The sale took place scarcely three months after Harriman died in Paris, as she was ending her term as U.S. ambassador to France. But it was her career as wife and mistress to wealthy and powerful men–including Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, Broadway producer Leland Hayward, Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, French banker Elie de Rothschild and diplomat Averell Harriman –that the sale evoked most vividly.
Pamela Harriman lived luxuriously in England, France and America, and her taste and social perfectionism symbolized a bygone era. “How can anyone have that many dishes?” mused magazine publisher Steven Brill as he surveyed hundreds of place settings of china and heaps of flat silver.
A Seurat purchased, by Averell Harriman’s second wife, Marie, fetched $552,000, and a whimsical Alexander Calder mobile went for $222,500, almost 10 times the low estimate. The auction’s top price was $1.4 million for John Singer Sargent’s “Staircase in Capri,” which Pamela had purchased for less than $1 million in the late ’80s on the advice of J. Carter Brown, then director of the National Gallery of Art.
The objects recalled the stages of Harriman’s life–the paintings and drawings by the French artist Paul-Cesar Helleu (sold for prices ranging from $18,400 to $481,500) that she bought for a pittance when she was Rothschild’s mistress in Paris during the 1950s, the 18th-century English four-poster bed (sold for $41,000) selected by the decorator Billy Baldwin for her Georgetown bedroom after she married Averell Harriman in 1971.
Under the terms of Pamela’s will, her son Winston and his estranged wife, Minnie, and their children could choose what they wanted and sell the rest. Not only do they face estate taxes of some $12 million; they are obligated to pay $2 million to the heirs of Averell Harriman, to complete the 1995 settlement of the lawsuit against Pamela for losing $40 million from their trust funds.
Averell’s heirs were miffed that so many of their family’s treasures were put, on the block, and they appeared at Sotheby’s to recover what they could. Averell Fisk bought his grandfather’s oil portrait by Gardner Cox for $15,800, and his cousins Averell and David Mortimer purchased political cartoons for $2,760.
After spending nearly six years researching and writing Pamela Harriman’s life, even this writer succumbed to the urge for a memento: a pastel listed as “Portrait of a Young Child.” But the child is unmistakably Pamela, with a mop of strawberry-blond curls, wide blue eyes and a pouty mouth. Following a spirited duel with a telephone bidder, the pastel was mine–for $1,840, three times the estimate. Not known for sentiment, Pamela Harriman would probably have disapproved of my impulse. But she would have been delighted by the price.
