Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  What happened the next day changed the course of the war, and, ultimately, the fortunes of Averell and Kathy Harriman. The world turned upside down as Russia was invaded by Hitler. Overnight, the Soviet Union morphed from enemy into ally. At Chequers, Harriman now spoke at length about his benighted years chasing mineral concessions in 1920s Russia and about what needed to be understood concerning Stalin and the Russian character.

  One question about the Harriman-Churchill affair still remains: did Kathy ever confront Pam? Years later, Pam Harriman told Christopher Ogden the details of what had happened, but the pages conveniently vanished from a complete transcript of their interview sent to the Library of Congress. It took weeks to track down the missing pages:

  C.O.: While you’re there—alright, you’re in the Dorchester, are you—when does Kathy catch on?

  P.H.: Well . . . to show you how different things were, I mean, I never discussed it with Kathy. Kathy never discussed it with me. At one point, she and I were driving down to the country on a Friday, and something happened, and she said to me, “Well, you know, I am not a total fool.” I knew immediately, and I was very surprised, and I said, “Uh, what?” And she said, “I had a big decision to make. I had to either decide to go home and not be part of it or—but I thought I should protect my father, and the best way to do that was by staying.”

  * * *

  —

  By August, Kathy understood the state of the world. “The war hit us today—the first time it’s hit me since I arrived,” she wrote Mary, when a close friend, flying for the R.A.F., was shot down. Suddenly she was working long days and spending weekends in the country. She wrote home angry letters about American friends “who still believe that we should do business with Hitler.” She wrote about the arguments Ave had with Beaverbrook on the subject of Russia—“the only subject anyone is discussing.” Soon the two men would take off for Moscow and another conference. Harriman had become indispensable. He was finally Churchill’s inside man.

  One astonishing letter in the dusty envelope had never been mailed. It was written by Kathy to her sister from Chequers sometime during the weekend of December 7, 1941. “It’s come at last—it’s exciting.” It was her 24th birthday, and the Churchills had given her a cake. As always, the valet brought in a small radio so that the prime minister could hear the latest bulletin. It was short: “The news has just been given that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii.” Churchill, who had been deeply depressed all weekend, bolted out of his chair. “Pearl Harbor? What is that?” Kathy continued, “Dinner—people running back and forth until finally I was left sitting alone in dining room. . . . P.M. came back, talked to Roosevelt. He seemed in very good spirits. . . . Then all of us heard midnight news. . . . P.M. pacing in dragon wrapper, danced a jig. Ave standing by the fireplace.”

  Kathy originally planned to stay in England for the summer, but in the end she remained with her father for the next five years. In the spring of 1942, Harriman was stricken with a form of typhoid so serious that it looked as if he might not survive. Pam never left his side.

  Not long after, Kathy confided to her former governess, Elsie Marshall, in a letter, “Averell goes to the Middle East and comes back with reports of what Pam said about him; he goes home and comes back with reports about what I say about Pam. Life is annoying! (Averell is anyway!)” In New York, Marie Harriman had taken a job running a volunteer corps to help the navy. Kathy wrote her: “You’re working too hard. Don’t you think that a prolonged vacation is in order?” She added, “Averell is terribly proud of you . . . getting up at the crack of dawn. . . . I was sort of hoping you might come back with him this trip . . . I do wish you would. There are all kinds of jobs to be done.”

  Later in her life, Kathleen Mortimer kept out of the Library of Congress scores of intimate letters she had written to Elsie Marshall. Mouche, as she called her, still lived at Arden and was close to Marie. In this new stash of letters, recently discovered, Kathy seemed to want to alert Marie about Pam. Her father had put her in an untenable position, and Kathy was clearly worried about her role. With exquisite care, she had drawn a floor plan of the new apartment she and Ave had taken on Grosvenor Square. She indicated Ave’s bedroom and identified hers as “my bedroom, huge.” On a sitting room that adjoined hers, she wrote, “Small room—Pam’s when in town.” By then Kathy was working full-time at Newsweek, and as usual asked Mouche to send her a dress or two. Mouche was pressed into service for Pam as well, with lists of “Pam’s Wants.”

  Marie finally reacted by firing off a cable to her husband: KEEP YOUR AFFAIRS CLEAN AND OUT OF THE PAPERS OR YOU WILL BE FACING THE MOST COSTLY DIVORCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC.

