PAMELA HARRIMAN ... and me.

Pamela Harriman and I weren’t intimate pals. Nor good friends. A brief acquaintance? Not even that. But she has been a yuuuuge part of my household for years. So it’s not like I’m dropping her name. Seriously, we shared something significant.

You remember Pamela.  Wife of Randolph Churchill (Winston’s only son). She then married Broadway producer Leland Hayward (“South Pacific”), and later became spouse of Governor/Ambassador Averell Harriman (Union Pacific Railroad trust fund baby, Brown Brothers Harriman dividend recipient; oh my, the man was rich). 

Averell Harriman was also my former neighbor. Sort of. He spent summer weekends two miles from where I grew up in a sleepy village 50 miles north of New York City. We didn’t have play dates or anything like that. He was 30 years older than me! But if I stood on tiptoes in my front yard, I could almost spot the 100,000 square-foot mansion set on 50 acres of greenery atop a Catskill Mountain foothill. Yes, two miles away but, in the greater scheme of things, my neighbor.

Some history: before Pamela and Ave hitched up, she was one busy lady. In addition to her three husbands, she had amorous acquaintanceships with Prince Aly Khan, Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, French banker Baron Elie de Rothschild, Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, just about anyone who wore pants. (It helped if those pants had deep pockets.)

Harriman was famously parsimonious, if not a penny-pinching skinflint. So after their marriage in 1972, Pamela applied her legendary charms and geisha-like devotions to convince him to open up his $100 million bank account so that she could, as her obituary in THE NEW YORK TIMES said, “fix up his houses.” 

Among her many fixer-up purchases were several sapphire blue, eight-feet-long tablecloths for use, I have no doubt, at dinner parties she hostessed in the Harriman mansion in my old ‘hood. After Averell died in 1986, she enjoyed his fortune for 11 years until her death. At that point, many of their possessions at the Harriman estate were given away. Through a maze of connections and serendipity, I was the lucky recipient of two of her tablecloths. And I treasured them.

While setting my tables for dinner parties, I envisioned Pamela in her chandelier-lit oak dining room, sitting regally at a sapphire-blue draped table, her sylph-like figure swathed in Chanel or Dior, lifting an ivory cigarette holder in her slender fingers with long red nails. I actually felt close to her.

I also have a hunch that, during dinners with visiting dignitaries, she tapped those sharp red fingernails too many times on the lovely blue damask.  Because today, despite their undoubtedly expensive provenance and my own TLC, those tablecloths are in shreds. 

One would THINK she’d purchase only superior quality cloths. Ones that would hold up well over the years and not rip to pieces.  She had the money! Truthfully, I am a little ticked off, maybe even offended, at the stringy napery I’m left with. 

I honestly think our relationship deserved better than that.