PAMELA HARRIMAN'S PARTY
EMERY, NOEMIE
PAMELA HARRIMAN'S PARTY By Noemie Emery So here is Bill Clinton, at the very beginning of the Lifetime network's biofilm about the late piece-of-work Pamela Harriman, speaking at her impressive...
...Today I am here in no small measure because she was there," he informs us...
...When she set out to build up the Democrats, her soirées quickly turned from issue exchanges into fund-raisers, a form at which she was expert...
...rich...
...Both Clinton and Harriman, of course, have been utterly shameless, the secret key to their success and survival...
...No Habitat for Humanity for him...
...chases girls like Warren G. Harding, Johnson, and John F. Kennedy, his putative idol—those between Clinton and the late Ms...
...Not a word passes the lips of this president that has not been tailored to cosset and please...
...To be fair, she did earn her money, for all of her husbands were difficult...
...a man capable of apologizing to one audience for having raised taxes and to another for having failed to raise them nearly enough...
...with Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Leadership Council, formed to save the country from Barbara Boxer...
...His "issues," such as they are, concern small, caretaking matters: school uniforms—car seats—no smoking!—unpaid days off to run personal errands...
...Her second and third—theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward and elder statesman Averell Harriman—were well past their primes when she wed them, and she spent much of her time as a nurse...
...Do you have an umbrella...
...Thus, Clinton has been both a New and the oldest of Democrats...
...She had indeed helped revitalize his party and then backed him to adorn it...
...It is between La Harriman and Our Bill...
...In true Pamela style, the Man from Hope, Oxford, and Georgetown has become a cash cow (a cash bull...
...Not for nothing was she known as the "Widow of Opportunity...
...In fact, she seemed strengthened by them...
...but Clinton seems aimed in the other direction...
...And he has weakened not only his party but his office...
...freshening the flowers...
...He has tarnished his office and exposed it and his country to ridicule...
...She signed on, for a fee, to coddle a man and look after his interests...
...She would surely approve of the renting out of the Lincoln Bedroom, the coffees in the Map Room (where her first father-in-law once conferred with FDR about Hitler), the fund-raising shakedowns, the funny deals with the Chinese...
...With Pamela, a deal is a deal," she quotes another friend as saying...
...If the cycle of triumphs and setbacks in her life had taught her anything, it was that she could endure bad publicity...
...When Pamela and Hayward took shows on out-of-town tryouts, she schlepped an electric frying pan to cook her husband the chicken hash he relished...
...Pamela Harriman tried in her later years to at least pass for a serious person, working long hours at her job as ambassador to France...
...4. The Nanny President: Pamela Harriman had one talent that lifted her price above rubies: She was the superlative, ultimate, absolute nanny...
...Churchill Harriman are so strong and so many that they merit careful study...
...Care was what she doled out, in exchange for luxury...
...Rumor has it that his Hollywood friends have bought him a refuge in Malibu...
...When she refused to cover the loan, Harriman's daughters and grandchildren hauled her into court, and much bad publicity followed...
...She was less a wife or lover than an employee...
...In politics, the equivalent to this is polling, by which needs are gauged, trends discerned, and desires designated to be filled...
...Every need was foreseen and then seen to...
...Widowed by him, plump and past 50, with much less money than she wanted to live on, she scored the coup of her life by bagging her old beau Averell Harriman, days short of his eightieth birthday, whose connections and fortune would sustain her for the rest of her life...
...Harriman is their ability to flourish while laying waste the country all around...
...tucking the rug around our feet...
...Our perennial national plumper of pillows, he hovers over us doing us favors, forever bringing us tea, wine, or whiskey...
...At home, she would bend down beside him to ease his slippers on and off his feet...
...As president, Clinton has been an indifferent leader, but as national nanny, he may yet make his mark...
...After six years of Clinton—first Democrat reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt!—the 267 seats are about to become 211, the 56 senators 45, and the 28 governors 17, including the governors of only 2 of the 10 largest states in the union...
...Dumped by him, she zeroed in on Leland Hayward in New York...
...Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy would have laughed themselves silly, but this is our president's conception of national leadership...
...Pamela is a good girl because she is getting me in my later years and taking care of me...
...For Baron Elie de Rothschild, who succeeded Agnelli, she became an icily elegant Parisienne, knowledgeable about designer dresses, fine antiques, and vintage wines...
...Let us number the ways: 1. The Personal President: For Bill Clinton, as once for Pamela Harriman, keeping public and private life separate is always a problem...
