A Woman Of Means

IT WAS SOMEHOW APPROPRIATE THAT the end came at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. Pamela Churchill Harriman, the American ambassador to France, died last week at the age of 76, of a cerebral hemorrhage after a swim in the hotel's pool. As a 24-year-old shortly after the liberation of Paris, she had stood at the Ritz Bar with her lover CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. The Broadway producer Leland Hayward had stayed at the hotel during his clandestine romance with Pamela before he became her second husband in 1960. As America's envoy to Paris, she had come several times a week to swim laps in the luxurious indoor pool, with its columns, mosaic tiles and ochre frescoes of Roman bath scenes. She went whenever she could find a spare moment.

Pamela Harriman was equally relentless in every other sphere of her life. She craved money, love and finally power, and she got all three. She was not exceptionally brilliant; she rose to the top, and stayed there, by dint of determination. She had more setbacks than were apparent in her seemingly effortless rise--""from riches to riches,'' as one of her friends once put it. But Harriman overcame them. She revised her life as she lived it, creating a mystique that captivated nearly everyone who met her. ""If Pamela Harriman did not exist,'' said Vice President Al Gore at her swearing-in as ambassador in May 1993, ""we would have had to invent her.''

The daughter of the 11th Lord Digby, she grew up in rural England with the advantages and expectations of the English aristocracy. Pamela had the trappings of privilege: a 50-room home and 22 servants, along with plenty of horses and hounds. Yet the Digby fortune was so diminished that her father had to take his family abroad and rent out his estate for several years. He found the money to finance Pamela's debut in 1938 through a lucky bet on the Grand National. ""When I come out,'' Pamela vowed to a friend, ""I won't date men unless they are a prince or a duke or a millionaire.''

She had to work at it. After graduating from Downham, a proper English boarding school, she was mocked by her fellow debutantes for being plump and pushy. Still, she found her way into power and influence through Randolph Churchill, the hard-drinking and womanizing son of the great British statesman. Young Churchill wanted to produce an heir before going off to war; he had already been turned down by seven women before coming across Pamela. He proposed to her on their first date in 1939--and she did not hesitate. They were married in a matter of weeks, and a year later she gave birth to their son, Winston.

In Pamela's world, the most desirable men were spoken for--but she didn't let that stop her. Three months after Randolph left for military service in Egypt, Pamela began an affair with diplomat Averell Harriman, the first in a series of romances with prominent American men. Harriman was a rich railway heir and an intimate of FDR's. Later her lovers would include millionaire publisher Jock Whitney, broadcasting giant William Paley and Murrow, Paley's star correspondent. They were all married. After Marie Harriman learned of her husband's affair, he set Pamela up in a beautiful apartment in London's Grosvenor Square, funneling his subsidy ($25,000 a year in today's dollars) through two bank accounts controlled by newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook.

Divorce was uncommon in those days, but Pamela managed to thrive after she and Randolph split up at the end of World War II. She moved to Paris, where she was supported successively by Fiat automobile heir Gianni Agnelli, Elie de Rothschild of the famous French banking family--who liked to call Pamela his ""European geisha''--and shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, among others. She held their interest by focusing her attention on them completely, molding herself to their interests and culture. During her Agnelli romance, she answered the phone with a cheery ""Pronto''; when she was with Rothschild, she would say, ""Ici Pam.'' She also made herself useful, by providing the men in her life with contacts in business, politics and society. Pamela carefully maintained friendships with her former lovers, doing them favors and earning their gratitude and generosity. She used to help Jock Whitney select jewelry from Van Cleef & Arpels for his wife. And when Agnelli was building a new yacht, Pamela sent her interior designer to decorate it.

The wives of Pamela's lovers had varying reactions to her. The most noteworthy was Liliane de Rothschild, who bashed her car into Pamela's Bentley. Leland Hayward's third wife, Slim, underestimated Pamela, who readily detected the vulnerability in Hayward's marriage and stole him away by dazzling him with her glamorous European milieu. He himself was a romantic figure, with many connections in Manhattan and Hollywood, but during his 11-year marriage to Pamela, his career took a dive and he developed a drinking problem. On his death in 1971 Hayward left Pamela only half of his $400,000 estate; the rest went to his two children.

Five months later, at 51, Pamela was fortuitously reunited with Averell Harriman, who was 79. She treated him to a carefully staged weekend at her country home--a house in upstate New York that her financial adviser had told her she could no longer afford. When Harriman asked her to visit him, she said she would never set foot in Washington unless she was his wife. They were married within two months, setting her on a path to political power.

Together the Harrimans attracted wealthy donors to their Georgetown home to meet promising politicians like Bill Clinton and Al Gore. During the Reagan and Bush years, Pamela raised $7.5 million for the Democrats. After Harriman's death in 1986 she inherited his $115 million fortune and established herself in Washington's foreign-policy circles. Though Bill Clinton was her third choice for president in 1992 (after Jay Rockefeller and Mario Cuomo), she worked hard for him, raising $2.2 million in one evening at her Virginia estate. Her reward was the appointment as ambassador to France.

On a personal note, she had always been better at raising and spending money than at managing it, and Harriman had unwisely made her responsible for an array of family trust funds after his death. When two of his grandsons discovered, in 1993, that the funds had lost $40 million as a result of ill-advised investments, the family sued her. She settled with the Harriman heirs in 1995, turning over $11 million that she raised, in part, by selling paintings by Picasso, Renoir and Matisse.

She always refused to be hemmed in by the moral judgments of others. During the 1950s, when her sister asked her why she did not object to gossip columns about her many love affairs, Pamela replied, ""I would rather have bad things written about me than be forgotten.'' Only in her later years was she concerned about how she would look to history. Last week Clinton said Pamela Harriman was ""one of the most unusual and gifted people I ever met.'' French President Jacques Chirac said she was ""such a beautiful ambassador, probably one of the best since Ben Franklin and Jefferson.'' For the woman William Paley called ""the greatest courtesan of the century,'' it was quite a journey. She got everything she ever wanted: wealth, admiration--and even, at the very end, respect.