Pamela Harriman

170
Pamela Harriman bigraphy, stories - American diplomat

Pamela Harriman : biography

20 March 1920 – 5 February 1997

Pamela Beryl Harriman (née Digby; 20 March 1920 – 5 February 1997), also known as Pamela Churchill Harriman, was an English-born socialite who was married and linked to important and powerful men. In later life, she became a political activist for the United States Democratic Party and a diplomat. Her only child, Winston Churchill, was named after his famous grandfather.

Early life

Pamela Beryl Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, England, the daughter of Edward Digby, 11th Baron Digby, and his wife, Constance Pamela Alice, the daughter of Henry Campbell Bruce, 2nd Baron Aberdare, a peer in the House of Lords. Pamela Digby was educated by governesses in the ancestral home at Minterne Magna in Dorset, along with her three younger siblings. Her great-great aunt was the nineteenth-century adventurer and courtesan Jane Digby, notorious for her exotic travels and scandalous personal life. Pamela was to follow in her ancestor’s footsteps, being frequently cited as "the 20th-century’s greatest courtesan."

Amid acres of Dorset farmland and woods, Pamela as a young girl enjoyed an idyllic lifestyle at the top of the county’s social tree. From an early age Pamela was a very good horsewoman. She competed at shows at the International Olympia, Royal Bath and West Show, and local shows at Dorchester and Melplash. She show-jumped a tiny pony called Stardust that did a clear round at Olympia when every fence was above the animal’s withers.

At the age of seventeen, she was sent to a Munich boarding school for six months. While there she was introduced to Adolf Hitler by Unity Mitford. She subsequently went to Paris, where she took some classes at the Sorbonne. Although in her Who’s Who biography she identified these classes as "post-graduate" work, she actually never completed a college degree. By 1937, she had returned to England.

Marriage to Leland Hayward

In 1959, she met Broadway producer Leland Hayward who was still married to Slim Hawks. He proposed to her, and after her marriage ultimatum to Rothschild was rejected, she accepted Hayward’s offer and moved to New York. The day Hayward’s divorce was final, she became the fifth Mrs. Hayward with the ceremony taking place in Carson City, Nevada on 4 May 1960. Hayward was rich with income from his productions, notably the very successful The Sound of Music, allowing for a lavish and luxurious life style mostly between their residence in New York City and the Westchester County estate "Haywire." Haywire also became the name of the bitter memoirs of her stepdaughter Brooke Hayward. Pamela Hayward stayed with her husband until his death on 18 March 1971.

Political life

As Pamela Churchill Harriman she became a United States citizen in 1971 and became involved with the Democratic Party, creating a fund-raising system — a political action committee — named "Democrats for the 80s", later "Democrats for the 90s", and nicknamed "PamPAC". In 1980, the National Women’s Democratic Club named her "Woman of the Year". U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed her United States Ambassador to France in 1993. The Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris in 1995 while she served as ambassador.

Pamela Harriman died on 5 February 1997 at the American Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Seine, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while swimming at the Paris Ritz one day earlier. The morning after her death, President Jacques Chirac of France placed the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur on her flag-draped coffin. She was the first female foreign diplomat to receive this honour. President Clinton, in further recognition of her contributions and significance, dispatched Air Force One to return her body to the United States and spoke movingly at her funeral at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

She was buried 14 February 1997 at Arden, the Harriman estate near New York.

Her life story has been the subject of a documentary film, and has been somewhat Hollywoodised in the 1998 TV movie The Life of the Party: The Pamela Harriman Story with Ann-Margret in the title role. In the biography of Madeleine Albright, Pamela Harriman is cited in contrast to Albright, as a socialite who slept her way to the top. In addition, the novel Absolute Power tells the tale of a fictional woman named Christy Sullivan, married to a much older W. Sullivan (a striking similarity to the name W. Averell Harriman perhaps), whose extramarital liaison with the President ends in her murder. In a new two-character play Swimming at The Ritz by Charles Leipart, Pamela Harriman, in need of $40 million to settle a family lawsuit, regales the audience with tales from her past. She and a hotel valet wait in a Paris Ritz suite for appraisers from Christie’s who are preparing to auction her possessions.