  * * *

  —

  In 1943, Roosevelt pushed Harriman to become the ambassador to Russia when Leningrad was under siege. Harriman did not want the post, but the president convinced him that he was the man for the job. By this time, Harriman too was seemingly tired of Pam and asked Kathy to deliver the message. For the rest of her life, Kathy kept a note from her father in a jewelry box: “Help Pam straighten herself out—poor child. She is in a tough spot. Tell her I am sure she will do the right thing if she follows her own instinct. Give her my best love and to you. P.S. Destroy this letter or keep it locked up.”

  Kathy accompanied her father to Moscow, where she helped to run Spaso House, the dreary official residence. Often Harriman held meetings all night long trying to keep Roosevelt’s relationship with Stalin on course. Kathy worked for the Office of War Information and placed third in the 1943 Moscow Slalom Championships. Kathy’s letters to her sister, she later said, became a diary of the endless social obligations of a Moscow outpost where communication was spotty. She wrote to Pam as well, but it was clear that their friendship had cooled. On several occasions, Pam complained she had not received her monthly stipend on time. Kathy quickly arranged a wire to Max Beaverbrook, who served as the conduit. Whatever Kathy thought of this task, Pam’s wants had become a dim secondary preoccupation as the news of the carnage from Germany began to seep into Moscow. Kathy wrote Mary the first moment she had news of the camps, heard from Bill Lawrence, the New York Times correspondent. Returning from Majdanek, Kathy wrote as if she were still reporting for Newsweek of Lawrence’s description: “the [victims’] articles were carefully categorized, women’s corsets, nail files, shaving brushes. I’m sort of glad I wasn’t there to see it. Bill Lawrence, the biggest skeptic among correspondents here, told us about this with tears in his eyes.”

  In 1944, Harriman commandeered a private railroad car for Kathy and 11 other correspondents to cover the exhumation of mass graves at Katyn, near a former P.O.W. camp for Polish officers. “I was lucky I had a cold,” she wrote, “so I could take notes seeing 1,000 corpses. . . . All of the other reporters were so ill.” Kathy and her fellow journalists accepted the Russian explanation, that German soldiers had slaughtered the Polish officers. In fact, it was later learned, the Russians had. The episode would later, in the context of the Cold War, be considered a notorious international incident. At the time of the Yalta Conference, Kathy would write, “I don’t trust Stalin. Nobody does.”

  Not long after the war, Harriman was appointed Truman’s secretary of commerce. Pam went to work as a columnist for Max Beaverbrook and appeared in New York, trying one last time to get Averell to leave Marie. At [the nightclub] El Morocco, Marie stared at her and then looked the other way. Pam had kept herself busy by having a brief fling with the handsome Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, who had just broken up with his wife, Babe. She was with him at El Morocco and introduced him to Kathy, then reporting on the United Nations for Newsweek. Later that evening he became ill. The two women helped him back to his apartment. Pam promptly twirled off into the night, but Kathy stayed. She and Stanley were married four months later. Babe Mortimer married Bill Paley, and they all remained friends; Kathy helped raise her stepchi
ldren, Stanley III and Amanda.

  Soon after Marie died, in 1970, Pamela Churchill Hayward surfaced again and rigged a seat next to Averell at a dinner. He was then 79 and deeply depressed, feeling out of the game, but Pam immediately revived their sexual chemistry. They were married in September 1971. By then she had a long list of conquests behind her—including Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli—and had developed her reputation for purloining the property of her husband’s children and heirs.

  Pamela Harriman created a new career for herself. She helped Bill Clinton get to the White House—he called her “the first lady of the Democratic Party.” After Ave’s death, in 1986, she was for years a Washington power hostess, opening her N Street town house for a merry-go-round of political-strategy sessions. As a reward, Clinton appointed her ambassador to France. In 1994, allegations of mismanagement of the Harriman trusts made front-page news when the Harriman family sued Pam and her advisers, citing egregious mismanagement of their assets. At stake was at least $30 million, lost to bad investments in a “conspiracy to breach fiduciary duties,” according to the court papers. Prior to the suit, Kathy had reportedly flown to Paris and quietly presented Pam with a long letter of allegations at the American Embassy. The suit was eventually settled.