...On that happy day in late 1992 when Clinton partied in Pamela Har-riman's Georgetown house to celebrate the end of 12 years of Republican terror, Democrats occupied 267 seats in the House, 56 seats in the Senate, and 28 governorships, including those of New York and Texas...
...If you smoked, the cigarette was there...
...Bill Clinton is her particular soulmate, a leader as shallow, self-absorbed, and amoral as she...
...Had she married Ronald Reagan, she would have been an arch-Republican," Sally Bedell Smith quotes Pamela Harriman's son, Winston, as saying...
...Bill breaks his vows and gives Hillary grief, but he has never stinted in giving her power...
...and to run (very badly) his single lunge at a political legacy, his grand plan for health-care reform...
...She lived, as it were, in her permanent War Room...
...2. The Chameleon President: Nothing binds the president and his patroness together like their uncanny ability to harmonize with their surroundings, to give an audience what it wants to hear and viewers what they want to see...
...In the course of this, Pamela personally guaranteed a loan of $18 million from the grandchildren's money, without informing any of the heirs...
...But through investments overseen by Pamela, Clark Clifford, and others, the trusts set up for Harriman's daughters and their children suffered huge losses, nearly $30 million between 1989 and 1993...
...After Averell Harriman's death, Pamela spent at her usual clip of around $2 million yearly, which the estate managed to cover...
...But, in an uncanny confluence of events, this film about a woman who used the fame and money she gained through sex to promote a president was aired in October 1998, as that very president faced impeachment proceedings—over a scandal involving a woman who tried to get a job and proximity to power through sex...
...Wipe your feet...
...Defeat" was not in her lexicon...
...The men were fully aware of the terms of the contract...
...PAMELA HARRIMAN'S PARTY By Noemie Emery So here is Bill Clinton, at the very beginning of the Lifetime network's biofilm about the late piece-of-work Pamela Harriman, speaking at her impressive funeral and apparently tracing his ascendance to her...
...But Bill Clinton's Democratic house has many mansions, and in it he cohabits at once with Barney Frank and Bob Kerrey...
...She might shudder privately when she took the first hits, but after that she seemed immunized against attacks that anyone else would find mortifying...
...But in the end, the greatest trait the Clintons have in common with Mrs...
...He allowed his wife to vet his cabinet (badly...
...Noting Pamela's "uncommon brazenness," Smith writes, "What the [Harriman] family misjudged was Pamela's apparent obliviousness to shame...
...a Baptist and a swinger...
...In her best Clintonian vein, Pamela cast herself as a victim, unable to see what sin she had committed to merit so nasty a fate...
...For Harriman, she became a Washington hostess and discovered a passion for Russia and Democratic politics, subjects in which before she had shown no interest...
...And the resemblances do not end there...
...marriage and sex life intrude on the work of the government...
...it is said they are readying a niche for him in the entertainment industry, where he clearly belongs...
...Money was always the point...
...Republicans can thank their lucky stars that she did not...
...And it is true...
...Who knows...
...Harriman, the Clintons have the ability to thrive under mortifications that would have normal people hiding behind the couch in the fetal position...
...The real resemblance is not between a Valley Girl and a world-class seductress...
...Bill Clinton, in turn, is our housekeeping president, seeing to tiny details of living...
...And when no one is watching, who is Bill Clinton...
...Newt Gingrich, who fell on his sword, has, in the long run, been good for his party, raising it up to majority status...
...She was never "dumped," but "moved on" to something quite different...
...While his points of resemblance to past presidents are few—he dissembles like Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson...
...By choice and necessity, it seems, he is moving into Harriman country and is willing to stay there...
...Clinton's troubles have come from letting his Noemie Emery is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard...
...As for Pamela Harriman, of course, her marriages and sex life were her profession, and all her love affairs were business transactions...
...And the techniques she used—glamour and flattery—to coax contributions to her party out of donors were the same ones she had deployed in past incarnations to pry money from men for herself...
...Most people take their survival for granted...
...But the deal was for money, and if she felt shortchanged, there was hell to pay, as numerous stepchildren discovered...
...As does Our Bill...
...He knew her price, and he also knew that she was worth it," writes her biographer Sally Bedell Smith of the Harriman marriage...
...For Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, she adopted his manner of speaking and became a Catholic...
...Other presidents have talked about struggle and sacrifice or fought for unpopular policies...
