"Life of the Party": Blowing the Whistle on Pamela Harriman

A new, tell-all biography of the American Ambassador won't faze the French, predicts Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

If the whistle indeed had to be blown on Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman's notorious lovelife and career, then the best place by far for her to reside when that bomb exploded was where she is right now: in Paris, once the theatre of some of her exploits, and where she currently officiates as Bill Clinton's competent and respected Ambassador.

Mrs Harriman is reported to be hopping mad about her indiscreet (and riveting) unauthorized biography written by the former Time Magazine chief diplomatic correspondent, Christopher Ogden, Life of the Party. Worse, she has chiefly herself to blame: she's the one who initially approached Ogden in June 1991 as a suitable co-writer when asked by a publishing house to write her autobiography. She had been, Ogden explains, favourably impressed by a biography of Margaret Thatcher he had recently penned.

A contract was duly drawn up, and Harriman sat for over 40 hours of taped interviews with Ogden before she started getting uncharacteristically cold feet. The publishers, Ogden reports, had offered a generous 1,625,000-dollar advance, and Pam realised she would have to produce a fairly complete memoir for that kind of money. Mercifully, at 73 and after three rewarding marriages, the multimillionnaire Harriman didn't need it. As is often the wont of the rich, she forgot that Ogden was not similarly circumstanced, and left him high and dry, having given up his Time job to write her book for her. Hence his decision to forge ahead.

The resulting book is a wonderful read, and Mrs Harriman shouldn't worry about the effect it has on her Parisian socialite friends (as opposed to the depressingly conformist inside-the- Beltway Washington crowd, or even her former British compatriots). The Pamela Harriman Tips On How To Seduce Rich And Powerful Men have been the guiding principles of Frenchwomen over the centuries. "When with a man, socially or professionally, not merely sexually, [Harriman] concentrated on him with laserlike intensity," Ogden writes.

"She would take a man who interested her out of a group the way a cowbow and fine horse could cut a steer from a herd for branding. She would approach the man, bring him out of the traffic pattern to a sofa, sit down and talk to him for five to ten minutes. She focused on his strengths: what he was doing, what had happened since they last met, his plans, all in a low, throaty, conspiratorial whisper, and in the process learned his weaknesses or what troubled him. She was glad to answer his questions if he had any, but she was extremely careful never to babble and never to burden the fellow with anything that might be troubling her. She wanted him to shine even as she learned what was on his mind.

"Careful never to keep anyone long, especially if his wife was with him, she would then return the man to the group, pick out another and repeat the process, perhaps half a dozen times or more. Rarely did she attempt to talk to a man in a group, rarely did she talk to women, although she tried not to alienate them unnecessarily. For those moments, those men sensed that no-one else in the world existed for Pamela. As her reputation grew, receiving the full frontal Pamela treatment, being Pamelized, was a heady experience for most men."

The time is 1947, the place is Paris, and Pamela Digby, 27, had been divorced for two years from Randolph Churchill. The "fast" debutante who'd married after a two-week courtship the son of the legendary British PM, then, neglected by him, had enjoyed a string of passionate affairs with some of the most interesting men to be found in London in the war years, from Jock Whitney to CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow and (déjà) US envoy Averell Harriman, had moved to to Paris to properly enjoy her divorcee status.

Paris was made for Pamela and Pamela was made for Paris. She met Aly Khan, son of the Aga, at the annual ball he threw each June at the Pre Catelan after the Grand Prix de Paris race, and to which she'd been invited in 1947 with her friend Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, daughter of Joe's and sister of Jack's. Aly Khan's 33 to 1 longshot horse, Avenger, had just won. It was lust at first grope. The two danced cheek to cheek as if welded. When Kick warned Pam against Aly Khan as a known womanizer, she made the mistake of hinting at his dark skin as well. It was enough to decide the headstrong Pamela.

Other playboys of the Parisian nights would follow: the young Gianni Agnelli, whom she eventually found too hard to pin down to the serious business of marriage, and even more tantalising, Baron Elie de Rothschild, whom she simply snatched away from his less beautiful, less devoted wife Liliane in 1953. An intellectual who was a voracious reader and an expert on eighteenth-century art, "Liliane certainly wasn't going to worry about bringing Elie his slippers," her own brother-in-law once explained. "Pam was. She's so good about paying attention to all the small things."

