Pamela Churchill Harriman, 76, a British-born aristocrat and intimate of some of the most prominent figures of the day who became a doyenne of the Democratic Party and the U.S. ambassador to France, died of a cerebral hemorrhage yesterday at the American Hospital of Paris, in the suburb of Neuilly.
With her red hair and marvelously fair, clear complexion -- in 1993, People magazine named her, when she was 73, among the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" -- she cut a striking figure in the corridors of power. Perhaps her greatest asset as ambassador was her access to President Clinton, whom she had known for many years.
In a statement at the White House after her death, Clinton said:
"Our country will miss her. We are deeply indebted to the work she did in France in maintaining our relationships with one of our oldest and closest allies. She was a source of judgment and inspiration to me, a source of constant good humor and charm and real friendship, and we will miss her very, very much. She was another immigrant who became a great American."
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called her "a central figure in the history of this century."
Harriman had planned to retire to her residence in Georgetown in the spring. Her funeral will be in Washington after a memorial service in France. She will be buried at Arden, her third husband's estate north of New York City, according to the embassy.
In the 1960s, while living in New York, Harriman was a fund-raiser for President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, his brother.
In 1971, she moved to Washington as the wife of W. Averell Harriman, the heir to the Union Pacific Railroad fortune, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, former governor of New York and stalwart of the Democratic Party. She had married him that year and become a U.S. citizen to give him a wedding present that, she said, would "really mean something." She had known Harriman since World War II, when the two had a love affair in London.
In Washington, Pamela Harriman soon became active in Democratic Party affairs, but it was not until 1980, after Ronald Reagan's triumph over Jimmy Carter in the presidential election, that she was recognized as one of its most effective operatives. Challenging the ascendancy of Reaganite conservatism and its effect on liberal causes and their champions, she established Democrats for the '80s, a political action committee. During the next decade, she claimed, it collected and distributed more than $12 million to Democratic candidates.
The $12 million figure became part of the mythology surrounding her. But Sally Bedell Smith, the author of a critical biography that appeared last year, estimated that Harriman's personal fund-raising efforts produced only about $7.5 million, of which $3 million went to candidates and the rest to cover expenses.
Harriman became one of Washington's leading political hostesses. Invitations to the dinner parties and informal seminars on current issues that she conducted at her houses in Georgetown and Middleburg drew powerful figures in the political, journalistic, legal and financial establishments. She was credited with moving the Democratic Party closer to the center of the political spectrum.
Although the job of ambassador was the first in which she had official responsibilities, it was by no means Harriman's first exposure to the workings of high policy. During World War II, she married Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill, the British wartime leader. While her husband was away at the war, she became a confidante of the senior Churchill and thus was privy to some of his thinking.
Statesmanship and politics aside, no account of Harriman's career could be complete without mention of her lovers. She frequently was described in print as a courtesan, and the men in her life are enumerated in Smith's book, "Reflected Glory," and another full-length biography, "Life of the Party," by Christopher Ogden, which appeared in 1994.
First among them was W. Averell Harriman. He was sent to London in 1942 as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's special representative to Churchill. The middle-aged millionaire and sportsman and the English aristocrat in her early twenties began an affair the same night they met at a dinner party that was interrupted by an air raid.
Roosevelt and Churchill were said to have approved of the liaison on the theory that it strengthened Anglo-American relations.
Pamela Harriman's other wartime lovers were said to include Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcaster, and William Paley, the head of the CBS network.
In the 1950s, when she was living in Paris, Harriman's name was linked with Pakistani Prince Aly Khan, a wealthy jet-setter; Gianni Agnelli, who became chairman of the Fiat auto company; and Baron Elie de Rothschild, of the banking family. In 1960, she married Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer whose hits included "The Sound of Music." A year after his death in 1970, she married W. Averell Harriman.
In 1986, he died, leaving her a substantial part of a fortune estimated at $100 million. It appeared that she was set to live out a life full of honors and devoted to the causes that interested her.
She did not arrive at that point without leaving resentments along the way. Both Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Leland Hayward, and Peter Duchin, who was raised in the Harriman family, published stinging accounts of their relations with her.
In 1994, Harriman's children and grandchildren from his first two marriages sued her for $30 million, claiming she had squandered as much as $41 million of the family fortune through bad investments and self-dealing. The money was held in trust for the heirs, and substantial amounts were invested in a former Playboy resort in New Jersey and a plastics company in Pennsylvania.
Also named in the suit were Clark M. Clifford, a former secretary of defense and Washington lawyer par excellence, who was among Pamela Harriman's closest friends, and Paul C. Warnke, a former disarmament negotiator and Clifford law partner. Clifford and Warnke were trustees of the Harriman estate with her.
In December 1995, she reached a settlement with the heirs that, in the terms of one of the lawyers, "satisfactorily resolved all the pending litigation between them through a mutual and reciprocal redistribution of family assets."
