Whether you will admire, despise, or dismiss the subject of Sally Bedell Smith’s new biography of Pamela Harriman depends on how you react to the following anecdote, which appears in the introduction of Reflected Glory (Simon & Schuster, $ 27.50). Flying to the Adriatic for an inspection tour of the U.S.S. Eisenhower, Mrs. Harriman refused to wear the safety helmet required for landing because she feared it might muss her bouffant do. The aircraft’s engines were powered down while pilots executed an elaborate landing sequence to create perfectly still hair conditions on deck.
Having risked her life, breached protocol, disrupted naval operations, and probably kept the battlegroup commander waiting while she reapplied lipstick, our official envoy deplaned with every lacquered lock in place.
Any woman who denies the guilty stirrings of admiration for such touch-my- hair-and-I’ll-kill-you chutzpah is either lying or bald. This is not, of course, a proper reaction for a woman of the ’90s. As Smith is at pains to point out throughout the book’s competently written and thoroughly researched 411 pages, Pamela (as she calls Mrs. Harriman) may be rich, powerful, glamorous, and famous — but none of this really matters because it is all ” reflected glory,” borrowed from men, and therefore not quite legitimate.
The next Friday night I am dining alone on Chee-tos and peach wine coolers, I’m sure this insight will prove immensely comforting. Meanwhile, I predict that most women will be less interested in the “borrowed power” thesis than in learning how to borrow more of it themselves. In this way, Reflected Glory might be a companion volume to The Rules, the wildly popular how- to tome on snagging your man.
Here’s how Pamela Harriman did it: “Her techniques mirrored those of the successful wife — the woman in the 1950s New Yorker cartoon wearing a negligee and holding a martini for her husband — but she elevated them to high art and used them audaciously.” Smith continues: “Her role as courtesan was in fact a rigorous discipline that required preparation, shrewdness, concentration, willpower, organization, taste, patience, attention to detail, and thorough knowledge of the social arts.” To “Pamelize” a man, she perfected “a ballet that was both artfully flirtatious and comfortingly maternal: the forward tilt of her upper body, the cocked head, the rapt gaze, the flattening small talk and questions . . . the sunshine smile with its tantalizing glimpse of her tongue pressed against the back of her teeth.” Ladies, are we taking notes?
Actually, American men appear safe from such solicitous and soliciting attentions these days. As Pamela’s contemporary Jeanne Thayer pointed out: ” The interesting thing is that [Pamela’s] attentiveness should be easy to imitate. But American women don’t want to bother. They want to be competitive. ”
Pamela was indeed competitive, but she was far less interested in beating men at their own game than in bedding them in hers. CBS mogul Bill Paley, millionaire Jock Whitney, legendary playboy Aly Khan, Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, aristocrat Elie de Rothschild, and shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos numbered among the notches on her lipstick case. “She was, in effect, a sophisticated social entrepreneur always willing to strike out for new territory,” observes Smith. She was a risk-taker, with “a gambler’s eye” for the main chance — displayed when the young Pamela Digby accepted Randolph Churchill’s marriage proposal on the first date, and on the day she decamped from Khan’s Riviera mansion to set sail with Agnelli, whom she had just met, for ports unknown.
Though Pamela had few qualms about luring away wandering husbands, she was herself an assiduously devoted wife, widowed by Broadway producer Leland Hayward and statesman Averell Harriman after having nursed them in infirmity, and leaving first husband Randolph Churchill (son of Winston) only after his alcoholic outbursts and abusive behavior became unmanageable. And, despite her prospecting approach to romance, her greatest love appears to have been the famous though financially unendowed CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow.
All through the book there is a tension between “Pamela’s mythology” and Smith’s less “idealized” version of events. Pamela “spun a glamorous scenario of weekend house parties and hunt balls” at the Digby ancestral estate; Smith reports a more “limited social life.” “Pamela liked to say . . . that she had been steeped in politics practically from birth”; Smith insists her parents ” abhorred politics.” Pamela “would offer increasingly inflated accounts of her education”; Smith exposes her degree from “Downham College” as little more than a high school Home Ec certificate from the Downham School. And so on.
