Spilling the tea on Pamela Harriman

A short history of one of Truman Capote's Swans

We are five episodes into Feud: Capote vs. The Swans on FX with diminishing returns. Frankly, I could barely get through last week’s episode where James Baldwin popped up like the Ghost of Christmas Past and Present to show Truman that he needed to keep writing. There was no need for this series to have eight episodes when four or five would have sufficed. In my opinion, it is stretching the premise of this show way too thin.

In episode three, viewers were briefly introduced to Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward, Leland Hayward's current wife, at the Black and White Ball that Truman Capote threw in 1966 at the Plaza Hotel. Pamela and wife number two, Slim Keith, snipe at each other over the breakfast buffet. It’s not even that much of a fight, not that these two women would have been so undignified as to have an actual catfight, especially with cameras rolling around.

I can understand why Jon Robin Baitz decided to narrow his focus to only the main swans in Truman’s life, but Pamela’s life is so fascinating that I had to share it. I first read about Pamela in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. Later, when I was researching Jane Digby for Scandalous Women, I was struck by the fact that two such fascinating women were born into the same family.

However, we are going to need a cocktail. How about an Early Grey Martini to start us off?

Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman

Pamela, the daughter of the 11th Baron Digby, was born on March 20, 1920. Her life was meant to be one of marriage to another aristocrat and time spent in the country hunting and shooting, with spring and summer spent in town doing the season. Dull and conventional. But Pamela knew from childhood that she wanted a different kind of life. She was fascinated with the story of her great-great Aunt, Jane Digby, who left her husband, the Earl of Ellenborough, searching for true love and adventure. It was a search that would take her from the court of Ludwig I of Bavaria to the desert as the wife of a Bedouin sheik.

The Digby’s had a long aristocratic lineage but very little money. At one point in her childhood, they lived in Australia to save money. Pamela was raised by governesses and taught the basics. When she was seventeen, she was packed off to the continent to ‘finish off’ spending time in France and Germany to perfect her language skills before returning to England to do the season financed by her father’s win through a lucky bet on the Grand National. Pamela wasn’t a success in her first season. Red-headed and chubby, she was also seen as snobbish and arrogant, the product of her mother’s firm belief that she was the most beautiful, talented child. Unfortunately, her mother was the only one who thought so. Pamela was a wallflower at many balls and cocktail parties during the ‘deb’ season.

When she was 19, Pamela was fortunate to go on a blind date with Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. He proposed to her the night they met, and Pamela said yes. She wasn’t about to lose her chance at becoming Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law, despite her future husband having a habit of asking women to marry him. His record was three women in one night! Randolph thought he was going to die in the war and wanted to sew up having an heir before his death. They were married a few months later, and Pamela became pregnant shortly afterward. The marriage to Randolph was a disaster; he was an alcoholic womanizing wastrel, who, although gifted as a writer, was also lazy and focused. He suffered from ‘son of a great man’ syndrome. However, Pamela got on like a house on fire with her in-laws. Her mother-in-law Clementine had devoted her life to her husband, neglecting her children, and she advised Pam to do the same. It was advice Pamela took to heart, just not with her husband.

After giving birth to her only child, Winston, Pamela parked him in the country and spent all her time in London, where the action was, despite the war. She spent weekends with the Churchills’ at the Prime Minster’s country home, Chequers. At age 21, she met Averell Harriman, a wealthy American railway heir (Union Pacific) and intimate of FDR, who was 29 years her senior, through his daughter Kathleen, whom she had befriended. The two were soon having an affair, even though they were both married, using Kathleen as a beard. Pamela proved her usefulness to Averell by introducing him to many influential people, including Lord Beaverbrook. But Averell wasn’t about to divorce his wife and marry Pamela. He’d already gone through one divorce from his first wife. However, he paid for Pamela’s Grosvenor Square flat in London and established a yearly allowance for her.

Harriman was not the only wealthy and powerful American Pamela had set her sights on. She also enjoyed romances with Jock Whitney and William S. Paley, who called her the courtesan of the century. When Averell had to return to the States, Pamela moved on to Edward R. Murrow, famous for his broadcasts from London. Murrow fell madly in love with Pam, and her with him. But there was one little snag; while Harriman’s wife had been safely back in the States, Murrow’s wife was with him in London, and Janet was not about to give up her husband without a fight. When Janet became pregnant, Murrow broke off the relationship with Pam.

