Kathy’s arrival on Fleet Street was hardly the coronation her proud father described. “Telephone all your stuff to central six seven six five, our dictaphone number, where your copy will be recorded,” her editor told her, but gave her little further assistance. Thrown into a world she had no experience to handle, she worried that she would never be able to make it as a journalist. “None of the American reporters have been the least help to me on my stories,” she complained to Mary, “even though they are a wonderful help in every other way.” She was chilled by the staff, but Kathy was not to be deterred. “This week-end we again went to Lord Beaverbrook’s, where Averell collared one Frank Owen, the most brilliant editor over here, and I at last got somewhere. Today I go to my boss Chris and he tells me the exact opposite from Frank. I almost laughed in his face So you see it is not very easy to turn overnight into a reporter.”
At first, she did not stray far from the gilded ghetto. She went with her father to greet the first Lend-Lease ships and railed in her journal about the photographers who dogged her every move. Taken to Chequers to meet the Churchills, she was struck by the ease of the prime minister. She would be at Chequers many weekends in the subsequent months, “watching everyone coming in and out.” Her father had quickly forged a strong relationship with Britain’s wartime leader, who was desperate for Harriman’s help. The half-American Churchill was drawn to Wall Street’s players. Often the Harrimans’ phone would ring at night and it would be Churchill’s secretary asking if Ave could come for a meeting. Those meetings were the infamous games of bezique, a French card game. Harriman would remain for hours, trading confidences with Churchill, who had already placed the American in his secret war-cabinet meetings. In her letters home, Kathy wrote Marie, “Do you all appreciate what a hell of a job he’s doing? I’ve finally decided that he ought to be triplets, one for Washington, one for London, a third for Moscow.”
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After three weeks in England, Kathy wrote in her diary: “Sat next to P.M. at dinner—he was in wonderful mood. Was excited to find he’s good at shooting the English brand of Tommy gun. Saw That Hamilton Woman—with Sea Lord there, the P.M. and everyone else being in England and so close to the war made the movie mean so much more. All the C.’s cried—that impressed me too.” On another occasion, they watched Citizen Kane, “a violent flop,” Kathy wrote home. On Saturday afternoons, she often played croquet with Clementine Churchill. Kathy’s private notes are filled with intimate conversations: “The P.M. was depressed at dinner tonight. Turkey is giving in. Russia won’t hold out more than 6 weeks, he says. All Europe is swaying toward a Hitler victory. They are giving in. ‘We need a victory.’ The battle started today—we talked about Lend-Lease. What they are getting—about the censor—America won’t come in til we’re almost there. The P.M. knows that. ‘I’d like to be a cat—without worries.’”
Kathy was beginning to understand the desperation. “Remember, I am an American,” she wrote in an early dispatch. “All this is new to me. I’m not accustomed to wholesale horror.” Her range of reporting expanded to refugees, gas masks, and food shortages.
When Averell took her to meet the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, she at first found him “gruff. He overpowers you and makes you feel rather young and inexperienced (a good idea).” The son of a Presbyterian minister, Beaverbrook, born William Maxwell Aitken, owned the Evening Standard, but he was now the minister of aircraft production, ramping up the British effort against Hitler. He was encouraging to Kathy, telling her, “Come ’round to see the old man who taught them.” He asked his top reporter, Hilde Marchant, to take Kathy under her wing. Kathy noted in her diary, “She’s scathing, cynical, a disapproving socialist. I’ll learn a lot from her.”
Kathy was kept off breaking news until she finally submitted a dispatch that showed she might have a gift for the profession. Visiting a military hospital, she produced a sensitive portrait of soldiers with maimed hands and faces in their saline baths. “Last week, believe it or not, I wrote a story all the office seemed to like on the plastic surgery hospital,” she wrote home. “Now they have given me a desk—and they are allowing me to write spot news. They want me to try to be Dorothy Kilgallen [the New York reporter].”
