An Adventurous Woman

Recently, and for the first time ever, I read two huge biographies of the same person, back-to-back.

And who was the fascinating subject? Not Benjamin Franklin or Clara Barton or any of those classic worthies.

Instead: Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who was in the league of Cheekiest Women of Our Time.

She married the son of Winston Churchill, and then producer Leland Hayward, and diplomat Averell Harriman, and in the interims was the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe.

"Pamela had been in the headlines for some fifty years, nearly always in extreme terms: the dazzling saloniere, the 'international siren,' the homewrecker, the gold digger, the power broker. 'If I had ever gotten bothered about what people thought, I would never have gone anywhere,' she told a reporter for The Washington Post in 1983." From Reflected Glory by Sally Bedell Smith.

According to one of her biographies, the word was that when she needed surgery three different men paid the same tab.

Now, I don't admire that. However -- I do greatly admire that she appeared to live the way she wanted to live and didn't appear to be held back by propriety. She was a 70s girl in a 50s world, and that took a lot of cheek.

She also wound up accomplishing quite a lot, when she went political in her later years. She became a major fundraiser of the Democratic Party, was sometimes referred to as the "doyenne" and "First Lady" of the party. So The Life of the Party by Christopher Ogden has a double meaning. She was "life of the party" in two ways.

As a 70-something she made People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People List. And she even died with flair: of a stroke in a swimming pool in Paris.