THE WOMAN MOST LIKELY TO

By R.Z. Sheppard

Few Americans can readily identify Pamela Churchill Harriman, born Pamela Beryl Digby 76 years ago in England and currently U.S. ambassador to France. But in the international world of the redundantly rich and overpowered, she has been an object of desire, scorn, envy and grudging respect for more than 50 years.

Following a nasty marriage to Winston Churchill's dissolute son Randolph, Pam Churchill went on to form lucrative unions and strategic dalliances on both sides of the Atlantic. Her second husband was Broadway producer Leland Hayward, who died in 1971. She then married the aged Averell Harriman--Wall Street heir, Roosevelt New Dealer, diplomat and former Governor of New York. He had been her munificent lover in Britain during World War II. Other beaux of that exciting time and place included John Hay Whitney, Edward R. Murrow and his boss, CBS founder William Paley, who later crowned the red-haired beauty the "great courtesan of the century."

With enough expensively soiled laundry for a dozen racy novels, Sally Bedell Smith's savvy unauthorized biography, Reflected Glory (Simon & Schuster; 559 pages; $30), reads as if it had written itself. That, of course, is a hard-earned illusion. The former New York Times reporter and author of a book about Paley has dredged decades of letters, memoirs, social histories and newspaper clippings. She has talked to hundreds of Pamela watchers and has had the benefit of reading Christopher Ogden's Life of the Party, a 1994 biography based on taped interviews Harriman gave Ogden and then prevented him from quoting directly.

Reflected Glory is packed with unflattering anecdotes, reminders that public figures with flavorful private lives should sometimes compromise with their chroniclers. An accessible Harriman might have charmed Bedell Smith into changing her title. Who wants to be remembered as merely a gilded mirror, decorative but empty until an influential man shows up?

What did this international femme fatale have that her rivals (often the wives of her lovers) did not? "Pink like a peach that you wanted to bite into," recalled an observer. There was the acquired Churchill name and a knack for what Bedell Smith calls Zelig-like appearances among history makers. There was also what friends saw as her "ardent femininity" and detractors called "the manner of a hot housemaid."

Yet, says her biographer, the woman who has been accused of home wrecking and gold digging knew how to hide her game. On the evidence, her well-documented ambitions, appetites and acquisitiveness were swaddled in social graces. She seems also to have given good value to the men who provided--sometimes simultaneously--the residences, the antiques, the designer frocks and the sort of pin money only Cartier understands. As Averell Harriman's wife and widow, she became a patron of defeated Democrats, opening her house to promising politicians, Bill Clinton among them. According to the numbers, Pamela Harriman was an effective party fund raiser, although not an especially generous contributor.

Money and power, not love and marriage, are the dominant themes of this brightly written book. The bottom line is that Pamela Churchill Harriman knew how to get money but not how to keep it. In the 1950s she made a virtue of her extravagance. "My life has given me a unique opportunity to shop," she once told a fashion reporter. Forty years later, following a decade of big spending and bad investments, she was selling off prime assets from the Harriman estate to meet expenses. Her biggest fear, notes one of Bedell Smith's many loquacious sources, was that she might have to live on $500,000 a year. Priceless stuff! Reflected Glory is some piece of work about some piece of work.

--By R.Z. Sheppard