20 
PAM
Among the first new friends Cheray and I made after moving out to Bedford was a glamorous couple, Leland and Pamela Hayward, who lived in nearby Yorktown Heights at their estate called Haywire. I had first met Pamela when she was still Pamela Digby Churchill, the ex-wife of Winston Churchill’s dissolute son Randolph. At the time, I was too naive to spot her as anything other than an attractive, upper-class Englishwoman with a fancy apartment in Paris, to which I’d been taken a couple of times by journalist friends from Paris-Match. I was nineteen, living on the barge, and more impressed to have spotted Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Deux-Magots than I was to be meeting this rather plump, red-haired, milky-skinned woman, even though she’d been the notorious mistress of Aly Khan and Gianni Agnelli and was currently “being kept” by the French banker Elie de Rothschild. Twelve years later, she reappeared as my neighbor in Westchester.
An extraordinary ability to focus on the object (or objects) of her desire—not beauty, wit, imagination, or style—is the secret of the woman who has been called “the courtesan of the century.” Pam has always known exactly what she wanted. And, if she doesn’t get it, how to move on. Having failed to marry the European potentates on whom she set her sights, she had arrived on the American scene by breaking up the marriage of one of the princes of show business, the agent and producer Leland Hayward, whose wife, Slim, was not exactly a pushover. By marrying Averell not long after Leland died, she would get what she had always wanted: a pile of money. And after Averell died, she would get what she really wanted: not just the pile of money but power and position, when President Clinton named her, despite her British origins, U.S. ambassador to France.
Pamela couldn’t have been nicer to Cheray and me at first. When she heard we were looking for property to buy around Bedford, she offered to help us look. Two or three times, she drove us around herself. She seemed the perfect wife for Leland. I had met him casually in New York, and though he hadn’t had a hit since his smash musicals Gypsy and The Sound of Music (and, before that, South Pacific), his boyish charm, enthusiasm, and nervous energy were still immensely attractive. He seemed besotted by Pam, especially after he suffered a mild stroke in 1970. By then, Cheray and I were among the “young people” asked over for lunch or dinner to “cheer Leland up.”
Leland seemed totally dependent on Pam, the way a little boy becomes dependent on his nanny. Like many Englishwomen, Pam was a terrific nanny. At Leland’s urging, she loved to take center-stage after dinner by reading aloud from her favorite book, The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch, a collection of short biographies of four adventurous women of the Victorian era. One of them was an ancestral relation of hers, Jane Digby, a femme fatale who had scandalized nineteenth-century Europe with her marriages to various princes and barons and her affairs with, among others, Balzac, King Ludwig of Bavaria, and an Arab sheikh with whom she ended her days in a tent.
Pam and Ave a few days before their wedding in 1971.
Although her adventures made good reading, they became less enthralling with each of Pam’s recitations. It didn’t take much intelligence to realize that we were meant to view Aunt Jane as the woman on whom Pam had modeled herself. We became further bemused when—again at Leland’s urging—she would go into one of her potted imitations of Winston Churchill, the ex-father-in-law whose name she couldn’t seem to mention often enough.
Ave had been a widower for six months when Leland died of a more massive stroke in March 1971. It wasn’t long before Pam heard about an upcoming dinner in Washington being given by Kay Graham at which Ave, Pam’s old wartime lover, would be present. Truman Capote claimed he persuaded her to call Kay and get herself invited. If so, it couldn’t have taken much persuading. According to several of the guests, Pam directed her focus almost exclusively at Ave, even though they were seated back to back—positions she had arranged beforehand in order to heighten the allure.
At Ave’s suggestion, Cheray and I and the kids had been spending that summer at the Harriman house in Sands Point. Ave was in Washington most of the week, and he’d shuttle up on weekends. Casually he mentioned having “run into” Pamela at Kay’s—too casually, we thought. The moment he’d left for Washington on Monday morning, the phone rang. It was Pam. She wanted us to know how wonderful it had been seeing Ave again. And he had looked so wonderful. Twenty-four hours later, she called again. This time she said: Wouldn’t it be fun if she came by some weekend and saw all of us?
Why not? Having Pamela as a houseguest would undoubtedly give Ave a lift. I called him to see if it would be all right. I’d hardly opened my mouth when he said, “Great idea!”
A few days later, Pam pulled up in her beige Cadillac. Out she jumped, looking glamorous and indomitable in her English country best. Ave, having just played croquet, shambled over in his ancient seersucker shorts and shabby Brooks Brothers sweater. Their embrace was correct, friendly but not too friendly. Ave ushered her to a guest room at the farthest point from his bedroom, just down the hall from our quarters. Absolutely correct. I followed, carrying two very heavy bags.
That night we all went next door for dinner at the house of Ave’s old friends George and Evie Backer. Pam was the belle of the ball, solicitous of everybody, vibrant, filled with stories. Ave had his hearing aid turned up so high it squeaked.