Harriman bragged to his wife that Kathy was at one event “chic as chic . . . in a flowered summer suit and black gloves.” She was having the time of her life, borrowing her father’s official car and heading for the Derby with Quentin Reynolds, the best-selling Collier’s correspondent, telling her family, “Every night next week is booked up already. The only thing people seem scared about is being lonely.”
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Midway through the first album, I came upon a photograph that seemed out of place, a Cecil Beaton picture of Pamela Churchill taken for Life in 1940, when her son, Winston, was born.
It took Averell Harriman only one day to introduce Kathy to Pam. The day after Kathy got to London, she and her father were whisked to the country, to Leeds Castle, home of the ferocious Lady Baillie, a prominent hostess who had been largely displaced by Emerald Cunard, the very social shipping heiress. It would be Kathy’s first real experience with the snide, coded society. Leeds was now an officers’ hospital, and Lady Baillie, Kathy noted, was a “beautiful lady of the 1920 model—nervous and out for effect. Husband a bore—hopes I’ll write a story on his place. Food all weekend amazing.” And there too was the prime minister’s daughter-in-law. Kathy wrote, “Pam Churchill is charming . . . a born leader in a quiet effective way—the Foxcroft type!”
No higher praise could come from a Foxcroft girl, and it has always been believed that Kathy was smitten by her new friend, who bombarded her with invitations and favors. It seemed a natural match—Pam was 21 and Kathy 23—and they became close very fast. But there were profound differences in their personalities: Kathy had the staunch personal code of a champion athlete with a first-class education; Pam, the scheming heart of a country aristocrat who modeled herself after a great-aunt, Jane Digby, a famous 19th-century courtesan.
Known for her flirty giggle, creamy shoulders, auburn hair, and laser attention to powerful men, Pam was as irresistible as Becky Sharp. “On Wednesday, I’m going down with Pam Churchill—the one on the cover of Life some time ago—to see the feeding center she has set up and to talk to some of the people,” Kathy wrote to Mary. “She is a wonderful girl my age, but one of the wisest young girls I’ve ever met.”
At 21, Pam was still in formation as “the greatest courtesan of the twentieth century,” as a future husband, producer Leland Hayward, reportedly called her later; but her freewheeling sexuality had already scandalized the Cliveden set. Harriman was her first major conquest of a wartime platoon that would include Edward R. Murrow, Jock Whitney, Bill Paley, and a cluster of generals. The vicarious erotic thrill of being a witness to her father’s romance would become a complicated dance that required Kathy’s deft navigation. “Pam is also a bitch,” Kathy would later note about her new friend. “I like her and think we’ll get on OK.”
A part of Pam’s allure was her ability to absorb and reprocess the large issues of political life. She took Kathy to a hospital, where she saw her first shell-shocked children, and later to her family’s house in Dorset, a drafty hall that Kathy noted “needs interior painting.” The two trips solidified their bond. Back at the Dorchester, Kathy wrote in her diary, “Came home—learned about Pam’s courtship. Engagement first night—Married 10 days later—Everyone hates her husband—wonder if he’s the louse they think.”
Under Pam’s influence, Kathy’s learning curve was rapid. “The funny thing about England is that age makes no difference. Tonight Pam’s dining alone with a guy Ave’s age. I’m going out with Quent [Reynolds]. . . . Who do I go around with? People I’ve met through Pam, mostly older men. . . . You can’t imagine how interesting life over here is,” she wrote Mary. Pursued by Churchill’s oil adviser Geoffrey Lloyd—A
ve called him “an opportunist”—and Polish aristocrats in exile, Kathy’s main beau was her I.N.S. colleague Red Mueller. She described her weekend routines: Saturday at Chequers with the Churchills, then to Cherkley to be with Max Beaverbrook, who “looks like a cartoon out of Punch. Small, baldish, big stomach and from there he tapers down to two shiny yellow shoes. His idea of sport is to surround himself with intelligent men, then egg them on to argue and fight among themselves. . . . All this makes N.Y.C. seem very remote. My only regret is that I didn’t get out of college a year earlier and learn the ropes about reporting.”
