Pamela Harriman is probably the most glamorous American ambassador ever to serve in France. There have been other notables, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Douglas Dillon and Chip Bohlen—all of them statesmen of remarkable achievement whose world she would have to navigate to get where she wanted to go—but none could match her for style, elegance, and rapt attention to detail.
But not all the details of her life. Failure to monitor the management of her last husband, Averell Harriman’s financial affairs, left to her after he died, became her undoing. Some believe that is what led to the “massive brain hemorrhage” that felled her while swimming, as regularly she did, in the pool of the Ritz Hotel. All this and a great deal more are laid out in Sonia Purnell’s riveting new book, “Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue.”
Carefully researched, superbly written and thoughtfully analyzed, this account of pre-feminist accomplishment by a woman neither ahead of nor behind her times, simply cantering through them with relentless perseverance, resists easy insights that would show us too little of the intelligence and nerve it took to ride that highly strung steed assigned to her by fate with as much agility as she did. Until, cornered by bad decisions made by mistakenly trusted advisors recommended by her husband, she found herself in a fight with two Harriman daughters and their children over lost income and vanished assets in which they had a residual right. Purnell covers this imbroglio in her final chapters with impressive access to facts and figures.
When Averell Harriman died, eleven years before Pamela, he was buried at a site she had prepared for the two of them in a secluded, wooded area, far away from any disturbance of their peace. The Harriman family wanted no untoward discussion of final rites for Pamela, especially not so soon after the battle between them had ended. So they raced to dig a spot out of solid rock for her, and transported her there in the bitter cold of February, with the flowers freezing, and the people too. But it was done, honorably. Two elegant concrete slabs mark the grave of each of them. His honors Averell Harriman as “Patriot, Public Servant, Statesman.” Hers: “Devoted Wife, Patriot, Diplomat.”
Her life was over. Already she had told President Bill Clinton that she had no plans to remain in Paris during his hoped-for second term. The fortune on which she relied to operate as Pamela Harriman, to be Pamela Harriman, was ruinously depleted. Purnell reports that Gianni Agnelli, a lover who still wanted to marry her but had an ailing wife who could not be disposed of, called every day.
Pamela still had the Van Gogh, Purnell notes, valued at over $50 million (close to $97 million today) that she had promised to National Gallery director Carter Brown, once a frequent escort. She could have sold it and vastly improved her situation, but she didn’t want to break that pledge. Perhaps her name on the wall of the National Gallery was the monument she really wished for, in the American capital, far away from the tombstone no one would ever see. Instead she auctioned off three other paintings for $17 million, not enough to cover a settlement with the Harrimans, and put her Georgetown house on the market. It was slow to sell, however, at a reduced price, and not until after she was gone.
The young British aristocrat, unlucky enough to be born a woman and thus cut out of “education, expectations and a large inheritance,” as Purnell tells us, married Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph (also, later, Broadway producer Leland Hayward) and had affairs during World War II with journalist Edward R. Murrow, and yes, Averell Harriman Both were married at the time, as was she. Pamela bloomed in those years. As she herself said, “It was a terrible war, but if you were the right age, the right time and in the right place, it was spectacular.”
Pamela Harriman was in Paris at the right age and the right time as well. But there was no place for her in the world after that.