The following night, Cheray and I couldn’t join them for dinner, since I had a job to play and Cheray had a long-standing invitation elsewhere.
“Good night, children,” said Pam and Ave as we exited, leaving the two of them alone.
It was one thirty when I got back. The house was dark as I went out on the screened porch to pour myself a nightcap. When I switched on the light over the bar, I heard a shriek. There in each other’s arms on the couch were Pam and Ave, unbuttoned.
“Jesus wept!” Ave bellowed.
The last thing I saw before turning off the light was Pam pulling her blouse together.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and fled.
I ran to wake Cheray. I’d gotten as far as “You’ll never believe” when we heard Pamela tromping very loudly down the hallway. Passing our room, she called out in her best nannylike voice, “Good night, children!” With a decisive click, she closed her door.
We were almost asleep—both of us delighted at Ave’s rejuvenation—when we heard a loud crash in Pam’s room. I got up, ran down the corridor, and knocked softly on her door. “Is everything all right?”
“Just fine,” cooed Pam. “Absolutely fine. No problem. The lamp fell over.”
I went back to bed.
The next morning there was a knock on our door. In came Pam, radiant in her pink negligee. Seating herself at the foot of the bed, she said in a conspiratorial half whisper, “Children, you’ll never guess what happened! Remember that ghastly sound around two thirty in the morning?”
“The lamp?”
“It wasn’t the lamp. It was Averell. He fell through the window.”
“He what?”
“He walked all the way around the outside of the house in his slippers and pajamas. But the poor darling forgot about the screen.”
“Is he all right?”
“Of course he is….Well,” she added, showing her dimples, “he’s a little…bruised.“
Scarcely a month later, on September 27, 1971, Pam and Ave were married very quietly in New York. According to Cheray, who had heard it from the source herself, the clincher had been Pam’s telling Ave: “I won’t go with you to Washington unless I’m your wife.”
It was a year and a day after Ma’s death, six months after Leland’s. Ave was nearly eighty Pam, at fifty-one, was twenty-eight years younger. The ceremony was held at St. Thomas More’s Church, Pam having converted to Catholicism some years earlier in her attempt to marry Gianni Agnelli.
An hour after the ceremony, they announced the news to more than a hundred friends and a few relatives at the Harriman house on Eighty-first Street. Without a word of explanation from Ave, Cheray and I had not been invited to the wedding—only a handful of people had, as witnesses. We felt a little uncomfortable as we climbed the red-carpeted stairs to the living room.
It was spooky. There was Pam, wreathed in smiles, welcoming everybody. There was Ave with his arm around her. But it was still Ma’s room. Her ghost was everywhere. Over there, under the Derain painting, was where we’d hugged after my father’s death. In front of the fireplace was where she’d welcomed the guests for our bridal dinner. We had played her favorite card games—bridge, canasta, gin—on the worn maroon leather table in the corner. I thought of the night, still recent, when Ma had given us the house so that we could host a benefit for John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I could hear her husky laugh as she stood at the top of the stairs, watching a dozen disabled veterans playing dodgem in their wheelchairs on the black-and-white marble below.
Pam’s timing was brilliant. Ever so subtly, she changed everything. Bit by bit, she redid the houses, sprucing up the best of Ma’s comfortably lived-in pieces, jettisoning the things she didn’t want around. One day she called Cheray and asked if we’d like to have the Chinese vitrine that had stood in the foyer at Eighty-first Street, as well as the Steinway piano my father had picked out for Marie and Ave years before. We were thrilled to say yes.
When Ma was alive, the Georgetown house was a place where everybody felt instantly at home. After Pamela moved in, you expected the Architectural Digest photographer to arrive at any moment. Pam put the decorator Billy Baldwin in charge of creating the stage set in which she would make her ascension in the Washington power scene.
One morning at breakfast after I’d spent the night there, I asked Ave how much Pam was doing to the place. “I don’t know,” he said, glancing up from the Times. “But there’s this little man who pops up now and then and talks to me in this sort of English accent. He seems to be a decorator.”
“He sure is,” I said.
“Who is he?”
“You’ll know when you see the bills.”
Ave glowered and went back to his Times.
Since Ave had always been perfectly content living out of a suitcase, I’m sure he hardly noticed when the Digby family crest—an ostrich with a horseshoe in its beak, supported by two chained monkeys and the unintentionally ironic family motto Deo Non Fortuna (“From God Not Fortune”)—began appearing on needlepoint pillows, household stationery, and matchbooks. Pam even had the hood ornament on her Cadillac replaced by a chrome ostrich. Another change was the vanity license plate, which read PCH, for Pamela Churchill Harriman. Pam had scrapped Hayward, and even her ancestral name, Digby. But she would never let go of Churchill—even though she had not only divorced Randolph but had the marriage annulled.
