Life of the Party
Ogden, Christopher
LIFE OF THE PARTY: THE BIOGRAPHY OF PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HAYWARD HARRIMAN Christopher Ogden Little, Brown/504 pages /$24.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON What I like best about this book is...
...And there were many more: generals, colonels, entertainers...
...All of which reflects the book itself: a bit unfair, pleasantly trashy, overcute and catty, and utterly engrossing...
...Harriman was born in 1920 and raised in country-house comfort during that Wodehousian idyll between the wars...
...The woman who endured the Blitz with Churchill also weekended with Cary Grant at Leeds, the most picturesque castle in England...
...The main chance presented itself in the person of Hayward, who was estranged from his wife...
...But his millions, soon to be hers, guaranteed that both would be honored and prized by the party of the working man...
...100 pages or more could have been cut without regret...
...Babe Paley called her, simply, "that bitch...
...His success at getting her to talk was so great that she apparently forgot that all this stuff might be published...
...You can bet they had to nail down the White House crockery that night...
...She moved to Paris, where she was serially kept in accustomed grandeur by rich fops of the type later known as Eurotrash: My Kahn, Elie de Rothschild, Gianni Agnelli, and others...
...Harriman decided to write her autobiography...
...Her experiences from those years make for splendid reading, notwithstanding Ogden's florid style...
...altar material, no...
...Ogden calls Mrs...
...She claims a close political association with Bobby Kennedy, though none of Kennedy's courtiers recalls it...
...By the end of the fifties Pamela grew bored with Paris...
...On one overnight flight aboard an Air Force jet, Averell slept in a pull-out bed that, upon landing, was folded up with him in it...
...Truman Capote wrote two short stories with Pamela serving as main character...
...It is an amazing life, rich with amazing stories, so it's no surprise that behindthis book lies an interesting story, too...
...After the war, divorced from Randolph, Pamela maintained this torrid pace...
...Above her in blood-red type is the title, which, given Mrs...
...Harriman's first salon, on Grosvenor Square in wartime London, included 'Ike and Waugh and Kenneth Clark...
...She spent her pregnancy at No...
...A mong its many delights, Ogden's book offers a detailed account of the inbreeding of the upper classes...
...She wanted to marry, but by now she was merely a famous mistress—catnip, yes...
...Her voice is erogenous and can skip across the scales of an aural keyboard, one moment sounding like the clink of polished sterling on a Waterford goblet, the next, like the soft, popping bubbles of the Pol Roger inside...
...The Duchess of Windsor—"the most perfect wife in the world"—taught her the finer points of entertaining and decorating, which the Duchess was otherwise wasting on her drooling husband...
...Pam lost their allegiance but got the money...
...H er marriage to Harriman, with whom she re-established contact after both were widowed in the early 1970s, was her ticket to Washington and the inner sanctum of the Democratic Party...
...France is her reward for a decade of fund-raising in which she lassoed $12 million for bemocratic congressional candidates...
...Catnip may be too weak a word for her charm...
...Does Mrs...
...Her son was off at some boarding school somewhere...
...Randolph, for example, was a famous drunk and womanizer...
...The thin vein of insecurity thus revealed is almost touching and perfectly understandable...
...At the bar in the Ritz, Hemingway wrote pornographic poems about her...
...Harriman is "catnip to men...
...He catches her inseveral instances of résumé-padding and worse...
...Mrs...
...m in no position to judge Christopher Ogden's journalistic ethics—maybe we can get Walter Cronkite or Fred Friendly to weigh in—but we should be grateful for his book...
...She looked for a way to move to America, where, after all, one was apt to find American men in larger numbers...
...0 68 The American Spectator August 1994...
...When the realization dawned, she backed out of the project and cut off communication with her ghost...
...Harriman's full bosom and wiggling bottom: Her complexion was ivory with just a hint of blush...
...her last, in Georgetown in the 1990s, boasted Al Gore and Dana Carvey...
...After Harriman was shipped off to Moscow, where he began a different kind of love affair with Stalin, Mrs...
...Pam's a witch," says another...
...Of course Averell was married at the time, but Pamela nevertheless nurtured the hope that at war's end he would leave his wife and marry her...
...Ogden's biography is exhaustive—maybe too exhaustive...
...Harriman any longer require an introduction...
...Though her feminist colleagues in the Democratic Party will curdle at the thought, Mrs...
...She needed the Andrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
...Ogden kept the tapes, however, and, using them on "background" to supplement his own interviews with other sources, produced his no longer authorized biography...
...Ogden doubts her account, and his researches seem to bear him out...
...This is a good example of Ogden's tone, which some might find too racy but which is in fact perfectly suited to its subject...
...The marriage was effectively over by the time the war was underway...
...Relations with in-laws and various step-children were equally strained, particularly when it came time for the reading of the wills...
...Of course Murrow was married at the time, but Pamela nevertheless nurtured the hope that at war's end he would leave his wife and marry her...
...Apparently Ogden himself isn't immune, to judge by the narrative's many references to Mrs...
...when the stewards finally found him he seemed not to have noticed...
...she daytripped with the young JFK but, mirabile dictu, didn't score (his Addison's Disease was acting up...
