Pamela Harriman

Diagnoses

Family

British noted family, the third daughter of Lord Digby and the wife of Randolph Churchill in 1939 (the son of Winston Churchill); they divorced in 1945. She married ambassador Averell Harriman and later, attained the position herself of ambassador to France. Called by her biographer "the century’s greatest courtesan," Pamela had a lifetime of amazing adventure, glamour and power. The daughter of a British aristocrat, she grew up on an imposing 1,500-acre family estate in Dorset. It was nonetheless an intellectually stultifying time in history for women, neither was she considered, at her coming-out in 1938, to have either beauty or grace. Loud, pudgy and awkward, she managed somehow to capture the catch of the season, Winston Churchill’s only son, Randolph, whom she met on a blind date. The catch turned out to be no prize. Randolph was a womanizer, a drinker and gambler, and after Pamela produced the requisite heir, Winston, in 1940, she began to create her own style. It was style indeed with the best of chic and social know-how. She and Winston Sr. became great friends and through him, she met the movers and shakers of the world in that era. Her romantic resume became a Fortune-500 catalog. With intelligence, savvy, ambition and sensuality, Pamela learned the secret of enveloping her men in a velvet cocoon of undivided attention. Living in Paris, she had various alliances and affairs including those with Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Elie de Rothschild and Stavros Niarchos. In 1960 she made a second marriage, to Broadway producer Leland Hayward. They lived in high style and his death in 1971 left her financially strapped. In 1972, now age 51, Pamela was reunited with a lover from long ago, 79-year-old Averall Harriman. They married and settled in Washington DC, where Pamela conquered the American political center with the same ease and finesse with which she had made Europe her playground. Becoming a major Democratic fund-raiser, she set her sights on becoming a diplomat. When Harriman died in 1986, there was a nasty period in which she had a legal battle over his estate, but she won enough of the fight to give her a comfortable lifestyle. She had a brain aneurysm and died 2/05/1997, 3:50 PM MET at the American hospital at Neuilly sur Seine, France. Link to Wikipedia biography