The water in the Ritz pool was still, and the afternoon light caught the trompe l’oeil sky as a figure slipped beneath the surface with a practiced grace honed over six decades. Pamela Harriman, the 76-year-old American ambassador to France, moved through her twentieth length with her head held high, a silent discipline protecting her hair from the water that would, within moments, become her final arbiter. At 3:48 on the 5th of February 1997, she was declared dead at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, leaving behind a legacy so tangled in power, seduction, and political survival that even the obituaries could not agree on who she truly was.
The collapse came suddenly at the Hotel Ritz on the Place Vendôme, where the ambassador had arrived unannounced, a departure from her usual protocol of a private, cleared pool. Her deputy had urged her to swim, concerned about a boss who had just concluded her term and now faced an unfamiliar void. As she went limp in the water, a security officer named Henri Paul—a man whose own appointment with infamy lay just seven months ahead of him—fitted an oxygen mask and worked desperately over her body on the tiles.
A single tear ran down her face as she slipped under, and the mechanism of a life built on charm and calculation finally ground to a halt.
She was born Pamela Digby on the 20th of March 1920 at Farnborough in Hampshire, the eldest daughter of Edward Kenelm Digby, the 11th Baron Digby, into a family that boasted lineage but lacked liquidity. The childhood at Minterne Magna in Dorset was one of governesses, gun dogs, and hunting country, a regimen designed to produce a county wife. Yet the Digby blood carried a streak of rebellion that would define her, a genetic echo of her great-great-aunt Jane Digby, the 19th-century runaway who traded an earl for a Bavarian king, a Greek count, and finally a Bedouin sheikh, dying in poetic romance in Damascus with her hair in two black braids.
At 17, she was dispatched to Munich, where Unity Mitford, that most catastrophic of English tourists, introduced her to Adolf Hitler, a fleeting encounter that would later be inflated in her Who’s Who entry into postgraduate work she never undertook. The London season of 1937 was a failure; she was red-haired, freckled, a bit plump, and too opinionated for most of the boys, spending many dances standing up. But what she possessed, and what her contemporaries noted with a mixture of horror and awe, was actual sexual experience.
“I thought she was so grown-up,” recalled debutante Sarah Norton. “Pam had definitely known some men. We were complete virgins, sexually childlike, incredibly innocent, and Pam was a girl who wasn’t.”
That reputation delivered her, by way of an act of revenge, to the door of history. Lady Mary Dunn, whose husband had confessed to sleeping with Pamela, arranged a blind date with a man known as the least marriageable bachelor in England, telling him, “If you want to have dinner with a red-headed whore, go around to my flat and you’ll find her.” The bachelor was Randolph Churchill, a drunk, a bully, the only son of a certain rogue politician about to have his moment, and a compulsive gambler who had reportedly proposed to eight women in a fortnight.
He proposed to Pamela the night they met. She accepted with an amusingly frosty rationale, telling the Washington Post in 1983, “I was getting so terribly upset by seeing all my friends watching the men go off to be killed. I thought how marvelous it was to be going out with somebody about whom I didn’t give a damn.”
They married on the 4th of October 1939, less than three weeks after meeting, and at 19 she became Mrs. Randolph Churchill. Their son Winston was born at Chequers on the 10th of October 1940, five months after his namesake grandfather became Prime Minister, and on the 27th of January 1941, Cecil Beaton’s photograph of mother and baby ran on the cover of Life.
Pamela installed herself in the private ecosystem of the Churchill family, playing Bezique with the old man into the small hours because he could not sleep and would not be alone. She listened to him, a novelty for a politician in private life, and Winston adored what he called her salty sense of humor. Clementine, more surprisingly, adored her too.
Then the bill arrived.
In February 1941, Randolph shipped out to Cairo with the commandos and lost catastrophically at cards on the voyage, writing home to instruct his wife to settle a debt of some $12,000—roughly $750,000 today—without troubling his parents. She sold the wedding presents, sold most of the jewelry, took a job at the Ministry of Supply for 12 pounds a week, and went to Lord Beaverbrook, the Prime Minister’s press baron and fixer, who paid off what remained and began teaching her what she was for. “It was a lesson,” she said long afterward.
“I suddenly realized that if there was to be any security for baby Winston and me, it was going to be on our own.” At her funeral 56 years later, Bill Clinton would recall a day when her train into London was bombed twice; she shook the glass out of her clothes, picked herself up, and went into work without a word of complaint. She was 21.
W. Averell Harriman arrived in London in March 1941 as Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease envoy, a lean, rich, humorless American railway heir of 50, nearly 30 years her senior and married. They met within a week of his arrival, and the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 began at the Dorchester on the night of the worst Luftwaffe raid to date, the building shuddering as shrapnel clattered into the street below.
