Pamela digby biography

There aren’t many people whose lives have such an epic, eventful sweep that they seem to combine the rumbustious picaresque of the 18th-century novel and the slightly more salacious demands of its late 20th-century equivalent. But Pamela Harriman’s was one such life. She was born in England in , into an old aristocratic milieu that the likes of Samuel Richardson (the author of Pamela, lest we forget) may still have just about recognised; by the end of her life, 77 years later, she was an Hon. of a different stripe, a U.S. ambassador to France with three marriages and innumerable affairs with powerful men behind her, and a starring role in Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, his unfinished tell-all swansong in which he gleefully stripped bare the lives of all his barely disguised socialite friends (not so much a roman à clef as a roman à trousseau de clefs). In the novel, Lady Ina Coolbirth (a.k.a. Harriman) takes Jonesy (a.k.a. Capote) to lunch at La Cote Basque, where she swigs Cristal and holds forth on various (undisguised) Alpha women, from Princess Margaret (“she’s such a drone”) to Jackie Kennedy and sister Lee Radziwill: “They’re perfect with men,” she says, “a pair of Western geisha girls. They know how to keep a man’s secrets and how to make him feel important.” Capote’s eyebrow was arched to breaking point here, as Lady Coolbirth’s coolly admiring assessment of the sisters was the generally accepted view of Harriman herself; one of her lovers, Baron Elie de Rothschild, called her a ‘European Geisha’, and she was referred to more than once as The Last Courtesan. She was born Pamela Digby into a gilded but straitened life in Dorset. Her father was the 11th Baron Digby and her mother was the daughter of the 2nd Baron Aberdare. Money was tight — she was able to make her ‘debut’ only after her father placed a lucky bet on the Grand National — and her horizons seemingly tighter. “I was born in a world where a woman was totally controlled by men,” she once said

English-American diplomat and socialite (–)

Pamela Beryl Harriman (néeDigby; March 20, &#; February 5, ), also known as Pamela Churchill Harriman, was an English political activist for the Democratic Party, diplomat, and socialite. She married three times: her first husband was Randolph Churchill, the son of prime minister Winston Churchill; her third husband was W. Averell Harriman, an American diplomat who also served as Governor of New York. Her only child, Winston Churchill (–), was named after his famous grandfather. She served as US ambassador to France from until her death in

Early life

Pamela Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, England, the daughter of Edward Digby, 11th Baron Digby, and his wife, Constance Pamela Alice, the daughter of Henry Campbell Bruce, 2nd Baron Aberdare. She was educated by governesses in the ancestral home at Minterne Magna in Dorset, along with her three younger siblings, and later attended Downham School. Her great-great aunt was the nineteenth-century adventurer and courtesan Jane Digby (–), notorious for her exotic travels and scandalous personal life. Pamela was to follow in her relative's footsteps, and has been called "the 20th-century's most influential courtesan".

Raised amid acres of Dorset farmland and woods, from an early age she