PARIS — The water of the Ritz pool was still, the afternoon light filtering through the trompe l’oeil sky above the colonnade, when the most powerful woman in American diplomacy began her final swim.
Pamela Harriman, 76, the U. S. Ambassador to France, had slipped into the hotel’s basement pool unannounced, a departure from her usual protocol, nursing a headache she had confided to almost no one.
Twenty lengths in, she groaned, went limp, and slid beneath the surface. A security officer named Henri Paul—a man whose own rendezvous with infamy would come seven months later in a tunnel under the Place de l’Alma—fought to revive her on the tiles. She died two days later at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, at 3:48 p.
m. on February 5, 1997.
It was an exit of almost theatrical symmetry for a woman whose entire life had been a performance of survival, seduction, and reinvention. Born Pamela Digby in 1920 to an aristocratic but cash-strapped British family, she had been dispatched to Munich as a teenager, where Unity Mitford introduced her to Adolf Hitler. By 19, she was married to Randolph Churchill, the bullying, gambling son of a man about to become Prime Minister, a union she accepted with chilling pragmatism.
“I thought how marvelous it was to be going out with somebody about whom I didn’t give a damn,” she later said.
The marriage collapsed under the weight of Randolph’s debts and her own ambitions. By 1941, she had become the mistress of Averell Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease envoy, a man nearly 30 years her senior. The 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 began during the worst Luftwaffe raid on London, the couple walking hand-in-hand across Horse Guards Parade the next morning to inspect the wreckage.
Winston Churchill, needing America, turned a blind eye. His son never forgave him.
What followed was a half-century masterclass in strategic intimacy. There was Jock Whitney, then CBS founder William Paley, who called her “the greatest courtesan of the century” with genuine warmth. Edward R.
Murrow nearly left his wife for her. Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat heir, gave her five years she called the happiest of her life, and a monthly stipend that lasted until her death. Baron Elie de Rothschild was blunter about her provenance: “Once it’s washed, it’s just like new.”
She married Broadway producer Leland Hayward in 1960, transforming herself into an American with method-actress intensity. When he died in 1971, leaving less than she expected, her stepdaughter Brooke recalled a terrifying rage: “How could I have been married for so many years to a man who would leave me so little?” The day after the funeral, she telephoned Averell Harriman, now 79 and recently widowed.
They married within the year.
In Washington, she built a political machine. Her Georgetown salon on N Street became the unofficial headquarters of the Democratic Party’s revival, hosting issue evenings that paired young governors with wealthy donors. One of those governors was Bill Clinton.
Her PAC, Democrats for the ’80s, raised millions. When Clinton won in 1992, she asked for Paris. She was sworn in as Ambassador at age 73, rising at 5 a.
m. , working until midnight, and negotiating the GATT Uruguay Round and the Bosnian peace accord with a diplomat’s steel.
But the final years were poisoned by litigation. Averell’s children sued her in 1994, alleging she had squandered $30 million of their inheritance on a collapsing golf resort and a plastics company. She had personally guaranteed an $18 million loan against their trusts, then pleaded poverty when the bank came calling.
“She’s got a real sickness about money,” said Peter Duchin, who grew up in Averell’s house. The case settled on confidential terms in December 1995. She had asked Clinton to relieve her of her post, but the release came only days before her death.
At her funeral, Clinton said simply: “Today I am here in no small measure because she was there.” Jacques Chirac laid the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on her flag-draped coffin, the first foreign female diplomat to receive it. She was buried at Arden, the Harriman estate, beneath the Van Gogh of white roses she had hung above her Georgetown fireplace.
The obituaries wrestled with her legacy. Max Hastings acidly noted she had been described as “a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings.” Her biographer, Sonia Purnell, argued that a woman who helped bind Britain to America in 1941 and rebuilt a shattered political party 40 years later was reduced to a joke about 𝒔𝒆𝒙.
But Pamela had her own verdict, delivered to a reporter who asked if she had been happy. “Very, very,” she laughed. “I drank deep from the well.”
