Pamela Harriman Dies In Paris British-Born Aristocrat, U.S. Ambassador Reigned Over Social And Political Life In Adopted America
Pamela Harriman’s very grand life was not only the stuff of books but also the kind of books she liked to read.
Romantic, adventurous, stylish, patrician, a little racy and peopled with the rich and famous of all the world - yet few so rich or so famous as Harriman herself.
Upon hearing of her death at age 76 from a brain hemorrhage in Paris on Wednesday, some here in her adopted hometown of Washington recalled when the late financier Robert Maxwell steamed his enormous yacht up the Potomac a decade ago and hired the biggest PR firm in town to round up “the most important people in the capital” for a yacht party 24 hours later.
Despite the quick, imperious deadline, the party was proclaimed a tremendous success - not because Attorney General Ed Meese, CIA Director William Webster and such were there, but because Harriman attended.
When she died, she had attained the rank of U.S. ambassador to France, one of American diplomacy’s biggest plums.
In a grander era, Harriman might have rivaled Louis XV’s Madame de Pompadour as leading lady of a royal court, fabulous arts patron, charming saloniste and one of the great social lionesses of history.
Married to or linked with some of the richest, most well-connected and powerful men of her time - the last of her three husbands was Averell Harriman, the multi-millionaire, former New York governor and one-time presidential candidate - the British-born Harriman was throughout her life a glittering and provocative presence in London, New York and Paris, which she first visited as an English school girl in search of excitement.
In her later years, she came to rule social and political Washington as majestically as any queen, counting President Clinton and Washington Post Chairman Katharine Graham among her most loyal admirers.
“She was an extraordinary U.S. ambassador,” Clinton said after learning of her death, which followed by 48 hours a massive stroke suffered while she was swimming at the exclusive Ritz Hotel in Paris.
“We are deeply indebted to the work she did in France in maintaining our relationships with one of our oldest and closest allies. 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.”
A longtime and generous fund-raiser for the Democratic Party after becoming an American citizen, Harriman threw a dinner party for Clinton at the outset of his first term. That event was considered the most sought-after capital invitation of the decade. Despite bad weather, it kept a huge crowd of celebrity gawkers outside her Georgetown mansion for most of the evening.
Incurred Nancy’s wrath
She incurred the lasting enmity of first lady Nancy Reagan by luring Raisa Gorbachev over to her house for tea in the midst of a program planned by the White House during the first Reagan-Gorbachev Washington summit - despite Nancy Reagan’s best efforts to thwart Harriman.
Washington attorney Kirk O’Donnell, longtime aide to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, credited Harriman with helping to turn around a Democratic Party demoralized by Reagan’s 1980 landslide.
“Her help was invaluable,” he said, “not only in providing material assistance as a tremendous fund-raiser, but spiritual help to a party in very tough shape.”
Among the Democrats Harriman befriended some 20 years ago was a congressman from Spokane who was moving into the House leadership, Tom Foley, and his wife, Heather.
“She was a very dear friend to Heather and me for many years,” he said.
Foley said it wasn’t her financial help that he and other Democrats valued most.
“Her house in Georgetown and her farm in Virginia were a place where people gathered and discussed political issues,” Foley said Wednesday. “She was at the center of a lot of efforts to cross-connect people in the party with other groups.”
Clinton called her “another immigrant who became a great American,” but Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman did not exactly arrive in steerage.
Born in Farnsborough, England, in 1920, the daughter of the 11th Baron Digby, she was an aristocrat who moved easily in the establishment circles dominated by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, father of her first husband, Randolph.
According to her close friend and longtime Georgetown neighbor, former National Gallery of Art Director J. Carter Brown, Harriman took as her role model an early 19th Century ancestor named Jane Digby.
Author of a book, “Wilder Shores of Love,” Jane Digby spent her life marrying and having affairs in a swath running from England through France, Germany and Greece into the Middle East.
“(Harriman) was much taken with her,” Brown said. “She was red-haired, too, and had a very adventurous life, mainly in the Middle East, with various Arab husbands, and was always full of vivre, so I’ve always thought there may be some genetic connection.
“She (Harriman) broke out from the British straitjacket. She found, I think, some of the English stratification confining, and she loved going to Paris as a girl and learning French.
“She became more American than the Americans. She’d say, ‘I’m American by choice, not by birth.’ And she was democratic by conviction. Though she came from the aristocracy, she believed in the values of the American system - with a capital D and a small d.”
According to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, Harriman had a wartime liaison with a man who later would become her husband, Averell Harriman. She had other publicly acknowledged affairs during and after her marriage to Churchill with such notable figures as newsman Edward R. Murrow, millionaire sportsman Jock Whitney, Prince Aly Khan, banker Elie de Rothschild and shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos.
‘You don’t have to marry her’
She subsequently married legendary Broadway and Hollywood producer Leland Hayward, wooing him away from his wife, New York socialite Slim Keith.
In her autobiography, “Slim,” Keith wrote that her response to the discovery of Hayward’s liaison was to say: “It’s not very original of you. If you want to have an affair with Pam Churchill, go ahead - but for your own protection, you don’t have to marry her. Nobody marries Pam Churchill.”
But Harriman and Hayward were married in 1960. He died in 1971. The same year, after a reunion at one of Graham’s dinner parties, she and Averell Harriman married. She was 51 and he 79.
Upon his death in 1986, she received $37 million outright and otherwise shared in an estimated $100 million estate. She continued as a Georgetown hostess famous for her gardening and as the chatelaine of a Middleburg, Va., horse country estate. She continued to ride and fox hunt well into later life.
Claimed poor legal advice
Her lavish spending and sometimes poor investments became a matter of controversy, when other heirs sued her for mismanagement of the money and losses they estimated at as much as $41 million. She countered that she had been ill-advised by two of Washington’s most prominent lawyers, the legendary Clark Clifford and Paul Warnke.
Harriman’s tenure as ambassador to France saw her applying formidable social skills to smoothing relations with an important ally during a time of difficult transition for transatlantic relations in the post-Cold War world.
Even if Paris and Washington were bickering over the number of American troops in Bosnia or France’s push to reassert its dominance within NATO, Harriman was a high-profile advocate of the U.S. position. Her close ties to the French elite meant that the Embassy was at all times a valuable window to the world of French politics, finance and culture.
Harriman had been interested in Clinton long before he emerged as a presidential contender, and made certain he met the right people, especially at her famous Georgetown soirees.
“Hers was very much a salon,” Brown said. “I would say right out of the 18th century - the concept as a place where people meet and exchange ideas. That’s how she got to know Bill Clinton. He would want to talk policy issues far into the night with people like Al Gore, long before he was a candidate. Everybody felt privileged to be there.
“She entertained so well. She was the kind of person who really made guests feel happy - intellectually, because she always had interesting people and interesting conversation, and because she took a real interest in the food that was served and how it was done and how everything looked. She was an artist in that sense. She really was gifted at it.”