Strategic Seduction. The Astonishing Life & Underappreciated Power of Pamela Harriman.
Dish’s Favorite Read of 2024: Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction and Intrigue By Sonia Purnell.
Tina Brown just called Kingmaker “the book everyone is reading this summer” on both sides of the pond. I’d love to believe that’s true because I found it the most compelling book I read last year and so I’d love to discuss it with more friends. (As former Editor in Chief of Vanity Fair, Tatler and The New Yorker, Brown ought to know.) With that hope, I’m resharing my review from The Crush Letter No 184 (January 18, 2025).*
Dish’s Favorite Read of 2024: Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction and Intrigue By Sonia Purnell.
I read a lot of good historical nonfiction last year — Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe was the best, but also The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, Precipice by Robert Harris, Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, to mention just a few. Kingmaker, though, about Pamela Harriman, was a jaw dropping revelation, which is saying a lot given that I’d already Life of the Party and Reflected Glory, two previous biographies of Harriman. One of the things I learned from reading Kingmaker wasn’t about Harriman, but about the authors of the two other biographies of her, and that is that they both went into writing their respective books with an axe to grind against Harriman. She was a woman who made enemies. Purnell’s biography felt more balanced, with a willingness to present Harriman in all her glory, alongside her flaws — most significantly, as a mother, but also sometimes as a friend.
Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman (to use all her last names), is a woman often referred to as “Churchill’s secret weapon“ to get the U.S. to enter WWII about the period in her twenties. Also, at the age of 73, as “one of the best ambassadors that ever served the United States,” about her success as the US Ambassador to France in the 1990’s (her first ever paid job). And also — most famously — as ”the 20th Century’s greatest courtesan,” a reference to how she spent much of the fifty year span between her aforementioned twenties and seventies. During that period, she was the lover of many of the great men on the international stage: Gianni Agnelli, Prince Aly Khan, Baron Elie Rothschild, Edward Murrow, Bill Paley, Jock Whitney. Before that string of alpha men she was, of course, married to Winston Churchill’s wretchedly cruel, stupid and selfish son Randolph Churchill (after knowing him only two weeks). When she married Randolph Harriman was, if you can believe it given her later prowess, having a hard time finding a husband.
After Randolph, she married Leland Hayward (the great theatrical agent and producer) and in her later years, Averell Harriman (the businessman and diplomat).
Pamela Harriman didn’t simply seduce great men, though. She became their confidante and advisor on matters that included diplomacy and politics, she engaged in strategic alliances with them, traded in information, made powerful introductions. Eventually, she parlayed her shrewdness in making connections between and with the world’s power players into her own political power base. At 51 she clinched her position by marrying Averell Harriman, who was not only loaded financially but a major businessman and statesman. Together, they set Pamela Harriman up to become a power player in her own right, which eventually led to her Ambassadorship to France.
Madeleine Albright summed it up best when she said Harriman was “not a woman to let the century pass her by.” Harriman’s life is a hell of a remarkable story. A triumph of soft skills, seduction, guts, persistence and ambition, she dodged gossip, jealousy, disrespect and terrible financial and legal advice to create a life that put her in the center of much of the great action in her era. Purnell’s biography is in some measure an effort at redefining Pamela Harriman as more than just the courtesan she is broadly known as.
While I found the first part of the book, centered on her astonishing role in World War II as Winston Churchill’s confidante, the most absorbing, the whole book was a worthwhile study in how an ambitious woman of considerable talent mad a big life without a tremendous headstart. A life like no other, and one of the most fascinating women of the century.
*I left this comment on Tina Brown’s review: “Kingmaker was my favorite read of 2024. Harriman is flawed, for sure, but it is still wildly unfair that her record continues to be deridingly summed up as ‘La Bouche’ or ’the century’s greatest courtesan.’ It is not as if ‘direct’ power was permitted. I had read the previous two biographies of Harriman, penned by writers who had an axe to pick, and found this more balanced portrayal absolutely fascinating — particularly the first two-thirds.”
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