WITH THE MOSTEST

The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.

- Margaret Talbot

They don’t make them like Pamela Harriman anymore. On balance, that’s probably a good thing. Not that there isn’t much to admire or, at least, marvel at in the life of the mid-century paramour turned Democratic Party power broker—her talent for keeping strategically chosen lovers as lifelong friends, her zest for reinventing herself, her unquenchable optimism about her party’s prospects, her capacity for leading a remarkably consequential public life without ever holding an actual public post, or even really a job, until she was seventy-three. But Harriman’s path to power—greased by aristocratic privilege, fuelled by sexual alliances, and, for both reasons, not exactly transparent—isn’t one you’d recommend to an ambitious woman today, either for her own sake or, not to sound too stuffy about it, for democracy’s.

Sonia Purnell’s new biography, “Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue” (Viking), is a bit of a feminist reclamation project, bent on producing a more respectful portrait than those found in two earlier books, Christopher Ogden’s “Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman” (1994) and Sally Bedell Smith’s “Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman” (1996). It’s time to set to rights, Purnell believes, Harriman’s reputation as, what she calls, a “conniving and ridiculous gold digger obsessed by sex.” I wasn’t entirely convinced that such a rescue operation was necessary. It’s true that the earlier books were meaner than Purnell’s, flecked with nineties snark and anonymous quotes. (Ogden’s was the product of an authorized-biography agreement gone sour.) And Harriman was certainly subject to gossip, some of it scurrilous and sexist. A nasty takedown in