Pamela Harriman, daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, described as a “European geisha” and “The Last Courtesan” was supposedly, according to a new biography, pimped out by her father-in-law (and Lord Beaverbrook) to seduce key Americans to ensure support for the UK war effort. She did bed W. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s representative in London and in later years married him. Though Pearl Harbour was more of a clincher than her charms.
Having hitched herself at 19 to Randolph Churchill, “a drunken, debt-ridden, offensive adulterer,” she needed to find a diversion. After the war she rollicked through a series of affairs with Prince Aly Khan, Alfonso de Portago, Gianni Agnelli, and Baron Elie de Rothschild plus two marriages one to a Broadway producer. By the end of her life, Bill Clinton made her U.S. ambassador to France.
Reviews suggest the biography is somewhat over-egged but her chart is interesting if only because her Sun, Mercury and Moon all in late Pisces are fairly current at the moment. She had a tough Water Grand Trine of Mars in Scorpio trine Pluto in Cancer in her attention-grabbing 5th trine Uranus Venus in Pisces, made into a Kite by Uranus Venus opposition Saturn in Virgo. She also had an upbeat Jupiter Neptune conjunction on her Descendant square Mars.
A hard, ultra-determined, courageous but not exactly nice person – she seemed to have had squabbles over inheritances in later life with her husband’s families.
She died of a brain haemorrhage aged 76 in 1997, collapsing in the swimming pool at the Paris Ritz and was fished out and given oxygen by Henri Paul, the intoxicated driver who later that year drove Princess Diana to her death. Tied into the zeitgeist to the end.