Sunday Read: Sex and Soft Power, The Book Everyone is Reading this Summer

For some reason, everyone I know on both sides of the Atlantic seems to be devouring Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell, the biography of the famed political horizontale Pamela Harriman, perhaps because, with Trump cosplaying master and commander, we all want to be bunkered in those storied war rooms beneath the streets of Westminster, wreathed in her father-in-law Winston Churchill’s cigar smoke.

Pamela Digby Churchill ​​Hayward Harriman was the luscious, wellborn redhead who, at the age of nineteen, and just two weeks after meeting him, married Winston’s appalling only son, Randolph, an abusive and misogynistic drunk, and soon gave birth to Winston Jr. While the great man was consumed with winning WWII, Randolph was the Hunter Biden figure of Downing Street, whom the whole family—his three sisters and his ethereal mother Clementine—tried to keep out of Winston’s way to avoid the inevitable scenes of rage and retribution. The marriage to Randolph collapsed after two years, leaving Pamela with nothing but her husband’s gambling debts, which forced her to flog off her jewelry and wedding presents. But, in the first indication of her remarkable social skills, Pamela captivated the senior Churchills, who, in Purnell’s words, told Randolph nothing but Pamela everything. She became a fixture at their Kent country retreat Chartwell, often staying up with Winston playing Bezique till 5am to help relieve his wartime stress.

19-year-old Pamela and Randolph Churchill on their wedding day

It was from this prestigious base—and door-opening name recognition—that Pamela became the accomplished seducer of a mind-blowing cast of the most alpha American power players based in London, such as Roosevelt emissary Averell Harriman, 30 years older but still, in Purnell’s words, a “sexed-up vision of athletic American manhood”; Edward R. Murrow, the chain-smoking news heartthrob; Bill Paley, the womanizing hard-ass and media tycoon (who happened to be Murrow's CBS boss); and philanthropist, businessman, and waspy stiff John Hay (Jock) Whitney, later U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.

Pamela in wartime London

Spy Games

If you believe Purnell’s rendition of Pamela’s amours—and the author had access to many formerly unavailable papers—Pamela’s sexual frolics were not the racy rumbles of a good-time girl who loved the high life. It was war work, in which Pamela was something of a milky-skinned Madame X, learning U.S. intelligence from her lovers that she brought back to Churchill, who deployed her like a heat-seeking missile to decipher Roosevelt’s intentions. She also ferreted out prized intel for Churchill’s consigliere Lord Beaverbrook, the portly Canadian gnome who owned the powerful Daily Express and Evening Standard. It is Purnell’s feminist thesis that, throughout Pamela’s life, the people who disparaged her courtesan career would never have done so if they had known how valuably she had served her country in the war.

Hmm. I can’t quite buy into the idea of Churchill and Clemmie pimping out their winsome daughter-in-law to the American brass during the Blitz, even to gather much-needed covert juice. It seems more likely that, seeing how irresistible Pamela was to older men, they ensured she had a seat at the table where she could employ her glorious charms—but perhaps didn’t know the gusto with which she exercised her brief.

What does ring true is how Pamela was a woman of underappreciated brilliance as well as allure, with highly developed political antennae. She was far smarter than most of the duds in the British establishment who occupied high office. Her access to power was through the only route available at the time—enthralling influential men.

Paris When It Sizzles

For her next act, Pamela expanded her field of operation to Paris, where her magnetic sapphire eyes and epic bosom attracted another astonishing lineup of lovers. An impressive conquest was Riviera playboy Prince Aly Khan, who apparently schooled her in mysterious sexual techniques, which perhaps helped win her the nickname in society circles of “La Bouche.” The dalliance tuned her up for the love of her life, the world-class heart-crusher, speed demon, and Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, who seemed to single-handedly hold up Italy’s postwar economy from his 80-foot yacht in the Med, wearing only a Patek Philippe watch and a towel round his bronzed torso. Agnelli bankrolled Pamela’s chauffeured Bentley and bijou apartment on Paris’s Avenue de New York, stuffed with Louis Seize furniture, where she answered the phone, “Pronto, Pam” in a lilting Italian accent. But she never got a wedding ring out of Gianni. As a patrician Catholic and captain of industry, marriage to a divorced woman was out of the question, despite Pamela’s warp-speed religious conversion. Forever besotted, Gianni nonetheless phoned her every morning until the day she died. Next up, the haughty Baron Élie de Rothschild was the Jewish version of the same story (with the added complication of a wife who fought back). Somewhere in this time period, now answering the phone with a coo of “Ici, Pam,” she crammed in a fling with the (also married) Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos.