Although the new couple were trying to keep their affair discreet, all of Paris knew. Where an English or an American wife would have confronted her husband with recriminations and tears, Liliane de Rothschild was wiser. The Duke of Windsor once asked her which of the Rothschilds was involved with Pamela. "My husband", she replied. And yet she suffered so much that forty years later, she still can't bring herself to say Pamela Harriman's name, calling her "that woman". Elie didn't divorce.

But the beauty of Paris was that Pamela Digby Churchill could lead her own life as freely as she wished, and still be received by everyone without difficult explanations. She was a regular at Louise de Vilmorin's salon, where she could meet the poetess's lover, André Malraux, and the future Academicien Francais Maurice Druon, with whom she had a fling. The American brigade - the Irwin Shaws, the Art Buchwalds, Theodore White, the 24-year-old Ben Bradlee, then press attache at the American Embassy she was one day to command - introduced her to the brilliant photographer, Robert Capa, whom she fell for. Later she'd complain to a Parisian friend: "Everyone always talks about the rich men I have slept with, no one ever talks about the poor men I have slept with."

When she left Paris for New York and marriage to the Broadway producer, Leland Hayward, in 1958, Pamela had made a host of French friends, from Ysabel de Faucigny-Lucinge (later Marquise de Ravenel) to viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes, Versailles curator Gerald Van Der Kemp, billionaire industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, or Princess Irene Galitzine, connections which would serve her crucially upon her return.

Never fazed by her style even at its wildest, Parisians these days find her positively low-key. And no-one, but positively no-one, would ever dream of not attending one of her dinner parties at the Ambassador's residence on 41, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore - fittingly, a former Rothschild residence, in which her move with her own Impressionists and furniture was duly recorded by Karl Lagerfeld's camera for "Vogue". There are rumours that she plans to settle in Paris even after the end of her tenure as Ambassador. It could be her wisest move yet, especially since another unauthorized biography, this time by the experienced writer Sally Bedell Smith, is in the works in Washington. Whatever new comes out, it will only add to Pam Harriman's prestige here.

"Life of the Party: the biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman," by Christopher Ogden, Little, Brown and Company, £ 18.99.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1996

The Saigon Kid

Moutet's Paris: The Saigon Kid

The European, 2 May, 1994

An amusing photograph is making the rounds in Paris these days. It shows a rather surly young man, black hair parted in the middle, dressed in a wrinkled shirt and sawn-off denims uncovering white knees, lounging in the seat of a bicycle rickshaw in the middle of a Saigon boulevard.

This is none other than Romain Balladur, 24, the youngest of our PMs four sons. This apple of his father's eye has mysteriously managed, after graduating from ISG, a second-string Paris business school, to be posted for his military service as a VSNE (Volontaire pour le Service National en Entreprise), or business trainee, for the water and construction conglomerate Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that a recent parliamentary report on campaign finance in the last General Election showed Lyonnaise-Dumez to have been the third largest contributor overall to candidates of whatever political stripe, even though its chairman, Jérôme Monod, is a card-carrying member of the Gaullist RPR.

Balladur the younger alighted in the former French colonial capital last November, I'm told, and set up his quarters at the Rex, one of the city's better hotels. Since then his activities have been mysterious. He has been having a wonderful time, members of the local French expatriate community will tell you, not very helpfully.

In an interesting coincidence, young Romain's tracks in Saigon and Hanoi crossed those of another famous scion of French officialdom, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, formerly his father's African affairs adviser at the Elysée palace, now a consultant for Lyonnaise-Dumez's arch-rival, the mammoth Compagnie Générale des Eaux (also a generous contributor to many an electoral campaign). Having managed to pull off a contract to build a tubings factory near Hanoi for CGE, Jean-Christophe couldn't help a dig when asked about his young rival: "Don't confuse us, please. I'm involved in serious work!"

IT WILL be even more difficult than usual setting up an appointment with any Parisian of note between 12 and 23 May next: everyone who's anyone has managed to wangle, earn or steal some sort of assignment at the Cannes Film Festival, enabling them to hop South for at least three days of sun, screenings, galas, and gossip at the Hotel Majestic bar (tip: the Carlton is for Hollywood types).