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Meanwhile, Harriman was desperately trying to solidify his own position. The newsman Edward R. Murrow, the most influential American in Europe, at first dismissed him as calculating and self-interested. The earnest [U.S.] ambassador [John Gilbert] Winant, loved by the British for his nighttime walks through bomb-torn London, complained bitterly that Harriman had ignored him to get to Churchill. Already in a power struggle with the State Department, Harriman knew his best shot was to be Churchill’s inside man. He wangled a seat on the plane to tell Stalin that there would be no second front in 1942. However close they were, Churchill was still prime minister and had a chain of command. Early on, when Harriman learned of a top-secret meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt on the high seas to forge what would ultimately become the Atlantic Alliance, he pushed to be allowed to accompany the prime minister. Kathy was privy to all of this, but she lived a split-screen life, protecting her father’s privacy in all matters. At press conferences, she learned to smile and say “I have no idea” when reporters asked her about her father’s activities.
Kathy had a gift for sliding quickly over difficult terrain, and for doing so with remarkable detachment. “She was magnesium,” said her niece Kitty Ames. Writing home after seeing bombed-out Plymouth with Lady Astor, she coolly noted, “I’m in a wonderful mood. I’m glad I went early. I think I will be able to be less emotional. A dead city filled with such alive people.” One of her early dispatches starts, “It’s so easy to forget there is a war going on in England.” She goes on to describe the daffodils and cows and sheep you see in the country. As she wrote to Mary, “Except for the continual stream of tanks and lorries filled with soldiers, this might be the same England we saw in 1936.”
That detachment would serve her well when Kathy learned that Ave was having yet another fling. From the time they were children, Kathy and Mary were aware that their father had an active romantic life. In the section of the albums in Kathy’s box marked “Childhood,” there are pages of photos of the girls on trips with their governess and mother, with no sign of Ave. Ave had met Kathy’s mother, Kitty Lanier Lawrance, a frail debutante, at a time when his own mother was hounding him to settle down. When Kitty was out riding one day, her horse shied, and she was seriously injured. Ave proposed. She recovered but was always delicate. Soon after Kathy was born, Kitty contracted tuberculosis.
From the time their mother died, in 1936, Kathy and Mary were embraced by Marie. “Ave, stop being such a stuffed shirt!” she would berate the remote financier, to Kathy’s huge amusement. Before Marie, there had been a nightclub singer and the star ballerina Vera Zorina. In fact, Marie had left her husband, Sonny Whitney, a Vanderbilt heir, to marry Ave. Glamorous and fun-loving, she presided at the Marie Harriman Gallery, on East 57th Street. On their honeymoon in Paris, she took Ave to meet Picasso and bought van Gogh’s White Roses for their heirs. Marie pushed progressive education and accomplishment for her own children and her stepdaughters. At home, she was every bit as freewheeling as her husband, in the midst of an affair with the suave bandleader Eddy Duchin. Duchin’s wife had died in childbirth, and he frequently parked his baby son, Peter, with Marie and a French nurse. All through the war, as Duchin toured with his band, Peter grew up at Arden and called Marie “Ma.”
It is easy to imagine Kathy trying first to puzzle out what was going on with Ave and then making a quick decision to look the other way—as she had seen everyone else in her family do. In the London of 1941, a frenzy of sexuality, it was probably inconceivable to her that Pam was anything more than an amusement.
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What Kathy intuited, almost everyone in Beaverbrook’s circle already knew. Soon after Harriman had arrived in London, in March 1941, Pam was seated next to him at one of the weekly dinners given by Emerald Cunard at the Dorchester; Pam conveniently lived in a small room on the top floor. That night she was dressed in gold. “I saw the most beautiful man I’d ever seen,” she said of Ave. Pam’s own marriage had been a misguided social leap. Randolph Churchill was handsome, a fiery orator, a gifted journalist, and a charmer when sober, but he was a rude drunk. He was also a heavy gambler and was known to propose to every girl he wanted to sleep with. Only one ever accepted, on her first date with him. Pamela Digby had a clear-eyed understanding that her future would be rosier as a Churchill. By the time she met Harriman, she had already given the prime minister a grandchild and seen her reckless husband off to sea, where he immediately gambled away two years of income, forcing his young wife to make herself indispensable to rich older men. What else was she to do? Beaverbrook counseled her to leave baby Winston with a nanny at his house in the country and move to London, where, he said, he would give her a job at the Ministry of Supply. Their tacit agreement, it has long been assumed, was that Pam would become his inside source for information. “There’s a very rich American coming to London for Roosevelt,” Beaverbrook is said to have told her, and his meaning was implicit. As the head of British war production, Beaverbrook wanted to stay well informed on the activities of the chief of Lend-Lease.
