Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman.

• Author: Levy, David

"POWER IS the greatest aphrodisiac," claimed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--who ought to know, having fascinated, among not a few others, so potent a femme fatale as Zsa Zsa Gabor. (Their budding affair was cut short, according to Zsa Zsa, when Kissinger became preoccupied with the invasion of Cambodia.) Yet Power itself succumbed to the charms of Pamela Harriman, present Ambassador to France and past seductress of the likes of Randolph Churchill, Edward R. Murrow, Elie de Rothschild, and, of course, Averell Harriman. As Christopher Ogden shows in his informative biography, perhaps no woman in this century has cast so broad and deep a spell over the men who ruled the western world. She was on intimate terms with top World War II generals and diplomats, the head of CBS, and even Frank Sinatra. No fewer than three participants at the Yalta conference of 1945 wrote her love letters.

Yet it would be unjust to portray Harriman, as some have done, as merely the greatest courtesan of her time. As Ogden makes clear, she was much more than a glittering jewel adorning the veneer of high politics. She had political convictions, and wlat is more, political talents, of her own. The convictions were essentially conservative (her father was a staunch Tory who sat in the House of Lords), though the talents were usually lent to Democratic causes. This was partly out of loyalty to her husband Averell and partly because, she says, she felt a certain kinship between Tory noblesse oblige and Democratic paternalism. The PAC she founded, Democrats for the Eighties (which helped the Democrats take back the Senate in 1986), was deemed by Mario Cuomo "the most effective political organization I know of within our party."

Born Pamela Digby in 1920 to an upper class British family, she was raised in an atmosphere of taste and breeding. But the grand period of her life began when she married Randolph Churchill in 1939. The marriage was not a happy one; Randolph was an atrocious husband. Yet she received a compensation of sorts. Early on she felt compelled to move out and live with her father- and mother-in-law, who loved her and treated her with kindness. Her father-in-law happened to be Prime Minister of England. Thus during 1940, the year Winston Churchill later called the noblest in all of English history, the year in which he declared that he had "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat," Pamela, pregnant with his grandson and sleeping in the bunk...