Details were not disclosed, but as part of the agreement, she joined the heirs in suing Clifford and Warnke on the ground that they were responsible for the losses because of their alleged failure to act prudently. That suit was settled in 1996 on terms that also were not disclosed.
In reorganizing her own finances, she sold a house adjacent to her residence in Georgetown that she had used for an office and a property in the Sun Valley, Idaho, ski resort, which had been founded by W. Averell Harriman in the 1930s. She also auctioned part of her art collection. Earlier, she had sold a property in Barbados.
Pamela Beryl Digby was born on March 20, 1920, at Farnborough, England. Her father was Edward Kenelm Digby, the 11th Baron Digby, and her mother was the former Constance Pamela Alice Bruce. She grew up at her family's 1,500-acre estate at Minterne Magna in Dorset.
She was educated at home. Growing up in the countryside, she developed a passion for horses and fox-hunting that stayed with her for the rest of her life. As a teenager, she was sent to Downham School, where she received a certificate in domestic science at age 16. Her family then sent her to Paris to learn French and continue her education.
In 1937, she returned home to attend the coronation of King George VI. The next year, she was formally presented at court. That made her an official member of society -- she could dine with men alone.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain honored its guarantee of Polish security and declared war on Germany. France did likewise. World War II had begun.
For many of Pamela Digby's contemporaries, raised on tales of the slaughter of the First World War, the future suddenly seemed foreshortened in the most dramatic way. Randolph Churchill, the brilliant and erratic son of the statesman, thought he surely would be killed in the conflict, and he was determined to leave a son to continue the family name.
To further this end, he began looking for a wife. In mid-September, he met Pamela Digby on a blind date and proposed. She accepted, and they were married on Oct. 4, 1939. On Oct. 10, 1940, she gave birth to Winston Spencer Churchill III.
By then, however, it was clear that the marriage would not work. Randolph Churchill's drinking and gambling depleted their meager finances. When her husband was transferred to Egypt, she took a job with the Ministry of Supply.
But her real supports were her father-in-law and his great friend and colleague Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate. For a time, she lived at No. 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's official residence. Later, she lived at the fashionable Dorchester Hotel and, later still, with financial help from Harriman, in an apartment in Grosvenor Square near the U.S. Embassy. For long periods, her son and his nanny lived at Cherkley, Beaverbrook's country estate near London, away from the bombing and his mother's other cares.
In 1943, she helped found the Churchill Club for American Servicemen. She was its leading spirit until 1946 when, with the war over and her marriage to Churchill ended in divorce, she was faced with the question of what to do with her life.
Beaverbrook came to the rescue. In 1946, he sent her to Paris as a feature writer for his many publications. The French capital remained her home until 1960, when she married Hayward.
Through all those years, according to Smith's book, W. Averell Harriman provided her an annual allowance. In August 1971, the two resumed their acquaintance at a dinner party at the house of Katharine Graham, then publisher of this newspaper and now chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of The Washington Post Co.
Seven weeks later, the Harrimans were married.
When Pamela Harriman broached the idea of Democrats for the '80s, she got little initial support. But with the backing of her husband, she held a number of evening gatherings at her house with such prominent Democrats as Robert Strauss, the Texan who later served as ambassador to the Soviet Union; House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill; House Majority Leader Jim Wright; and Sens. John Glenn of Ohio, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina and Gary Hart of Colorado.
Some of the gatherings were "issues evenings," in which people such as Felix Rohatyn, the New York investment banker, would discuss Reaganomics and Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, would talk about defense policy.
One result was a consensus that the Democrats had been outmaneuvered and that the party had lost touch with the middle class. Another was a concerted effort to raise money, and so Democrats for the '80s came into being. At the conclusion of the dinners and discussions hosted by the Harrimans, contributions would be solicited for the party. One of the first people she put on the board of directors was Bill Clinton, who had just lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas. "You felt so impotent about what you could do," Pamela Harriman recalled in 1992. "But rather than just cry about it, it was important to stand up and be counted and try and fight your way back."
Harriman was national co-chairman of the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign in 1992, a member of the board of directors of the Commission on Presidential Debates, a member of the National Committee of the Democratic Party, an honorary trustee of the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also was a trustee of Rockefeller University, the Council of the National Gallery of Art and the Winston Churchill Foundation. In 1980, she was named Democratic Woman of the Year of the Woman's National Democratic Club.
She also was a patron and a former trustee of the National Gallery of Art, to which she had made a "partial," or promised, gift of the famous Van Gogh painting "Roses." The picture hung in her residence next to the embassy in Paris until her death.
Survivors include her son, who lives in London, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. CAPTION: Pamela Churchill Harriman, pictured last year, was 76. CAPTION: The soon-to-be Mrs. Harriman walks with W. Averell Harriman in September 1971 at the home of Katharine Graham, then publisher of The Post. CAPTION: Pamela Harriman greets then-Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton on the steps of her home in Georgetown in August 1992. "Our country will miss her," Clinton said after her death.