Smith’s game of gotcha wears thin after the first fifty or so rounds, so much so that one wishes she would spend less time nit-picking Pamela’s ” exaggerated claims” and simply get on with the real thing. Who cares, for instance, whether Pamela spent three nights in the basement of 10 Downing, sleeping in the bottom bunk of Churchill’s bed during the wartime Blitz, or thirty? Embellished or unadorned, hers is an extraordinary life. Smith concedes that “few people in the past fifty years dealt so intimately with so many powerful men in so many different arenas.”
There is Pamela in late-night bezique matches with Winston Churchill, partying till dawn with visiting soldier Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., visiting the ancestral Kennedy home with the young future president, engaging Dwight Eisenhower to help out in the kitchen of her officers’ club during the war, sitting by Edward R. Murrow during his famous broadcasts, trading information between American diplomat Averell Harriman and British generals, discussing politics with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
Unlike Christopher Ogden, whose Life of the Party biography of Pamela was published two years ago, Smith did not have access to her subject (Pamela originally collaborated with Ogden, but bailed after Random House made it clear that, for $ 1,625,000, the international affairs they were interested in were not those she had been pursuing at the Council on Foreign Relations). Smith compensates for this handicap with elegantly intersticed quotations from over 400 interviews, which gives her account more depth and detail than Ogden’s version.
Too much detail, in places — as in the last thirty-five pages documenting Pamela’s recent financial and legal difficulties, the particulars of which are so mind-numbingly boring that the author herself seems to collapse with facts-and-figures fatigue on the final page, lamely summing up Pamela as ” secure in her bloodlines, toughened by the hunting fields, entranced by glamour and wealth, and always ready to fight — again, again, and again.”
Strangely enough, by the conclusion, I found myself rooting for Pamela — against the heirs, against her snotty Georgetown rivals, against even her biographer Smith, who never passes up a potshot at the grande dame. Pamela is clearly intelligent but, Smith hastens to add, “only up to a point.” Pamela was attractive, but “not endowed with exceptional beauty.” Though socially gracious, her “utterances were neither witty nor memorable.”
At times Smith sounds like the debutantes who dissed Pamela as “a red headed bouncing little thing,” a “fat, stupid little butterball.” But it would be simplistic to ascribe Smith’s snide asides to mere cattiness. Consciously or unconsciously, they reflect assumptions about femininity and sexuality that have been perpetrated by modern feminism.
Like Pamela’s great-great-aunt Jane Digby — who scandalized Georgian society by jilting her British lord, escaping with an Austrian prince, seducing a German king, and marrying a Greek count (and sleeping with his son) before eloping to Syria with a Bedouin sheik — Pamela played a role as international siren with precedents dating back to ancient Greece. The hetaerae were the courtesans of Athens, mistresses who cultivated beauty and knowledge (proper Greek wives shunned learning as the “mark of the harlots”). Aspasia, the most famous, was Pericles’ lover. Like Pamela’s, “the power she derived from serving men,” as Smith puts it, was surely no less heady for having been “reflected.”
Theodora, the Byzantine empress, began as a stripper, whose trick of having geese peck grain from her nether regions so charmed Justinian that he changed the law banning marriage between royals and commoners and gave her an empire. Catherine the Great began her climb to power by showing off her gains in a page costume at the Russian court’s weekly transvestite ball. Ex-Ziegfeld girl and gold-digger extraordinaire Peggy Hopkins Joyce called the diamond bracelets stacked up her arm her “service stripes,” and made one of her five husbands slide a check for a million dollars under the bedroom door before she would admit him to the bridal bed.
But like a great religious reformation, promoting some icons to sainthood and relegating others to purgatory, the changes that took place in feminism in the late ’60s and early ’70s cast the courtesan into the outer darkness. And though Pamela Harriman managed to rise to serve as the U.S. ambassador to France, she is clearly a type out of time, incorrect for our age.
Sally Bedell Smith has done a service by preserving the story of the most legendary seductress of the 20th century — even if her tale is told at times in the tone of a disapproving headmistress. Perhaps, in fact, that will only burnish her appeal. As literary critic A. C. Bradley once observed of one of Pamela’s precursors: “Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra; and the more that are said the more wonderful she appears.”
Jennifer Grossman is a former presidential speechwriter living in Washington, D.C.