One celeb however will be conspicuously absent from the opening star-studded gala dinner, traditionally given by the French Ministry of Culture: Jack Lang, the long-serving, charismatic and extremely popular former Culture minister under Mitterrand's both terms, has been informed by his lackluster successor Jacques Toubon's secretary that he was not welcome to dinner on the 12. News of this ham-handed slight went round Paris like lightning, with comments overwhelmingly detrimental to the hapless Toubon. Had he wanted to emphasize his (legitimate) fear of being upstaged by his predecessor, the gossip goes, he couldn't have gone about it in better way.

Meanwhile Jack Lang and his wife Monique have booked a suite at the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc, like Bel-Air royalty, for the duration of the Festival, and will be among the guests of honour at the even more glittering party given on the following day, Friday 13th May, by the unsuperstitious Claude Berri (of Germinal and Jean de Florette fame) for his existentialist, Patrice Chéreau-directed megaproduction of Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot, starring Isabelle Adjani. Nobody in Paris doubts that Jack and Monique will be better seated than Toubon and his wife Lise

WOULD YOU willingly spend an evening reading 260 pages of statistics? Well, possibly, if they all have to do with Frenchwomen. Or so bets Agnes Michaux, a sociologist with an appreciable sense of humour, who has just come up with a book gathering every fact, poll, figure, statistic, test, market study, and assorted theses devoted to the female of the French species. The result is of course riveting (albeit better absorbed in small instalments.) Did you know that 7% of Frenchwomen have already made love in a lift? That 22% are bosses of their company? That 87% define the ideal man as "the one who makes me laugh"? (but that 84% also define him as owning a building society savings account large enough to buy them a house.) That 58% of them believe in astrology? (but 68% believe in Paradise.) That 27% would have liked to have been born in the aristocracy? That they account for 35% of the French homeless? That 3% would have liked to be Francois Mitterrand's mistress? That 26% keep their bank account separate from their spouses? That 91% say they're happy? And that 0%, not a single one, would leave their place in a liferaft to Madonna?

METEOROLOGICAL studies have just proven that Paris, the most compact city in Europe (and the one with the largest population density) enjoys a specific microclimate with temperatures 6°C warmer on average compared to its immediate surroundings. This is caused by the heat radiated by the city's buildings and population, but also by Paris's waterproof quality (most of it is covered in asphalt, stone or zinc, so that rainwater flows straight into gutters and sewers instead of slowly evaporating in the air as it does in cities with more public and private parks and gardens.) The heat of the city also repels rain in the cold season: in the past twenty years the average annual raintime was 840 hours at Orly airport, as opposed to 529 hours only in the Parc Montsouris weather observatory.

THE PARISIAN couture world is waiting with bated breath for 18 May, when Paris's Tribunal de Commerce pronounces its ruling on the bitter fight pitting Yves Saint Laurent against the American designer, Ralph Lauren, whom the Frenchman accuses of having plagiarized one of his designs, and is suing for 5 million francs. Sides are being taken, self-appointed goodwill ambassadors spend hours on transatlantic phone calls; even US Ambassador Pamela Harriman has been drawn into the battle between the two rag-trade primadonnas.

Ralph Lauren, who is countersuing YSL supremo Pierre Bergé for defamation for 1 million francs, has already sold 123 of his thousand-dollar black sleeveless tuxedo-cut evening dresses, "the exact copy, minus the qulity," Bergé sneers, of a FF140,000 ($25,000) couture model from YSLs 1970 winter collection. Perhaps significantly, the company withdrew the model from its racks the minute Saint Laurent sued. (In 1992-93 YSL had shown the dress again in its Rive gauche ready-to-wear collection.)

Respectively standing in each corner, watched over like prizefighters by huddles of protective lawyers, two top models wearing the two dresses were in turns sent sashaying in the narrow courtroom to demonstrate the fraud, or absence thereof, last Friday. "The Saint Laurent dress is obviously more beautiful, but that can't influence my ruling," Judge Madeleine Cotello remarked before retiring.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.