In yesterday’s extract from her compelling new biography of Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Purnell recounted how a woman dismissed as ‘the courtesan of the century’ was a political mastermind who used sex and seduction to bring America into the War. Today, we reveal how Pamela Harriman took Europe by storm – before she was bowled over by the political charms of a young Bill Clinton…
When Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli asked Pamela Harriman if she would sail with him from the Côte d’Azur down the Italian coast to Capri, she refused.
Pamela was due to dine that night with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had taken a villa nearby and befriended her.
Only recently divorced from Winston Churchill’s pompous son, Randolph, Pamela hardly knew Gianni and spoke no Italian.
Moreover, this was 1948, the war was still fresh in the memory – and fascist Italy had been an ally of Hitler. While Pamela had been performing invaluable service as an aide to Churchill, the Agnellis had been enriching themselves as suppliers of trucks and tanks to the Italian and German armies.
Known for her aristocratic connections and seductive charm, Pamela Churchill was once dismissed as little more than a courtesan. Yet she influenced key people and major events for decades, eventually marrying US businessman and diplomat Averell Harriman
Pamela bedded some of the richest men in the world, including Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli, and partied in the millionaire’s playground of the Cote d’Azur, pictured here
Former lover Gianni Agnelli plays his respects at the funeral of America’s ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman
Harriman, far right, is pictured at a diplomatic dinner in the Elysee Palace, Paris, honoring her protege, President Bill Clinton, centre
It was then that a telegram arrived from her overbearing former husband announcing that he was on his way to the south of France to see her. That changed her mind.
Thick clouds blotted out the stars as she boarded Gianni’s 12-meter yacht, but he ignored the weather warnings and soon the boat was sawing through huge waves.
A glass of water on a shelf above her bed smashed down, cutting Pamela’s forehead. So, at first light and with blood all over the cabin, they sailed into Portofino on the Ligurian coast from where Gianni took her to hospital in Turin.
Meanwhile, as she waited there for the stitches to be removed, Randolph was calling anyone he knew in Italy to bellow down the phone: ‘Where is she? Is she out whoring?’
Pamela was soon back aboard Gianni’s yacht, now cruising through calmer waters down to Capri. There they stayed at a pastel-painted villa rented by his friend, Count Rudi Crespi, an international magazine executive.
They arrived late at night, and when Rudi came into their room the following morning with coffee, Gianni threw open the shutters saying, ‘I want you to meet Pam. I’m crazy about her.’
She came in, naked, and walked over to Rudi, who noted the milkiness of her skin. She shook his hand, sat on the bed and ‘demurely’ crossed her legs.
An astonished Rudi told friends she was the first natural redhead he had ever seen.
After her move to America in 1959 to marry the great Broadway producer Leland Hayward, Pamela seized the chance to rekindle a wartime friendship with Ike Eisenhower (now president) while also helping Jack Kennedy in his campaign to succeed him.
But it was not until Hayward had died and Pamela had gone on finally to marry her war-time lover, Averell Harriman – by now a Democratic party elder statesman – that she finally made a splash in Washington power circles.
Even Richard Nixon was gripped by her past and broke off discussing the balance of payments to ask his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger for a full briefing on Pamela’s time in Downing Street.
Later he invited her to the White House to hear her thoughts on why Churchill had lost the 1945 election and even how he could boost his own election chances.
Although she was not enthused by Jimmy Carter as a candidate Pamela worked hard on getting him elected in 1976, fundraising for the Democrats. In 1980 she was named Democratic Woman of the Year.
Pamela could do nothing against the Republican landslide that elected Reagan later that year. Yet it was a chance, all the same.
Whereas the Democrats were down, divided and almost bankrupt, at the age of 61, adversity galvanised Pamela and she brought her long experience to bear.
‘Pamela learned about leadership from Winston Churchill,’ one party official noted, showing a ‘joie de vivre in the midst of devastation’.
Soon she was using her name, reputation and glorious art-filled house in Georgetown to raise money, explore new policies and seek a presidential contender who could finally bring the long Democratic losing streak to an end.
Long before others, she identified Bill Clinton as an unusual political talent – brushing aside widespread concerns that he was a mere governor from a hick state who had no chance of entering the White House.
The British aristocrat, who owned five houses and a safe full of jewels, saw that a flawed figure from Hope, Arkansas could indeed, however improbably, reach the Oval Office.
She marveled at his ability to work a crowd, exude a crucial optimism and decipher the wider political picture and went on to project and promote him.
She counselled Clinton, especially on international affairs.
Pamela Harriman, pictured in 1989, was an aristocrat who owned five houses and a safe full of jewels. But she understood that Bill Clinton, an obscure governor from a hick state, could reach the Oval Office
Decades after her war-time seduction of Averell Harriman, right, the two eventually married
French president Jaques Chirac would describe Harriman as a worthy successor to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton greets Pamela Harriman on the steps of her Georgetown home in August 1992 after a fund-raiser
There was ‘no doubt’ in his mind, he once wrote, that he would not have been ‘fully prepared to stand before America and the world’ as president without her support.
In return he gave her the ambassador’s job. Both Clinton and President Chirac of France came to rely heavily upon her as a conduit to Europe during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.
Her own experience of the Blitz drove her to lobby hard and repeatedly for western intervention to stop the bloodshed.
On her death 1997, a grief-stricken Chirac described her as a ‘peerless diplomat’, going so far as to comparing her to great American predecessors Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in her skills.
At her funeral, Clinton told the congregation that he was president ‘in no small measure’ because of her unique set of skills and experiences but also her delight in life itself – a ‘vibrant sense of history and the wisdom that came to her from the great events [that] she had helped to shape’.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk