Lives and times: Pamela Harriman

Pamela Harriman (1920-1997), adventurer and diplomatist, was born on 20 March 1920 at Farnborough, Kent, the eldest child of Edward Digby, eleventh Baron Digby (1894-1964), and his wife, Pamela née Bruce (1895-1978).

After a period in Australia, she grew up near Dorchester in Dorset. Her upbringing was provincial, with an emphasis on sporting pursuits. Her formal education at home was by convention similarly limited. Glamour was in short supply, but those glimpses she had of it proved the spur that would take her from rural England to the heart of American political life, via the bedrooms of some of the richest men in the world.

On coming out into society in 1938, Pamela Digby was taken up by the American hostess Lady Baillie, who recognised and fostered her ability to attract, please and organise the lives of powerful men - the art of the courtesan. She remained without a genuine suitor until the outbreak of war in 1939.

Then, on the first evening that they met, she accepted a proposal of marriage from Randolph Churchill (1911-1968), only son of Winston Churchill. Despite warnings on all sides the couple were married within three weeks. Pamela Churchill, however, quickly established excellent relations with her parents-in-law, Winston and Clementine, and sealed the bond with the birth on 10 October 1940 of her first and only child, also Winston. When her father-in-law became prime minister in 1940, Pamela Churchill leapt at an offer to live at 10 Downing Street.

Less happy were Pamela Churchill's dealings with her husband who was adulterous and argumentative, and drank too much. The marriage had got off to a sticky start when he insisted on reading Gibbon aloud to her on honeymoon, and deteriorated rapidly under the weight of his gambling debts.

Soon both parties began to look elsewhere for amusement, and Pamela Churchill formed liaisons with several visiting American dignitaries. Her most important conquest was Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt's choice to supervise the lend-lease programme; she was 21, he 49. The relationship came to an end when Harriman was posted to Moscow in 1943.

Randolph and Pamela Churchill were divorced in 1946, although she continued to use the surname (which became an asset in her amorous adventures) for much of the rest of her life. For a time she worked as a gossip writer for the Evening Standard, but post-war England, and English men, were not to her taste, and in 1947 she moved to France, where she soon took up with Prince Aly Khan. When he left her for Rita Hayworth the next year, she speedily reattached herself to Gianni Agnelli, the owner of Fiat.

Aside from her gifts of vitality and self-discipline, Pamela Churchill's great skill as a mistress lay in her malleability. She made every man at whom she set her cap feel that he and his cares were the sole object of her attention. At times she overreached herself in ambition and extravagance, but she took no outward heed of criticism or shame, and simply marched on to the next consuming interest of her life.

Any such vexation can only have been increased by her repeated failure to turn her status as mistress into that of wife. Despite running Agnelli's household for five years, he looked elsewhere for a wife and so, after a fling with the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, in 1954 Pamela Churchill became matresse en titre to Baron Elie de Rothschild, the French banker.

When it became clear that Rothschild would not leave his wife for her, in 1960 Pamela Churchill turned to America and captured the Broadway producer, Leland Hayward. They married on 4 May 1960, the union lasting until his death in 1971.

"The Widow of Opportunity", as she became known, then made eyes at Frank Sinatra before bringing the wheel full circle that same year by marrying Averell Harriman, himself now a widower and formerly governor of New York state. In December 1971 she took American citizenship. By instinct a conservative, she now became, like her husband, a pillar of the Democratic Party, prized by it for her skill as a fundraiser and political hostess at her home in Georgetown, Washington, DC, which served as the party's unofficial headquarters during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Although never an intellectual, she also took care to familiarise herself thoroughly with policy issues.

Averell Harriman died in July 1986, leaving his wife $115 million, as well as Van Gogh's White Roses. She soon gave her backing to two aspiring presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and when Clinton was elected in 1992, he rewarded her the next year by making her ambassador in Paris.

Her time in France was broadly a success. She approached her briefs with the energy, hard work, and determination that had characterised her career hitherto. If the English still carped at her past behaviour, the French were impressed by her looks (which had been improved by time and surgery) and her social adroitness. Her reconciliation of differences between these two last nations helped finalise the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1993.

Pamela Harriman died on 5 February, 1997, at the American Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Seine, after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while swimming at the Htel Ritz, Paris. She was buried, after a service at Washington National Cathedral conducted with the protocol of a state funeral, on 14 February at Arden, the Harriman estate near Harriman, New York.

Extracted from the Oxford DNB biography by James Owen.

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