Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406210050
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LORAINE O'CONNELL ORLANDO SENTINEL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You may have only a fleeting notion of who she is, depending on when you last saw her name in a gossip or political column.
For example, there was Pamela Churchill, wife of Randolph and, much more important, daughter-in-law of Winston; then there was Pamela Hayward, wife of famed Hollywood agent and producer (``The Sound of Music'') Leland; and there was Pamela Harriman, wife of renowned diplomat Averell. Now it's Pamela Harriman, U.S. ambassador to France.
Christopher Ogden's biography, ``Life of the Party,'' puts all of these fragments together into a comprehensive look at a 20th-century social phenomenon.
Born Pamela Digby in 1920, she was the daughter of two titled members of the English aristocracy and grew up - quickly - to become a mistress or wife to some of the most powerful, prominent men of the last half-century.
A social climber extraordinaire, the ambitious Pamela realized early on that men were her ticket to the good things in life. She skillfully used them as steppingstones to pull herself out of stodgy English nobility and into the excitement of World War II intrigue, the Hollywood glitz of showbiz and the prestige of Washington power politics.
Not that she didn't actually love some of the men she dallied with; she just never let love overwhelm pragmatism.
A classic English beauty in her youth, Pamela schooled herself well in the essentials of the ultimate boy toy: home decorating, entertaining and fawning over men.
``She flitted and fluttered over every aspect of a man's life,'' Ogden writes of Pamela, ``boosting his ego, anticipating his every interest, convincing him that her time with him was the greatest thing that had happened since the juxtaposition of the planets.''
No feminist she.
In fact, until the mid-1980s, she was so dependent on men to fulfill her ambitions and give her life meaning that acquaintances say she had no real identity herself.
``When Pamela met a man she adored, she just unconsciously assumed his identity, as if she were putting on a glove,'' Ogden quotes one female acquaintance of Pamela's as saying.
But, hey, it worked for her.
During the war, she had an affair with the young Averell Harriman (yes, the same one she married some 30 years later). He was married at the time. But what the heck, so was she.
Harriman was FDR's special envoy to wartime Britain, and ``the Averell-Pamela link was a very important tie that bound,'' Ogden writes. British statesman Lord Beaverbrook ``was every bit as eager as Churchill to pull in the United States'' and ``knew that their affair could only help the cause'' as Pamela ferried information back and forth via Harriman.
Pamela divorced Randolph Churchill, your basic boozer, gambler and womanizer, in 1945 - but not before giving birth to a son, Winston, which allowed her to trade on the Churchill name for the rest of her life.
Until her marriage to Hayward in the early '60s, she bedded a wide array of notables, including millionaire John Hay Whitney, journalist Ed Murrow - who came this close to leaving his wife and baby to marry Pamela - playboy Aly Khan, Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, and European financier Elie de Rothschild.
She actually hoped to marry some of these guys but struck out in Europe, where she was seen as a high-class courtesan. In the United States, it was easier to break up marriages, and she struck paydirt with Hayward, whose marriage was falling apart anyway. By the time she wed Harriman, he was widowed.
Ogden's accounts of each liaison offer interesting profiles of Pamela's lovers, sort of minibiographies in themselves.
His style is witty and often scathing, reflecting his mixture of fascination and disgust with his subject. It seems clear that he views Pamela as one amoral and calculating old babe. However, he doesn't doubt that, in her prime, she was charming and - to many men - irresistible company.
``Race, creed or national origin was no impediment for Pamela,'' he writes. ``She was never racist, never anti-Semitic, prejudiced only against boors and bores. If a man interested her, that was sufficient. Christians, Moslems, Jews, atheists and agnostics: she was an equal-opportunity playgirl and eventually sampled them all.''
After burying Hayward in 1971 and Harriman in 1986, Pamela was worth $100 million.
Trading on her Harriman name, she turned her attention to fund-raising for the Democratic Party during its 1980s exile.
Her success at hosting salons that brought in megabucks and brought together politicos from across the spectrum of the party led to her being christened the ``first lady of the Democratic Party'' after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.
And guess what. Once again, a guy has come through for her. Clinton in 1993 appointed Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman ambassador to France.
LIFE OF THE PARTY: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, by Christopher Ogden; Little, Brown ($24.95, 504 pages).
by CNB