THE SWANS OF FIFTH AVENUE by MELANIE BENJAMIN : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT BOOK REVIEW

An artful fictive recounting of the interactions between author Truman Capote and his "Swans," which in this case includes Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman, as well as Slim Keith who was married to Leland Hayward before Pamela married him, Babe Paley, and other ladies who did lunch in the pre-Beatles 1960's in New York, I was just fascinated with how author Melanie Benjamin reimaged in all.

Known to have betrayed his long friendship with Babe Paley, as well as the other women, by using them as characters in a "fictive" novel that was exposed first as a magazine article, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" fame and participation in high society ended with his alcoholism and inability to write any more. In Swans of Fifth Avenue these women's friendships sometimes seem unlikely, as is their tolerance and ultimate understanding of Pamela.  She is dining out with the woman whose husband she went after. In the end, though estranged, both Truman's and Babe's death bed scenes include loving memories of each other.  Meanwhile, after Babe's death we learn that womanizing husband Bill Paley had a long time affair with Babe's best friend Slim.  And hints that Gloria Guinness had been a mistress makes me want to start researching her.

But about Pamela

EXCERPT:

"Babe would never do that," Slim admonished her.  "Babe Paley would never apply lipstrick at the table."

"She never had to," Pam marveled.  "How is that possible?  I've never seen Babe's lipstick ever smear or fade."  Slim, she noticed, had apparently applied her makeup with a trowel, and now it was sliding down her face, like melted frosting. Poor Slim.  She did look like the wreck that she was; the bitter, resentful wreck who sill behaved as if she was Leland's rightful widow.

But Pam was simply not to blame.  Men, the dear boys, did need to be taken care of, and American women were particularly bad at that, so intent on having their own fun.  Babe really was the only American woman of her acquaintance who knew how to keep a husband.  Whereas British women, well, they were born knowing how to take care of men, their own - and everyone else's.

Pamela had grown up possessing the gift of how to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much.  She knew how to cast a wide net and keep things friendly, no matter how distastefully they might end, so that she would be able to use one lover to help another, politically or in business.  These men were grateful to her, and had paid her handsomely, set her up very well, and for a long time, after that disaster of a first marriage to Randolph Churchill....   But then one day she realized she was well into her thirties and known only as a courtesan, not a wife.  And in the twentieth century - the prosaic, unromantic twentieth century - wives were more highly prized than mistresses.  So she looked around and saw a husband who wasn't being cared for, and determined to rectify that.  Yes, well, it was rather a shame that the husband happened to belong to a friend of hers.  But that was water under the bridge in her opinion.


Pages 88 and 89 - Reflected Glory by Sally Bedell Smith

Notes: the person who does lipstick at the table is Marella Agnelli.  Of course Pamela has had a long mistresshood with the man who married Marella.  So this scene seems to me to be especially unlikely, even if Pamela liked to stay friends with her exes.  But you never know!

Missy

PAMELA DIGBY as well as AGNELLI and HARRIMAN : SOME GREAT ARTICLES TO READ AROUND THE SUBJECT

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/guest-diary/2016/the-courtesan-and-the-consort  EXCERPT: Still, men of the World War II generation were enthralled by her as most ached with Churchill-envy, and knew she was the closest they’d ever get to the great man himself. Women, usually, felt over-matched, and they resented her. Not simply because she ignored them, but because she had a past — a vivid, exotic sex-filled past — which had allowed her to accrue wealth from a variety of rich lovers, most of whom were married.

***

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/04/to-war-in-silk-stockings-kathleen-mortimer  THIS ONE IS ABOUT AVERILL HARRIMAN's DAUGHTER, who was friends with Pamela.

EXCERPT:
Daughter of aristocratic titan Averell Harriman, Kathleen Harriman Mortimer was born to wealth, beauty, and blueblood values. But when her father plunged into the politics of World War II as President Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain and later the ambassador to Russia, she went with him, going from working as a wide-eyed ingénue reporter to enchanting both Churchill and Stalin. After Mortimer’s death last February, and with exclusive access to her previously unknown scrapbooks, Marie Brenner excavates the heiress’s backstage pass to history, including Averell’s affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the legendary Pamela, who would be his last wife. (This article originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Vanity Fair.)