The following morning, they were seen walking hand in hand across Horse Guards Parade inspecting the wreckage like tourists. Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, noted in his diary that he had seen them and made no further comment. Neither did the Churchills, as the Prime Minister needed America and his daughter-in-law had become a highly convenient channel to it.
Randolph, when he finally understood, exploded in rage, and the wound between father and son never fully healed.
Harriman went to Moscow as ambassador in October 1943, leaving behind a Grosvenor Square flat and an allowance that would keep her, in one form or another, for 50 years. Pamela did not mourn his departure for long. There was Jock Whitney next, then William Paley, the founder of CBS, who would later pay her the compliment of calling her the greatest courtesan of the century and meaning it with warmth.
And then there was Paley’s own star, Edward R. Murrow, whose voice was bringing the Blitz into American kitchens and who fell in love with her so much that he intended to leave his wife. “Pamela was quite an experience for Ed,” Janet Murrow said afterward with the dryness of a woman who had already decided to get over it.
“She was a great beauty.”
In December 1945, Pamela filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion, and in 1946 the Churchill marriage was formally over. Paris took her in, where the body that had failed her in Belgravia became an asset on the Riviera. “I shouldn’t say this, but she had beautiful breasts.
Probably the best I ever saw in my life,” her saleswoman at Dior, Eliane Martin, said years later with professional precision. “She was marvelous in the long straight line and she liked décolletage because she had very nice skin and shoulders.” In 1948, she was at Prince Ali Khan’s Château de l’Horizon on the coast, briefly the reigning favorite of the most celebrated lover in Europe.
When Ali went chasing Rita Hayworth, a yacht pulled in for lunch and delivered Gianni Agnelli. The Fiat heir was 27, a year younger than she was, orphaned, handsome, impossibly well-dressed and idle. The five years that followed she would call the happiest of her life.
She learned Italian manners, converted to Catholicism for him, and through her Roosevelt connections helped him secure the North American distribution for Fiat. The old man in London was unimpressed. “What’s this I hear?”
Winston Churchill asked a friend about Pamela taking up with an Italian motor mechanic.
In August 1952, she walked into a party and found Agnelli embracing a young woman named Anne-Marie d’Estainville. Driving the girl home that night, he wrecked his car and nearly lost his leg. Pamela nursed him through the hospital and the convalescence in Turin, and there they agreed to end it.
He married a Neapolitan princess, but he also telephoned Pamela every morning for the rest of her life and left her an apartment on the Avenue de New York, a Bentley, and a monthly stipend, having been asked only one question in a modest voice: “But what will happen to me?” The pattern was now visible even to its participants. Baron Elie de Rothschild came next and was entirely without illusions.
“I wanted to go to bed with Pam, and I did,” he said. Of her provenance, he was cruder still: “Once it’s washed, it’s just like new.” She responded by educating herself hard in pictures and furniture and wine, building a taste that would later hang impressionists in Georgetown.
What she could not do was dislodge Liliane, who ended the contest with a single sentence at a dinner party in 1954, when the Duke of Windsor blithely asked the table which Rothschild was Pam Churchill’s lover. Liliane looked straight ahead: “My husband, sir.”
After that came the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos and a migratory calendar of St. Moritz in winter, Paris in June, London for the Derby, and the Riviera in August. Her son grew up in England with nannies and the Churchill relations, but she was far from spent.
In 1958, another yacht in the Mediterranean produced Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer of South Pacific and Gypsy, a charming twice-divorced barbiturate-fueled American married to Slim Keith. Pamela began seeing him in New York while lending Slim her Paris apartment and her Bentley. “If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine for not paying attention,” Slim said later.
“Any woman with any sense should have had her guard up.” On the 4th of May, 1960, the day his divorce came through, Pamela became the fifth Mrs. Hayward in Carson City, Nevada.
She turned herself American with the thoroughness of a method actress, baseball on television, no more European affectations, and worked her European contacts to help secure the rights that became The Sound of Music.
Hayward’s children were not persuaded. “I didn’t get it,” his daughter Brooke said. “There was no razzle-dazzle.
She was a banal milkmaid, a little plump, certainly not beautiful.” Dennis Hopper, who married Brooke, was even blunter: “Pam was one of the few people in the world I truly hated. She was one of the most despicable people I have ever met.”
Hayward’s luck failed before his health did, and he died on the 18th of March, 1971, leaving far less than his widow expected. Brooke never forgot the reading of the will. “Pamela’s face turned ashen,” she said, “and later that day she flew into a terrible rage, the first time I’d ever seen her lose her temper completely.
She actually said to me, ‘How could I have been married for so many years to a man who would leave me so little?'” She was not one for mourning, and she was also determined to extract her inheritance, even if it had to come from an entirely different man.
