The eventful love life – and intelligence-gathering skills – of one of the most talked-about women of her age makes the first half of this sympathetic study more compelling than the postwar ‘gold-digging’ years
s a youth she wasn’t popular among her peers. “Fat and freckly with red hair and mad about horses,” remembers Clarissa Churchill. “We used to bully her.” Nancy Mitford was no kinder: “She was a red-headed bouncing little thing, regarded as a joke.” Among the debutantes of 1938 she did not shine, being neither rich nor beautiful.
Born into a privileged but cash-strapped family that sold up in Belgravia, London, and moved to Dorset, where her grandfather, the 10th Lord Digby, built a 50-room mansion without bathrooms , she was an adventurous and energetic girl who so craved escape from loneliness that she gambled on marrying, aged 19, a man she had only known for two weeks. That her betrothed was Randolph Churchill, a bumptious brute much disliked in society, was both a personal catastrophe and the making of her.
The most astonishing passages of the book concern Churchill Harriman’s early role as an intelligence-gathering intermediary between the British war cabinet and the Americans, who were yet to commit to the fight against Germany. Handled like a bedroom spy by Max Beaverbrook, she seduced a number of high-profile bigwigs, at one point alternating her nights with the head of the US bomber command and the British chief of air staff, which sounds like the plot of acomedy.
While the end of the war brought relief, it also put the wind up her: she was 25, lonely and jobless. “I am afraid of not knowing what to do with life in peacetime.” It also leaves her biographer with another 300 pages and 50 years to fill, none of them nearly as compelling as 1939-45. In the event, Churchill Harriman continued her rampage through the bedrooms of rich and prominent men, but with the mood of peril and desperation gone the narrative wants for suspense.
Purnell makes a great deal of Churchill Harriman’s legendary charm, which finally landed her a job, aged 73, as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to France. She carried out the office honourably and won praise from the natives, too, albeit of a backhanded sort:called her “a cross between Lady Hamilton and Moll Flanders”. The years of acquisitiveness caught up with her in the late 1980s when “financial distress” forced her to sell “her beloved Degas ballerina for $10m”.
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