Anyone who reads and believes this book will find it hard to feel warmth for Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the woman Bill Clinton appointed ambassador to France in 1993. Self-centered (her romantic life took precedence over her only child, Winston) and calculating (her lifetime pattern suggests that if a man wasn't rich or powerful, Pamela wasn't interested) are among the adjectives appropriate for Madame Ambassador in this unsparing biography by the former chief diplomatic correspondent for TIME magazine.
The woman who grew up to be a formidable fund-raiser for the Democratic Party was born in England in 1920 and raised on her family's estate in Dorset. According to Ogden, she was chafing to get away from her hidebound aristocratic family and on with her life from an early age. At 19, after a three-week courtship, she married Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, then a 28-year-old journalist with a problem holding his liquor and his temper. Pamela had doubts about Randolph, says Ogden, but she was pretty crazy about his last name. The two had a child (now Conservative MP for Davyhulme) and some heavy rows before going their separate ways in 1945.
Ogden, who says that he interviewed nearly 200 sources with close knowledge of Harriman at each stage of her life, paints a mostly unflattering portrait of the woman so many men found desirable. Among her reputed lovers were Elie de Rothschild of the European banking fortune; Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli; Prince Aly Kahn; CBS founder Bill Paley and—during the same heady period of World War II—British general Frederick L. Anderson; prince of cafe society Jock Whitney; and Edward R. Murrow.
How does the author account for Harriman's appeal? Though not a great beauty, he writes, Pamela was shrewd, a quick study and a gifted—no, extraordinary—listener. Furthermore, she oversaw "every aspect of a man's life, boosting his ego, anticipating his every interest, convincing him that her time with him was the greatest thing that had happened since the juxtaposition of the planets."
But not everything went her way. Both Agnelli and Murrow broke her heart by refusing to come through with wedding rings. Others, however, did. The woman one former husband allegedly referred to as "the greatest courtesan of the 20th century" was married to super agent Leland Hayward from 1962 to 1971 and to New York governor W. Averell Harriman, with whom Pamela had also dallied during World War II, from 1971 to 1986.
Ogden probably won't be getting dinner invitations from Harriman, but his book represents a serious and intriguing study of a woman who began as a trophy wife and emerged as the Democrat's force majeur. (Little Brown, $24.95)
by Robert Cullen
This just in: The news from post-Soviet Moscow is bad. And thrilling. And relentless. At least it is in the fictional world of Colin Burke, the Moscow correspondent of an American newsmagazine, who trips over a story involving Syria's attempts to woo Russian nuclear scientists. Caught amid New York City office politics, a Russia straining between Marx and market economy and his own thirst for Stolychnaya, Burke is catapulted into a labyrinth of intrigue.
Cullen, a former Moscow correspondent for Newsweek, portrays a post-Communist country where the hidden mikes are still on but no one is listening, and where an extra gallon of gas may be more difficult to come by than weapons-grade plutonium. It's enough to make one go ballistic. (Atheneum, $20)
by Whitney Otto
Germaine Greer would easily recognize the plight of Kiki Shaw, who, as she approaches 40, finds herself disappearing. Strange things are happening: Her foot goes through the plump body of her cat; she sometimes sees no reflection in the mirror; a coworker rifles through her office desk as if she were invisible, all of which prompts Kiki to evaluate her life and conclude that "it seems to consist primarily of Other Lives."
A researcher for a TV game show, Shaw is obsessed with trivia. She digs for unusual historical facts about women in roles as workers, wives and mothers. The relationships of her own mother, Gen, who is lost without a man, and friends Nora, who reinvents herself for each new beau, and Collier, the secret lover of a married man, inspire Kiki's musings as she traces her life back to her childhood.
Otto, author of the best-selling How to Make an American Quilt, scores again with these stories of engaging women who are struggling for identity in a society that doesn't really "see" them. (Villard, $20)
Compiled and edited by Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer makes his living as a publicist. But his obsession is the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. After writing eight volumes about the nation's 16th president, does Holzer have anything left to say?
Yes, thanks to a clever idea. Letters by Lincoln have been published aplenty—but what about letters to him? The result is a perfect browse. The editor of a newspaper for New York City's Germans solicits Republican advertising with the Lincolnesque injunction, "Men are born to assist each other." Grace Bedell, 11, urges candidate Lincoln to grow a beard ("All the ladies like whiskers"). A weatherman promises the President fair skies, whereupon Lincoln tartly notes, "It is raining now and has been for 10 hours—I cannot spare anymore time to Mr. Capen." An "inventor" of a purported perpetual-motion machine is written off even more briskly as a "crazy man."
Most striking is how direct the contact once was between government and its of-by-and-for people. The folksiest moment: Lincoln's predecessor. James Buchanan, asks Honest Abe to forward some books that were accidentally left lying around the White House. (Addison-Wesley, $26.95)
Images of war by children of former Yugoslavia
There may be no explaining the civil war in the morass that used to be Yugoslavia, but this little volume offers abundant proof of its horror. Compiled by the United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF), the book offers sometimes profound, always poignant drawings and bitterly poetic essays by children on all sides of the conflict.
"We are children without a country and without hope," writes 14-year-old Dunja next to a watercolor of a bombed church. "I had a new tricycle, red and yellow and with a bell.... Do you think they have destroyed my tricycle too?" asks Nedim, a 5-year-old refugee.
A gallery of photographs loses impact because there are no captions. The editors also do the writers a disservice by editing their work sloppily. One child, for instance, is allowed to overwrite: "War is the saddest word that flows from my quivering lips. It is a wicked bird that never comes lo rest." If ever a case didn't need overstating, it's that of these children. Their artwork alone speaks eloquently of their acute understanding of fear, death and destruction. (HarperCollins, $12.95)
>Christopher Ogden
TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL
PAMELA HARRIMAN HASN'T BEEN able to vamp every man. One notable holdout: biographer Christopher Ogden, now a columnist for TIME International. "She's not my type," he says, "she doesn't read much, she has very little joy, and at the same time she has lived this fabulous life."
If Ogden, 49, wasn't attracted by Harriman's much vaunted allure, he did want to tell the story of that fabulous life. And initially Harriman invited him to tell it. The two had friends in common, were neighbors in Georgetown, and Pamela was a fan of his 1990 biography of Margaret Thatcher. But Ogden set some ground rules. "I made it clear that this had to be a real book," he says. "Pamela had had many relationships that we had to get into. She said she agreed."
When Random House offered an advance of $1.6 million, Ogden says that Harriman got very cold feet. "I think she realized that for that much money she was really going to have to tell her story, and she wasn't prepared for it," says Ogden, who had already amassed 40 hours of taped interviews with his subject. "She was prepared to talk about life with the Churchills and about being godmother lo the Democratic party."
When Harriman bailed out, Ogden look the book elsewhere for less money. He claims to have no hard feelings and even acknowledges admiration for his reluctant subject. "The impression of Pamela has been that she's always had it her own way," says Ogden, "but she's been hurt a lot, let down, abandoned. And yet she's always picked herself up and kept after her goals."
- Contributors:
- J.D. Reed,
- Louisa Ermelino,
- William Henry III,
- Ralph Novak,
- Joanne Kaufman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
