When​ Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman died in 1997, having suffered a brain haemorrhage in the pool of the Paris Ritz, the tributes divided into accounts of a harsh life powered by sex, and prim obituaries that extolled a leading diplomat and ‘doyenne of the Democratic Party’. Madeleine Albright called her ‘a central figure in the history of this century’ and Bill Clinton lauded her as ‘a great American’ who had been ‘a source of judgment’ to him. The Economist imagined a dinner party of her ‘fancier lovers’ and concluded that together they could have ‘bought much of the world’. British newspapers made frequent use of the word ‘courtesan’ and chronicled her sexual pursuits, while the American press mentioned only her many ‘friends’ and ‘intimates’, and, at most, her ardency.

Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker is the first major biography of Harriman to appear since 1997 and its publication coincides with the twilight years of the Democratic politicians she knew in Washington in the 1990s. It is a good time to reassess the Clinton era and the changes in the party that preceded it. Purnell’s account, however, is partisan and fanciful. Her view is that Harriman was ‘trashed by the presumptions of her time’, dismissed as a ‘conniving and ridiculous gold-digger obsessed by sex’. Her book incorporates some new material from Harriman’s papers at the Library of Congress, but the conclusions she reaches don’t align with the considerable previous research and credit Harriman with a towering significance even her most loyal admirers never claimed. In this version of her life, Harriman helped secure America’s entry into the Second World War and thus the defeat of Nazi Germany, worked tirelessly to oppose tyranny and helped to broker the end of the Cold War, all before holding her only official job as US ambassador to France.

The resistance against tyranny began early. In the spring of 1941, two years into her marriage with Churchill’s boorish, alcoholic son, Randolph, the couple were badly in need of money. Randolph, a chronic gambler, was stationed in Cairo as a press officer, and his letters home relayed news of mounting debts. Pamela was only twenty, the marriage was a calamity and she was stuck in London with their baby, Winston. She turned for help to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who advanced money and set up Winston and his nanny at Cherkley Court, his house in Surrey. The arrangement freed Pamela to devote herself to the seduction of Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s lend-lease envoy to Britain. Harriman was the railroad heir of a robber baron father (Theodore Roosevelt called him a ‘malefactor of great wealth’) who had bought his way into 1890s New York. Beaverbrook bought Pamela a gold lamé dress and told her to look out for Harriman at dinner. Their affair, launched at the Dorchester in the late hours of a particularly intense bombing raid, marked the first phase of her career as the high-level mistress of politically influential Americans. She would bring Harriman to Cherkley or Chequers for the weekend, where he would spend hours talking war with Beaverbrook and Churchill, and she would repay her debt by passing along any titbits she heard. It was, Purnell writes, a concerted intelligence mission: ‘Operation Seduction USA’.

Previous biographers have treated the Harriman affair far less seriously. The American journalist Christopher Ogden spent forty hours interviewing Pamela for her memoirs, which he was helping to write, before she backed out (Harold Evans had bought the rights for an exorbitant sum, stipulating that the account must be ‘full and frank’). Ogden kept the tapes and wrote his book Life of the Party (1994) without directly quoting from the interviews. His conclusion was that Pamela herself ‘never believed it was anything more than a wartime romance with important strategic overtones’. The arrangement made her ‘part of the action’, but only inasmuch as she facilitated Harriman’s closeness to Churchill and Beaverbrook. Sally Bedell Smith’s Reflected Glory (1996) rests on the widest research (more than four hundred interviews, including people who knew Pamela during the war). She calls Pamela a ‘wartime hostess’ and describes her role as a ‘back-channel of information’. Harriman would discuss issues with Beaverbrook and Churchill; Pamela would soak up his private reflections and pass them on.

Pamela’s reputation in these years is disreputable, and Purnell suggests this is because her motivations have been misunderstood. She went after Harriman not because he was a vastly wealthy, attractive, ‘sexed-up vision of athletic American manhood’ and ‘the antithesis of the increasingly blotchy and bloated Randolph’, but as a deliberate, patriotic act of wartime service. In this telling, Pamela did far more than relay what she heard about what the Americans were thinking and planning. She was an intelligence agent run by Beaverbrook, who was ‘effectively her control officer’. Her ‘pillow talk’ was ‘influencing high-level policy on both sides of the Atlantic’ and Harriman was ‘compromised’. To arrive at this position, Purnell knits together inferences: Churchill wanted Roosevelt to agree to have British warships repaired at American ports, Pamela advocated for this, and Harriman eventually persuaded Roosevelt. The outcome was Pamela’s handiwork. Purnell writes that Pamela was ‘the best and perhaps only way of prising out closely guarded thinking on the American side’, and suggests that, without her, Beaverbrook and Churchill would have lacked access to the private opinions of American politicians.

But Harriman was already working to secure Roosevelt’s entry into the war. Quite apart from the link through Pamela, Bedell Smith notes that Harriman was in close contact with Churchill and Beaverbrook ‘to a degree no other American could claim – virtually from the moment he arrived in Britain’. It was not uncommon for Churchill to ring up asking him for a game of bezique. Beaverbrook was on friendly terms with the American generals and was running the Ministry of Supply. The indebted, socially restless Pamela was a handy informant, but no more than that.

