The D-Day shindig has been bad news for Sarkozy

The French president may rue the day he thought up this photo-op, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

As Nicolas Sarkozy prepares for the hardest-won photo-op of his presidency – the D-Day commemorations on the Normandy beaches, starring Barack Obama, with the Prince of Wales and Gordon Brown as last-minute supporting players – he could be forgiven for thinking himself ill-used. What started as a mid-scale, bilateral event at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer (which is US soil, donated by France in perpetuity) has been successively targeted by the big guns of the Daily Mail, Downing Street, Sarkozy's socialist opposition, and the White House Communications Office.

Admittedly, Sarko's own intentions weren't entirely selfless. Yes, he is the first president since de Gaulle to pay constant and sincere homage to veterans of the Second World War and La Résistance (he was brought up by his arch-Gaullist maternal grandfather, a Jewish physician who was banned from practising during the Nazi occupation and had to go into hiding). But Sarkozy is also very aware that in the run-up to the European elections, held tomorrow over here, Obama is the ultimate arm-candy, a little touch of Yes-We-Can on the hustings.

A year ago, when Obama, still on the campaign trail, had just given his Berlin speech, Sarko invited him for a joint press conference at the Elysée, deploying all the ceremony usually reserved for heads of state. The two were bestest buddies, joking that they had reconciled their two countries after the froideur of George W Bush, Jacques Chirac and "freedom fries".

But since that golden moment – in fact, since Obama's election victory – the most pro-American French president ever has been snubbed. In vain did Sarko angle, time and again, for an invitation to Washington (he would have loved those DVDs that Gordon brought home). In vain did he plea for a repeat of the Elysée event in April. The Obamas, visiting Strasbourg for the Nato summit just after France re-joined the organisation, had no time, positively no time, to swing by Paris: the Bruni-Sarkozys had to make do with a short walkabout in Alsace. Adding insult to injury, Obama made the case for admitting Turkey into the EU, something both Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel are dead set against.

As for today's D-Day visit, which will mobilise several platoons of gendarmes and practically cordon off Normandy (7,000 official guests are expected, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks), the White House had – as of yesterday morning – still not given a firm schedule to the Elysée, whose hyper-professional flacks were uncharacteristically briefing against their American counterparts. No, Mr Obama had not accepted the dinner invitation on Friday; there would only be a working lunch in Caen today. Yes, Mrs Obama and her daughters would be staying in Paris over the weekend, but their plans were "uncertain"; it was a "private visit".

However, it was the fracas involving the Queen's invitation – or the lack of it – that really stirred things up. As it happens, nobody in Paris reacted at first to the accusation of a snub to Buckingham Palace. The French, who were originally planning to have Sarkozy attend a specific French-American ceremony, acceded to Downing Street's request that Gordon Brown tag along. But it was only when Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, insisted that Mr Obama wanted the Queen to attend, and was "working with those involved to see if we can make that happen", that the whole affaire took off.

The French opposition, which is expected to trail behind Sarkozy's UMP party in the Euro-elections tomorrow, realised that while French law forbids political campaigning from midnight onwards on the Saturday before a Sunday poll, Sarkozy would be on every television screen before the vote, saying worthy, statesmanlike things. They grabbed the Obama-validated royal story and ran with it. Sarkozy was pelted with insults by every opposition candidate in the country, who flew – with no sense of irony – to the defence of Britain, usually painted as the fly in the Euro-ointment. Sarkozy's behaviour towards Her Majesty was that of a cad, a buffoon, a jerk, a pathetic human being with no manners – a bad European, and a worse Frenchman.

Then, into this heated atmosphere, came the translation of Obama's speech in Cairo. Fabricated outrage was instantly replaced by very real indignation, in a country where the neutrality of the public space is sacrosanct. Obama's pointed words defending the hijab aroused the ire of feminists, teachers' unions, and even moderate Muslim groups, who have come to a civilised arrangement with the headscarf law, which bans the conspicuous display of religious symbols in schools. Equally vocal were France's political parties – not least the president's own.

