Reflected Glory - Hardcover

The catalog of lovers, husbands, and tryst partners that runs throughout this 560-page biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman is astonishing in itself: Randolph Churchill (the besotted son of Sir Winston), Edward R. Murrow, Elie de Rothschild, Averell Harriman ... What's more astonishing is that along the way Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman managed to find time to become an accomplished globe-trotting socialite, a mother, a leading fundraiser and den mother for the Democratic Party, and, today, the American Ambassador to France. Sally Bedell Smith sought out Pamela Harriman's most far-flung associates and detailed everything from her subject's cosmetic surgeries to her fudged studies at the Sorbonne to produce this exhaustive work, and though the subject comes across as cold, calculating, and duplicitous, there is a grudging admiration for the century's ultimate courtesan.

In 1994, Christopher Ogden, employed by Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman to ghost her autobiography, published Life of the Party. When she balked at exposing the spicier side of her career, he went ahead on his own, using her taped interviews, but legally he could quote nothing. Smith, another unauthorized biographer, quotes little from Harriman, written or vocal, for similar reasons, but 400 of her acquaintances cooperated, resulting in a deeply informed and revelatory study. Smith (All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley) has done further homework in financial and court papers and in the diaries, letters and memoirs of contemporaries. Had it not been for Ogden's preemptive strike, Smith's intensely detailed biography of the least sedate of American ambassadors?British-born Pamela Harriman, now 76, represents the U.S. in Paris?would be even more explosive. Perhaps only in France, where premiers and presidents often have publicly acknowledged mistresses, would she be acceptable, even admired, as an envoy. Bedding her way to wealth and power, the resourceful red-haired beauty wed Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward and Averell Harriman, filling in the interstices between marriages with Edward R. Murrow (her only unmoneyed lover), Gianni Agnelli, Aly Khan, Elie de Rothschild and other deep-pocketed admirers. Said one observer: "She could make a man, not just in bed. She stretched a man's horizons." Austerity was never her cup of tea, nor was familial loyalty to the children and grandchildren inherited from two American husbands. Her lifestyle, Smith contends, was always based on self-aggrandizement. As a former Hayward wife remarked, "Pam Churchill thought she would marry [Fiat heir] Agnelli, so she became a Catholic on spec." Brushing aside her reputation as grande cocotte, a French friend scoffed, "Everyone has a past. It is who she is today that counts." Photos not seen by PW. First serial to Vanity Fair.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.