***
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/agnelli200808

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT THE AGNELLI FORTUNE... Agnelli being one of Pamela's men who kept her, as well as the keeper of Bruna Palombo (a Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto)
EXCERPT: The Agnellis are a study in dysfunction. Gianni, the international titan and epic playboy of a father, turned the family company, Fiat, into a business machine that transformed postwar Italy into the world’s fifth-strongest economic nation and himself into a colossus of power, privilege, and style. His wife, Marella, a Neapolitan princess turned model, photographer, and taste-maker, who was immortalized by Richard Avedon as one of the world’s most beautiful women, and who became one of Truman Capote’s close confidantes (known as his “swans”), was portrayed by Isabella Rossellini in Douglas McGrath’s 2006 film about Capote, Infamous. Attempting to hold her own in the face of her husband’s sexual wanderlust, Marella once told a biographer, “For Gianni, a woman is to be conquered, not to be loved.”

PAMELA HARRIMAN OBITUARY from THE NEW YORK TIMES "An Ardent Political Personality"

NEW YORK TIMES: PAMELA HARRIMAN OBITUARY

EXCERPTS: Pamela Harriman, the United States Ambassador to France, a leading figure in the Democratic Party and for decades one of the most vivacious women on the international scene, died yesterday at the American Hospital in Paris of complications of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 76.

Mrs. Harriman, who was preparing to relinquish her post and return to Washington, suffered the hemorrhage on Monday at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where she had gone for her usual swim.

...

One of her biographers, Christopher Ogden, was beguiled himself when he described her on the night in November 1992 when she welcomed Bill Clinton, the new President she had helped to elect, to a dinner reception at her Georgetown house.

"She looked fabulous, almost breathtaking,'' he wrote in his book ''Life of the Party.''

''Her smile can appear too practiced but tonight it was wonderfully wise and guileless,'' he wrote. ''Her voice was low with a sexy, croaky catch.''

FUNERAL of PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HAYWARD HARRIMAN

A FRENCH CHRISTMAS

PAMELA DIGBY CHURCHILL HAYWARD HARRIMAN - A WOMAN OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, the woman who was called the Courtesan of the 20th Century, started out as an unsuccessful debutante with no real money compared to her peers, embarrassed by her clothing, yet in life set herself apart.

She went on to become a Democratic Party fund raiser.

The woman who was know to say little, to speak only when spoken to, or only to uphold her man, who only reflected the status of a 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 woman who lacked a good education but for a "finishing school," who was expected to marry well and retire to a predictable life in the English countryside, proved to have been someone who learned well from life. She had studied others well.

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.

PAMELA HARRIMAN - LIFE OF THE PARTY - Washington Post


Another book you might want to read about Pamela.

GYPSY ROSE LEE UPDATE - A NEW DOCUMENTARY

DAILY MAIL : STRIPTEASE ARTIST GYPSY LEE - DOCUMENTARY

Our Mistress of the Month for September 2018, news is that Gypsy's only child, son Erik Preminger, is behind a new documentary about his mom.  Go to the article that includes a video!

EXCERPT: The event was hosted at the Hollywood Heritager Museum and after the screening, Preminger, 74, was joined by burlesque start Dita Von Teese, who has cited Gypsy as one of her inspirations, for a Q and A.

Preminger is Gypsy's only child and he was constantly by her side until the age of 17, traveling with her to gigs and helping her change between acts backstage.

PAMELA CHURCHILL HAYWARD REUNITES WITH HER LONG AGO LOVE AVERILL HARRIMAN

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.

10th ANNIVERSARY of MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT

A whole decade ago, I had the idea for this blog, and began posting.  It took a while before I began with the Mistress of the Month magazine idea, but for a while I was just warming up.  Through these years there have been times when I thought I was going to run out of interesting Kept Women and Kept Men to feature or write about.  I haven't.  At the moment, I have no plans to stop blogging but I would love your suggestions.  Check out the list of persons and subjects  I've covered in the past which is called Archive in PAGES.  Do you know of someone I haven't covered that you can recommend?  Links, books - tell me what you know!  Leave a comment; all comments are read by me first and then published if they keep to my comments policy!

THANKS FOR READING MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT!

Missy