High life
Poor old Ben
Taki
ally Bedell Smith is an American biog- rapher who did to Bill Paley what Bomber Harris did to Dresden. Mind you, she was fair. Paley's only weakness was — and Smith homed in on it — despite being almost an emperor, he was not quite a gen- tleman. Sally has now done Pammy, as in Digby, Churchill, Harriman, Murrow, Roth- schild, Khan, Agnelli, Hayward, Niarchos, Harriman again and other gentlemen in England, Paris, New York, Long Island and Washington now abed. It's a terrific book about a courtesan who reached the zenith of her quest when she was appointed by the Draft Dodger to be American ambassador to Paris — a post once held by Benjamin Franklin — having burned through the Harriman fortune in the process.
What, yet another bio of a woman who has never read a book but knows how to count up to four billion and who thinks
Aristotle was named after Onassis? Well, yes, although the Ogden book on Slam, Bam, thank you Pam of three years ago was more or less the definitive hatchet job, Smith's is a kinder version, based on 800 interviews with 400 sources. The result, however, is the same. Our Pam emerges as no virgin. In fact, she gives courtesans like Lola Montez and Mata Hari a very bad name. After all, throughout history most grand horizontales helped their benefactors when the latter hit rough times. Our Pam did the contrary. When she had it all, she reached for more, almost ruining two large families in the process.
Writing a biography of Pam Harriman cannot be an easy task. Repeating ad nau- seam the names of Agnelli, Churchill and Harriman must be an awful bore. Furni- ture, houses, flowers and the relentless pur- suit of lotsa moolah is what Pam's life has been all about, not exactly the stuff to excite a modern Boswell. What Reflected Glory, Smith's book, has over Life of the Party, Ogden's opus, is that it includes the last sorry chapter of Pam's quest to have it all. The very public fight between her and the Mortimer and Fisk families over the Harriman fortune — now settled out of court — is sleaze personified. Here I will declare an interest. The Mortimer family, some of whom I have known since I was young, are among those who believe one's name should appear in the newspapers only three times. To have their names
dragged through the gossip columns must have been a terrible experience. Especially as they were only trying to have what was theirs in the first place.
For any of you that may have missed it, Pam married Averell Harriman when he was 80, six months after her last hubby's death. She spent the next 15 years coaxing money out of the old miser, finally becom- ing seriously rich upon his death. This is where old Harriman got it wrong, as wrong as his lifetime liberal politics. His was an inherited fortune. He was the guardian of it, and should have passed it down the line. Even worse, the art collection he gave to Pam was not even his to give. It belonged to his late wife and should have gone to his children, Mrs Mortimer and Mrs Fisk. Instead, he left Pam in charge and she blew most of it after instructing her financial advisers — no, not John Bryan — to invest the moolah in high-yield ventures. At the end, the rightful heirs were given a stipend, most of which came from Pam's sale of three Impressionist paintings which were theirs to begin with.
They say no gentleman should ever speak ill of a lady, but Slam, Barn, Pam makes it very hard for one to stay a gent. It is the greed that shocks. Just as lefty edi- tors fire people on Christmas Eve — I am thinking of the grotesque phoney Hugo Young — without the slightest hesitation or conscience pang, so do trendy liberals like Pam Harriman pursue mammon. Relentlessly and cold-bloodedly. In fact, it's typical. The man who has most diminished the presidency of the United States named a woman who had diminished the role of the courtesan as his ambassador to the City of Light. Poor Ben Franklin. I'd hate to be buried next to him and hear him turning over again and again.
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