For the first time, newspaper websites were full of anti-Obama comments – a decided first in France. However much he looked forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with the US president, Sarko may rue the day he dreamt up this D-Day photo-op.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

The Euro Shoe-In

Here in Paris it is the bright sunny dawn of November 4th - “just the day,” interviewees tell you unselfconsciously on the morning news, “to start liking America again.” It doesn’t matter that the first US election results won’t fall until the small hours tomorrow (a day scheduled with rain.) The French have already elected - anointed - Barack Obama as The US President They Want.

For weeks now, neither newspapers nor radio or television channels have even bothered sending a reporter with the McCain campaign, which they view as best as an irrelevance, and mainly as a useful foil for the Tales of Barack. (Voters repelled by Sarah Palin’s anti-abortion stance? Check. McCain partisans guilty of racism in the voting booth? Check. Gun-totin’ embittered Joe Six-Packs shooting baby fawns from their pick-up trucks on the way to the megachurch? Check.)

Instead, reporters have been dispatched to Harlem to report on the planning of street parties tonight (France Info); to Dixville, NH for the first Democrat victory of the day (“the first since Humbert Humphrey’s candidacy in 1968,” France 2 TV adds helpfully); even to Hawaii for the coming funeral of Madelyn Dunham, the candidate’s grandmother (TF1 TV, which never thinks of mentioning how Mrs Dunham first entered the campaign rhetoric, as a useful comparison to Rev. Wright in terms of racial prejudice.) America, we are told, will finally set an example to the world.

And what if, in a surprise upset, this beloved screenplay is brutally rewritten?

“There will be riots,” pundits pronounce. Those riots, you understand, would be justified. America’s “visible minorities” will have been cheated of their victory. So will ours, who have no hope in the next decade of achieving anything like the US’s political integration. What few Muslims and French-African politicians occupy Cabinet jobs were high-handedly appointed by a right-wing president, Sarkozy, going against established habit and party power plays in apportioning the spoils. Not coincidentally, those same appointees have been the butt of most of the criticism levelled at the government by professional civil service leakers. Rachida Dati, the Justice minister, who is of Algerian/Moroccan origin, has been branded “incompetent”, “unqualified,” and, yes, “a diva.” Fadela Amara, the Housing Undersecretary, a French-Algerian feminist, is “disorganised and can’t run a team.” Sounds familiar?

In reality, we Europeans, who pride ourselves on our supposed forward thinking, respect nothing more than Establishment figures. In our reasoning, it is up to you, dear American voters, to provide us with the right Harvard Law School grad of the right colour, to simply start the wheels of change here (and to keep our restless minorities happy in the bargain.) How could you even consider disappointing us? What better motive can there be? Make the Paris MSM and French political party machines time-servers happy! Vote Obama!

© Copyright Hudson Institute New York & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Old World Wiles

As the European press from L'Humanité to the Financial Times (what were they smoking?) endorses the Imminent Coming Of Saint Barack, we other Europeans are seized by a strangely familiar feeling. We have been here before. Namely in 1981, when 23 years of conservative (Gaullist, at any rate) rule in France finally ended with the election of the Socialist François Mitterrand. Mitterrand appointed four Communist ministers among his cabinet, and proceeded to nationalize the banks (sounds familiar?) as well as most large industrial corporations. France resolutely ploughed into the Reagan-Thatcher Eighties in deep contrarian denial: exchange controls, punitive redistributive taxes, a shorter workweek, legal vacation time raised from 4 to 5 weeks annually, a 10% raise on the minimum wage, etc.

Wealth had to be shared. The byword was solidarité: the new wealth tax went by the acronym ISF, Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune (it has never been abolished since all our successive presidents believe our Marxist-lite media-massaged public opinion wouldn’t stand for it.) Keynesian economics would inevitably provide jobs and prosperity. When newly-flush consumers had the bad taste to prefer Japanese-made VCRs to French-produced goods, stiff tariffs and regulations were slapped on faster than you can say WTO. The result was predictable: inflation; more, not less, unemployment; and successive devaluations of the franc.

