In 1941 Kathleen Harriman, daughter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal envoy to Britain, found herself sharing an apartment in London with Pamela Churchill. At 21, the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law was two years her flatmate’s junior, but for Harriman she was “one of the wisest young girls I’ve ever met — she knows everything about everything, political and otherwise”.
The second half, at least, of that judgment was to hold good over time, as Pamela Churchill used her understanding of men’s passions to become, as one of her husbands proudly described her, “the greatest courtesan of the century”. In time, too, she would become Kathleen Harriman’s stepmother, sparking a bitter feud that famously culminated in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
Yet there was more to Harriman’s long life than just that, for her wartime assessment of Pamela Churchill applied equally to herself. She came to know, and to charm, many of the leading personalities of the Second World War, and she spanned America’s history from the age of the robber barons to the birth of the internet.
She was born in 1917, the younger of the two daughters of W. Averell Harriman and Kitty Lanier Lawrence. Her grandfather, E. H. Harriman, had been chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and on his death in 1909 he left a fortune of $100 million, making his widow the richest woman in America.
Kathy grew up at homes in Manhattan and South Carolina, but perhaps most memorably at Arden, a house of 100,000 sq ft atop the highest crag of the Ramapo Mountains in upstate New York. Guests reached it by its own funicular railway. Horses came up the same way, and were sometimes used to explore its cavernous halls. Kathy’s grandmother would force her to listen to organ recitals in the near-cathedral-sized music room, a penance that put her off the instrument for life. Arden was eventually converted into America’s first conference centre.
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At school she proved a star athlete and a fine basketball player. Tennis, golf, fishing, shooting and riding all came naturally to her. She was also one of the best skiers in the country, aided by her father having founded the Sun Valley resort in Idaho in 1936, and she was selected as a reserve for the US Olympic team.
Yet, she had intellect as well, and enough independence of mind to choose to study for her degree (in social science) at the recently founded Bennington, Vermont, rather than at a more conventional college. After graduating in 1940 she followed her father to London, where he was administering the aid provided under the Lend-Lease agreement and acting as Roosevelt’s private conduit to Churchill.
Kathleen’s parents had divorced in 1929, and Averell Harriman had remarried, to Marie Norton Whitney. She, however, was in ill health and stayed in America throughout the war. Kathleen acted as her father’s social hostess in London; she was at Chequers, celebrating her birthday, when news broke of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
She was not content solely to be an adornment, and worked from Britain as a reporter, first for the Hearst-owned International News Services, and later for Newsweek and for United Press, whose bureau chief was Walter Cronkite (obituary, July 20, 2009).
She would give her pay cheques to Pamela Churchill, who was always short of money, and whom she soon discovered was conducting an affair with her father. Pamela was already effectively estranged from her husband, Randolph Churchill — their married life had started badly when he insisted on reading aloud to her from Gibbon during their honeymoon — and capturing hearts all over blacked-out London.
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It was perhaps therefore with some relief that in 1943 Kathleen Harriman heard that her father had been appointed Ambassador to Moscow. She learnt basic Russian and helped to interpret for him there, aided by a sense of humour he somewhat lacked. She also worked for the US Office of War Information, compiling a news digest for American embassies, and even found time to come third in the Russian slalom championships.
In 1944 she acted as her father’s official representative during the Soviet Government’s disinterment of the thousands of Polish officers murdered earlier in the war at Katyn. At the time, like the other Western reporters present, she was persuaded that the Germans had carried out the killings; the Russians admitted their guilt only in 1990.
The next year, she travelled to the Livadia Palace at Yalta to oversee the American arrangements for the conference there, and later accompanied her father to the Far East, where they met the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. After Harriman was made President Truman’s Secretary of Commerce, they returned home in 1946 with a parting gift from Stalin of two thoroughbreds, Fact and Boston.
Following her marriage in 1947 to Stanley Mortimer, an advertising executive and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, she adopted a lower public profile than she had had during the war. She campaigned, nonetheless, for her father during his runs for the governorship of New York in 1954 and 1958, and during his two unsuccessful bids for the Democrat presidential nomination.
In 1971, following his wife’s death, Averell Harriman married Pamela Churchill, herself left a widow six months earlier by the death of the Broadway producer Leland Hayward. In the intervening years she had been the mistress of such titans as Gianni Agnelli and Stavros Niarchos, and even briefly of Bill Paley, the founder of CBS, whose wife Babe had formerly been married to Kathleen Mortimer’s husband Stanley.
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Yet as Pamela Harriman she became a pillar of the Democrat Party, and was rewarded for her support for Bill Clinton by being appointed Ambassador to France when he was elected President.
Her relations with her stepchildren were less easy. They had attended Averell Harriman’s funeral in 1986 at the family plot, only to discover afterwards that he was to be buried elsewhere, at a spot that his widow had helped to choose.
Then, eight years later, Kathleen Mortimer joined with her relations in claiming that Pamela Harriman and other trustees of the family fortune had squandered much of it. In the early 1990s, it was alleged, some $21 million had been sunk into a resort and casino in New Jersey which had a history of financial and environmental problems. Moreover, the investment had been made by buying shares in a company among whose directors there were several with dubious reputations for honesty.
When confronted by her septuagenarian stepdaughter in Paris, the Ambassador denied all knowledge of impropriety. Nonetheless, she was forced to settle the suit, and obliged to sell paintings by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso, as well as a house in Washington, in order to do so. She died in 1997 after suffering a stroke while swimming at the Paris Ritz.
Kathleen Mortimer was keenly interested in philanthropic causes, mainly related to health and education. She continued to ride into her mid-eighties, and regularly hosted the national cocker spaniel field trials at Arden.
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Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by their three sons.
Kathleen Mortimer, heiress, journalist and philanthropist, was born on December 7, 1917. She died on February 17, 2011, aged 93