Au Revoir, City of Lights

By Pamela’s late thirties, it was clear she had burned through too many high-society women’s husbands in Paris. Potent evidence was the humiliation of being banned from the British embassy’s glittering guest list for the young Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit in 1957 (on the grounds of the ambassador's wife Cynthia Jebb’s assessment: “I will not have that tart in the embassy”). Thus, our ever-resourceful heroine packed her bags and took her décolletage to New York. She immediately targeted the big-time theater impresario Leland Hayward, whom she married in Carson City, Nevada, in May 1960, the day after he had legally kissed off his fourth wife, the celebrated society beauty Slim Keith. Fellow swan Babe Paley remarked acidly of Pamela’s appeal, “I can see that Leland has fallen into a tub of butter."

Jesus Christ. By round about page 198, the pileup of broken furniture in Pamela’s unstoppable climb leaves you breathless. She was an atrocious absent mother to young Winston, dumping him for weeks at a time with anyone who would have him, and then feeling lifelong hurt that he had so little filial feeling.

American Hustle

Averell Harriman said “"Marrying Pamela was the best decision I ever made."

The mise-en-scène of Pamela’s Act III was Washington, DC. In 1971, the day after Leland’s funeral, Pamela, now 51 and short of cash, thanks to not getting the fulsome payout she expected from his will, made her canniest move to date. She reconnected with and married one of her wartime flames, the loaded, now 79-year-old statesman, businessman, and (Ave Maria!) widower Averell Harriman. She used his stature to get back into the world of her first love, politics, inserting herself into the project of reinventing the Democratic Party, which had spent years in the wilderness. At her sparkling salons at the elegant Harriman residence in Georgetown, where Van Gogh’s Roses (a gift from Averell) glimmered above the fireplace, she played hostess and power broker to political hopefuls and presidential contenders, who thrilled to her unmatched entertaining skills, her sharp moderation of the conversation, and her deft deployment of her famed Rolodex.

The peak of Pam Power was after Averell's death in 1986, when she was liberated from having a grand old codger in tow, and she became an early talent spotter of the young Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. I met Pamela at the home of Washington Post chairman Katharine Graham in the early 90s, when my husband, Sir Harry Evans, then president of Random House, was trying to persuade her to write a book. To my young eyes across the dinner table, Pamela seemed like an august old trout with a Mrs. Thatcher power-helmet coif, but not to my husband, who found her, to my annoyance, mesmerizing. La Bouche had mastered the art of deep, immersive attention (said Harry), locking eyes with an expression of intense fascination.

In 1993, now-President Clinton rewarded Pamela’s assiduous fundraising for the Democratic Party with her first real job, the premier posting of U.S. ambassador to France. What sweet revenge to return to Paris as queen of the most coveted address on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (a former mansion of the Rothschilds, no less), occupying a position of real power, with the U.S. president on speed dial. She worked at full throttle on international trade, NATO expansion, and the Bosnian War, making full use of the gifts that would no longer be belittled as “charm,” but retitled as soft power. One senses she loved her diplomatic brief as much as any of the diamond necklaces locked in her safe.

Alas, in his will, Averell Harriman entrusted the family finances to the oversight of delinquent advisors, who lost a hefty chunk of it through mismanagement and bad investments. The rancor and stress of the rows with all the stepchildren, who were united in hatred of what they saw as Pamela's profligacy after years of gold-digging, probably accelerated her death in 1997 from a brain hemorrhage in the swimming pool at the Ritz in Paris at the age of 76. Bizarre footnote: the attempts to resuscitate Ambassador Harrriman were conducted by the Ritz’s then-obscure head of security, Henri Paul, who just seven months later was at the wheel of the fateful hotel limousine bearing Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed to their (and his) doom in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

Pamela’s passing was marked with a state funeral-sized send-off at the Washington National Cathedral, where President Clinton asserted with emotion that, “Today, I am here in no small measure because she was there,” and, in a statement, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called her a ''central figure in the history of this century.'' It was the obituary Pamela had always dreamed of, but it was fleeting. The woman who craved so much to be remembered for substance will, sadly, always be remembered for sex.