In 1943, Harriman was sent to Moscow as US ambassador. His departure left Pamela free to pursue further, often overlapping, affairs of ‘strategic purpose’, while still collecting the monthly stipend Harriman provided. This ‘mating dance’, Purnell writes, was her ‘true war work’. Edward R. Murrow was a celebrity foreign correspondent when they met. His dispatches from the front and from the bombed-out streets of London transfixed Americans and drew public opinion towards intervention. Purnell credits Pamela with advancing his project, suggesting Murrow ‘needed to be wooed to British thinking’.

In the years that followed, Pamela pursued relationships with various dashing men, always with an eye to collecting income. She revived a fling with Jock Whitney, another impossibly rich American who was serving as an intelligence officer with the OSS. Whitney was a close friend of Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, and quite a catch, but he too was just ‘work’, Purnell claims, another ‘key asset’. The affair was short, but his stipend was added to Harriman’s. Bill Paley, the boss of CBS, was also a ‘recruit’, who through Pamela’s arts became ‘a passionate defender of the British cause through his radio empire’. (Stipend follows.) From the age of 23, it seems, Pamela took up no romance that was not designed to ‘shore up the Anglo-American alliance’. Her affairs amounted to the running of ‘a whole network’, a ‘strategic sex life’ that Purnell says is now recognised by historians as ‘politically significant’. The men are the most eligible on the Eastern seaboard, married to great beauties and heiresses and already sympathetic to Britain. Purnell describes the liaisons as the ‘sacrifices of a 20-year-old woman hell-bent on waging war against tyranny’. The problem for Pamela, she writes, was that ‘her greatest feats were the least known’.

It has never been easy to assess the contributions of women intelligence agents in this era. Their work isn’t included in classified archival sources and was dismissed by male intelligence chiefs (the first head of MI5, Vernon Kell, said before the war that ‘women do not make good agents’). Verifying the role of women in one-off or informal missions is even more difficult. The high-level escort operation run by Madame Claude (Fernande Grudet) in the 1950s and 1960s was bound up with the French state – the ‘Claude girls’ gathered intelligence for the French secret service and police – yet we know almost nothing about its activities, even now. Purnell similarly portrays Pamela as a de facto secret agent on the basis of claims that cannot be verified and suggests that less admiring interpretations of her activities are misogynistic.

After the end of the war, Pamela moved to Paris, where she deployed her English aristocratic manners and Churchill surname in the pursuit of wealthy Europeans. She juggled Élie de Rothschild, Prince Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos and Gianni Agnelli, the Italian powerbroker and Fiat boss. She was ostracised by many women, allies of the wounded, popular Liliane Rothschild. Only Agnelli’s hold on her was enduring. She redecorated his villa on the Riviera and converted to Catholicism to make herself marriageable. But she wasn’t respectable enough for the Agnelli clan, and his three sisters conspired to put an end to that possibility.

Nearing forty and anxious about her prospects, Pamela began pursuing the married Broadway producer Leland Hayward in 1958. Hayward wasn’t especially rich and he wasn’t single. But he was magnetic and successful, and moved in Hollywood circles that made up for his lack of wealth. Crucially, he also found her past, and the possibility of membership in ‘Pam’s Club’, a source of pride. His wife, Slim, on hearing of his intentions, was more concerned for Leland than for herself (‘Nobody marries Pam Churchill!’). In 1960, Pamela accepted Hayward’s proposal and moved to the US to start over as a respectable woman. In the decade during which she was married to Hayward, Pamela took no interest in politics (though she kept Churchill as part of her name), joining Truman Capote’s circle of luncheon friends at La Côte Basque. Hayward’s death in March 1971 offered the chance of an even greater transformation. She arranged to be reintroduced to Averell Harriman, now 79, at a dinner party. Within six months they were married.

By the early​ 1970s, Harriman was doddering and slightly deaf. The upper WASP hold on Washington politics was weakening, but he still stood at its peak as the country’s pre-eminent diplomat. He had served four presidents over four decades and was a major Democratic Party financier. Through Harriman’s network, Pamela went about establishing herself as a Washington hostess, a position that in earlier decades had allowed politically astute and motivated women such as Perle Mesta and Alice Roosevelt Longworth to steer political life through their salons. That tradition, too, was dying, and Pamela invented herself as a modern Washington hostess: partisan and keenly focused on money. She convened, facilitated and fundraised at their Georgetown townhouse on N Street, applying her Digby crest, topped with the initials P.C.H., to everything (Pamela’s father, Edward, was Baron Digby). At her Issues Evenings, where guests paid $1000 to hear a prominent Democrat discuss policy over dinner, she made a habit of giving directions to the telephone via a Van Gogh (Averell had inherited his first wife’s art collection). The Issues Evenings encouraged her to found a political action committee, referred to slightingly as PamPAC. She spent the 1980s charting a course through America’s political currents, informed by no particular ideology. When second wave feminism seemed to be ascendent, she backed the New York feminist Bella Abzug (though she advised Abzug to slim down and stop wearing kaftans); when the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly mobilised Republican women en masse, she changed her style to appear more traditional, what the press called a ‘very quiet wife’.