It took Mitterrand’s sobered cohorts, minus the Communists who did not survive the first Cabinet reshuffle, less than two years to make a complete u-turn. By the mid-80s, France was dipping a collective toe in the uncharted waters of stock-market deregulation. By 1990, a nominally-Socialist Finance minister (later PM), Pierre Bérégovoy, prided himself on the success of Paris’s derivatives exchange.

It would be tempting to resign oneself to the likely election of Barack Obama as a coming moment of painful silliness, tinged with vainglorious ideology, to be endured for a relatively short time, before its more noxious side-effects can be reversed. Some points, after all, have to be made. The French wanted to show that the Fifth Republic was not the property of a single party. Americans would like to prove - to themselves first - that they have put behind them for good a past of racism and bigotry.

Mitterrand and Obama, both lawyers with little actual practice but ample oratory gifts, have a lot in common, foremost a burning ambition and far less ideological principles than their troops. The Obama who cites as solipsistic proof of his executive experience the very fact that he is running a large campaign, is not so far removed from the maneuvering Fourth Republic hack who showed an undistinguished but long career as evidence of his capacity to lead the Republic. Supporting in turn Vichy France and the resistance, French Algeria then anti-Colonialism, anti-Communists then the Socialist-CP alliance, François Mitterrand never failed to reinvent himself in the direction he felt would more advance his personal ambition. (The Socialist Party he remodelled to his own specifications ended up with a lot in common with the Chicago Democrat machine, too.) In throwing under the bus his pastor or his foreign adviser, Obama shows signs of a similar flexibility.

Yet the situation is hardly comparable. In an interesting reversal, a President Obama might well find himself the Leftmost head of State at any forthcoming G8 among the likes of Sarkozy, Merkel and Harper, just as the Socialist Mitterrand had to deal with Maggie and Ronnie. But the world was a far less interconnected place a quarter of century ago. Economic decisions in France affected the world economy even less than they would today. The leading position of the US, despite constant claims that it’s been overtaken by the New Tigers, means that a housing slump in North Dakota influences the Italian stock market - and an Italian stock market plunge destroys jobs in Detroit. The stakes today are higher, faster, riskier.

And, of course, there’s the rhinoceros in the room - foreign policy and the threat from Islamist extremism. For all his faults - he misread, and mistrusted, the collapse of Communism, and appointed as his last Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, the architect of codified international anti-Americanism - François Mitterrand fell on the right side of the fence at critical moments, such as when France sent troops to Beirut in 1982, or joined the first Gulf War coalition. The worst terrorist attacks on French soil occurred under Mitterrand, masterminded by Algerian Salafists or Pasdaran-commissioned Iranians. A Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 58 of our paratroopers at 6:20am on October 23, 1983, precisely two minutes after another hit 241 US marines at Beirut airport. An old man with a very long memory and an acute sense of the balance of power, Mitterrand would never have opened talks with Iran without stiff preconditions.

Obama has none of these old world wiles. Surrounded by superannuated Carter administration hacks, frisky neo-Marxists, and UN-admiring CFR alumni, he buys into the al-Jazeera image of the US and believes America can gain the world’s affection with the same charming techniques he employed to win a seat on the Illinois State Senate, or that his wife deployed to soften her image on The View. He may realize his error at the first lost round of negotiations, but by then it might be too late.

© Copyright Hudson Institute New York & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

'Monica's story' much like Diana's

The most famous feminine icon of our media-obsessed fin-de-siècle is an attractive, egocentric, not-particularly bright, love-addicted young woman from a well-to-do broken home, prone to frequent temper tantrums, with an eating disorder, a questionable taste in men, a serious telephone, shopping and hairdressing habit, and who, just out of her teens, fooled herself into thinking that she would one day become consort to the Master of the World.

No, not Monica Lewinsky. The late Princess Diana, of course.

