The Democrats’ Party Pleaser : Years of Raising Dollars and Spirits for Party in Exile Earn Pamela Harriman Nomination for Envoy Job

Democrats think of her as their political godmother, their queen mother, their mother superior.

Journalists, entranced by her regal manner, regularly describe Pamela Harriman as an empress or a duchess.

Even denizens of stuffy Georgetown, once wary of the striking redhead they dubbed the “Widow of Opportunity,” have come to acknowledge her as the doyenne among dowagers.

And now, to this formidable list of honorifics, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, 73, is adding an official title.

Ambassador.

Her nomination to serve as America’s top envoy to France comes as one of President Clinton’s least surprising appointments. Almost from the moment Clinton was elected, Washington has assumed that the widow of W. Averell Harriman was in line for a top diplomatic post.

Harriman’s wealth and worldliness make her a kind of royal figure among Democrats, who shed their populist pretexts when an invitation comes from her N Street mansion. Bill and Hillary Clinton traveled to Harriman’s Georgetown home for their first formal dinner party after arriving in Washington.

“Anyone who has been involved with the Democratic Party for any length of time is certainly familiar with Mrs. Harriman’s talent for diplomacy,” Clinton said when he nominated her.

Pending her confirmation hearings, Harriman declined to be interviewed. In the two months between Clinton’s inauguration and her nomination, she had a stock response: “I certainly don’t want to leave Washington,” she kept saying when the question of an ambassadorship was posed. “I mean, I haven’t waited to get a President elected for 12 years to then leave Washington.”

But her undisputed role as chief cheerleader in the un-Democratic ‘80s made her a force to be recognized--and better yet, rewarded.

“Those were the dark, dark days,” Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said, as he looked back on the Reagan and Bush administrations. But “Pamela just had this commitment.”

Harriman’s dedication was not only contagious--it also translated into big money for a party in a state of financial despair. Democrats for the ‘80s, the political action committee she founded just weeks after Reagan was elected in 1980, was swiftly renamed PAMPAC.

Starting on her birthday in 1981, she held monthly “issues evenings” for 30 or 40 carefully selected guests. Policy experts, such as Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) or New York investment banker Felix Rohatyn, would talk about defense strategy or the economy, and then someone of the status of Robert Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, would pass the hat.

“Her home really became the gathering place for the party in exile,” lobbyist Tony Podesta said.

PAMPAC sponsored other, more glittering occasions as well. One legendary fete champetre at Harriman’s Virginia hunt country estate in 1991 brought in $3.2 million in a single day. That rather remarkable outpouring also earned a snipe from then-President Bush.

“Pamela Harriman’s farm,” Bush scorned. “The bastion of democracy.”

PAMPAC distributed more than $12 million to Democratic gubernatorial, congressional and presidential candidates throughout the 1980s. It also paid for improved broadcasting, satellite equipment and other technological innovations for the party. And there were PAMPAC-published candidates’ handbooks, offering what Foley called “the best Democratic thinking on a number of key issues.”

PAMPAC fast became an important Democratic calling card. One of its founding board members, in fact, turns out to have been a defeated one-term Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton.

Clinton was not Harriman’s first choice for the Democratic presidential nomination; that honor went to Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. But she grew to admire Clinton--in particular, his stamina.

It was almost as if some of her own philosophy had rubbed off on the 42nd President of the United States.

“You never give up,” Harriman has said. “There may be deep periods of frustration and disappointment. But don’t feel downhearted.”

Those comments were made in reference to the determination she learned from Winston Churchill, her former father-in-law. The British prime minister, for whom young Pamela acted as a surrogate hostess when his wife was ailing, was only one of a litany of famous, powerful men whose lives have intersected with hers.

She was born in 1920 on a British dairy farm and at 19--plump, but with the peach-soft skin that still dazzles men and women alike--she married Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. Though it produced a son, Winston, the brief wartime alliance was doomed when Randolph turned out to have a weakness for gambling.