The day after the funeral, Pamela telephoned Averell Harriman, 79 years old, recently widowed, still one of the richest men in America. They married on the 27th of September, 1971, and Washington was the making of her. The Georgetown house on N Street was filled with Impressionists, including a Van Gogh of white roses that hung above the fireplace, and with Democrats who by 1980 had nowhere else to go.
She founded a political action committee called Democrats for the ’80s, inevitably nicknamed Pampack, and invented the issues evening, a speaker, a real argument, dinner, no ticket price. “It was more an informal thing where the Democratic establishment and donors could meet some of the young faces of the party,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who co-founded the group with her. One of those young faces belonged to the governor of Arkansas.
Upstairs, meanwhile, an increasingly frail old man was calling for her, and she went every time. Averell Harriman died on the 26th of July, 1986 at 94, leaving the bulk of an estate of some 65 million dollars to his wife.
In 1992, she raised $3. 2 million in a single afternoon at a $10,000 a head garden party in Virginia, served as a national co-chair of the Clinton campaign, and asked, when it was won, for Paris. She was sworn in as United States Ambassador to France in May 1993, age 73, and moved into a residence on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, built by a Rothschild whose monogram was still on the doors.
She rose at 5:00, worked to midnight, and told Vogue exactly how she expected to be measured: “It’s not the accolades when you arrive, but the judgments when you leave that count.” She pushed France towards agreement in the Uruguay round of the GATT talks, and the Bosnian peace accord was signed in Paris in December 1995. The columnist William Pfaff judged her the most successful American political ambassador of the decade.
The judgment nearly came early. In February 1995, a botched CIA economic espionage operation run out of her own embassy was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 by the French interior minister, and she survived it by miraculously knowing nothing as loudly as possible. Far worse, in September 1994, Averell’s children and grandchildren had sued her, alleging that she and her advisers had squandered around $30 million of their inheritance in a collapsing New Jersey golf resort and a small Pennsylvania plastics company.
She had personally guaranteed an $18 million loan against their trusts, and when the bank came calling, she pleaded poverty and let them pay. “She’s got a real sickness about money,” said Peter Duchin, who’d grown up in Averell’s house. To her doctor, she said only, “I don’t really think I deserve this,” which may or may not have been an admission of the sickness.
It settled on the 29th of December 1995 on confidential terms. “She’d work all day,” Eizenstat said, “and then at 10:30 at night, she was on the phone with her attorney.”
By late 1996, she had asked a reluctant president to release her, and the release was the problem. She was 76, working 19 hours a day, and had spent 2 years being sued by her dead husband’s children while running the largest embassy in Europe. On the afternoon of the 3rd of February, 1997, her deputy, worried about a boss who had just ended her own reign and now had nothing to do, told her to go and swim.
She went unannounced, which was not her habit. Ordinarily, the Ritz cleared the pool for her, and instead she had to part the balcony curtains and look down to see who was already in the water. She had a crushing headache when she did it, the bleeding in all likelihood already begun.
There was a rumor among the staff that one of the pool attendants had fallen for her, a man young enough to be a grandson, and 56 years after the Dorchester shuddered under the bombs, the mechanism was apparently still running. The attention, the laugh, the trick of making a man feel he was the most important person in the room, whether he was running Fiat or arranging the towels.
She got into the water in a swimsuit chosen to sculpt a figure she had disciplined for six decades, chin up so the coiffure stayed dry, and swam 20 lengths. Then the water took her. As Henri Paul worked the oxygen mask, a single tear ran down her face, and she went under into a dark she did not come out of.
An ambulance screamed into the Place Vendôme, and Jacques Chirac personally ordered the best physicians in Paris to save the woman he felt he owed. She died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine at 3:48 on the afternoon of the 5th, and her son telephoned a family friend to say that an extraordinary and dramatic exit befitted his extraordinary, dramatic mother. Jacques Chirac laid the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on her flag-draped coffin, the first foreign female diplomat to receive it, and said that not since Franklin and Jefferson had America been so well served in France.
Air Force One brought her home, and on the 13th of February at Washington National Cathedral, Clinton called her indomitable and said simply, “Today I am here in no small measure because she was there.” She was buried the next day at Arden, the Harriman estate in New York.
The obituaries could not decide what she had been and neither quite can we. Max Hastings noted acidly that she had been described as a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings. Her most recent biographer, Sonia Purnell, argues that a woman who helped bind Britain to America in 1941 and helped rebuild a shattered political party 40 years later was reduced by her own century to a joke about 𝒔𝒆𝒙.
What she left was oddly durable. A fellowship at William and Mary still sends students to the embassy she ran. Van Gogh’s white roses hang in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, given in Averell’s memory and completed by her will, the last flowers from a woman who understood exactly what a beautiful object could buy.
And there is her own verdict, delivered late to a reporter who asked whether she had been happy. “Very, very,” she said laughing that famous laugh. “I drank deep from the well.”