The announcement, earlier this week, that Diana's approved biographer, Andrew Morton, would write Monica's own story for St. Martin's Press/Michael O'Mara books, should come as no surprise to us.

After all, both women alternately tried to conform, then chafed (rather than rebelled) against bewildering expectations of public and private behavior. They found themselves hounded by the establishment and the media, their telephone calls tapped, their love life speculated upon. Both have followed various courses of psychotherapy and counseling. Vast sums of money have been offered to auction off their clothes. Both rated "Vanity Fair" photoshoots. Both spent claustrophobic months cooped-up in their plush apartments, eating TV dinners in front of the tube, reduced to tears at the prospect of a life forever spent under a magnifying glass.

The similarities go much further than the effects of the celebrity machine steamroller. Both Monica and Diana were painfully ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, their barely-adequate schooling (whether at West Heath College or Bel Air Prep School) offering them little opportunity for self-esteem. After managing a single prize over her entire high-school years (for "best-kept hamster"), Diana was so desperately unhappy in the Swiss finishing school she was subsequently packed off to that she dropped out after one term. Monica was the only girl in her class not invited to her classmate Tori Spelling (daughter of "Dynasty" producer Aaron Spelling)' 15th birthday. Diana's first jobs were as cleaning lady and nanny. Monica's were as shop assistant and legal receptionist.

Both girls have unresolved conflicts with more poised, but less scrupulous mothers, who drilled into them unreasonable expectations, and whom they have regularly, if somewhat wistfully, termed [their] "best friend[s]". Diana's "bolted" (the accepted expression, in the English upper classes) from the family home to pursue an affair with a married man, ultimately losing custody of her children. Marcia Lewis-Lewinsky divorced Monica's father California-style, with a settlement including therapy costs for her daughter. "I was brought up with lies all my life," says Monica in the infamous Tripp tapes. "To get money from my Dad I had to tell him a story. My Mom lied about everything ... all the time."

It was her mother - thin, celebrity-focussed, more successful with men - who got Monica her intern's job at the White House. It was Diana's maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, who eventually pushed her as a suitable bride for Prince Charles; but it was Diana's mother who first encouraged her children to play with the young princes, and used to joke that Diana would marry Prince Andrew. This is the boomers' sense of entitlement gone mad: Windsor Castle or the White House as post-prom playground; as the convenient set for ambitions vicariously vested in their children.

Just as Diana ranted about the courtiers, the "gray men" who tiresomely wanted her to read up on the institutions she carelessly opened, Monica complained about Evelyn Lieberman and other White House staffers who expected of her -- typing skills! correct spelling and grammar! Diana rollerskated down the corridors of Buckingham Palace to the muffled sounds of her Walkman. Monica stalked the East Wing corridors with gifts of pizza and Godiva chocolates. Reproaches of unseemliness were greeted with rolled-up eyes by both girls alike. Even their indiscretions are amazingly similar, down to the expletives. "When I think of all I've done for this f***ing family!" [the House of Windsor] Diana complains to her boyfriend James Gilbey in the notorious "Squidgygate" taped telephone call.

Flareups were frequent: Diana shouted at her secretaries, press assistants, her husband's staff; rang up Camilla Parker-Bowles to tell her she had sent hired killers to her house; dropped her friends dramatically; fired aides, maids, hairdressers, masseuses, therapists. Monica merely screamed at the Secret Service and at the long-suffering Betty Currie. "If I'd know the sort of girl you were, I would never have gotten involved with you," President Clinton is quoted as telling Monica: feelings heartily endorsed by Prince Charles.

Both Diana and Monica have repeatedly described themselves as "insecure" and "vulnerable"; and in both cases, they have been enthusiastically believed when putting forward their cases for public consumption. Diana's stage was the world media, while Monica's, so far, has only been Ken Starr's Grand Jury; but it is interesting to note how well the jurors received her testimony: time and again, evidence of identification and bonding shows through the transcripts. Motherly advice is profferred: ": Monica, none of us in this room are perfect," says one juror at the end of her deposition. "We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster." Diana charmed the historian Paul Johnson and the film producer David Puttnam; Monica has obviously bowled over Larry King, who had repeatedly said on air that "the President did the wrong thing by this young girl."

