Life of the Party.

• Author: McElwaine, Sandra

Trust me on this one: If you are a devotee of Vanity Fair, W, or the late, departed Spy, you will undoubtedly become hooked on Life of the Party, an unauthorized biography about the consummate 20th century adventuress, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman.

If you wonder whether an obscure, well bred British country woman can find happiness in the beds of a slew of international power players, the answer is yes. But only if they are very rich, very social, and very, very, prominent.

The rise of the fair and notorious Pamela, born in 1920, begins more than 50 years ago in the promiscuous years of war-torn London with her brief, tempestuous marriage to Winston Churchill's son Randolph. A glamorous, single-minded, seductive 18-year-old, she quickly eschewed connubial bliss with her impecunious and volatile husband--whom she had married in 1939 just three weeks after meeting him--and set her sights on more celebrated game. Pamela then launched a dazzling career of sexual dalliances that terrified married women on both sides of the Atlantic and earned her the title "Courtesan of the Century."

In an unusual disclaimer in the front of the book, the author, Time contributor Christopher Ogden, explains that he and Pamela set out to tell her titillating tale together, but she got cold feet when she realized that for Little, Brown's multi-million dollar advance, she would be expected to tell all. She subsequently backed out of the deal. Although Ogden had 40 hours of intimate tapes, he says he was happy to pull out, too, until the Queen Mother of the Clinton administration (as New York magazine calls her) imperiously refused to pay him a sou, not even expenses. So Ogden decided to press on without her, interviewing old lovers and their spiteful wives, former butlers and maids, disgruntled stepchildren, along with friends, unhappy relatives, and a raft of doting political allies.

The result is mirthless and heavy handed, but Ogden does dish, and he has allegedly enraged the multi-talented Pamela, who through guile and extensive political fundraising now resides in an opulent residence in Paris as U.S. ambassador to France.

How did this voluptuous young woman with a minimum of education propel herself from the drab countryside of wartime England to the lavish palaces of Europe to the pinnacle of power in the U.S.? To put it bluntly, through rat-like cunning and sex.

Her illustrious lovers are so numerous they boggle the mind, and Ogden entitles...