While debutant Pamela Digby was unhappily married to her first husband, Winston Churchill's son Randolph Churchill, and Randolph was away at the war, she had an affair with William Averell Harriman, called Ave. He was unhappily married too and old enough to be her father. He was the first man to have kept her. Though he soon returned to the United States and his marriage, he was a very wealthy man and another man, Lord Beaverbrook, acted as a negotiator and a go between to fund Pamela's apartment in London and expenses. These payments went on for three decades, though he may not have always been paying attention to his finances.
When Pamela Churchill Harriman, newly widowed, arrived back in the United States after a trip to Europe to visit her son, Winston, a visit to France, and a cruise, she was invited to a dinner in Washington D.C. She spotted Ave, now 79 and a widow.
No one could make his life easy again - except Pamela. They quickly reignited old passions. They were married eight weeks after their reunion.
She set out to redecorate and claim her own turf. She expanded their staff. They had a private jet. Now became truly wealthy in her own right for the first time.
They married when she was 51. He died when she was 66.
Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the woman who was called the Courtesan of the 20th Century, who started out as a dumpy debutante with no real money compared to her peers, had set herself apart.
She went on to become a Democratic Party fund raiser.
The girl who was know to say little, to speak only when spoken to, or only to uphold her man, started giving political advice.
The woman who lived more than half a century before she felt she had enough money controlled grants given by the W. Averell and Pamela C. Harriman Foundation and the Mary W. Harriman Foundation. She gave out large sums of money every year to effect public policy.
The girl who lacked a good education but for a "finishing school," proved to have been someone who learned well from everyone she was involved with.
Influential in President William Jefferson Clinton becoming elected to the nation's highest office, she was rewarded when he named her United States Ambassador to France.
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