Andrew Morton, one of the hardened breed of British Royal correspondents, will no doubt find himself in familiar territory when he starts working with Monica. "They clicked very loudly," his publisher Michael O'Mara said last week, describing the first Morton-Lewinsky meeting. "They were making progress on the book before [Morton] even signed." Diana had picked him personally to write the 1992 biography revealing her bulimia and her suicide attempts, and which finally sealed the end of her marriage to Prince Charles. Its serialization in the Murdoch-owned "Sunday Times," raising as it did Britain's Republican sentiments, was seen as high treason by the Windsors. (Diana answered all Morton's questions in a series of tape-recordings in order to be able to deny ever having met him, a cute legalism Clintonites should appreciate.)

There will be talk of midnight binges (Monica, unlike Diana, did not make herself throw up afterwards); of best friends to whom one "babbles." There will be names of heads of State and foreign countries thrown incongruously into a Barbara Cartland recital: Monica accompanying the Defense Secretary to Bosnia and giving her analysis to Clinton late at night; Diana meeting president Sadat of Egypt during her honeynoon and impulsively kissing him.

It should be acknowledged at this stage that both women tried to please according to the rules they were brought up with. Diana, perfectly capable of stalking her men (the married art-dealer Oliver Hoare, who received more than 200 anonymous phone calls traced to her private line; the Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she regularly visited at night in hospital, and whose parents received a surprise visit at their home near Lahore) outwardly cultivated the pure English rose style. Monica, in the Beverly Hills style documented by the late Nicole Simpson and Faye Resnick, "fooled around" at the drop of a beret.

Of the two, Monica got the rawest deal - a $600,000 book contract instead of a $80 million divorce settlement; Monica inflatable dolls instead of Diana Franklin Mint memorial figurines - but it should be said that she was the more sincere of the two. She did love her "Butthead", whom she saw, perhaps accurately, as a lonely, insecure little boy (a description which could easily apply to prince Charles, but which his ex-wife never considered.) Unlike Diana, she never wished to topple the head of State, trying to protect him instead. But with Andrew Morton's canny help, she might fare better in the long run, as long as she avoids playboys and too-fast cars.

© Copyright Chicago Sun-Times & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1998

Le Zippergate

When Harry, the eponymous hero of Woody Allen's latest movie, quips back to his sister who's just accused him of believing only in "cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm" that in France, he could "run on that platform," audiences in packed Paris movie theaters howl in appreciative laughter.

"After all," one spectator joked coming out, with no hint of reproach in his voice, "that was indeed François Mitterrand's unofficial platform."

Deconstructing Harry is tipped for the César of the Best Foreign Film in a few days: we French adore Americans who understand us so well.

At for all the others, those who fuel the Monicagate furore and seem to want to get rid of Bill Clinton for a mere peccadillo, we shrug in Gallic incomprehension. Then sly enlightenment dawns on our faces: once more, in true Gaullist tradition, we'll be able to smugly sock it to the Yanks.

Besides, the French like their leaders to have a sex drive. Widen this to a sensual drive. We like them to eat, drink, and be merry. We prefer by far Talleyrand, with his corruption and womanising, to Robespierre, who lived blamelessly in a tiny walk-up apartment on rue Saint-Honoré, from which he would walk to the Revolutionary Assembly and sentence hundreds of people to the guillotine daily. One of favourite kings was Henry IV, the Religious Wars peacemaker whose second most favourite quote is "Madame, until age 40 I thought it was made of bone."

In a country that thought a good rap on the knuckles would have been amply sufficient punishment for Richard Nixon, "the most brilliant player in world policy at the time," Le Figaro's then foreign editor, Robert Lacontre, used to write the idea of impeaching a leader who presided over a fall of the unemployment rate to 4% (ours is at 12.2%) and the doubling of the Dow Jones index is absurd.