Soon Pam was put next to Harriman at dinner. “He was a hick from America. He knew nothing,” she told author Christopher Ogden many years later. “Averell would never have had this close relationship with Winston and Max without me. I mean, it was just that night that Averell and I met when I went back down to his apartment in the Dorchester, because it was safer.” Writing home, Harriman told Marie, “A bomb hit so close that it almost blew us back in the room. Bombs dropped all around us. The clusters of flairs coming down very slowly lit parts of the city like Broadway and 42nd.” He made no mention of Pam. Did Beaverbrook know immediately what was up? “Oh yes, Max knew immediately,” she later said.
Pam said that Harriman soon mentioned that his daughter Kathy was coming over, “and would I take care of her when he had to travel? So I moved into their apartment when he went off with Churchill. Then she and I took a cottage in the country together. We were already ensconced in this cottage by the time Averell came back. So that was kind of a good alibi. She was wonderful. She was the sort of typical American college girl. Long-legged and attractive-looking—totally captivating.”
If Kathy captivated Pam, Pam had definitely caught her father. Like Beaverbrook, Harriman used her to pick up information and relay messages. In return, Pam had found the answer to her dire financial straits. When Kathy and her father took an apartment on Grosvenor Square, Pam moved in, and the three of them lived together for almost a year. Shocked that Randolph had left Pam without an income, Kathy gallantly volunteered to turn over her Newsweek salary to her new friend, biographer Sally Bedell Smith later would note. Soon Kathy would learn that Ave was also giving Pam money. Due to an overlooked accounting error, she would actually receive a monthly check for the next 30 years. When she and Averell married, in 1971, Harriman received a call from his bookkeeper: “Now may I take Mrs. Harriman off our rolls?”
“What? We’ve been paying her all these years?,” Harriman said.
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Going through Kathy’s dispatches, I came upon a dusty envelope filled with letters that had either never been sent or had been returned by the censor. At the bottom of the envelope was the black notebook that Kathy had carried from the time she got to Lisbon. In those handwritten pages, the real Kathy be
gan to emerge. Landing in a Lisbon filled with desperate refugees and the Gestapo, her first night at dinner, she noted, “the conversation was of one Victor Sassoon—rich English Jew—who is said to own much of Shanghai.” However much a Bennington girl Kathy was, she was also of her class in a time of intense parlor anti-Semitism. A few days later, in London, she was taken to another dinner, this time at a gambling club. “All tough looking Jews—women worse than men,” she wrote.
While Harriman was away at the Churchill-Roosevelt summit, Pam set out to win Kathy’s affections. Writing from the ship on his way to Washington, Harriman sent his first clue to Marie: Kathy “has teamed up with Pamela Churchill, the red-headed 22-year-old wife of your friend Randolph.” “Your friend Randolph” was added in with an arrow as a hasty afterthought. Then he casually dropped the news of a country house the girls had rented together. The diary makes it clear how perceptive Kathy was about her new friend. On the day she escorted her father to the airport, she wrote: “Have decided Pam has a narcissist’s complex—not quite—but she sure does fancy herself. E.g.—all her pictures around the room—Has C. Beaton do new ones every other week.”
That entry was dated June 21, and it was clear that Kathy had already figured out what was going on: “[Pam] got very upset at Lady Baillie’s remarks about her using me as a means to get to Ave—Lady B. is a terribly frustrated bitch to be so jealous of someone else having Ave’s attentions.”
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