She Gave Men the Best Years of Their Lives

When the name Pamela Harriman is mentioned, one tends to gloss over her efforts as fund-raiser and power broker for the Democratic Party, as well as her recent role as U.S. ambassador to France. Instead, your mind inevitably races to the image of the woman many said cornered the catnip market when it came to rich and powerful men. The woman I knew was nothing like Homer’s sirens--whose seductive songs were so impossible to resist that sailors had to lash themselves to the masts of their ships. Though, well, maybe she was.

My parents, Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle Hart, traveled in the same exalted circles that Pamela fox-trotted through in the late 1940s, sharing many of the same friends in both England and the United States. As I was growing up, I enjoyed hearing stories of her romantic derring-do, and marveled as her name changed from Churchill, to Hayward, to Harriman. The tales of the big fish who got away--with names like Agnelli, Murrow, Rothschild and Niarchos--were pretty good, too. These men all shared an interesting perspective: They all seemed to feel Pamela had given them the best years of their lives.

I began to meet her in person when I was about 10 or 11. I liked her immediately, though I wasn’t totally sure why.

By the time I was so-called grown up (in the eyes of your parents and their friends, no one ages past puberty), Pamela was married to W. Averell Harriman, a man who’d fallen for her 50 years before. At the time, during the war, he was somewhat inconvenienced by already having a wife. It was what my mother called a “great love story.” Finally together--his wife, Marie, had died--Harriman was then in his 80s. Within five years, he would be dying.

They spent a lot of time in a house on Barbados that she fixed up to within an inch of its life, a place called Mango Bay. Pamela invariably lived in houses that had their own names: Minterne Magna, Chequers, Haywire, Ardena and Mango Bay, to name just a few.

Many thought Pamela would find other things to occupy her during Averell’s long illness. But after two years, the word on the street--streets including Park Avenue, Georgetown and Grosvenor Square--was that Pamela was sticking by her man.

I was sitting next to her at lunch one afternoon at Mango Bay, as she gently and skillfully steered several conversations toward Averell at the other end of the table, even as he struggled physically to raise a spoonful of a tasty flying-fish chowder. She never ignored him, or let him languish in his infirmities. Instead, she drew him out and brought the other guests to his still agile mind.

At some point during the meal, she turned to me to ask what I was up to--her attention only momentarily diverted from Averell. As I began to answer, facing directly into her legendary blue-green eyes, I suddenly felt the power of her look. I felt myself thinking, “Lash me to the mast, boys, and don’t let me loose no matter how much I beg.”

I was transported back to when I first met her, when I was a little boy. The first thing that happened when she focused on you was that everybody else in the room disappeared. And even as you’re saying to yourself, maybe she isn’t doing this on purpose, perhaps it’s merely a felicity of her features and the lighting, you are pulled in.

It was then that I finally figured out why I had liked her right from the beginning: When she looked at you, even at age 11, even over lunch in you parents’ dining room, you always felt, maybe, you had a shot.

Many years later, I asked my mother what it was that she had? My mother answered, using the medical terminology, “She had lady fluid.”

Pamela Harriman’s odyssey may finally be over--but her seductive song still lingers.