In 1945, Pamela and Randolph Churchill were divorced. Pamela’s relationships with wealthy married men were well-known in English society, so she headed to Paris for a fresh start. Leaving her son Winston behind in the country, she settled down in Paris. She soon met the young Gianni Agnelli, heir to the Fiat fortune, who was intrigued by this woman who had so many powerful men at her beck and call. Although Pamela received an annuity from both Jock Whitney and Averell Harriman, she desperately wanted to get married again. She even converted to Catholicism, hoping that Agnelli would pop the question. However, Agnelli had no desire to marry his mistress, not even when Pamela tried to make him jealous by having flings with Aly Khan and Stavros Niarchos. His sisters also didn’t like Pamela.

Pamela then moved on to Baron Elie de Rothschild of the famous banking family, who liked to call Pamela his “European Geisha.” Married to his cousin with three children, Elie wasn’t about to divorce his wife and marry Pamela either. He found it amusing to have as a mistress a woman who had slept with so many powerful men. His wife, Liliane, didn’t find it so funny; she once bashed her car into Pam’s Bentley. Although, like Agnelli, he supported Pamela in the style to which she had rapidly become accustomed. Pamela held the men in her life by taking up their interests, molding herself to their culture, and focusing entirely on them to the exclusion of everything else. With Agnelli, she even developed an Italian accent, answering the phone as ‘Pronto Pam.’

Once she had moved on to Rothschild, it became ‘Ici Pam.’ She also made herself useful to them by providing them with business, politics, and society contacts. Smart as a whip, although not an intellectual, she stayed friends with all her former lovers, except for Rothschild, doing them little favors. For instance, she helped Jock Whitney buy jewelry for his wife. By the end of the 50s, Pamela knew her days as a mistress were numbered. She was fast approaching forty. She needed to get married. Her days in Paris were over, and feeling out of place in England, there was only one place Pam could go: the land of opportunity, America.

She set her sights on Broadway producer and legendary agent Leland Hayward. So what if he was married? Pamela could see that his wife, Slim Hayward, was neglecting him. Hayward was dazzled by her attentiveness and quickly made her his fourth and last wife, much to Slim’s chagrin. Unfortunately for Pamela, she met Hayward at the peak of his career with the production of The Sound of Music. As soon as he married Pam, his career took a nose-dive, and he started drinking heavily. Still, Pamela made the best of it; for a brief time, she ran a shop on Madison Avenue that specialized in expensive tchotchkes. Leland still had money, and Pamela spent it like water, buying a country house and a costly apartment on Fifth Avenue. She also managed to alienate his three children.

After 11 years of marriage, Hayward passed away, leaving Pamela a widow. After the shock of his death, Pamela received another shock when his will was read. Under the terms of his divorce from his second wife Margaret Sullavan, Hayward was required to leave half of his estate, which totaled $400,000, to his surviving two children, Brooke and Bill. Pamela found herself at 51, right back where she had started, but not for long. The good fortune fairy must have smiled on Pamela when she was born because Pam had hooked up again within months with Averell Harriman, her war-time lover, who was now a widower. Six months after Leland Hayward’s death, she and Harriman were married.

The final chapter in Pamela’s life saw her becoming one-half of a political power couple in Washington, DC. Harriman was a lifelong Democrat, and now Pamela became one as well as an American citizen. She established her own political action committee, PamPac, giving money to all the rising Democratic politicians, including Al Gore, Jay Rockefeller, and Bill Clinton. Despite her new interest in politics in her marriage to Harriman, she still made sure not to neglect her hubby. As Harriman grew older, he became more deaf and cranky, often taking out his anger on Pamela. She took it in her stride, ensuring that Harriman always had friends and family to come and look in on him when she traveled.

She also cracked open the purse strings Harriman held tightly during his first eighty years. They bought a private plane, an estate in Virginia, and another in Barbados. Pamela also removed traces of Harriman’s late wife Marie from all the homes, including the art collection that Marie had put together over the years, donating it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. When Harriman finally died at the age of almost 96 in 1986, Pamela even made sure that Harriman wasn’t buried anywhere near his late wife.