  * * *

  —

  Visiting Arden [House] this past June, I found perhaps a clue to Kathy’s inner fortitude. It was here among the lakes and stone cottages and 40 miles of horse paths, a world unto itself, that the extended Harriman family met often for celebrations and rituals. Entering by a long road off the Taconic Parkway, I was thrust back into an Edith Wharton childhood where Kathy grew up in a cocoon of privilege, with a private polo field, a track for trotting horses, and a dairy that had supplied nearby West Point since the Spanish-American War. Whenever Pam, as Mrs. Harriman, visited Arden, she would be besieged with dogs and the family’s homey way of life. The Carrère and Hastings mansion had long ago been given to Columbia University, and the family stayed in modest cottages on the grounds, just as Averell always preferred. One Thanksgiving, Kathy had to snatch the pâté for hors d’oeuvres out of the mouth of one of the dogs. Putting it back on the platter, she turned to her stepmother without missing a beat and said, “May I make you one?”

  In private, Kathy rarely complained about Pam, even when the Harriman heirs brought suit against her. At Arden, on the day I went to visit, Kathleen Harriman Mortimer was celebrated by her family and friends as a woman from another era who never surrendered her principles.

  I thought of a letter Kathy had written to Mouche from Moscow on August 8, 1945: “Tonight the Soviets declared war on Japan. I’m about to go out on the town. . . . Among other things it means that the end of my session here is in sight! What next?”

  AUDREY HEPBURN

  WHEN HUBERT MET AUDREY

  By Amy Fine Collins | December 1995

  On the subject of Audrey Hepburn, Cecil Beaton once tartly observed “Nobody ever looked like her before World War II. Now thousands of imitations have appeared. The woods are full of emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon pale faces.” Like mushrooms after rain, suddenly a whole new generation of Audrey clones has sprung up in the forest. Obsessed with the waifish actress, they aspire not only to look like her but to dress the part as well. Divining the trend early, the department store Barneys launched a collection inspired by Hepburn’s dresses, culled from her personal and cinematic wardrobes. Scores of fashion designers have since hopped aboard the Audrey bandwagon, peddling a head-to-heel neo-Hepburn look featuring fitted shifts and low, ladylike pumps. And this month Paramount Pictures is bringing out its remake of Billy Wilder’s 1954 Sabrina, the Cinderellaesque Hepburn classic which defined her image for the rest of her career.

  All of this Audrey revivalism has been noted with extreme curiosity by the late actress’s close friend couturier Hubert de Givenchy, who first dressed the star in Sabrina and ended up creating her wardrobe for seven subsequent film roles, as well as for private life. Ironically, this renewed adulation of le style Audrey Hepburn is peaking just as Givenchy is retiring from the house he founded in 1952. This month English wunderkind John Galliano will replace the veteran couturier, who in October showed the final collection of his 43-year career.

  Early one morning in his Paris studio, located just behind the Givenchy shop on Avenue George V, the master couturier sits, erect and silver-haired, at a table in a tiny conference area adjoining his workrooms. Dressed in his traditional uniform of an impeccable white linen smock, whose cuffs he has neatly rolled up, he embodies an old-world, gentlemanly ideal that is as rare today in the fashion world as a well-mounted sleeve. “The other day I was in Venice,” he recalls quietly. “And Egon von Fürstenberg showed me a picture in a magazine. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘all your work is now reappearing.’ Then this week Jeannette [who has worked with him since he opened] showed me another picture, in an Italian magazine. I first started noticing it myself a year or two ago, in American magazines. I began seeing Sabrina necklines,” he says, slowly tracing, with his long, large fingers, a wide horizontal above his collarbone. “And sleeves cut like this,” he adds, chopping the inside of his shoulder with the edge of his hand. “I have seen I don’t know how many young girls in little black dresses or little narrow trousers with black T-shirts. They seem to adore Audrey more for the clothes than the movies—maybe they don’t even know the movies. In fact, last weekend I was visiting a friend in Portugal, and her daughter, who is 14, asked if I had any of Audrey’s dresses. She wanted to see, to touch them.”

  Givenchy could easily fill the girl’s request—shortly before she died of colon cancer in January 1993, Hepburn gave the designer more than 25 dresses he had made for her, which he keeps in his Paris apartment. “One by one” he is distributing them to museums around the world, though at this moment he has in the atelier a long, narrow, sleeveless pearl-embroidered tulle sheath in cream, circa 1960, which he is offering to the daughter of an Italian friend, Natalia Strozzi, to wear for her debut in Rome. Givenchy summons an assistant, who ceremoniously carries it out from the workroom. Tenderly, she releases the softly glittering gown onto the table, spreading it out before its maker like a precious treasure. A sumptuous but inanimate husk, it is as empty of life as a lovely shell abandoned long ago by the fantastic creature that once inhabited it.