...She preferred American men to Brits, but mainly she just preferred men...
...Her star rose during the Reagan tyranny, and shone undiminished after Averell's death in 1984...
...Today she is United States Ambassador to France, appointed by President Clinton, who recently called her "the First Lady of the Democratic Party," and did so right in front of Hillary...
...Harriman took up with Edward R. Murrow...
...Harriman's history of hosting and fund-raising for Democrats, is a double entendre...
...Harriman thereupon began a series of wartime affairs...
...Together they served as goodwill emissaries under President Carter...
...Down boy...
...It was a good bet, on both counts...
...Like most famous people who decide they want to write, she immediately hired a writer, in this instance a correspondent for Time magazine named Christopher Ogden...
...By this time the old fellow, who had never been known for his intellect or savvy, was almost non compos mentis...
...Right...
...To pick loose a single strand from the sordid tapestry: Pamela had an affair with Jock Whitney, who was earlier married to Liz Altemus, who later married Harry Hopkins, who fixed Pamela up with Averell, who introduced her to Ed Murrow's boss Bill Paley, who slept with Pamela (natch) and who married Babe Cushing after she, divorced Stanley Mortimer, who later married Averell's daughter Kathleen around the time that Babe's sister Betsey married Jock...
...She would raise her son by long-distance ever after...
...Pamela appeared, and he actually married her...
...Murrow told the author, kindly...
...Though he surely didn't mean to, Christopher Ogden has written an eloquent account of the decline of the West...
...But she bore him a son, named Winston, who forever bound her to the child's grandfather...
...I didn't admire the kind of person she was," Mrs...
...A child of British nobility, she met her first husband, Randolph Churchill, at the dawn of World War II, the bulk of which she spent in the company of Randolph's father Winston...
...She oversaw the courtship of Aly Kahn and Rita Hayworth, and sat by as Rodgers and Hammerstein composed The Sound of Music...
...Sure...
...But her parents were distant and The American Spectator August 1994 67 forbidding, and by Ogden's account the neglect created in her an unquenchable craving for security, power, and prestige...
...she was given the latest clothes by the actual Christian Dior...
...For the next several months Ogden wheedled out of her and into his tape recorder dozens of tales of romance and intrigue...
...Thanks to his peculiar relationship with her, Ogden has not only Pamela's less reliable account but also those of her friends, family, acquaintances, and enemies...
...Grosvenor Square was also the site of her first salon...
...Not all of her guests were lovers, of course...
...For those who would like one it is best to work backward...
...First up to bat was Averell, whom FDR and Harry Hopkins had chosen as special envoy to Churchill...
...LIFE OF THE PARTY: THE BIOGRAPHY OF PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HAYWARD HARRIMAN Christopher Ogden Little, Brown/504 pages /$24.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON What I like best about this book is the dustjacket— a lush, almost lurid photograph (from Vogue magazine) of a carefully coiffed and painstakingly coutured Pamela Harriman caught in mid-shriek...
...Tonight, her voice was low, with a sexy croaky catch...
...Winston, says Ogden, fully approved Pamela's liaison, since it gave him, through the medium of pillowtalk, a special insight to American thinking in the months before Pearl Harbor...
...She married Harriman, a lover from her youth, even as the body of her second husband, the famous show business agent Leland Hayward, was cooling off...
...Harriman's "one of the most fascinating lives of the century," and the exaggeration is only slight...
...You won't be surprised to know that while Pamela was catnip to men, their wives held her in rather lower regard...
...Oh, do tell...
...work though not the money, for she had spent the previous decade propping up her third husband, the ailing Averell Harriman, until his death at 94...
...She was an early backer of candidate Clinton, though she worried, with the air of an expert, about "his zipper problem...
...for women in Mrs...
...It is nonetheless a signal contribution to our popular literature...
...She vows she met Hitler briefly before the war...
...They would sometimes pass each other on the stairs to her flat on Grosvenor Square...
...she sat next to Murrow in the studio as he made his legendary wartime broadcasts from London...
...You can too tell a book by its cover...
...In mid-1991, Mrs...
...Yet she embroiders her life in the retelling to this day...
...And we wonder why the children of rich people always seem a little slow...
...The poor old gal looks as if she just spotted the men in white suits bursting through the door to take her away...
...Harriman's life draws its fascination largely from the fascinating men she has assiduously cultivated...
...After the child was born she packed him off to the country home of Lord Beaverbrook, one of her many protectors...
...And so on...
...10 Downing Street, waiting out the Blitz in a safe room below ground, with old Winston snoring in the upper half of the bunk bed she shared with him...
...She always moves in when wives are off duty," says a Rothschild...
...Lawyers stepped in, and the imbroglio was closely chronicled in the gossip pages...
...Harriman's line of work, the need to dissemble must be primal...
...These are what she sought from her men, who more often than not were more concerned with her wiggling bottom...
...And now Paris is hers...
...and the subtitle—note that this is "The," not "A," biography—reeks of confidence...
...Pamela," writes Ogden, with rare understatement, "was not a one-man girl...
...On the back a blurb from the gossip columnist Suzy tells us that Mrs...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