...While most of the items put forth in his State of the Union address quickly went nowhere, he himself has gone to innumerable fund-raising sessions: parties in Malibu with Hollywood big-wigs, a Hamptons weekend with leveraged-buyout kings and yet more film biggies, posh lunches on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $5,000 a plate...
...The payoff, of course, is that we love him, at least enough to maintain him in office...
...Like Mrs...
...She may have briefly enlivened the Democratic party with her glamour and money, but she also infused it with her insidious spirit...
...So, how is Bill Clinton like Pamela Harriman...
...All this resembles the tactics of Harriman, who, in her long life of seduction, made a practice of taking on the speech, habits, interests, hobbies, profession, nationality, and even the religion of the men with whom she was involved—like the murderess in the movie Black Widow, who studied each man, deduced his ideal, and then quickly became it...
...With him too, a deal is a deal...
...6. The Comeback Kid: Before Bill Clinton, before even Dick Nixon, the real comeback kid was Pamela Harriman, who refused to acknowledge rejection as final and saw each setback as the springboard to something new...
...Pamela went on the offensive, almost as if adversity seemed to fuel her in some strange ways...
...senators...
...You'll need your warm coat...
...5. The Material Boy: Pamela Harriman, who made a career out of caring, cared first and foremost for money...
...But hey—he is still in there...
...to choose his cabinet (badly...
...As his reign grinds on and we come to know more of his governing tactics, it becomes clear that Clinton is indebted to his patroness not merely for help winning his job, but also for the way he acts in it: He is the first of the Harriman Democrats (named after the wife, not the ex-governor), bringing techniques of seduction to national governance...
...Needing cash to secure their survival, they were not very fussy about where it came from: Pamela was supported for a time by two men at once (Harriman and Jock Whitney), something even some kept women frown on...
...Each comeback was more stunning than the last...
...for the faithful, raking in the funds that are the lifeblood of the party, but also living to party with the very (can we call them obscenely...
...Nearly 400 elected officials have switched parties to become Republicans since Clinton took office, including two U.S...
...There followed some riffs by columnist Maureen Dowd on the woman of the world and the ditzy sex kitten (and the fate of the man who seems strung between them like a hammock), but this misses the point...
...Bill Clinton, though he personally won reelection, has been bad for his...
...Dumped by Edward R. Mur-row, she found Gianni Agnelli...
...He "wins" if he merely is mocked, and not censured...
...All his consorts know it when he changes his tune, and they can be counted on to complain bitterly, making for less than domestic tranquility...
...They pretend things are fine and get away with it, or so they think...
...possibly the greatest nanny of all time...
...His future life will no doubt be glitzy...
...For Pamela, this worked like a charm, as she had to please only one man at a time...
...She was, of course, a master of personal spin...
...Not he...
...So too with the Clinton ménage, which Americans overwhelmingly surmise is a professional bargain...
...Dumped by Agnelli, she moved on to a Rothschild...
...For Hay-ward, she watched TV and baseball games, read Variety, hit Broadway night spots, and gave up wine for hard liquor...
...Her first, Randolph Churchill, was a boor and a drunkard...
...wins" when he settles a lawsuit for a great deal of money...
...Bill Clinton, who called himself the winner when he lost in New Hampshire, understands this perfectly: His White House has redefined clinging to office as a triumph...
...The political equivalent of the typhoon that ravaged this once-awesome fortune is what Bill Clinton did to the Democratic party's estate...
...In fact, when not engaged in damage control, Clinton has done almost nothing this year except fund-raise, always in very plush settings...
...If you liked art, artists were invited," Smith quotes a friend as saying...
...3. The Courtesan President: Pamela Harriman was the ultimate geisha, anticipating her companion's every wish...
...Thus, Clinton's campaign in 1996, his convention speech, and the State of the Union addresses that followed were no more and no less than strings of small-bore, feel-good, poll-tested measures, tailored to what the public (or many small publics) said it wanted...
...All of this caring will come at a cost...
...English women, far more than American women, are built-in nannies, housekeepers, gardeners—with the lightest touch in the world," wrote Hayward's daughter Brooke...
...She is living up to a bargain," Smith quotes Hayward as telling a friend...
...Mistress of the detail, she could make a great house (or three) run like clockwork, the decor pristine, the landscaping immaculate, the hot meals punctual...
...What else matters...
...It was a delusion that kept her going," Smith says...
...Government to him is about gaining favor by dishing out countless small, cushy favors...
...And so there he is, the Seducer-in-Chief, our very first Courtesan President...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