Ave may have grumbled about the bills, but he—as Leland had been—was a goner. One day when I idly asked after his health, he replied, “Things are great. Why, do you know that Pam even puts my favorite flower by my bed every morning?”
“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know you had a favorite flower, Ave. What is it?”
Ave stammered: “Oh…I don’t know. But whatever it is, she puts it there every morning.”
Pam tarted up Hobe Sound as well. The story of what she did to the garden has become a local legend. It had become Ave’s habit after lunch to retire to his room for a couple of hours. One afternoon, the bulldozers and steamrollers arrived the moment he’d disappeared upstairs. Minutes later, they were followed by trees, bushes, shrubs, earth, and sod. When Ave woke up and came down for his afternoon swim, his landscape of thirty years had been transformed. As the story goes, if he noticed it, he never said a word.
Now that Pam and Ave’s life was centered in Washington, Cheray and I didn’t see much of them, especially after Pam persuaded Ave to sell the house on Eighty-first Street for tax reasons. During the first years of their marriage, the Georgetown house was open to us as a place to stay, as long as we called ahead and made a reservation. But as Pam accelerated the building of her power base, her bedrooms began filling up with people who could be useful to her.
She occasionally suggested I be hired for a party for one of her organizations, but this soon ended. Later, I was told by one of her friends that she’d been put out by the fact that I hadn’t given her organization a discount. Such a thing had never occurred to me. Whenever Ma had gotten me a job, she’d insisted I charge the full price, saying, “It’s one way Ave and I can help you along.”
Meanwhile, the acre of land Ave had promised us in Hobe Sound was never brought up. In any case, it wasn’t something Cheray and I thought very much about.
So I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened when I found myself seated next to Pam at the Al Smith Dinner, the Archdiocese of New York’s annual fund-raiser at the Grand Ballroom in the Waldorf. Casually, as though she were remarking about the weather, Pam mentioned that she and Ave had put Hobe Sound on the market.
Knowing how much Ave loved the place, I was surprised.
“Yes,” she went on. “We think we’ve found a very good buyer for it. And I’ve found an absolutely super place in Barbados.”
Ave looking for shells on a Caribbean beach? I couldn’t see it.
“Pam,” I said, “I hope you’re not including that acre of land as part of the deal.”
“What acre?” she said sharply.
“The one Ave promised Cheray and me. You know, down by the grapefruit grove.”
Her smile froze. “Is it in writing?”
In the moment I paused to answer, “Of course not,” I realized there was nothing more I could say. I glanced over at Ave, who occupied one of the central seats on the speakers’ dais. If I had never been able to ask him for anything before, I certainly wouldn’t be able to now.
One day without warning, a large box arrived at our door, courtesy of UPS. Inside was every framed picture of me with Ma and/or Ave, or me with Cheray and the kids and Ma and/or Ave, that had occupied a place in the Harriman houses. Her secretary included a brief, explanatory note.
From then on, every time I called Ave to ask how he was doing, or perhaps to meet for lunch, I was never able to speak with him alone. After we’d say hello, Pam would get on the line and footnote the conversation. When Ave and I did meet for lunch, it was never just the two of us. Pam, as I later learned from a former secretary of hers, would have changed whatever appointment she had in order to be there. It wasn’t out of fondness for me.
The invitations declined sharply. Now, Cheray and I were included pro forma only at Ave’s birthday parties—never to meet any of the politicos Pam collected for one of her lavish dinner parties. Not that I wanted to be at Pam’s dinner parties, which seemed to be about nothing but building her power base in Washington. But I missed the calls I used to get from Ma: “Peter, we’ve got Leonard Bernstein for dinner on Friday. You must come for it.” And I really missed my friendship with Ave.
By all reports he was thriving under Pam’s stewardship. His clothes got spiffier, though I can’t imagine how Pam got rid of those ancient Brooks Brothers sweaters. She even built him something he would never have built for himself—a proper, perfectly manicured English croquet course at Haywire. Raising the subject of our altered relationship would only have confused and upset him—the last thing I wanted to do. By the time the seventies had turned into the eighties and Pam had begun laying the groundwork for her next adventure as fund-raiser par excellence for the Democratic party, I was seeing very little of Ave.
The house in Hobe Sound was sold, along with my acre. As Ave became increasingly deaf—and, before long, increasingly blind—he was transported into new domains that were entirely of Pamela’s creation, arriving in their private jet. Weekends they spent an hour’s drive away from Washington at Willow Oaks, a many-acred equestrian property in Middleburg, Virginia, that Pam had transformed at untold expense into a showplace. They wintered in Mango Bay, their fairy-tale hideaway in Barbados, which had been built by the British set designer Oliver Messel largely out of coral. Ave had clearly moved on.