In yesterday’s extract from her captivating new biography of Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Purnell told how a woman dismissed as “the courtesan of the century” was a political mastermind who used sex and seduction to lead America into war. Today, we reveal how Pamela Harriman took Europe by storm, before being captivated 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 French Riviera down the Italian coast to Capri, she declined.
Pamela was due to dine that evening with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had rented a nearby villa and had become friends with her.
Recently divorced from Winston Churchill’s pompous son Randolph, Pamela barely knew Gianni and spoke no Italian.
Moreover, it was 1948, the war was still fresh in people’s minds, and fascist Italy had become Hitler’s ally. While Pamela was rendering invaluable service as Churchill’s aide, the Agnellis were growing rich as suppliers of trucks and tanks to the Italian and German armies.
Pamela Churchill, known for her aristocratic connections and seductive charm, was considered little more than a courtesan. However, she influenced key people and important events for decades, eventually marrying American businessman and diplomat Averell Harriman.
Pamela slept with some of the world’s richest men, including Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli, and partied in the millionaires’ paradise of the Cote d’Azur, pictured.
Former lover Gianni Agnelli pays his respects at the funeral of US ambassador to France Pamela Harriman
Harriman, far right, is pictured at a diplomatic dinner at the Élysée Palace in Paris honoring his protégé, President Bill Clinton, center.
It was then that she received a telegram from her overbearing ex-husband announcing that he was heading to the south of France to see her. This changed her mind.
Thick clouds blotted out the stars as she boarded Gianni’s 12-metre yacht, but he ignored weather warnings and soon the boat was slamming into huge waves.
A glass of water on a shelf above her bed fell and cut Pamela’s forehead. So, at first light and with blood all over the cabin, they sailed to Portofino on the Ligurian coast, from where Gianni took her to the hospital in Turin.
Meanwhile, as she waited there for her stitches to be removed, Randolph called everyone she knew in Italy, shouting over the phone: “Where is she? Is she prostituting herself?”
Pamela soon returned aboard Gianni’s yacht, which was sailing through calmer waters toward Capri. There they stayed in a pastel-colored villa rented by her friend, Count Rudi Crespi, an executive at an international magazine.
They arrived late at night and when Rudi came into his room the next morning with coffee, Gianni opened the blinds and said, “I want you to meet Pam. I’m crazy about her.”
She entered naked and approached Rudi, who noticed the smoothness of her skin. She shook his hand, sat down on the bed and crossed her legs “modestly.”
Rudi, amazed, told his friends that she was the first natural redhead he had ever seen.
After moving to the United States in 1959 to marry the great Broadway producer Leland Hayward, Pamela took the opportunity to rekindle a wartime friendship with Ike Eisenhower (now President) while also assisting Jack Kennedy in his campaign to succeed him.
But it was not until Hayward died and Pamela finally married her wartime lover, Averell Harriman – by then an elder statesman of the Democratic Party – that she finally made a splash in Washington’s power circles.
Even Richard Nixon was moved by her past and stopped discussing the balance of payments to ask his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, for a full report on Pamela’s time in Downing Street.
He later invited her to the White House to hear her thoughts on why Churchill had lost the 1945 election and even how he might improve his own electoral chances.
Although she was not enthusiastic about Jimmy Carter’s candidacy, Pamela worked hard to get him elected in 1976, raising funds for the Democrats. In 1980 she was named Democratic Woman of the Year.
Pamela could do nothing about the crushing Republican victory that brought Reagan to the polls that same year. But it was still an opportunity.
As the Democrats lay defeated, divided and nearly bankrupt, at the age of 61, adversity galvanized Pamela and she drew on her long experience.
“Pamela learned about leadership from Winston Churchill,” said one party official, displaying a “joy for life amid devastation.”
Soon he was using his name, his reputation and his glorious, art-filled Georgetown home to raise money, explore new policies and search for a presidential contender who could finally end the Democratic Party’s long losing streak.
Long before others, she identified Bill Clinton as a rare political talent, brushing aside widespread concerns that he was a mere governor of a small-town state who had no chance of winning the White House.
The British aristocrat, owner of five houses and a safe full of jewels, saw that an imperfect figure from Hope, Arkansas, could indeed, albeit improbably, make it to the Oval Office.
She marveled at his ability to work a crowd, exude crucial optimism and decipher the broader political landscape and continued to project and promote him.
He advised 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 rural state, could make it to the Oval Office.
Decades after her wartime seduction of Averell Harriman, right, the two finally married.
French President Jacques 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 his Georgetown home in August 1992 after a fundraiser.
“I had no doubt,” he once wrote, that he would not have been “fully prepared to stand before America and the world” as president without their support.
In return, he gave her an ambassadorship. Both Clinton and President Chirac of France came to rely heavily on her as a liaison with Europe during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.
Her own experience of the bombings prompted her to push hard and repeatedly for the West to intervene and stop the bloodshed.
Upon her death in 1997, a heartbroken Chirac described her as a “diplomat without equal,” even comparing her skills to great American predecessors Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
At his funeral, Clinton told the congregation that he was president “in large measure” because of his unique set of skills and experiences, but also because of his joy for life itself: a “vibrant sense of history and the wisdom that came to her from the great events she had helped shape.”
