RICH LITTLE POOR GIRL
Alastair Forbes offers a memorial, after his
fashion, for the life and work of Pamela Harriman
I WAS opening for a great-niece a very Pretty tin of 'Dorset Gingers' (the lid of which showed a pretty mother with hair of that colour dishing up tea for her child) when the news of Pam Harriman's death was announced on the radio.
Perhaps it was an early surfeit of such delicious goodies in her home country that had turned her into the portly, redheaded bride on Randolph Churchill's arm, pho- tographed for posterity on the steps of St John's, Smith Square, not long before that Pretty church was to be deconsecrated after a direct Luftwaffe hit. It later became an acoustically perfect concert hall, a far cry indeed from that plump, tone-deaf couple on its steps. After detailing the well-known debts Randolph had run up on his voyage out to the Middle East with better-heeled fellow officers, the gossip columnist Kenneth Rose summed up this 'Major Disaster for Pamela', as it was headlined, as follows: 'In 1946 she divorced Major Churchill. The rest is history.' Well, only up to a point, would-be Lord Copper! The divorce was amicable: no adulteries on either side came into it, though Ran- dolph's single Cairo attachment was great- ly outnumbered by Pam's baker's dozen of bedmates in wartime, a list which in post- war Paris had been brought to a score. Not surprisingly, she was not likely to have been, for more than a taste, Aly Khan's cup of tea, for he preferred his women high', like Britons' pheasants, and Pam to the end of her life liked a bath.
But the French, who have done Pam in death such signal honour (not wholly undeserved, for, with the help of her admirable Minister, Avice Bohlen, widow of the even more admirable Russophone diplomatist Chip Bohlen, and a staff well rewarded with smiling pampering, she proved an excellent ambassadress) have a Percipient saying: 'II y a des noms qui font bander' — 'There are some names that give a man an erection.' No wonder our Spam (her nickname, taken from the principal wartime import — her lovers apart — from the United States), who clung all her life, against every social convention, to her famous first father-in-law's name, was just what an Ital- ian needed to efface the memory of any medal won on the Russian front. It cannot be denied that Pamela, now slimmed down, though never able to acquire a neck, was an excellent and decorative companion and hostess for Gianni Agnelli, a man who was certainly grateful for the comforts she provided and he paid for.
But when she one day telephoned to say from London that she, as a converted Catholic, had had her first marriage suc- cessfully annulled, poor Gianni panicked and begged my beloved and much missed friend Princess Topazia Caetani to come at once to Turin to help him stave off this attack. Already in Fiat's fair city, after its wonderful football team had been wiped out in an air crash homeward-bound, Pam had been accused of possessing the maloc- chio, the evil eye. At last she got the mes- sage, and a huge settlement, while Gianni married a well-born virgin beauty.
Briefly at a loose end, Pam surprisingly agreed to give Randolph another trial run. With the connivance of his greatest love, Laura Charteris, the pair went off for a long weekend at Wraxall, family seat of Laura's first husband, Lord Long. It was not, he told me, an unmitigated success, and it may be that her first husband, whose funeral she curiously insisted on attending, was the last Brit she ever held in her arms.
At a Hollywood dinner party I once attended, having been taken there by the novelist Susan Sontag, the hostess suddenly insisted that each guest in turn select the person he or she would most like to see dead. Pamela was named, not without some venom, by her second husband's son.
This was no better advertisement for her talents as a stepmother than the lawsuit brought against her by Kathleen Harriman and her sisters which was to diminish her for- tune by many millions and several priceless pictures, not to mention a house or two. But she mellowed with the years, her body rejuve- nated by the most expensive toe-to-face-lift in the world and free at last from its craving for multimillionaires' caresses. It was touching to see her surely almost last surviving lover of old, Agnelli, at her Paris send-off.
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