Pamela inherited his entire $115 million fortune at his death and used the money to position herself as a power broker in Washington. For the first time in her life, she didn’t need a powerful man on her arm; she was the power. She immersed herself in foreign policy issues, making speeches around the country, reveling in the publicity that named her one of the foremost hostesses in DC. She worked hard for Bill Clinton’s presidential election and was rewarded with her appointment as Ambassador to France. Pamela threw herself into her role as Ambassador, studying briefs like she was about to take an exam and giving speeches in French, which she spoke fluently, if not well. This time, she was arriving back in Paris in triumphant.

While her public life was going great gang-busters, her personal life was going to hell. Her relationship with her son Winston was often strained. He’d been raised mainly by both sets of grandparents and only saw his mother when she needed an escort to a function. Despite bearing the same name as his illustrious grandfather, Winston’s career never equaled his grandfather’s success. He managed to screw up his career in Parliament by opposing sanctions against Rhodesia and having an affair with the ex-wife of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and eventually lost his seat. Pamela found him an extreme disappointment. Her relationship with Harriman’s children and grandchildren also took a blow when they accused her of mismanaging the family trust funds after his death. The family sued her, and she finally settled with them for 11 million dollars after selling several artworks by Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse that had been earmarked for donation to the National Gallery after her death.

Pamela Harriman died on February 5, 1997, at the age of 76, after suffering a stroke while swimming in the pool at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, a place of great significance in her life. She’d enjoyed a clandestine rendezvous with her second husband, Leland Hayward, there and celebrated the liberation of Paris with her lover, Edward R. Murrow, at the bar.

Like her great-great-aunt, Pamela refused to be hemmed in by the judgments of others. She never apologized for her series of affairs with married men, nor did she object when her name appeared in gossip columns. “I would rather have bad things written about me than be forgotten.” After her death, Jacques Chirac, the President of France, called her ‘probably one of the best ambassadors since Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson.” Ultimately, Pamela finally got everything she wanted: fame, money, admiration, and respect.

Sources:
Life of the Party - Christopher Ogden
Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman - Sally Bedell Smith
The Fortune Hunters - Charlotte Hays

Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Ambition, and Betrayal - Laurence Leamer

What I’m Watching:

Call the Midwife: Since I have PBS Passport, I’ve been able to watch the first two episodes of series 13, which should be premiering next month. In 13 seasons, I don’t think I’ve been able to get through an episode of this show without crying. It’s been a fascinating look at life in the East End of London from the 1950s through the 1960s.

Sense and Sensibility: I watched all four Hallmark movies for their Loveuary series, and they have been a mixed bag. Thankfully, they saved the best movie for last, a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The production had the good sense to hire author and historian Vanessa Riley as a consultant on the film, which features a diverse cast. Of course, there are going to be people out there who quibble, claiming that they are trying to make Jane Austen ‘woke,’ but the reality is that there were 15-20,000 Black people living in London during the Regency period. The movie was beautiful to look at, and the acting across the board was excellent, especially Deborah Ayorinde (Elinor Dashwood), Bethany Antonia (Marianne Dashwood), and Dan Jeannotte (Edward Ferrars).

What I’m reading:

A Murderous Relation by Deanna Raybourn - This is the 5th book in the Veronica Speedwell series. I’m a little behind in this series and trying to catch up before A Grave Robbery comes out in March. I adore Deanna’s books, and I highly recommend them if you love historical mysteries set in the Victorian era with a main character who is feisty, independent, and a whole lot of fun. Veronica Speedwell is a lepidopterist, and when she’s not hunting butterflies, she’s getting into all kinds of delicious mischief. You will love the Veronica Speedwell series if you are a Miss Scarlet and the Duke fan.

The Holy or the Broken: I pulled Alan Light’s non-fiction book off my TBR pile because I wanted to read something that had nothing to do with my work in progress. Light’s biography traces how Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song ‘Hallelujah’ went from obscure to one of music history's most beloved and recorded songs.

What I’m listening to:

The Turning: Room of Mirrors - I’m not big on audiobooks, but I love podcasts. As a ballet fan who once dreamed of being a ballerina, this podcast is a must as it pulls back the curtain on not just George Balanchine and New York City Ballet but the state of ballet itself.