Reflected Glory

The catalog of lovers, husbands, and tryst partners that runs throughout this 560-page biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman is astonishing in itself: Randolph Churchill (the besotted son of Sir Winston), Edward R. Murrow, Elie de Rothschild, Averell Harriman ... What's more astonishing is that along the way Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman managed to find time to become an accomplished globe-trotting socialite, a mother, a leading fundraiser and den mother for the Democratic Party, and, today, the American Ambassador to France. Sally Bedell Smith sought out Pamela Harriman's most far-flung associates and detailed everything from her subject's cosmetic surgeries to her fudged studies at the Sorbonne to produce this exhaustive work, and though the subject comes across as cold, calculating, and duplicitous, there is a grudging admiration for the century's ultimate courtesan.