers and detractors: ''The one thing that they've all missed is the fact that having once been married I said to myself, 'I don't have to get married again.' I was bruised. What annoys me, especially in this world where women are equal with men, why do they all take the same tack, that people didn't marry me? Nobody's ever thought that I didn't want to marry.''

But then she did marry, in 1960. During a visit to New York she was introduced to Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer of such hit musicals as ''South Pacific'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' A friend asked her to go to the theater with Hayward, whose wife, Slim, later known in New York society as Lady Keith, was in Europe. It was not long before Hayward proposed.

She showered him with what Sally Bedell Smith characterized as ''geisha-like devotion.'' She cooked chicken hash on a hot plate when they were out on the road and organized splendid houses in New York and Westchester, but theirs was a complicated marriage. Hayward had three children from his marriage to the actress Margaret Sullavan, who committed suicide in 1960, 11 years after their divorce. The children loved their mother and their first stepmother, but not their father's new wife.

When Hayward died of a stroke in 1971, there was a feud over his will. His daughter Brooke Hayward even suggested in her book, ''Haywire,'' that her last stepmother absconded with a string of pearls her mother had left to her. Pamela Harriman insisted that she knew nothing about the pearls.

As the Wife of Harriman, She Buoys the Democrats

Five months after Hayward's death, at a dinner party given by Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, there was a serendipitous reunion with W. Averell Harriman, who had been widowed the year before. A month later Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward, 51, married the 79-year-old former Governor of New York, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Harry Truman's choice to be President of the United States.

Although Harriman was the heir to the Union Pacific Railroad fortune, he was famously parsimonious. With his new wife, however, he was generous, and began to live up to his means. She fixed up his houses. She became an American citizen and adopted his interests in the Soviet Union and, more exuberantly, in the Democratic Party.

As Mrs. Averell Harriman, she gave fund-raising dinners for Democratic candidates in the 1970's. But it was the election of Ronald Reagan and the big Republican gains in Congress in the 1980 election that galvanized both Harrimans to action. To resuscitate the Democratic Party, they agreed to form their own political action committee, which quickly became known as PamPAC. Mrs. Harriman surrounded herself with advisers and learned quickly. She built up her political curriculum vitae, giving speeches and, with the help of friends, writing Op-Ed pieces for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Harriman house in Georgetown, with its fine collection of Impressionist works, became a headquarters of sorts for the party in exile. Contributors paid thousands of dollars to be invited to Mrs. Harriman's receptions and dinners, where they were given briefings and allowed to rub shoulders with party nabobs like Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss and any number of Presidential candidates and senators, current and past.

When Harriman's health deteriorated, his wife worked assiduously to keep him occupied, making sure he had visitors to keep him company when she was away. By then Mrs. Harriman had her own airplane, so she was able to return to him in the evenings. He died in 1986 at the age of 94.

A $100 Million Fortune, And a Family Feud

There were two funeral services, one in New York and one in Washington, and two burials. Mourners thought they were witnessing his burial in the family plot next to his previous wife, Marie. In fact, The Washington Post later reported, Mrs. Harriman had postponed the actual interment for two months while another burial plot was prepared at his estate in Arden, N.Y. Pamela Harriman will be buried at his side, after a funeral service in Washington next Thursday and a memorial service in Paris.

In addition to her son, Mrs. Harriman is survived by her sisters, Sheila Moore of Atlanta and Ireland, and Jaquetta James of the Isle of Mull, Scotland; her brother, Edward, Lord Digby, of Minterne Magna; four grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

Harriman left his widow most of his fortune, more than $100 million, and designated her an executor and trustee of his estate and their charitable trusts. His daughters and their children were to share in the remains of a trust after Pamela Harriman's death. The financial arrangement set the stage for another family feud.

At about the time of their marriage, Harriman put his investments in the hands of William Rich, a man he believed to be a careful and conservative investor, and he engaged his old friend Clark Clifford and his partner Paul Warnke as his lawyers.

He told his wife to follow their advice, but Mr. Clifford soon became preoccupied with defending himself against charges growing out of allegations that he was involved in the huge B.C.C.I. bank and money-laundering scandal, and Mr. Warnke moved to another law firm. Mr. Rich proceeded to make what the Harriman heirs have charged were highly speculative and unwise investments that resulted in huge losses.

The heirs turned to her to make good on those losses. In 1994 they sued her in Federal court in Manhattan. Family members suggested she had pushed Mr. Rich into making risky investments to maintain her expensive habits. She denied it.

''I never got involved in finances,'' she said. ''It is totally absurd to think that I had any influence, or tried to have any influence, on the running of the office or the management of the money. Never. There was no reason.''

Mrs. Harriman sold some property as well as a Picasso, a Matisse and a Renoir during that time. The two sides reached a settlement in 1995, agreeing not to divulge the terms, then joined forces to file a civil suit against Mr. Rich in Virginia.

Clinton's Her Candidate And Is Duly Grateful

In 1988 Mrs. Harriman's choice for President was Al Gore, not Michael Dukakis. For the 1992 election she considered a number of candidates before settling on Bill Clinton. She committed herself wholeheartedly to raising money for his campaign and he showed his gratitude by choosing her house for his first triumphal victory dinner in Washington. Later he named her Ambassador to France.

That was how Mrs. Harriman came to preside over the palatial residence of American ambassadors on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honore, not far on a Paris street map but a world away from the Avenue de New York and the apartment she occupied in the 1950's as Pamela Churchill.

That she was a woman with a past enhanced her standing with the French. Her energy went into 16-hour days dealing with questions of international trade, NATO expansion and the war in Bosnia, and working the telephone to Washinton late into the night, trying to forestall cuts in the Foreign Service budget. She loved every minute of it.

Remembering Mrs. Harriman yesterday, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called her a ''central figure in the history of this century.''

''America has lost a remarkable representative, the State Department has lost one of its most effective diplomats and I have lost a friend,'' she said.

That Sunday morning in late 1996, as she sat in the living room of her private apartment in the Embassy residence, Mrs. Harriman was asked if there was anything she wished she had done differently.

''No,'' she said.

''Really, no regrets?''

''I consider I have had a very fortunate life.''

''A happy life?''

''Very, very. I drank deep of the well.''