Sex, Money, and Power
Pamela Harriman was born in 1920 into minor nobility as a Digby. She later, through her marriage to Randolph became a Churchill and through her marriage to Averell she became a Harriman. In the middle she married Hayward Leland a Broadway producer of “Sound of Music” fame. However, the real story as journalist/biographer Sonia Purnell tells it in her hagiographic biography is about how a once chubby girl uses are innate smarts and her sexual powers of seduction to have access to great wealth and be influential in the corridors of power in England, France, and the United States.
Her marriage to the alcoholic and womanizing Randolph was destined to fail. Nevertheless, she so charmed his father Winston, that she was able to sit on many high-level meetings of state at his Chequers country estate. She also had his full permission to seduce Averell Harriman who was in charge of lend-lease aid to Britain. She was 21 and Harriman was 50. It was said that her high diplomacy took place between the sheets of the Dorchester Hotel, where Harriman put her up. After Harriman was reassigned to Moscow, she seduced Edward R. Murrow, the leading radio journalist in London at the time. Murrow almost divorced his wife for Pamela. Her affair with Murrow did not stop her from sleeping with Bill Paley, Murrow’s boss at CBS radio.
These affairs took place after Pamela gave birth to young Winston. She was far from the best of mothers and young Winston was shuttled between relatives and nannies. Her sexual liaisons and the affairs of state took precedence over her son.
The end of the war was a letdown for her, but soon she took up with Prince Aly Khan. Khan teaches her the Arabian arts of lovemaking which she will soon use with great affect. According to Purnell she became quite expert at oral sex.
After her affair with Khan, she started a long lasting on and off affair with Giorgio Agnelli of Italy’s Fiat automobile company. He along with Khan rained substantial gifts upon her including apartments and artwork. She later had an affair with Eli Rothschild of the Paris branch of the eponymous bank.
She moved to the United States upon her marriage to Hayward Leland. The marriage was not a happy one but it last until Leland’s death in 1971. After his death and the death of Harriman’s wife, the two are reunited after thirty years. Remember at this time Harriman was 80 and she was 50. Harriman, a scion of the Union Pacific fortune was a power broker in the Democratic Party. He introduced her to the Washington D.C. movers and shakers and their Georgetown mansion becomes the locus of high-level socio/political events.
By 1980 she was the doyenne of the Democratic Party. After Bill Clinton’s defeat in his reelection race for the Arkansas governorship, she took him under her wing and introduced him to the D.C. establishment. By the mid-1980’s she had a political action committee and was funding Democratic Senate races throughout the country. She became close to Sandy Berger and Richard Holbrooke who would become key figures in the Clinton Administration. She also went with Averell to Moscow to meet with the then Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and sensed that times were changing in Moscow.
As a reward for all of her efforts, Bill Clinton appointed her ambassador to France in 1993. There she became very close to French president Jacques Chirac. He spoke at her memorial. While in Paris she played a behind the scenes role in settling the Bosnian Wars.
All wasn’t sex and parties. She had an abortion, and her finances were totally mismanaged by Washington power broker Clark Clifford causing the Harriman family to sue her, as she was the executor of the Harriman estate.
All I have to say is that her seductive powers jump right off the pages of this wonderful book. Purnell gives great credit to this remarkable woman.