  * * *

  —

  Late in 1952, the 22-year-old neophyte actress Audrey Hepburn was preparing to embark on a national tour of her Broadway hit, Gigi. She had recently completed her first Hollywood picture with Paramount, Roman Holiday, for which she had been paid $12,500—a quantum leap from the meager $33.60-a-week salary she had commanded as a bit contract player with England’s Associated British Pictures Corporation. Though Roman Holiday had not yet premiered, expectations were high, and Paramount executives were fishing for an appropriate follow-up project for their promising ingenue. The studio sent to its pixieish protégée a script by Samuel Taylor of a play Paramount had just purchased, Sabrina Fair (a name taken from a work by Milton), a frothy comedy about a chauffeur’s daughter who returns from a trip to Paris so worldly and fetching that she ends up having her pick of her father’s millionaire boss’s two eligible sons, Linus and David Larrabee. Hepburn at once agreed to take on the title role, at a fee of $15,000. Her co-stars would be William Holden in the part of the rakish younger Larrabee boy and Humphrey Bogart as the sober older son who, despite his stuffy, unromantic nature, wins the girl. One of Hollywood’s most distinguished talents, the obstreperous immigrant genius Billy Wilder, would direct.

  In the early summer of 1953, while Hepburn was performing in the San Francisco production of Gigi, Paramount’s autocratic wardrobe supervisor, Edith Head—who had designed the actress’s Princess Anne regalia for Roman Holiday—flew up for a costume meeting with Hepburn. As she wrote in the 1983 memoir Edith Head’s Hollywood, “Every designer wishes for the perfect picture in which he or she
can really show off design magic. My one chance was in Sabrina. . . . It was the perfect setup. Three wonderful stars, and my leading lady looking like a Paris mannequin.”

  Head’s dream of a “perfect setup,” however, was abruptly shattered when Wilder announced to the wardrobe diva that he was sending Hepburn overseas to buy Paris originals from a real French designer. Head’s services would be required only for a pre-Paris ragamuffin frock and two insignificant sportswear ensembles Sabrina would appear in after her return to the Larrabees’ luxurious Long Island home. Though Wilder—a man of sophisticated European tastes who fully appreciated the singular allure of French couture—was the one who informed Head of the change of plans, it was, the director says, Hepburn who had actually come up with the idea. For a clothes-mad actress with limited resources—an embroidered cotton blouse from Givenchy cost nearly $3,000 at the time—the chance to wear genuine Paris couture was a fantasy come to life. “Clothes are positively a passion with me,” Hepburn confided to a journalist on the set of Sabrina. “I love them to the point where it is practically a vice.”

  Sometime later during that same summer of 1953, the lanky, aristocratic, 26-year-old Hubert de Givenchy, in the throes of preparing the fourth presentation of his career—an Oriental-themed winter collection, to be shown in late July—received an unexpected telephone call from his friend Gladys de Segonzac. Married to the Paris head of Paramount, Segonzac was also the directrice of Schiaparelli, where Givenchy had worked for four years before establishing his own business in 1952 on the Rue Alfred de Vigny. The reason for Segonzac’s call, Givenchy learned, was that “Miss Hepburn” had arrived in Paris and wanted to see him at once. Busy as he was, the young couturier’s interest was piqued—“I was thinking she meant Katharine Hepburn,” he now explains. Roman Holiday—which would win her a Time-magazine cover and an Oscar for best actress—hadn’t opened yet, and there was no reason for him to be familiar with the obscure newcomer who had recently created the title role in the Broadway production of Gigi. The actress was then merely, as Hepburn later put it, “a skinny little nobody”—dressed in an outrageously quirky manner for someone about to have her first encounter with the latest Parisian fashion sensation. Givenchy distinctly remembers greeting “this very thin person with beautiful eyes, short hair, thick eyebrows, very tiny trousers, ballerina shoes, and a little T-shirt. On her head was a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon around it that said VENEZIA. I thought, This is too much!” Eccentric as Hepburn’s getup was, her appearance that day, recalls Dreda Mele, then the directrice of Givenchy (now Armani’s general manager for France), “was like the arrival of a summer flower. She was lumineuse—radiant, in both a physical and spiritual sense. I felt immediately how lovely she was, inside and out. Though she came to Givenchy out of the blue, there is no doubt that they were made to meet. Audrey was always very definite in her taste and look. She came to him because she was attracted by the image he could give her. And she entered that image totally. She entered into his dream, too. I repeat, they were made for each other.”