The 1980s were Pamela’s political heyday. Reagan’s crushing victory over Jimmy Carter gave him a mandate to remake the country, and during these years Pamela ‘kept the lights on’ for the Democrats. She had thought Harriman ‘a hick’ in 1941 and now carried out a civilising mission on a new class of Democratic politicians who were waiting out the Reagan era. In 1987, she succeeded in outmanoeuvring the first lady. Throughout her husband’s presidency, Nancy Reagan competed with Raisa Gorbachev for headlines at diplomatic summits, and the two women tormented each other with their various advantages (couture for Nancy, Marxist-Leninist ideology for Raisa). When the Gorbachevs travelled to Washington for a state visit, Raisa asked for an invitation to Pamela’s house while leaving Nancy’s invitation to tea unanswered for two weeks. Pamela’s coffee with Raisa was a triumph. This, on the heels of cultivating the Russian ambassador and writing op-eds advocating ‘common ground’, Purnell believes, sealed her ‘highly personal part in the rapprochement of two wary superpowers’.

In her fundraising years, Pamela was ‘brimming with ideas’ to reinvent the post-Reagan Democrats and ‘intent on making her own contribution to racial justice’ (she apparently once hosted a dinner for Marion Barry, the DC mayor). Joe Biden auditioned for her attention, as did Bill Clinton. Bill and Pamela had much in common. Both had a sexual history that was hard to shake and both gave their lovers identical tokens (copies of Leaves of Grass for Bill, engraved Cartier cigarette cases for Pamela). By 1992, she was, as the former DNC head Paul Kirk put it, the ‘first lady of the Democratic Party’.

Kingmaker is thick with praise from Clinton and other ageing Democrats for Pamela’s character and political instincts. Purnell dismisses accounts of tension between Pamela and Hillary following Clinton’s victory in 1992, and even finds explanation for the long, chilly months it took for Pamela to receive her reward for supporting him, her appointment as US ambassador to France. Richard Holbrooke made the case on her death that we should view the arc of Pamela’s life as starting ‘at its end with her ambassadorship to France’. For liberal Americans, Pamela Harriman should be memorialised without reference to her sexual antics or her unabashed striving for wealth. Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker in 1997, objected to the obituarist for the Economist asking: ‘Was there not always, at the very back of her mind, just a nagging feeling that she was being laughed at, even scorned?’ It was ‘an attack in the guise of an obituary’, while the Times had called her a ‘colourful courtesan’, making ‘it plain that, as far as Pamela Harriman was concerned, the age of chivalry was over’. Gopnik suggests, like Purnell, that Pamela was misunderstood: ‘Had this life been played out in the 18th century, she would undoubtedly be the subject of an admiring biography or two by a feminist professor.’

In her account, Sally Bedell Smith writes that Pamela lived for two decades ‘as a courtesan, in the precise, centuries-old definition of the word’. She may have lived like Madame de Pompadour but she lacked her purpose and personal influence. Pamela was drawn to power itself, rather than what power could achieve, and had no developed politics of her own. She could easily have been a Republican, if she had married one. She operated through the men she consorted with, acquired their stature and adopted their politics because that was her style, not because the times ordained it. Purnell writes that when Pamela married Harriman in 1971, ‘the only political role permitted was hostess.’ But even as a hostess she operated as a partisan fundraiser, much closer in sensibility to the pay-for-play DC hostesses of today than the grandes dames hostesses of the mid-20th century. Women entering formal politics was also not as far-fetched a notion as Purnell suggests. By 1972 seven women had already served as ambassadors (including Clare Booth Luce, whose husband, Henry Luce, Pamela had slept with). Nixon’s adviser Barbara Franklin was busy quadrupling the number of senior women in the federal government.

But by most accounts Harriman was unsuited to politicking: she lacked analytical acumen, disliked reading and writing (Capote called her a ‘marvellous primitive’) and her public speaking was wooden and stentorian. State Department officials who worked with her in Paris reported that her French accent was poor and she needed heavy briefing. An occasion described by Bedell Smith is revealing. In 1996 Pamela found herself sharing a stage with Margaret Thatcher, who was serving as the chancellor of William and Mary College, which had received generous donations from Pamela and Averell over the years and was now awarding her an honorary degree. It was Thatcher’s task to sum up Pamela’s accomplishments: in an ‘oddly disjointed tribute’ she spoke of the ‘great shrewdness which from an early age she always exercised’, her influence on both sides of the Atlantic and her ‘remarkable experience of being associated with two of our greatest politicians’, Harriman and Churchill. She dwelled at length on Churchill’s foreign policy, and only in closing touched on Pamela’s ambassadorship: ‘We were so delighted that Mrs Harriman’s talents were used for themselves and for herself when she came onto the international scene.’