Romance novels, for those who’ve never ventured beyond their metallic-relief covers, depict a life unknowable to most women. It is a life in which bemuscled, race-car-driving aristocrats pursue glamorous heroines and in which couples with little need for frequent-flyer mileage cavort from grand Euro- capital to grand Euro-capital, proving that love blossoms best in those cities where a branch of Cartier may be found.
It is certainly a life knowable to Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the transcontinental socialite and current United States ambassador to France, whose jet-setting exploits are engagingly chronicled by TIME contributor Christopher Ogden in Life of the Party (Little, Brown; 504 pages; $24.95 ). If the genre existed, Life of the Party would be billed as a True Romance because it exhaustively details the affairs that have made Harriman legendary.
A redhead who attracted suitors with remarkable ease, the British-born aristocrat had married and divorced Winston Churchill’s son Randolph by the time she was 25. The young Mrs. Churchill spent the rest of her 20s and 30s spinning around the London-Paris-Antibes social orbit, bedding other wealthy and powerful men. They included journalist Edward R. Murrow and Italian mogul Gianni Agnelli, whom Ogden describes — Jackie Collins-style — as looking “so luscious” to Harriman when they first met that “her knees trembled.” Ultimately, Agnelli, a lothario, refused to marry her, which hurt Harriman deeply.
But she recovered from this rather quickly, as she did from all her relationships. At 39 she married her second husband, producer Leland Hayward. . Six months after his death in 1971, she moved on to the industrialist and diplomat Averell Harriman, with whom she had had an affair in her youth. It was as Mrs. Harriman that she became the Democratic Party’s most celebrated fund raiser.
Ogden sometimes seems unreasonably priggish when discussing Harriman’s sexual pursuits. “Christians, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, she was an equal- opportunity playgirl and eventually sampled them all,” he writes. He is lucky that she did. If Harriman had been more demure and straitlaced, Ogden never would have been able to ride the best-seller lists with this entertaining book.
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