In her 20s, after her marriage to Randolph Churchill, she traveled in Ireland with John F. Kennedy and his sister Kathleen, with whom she had been a debutante at Buckingham Palace in 1938. Harriman lived in Paris in her 30s; Jean Cocteau was among regular guests at her Sunday evening salons. Evelyn Waugh, the British writer, penned a playful paean to her “kitten eyes, full of innocent fun.”

Her next husband was American producer Leland Hayward, whom she married in 1960. As his third wife, Pamela quickly became a star of the theater world’s social circuit. She also became a pariah among Hayward’s children--his daughter Brooke used the pages of her autobiography, “Haywire,” to skewer her stepmother. Pamela’s predecessor, Slim Keith, also got her digs in at Pamela in a memoir.

“Rich and powerful men were her career,” Keith wrote.

In the summer of 1971, four months after Hayward’s death, Pamela Harriman attended a dinner party at the home of her friend Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. Another guest, Averell Harriman, also was recovering from the death of a spouse: his wife of 40 years, Marie. Two months later, Pamela and Averell were wed.

Averell Harriman was a political potentate. He advised every Democratic President, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, until his death in 1986. He was a former governor of New York, and a onetime presidential aspirant himself. He was 79 by the time he and Pamela were married, and members of his party paid court to him, like a kind of elder statesman. As a wedding present, Pamela gave him her U.S. citizenship papers.

Averell Harriman also was a social powerhouse, the son of robber baron E.H. Harriman, president of Union Pacific Railroad. Averell was credited with popularizing downhill skiing in this country, and was renowned as a polo player. What’s more, Times staff writer Rudy Abramson reported in his book “Spanning the Century” that Harriman, an international banker and businessman, was among the first Westerners to do business with the Soviet Union.

In truth, theirs was no whirlwind courtship. Years before, following her breakup with Randolph Churchill, Pamela had been linked romantically with Harriman--and later, with CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, Italian automotive magnate Gianni Agnelli and Baron Elie de Rothschild of the French banking house.

Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle Onassis and Frank Sinatra also were in Pamela’s circle of male acquaintances.

“It’s quite a list,” said Christopher Ogden, a Washington writer who is at work on Pamela Harriman’s biography.

The men in Harriman’s life received her complete attention. “Pamela really functions through her men,” said costume jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane, a close friend.

To Averell, for example, “she was a faultless wife,” Lane said. “I stayed with them in Georgetown, and the house was exactly the temperature he liked it. I opened the window immediately.”

Averell left Pamela with an estate of at least $75 million. She has homes in Georgetown and Barbados. But while she has always dressed impeccably, with clothes that seem custom-matched to her flawless complexion, Harriman never seemed particularly interested in the more obvious trappings of wealth, such as the adornments Lane has made a fortune copying.

“She has never collected great jewels, ever,” he said. “No thing is important to her.” (A Van Gogh painting, “Roses,” that she donated to Washington’s National Gallery, for example, was valued at $60 million.)

“She really just cared for her men,” Lane said.

With Harriman’s expected return to Paris--as the first woman ever to head the embassy there--Ogden, and others, see a kind of symmetry.

“If you go back and look at what she was experiencing when she was 19, 20, 21,” huddling in a wine cellar that doubled as a bomb shelter with Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain, “she has come full circle in a way,” Ogden said.

Certainly some women of her generation and social standing might have been content to have established themselves simply as important hostesses, a much sought-after job description in this protocol-conscious capital.

Or, said House Speaker Foley, “she could well be living a life of great leisure. But that’s not Pamela.”

“There are lots of socialites who try to play politics” in Washington, lobbyist Podesta said. “But she’s the only one who ever did it successfully.”

Rousing the Democrats out of their cheerlessness required “enormous energy, constant work and determination,” Foley said. “It’s not always been comfortable or easy.”

But the frustrations only enhance the challenge, friends say. Compared to many other avenues she might have pursued, one acquaintance said, “This is just more fun.”

In a statement released after her appointment to the U.S. Embassy in France, Harriman said she was “honored” by the nomination.

And if confirmed by the Senate, she said in a phrase that bespoke her glee at having helped the Democrats to regain political power, “I look forward to serving my country in an Administration that offers so much hope to America and to the world.”