Pamela Harriman in Serious Condition

Her health unimproved, U.S. Ambassador Pamela Harriman, victim of an apparent stroke, was in intensive care Tuesday, where she was joined by members of her family.

Harriman, 76, was hospitalized Monday evening after having a seizure at the Ritz Hotel, where she had gone for a swim in the health club’s pool. The wealthy socialite turned Democratic Party fund-raiser and diplomat was taken by ambulance to the American Hospital in the northwestern suburb of Neuilly.

“Her condition was serious when she arrived, and her condition is serious now,” U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mary Carlin Yates said at the hospital Tuesday. The initial diagnosis was that the English-born Harriman had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, Yates said.

Harriman’s son, Winston Churchill, a member of the British House of Commons and grandson of the celebrated wartime prime minister, was at her bedside, embassy employees said. Harriman had spent the past weekend in Britain to attend the christening of a great-granddaughter, the employees said.

At the White House, Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Harriman was in the “thoughts and prayers” of President and Mrs. Clinton. French President Jacques Chirac asked some of France’s leading medical specialists to be ready to provide assistance if the U.S. Embassy requested it, the presidential press service said.

Harriman, ambassador in Paris since 1993, was widely expected to be departing this summer. Her appointment by Clinton to such an important job raised many eyebrows, but she has proved a popular and effective envoy.

The French knew that the glamorous Harriman had the ear of the American president, whose political fortunes she boosted through a political action committee she founded to help the Democrats counter the Republican landslides of the Reagan-Bush years.

In relations with what may be America’s testiest ally, she has been widely credited with smoothing over the rough patches on issues as diverse as Bosnia-Herzegovina, the World Trade Organization and CIA spying in France.

Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister who sent her a telegram of get-well wishes, said she “conquered Paris society.” Madame Figaro, a popular women’s magazine, once termed her a “living legend” and said she had brought a “breath of fresh air” to Franco-American relations.

“She has been a wonderful ambassador,” said Denis Lacorne, political analyst for the International Relations Research Center in Paris. “She knew how to soften the rough edges, and we know that the officials of the Quai d’Orsay [French Foreign Ministry] are anti-American.”

Harriman became a U.S. citizen after marrying the late American statesman, financier and Democratic Party power broker Averell Harriman in 1971. He died in 1986.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pamela Harriman worked to rebuild the Democratic Party by hosting fund-raisers at her Georgetown home. It was her idea to set up a political action committee, which later turned into “Democrats for the ‘80s.” She supported Al Gore Jr., then a young senator from Tennessee, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and, four years later, was attracted by Clinton’s intelligence and stamina.