Kingmaker or gold digger? Paul O’Connor takes a look at a recent biography of the most famous seductress in the 20th century.
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor
KINGMAKER: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction and Intrigue. By Sonia Purnell. Penguin Random House Audio. Read by Louise Brealey. 16 hours, 58 minutes. Also available in Hardcover from Viking. 528 pages. $35.
Many of us have known someone like Pamela Churchill Harriman, someone who with brains, style, elegance, money and astonishingly good looks seduces all around her – especially men.
But none of us know anyone who was Pamela’s equal at this art of seduction. In the 20th century, she had no equal in that regard.
Born into a family low in the ranks of England’s nobility, but noble nonetheless, Pamela Digby was a flop during her coming-out year of 1938. But within a year, he fortunes turned when she made the rash decision to accept a marriage proposal from Randolph Churchill, son of Winston Churchill, just as World War II was beginning. They’d known each other two weeks, and she ignored all of the warnings provided about his misbehavior.
And while the marriage quickly became a disaster, her relationship with her in-laws proved life-altering in a positive way.
With her jerk of a husband away having affairs and playing at being a soldier, Pamela was drawn into the prime minister’s inner circles. A quick learner, she became a trusted ear during Britain’s most dire days.
Winston recognized Pamela’s skill at ingratiating older and very powerful men, and he set her to work influencing important Americans who came to London. She became close to many, including Averill Harriman, Harry Hopkins and Edward R. Murrow, all identified by Winston as essential British allies in the effort to draw American support to the cause. Eventually, she slept with Harriman and Murrow, and many others who needed seducing.
Much of the pillow talk made its way to Winston during their regular debriefings, until the Normandy landings, that is. The successful invasion of France on June 6, 1944, abruptly cut her off from her sources of information. All the action, and generals, had moved to the continent.
Purnell is awe-struck by Pamela and quite possibly credits her too enthusiastically with the eventual American decision to provide aid to England through the Lend Lease Act and then to enter the war. Yes, Harriman and Hopkins were wary of America’s entry into the war when sent by President Franklin Roosevelt, but Pamela wasn’t the only Briton making the case for American support. And Murrow didn’t need to be persuaded to support the British.
Nonetheless, she clearly helped Winston and, in the process, was ridiculed by many as a woman of ill repute. Purnell regularly describes her as a courtesan, actually as the greatest courtesan of the century.
After the war, she became involved with a series of extremely wealthy men, married one, broke other hearts, maybe had her heart broken a few times, all before she reunited with, and then married, a now-widowed Harriman in 1971.
From that point on, she is an American story. She becomes a citizen and then gets deeply involved in the Democratic Party, developing a political action committee that sought to bring the party toward the center. She was one of Bill Clinton’s leading patrons despite worrying that Clinton’s philandering would destroy his career. Purnell makes the obvious reference to a kettle calling a pot black.
And it was through Clinton that finally, in her 70s, she assumed what she had long sought: her first official post, American ambassador to France from 1993-1997.
Put the sex and glamor aside and this is a story of a woman struggling to be taken seriously for her brains, diplomatic skills, hard work and deep understanding of politics. Some people, like Clinton and Joe Biden, recognized these talents. Others saw her as a seductress and gold digger, interested only in money and social station. There were plenty of dry eyes at her funeral, one wag reported.
Purnell clearly falls on the side of the admirers, and I would suspect most readers of this book will, too. Purnell does a good job of allowing Pamela to seduce us nearly three decades after her death.