Our pols can be straight or gay (both the former spokesman of the Socialist party and the Mayor of Marseilles are gay): all that matters is that they're getting some. We want them potent, in every meaning of the term.

Even our Reds are no Puritans: the Communist union leader Henri Krasucki worried comrades and foes alike by staying single and living with his elderly mother until well in his fifties - then everyone heaved a sigh of relief on the day of his marriage. CP historical leader Georges Marchais lived openly with his mistress until the early Eighties - the kind of conduct that could have sent an East German or Soviet pol into disgrace. The only disgrace some can find in themselves to ascribe Clinton is the distressing lack of sophistication of his pants-dropping wooing style. "But does he get results like that?" one bemused, faintly supercilious senior Elysée aide asked me as I explained the alleged circumstances of the Paula Jones incident.

Similarly, the only thing that shocked the French about the Bank of England sex scandal (when deputy governor Rupert Pennant-Rea's career came to an abrupt end after it transpired he was having a torrid affair at his office) were the squalid logistical details. No Frenchwoman would do it on Governor Trichet's Banque de France office carpet (it helps that the Republic provides Trichet with a 9000 sq. ft flat at the Palais Royal, the most beautiful location in Paris.)

Not only do we want our men to have cojones we want our women to have them too. Monicagate managed to raise yet higher, if it was possible, Hillary Clinton's popularity in France. We love Hillary. Hillary could be French: she's razor-sharp, sophisticated, elegant, ruthless if need be, and a lioness to defend her man.

Even for those who understand that the issue is less sex than lying and perjury, the reaction doesn't vary. "But whyever ask him in the first place?" inquires Conservative député André Santini. "Any man will lie if asked whether he has a mistress. It's kinder to everyone involved. Nobody needs lose face over it."

"Wanting to know everything about a man is the mark of the totalitarian mind," the leader writer of the provincial newspaper "Sud Ouest" wrote, echoing André Malraux's famous quote: "What is a man but a miserable little heap of secrets?"

And the right to keep one's own secrets is deeply valued by the French, to the extent that our country, where habeas corpus is unknown and the police enjoy rights unknown in England or America, boasts one of the most extensive laws against cross-referencing electronic databases. We are old Catholics and do not believe in Perfect Man an idealistic, Reformation notion. One of our few favoured Bible quotes is "who aspires to be an angel becomes a beast."

Yvette Roudy, a Socialist député and former (quite militant) Minister for Women's Rights, says those who would accuse Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, be it over Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, are doing women a "true disservice. Sexual harassment is a real evil that must be stamped out. It can include loss of job and health, deep depression induced over months of pressure and bad treatments on the workplace. Demeaning the accusation by using it over a case in which Clinton took no for an answer at once; or another on which both parties were major and apparently willing, makes women look ridiculous and hysterical."

Madame Roudy, let's face it, in one of the very few to look seriously at the possible consequences of "Braguettegate" (Zippergate), as it is called here.

Most politicians, commentators, and private citizens are just enjoying the giggle with a vengeance. Early on, the widely popular satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l'Info showed, on prime time, a police line-up of line-drawn penises, one largely tattooed with a saxophone, in which Mss. Lewinsky & Jones had to pick the guilty party. Left- and Right-wing députés who a week before had come to fisticuffs on the floor of the House over the Dreyfus affair, paraded for TV cameras in happy harmony. Newspapers all ran headlines punning on various equivalents of the English verb "blow."

Of late, though, a more thoughtful note has crept into the comments: "The real pity would be if Clinton's little bit of fun affected his foreign policy performance," says Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of the newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles.

On Friday, after president Chirac (who shares with Clinton a love for food and various romantic links, the latest to the actress Claudia Cardinale) decided to support the US over the Iraqi threat, the Guignols de l'Info puppet anchor blared "Clinton conclusively proves the 'butterfly effect' in chaos theory: Unzipping a fly in Washington causes steel rain in Baghdad."

© Copyright Pittsburgh Post-Gazette & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1998

"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